I can't tell for sure what was the cause of the changed mood, but everthing got brighter when we left that damn nebula. Or maybe it was just the fact we entered the end of the year. A few crew members decorated some areas of the ship festively. There even was a fake tree in the canteen, made from a bunch of metal rods and spray paint. Nobody thought of buying a durable christmas tree when we left Sirius, so we needed to make our own.
Christmas was on my mind quite often lately. There was this one specific moment when I entered the canteen. Usually, the first person to be there in the morning was Sherry, to get herself a cup of coffee and plan her daily schedule for... probably an entire month. To be honest, I sometimes thought she was just reading a book or pretended to read while listening to the conversations at the table. I mean, nobody was more professional than her. After all, she was the Second-in-Command, and basically the brain, heart and soul of the Apahanta, and the most intimidating person on this ship, but come on, there is not that much to gain from scan reports and inventory checks and what not. Nevertheless, I never asked what she was doing. I just tried to not stare at her whenever we were alone.
This morning, we were, for a few minutes. Sherry was there, with a cup of steaming coffee, sitting at the big table, a PDA in front of her. I've never seen her wearing anything different than the Apahanta suit except during the daily workouts. To say her body was in a perfect shape almost sounds like an understatement. Athletic, lean body, well defined abs. For someone like me, who likes to draw people, she was basically the ideal example of a powerful woman. No surprise she got Ezrael's attention back when they met at Durham Station, before they stole the Apahanta.
I took my food tray and sat down on the other side, basically diagonally from her. "Good morning, Commander," I greeted her, as usual.
"Good morning, Noel," she replied. I was just going for the knife to cut my bun open when I realized she adressed me with my first name. Something she usually did not do. Surprised, I stared at her for a moment until she raised her gaze from the PDA to react. "What?"
"... You usually don't do that."
"Do what?" she asked.
"You use my last name or my rank, not my first name."
"Did I use your first name? Huh." She looked at her cup, then back at me. "Pardon that, Baker."
"Nothing to apolozige for. I mean, I don't mind that. It's just that I'm not used to hear you call my name." At this point I felt embarrassed to have brought it up.
"If you prefer it, I'll continue calling you by your first name."
Intimidated by the neutral expression she gave me I nodded. "Eh, nothing would make me happier!" Panic made me say that. Instant cringe moment. Ashamed, I focused on my food.
She dropped the subject with a final "Well then. Guten Appetit, Noel."
"Thanks!"
That was awkward, and for some reason, I interpreted her faint smirk as if she was fully aware of how uncomfortable I felt. The followeing silence didn't make it any better. She stared at her PDA, I prepared my bun. Sherry was hard to read. Her unbreakable professionalism, her size and her voice usually managed to make people try to remain at a careful, respectable distance to her. And from being in a relationship with Sombra I was conditioned to women being sadistic imps who love to make me feel awkwardly uncomfortable. Not that Sombs was in any way dominating, torturing or in any other way treating me badly. Not at all, I was happier than ever since we became a couple. It is just that she has an absolutely vile sense of humor.
For example, she has this horrible habit of saying weird things when we have romantic moments. A few days ago she surprised me with a really lovely dinner in our room. Everything was nicely decorated. Soft lighting, jazzy music, she wore a very sweet dress, the air was full of her perfume. We ate, then she took my hand, made me stand up and carefully made me slow dance with her. Our bodies were close to each other, she leaned in to place her head onto my shoulder - which probably looked funny, given I'm a head shorter than her - kissed my neck, grazed my ear with her teeth and whispered "Mmmmmhh, mommy needs a new diapy" in a very immersion-breaking baby voice to me. It weirded me out to the point where I wanted to take a step away from her, but she tightened her grip on me and continued to say funny, weird things to me. In the end, both of us broke and we laughed, but that is basically how she works. Of course, she does not wear diapers.
There is also the fact that we have just one child on this ship, Ezrael's and Abigail's daughter Luna. Fully aware of her being in the age where she begins to understand and repeat words, Sombra's vocabular switches from romantic and eloquent to rotten, vulgar slang. To a certain degree I think she does that because she hates the child, or at least the fact that Abigail forced this child onto Ez, but on the other hand, I also believe that Sombra really just derives pleasure from the idea of children learning foul words from her.
