~Videl~

The next week passed by in a blur. Videl was surprised to find that she was getting used to waking up early - she was actually starting to like it. Getting up before 6 a.m. made her feel like she had already accomplished something just by starting her day earlier than most. She was eager to see Kane every day waiting for her to show up, and she was too proud of herself when she wasn't late. She chose not to leave the bench until Kane and Dare were done, so that she wouldn't feel guilty about them cutting their work out short again, just to swim with her. And she was glad when Ava and Kayleigh showed up each morning to spy on Dare. The first day, they meandered by nearby machines, pretending to know what they were doing, when really they were trying to give Ava the opportunity to sneak peeks at her crush when she thought he wasn't looking.

Videl could tell that Dare was painfully aware of it by the look on his face, and it made her want to laugh to see how hard he was trying not to notice. By the third day, Ava had completely given up on hiding her intentions for being at the Gym, and to Videl's delight, and Dare's dismay, Ava joined her on the bench to openly watch him. Kayleigh was obviously satisfied that her friend was through pretending to work out, and was more than happy to retreat to the hot tub in the pool room.

Videl was glad to have someone to make small talk with while the guys were exercising, and she enjoyed not being the only one blushing on the bench like a lovesick puppy. It didn't hurt that Ava was a great conversationalist once she came out of her shell, so Videl didn't have to offer many words to get her new friend going on a friendly ramble. It was only a little awkward when Ava asked her something about her life, like what her favorite class in School was, and Videl had to evade her questions, or make something up that sounded believable. She didn't want to share what had happened to her in Cryo - she just wanted to have a friend that thought she was as normal as anyone else. But she didn't have the first clue what classes the real Videl had chosen for herself, let alone which class might have been her favorite. She didn't know anything about the experience the Videl of the past had in School, aside from a story that Sienna had told her about the day that Videl had an allergic reaction to a daro fruit smoothie in grade 6, and how she had nearly died when her throat closed up.

Once the guys were finished with their sessions each day, Videl would head to the women's locker room to get ready to swim. Kayleigh had talked Ava into leaving with her for breakfast most days that week, claiming how starving she was, but on the fifth day, Ava asked her to go on to the Cafeteria without her, so that she could join Videl (and the guys) for a swim. Kayleigh relented, asking Videl to look out for her best friend, so that she wouldn't feel guilty about leaving her for food, to which Videl earnestly agreed that she would.

Showering next to Ava was incredibly unnerving for Videl who had gotten used to having the locker room to herself while she rinsed off any lotions or perfumes on her skin. Changing into her bathing suit afterward was just as awkward for Videl, but each time she nervously checked to see if Ava was peeping at her, she wasn't, and so she tried not to worry about exposing herself. She chastised herself for being so wary of prying eyes, given that because of her frequent glances, she was looking at Ava way more than Ava seemed to be looking at her.

You're the one peeping and being weird, now. Videl thought to herself with chagrin. Because you're so scared of being peeped on. Relax, you weirdo!

Once they were dressed, the two of them made their way to the pool room, and when Videl wrapped a towel around herself before entering, Ava looked at her curiously.

"Are you embarrassed about showing so much skin?" Ava wondered out loud. "You shouldn't - you have a bangin' body, V." Ava smiled, encouragingly, and Videl felt her face burning.

Maybe Ava had  seen something. Oh Stars, that's embarrassing!

"It's n-not that," Videl stammered. "I just feel weird about being exposed, is all. Once I get in the water, I feel better. Especially with Kane there."

The thought of being exposed (and being with Kane) made the memory of them in his bedroom flash in her mind, and she blushed even harder. Ava must have noticed, because she quickly patted her back sympathetically.

"Oh, sorry! That makes total sense!" Ava hurried to say as she grabbed her own towel from the rack, throwing it over her shoulder. "You're modest," Ava smiled again, then seemed to change her mind about her towel placement, as she went to wrap it around herself like Videl had. "Maybe I should be, too. I don't want Dare to think I'm a ditz or something."

Ava giggled and Videl shook her head, smiling as they entered the pool room. The guys hadn't finished showering or changing yet though, so the room was still empty, but it was less eerie with Ava walking next to her.

"Echo!" Ava called out - the walls bouncing her sweet voice around them.

Videl laughed, the sound echoing as well. Once they had made it to the sane people pool, they removed their towels. Ava didn't hesitate to jump in, and the splash was much smaller than Dare's daredevil  cannon-ball the day that Videl was worried she wouldn't be able to swim - but the water droplets still went flying over to land on her skin where she stood at the stairs. Videl squealed and giggled. She wasn't as brave as Dare or Ava, yet. She wasn't ready to catapult herself over the side, straight into the deep end, so she just walked down the stairs until she was submerged. I might be too crazy for the sane people pool, Videl thought to herself. But she had hope that she would eventually get the guts to jump over the side - maybe even cannon-ball one day. She watched in fascination as Ava used the little diving board. Compared to the precarious high dive of the giant pool, it was child's play, but Videl was still impressed.

