You can't be a man until you live through this, and the reason is very simple: you must subtract the story from the person -- as Bill and Laura both just so recently discovered -- and see him as he is: just a man. A man who wasn't built for this, because no man was built for this, nor woman, nor child. Because when you subtract your Quo Vadis from your Status Quo, you arrive at What Just Is. And you realize Cally said the truest and the hardest thing: the rough spots are all we have left. They're all we ever had. There is no one last hump and then it's golden. There is no Lie that earns your rest. It's not a vending machine.

Lee takes his father's face; blue eyes on blue. "Okay Dad, listen to me. Listen to me! Pull it together." Bill begins a litany that Lee doesn't understand: " I can't. I can't. I can't. I can't." Lee swears that he can, but he hasn't reached the end of the sentence: "I can't. I can't kill him. I can't kill the bastard. I can't. I can't." And he can't. And he shouldn't have to.

Imagine two stones, black and white. Concentrate on the area between them, the space where nothing is. I move them closer together, further apart -- See how it changes? This is no conjurer's trick, it's just two stones and the space between them -- and the area changes in kind. Everything you need to know is there.

Lee caresses him, holds him to his chest like a pelican. Holds his father like a baby.

"It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. I'll take care of it."

He kisses his father, blessing him.

"I'll take care of it."

He is a man.

THE LAST THING IS A BULLET

Lee marches straight into the airlock, professional clip-clop, and punches the hell out of Saul Tigh. Maybe last time you were the interrogator, and I was the prisoner: at the Trial, Bill disowned Lee for breaking Saul, and now Lee will kill Saul for breaking his father. For forcing him to live through that. "You motherfrakker. Who are the others?" Saul looks him in the eye, sad. "Where's the old man?" he asks, worried. "Right where you put him," Lee spits. He's not wrong.

Lee gets a call from Three and heads into the control room; he stares through the window at Saul in the spotlights. This is what it was like for Tory, watching Cally wake. "This is the President," he says, and Three taunts. As is right and just in war. "Mr. President, you're running out of time." Lee explains that actually, Three's out of time, and it's best to just listen. "If you harm another one of my people, you so much as blacken one of their eyes, and I flush Saul Tigh out of a launch tube."