Time passed and the other crew members joined for breakfast. Sombra sat down next to me and pecked my cheek. Ez, as usual, next to Sherry, as they used the breakfast to talk about the schedule. A bunch of other people, too. Others sat down a bit further away, like Abigail and her daughter. Most of the time, one wouldn't have been able to tell that Ezrael is the father, as they rarely spend time together in public. I knew it would be different for christmas, as, despite their differences, Ez and Abigail got a bit closer with another again. Most likely for the sake of parenting, and because Sombra was no longer available to him.
There was some random conversation going on, and it somehow ended up with the omnipresent topic of christmas again. The more they talked about it, the more I had to think about it. Sombra noticed I grew silent and poked me in the side with her finger pistol. One of her, annoyingly, most effective moves to get my attention.
"What up, my boi?"
"I wonder how people celebrate christmas on Curacao. How did you do it? I mean, there is no snow, right?"
"Really, the same way it's celebrated on most other worlds. Yeah, no snow, but OSC usually did festive events. You know, marketing. Sometimes it was about fake snow, sometimes it was summer christmas with people in revealing clothes and such." That being said, from what I knew about Curacao, revealing clothes were an everyday thing there anyway. If anything at all.
"One time OSC hired Synth to create a palma tree version of a christmas tree," Ezrael explained, smirking while thinking back. "It was about fifteen meters tall and instead of needles, it had long and heavy leaves in layers. It was a big marketing gag and everyone was wondering whether the tree was an actual organism or just an elaborated thing made of plastic. When the thing began to rot, they realized Synth actually created a pine tree with the characteristics of a palma tree."
"I remember that. For some reason, the thing was incredibly stinky. Like, first it smelled like a regular pine tree and when it started rotting, people complained about the stank all over the island."
"That sounds hilarious."
"I bet you always had white christmas on Hamburg."
"Sort of. It often was too cold to go outside. And when my parents got the freighter, we simply left Hamburg. Kind of a bummer, now that I think of it. I never got to build a snowman, and looking at the future, I guess we'll never get the opportunity to build one." The moment I said that I realized the impact of that line. Sombra glanced over to Ezrael, who frowned for a moment. For the rest of our lives, we would remain on the Apahanta. Visiting other planets was too risky, according to Ezrael. Flesh-eating bacteria, terminal viruses, potential hostile lifeforms and so on. It was not like we didn't have the means to explore planets, as we had the Rovers and the Apotheosis, but it was a risk not worth taking. Everything we needed could be grown on the Apahanta or extracted from asteroids.
Realizing I just killed the mood, I exhaled audibly. "Sorry."
"We'll have to come up with a bunch of new traditions, or at least variants we can do on the Apahanta. Maybe we can create some fake snow for a snowman." Ezrael looked over at the fake christmas tree. "It's all about the spirit, right?"
"Yeah! We'll simply pour white color all over you, place you next to the tree, put a scarf on you and ram a carrot into your face." She gave Ez an impish smirk.
"Well, maybe something less extreme."
"Nonono, it's all about the holiday spirit, Ez! You'll be our Snow-Ez! And then we put christmas hats on all 400 KSRs! And who doesn't insert at least one ho-ho into their sentences will get thrown out of the airlock."
"That- "
"HOLIDAY SPIRIT!!"
It was another rare instance of me noticing a faint smirk on Sherry's face. Considering she and Sombra used to be rivals, it was a bit of a surprise to see her smirk about her childish jokes. Or maybe it was about something else.
As a boy from Rheinland, I got reminded of the differences in celebrating Christmas outside of Rheinland every year. For example, children get their presents in the morning of the 25th. In Rheinland, it's in the evening of the 24th, Heiligabend. Supposedly, Santa breaks into the house when the children sleep. Which sort of makes more sense than just showing up in the evening, but always without getting seen by the children. In Rheinland, people don't place a glass of milk and a plate with chocolate cookies on a table for Santa. The closest thing we have to that is the Weihnachtsteller, the christmas plate.
It's basically just a plate full of low-quality chocolate that you wouldn't touch if it wasn't for christmas. Like, these small chocolate balls that are wrapped in aluminium foil to look like christmas tree decoration. And then the little flat things with thousands of little sugar spheres on them. They always get stuck between the teeth, and they taste more like peppermint than like chocolate. I think the only christmas sweets I ever liked were marchpane potatoes. Marzipantöffelchen.
While we usually remained rather strict with the food stored in the cargo bays, trying to rely mostly on what the hydroponics and the food processing system allowed us to do on a day-by-day basis, certain holidays lead to Ezrael being rather generous. All kinds of sweets, red wine, some non-synthetic meat, even some of the very limited gallic cheeses. Ez always mentioned the dinner he had with Isabelle Montlaville de Chanteloup, the gallic admiral. Given he took care of her during her coma, people assume there was more going on than just a dinner. When confronted about it, he insisted that the only admiral he ended up in bed with was Admiral Knight of Battlegroup Harmony.
