I woke up in the middle of the night, most likely because the heat of Sombra's body on mine plus the blanket was too much. I was slightly sweaty. She was, too. Trying to get some air, I carefully pushed her upper body away. Chances were she would instantly wake up because of that but pretend to still be asleep or she simply was sleeping regardless of me moving her. Most likely the former, knowing her.
According to the ship's internal timer, I managed to get around two hours of sleep, so the night was still young. I didn't want to take a shower right now, though I moved into the bathroom to wipe some sweat off me. The last shower was three hours ago, right after Sombs had ambushed me in bed. Returning to the bed, I was about to join her again, but eventually decided against it. Instead, I took the towel that was still in bed to cover the wet spot from earlier and threw it into the bathroom. Realizing I wouldn't be able to fall asleep any time soon, I figured I could just get a cool drink from the cantine.
Trying to be as silent as possible, I put on my Apahanta suit and left our room. The hallways outside were illuminated in a moody blue, meaning it was local nighttime. The blue light was supposed to keep people awake during the night shift. No idea whether it works that way or not. I walked down the hallway, used a lift to get to the deck with the canteen, another hallway, not a single soul to walk around the ship during this time. Most of the crew were sleeping, which was alright, since about 400 service robots were taking care of routine jobs all over the ship and the ship's AI would wake up the bridge crew in case of an unexpected situation. There also was no need to worry about someone else using the nightshift to ambush as, simply because... well, we are all alone this far out.
I found myself surprised when I entered the canteen and noticed that Ez was there. The room was calmly lit in orange, almost as if an imaginary sun was setting. He was alone, sitting in a chair, looking up from the pictures projected by the big at the wall. A glass of red wine in front of him on the table, altogether with the matching bottle and a small plate with a few slices of bread and little cheese snacks. Finding him there like that was new. Ever since we left Sirius, he got a more healthy sleeping cycle. Generally, all of us were living more healthy.
"Am I interrupting anything?" I asked in a somewhat careful but more curious manner. Looking over at the screen, I realized he was watching some sort of documentary about Curacao.
"Oh, no-no. Just having a snack." The tall man pointed at the cheese cubes on cocktail sticks. "Can't sleep?"
"Sombs sorta smothered me." I moved a few steps into the room, looking back and forth between his face and the big screen showing all the nice shots of Neo Laguna. "Just wanted to get something cool. "
"Isn't that annoying?" he sounded out with a weird with a suddenly increased energy in his voice. "I had many women sleeping on my, but she is the only one that never got cold limbs during the night. She always warms up further and further, it's like she is literally burning calories in her sleep."
"... I wouldn't know the difference." Sombra was 'only' my third girlfriend. No idea whether Lorena and Simone got cold hands and feet while sleeping. Nothing I wanted to think about, really. Instead I moved behind the counter of the kitchen area, intending to get a bottle of water from the refrigerator. The bottles in Sombs' and my room weren't cold enough. "What are you watching?"
"Just some old stuff," he responded while staring at the screen, basically talking to the wall.
"I mean, not really possible to get 'new' stuff out here." Simply because Sirius was about a year away from us. Well, not really. If we were to backtrack, it would probably take only a few months. Exploration and finding jump holes took most of the time, so moving away from Sirius takes more time than getting back to it. And then again, if we really wanted to return, we still had the jump coordinates. Kind of a tricky topic right now.
"Erh, you know. It's one of those nights where your brain decides to go through every possibly wrong decision one made in the past. What-ifs o'plenty. Nostalgia. So I went here to watch this documentary about Curacao. It's right from before the Gallic Deathmarch into Cortez."
Oh boy. I was not sure whether he was treating himself or whether it was torture. Leaving behind Curacao was difficult for me, tough for Sombra since she is a Curacaoan but extremely painful to Ezrael for the same reason. He loved the planet and everything about it almost as much as he loved chasing after women. With the steaming cold bottle in my hand I made my way over to him. It was probably a good idea to not leave him alone with these thoughts.
"I know the feeling. Sometimes I wonder how my life would have looked like if I had not joined your crew. But, you know, I'd probably be dead or something. The Apahanta has changed everything for the better for me." I figured giving him some positive feedback would be helpful.
"Heh. That's nice of you to say." Patting the place next to him, he invited me to join. I took the invitation, placing the cold bottle on the table. "I don't know, really. We're really doing well out here. It's not like we're missing anything. It's actually better than we all assumed it would be, even in terms of self-sustainance."
He pointed at the water bottle. "Purified ice asteroid water, the bottle made from ship-grown plastic from the hydroponics. Synthetic wine, chemlab cheese. Of course not the original, but I wouldn't be able to tell a difference in the taste. We got more and more creative over time."
"But...?" I asked. Something was bothering him.
"Er... I mean, it's the nature of mankind to miss what they can't have in the moment. Looking at the past with pink glasses. Still, it's something natural. It happens, and I never figured out how to communicate to my brain to not do it. I'm happy. I should be happy. Maybe I am."
"What exactly are you missing?" I asked, trying to get him to find the core of the issue.
Little did I know, his response was something I would never have imagined. "Enma."
