Chapter Text
Uncle Owen hands her the keys to the speeder the next day.
"Heard Mrs. Sandsetter had a job for you," he says. He doesn't seem happy about it. "Be back before the second sun sets."
"Yes, sir," Leia replies, and holds in her whoop until she's got the speeder skimming over the salt flats as fast as it can go.
It's a clear day, only one sun barely up yet and the air as still as it ever gets. The desert is cast in gold and pale blue, the sky still pink where the second sun is beginning to rise.
The line of the wastes is ahead of her, and for a moment the wind rises inside of her, a full-empty feeling calling out to the canyons and the weathered old hut. She feels a flash of—of something, the thing she doesn't have words for, but it's only a flash, and she turns the speeder south towards the Sandsetter farm.
It isn't even full sunsup yet by the time she gets there, and there's only a prickling of sweat on her chest when she pulls into the courtyard and smooths her braids down to knock on the door.
Mrs. Sandsetter looks surprised to see Leia when she opens the door, one of the twins perched on her hip, almost too big to be there. "Leia!" she says, but she smiles when she does it. "I didn't expect to see you out and about so soon."
Leia shrugs awkwardly. "Biggs said you had a job for me?"
"Yes!" she replies, stepping aside so Leia can enter. "Come on in." She hands the twin—Tomar, Leia thinks it is—over without a second word, and Leia's arms nearly crumple under the weight. Tomar must be nearly three now, and growing like algae in a cistern.
"Go ahead and sit down in the kitchen, I just need to go grab a few things."
Leia takes Tomar to the kitchen dutifully and perches him on her lap. He's a wriggly little thing, itching to get down and run, and she has to keep grabbing him back every time he nearly gets away, getting punched in the tit twice for her trouble.
There are pounding footsteps in the hall, and then Norai's in the kitchen, dark hair swinging to a stop all the way at her waist.
"Biggs said you were grounded," she says, which feels like an accusation even if it isn't. "Canyon racing."
"Was,” Leia says back. “But now I’m ungrounded. It's the new water tax, I think. Uncle Owen needs the money. And I helped with some womps in last night." Leia bounces Tomar up and down her lap.
"Oh, just let her down," Norai says. "She can't reach any of the knives."
Leia glances at the door, where Norai's mom could come back at any moment, which is right when Tomar decides to grab at her ear and pull it as hard as possible. Leia sets her down.
Confounded by her newfound freedom, Tomar stops dead for a moment. Then she looks up at Norai and begins to cry. Begrudgingly, Norai picks her up. "Janek is supposed to be taking care of the twins so I could head with you Tosche," she says. "But there was a problem with the vault in the east field, so it's on me."
Leia wrinkles her nose in deference, wondering, "Doesn't Janek usually go to Tosche for you all?"
"Yeah." Norai's face sours. "Mom wanted me to go this time though, as long as I went with you or Connie, but Connie’s going to be out near Mos Espa for months after the wedding,” she says. “Whatever. I’m better with the twins anyways—boys, you know. A baby starts screaming and they lose their minds. Who did you guys go racing with?"
Leia lists off the names and the wins, and then makes a face. "Not that it'll matter soon. Biggs enrolled in the Imperial Pilot Academy. He's headed out in two months."
Norai wrinkles and comes to lean on the table next to Leia. Tomar yells to be put down, and she ignores her. “It’s going to be boring around here without him,” she says, putting words to something Leia hadn’t even known she’d felt. “I mean, we knew it was gonna happen, but he could have waited another year or two.”
"Yeah," Leia replies, choking on her own voice. “Like—yeah.” Biggs gone, and the rest of Tatooine stretching out in the distance behind him, forgotten. Lukho will start winning a lot more races, and Sep’ll pull out entirely probably, because he’ll be getting beat by a girl—not that Leia will know about any of it, because she’s not a racer and not one of them will bother swinging by to pick her up so she can sit there and watch. She’s always been Biggs’s tagalong, and even Aytin and Janek call her Wormie if Biggs isn’t around. It’ll be her and Norai in the kitchen of the Sandsetter home forever getting wailed at by Tomar.
“It’s fucked,” Leia says, which of course is when Mrs. Sandsetter does walk right back into the kitchen, and Leia is sent on her way to Tosche with an admonishment that her uncle will hear and feeling like fizzing in her ears.
It’s the same as it always is when she gets there—cool and dry, filled with the smell of sweaty, unwashed bodies and the techno jizz that was hot years and years ago. Laze is in the corner, like usual, sitting too close to Camie and trying to look casual about it, as if she isn’t three quarters of the way to halfway gone on him. Laze’s friends are there too, sitting around and laughing like idiots playing bad sabacc and trying to impress the strangers that show up from Anchorhead.
Leia tries to edge past them, ignoring their obnoxious laughing and the fact that one of Laze’s friends—the one with the hair like dirt—is clearly bluffing about something, but doesn’t quite make it.
“Wormie!” Camie yells in her stupid, fake core-world accent. She keeps trying to convince everyone it’s because her mom was from Corellia, but, even if her mom was from the Core, there’s no way she doesn’t practice it in the mirror every morning.
