Archive of Our Own ^beta

Hoth is always cold, but this is ridiculous.

Everything is dark; how much longer till Kallus's alarm goes off? He tries to reach for the chrono at his bedside, to check the time, but he can't move his arm. Sleep paralysis? Lately the old nightmares haven't troubled him as they did again after the destruction of Alderaan, but these things have a tendency to crop back up.

Is he … drooling?

Kallus spits out a mouthful of half-melted snow and grits his eyes open. The world around him—the exceedingly small world around him—is all a singular shade of dingy gray. Somewhere, a tinny voice crackles from a communicator, but he can't make out the words nor the speaker. When he moves his head, looking for the source of the sound, he can only lift it a few inches, and when he drops it back down, he's lying on ice and not a threadbare Rebellion-issue pillow.

Not sleep paralysis, then.

Images trickle back to him. Echo Base has been compromised—Imperial AT-AT walkers on the march. Artillery fire. Running across the snow, firing at advancing snowtroopers, and finally retreating back to the base. The evacuation effort—his head shoots up again and cracks against hard-packed snow.

He gives himself a moment to lie flat, ears ringing. Then he shifts his weight, pulling his knees beneath him, setting his hands flat on the ground. His bad knee, the one that's plagued him on-and-off since that fateful visit to the Geonosian moon, complains of the cold, an ache that radiates all the way to his hip. He sets the pain aside, to deal with later. This time, when he pushes upward, his shoulders drive into the snowpack so hard that it cracks—which gives him just enough space to drag himself forward. He manages to work his way into a small open cavity formed where two broken pieces of ice that used to be a ceiling have fallen together and created a small shelter. Enough room to sit up and breathe. Above him, a thin crack admits only the faintest, most dreary light, but the small breeze coming out of it is sharp enough to bite. Fresh air, from the outside. At least he won't suffocate, then. Could he force his way out, to the surface? He somewhat doubts it, and doubts even more that he would like the aboveground reception he might receive from Imperial forces.

"Zeb?" he calls, when he has air in his lungs again. Zeb was ahead of him in the corridor as they made for the waiting ships to evacuate. Far enough ahead to avoid being caught in the collapse? He's not answering; Kallus chooses to believe that means Zeb is simply out of earshot, well clear and on his way to the hangar.

From here, he can hear the communicator more clearly. There's no longer a clear forward or back in the hallway, but he can see another small hollow that branches off of the one in which he shelters. In it, a communicator lies half-buried in tumbled snow, and he can recognize the voice coming out of it as Hera's. "Spectre Four, do you read me? Spectre Four, do you read? I've got two minutes, tops, before our window closes, Zeb!"

Kallus's stomach drops. He gets down onto his side, digging aside the snow he can so that he can reach through into the next hollow. He is not a small man, and he's not going to be able to actually get all the way through, but pressing his shoulder against the opening as hard as he can, he manages to get one finger on the communicator's strap, tugging it a little closer until he can close his hand around it. "Spectre Two," he says, as soon as he can get it to his face. "I deeply regret to say that we will not be joining you today."

"Alex, is that you? Where's Zeb?"

"I don't know. The corridor came down—it doesn't matter. We're pinned down."

There's no answer at first, long enough that Kallus wonders if snowmelt has destroyed the communicator's inner workings. Then Hera says, a hitch in her voice, "This family is not losing anyone else today."

Kallus grits his teeth. "Your son cannot lose anyone else today." He says it with intent to hurt, to get her to do the only sensible thing and turn her back, and he knows he strikes true; even through the static of the communicator he can hear the sharp breath she draws. "Get out of here before the window closes. There is nothing else you can do." He doesn't even know if Zeb is still alive. Perhaps it would be a kindness, if he's not; better to perish in the bombardment. A sickening thought, but not, Kallus thinks, an incorrect one. His own remaining options are to freeze to death or fall into Imperial hands and, truly, he's never found the prospect of becoming a human ice cube so appealing as he does now.

"Listen." Hera's voice is tight. In the background, he hears engines thrumming louder, switches being thrown. "I need you to sit tight. Understand? The Imperials don't have any strategic interest in Hoth—once they've searched the base and destroyed everything of value, they'll pull out. In the meantime, you stay out of sight, and you do whatever you need to do to survive. That is a direct order. And we'll be back for you as soon as we can. That is a promise."

