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No one, no one, had warned her about space. Turning onto her side where she lay on the bed roll and peeling back a bit of the curtain with a trembling hand, Omega decided it wasn't fair.
Through the transparisteel, the stars dotted the black expanse, and she lost herself to her thoughts the way she might lose herself amongst the star-fields. The lack of warning made sense, she reasoned doubtfully: she had been in space many times after all. Her toddler handprints had been amongst the first things Wrecker had shown her on the Marauder, there were marks on the wooden aiwha where little teeth had dug into its grain, and the creaking hinges of the racks were as familiar as her buire’s voices.
Yet, somehow, she could never remember being this cold.
Her toes curled within her socks, and she pressed her cheek hard against her knees. None of her memories included a blanket that trapped the cold better than the heat, or a world where the temperature struck her like so many needles despite her clothing, or a bed roll that was so permeable to the icy metal floor she felt like she wasn't on a bed roll at all.
In fact, neither temperature nor comfort (or discomfort, for that matter) were the highlights of any memory of the ship.
The Marauder of her youth was the epitome of wonder and adventure and excitement. It was the shades of brilliant blue and laughing silver and beloved red. It was thudding footsteps and beeping consoles and dear voices, all in tune with the wordless song in her head she liked to call love.
But cold — it was never cold, not so cold as to be remembered.
Never so cold as this.
Heat, you see, had a way of sinking into you, as if your skin was another permeable layer over the sponge of flesh, simply soaking every last drop of thermal energy. You could always tease it out by making the world around you colder, be it tossing yourself under the showers or turning the room’s temperature down.
But cold, which she expected would feel like something being sucked out of her body, was more of a thin epidermis than a creature feeding on her enthalpy. It was a layer that stretched her cheeks so tight the way drying tears would. It was a coat she couldn’t shake off, no matter how hard she tried, common to Tipoca City’s sterile laboratories and Nala Se’s empty stares.
With a fierce shiver, Omega bit her lip and pulled the blanket around her tighter, trying not to cry from the frustration of it all. She was tired and she couldn’t sleep, no matter how tightly she coiled into herself, or how deeply she snuggled into the spread beneath her, or how much she rubbed her hands together to warm them. She was cold, terrifically cold, and she didn’t know how to stop being so cold. It was miserable being so tired and so bitterly cold. She hated that no memory or person warned her about space being so cold.
And that was the worst of everything: that she didn’t remember this cold.
Her memory was exceptional. She knew this because Mistress Se had told her as much. Flash-training left a greater imprint on her than the other cadets, according to the Kaminoans who had kept close track of her performance. She could still remember in vivid detail the arrangement of Nala Se’s medical tools before she performed a procedure, the circuitry of the droids that wandered Tipoca City’s halls, even the words of every trooper-song she had grown up with.
The fact that she didn't remember something so bitingly obvious disturbed her more than any discomfort. What did this mean about her? What did it mean for her? She was meant to be good at remembering things, things others wouldn't, couldn't, remember. If she had remembered, she would’ve been prepared to face the chill. But she hadn’t remembered, and she was cold to the point she thought her heart would stop beating, and she was tired and upset and cold and cold—
Three soft knocks on the wall behind her made her freeze, muscles and all. “Omega?”
Curling tighter into herself, she kept silent and still. It came with practiced ease; after all, medical assistants who didn’t maintain the observed hours of rest were not looked upon kindly. She’d played the part of being asleep one too many time to count: it was all slow and measured breathing, controlled inhalation and expiration, relaxed posture—
“Ad’ika,” came the hearty but quiet laughter outside, and her heart squeaked when she heard the curtains separating her little sanctuary from the rest of the ship scuttling apart, “99 with enhanced senses, remember?”
Her memory was failing her in multiple disappointing ways, it seemed.
She rolled to her right, blinking up at Hunter’s face. Head tilted, a slight grin dancing along the corners of his mouth, there were wrinkles that creased further on the edges of his eyes when they met hers. She thought — and hoped — it was a look that meant she wasn’t in any sort of trouble for being caught awake.
Hunter leaned forward into the space of the gunner’s mount, touching her hand where it lay beneath the blanket. “Can’t sleep?”
Pausing, she let hesitation have its moment, giving her thoughts some time to whirl like a storm in her mind — then nodded as it all calmed in one huff of breath, her chin dipping beneath the blanket. Her fears and worries could wait. She had more pressing matters to address.
Fingers came to rest gently along her cheek. Hunter made a noise of understanding, eyebrows quirking together. “You’re freezing.”
That felt like an understatement, but maybe it was just her.
Hunter turned away and reached for something, then turned back towards the mount. “Sit up,” he said softly, and she did, despite how bitterly cold the air was.
She’d only just sat up when something thick was wrapped around her. Hunter drew the blanket tight around her shoulders and rubbed her arms, muttering, “You always did get cold too easily.”
She blinked, processing this new piece of information from what seemed the distant past. “Really?”
It took him a second too — he didn't seem to realize he'd spoken out loud until she'd asked. “Yeah,” he said, then nodded, the worry-lines slipping from his face as a smile grew, “Yeah, you did. We couldn't put you down unless you were dressed in at least three layers of clothing.”
“Put me down?”
A full-fledged smile spread across his face, all fondness and warmth, just for her. “For such a tiny clone, you sure did like running around.”
The blood rushed into her cheeks, and she looked away, wrapping her arms around her shins with her feet cradled by each hand. Her past self seemed like such a different clone altogether. She found it hard to reconcile that she faced this very same cold of space when she was even smaller and won against it.
“I don't remember,” she admitted, failing to make it sound like something other than a confession, “I don't remember being so cold.”
