I almost don't need to think about it, anymore, even in the half-sleep before the artificial dawn, my fingers fumbling for the strap around my chest and waist. Cloth and skin dance past in the dark underneath my fingertips, until I can feel the chilled plastic of the buckle, setting it free with a soft click in the pitch black.

My legs float free, and I lever myself upright, metal against my palms as I haul myself from the cramped recesses where I sleep. Something at the back of my mind protests, always protests, that I shouldn't be able to move like this, the weight of muscles silently gliding without an ever-present pull. That little alarm bell rings, like a silent warning to slink back into my tree, back into the sea, and jars loose the last shreds of the dream I'd been clinging to. Something about a sunlit beach, warm air around me and a hazily-remembered half-smile, hair in my hands and someone else's sweat rolling down my thighs.

I can hear her against the vast silence, the hollow ping of knuckles on steel sounding again as I float down the corridor. A faint sound, like ice forming and breaking loose, adds its chorus, and I glance at the entrance to the lab, red and quiet, as I go by. Everything's still, during what might as well be night, and the suits are where they always are, orange and silver in their racks. I can't help but grin - Kat's got hers half undone, again.

Something tickles at the back of my head; a loose memory coming free, perhaps, but the lock looms ahead, square and matte, a door shielding us from nothing, and I can hear that rapping ping once again. Nothing important.

Another push off the wall, and I'm there, wheeling in the dark, until my feet find purchase. The glass is close enough to touch, and on a whim, I shift until I can see through the far door, drifting up, until my eyes draw level with hers.

Hers.

It's like cold wire dragged through my veins, a chill and a hot flush of panic all at once, as she blinks. Once, twice; the motion like glacial clockwork to my heart's ragged roar.

She's there, fingers pressed against the glass, fingers, not the black layers of cloth and plastic to shield against the cold. Pale with the faintest hint of red, dark eyes boring into the inside of the station, that familiar sheaf of black hair eerily still as the stars silhouette her. I'd seen those strands float gently against her face when she slept, felt it against my hand, her breath against my shoulder, but this...

My fingers can't bring themselves to loosen, and I can hear a half-thought-out curse fall from my tongue, and nothing comes to mind but the silence outside, the glitter of the pinpricks on naked skin, and the way her head turns to regard the warmth inside before rolling languidly back to rest her gaze on me again.

The suit, half open behind me, yawns like a tunnel to something blacker than what's between the stars, the stark Maj. Vasiliya too small to encompass everything running through my nerves like lightning.

There's something small about it, wrapped in a cocoon of plastic and metal, the cloth suddenly rough against my skin where her own is clad in starlight.

"Kat," I breathe, reaching out a hand to hover desperately against the release lever, watching the stars stare back in black eyes.

For a moment, the only sound are the machines inside, and I swear again.

"Fuck."

"Jesus fuck," I offer up to the stars, a smile teasing at the edge of my lips.

"You scared me with that one."

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