"Hera, Zeb is not here." The family she spoke of has already gotten smaller; there is nothing she can do about that now. Kallus lets his head fall forward until it rests on the snow, so cold it burns. He doesn't want to lie to her, to draw her back into danger on false premises; which means he has to stop lying to himself. "… I don't think he made it."

Behind Hera's voice, the sound of the engines grows louder. "I gave you an order, Captain Kallus. Do you copy?"

"Yes. Yes, General, I copy."

"Damn right you do. And Alexsandr Kallus, after all this time, don't you think for one moment that you're not—"

The communicator crackles an out-of-range warning. For a moment, Kallus almost drops it back into the snow. But orders are orders, and if Hera comes back and finds him not answering her calls—well, an Imperial interrogation practically pales in comparison. He moves his forehead to the back of his wrist, a minute reduction in his odds of immediate hypothermia. It would be very easy to die here, he thinks; too easy, and he is not quite ready to lay down all his burdens yet at the boundaries of death's door. He scrapes snow out of the gap at his wrist between his glove and the sleeve of his quilted snow-scout jacket, scoops more out of the sides of his hood and fastens his hat more tightly under his chin. "At least I'm dressed better for it than I was on Bahryn," he mutters.

"Alex?" a familiar voice echoes. "That you?"

"Zeb!" Kallus puts his face to the small opening he created into the next hollow, the one where the communicator had fallen. Through a fist-sized hole on the far side, he can only just make out the grass-green gleam of an eye. He chokes on a hysterical laugh and crushes his fist against his mouth to contain it. "I thought you—I thought I was alone down here."

"Wished you were, maybe. You're stuck with me." Zeb grunts, trying to push at the wall of ice between them, but it holds fast. "Pretty literally, looks like."

Once again, Kallus tries to force the opening into the next chamber wider, to no avail. "Are you injured?"

"Eh, nothing serious. I'm stuck pretty good, though. Looks like half of the base might have fallen on my head, but you know what they say about Lasat skulls. Thicker than durasteel."

"Head injuries aren't a laughing matter. You seem to have gotten hit hard enough to knock you out for a spell." If Zeb isn't further injured, then he should be able to hold out at least as long as Kallus; they're dressed similarly in Hoth-appropriate scouting gear, and Zeb's greater body size gives him the advantage as well, a simple matter of surface area-to-volume ratios. Kallus gives up on the hole and curls back into himself, conserving what body heat he has: hands in armpits, chin tucked to chest. He tries to fold his legs in close, too, but his right knee won't bend enough. Shades of Bahryn all over, truly. "Rebel forces have pulled out. I spoke to Hera briefly; she says, if we can hold out here, in hiding, she'll return for us after the Imperials depart."

A contemplative noise from Zeb. "That's a terrible idea."

"I hasten to point out that it was her terrible idea, not mine."

"Oh! Well, in that case, it's a brilliant plan." Zeb's eye disappears, and there's the sound of scuffling, as he tries to find a more comfortable position. "Got any terrible ideas of your own on how we can avoid freezing to death in the meantime? Any shiny, glowy, self-heating rocks over there?"

"I am regretfully short on those." Kallus leans back against the wall. "On the bright side, there also appears to be a shortage of beaked monstrosities waiting to eat us."

"So we'll die of boredom before we freeze," Zeb sighs, and, in spite of himself, Kallus laughs.

Hours pass, growing colder as they go. They talk, intermittently falling silent when Imperial scout patrols pass by overhead. They reminisce about Bahryn, speculate idly about the first things they'll do when they get out of here: eat an entire crate of rations, Zeb suggests. Kallus counters: use an entire week's water allowance taking the longest, hottest shower possible. They agree on sleeping for the rest of that week.

Another stretch of silence, then. Kallus has an idea or two about what else he'd like to do if—when—they get off this frozen rock. They've been in one another's awkward orbit for so long now, an obscure and complicated interplay between gravitational pull and obscure inertia. Objects in motion remain in motion, unless acted on by an external force … such as an Imperial incursion. Then, sometimes, they end up on a direct collision course. "You know," he says, carefully. "I retract my previous statements. I don't care what, exactly I do next after we get out of here, as long as I'm doing it with you."

There's an excruciating silence, during which Kallus considers that, if he doesn't die of the cold or at Imperial hands, a third option is of course dying of embarrassment. Then Zeb huffs a laugh. "Your timing's impeccable, anyone ever told you that?"

