#request received

Laika had never truly gotten used to sleeping on the ship, the stagnant air that laid so heavy it could choke. The unnatural warmth that Laika had known exclusively through body heat now overwhelmingly consistent. Sweating through her button up alone felt more unbearable than freezing next to someone.

Yet, for all her reservations, her bed had been calling to her ever since the nosebleed. Not just from how light headed she felt—no. This was something else. The way she sunk into the mesh material of her cot, how the overhead lights didn't breech beneath her eyelids like usual, the rocking of the Omega breeding lethargy rather than nausea.

Laika doesn't even clock she's asleep at first, and the way her eyes blink open on instinct has her mourning just how close she'd gotten.

Before the void stares back at her.

There's only a millisecond of eternity that her brain tolerates before it latches onto something it can comprehend, even if with only slightly better understanding. Because Laika knows what a cat is, there were a few that lived on Eden after all. None of them stood on two legs though, and maybe she just wasn't worth the conversation but she didn't think they talked either. Maybe it isn't a cat at all, but whatever it is, whatever it's saying— It's lost in translation as Laika instead grapples with the questions she has that get trapped in her throat. And it isn't until it's saying its goodbyes that she regains the ability to talk, blinks away her deer in headlights expression, and physically jolts into action.

"Wait! Don't leave, I don't—"

Her hand grabs air. And suddenly an incomprehensibly void peels away to reveal something just as mind bending— even if for completely different reasons.

The salt in the air hits her first like a punch to the gut, and her muscles tense up accordingly. Laika is reminded just how lacking her imagination truly is, because being able to taste it had never even registered as a possibility during her attempts. But it's undeniable, the way her throat closes up in protest against the assault on her senses despite merely breathing it in.

Laika's eyes water, and she doesn't even know the saline carried in the breeze is partly to blame. Though her assumption that it's from awe alone is an understandable one. Especially when placed in the context of what lay in front of her.

A spectrum of colors she didn't even know existed bends on the horizon, threatening to break against the curve of the Earth as the sun sets. There's one in particular she knows all too well though, one she never thought she'd see again.

Her favorite.

["Like your eyes??" “Okay, ouch— don’t go poking them out or they wont be blue for much longer but yes. Like my eyes, silly.”]

The sound of water lapping at the shore becomes the backing track for Laika's emotional descent as the sight of it all makes her feel faint, her tears fall heavier. Her knees buckle, she hits the sand, and the tide hitting her knees is what finally snaps her out of it.

She's seeing the ocean, touching the ocean. The beast sailors failed to conquer, the savior humanity lost in the rapture, the pipedream she thought impossible.

The wish her sister never stopped making.

["You know you're supposed to be asleep, what are you doing up?" ". . .Did the pictures make you sad?" "What?" "You're crying. . .was it the pictures? I can beat them up if you want." "Pffttt. No Laika, it's just— It's not the pictures themselves. I suppose I'm just feeling a bit homesick." "But— we are home, aren't we?" ". . . maybe you are."]

Something about that memory she had forgotten all about becomes clearer in the aftermath of the sight she struggles to describe.

Laika was been born on Eden, she'd barely been four when God decided to take the stars and planets like a thief in the night. The ocean she'd come to yearn for was one from books, archives, photographs. The one Jordan mourned was real— forged from water, coral, and life. Not paper and ink.

With the small pinhole Laika had known Earth through, she could never understand her sister's grief even if she sympathized. She harkened it to someone being born blind and another losing their sight well into adulthood. Both tragedies, ones neither of them truly grasp even with its overlapping symptoms. But now— in the face of a small fraction of what her sister had known—she understood.

How could anyone who'd bore witness to heaven be at peace in its substitutes?

Part of Laika wonders why Jordan didn't cry more, didn't collapse into herself from the weight of it all, the way she knows she will the moment she wakes up. Of course, Jordan had always been the stronger of the two— it'd been a miracle she'd been caught crying at all. It's that reason that makes Laika suddenly feel wrong for assuming her sister would fall victim to her despair the way she felt so comfortable doing. They may have been cut from the same cloth, but Jordan's had never needed as much patching up as hers.

The reminder has her attention going to the sleeve of the button up she wears. The tide had drenched its cuffs, and there's an automatic instinct to pull away, to not let the water taint it anymore than it had. One Laika ignores in favor of submerging her hand up to her forearm. Something about the last thing her sister had worn being completely covered in sea water— it just felt right. But she wouldn't go that far, mostly because she feared if she submerged herself in its depths she'd forget any reason to come back up.

The morbid thought forces her eyes off the water and back towards the shore, where she does a double take at the figure sitting there.

"Jordan. . .?"

She hadn't said her name out loud in so long, a streak she didn't mean to break. Maybe it was a combination of the fact her sister was the only other person she associated with the setting and she'd already been thinking of her. But upon seeing whoever that was in the distance? It slipped out— a wish of her own.

It was impossible, but Laika stood up anyway. It was impossible, but she was already standing in the biggest impossibility was there— right? Laika knew it was impossible, and she made her way towards them anyway. Picking up speed. Hoping beyond belief that her sister would be the one sat on that shore. That all her trials had been worth it, all her obedience finally counted up, maybe she was finally getting her reward.