LATA IS A NORTH STAR

October 26th, xxxx

RAIN'S DEATH IS A PREQUEL, Lata thinks harshly. Rain's death shouldn't be a prequel, it shouldn't be the beginning, the world shouldn't move on. She shouldn't move on.

Yet she nods when the Alpha ask if she wants to formally be recognized as North Star. He looks her dead in the eye, dark eyes the bottom of the ocean, its depth liquid, probing, never-ending.

Lata clears her throat, gripping the now empty urn in her arms and vocally accepts that yes, she wants to be North Star. No, she can't be Blue Sun anymore.

The Alpha says nothing awhile, searching while Nuka claps, Hayan smiles and the Major briefly squeezes her shoulder.

"A North Star you shall be," he assures, prying the urn away.

Led to the shrine blindfolded, she sees nothing, feels nothing as if buried in the ether, in bottomless space, in nothing.

She's carried and for a second, she floats above air, suspended like royalty, her feet doesn't touch the ground because they're jewels.

Then gasps when she's gently dropped in water—freezing water that chatters her teeth and stretches her flesh.

One minute she's freezing, struggling to be let out. The next minute she collapses against the wall of the pool completely numb, completely motionless.

A paw is in her hair. A palm around her throat, the claws digging in her soft flesh and panic rises but is lodged like a silent scream.

A sharp pain zing through her blood like pins and needles, like it's sucking her out, wringing her dry and as sudden as it attacks her, it slithers away as if it was never here. As if she hadn't feared this is where she dies.

"Open your eyes."

Lata obeys, flinging her eyes open like a window and like a window sees through it, seeing everything all at once. First, she registers the Alpha standing in all of his glory, wet clothes sticking to his skin, water dripping onto his cheeks from his hair, eyelashes, chin.

He looks down at her expressionless but where his black eyes had once probed, now, it stares like it's privy to the answers of the universe.

The second thing she notices is that the water is cool. Not cold, not freezing, cool like an evening breeze, like the morning mist, like the first snow.

It shimmers like a crescent moon shines on it but the shimmering is the shrine walls, blue like midnight sk, blue like the ocean, blue like paint, blue like fire, blue blue blue, it sparks in her eye and a sense of joy, a sense of calm rests in her heart.

The Alpha stretch a hand, she takes it and he pulls her to her feel as if she's weightless—she is weightless but grounded and she finds she has missed this feeling.

She used to feel like this when home was still home, when Pack was still family, when the insignia on her neck didn't feel like a burden, like a cage, like prison.

He leads her out of the pool and the Doc (clothed in blinding white, in red and blue of pearls on her neck, waist and legs that when she walks to give her a mirror, it rattles like beads.

Lata strokes the insignia on her neck. North Star. No one asks how it feels. They don't need to ask. They know. They feel it. The energy in her room, the energy of a new pack member is as strong, as potent as honey on the tongue.

Like a unit, they leave the shrine. Lata, escorted by a grinning Hayan, changes out of the wet clothes. If she is one for theatrical elation could've screamed, for when Hayan steers her to the central courtyard, the whole Pack is present, identical smiles on.

They hug her, they hold her hands. She pays her respect to the Elders, the soldiers carry her on her shoulders and march around, hailing her name before dropping her in front of the regal standing Alpha North.

Holding her hand, he bends to her height and asks for her name in a whisper. She knows what she wants to be called. Her own nation.

Standing to his full height and in a stentorian voice declares, "Lata North. North Star omega. Our Pack, our family."

The proclamation is received with a raucous jubilation and her heart melts and her head clears. Her lips could fall from all the beaming she's doing.

It'd have been perfect if Rain was here. They could've been North Star together, start anew, forget the past permanently.

She thinks this and more, her mood dropping with every if but the trance is broken sooner than she allows when the Captain scoffs.