There's a chatter to Zeb's teeth that Kallus hasn't heard before. Zeb's greater bulk should have afforded him much more protection against the elements; where did Kallus's calculations go awry? Some unknown aspect of the comparative anatomy of their different species?

Or then again, blood loss could also make the difference.

Kallus pushes up on one elbow. "Ready to stop hoping already?" he snaps, infusing the words with every ounce of disdain he can muster. "I thought you said Lasat never know when to give up."

"Yeah, well, I was just parroting some garbage I'd heard from this absolute sleemo of an Imperial security agent." There's still a smile in Zeb's words, even under the tremor of cold. "It's been a good run, anyway. Survived longer than I had any right to. And so did you, if you'll excuse my saying so."

"I absolutely do not excuse it, and I do not accept this—this unconditional surrender." He shoves his arm into the snowy gap once more. His gloved fingers dig into the floor's slick surface, clawing for purchase, pulling forward just a few centimeters farther. "Zeb. Give me your hand."

He can't see into the open space between them anymore, but after a moment, there's a scratching, as of fabric on ice. Zeb's wrist and forearm are a good deal bigger than Kallus's, and he grunts as he tries to force it through a little farther. Finally, one claw brushes against the back of Kallus's hand.

Kallus shoves himself forward as hard as he can, pushing with both feet. Even through the quilted coat, he feels bruises rising at shoulder and armpit, but he grabs Zeb's finger and holds fast. "Maybe we have had more time than we deserve," he says quietly. He doesn't even know if Zeb can hear him, with both ice-holes plugged fast. "It's selfish to want more." Especially when he's spent so much of that time on all the wrong things. Especially when he's wasted the extra he has, without reason, been given. "But I do."

"Well." Zeb's hand flexes a little, as if he's trying for another push forward, but he doesn't manage to gain any more ground. "If wanting was a crime, the whole galaxy would be in jail."

"How bad is it?"

"Nothing a little R&R won't cure," Zeb insists. Worse than Kallus thought, if he's lying about it so transparently. "It's okay. Hera has to take care of the rest of the crew first and foremost, and if that's a downer for us, well. Things are what they are. I'm not scared."

Nor is Kallus, but that's beside the point. "I did not join this hopeless crusade of a Rebellion because I wanted to continue to accept things as they are." He spent time enough capitulating to the status quo, the notion that some people have to die, some worlds have to burn, in order to uphold the lives and wellbeing of the rest. No more. He looks up, seeking the crack in the snow through which air and wan sunlight are still trickling. "I'm going up there. There's a weak point in the snow, on my side, and I can make it through. I'll bring back supplies, maybe even tools to dig you out safely."

Zeb's hand curls into a fist, pulling it out of Kallus's reach. He withdraws, too, using both hands now to feel his way around the packed ice, searching for a weak point.

"Like hell you are!" At least Zeb sounds more alert now. "You're liable to pull the cave down on your head first, and if the Imps are still up there, they'll kill you!"

"If I fail—and that is not a point that I concede as readily as you!—then you won't have to watch me die."

Zeb grunts, as if punched in the gut. Kallus forces his knee to bend once more, getting it under himself so that he can set his full strength (such as it is, by now) against a soft spot in the snow. "If," Kallus says, in a more conversational tone, "you get the urge to remove your coat and boots, do your best to resist it.” Advanced hypothermia can convince a freezing man that he’s become suddenly overheated.

"Oh yeah?" says Zeb, and Kallus can practically hear him roll his eyes. "Why's that a bad idea? Explain it to me in real little words."

"Because—" Kallus grinds his teeth as he tries to force himself to a stand, driving his arms into the soft point in the debris. Snow drifts down onto his face, filling his mouth once more and clinging to his lashes and beard. "I will be very cross—if—you die!"

Something in his knee pops, and something in the wall gives way. Wan sunlight breaks through, and Kallus smothers his crow of triumph. There's enough space now for him to get his torso into the gap, his elbows and forearms pressing into the sides of the shifting-snow tunnel long enough for him to get his feet of the ground of his would-be tomb.

"Zeb?" he calls back, pitching his voice carefully low. "I'm think I'm clear."

A noncommittal noise from below. "Just don't be a hero out there."

"I will endeavor to follow the fine example you've so often provided in the past." He loses Zeb's rude retort in the shuffle of snow as he crawls the rest of the way to the surface and cautiously lifts his head above the fallen-in debris.

He's come aboveground in the middle of a graveyard.