The 24th was quite festive, as expected. People grew impatient about Secret Santa and wanted to do it as early as possible, but Commander Aguilar made clear that we wouldn't begin before dinner. With most people being busy with decorating, the preparation of food or getting frustrated at wrapping gifts, Sombs and I spent most of the day in our room, which was mostly involuntary on my part.
Right after breakfast at the canteen, Sombra lured me to the entrance, where a makeshift mistletoe was hanging from the ceiling. She kissed me, then dragged me into our room and what happened there I don't need to explain. What I didn't know was the fact that it was not just to celebrate christmas and our youthful relationship in a, well, fun way, but it was also to make sure I wouldn't walk around on the Apahanta.
In the evening, we had the big dinner. It was a rare sight to have the entire crew in the canteen at the same time - as, well, someone needs to operate the ship, day and night shifts, et cetera. We enjoyed the meal, listened to very annoying christmas songs and then Secret Santa happened, with lots of gifts under the fake tree. Most people put a lot of effort in the wrapping, and then there was Sombra, whose gift was the most obvious to identify, as it was more duct tape than wrapper. To make sure everyone would get some personalized gift, the rule was to craft something from clay-like material.
Some people got really creative. Sherry got a miniature skyline of Manhattan's capital, all painted in high detail. Sombra got a black cat with huge eyes. The person who got Sombra's gift got an absurdely detailed male genital. Someone else thought it was funny to gift clay socks to Ezrael. Leon got a little figurine of supposedly himself on a surfboard, I guess?
When I unwrapped my gift, I found a not-too-detailed 2D picture of the Observation Deck painted onto burnt clay. There was a paper note under it, telling me to go there. So that was what I did. While everyone stayed at the canteen to just be together there and celebrate, I excused myself and headed out.
When I left the lift to get on the level with the Observation Deck, I quickly noticed that the environmental support was offline. It was cold. Given I was wearing my Apahanta suit and a christmas hat, the latter against my will, I only felt it in my face. It was probably below zero. My first instinct was to be careful, yet I moved forward and soon realized what was going on: There was a layer of snow. The closer I got to the Observation Deck, the higher it got. When I entered the room with the wide duraglass windows, the snow layer was probably half a meter high. It was amazing. I did not understand, baffled by the sight. Looking around, I realized a very faint set of footprints in the snow that lead away.
"Do you like it?"
I turned around. Commander Aguilar was behind me, smiling in a way I've never seen her do it before. "You did this?"
"Yes, for you. Do you like it?"
Baffled, I just stared at her for a moment before looking at snow again. "It's amazing!" She did that for me. Wow. "I love it!"
"What are you waiting for, then?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, here is your snow. Build a snowman, that's an order."
I chuckled, still feeling surprised by all this. I tried to explain to myself how she must have done this. Probably lowered the temperature of the room and the adjacent corridors on purpose, then went in here with some kind of snow machine. However, she gave me an order, so I did as I was tasked, rolling up the lower body of the snowman. After a minute or two, the ball was already half my size. I realized Sherry was watching me the entire time. "Commander, it would seem like additional support is required to accomplish this mission."
Sherry chuckled and kept smiling as she stepped through the snow, bent down and began rolling up another ball of snow. I didn't know how much time had passed, but it was fun. We built a snowman together! On a space ship! Due to the lack of rocks, we did not really get to decorate him, but later, when Sombra lead the entire crew to the Observation Deck, they added twigs of the fake christmas tree from the canteen for arms and the pretty gift wrapper of Sombra's gift was turned into a makeshift scarf. He even got small chocolate sweets for eyes and mouth and someone thought of getting the closest thing we had to a carrot for the nose - namely Sombra's gifted clay phallus.
We got to appreciate the dick-nosed snowman until Sombra made a comment while smirking widely. "Not as big as the snowman I made, but probably prettier."
Confused, I looked around, but did not find another snowman. I even glanced over to Ezrael, who was certainly not covered in white paint. "Er, did you make one from clay?"
"Not quite, but, well, something similar." She took my hand and lead me to the window. Then I saw it. The past three days, Sombra was toying around with the Rovers. She said to explore the system. I realized she did something else, and I also realized she did not keep me cuffed to the bed to buy some time for Sherry to flood the Observation Deck in snow, but to prevent me from looking out of the windows.
