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She had to admit, she thought it was finally the end of her.
But in a rare moment, she was glad it wasn’t. There was no way she lived on for more than a thousand years surviving monsters and men and everything in between, only to go down by an idiot who just happened to be lucky.
Mushu would never let her hear the end of this.
She groaned inwardly, wincing at the sliver of pain around her midsection where Calican had shot at her point-blank. For all of her immortality, there was no escaping the sensations of how she might have died, or the process of recovery before she was back to her usual fighting form.
The sands of Tatooine fell indelicately on her clothes as she ungloved a hand and worked it underneath her coat. Her fingers brushed against smooth scales, eternally warm and comforting as always, and she let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding back.
She pulled Mushu out and gently set him down next to her on the sand. He was still unconscious, having taken the brunt of the impact from the blaster, but his chest was rising and falling steadily.
He was going to be all right. They both will be.
As if they had a choice.
Coulson had a choice, and he certainly took it.
She’d be lying if she said it didn’t hurt. For once, she had someone other than Mushu who was equally incapable of staying dead, who had the means to live on for as long as she could.
Someone she didn’t have to say good-bye to.
But Phil, she supposed, eventually lost the zest for continued life after the people they loved left them one by one. The loss of Daisy was especially heartbreaking, the woman passing in her sleep as someone who lived to old age and looked like it while they stood beside her deathbed, disturbingly youthful.
(He had the excuse of being an L.M.D. She had to leave boxed hair dye and a constant rotation of anti-aging skincare in communal bathrooms and her quarters to ward off any questions.)
Phil had the choice in the press of a button. She couldn’t make him stay if he didn’t want to.
For endless centuries, she closed herself off from forming meaningful relationships, all in an attempt to protect herself from the heartbreak that was inevitable.
But she is not a terra-cotta warrior — she cannot fall apart, yet only mend time and time again. Her parents. Her grandmother. Shang. Carter. Suyuan. Waverly, Rose, and Lena. Andrew. Phil. Daisy.
She wouldn’t trade a second of her time with them, however brief those years were, for an immortal life of no regrets.
When she found herself unexpectedly transported into space the first time, she knew it was the way. Years later, with Daisy laid to rest and the depowered remote control that was all she had of Coulson, she bought one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s retrofitted Quinjets and took off without a word, allowing Mushu the rare few hours to lounge comfortably beside her on the co-pilot’s chair instead of at her nape behind the curtain of perpetual ink-black hair.
It would be an actual fresh start, she surmised, throwing an idle glance at her forever companion, strikingly red-orange against the gunmetal gray of the cabin.
They were leaving her cemetery of previous lives behind, a blur of empty graves and nondescript tombstones that no one visited anymore.
Sometimes, she wondered about legacies and how they could truly be significant past death — unless you did something meaningful enough for the history books, you usually end up largely forgotten about.
She had been keeping a low profile for hundreds of years; even as the world changed with the times, the fear of the unknown lingered, instilling terror against those considered an anomaly, against the normal. She saw it with gender, with people of color, even with speaking out.
“Well, it’s a new galaxy,” Mushu reminded her matter-of-factly. “Maybe it’s time you make some noise.”
She painted part of her new helmet red-orange for him. He plaited her hair intricately until it was tight against her scalp and cascaded like a tail down her back. If he wove a thread of the same color through her braids, he didn’t say anything, and neither did she.
But it stayed on as Fennec Shand became one of the most feared and famous mercenaries in the entire galaxy.
Blasters were neater than traditional guns, and a whole lot more fun, though she missed and vastly preferred the non-lethal I.C.E.R.s. FitzSimmons had perfected.
At the end of the day, it didn’t really matter — she could turn herself into the weapon if she didn’t want to use one, and the money and security she sought were attainable only by killing.
How different was it, really, from what she had done to survive all the way until now?
“I thought you were tired of war.” That was rich, coming from Mushu of all people.
“Weren’t you the one who said it was going to be good for me?” she retorted quietly without any actual heat, blaster ready in her capable hands as they descended the stairs.
She’s never missed a shot, but it wasn’t without work. Thousands of years's worth of it, in fact.
“I don’t think a life without war is possible,” she sounded dejected, Mushu risked poking his head through her collar to rest his cheek against her porcelain neck. She smiled wanly at the gesture, feeling a comforting warmth spread through her, before hushing him to go back into hiding.
She shot several guards at the bottom of the stairs, then strolled into the throne room, her alert eyes taking stock of the surroundings quickly before shooting the shackles on the slave wrists. A wordless head tilt — patented from her days as Melinda May — and the poor Twi’lek was running towards her freedom at last.
Satisfied, she made her way behind the throne and reached for a neglected bottle of spotchka. “At least this time everything’s on my own terms, you know? Haven’t had that in a while.” She murmured so Boba wouldn't hear, and she felt the scaly swish of Mushu’s tail as he conceded — for now.
She allowed herself a small smile before taking a well-deserved swig of her drink.
It may not be her ideal life, but it’s not that bad.