At a distance, AT-AT walkers lie crumpled. As twilight gathers, they cast long thin shadows, like the bones of some hulking mythical beast. Closer, corpses litter the ground: white-armored snowtroopers, visible only by the dark joints in their armor; Rebel troops in pale gray. Here and there, blood offers a shock of color against the washed-out landscape. Already the snow has begun the weary work of burying the casualties—with help from the wind, which whistles cuttingly over the packed and red-stained snow. The chill pierces straight through Kallus's winter gear; there are plenty of cautionary tales about being out past sundown on Hoth, not the least of which was so recently and vividly provided by one Commander Skywalker.

But there is no movement out there that Kallus can see—no wampa, certainly, nor any Imperial troops—and no noise save the wind's unhappy squall—no communications chatter, no starship engines. The entire planet of Hoth is sleeping, it seems; dreaming, perhaps, of a world that remembers spring.

When Kallus climbs out of the tunnel, he's relieved to find that his leg takes his weight with only a twinge. He would have run laps for kilometers through far worse pain, in his Academy days (and, it occurs to him only now, the inanity of the calculations the Empire makes every day; every cog in the Emperor's terrible machine is disposable, replaceable, a senior Security Agent just as much as a fresh-faced idiot child looking for purpose). He'll make far better time walking, albeit uncomfortably, than dragging himself through the snow, and time is uncomfortably precious right now.

As he goes, he marks his tracks with an X of blaster fire every several paces, until even his weapon's battery surrenders to the cold. It's gotten him close enough, though. A plume of black smoke betrays the location of the base's entrance—as well as the likely fate of the supplies he'd hoped to find. Dread makes his limbs heavier, but he moves faster anyway, throwing what defiance he can still muster in the face of the long, long odds.

With the blast doors thrown wide open to the falling night, snow has swamped the charred, abandoned starships still on the ground: wreckage both Imperial and elemental in origin. The smoke tears a cough out of him; eyes watering, he puts on his goggles and covers his nose and mouth with his scarf as best he can.

How strange, to be sweating on Hoth. The snow has put out the worst of the fire here in the hangar itself, but when he tries to open a door deeper into the base, a blast of intense heat knocks him back, refusing him a way forward.

Despairingly, he turns back to survey the hangar. Supply crates lie smashed all over the frozen floor, precious food and water and medical kits shredded and stomped into nonexistence. He drops to a sit beside the wreckage, sifting through for anything useful left; but there's only ruins. In the back of his mind, he's constantly doing the calculations of how long he can afford to wait before he should turn back. Whether he can still save Zeb.

Once more he scans across the hangar, seeking something he missed before, and his eyes land on a pair of Y-wings whose pilots never made it back to them. The cockpits are open, the controls inside clearly wrecked, but from what he can tell, the underside of the ships are relatively unscorched.

Immediately he's on his feet again, limping toward them. An ordinary snowtrooper would have no reason to be aware of the particulars of any given starfighter's schematics. Indeed, the only fighters they'd be familiar with—TIEs—are short-range craft, not given to long-haul missions without a support ship.

An Imperial Security Agent, however, has to be intimately aware with all the ways devious Rebels might squirrel away secrets. He raps lightly on the first of the two fighters, feeling his way along a seam in the dead ship's belly. Finally his fingers find a hidden catch, which releases at his touch. There's not much room in the cockpit of a starfighter, but any seasoned Y-wing pilot who might want to bring some personal effects (or contraband) along for the ride knows about this particular cache.

With a muttered apology to the ship's dead pilot, Kallus paws through the contents inside. A deck of playing cards, the expected bottle of cheap liquor; these both hit the ground at his feet. A miniature med-kit goes inside his jacket, though, and he slings a bag of civilian clothing over his shoulder. Not that Zeb is going to fit into them, but anything he can use to wrap himself in another layer is worth taking at this point.

In the second Y-wing, Kallus finds a half-finished, handwritten letter, which he guiltily adds to his jacket on the chance it might still be delivered, and—he laughs in disbelief—a standard sleep kit, of the sort assigned to Rebel ground troops. The green fabric of the sleeping bag is acrid with the scent of smoke, but it's intact, down to the embedded electric heating element. He slings that around his neck like a ridiculous puffy cloak, and turns toward the dark rectangle of Hoth's night visible through the blast doors. "Thank you," he says, to the dead pilot, who may have unknowingly saved a life when they pilfered the kit off some unlucky infantry soldier. And he sets off back the way he came.