Blinking a few times at him, I needed a moment to process what he just said. "Enma... Loyola?" I recalled him and her having had a rather steamy affair on some Zoner station. The entire thing went through the social media back then, but everyone forgot about it just as fast. Loyola was known for drama and controversial statements on the net, and Ezrael was a nobody in terms of social media. Hopefully. I think, if anything, people saw him like just another excentric edgy-looking playboy, just one with a personal warship.
He gave me an awkward smirk. "Look, I know what you're thinking. Why her, why even. What? It's not that I really miss her. I just wonder what she is doing right now, or whether she is still alive. And the same goes for many other people. Nancy, Raven, Knight, Thallia, Elena, Nick, the pretty gallic admiral, Isabelle... du frommage. Isabelle Montlaville... damn, I don't even recall her full name. All those guys, though."
"... Enma? Really... ?" I blinked at him while he took a sip of his wine.
"Why not? I slept wit her. Do you think I don't care about the women I was with?" He frowned at me.
"No, I am certain you remember all of them and could name them all right now and tell me your stories with them." His frown disappeared, switched out for a laughter.
"Well, alright. I guess I'm really just wondering in general how the people I met in the time before we left are right now. Not really caring, just curiousity, I guess. I would probably not miss them at all if I was to see them again for a moment."
"So, just to make it clear, you're not secretly planning to have us return to Sirius?" It was important to me to ask that.
"Hell no. That would make all of our lives miserable again. Constant fear of bounty hunters and Order agents trying get our secrets, the omnipresent threat of war everywhere, clowns like the Hackers and the Unioners, seeing how Curacao gets littered in space debris... no, thank you." He sighed, then looked down to me, given I was about a head shorter than him.
"No, don't worry, Noel. We're not returning. Everything is perfect the way things are. It's really just another hour of the wolf. Nothing none of us can handle on their own."
"Even then, you wouldn't need to handle it on your own." I would have liked to place my arm around his shoulder, but there was the issue of me being one head shorter than him, so I simply leaned against his side. One can't have enough physical comfortation. "We've taken the best things about Sirius with us. Just keep that in mind. All that we left are a few good souls among millions of horrible people fighting each other over dumb things. If we were ever to return, we'd be disappointed instantly. Things will never be the same as they were in the past. You wouldn't recognize most things. People change, most for the worse. Chances are Curacao and Gran Canaria and Niigata and all the other nice places we went to are in shambles. Maybe it's even worse, they could all suffer from a horrible, sirius-wide plague."
He placed his arm around me, pulling me even closer at his side. "You're right."
"I know I am. Always trust your lucky charm!"
"Chanteloup! That's the name. Amiral Isabelle Montlaville de Chanteloup. One hell of a woman. I think she was almost as intimidating as Yoshida or Heinrich. But in a more lovely way. A shame you didn't get to meet her, Noel. As frosty and one-sided our meeting was in the beginning, I felt like our ways parted as some sort of respectable friends. I hope she recovered from her defeat in Leeds."
"... Ez?" He turned his face to look at me again. I pointed to the cheese and wine. "Could it be that it is more about her than about anyone else?"
"Maybe." He probably connected the dots in that moment as it was followed by him smirking again. "I can see why you'd assume so."
"You did the right thing back then. Taking her with us without asking her would have been bad." The situation back then was difficult. We were under a lot of pressure. Back then, Ezrael had promised her to be there if she needed him. So she did send him a distress signal from Leeds. We snuck in there, found the knocked-out ship of her and rescued her and a handful of people. She was alive, but comatose for the entire time of her staying with us. The Gallic officers took care of her, guarding her all the time, and Ezrael had a part of the Apahanta sealed off to prevent them and the crew actually meeting in any way. He later explained why, since most of us had no idea what was going on.
According to Ezrael, there weren't any medical officers among the Gauls, so he and Adrianna took care of her. I often forgot about it myself, but after all, Ezrael was a biologist and was actually quite competent in terms of medical stuff. The closest we had to a Doctor, next to the old woman and medical robots. The Gauls were forced to trust Ez. But in the end, despite all efforts, they did not manage to get her out of the coma. Physically, her condition got better and better, to the point where Ezrael made a decision. It was the final days before we left Sirius. We couldn't take the Gauls with us, so Ez decided to give them Sombra's transport ship, the Catport, so they could pretend to be Zoners and move where they want to on their own. And just like that, we left Sirius, leaving everything behind. Chanteloup was no longer our issue. But obviously, Ez felt bad about it for a long time. I first assumed he got over it by now, but seeing how about one year had passed at this point, he got nostalgic.
"I don't worry about Curacao, really. I just hope, really, that the few good souls we left in Sirius are holding up well. There is no way to find out. Chances are, they forgot about us. And that is okay. I never wanted to try and leave something that would remind people of me in Sirius. People do the dumbest things in order to create a legacy and don't realize how nobody else cares."
"Yeah."
Both of us looked over to the screen. His grip around me got more firm for a moment. "Still, it would be nice if those few people we got to like were to remember us every now and then. Maybe in a night like this, while watching some nostalgia-driven movie."
"... you know, we didn't really say goodbye to most of them, so chances are they sent you transmissions and you didn't respond to them, which most likely made them angry at you."
