Remembering Omega
She only pieced together her childhood - or what passed for one - later.
Children didn’t remember things. Children rarely remembered places, either, or features, their minds twisting objects and beings until the tops of their heads touched the sky and their eyes glowed down like yellow lamps, unblinking and uncaring.
But children did remember feelings.
Her first memory is of cold. Darkness. They combined into something tangible, something pressing and present and absent. She remembers how it had sunk into her bones and made something in her chest sharp and stabbing. She remembers that it felt empty. Empty of something she couldn’t really understand, and though she had no reason to think that this wasn’t normal, it felt out of place all the same.
Her second memory is of absence. It was the first time she was able to recognize anguish, tearing at her throat and constricting her airway, and panic, and pain. She wasn’t cold anymore because she was so hot, her blood galloping through her veins and boiling, salty, liquid something dripped down her cheeks and seared her eyes. She remembers a wild need for something, for someone, a hand to cover hers or arms to bundle her up in or even just a voice, and it wouldn’t matter what the voice said so long as she could recognize that maybe there was someone there, and maybe she wasn’t the only one here. She remembers her skin prickling, prickling, prickling, because she’s cold again and there’s some primordial, primal demand for another living being to touch her.
Her third memory is of distance. She was used to the watchful one by now, used to the way it moved and how its features never betrayed any of its thoughts, a mask that she was too inexperienced to see through. But even when the watchful one watched her, even when it spoke, told her to stay still, she never felt seen. When the respected one and the one in the middle, the one who visited, came to see the watchful one and seemed so urgent about when, they looked at her like a puzzle, like an anomaly, like something that wasn’t supposed to be here. She knew they talked about her, but not one of them ever turned and bent their elegant bodies down to her, looked in her eyes and said some kind of something that made a piece fall into place that she was….something. Alive. Okay. She didn’t know the word loved until later, and for her it was defined as the opposite of how unreachable the watchful one’s eyes were.
Her fourth memory is of lost, and of the moments when lost seemed not quite. The world had gotten bigger, like it had simply blinked into existence, and the watchful one had opened the door and sent her away in the care of a strange floaty thing, with shiny limbs and a shiny voice that wobbled with panic whenever she took a step the wrong way. She remembered how bright the lights were, a glowing, constant white that bordered on iridescence and hurt when she looked at them too long. They stabbed somewhere within her skull like an afterthought, a silent kind of pain that didn’t yield until she learned to avert her eyes and keep her head down. She remembered how noisy it had seemed, how her footsteps faded into the endless white hallways. To someone who’s only ever heard silence, even hush is loud.
She remembered her first face, other than the watchful one and the respected one and the one who visited, and how warm its colors had seemed against the stark white corridors. It was tall, but compact, and sturdy, its eyes were confused, but it seemed like asylum when it scooped her up. Its arms were solid and warm and it cradled her head against its chest while it moved, and it clicked something into place. It wasn’t love, but it was something that set a few seconds aside to care, and the warmth in its concern wrapped around her like a blanket and made everything seem okay.
She remembered her second face, and this one was older, its back beginning to stoop and lines sinking into its face like stories untold, and its mouth curved when it looked at her. It knelt down and held her hand and asked her questions she didn’t understand, but it was kindness, and that was new too. She remembered the windows, when the endless white had found an end, and she remembered the cool of glass. She remembered the rain, and that the seal on the window must have been faulty. The kind one had put a work-gnarled hand on her shoulder and let her reach out to drag the ends of her tiny fingertips across the condensation, leaving trails that said I am here. It was the only here that had ever stopped to acknowledge her, the only thing that changed when she moved, like she was worth paying attention to.
Most of all, she remembered her third face, her fourth, her fifth, her sixth, glowing as tiny little lights back in the watchful one’s dark. The others started asking about it, started coming through the door from the world and pointing at the four little lights and saying when. She remembered learning that when got smaller slowly, and the respected one was never happy about it. The one who visited came to say would, and to say this, and to both of them the watchful one’s reply was always will. But every time the respected one came to say when, the four little lights would get a little bit bigger, until she could find herself in their tiny faces and tiny fingers and hope that their four little lights would make the dark a little less.
For now, the four little lights floated oblivious, asleep, maybe, and maybe when they woke up they’d get to stay. For now, they were together, and she remembered something calm settle in her core like how the waves stilled when the rain stopped. The kind one had picked her up and called it the ocean, before the watchful one could see them. He’d pointed, showing her how the funny flying creatures brought their littles to play between the pylons that held the city above the water.
At the end of the when, the four little lights turned off. One of them was bigger than the others, and one of them had a thick thatch of shadow-dark on his head that the watchful one didn’t seem to understand. One of them had a sharper face, carved out of focused intensity, and the smallest one curled in on himself like he was trying to shut out the world. The watchful one gave them numbers, nine-nine, nine-nine, nine-nine, nine-nine, like they were always meant to be together, and something clawed at her stomach when she realized that no one had ever given her one.
Instead, the shiny one zoomed up with its shiny limbs and its shiny voice, intent on a somewhere, and she didn’t want to go, didn’t want to take her eyes off of the four little nine-nines, afraid that they would disappear as simply and finally as a mirage if she looked away.
She only pieced together her childhood - or what passed for one - later.
It took time for her to understand her scraps of memory and feeling, lost without concept or context. She didn’t realize there was a cavernous, empty space she was lost in until she wasn’t anymore, like the way the vents were always loudest in the seconds after they’d just turned off. How do you place isolation, when you’ve been alone your whole life? How do you understand love, when all you’ve ever found is apathy?
She remembered alone, because she never had someone else to be alone with.
She remembered wrong, everything wrong, because there had never been anyone to tell her that she was right.
Now, everyone had a name. She recognized the watchful one, the respected one, the one who visited, and the kind one and the shiny one, who always blurted it in her ear with his shiny voice. For a while, she didn’t understand the identification in these strings of syllables, how they could mean everything, how you would be recognized and explained in a breath. Nala Se, Lama Su, Taun We, Ninety-nine, AZI-345211896246498721347.
She didn’t have a name, because what was there to define her?
She was the last.
Nala Se called her Omega.
*******
eeeeek so I opened Tumblr this morning to a giant pile of notifications and FREAKED OUT. Stupid sloppy grin, excited lil bouncing, all of it. Thank y’all so much for making my day, and probably my week too (by the way, @isaakandreyevs, you’re incredible and I love you).
Anyway, TBB today! I confess I don’t write with them as much as I should, but I got stuck on Omega’s childhood memories. I have discovered that it is REALLY HARD. Like, it’s not supposed to make sense to her, but it has to make sense to you, and my brain is so twisted up right now it should be in Cirque du Soleil.
Let me know what you want to see next! I’m thinking my best boys in the 501st, but suggestions would be more than welcome.
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