His knee is stiffer on the return trip, and, perhaps unconvincingly, he blames the deepening cold rather than the possibility that he's done lasting damage. And it is cold, enough to set him to shivering, with the sweat now cooling to ice inside his clothes; it's starting to make his original icy cell feel like a beach vacation. His breathing grows labored as he follows his own trail back toward Zeb, who is expecting him. Who is expecting him. These aren't mere training laps at the Academy; if he has to burn out his use to the Rebellion now to make it in time, so be it. There is something considerably more important than an empty commendation on his record if he succeeds now. And—

He is not, he realizes belatedly, alone on the ice.

A pair of massive shapes rise to their full height of two and a half meters—even three, maybe? Starlight illuminates bloodstained white fur and curving, vicious claws: wampas. They raise their heads toward him, sniffing the air; their gaping mouths reveal an impossible geometry of jagged teeth.

He looks down the line of his blaster marks and realizes there are only two more to go. If he yelled now, Zeb might even hear him; but why would he do that? If he even remains sensible enough to hear Kallus, Zeb doesn't need to know how close they made it. It feels impossibly wasteful to get this far, and no farther. But his blaster is dead, he can't run, his strength is spent—and even at his prime, he could hardly have wrestled one of the beasts, let alone two. The tension in his shoulders releases. He looks up at the sky: so many stars, so different from the light-polluted nights on Coruscant. If he's going to die, it's as good a place as any. He closes his eyes, and waits.

If a Lasat can learn to give up, so too must a human man.

One of the wampas bellows, and there is a horrible crunching sound. Kallus risks a look. The wampas have turned away from him to something they've dredged up out of the snow. One of them holds a snowtrooper carcass, from which it has torn a limb. The other one clutches the headless body of a Rebel ground trooper, gnawing on the poor soul's bloodied shoulders through its coat.

Kallus stares, disbelieving, for a moment more. When he finally edges down the path, toward the fallen tunnel, toward Zeb, the wampas' heads swivel around to watch him. But they don't follow, and he doesn't turn his back on them for a moment until his feet find the soft patch of ground and he slips into the snow-swept mouth of the tunnel.

"Zeb!" he cries, as soon as he breaks the surface. No need any longer for him to lower his voice against Imperial ears. "Talk to me."

"Who else am I going to talk to?" Zeb snorts, from out of sight. "Talking to myself is even worse company than talking to you."

Kallus doesn't waste time on a clever rejoinder. He shoves the sleeping bag through first, and listens while Zeb grunts and fusses to arrange it comfortably around himself. Then he hands through the clothing—"What am I supposed to do with human trousers?" Zeb grouses, "wear it on two of my fingers?" Kallus tells him to wrap it around his idiot ears—and the medical kit.

While they settle in again, Kallus describes what he saw above—the destruction of the base, the silent battlefield, the wampas. Zeb listens, cutting in occasionally with questions. Finally, when Kallus has petered out, Zeb says, sounding very much like his usual self: "I'm pretty steamed at you, y'know."

"For what?" Kallus's knee aches whichever way he tries to set it. There's really not a comfortable position to stretch it out in, so he stops trying. He closes his eyes and leans his head back, trying to ignore it. "Are we holding grudges about saving each other's lives, now? I think I get to be angry with you several times over, in that case."

Zeb pitches his voice higher, mimicking—poorly—a Coruscanti accent. "'Oh Zeb, hold my hand. Before I leave you to die alone.'"

"Well, you didn't quite manage to die." The ice beneath his back doesn't bite into his bones as much as it did before. He must have brought back more of the warmth of the inferno inside the base than the thought; or perhaps that's just the adrenaline aftermath of a face-to-face encounter with the wampas. He tugs his scarf a little, loosening it from his neck. He'd take off his hat, too, but the ground is hard and, at his age, an uncomfortably scratchy, overwarm pillow is better than no pillow at all. "And you're not alone. So I very much do not apologize."

"What's that? Speak up over there."

"I said that I do not apologize."

"Well, I'm not asking you to! I'm trying to thank you." Zeb groans. "I'm just bad at it, all right?"

"You're bad at a lot of things."

"What? Are you talking out of your elbow over there? I can't understand half the words you're saying. And unlike usual, I don't mean just because you apparently ate a thesaurus every morning for breakfast as a child."

Absurd, Kallus thinks; you can't eat a thesaurus. He's too tired to argue with Zeb's particular brand of nonsense right now, he says, without opening his mouth, which would be a wearisome waste of energy.