A pause filled the air, and Hunter's head tipped downward, eyes staring past durasteel to the fossils of the past. Lost, she realized — he was lost between the present and memory, trying to do the same thing she was: reconciliation.
Something twinged in Omega's chest, coiling into itself as if the walls of her heart were made of frost and it was trying to keep warm, just as she was. There was a chasm stretching between them, and it would be difficult to bridge so much time lost.
She still remembered the last time she had seen them, seen him, before they had parted ways. He'd held her face, and told her she'd be fine, and that he'd be right back, that they would all be right back, and she would just have to wait, and he left a kiss on her forehead before he'd turned away.
And she did wait. Every day she woke up wondering if they were back. She went about her day, cleaning up after Nala Se and the Kaminoans, fixing droids, trying to make Lula dolls from whatever she found, as she waited for the tap on her shoulder that signaled their return. Every time the door opened as she sat with legs swinging, tubes running in and out of her, on the examination table, she searched for that familiar red and grey. When she was ordered to bed, she walked as slowly as her droid escorts allowed her, hoping to catch some sight of them. Even her dreams featured them, laughing as they ruffled her hair and taught her something clever and told her story after story after story.
It was only when she'd stopped waiting, when she'd seen her chance from the gallery of the staging area, the defective clone unit standing in stark contrast to the sea of fresh white plastoid, that she’d realized she had to make her move. Mistress Se was suitably distracted, there was no droid keeping an eye on her, and she had slipped as quickly and quietly as she could to race through Tipoca City's white halls.
To meet — to reunite — with them.
There was a chasm stretching between the two of them, now.
That didn't mean it was impossible to bridge it.
Omega, gathering every last scrape of courage within her, dared to reach a hand from under the blankets, shaking, small, and place it carefully atop Hunter's.
His reaction wasn't sharp or swift — instead, he turned his head slowly and considered their hands together. She suppressed a smile: hers was so disproportionately little. She thought of a tubie’s hand in place of hers, and she nearly giggled aloud.
When she peeked up, Hunter was smiling too. He turned his hand, caught her very small one in his, and exhaled something between a laugh and a sigh. “I'm glad,” he said, eyes fond and warm once more when he held her gaze, “You don't remember.”
If the cold hadn't confined her jaws to chattering limits, they would've dropped open a lot farther. She gaped at him, skin still tight around her wide eyes, as every mental faculty came to a shrieking halt. Because here she’d been, agonizing about her failing memory, about how she was struggling now thanks to it—
And now he was telling her he was glad for it?
Still drowning in her own thoughts, she missed the moment when he chuckled and shook his head, when he kissed her hand and let go of it, when he climbed up into the mount to settle beside her.
Nala Se—
Something warm cupped her shoulder. She tipped her head upwards to meet his grin with something of a protest on the edge of her clicking teeth. But when he shook his head, a simple tilt of the chin to the floor, they fell silent and still.
“I’m glad, Omega,” Hunter explained, bending close to her eye level, “Because it means we kept you warm enough to never remember the cold.”
Oh.
She turned to stare at the curtains, waving in patient arcs, back and forth, back and forth, where they hung tucked together at one end. Beyond them, the lights on the consoles twinkled in red and blue and dull white. Her hands clenched around the edge of the blanket, and she drew it closer to her neck.
Hunter's words were strange, but what was stranger was the image of a little clone running about the ship without even the slightest of shivers. A clone without fear, without worry, who laughed as loudly as she cared, and wept as bitterly as she might, and had only to raise her arms and whine to be picked up that she might be held close in dear arms against dearer hearts and rocked to sleep.
What was even stranger was that Omega could remember being that little clone — just as well as she could remember being the clone with needles piercing her veins as the anesthetic took effect, or the clone with only a broken droid for a companion to talk to as she fixed it, or the clone huddled into herself as she cried herself to sleep alone in the isolation tank. To think she had a whole past of joy before she was consumed by the cold and loneliness: it felt like an impossible thought.
Hunter lifted his arm and cast it around her shoulders, drawing her close into his side. It was as strange as his words and her memories, but it was a familiar sort of strange, so she sank willingly into his embrace. The fact that he was warm, wonderfully so, certainly helped. She closed her eyes, imagining herself smaller, happier.
“Did I get cold very often?”
With her head resting against his chest, she could hear his breath rise and fall in a deep sigh. “Yeah,” he said quietly, voice a comforting rumble beneath her ear, “You did.”
She hummed, fatigue tugging her further beneath the waves of sleep now that her body no longer shook with the cold. “Was keeping me warm a lot of work?”
Perhaps it was because she was slowly drifting, drowning, down to that place of sweet unconsciousness where her fingers lay slack and her mouth fell slightly agape, gravity’s force now greater than her force of will. Perhaps he had spoken after all, and she had simply mistaken it for another rustle of his clothes beneath her ear, or another murmur of his heartbeat beneath his ribs. Still, a silence draped over them, like a third blanket big enough to cover them both. For once in her life, Omega thought it didn’t matter if she’d made a mistake in asking, or if her question went unanswered, or if she was in any trouble at all. Sleep weighed heavily upon her, and she was warm, very warm.
“Yes.”
Standing at the very edge, only one, two, three, four steps away from falling asleep, she felt a soft breeze along her forehead. With gentle fingers, it hooked around her dangling curls and brushed them back, careful not to get caught in her tangles.
“You’re right: It was a lot of work.”
She knew it was a kiss, even though she was already tumbling into sleep, even though it was pressed to the top of head. She knew it was a kiss because it had happened to her before. She knew it was a kiss because she remembered.
“But it was all worth it, because it was you.”
Space wasn’t all that bad — not here, warm, in her buir’s arms.