When Kane and Dare finally made their entrance, Ava stopped splashing Videl playfully, and froze like a deer in the headlights.

"He's coming!" Ava squeaked, suddenly retreating inside her shell, and resuming her shy demeanor.

Dare was smiling at something Kane had been saying when his eyes trailed past Videl to see that she wasn't alone in the pool. A flit of irritation faltered his smile, clearly annoyed that his "stalker" had finally gotten the courage to encroach on his swim time. If Ava noticed his discomfort, she wasn't bothered by it. She looked at him like he was a star-studded celebrity as she greeted him.

"Hi, Dare!" Ava said cheerfully.

Dare seemed to grumble something under his breath as they approached, and Kane elbowed his ribs with a considerable lack of subtlety.

"Hey," Dare faked a friendly smile. "Ava, right?"

Ava nodded eagerly, obviously pleased that he remembered her name. The four of them swam for an hour or so. At first, Dare appeared to be purposely avoiding interacting with Ava, but by the end of it, he was splashing her and grinning as he picked her up and threw her into the water, more than once. Ava acted as if her dreams were coming true, and Videl supposed that they were. At some point during their play, Kane pulled Videl to him.

"Dare seems to be warming up to his date," Kane murmured as they watched his friend and Ava laughing.

Kane kissed Videl's forehead, holding her in his arms.

"I'm happy for her - she's such a little sweetheart," Videl replied quietly, nuzzling her face against his bare chest.

"So are you," he mumbled so lowly that she almost hadn't heard him say it.

~Kane~

Kane and Dare were folding laundry in his living room - mostly gym clothes and socks - as the TV blared on a music channel. Kane mouthed along to some of the rock songs he knew, and Dare paused in his folding, occasionally, to perform an epic solo on air-guitar in time with the songs. Kane laughed at how much Dare was into the performance, throwing his sandy brown locks back and forth in a vigorous head-bang as he played his imaginary electric guitar.

After they finished, they were milling around in the kitchen, deciding what to eat, when Dare opened the fridge, sighing wistfully as he surveyed the many food options.

"Man, we never had this much food on Omega," he reminisced, his words coming out in an absent way.

Kane paused in the middle of reaching for a bag of chips in the pantry. Dare seemed to avoid talking about the Omega Starship, most of the time. Maybe now there was an opportunity for Kane to ask about it. As Dare pulled out a package of chicken breasts, his eyes had a distant look to them, like he was remembering the past.

"Really?" Kane asked him hesitantly. "What was it like on Omega?"

Dare's usual upbeat attitude seemed to deflate as he grimaced at the question.

"Uhh . . . " Dare appeared to be deciding whether he should answer or not, as he busied himself removing the plastic wrap on the chicken. "Before the transfer, they made us sign NDAs, so I could probably get killed for telling you this, but . . . "

He sighed, suddenly looking older than he did moments before, when he was shredding on air-guitar. He grabbed some seasonings and readied the cutting board, as he seemed to think about how to word things.

"Things were getting pretty bad on Omega," Dare confessed with a wince.

Kane listened intently as Dare went on to explain just how bad it was. He told him that there had been rising concerns about over-population.

"Two or three families would share private quarters, but that was nowhere near the worst part," Dare said.

Kane's eyebrows shot up, trying to imagine that many people crammed in a tiny space, but he didn't say anything. Suddenly, Dare's claustrophobia made a lot more sense.

"People were going on strike on the Agriculture Level. The Hydroponics were failing to yield without the fertilizers the farm produced. Food was becoming scarce."

Dare paused to begin searing the chicken and the smell of food cooking filled the air, juxtaposing what he had just told him. Kane waited patiently for him to continue. Dare went on to say that the Omega Council was holding daily meetings to discuss and vote on new protocols to mitigate the problems. He said that lots of families chose Cryo, in hopes that things would be better in a year or two, and they figured that it would help ease the burden of the food crisis.

"People were wondering why a whole Cryo Level seemed like it was being reserved, when the general consensus was that the more people on ice, the better." Dare told Kane, flipping the meat over with a spatula, the resulting sizzle punctuating his words.

Before Kane could ask what the Level was being reserved for, Dare continued,

"But apparently, they had other plans for those pods that they weren't ready to announce yet."

Dare shook his head, and Kane couldn't see his expression with his back turned to him, but he could bet that he was reliving the stress of what went down, and probably scowling. When Dare spoke again, his voice sounded hard. He explained that they enforced strict rules on procreation - that only people who were married were allowed children, and no more than two were permitted for each marriage, and that if a child was born out of wed-lock and went unreported because of it, the parents would face criminal charges. The Omega Council couldn't risk unreported children sullying their census statistic simulations, when the survival of the Omega inhabitants depended upon the number of mouths to feed to be exact. Dare went on to tell Kane that there were measures being voted on to force chemical contraceptives on anyone of reproductive age who wasn't married.

"The Omega Council wanted to avoid the Starship getting decommissioned," Dare grunted as he finished cooking and flicked off the burner. "I guess they didn't want the Omega to go down in history as the first failed Starship."