Leia freezes, flinches, and turns around. “Hi,” she says, and wants die.
“We didn’t know you’d be around,” Laze says, like it’s supposed to mean something. Maybe she’s supposed to pretend they would have waited for her to play if they’d known she was coming.
“I’m picking up some things for Mrs. Sandsetter,” she says, and turns around. Her heart is in her throat—it’s so stupid the way she gets around them—and she can feel her cheeks prickling.
“I heard you and Biggs went racing a couple weeks ago,” Camie says then, and Leia doesn’t have to turn back around to know that Laze’s face looks like he ate something sour. Biggs and Camie were going steady back when Biggs was fifteen, and Laze never really got over it. She does turn back around though, and Laze’s face does look like he was sucking on straight vinegar, but Camie does look actually interested.
“Yeah,” Leia says. “He cleaned up.” Then, because she can’t help it. “He’s heading to the Imperial Academy soon—gonna be a pilot.”
“Well,” Camie says, looking impressed. “I knew he had it in him.”
Leia snaps, “We all did,” and suddenly wants to crawl inside herself and die. “Anyways,” she says, and means to finish with good luck with your game, but it hits her then, again, that Biggs really is leaving. No more races. No more sneaking out at night. No more speeders flying across the desert under the stars. Just her and Norai in her mom’s kitchen. For days, and weeks, and months, and years.
“Good luck with your game,” she does say in the end, and goes to negotiate Taron down from his usual puffed-up prices with a bluff about heading all the way to a Mos instead.
Leia saves more than she needs to in the end, and Mrs. Sandsetter already promised her twenty percent of whatever she saved, so there’s still some cash jingling in her pocket as she walks back past Camie and her friends. They look mostly done with the game—except the one with hair like dirt, who looks mad that the rest of them are more interested in whatever they’re talking about than taking their turns—and for a moment, Leia looks straight at the door.
Biggs is leaving, she thinks to herself, on purpose, trying to make it hurt, and heads towards them instead.
“Do you have room for another player?” she asks, her voice a little too high to be casual.
Laze looks like he’s about to object, but Camie gets to it first. “Yes, of course,” she says, and Laze’s friends obligingly scoot aside to make room for her. “We were just about to start another round.”
“Buy-in’s ten credits or two wupiupi,” Laze calls as they deal her in, and she tosses the money on the table.
She’s only played sabacc once or twice, when she and Biggs have gone to the canyons and no one’s wanted to race. Uncle Owen doesn’t hold with gambling—he’ll get up and leave a wedding, sometimes, if it starts, and take her with him—and Aunt Beru hasn’t ever so much as touched a sabacc card. Bad business, they call it, and maybe it is, but so’s hunting womps and racing in the canyons and neither has done her in yet.
She loses the first two rounds—not badly for the first one, and real badly for the second—and manages to almost get through on the third. She can tell when Laze is lying, and that Camie doesn’t bother lying unless she thinks it will be funny, and Windy (the one with hair like dirt) takes it so seriously that it never really matters if he lies or not because he works himself too much to manage winning, and that everyone thinks Deak is a way better liar than he really is.
It doesn’t help much when it comes to counting cards, though, which Windy is probably trying to do and Deak might actually be doing, and it helps less when trying to find a decent array. No matter what way she swings it, Leia can’t manage a win.
She loses twelve wupiupi all together. Thinking about it almost makes her throw up—she’ll have to tell Mrs. Sandsetter that she spent it all on converters and mediator shells. The only other option is that she tells Uncle Owen that she gambled half the money she earned away, which’ll just get her spanked like a six year old and grounded for a month.
They buy her a drink in consolation, and Leia doesn’t mind the taste compared to black melon liquor, so she drinks it all. They were gossiping during the game—stuff she couldn’t join in on, like one of the travelers that came through the station a few days ago, and Laze’s weird uncle’s second wife’s attempt to con one of Jabba’s goons. But they get bored of that when they get bored of the game, and start gossiping about other stuff: the sand people, Connie’s wedding, the womps. Leia can join in on that, so she does, and tells them that Connie’s fiance isn’t actually all that hot, he’s just tall, and that half a nest of womps attacked the farm, and then she tries to talk about racing and that doesn’t really interest them, but she doesn’t care. Biggs is leaving.
It’s late by the time she stumbles out of the station, and she feels both empty and sick, somehow. Like she misses something so bad it’s turned her stomach inside-out. But there isn’t anything to miss, except twelve wupiupi. Camie sided with her about Connie’s fiance and gave her a secret smile when the boys started yelling. Deak invited her to play again whenever she’s back at Tosche. She doesn’t need Biggs.
The first sun is down as she speeds across the flats, the line of the Wastes rising high above her to her right. The light of the setting second sun cast deep shadows across the hollows and crags of the cliffs, making patterns that almost look like faces.
Leia thinks of Ben, all alone at the top of the wastes, the wind blowing against him, through him, hollowing him out.
She gets a different feeling, then—this one in the back of her throat, like a dip’s been carved there, like something’s dripping into it, dripping out, a river down the back of her throat. Or not. Not really. She feels full and she feels empty. She feels strange.
And the sun sets behind her as she speeds on.