Kane nodded, imagining that his father would be one of the last ones to surrender if the Titan faced the same possibility. He had no idea who his father would be if he lost his place on the Council - his Starship dispersed and dissolved, the guilt he would feel for being instrumental to the downfall of hundreds of years of a Starship's service. He couldn't picture his father as a simple passenger, forced to board another Starship after Titan was decommissioned. Kane imagined that his father would sooner die than lose all that power.

As if reading his mind, Dare continued his story, plating the chicken as he did so.

"So the Council decided to ask families to volunteer for transfer, but they couldn't just unload hundreds of people on another Starship without raising suspicion, so they could only request for a handful of families to transfer to each Starship they passed on their flight trajectory. And only if each Starship approved docking, and the number of passengers beforehand. They also had to pretend that these weren't emergency transfers."

Dare slid Kane a plate, sharing the food he'd cooked, and Kane pushed aside the bag of chips he'd grabbed, thanking him. The bag of chips remained unopened - Kane had been too focused on the details of Dare's story.

"They had to pretend that they were just offloading passengers who had planned to visit star systems that weren't on Omega's trajectory." Dare snorted, rolling his eyes. "Because, you know, that's  something that happens all the time," he said sarcastically, taking a bite of his chicken.

It obviously was something that so rarely happened that it was cause for an extravagant Welcoming Ceremony. Starships didn't take on passengers from other ships every day. It had only happened one other time in the course of Titan's history, and it hadn't been to appease shallow, sight-seeing whims, like the Omega wanted other Starships to believe. It had been an emergency situation, and the whole event was studied in the Titan Starship History class. Titan had the last remaining vial containing a medicinal treatment for solar radiation poisoning, and doctors and scientists had to transfer urgently, so that they could use the vial to synthesize more for their Starship. Titan had held onto the vial for sentimental reasons, after having no practical use for it for hundreds of years.

The genetic predisposition for SRP had long-since faded from prevalence, as each generation of children raised in space grew more resistant to getting sick from it. Most people on Titan were eventually completely immune - civilization became more harmonious with the harsh elements of space. The passengers on the Nebula Starship weren't so lucky. They never fully bred out the people with the genetic predisposition. Hundreds of years later, people were still getting sick, and they had run out of their supply of the medicine. Originally, every Starship was given a vial, but the Nebula's vial had slowly dwindled with every time they had to synthesize more, until there was nothing left of it to synthesize from. People were suddenly dying from SRP for the first time, without the treatment, and the Nebula Starship requested permission to dock with the Titan so they could acquire their vial.

The Titan didn't need theirs, and the Council was more than happy to allow them to retrieve it, and save their people. The history teachers loved to tell the story, obviously proud to paint the Titan Starship and its Council at the time as heroes of the human race. But that was 200 years ago, and none of the Nebula doctors or scientists were offloaded to live on Titan. They took what they needed and left. The Omega dropping off their people like they did, with a flimsy excuse, was highly unusual, and it surely would raise red flags with the Galactic Federation once they received reports of the Omega docking and offloading passengers at every possible chance. They were playing a risky game, and it was likely that they would be caught after two or three more transfers, in such a short amount of time.

Kane took a bite of the chicken - it was a little heavy on the seasoning, but he had no reason to complain. After Dare took a few more bites of his own, he told Kane that his family was quick to volunteer for transfer, so they were assigned to the Titan Starship, which would have been the first Starship the Omega would have a chance to dock with. He said his parents were so relieved when the Titan approved docking, assuming that must have meant that their Starship wasn't facing the same problems that the Omega was.

"A week before transfer, the Council had us sign the NDAs. They put us in cryo-pods on the reserved Level, and I woke up on Titan." Dare wiped his mouth with a napkin, having finished his chicken, and smiled at the memory. "We couldn't believe that we didn't have to share our quarters. Mom and Dad danced around like little kids with all the extra space," he laughed. "When I found out that I could file for my own quarters, I thought it was too good to be true. And when you told me that it would only take a few months to be approved, I really couldn't believe it. Just a few months on a waiting list, and I could move out of my parents' place?" Dare was shaking his head incredulously.

"And I thought that you were shocked that it would take that long!" Kane found the whole story to be a lot to take in. "Once people finish School, and apply on their 18th birthday, they usually mope around with their shoulders hunched, waiting for the approval. We call it the Senior Slump." Kane chuckled, imitating the slouched, depressed way they would walk. Dare laughed at the impression, but after a moment, he sighed somberly,

"If they knew what it was like on Omega, they would be more grateful."

Kane knew that he should be more grateful too, given Dare's story. Regardless of what was happening on Omega, Kane was still more fortunate than most teenagers had been on Titan. He never suffered through the Senior Slump that most of them had. As soon as he had turned 18, his quarters had already been arranged for him - no waiting list, no roommate, aside from the promise that he would share with Kiana when the time came. Even if he hadn't felt like it, that alone made him spoiled. Despite all the stress caused by his parents' divorce, the resulting responsibilities he'd shouldered, he had been well-off, thanks to his father's status. Kane thought to himself that maybe he should have been more appreciative.