"You take the sleeping bag for a while. We'll take turns." A rustling sound from the other side. "Alex! I'm talking to you!"

 Kallus doesn't dignify this with a response. He doesn't need the sleeping bag, he's overheated enough as it is.

"Karabast," snarls Zeb. There's a scrabbling sound, and a growl of frustration. "You idiot. I take it back! I take it all back! I'm furious with you, and when I get my hands on you I'm going to shake you until those beady little eyes pop out of your head! Don’t you dare weasel out on me now."

"Typical Lasat ingratitude," Kallus mutters.

"Typical human arrogance."

Kallus cracks one eye open. There's not much to see; without even the muted sunlight filtering in, the cave is pitch dark around him. "Typical Imperial arrogance, you mean."

"I said what I said, you useless flat-footed land-gibbon."

"… Land-gibbon?"

"Yeah, it doesn't translate well from the original Lasat, okay? But take it from me, it's about the worst thing I could call you."

"The worst thing you could call me," Kallus says, thickly—is there snow in his mouth again? No, he thinks not—"is a coward." Truth always cuts the deepest; one of the first and most important lessons for an ISB agent to learn. Too afraid to look past the surface of what he was doing, at the bloody foundations that upheld a pretty façade of law and order; too afraid to tot up all the red in his own ledger, lest he find it had overwhelmed everything good he had done and would ever do. There was no way to earn grace, and no way to stop trying; and in spite of all that, he is afraid of the day it will, inevitably, run out on him.

"A coward? Now that's something I'd never call you." Zeb growls, deep in his throat. "Plenty of other applicable insults, though. Let me run down the list…"

And he does, calling Kallus every name under the sun, starting, again, with idiot and other similar classics, then continuing with increasing creativity, and occasional critique from Kallus, through fart-brained nerf-noggin and lopsided bantha testicle.

"Banthas don't have testicles," Kallus objects to this last. He's almost certain this is true, though he has to rack his uncooperative brain to produce a reason why. "They reproduce by—no, they're a hermaphroditic species, and two mating banthas have to conjoin their cloacas in order to exchange—"

Zeb interrupts: "Shut up."

"Correcting misinformation is an important—"

"No, shut up and listen."

Kallus shuts up. In the crystalline silence, he hears what Zeb heard: the crackle of the communicator at his side. He fumbles for it, fingers clumsy in the cold and dark. It's too heavy to lift, so he drags it up his chest until it's close enough to his face. "—read me?" Hera's voice breaks through the static. She sounds angry, enough so that Kallus wonders if he ought to apologize. "Damn it! I repeat, Captain Kallus, do you read me? Come in, Captain Kallus!"

"Down here," says Kallus. A moment's clarity pierces the exhaustion. That's adrenaline, and it won't last long, but he hangs on to it for now with all the faculties he can muster. "Hera. We're both still down here. Our signal—?"

"We can lock onto it," Hera says. "Leave the comm open, and hold tight, Alex. Not much longer now."

He lets his arm fall to the side, keeping the switch compressed, the comm open. "Zeb—"

"I heard! I heard her. We did it."

"Is this a bad time to say I told you so?"

"You smug son-of-a—" Zeb's growl turns into a laugh. "You know what? You survive long enough to make it back on board the Ghost, and you can say it as many times as you want. Hell, you can write a whole song about it."

"I'll sing back-up," says Hera, on the communicator. "Chopper will do percussion." There's a distant squall of protest from the droid in question. "He says he's excited to participate."

Overhead, somewhere nearby, a heavy crunch rumbles through the snow. Then footfalls, nearly as heavy, so that grains of snow shake loose onto Kallus's face. "Here!" he croaks, and a stained white gauntlet punches through the snow over his head.

"Steady there, Kallus." It's Rex, grabbing Kallus by both arms and pulling. For a moment, Kallus thinks the clone trooper is simply going to fall through the snow on top of him, but then he's moving upward, sprawling on the snow. Though the sky is midnight-black, he's dropped straight into a pool of painful brightness: the Ghost's running lights. Hera is loping down the ship's ramp. She has Chopper dogging her heels and a length of chain draped over one shoulder. "Rex, I need you," she barks. "Sabine, get him on board."

"But—" says Kallus, and to his great indignation, the tiny Mandalorian hauls him to his feet, keeps him upright, and manhandles him on board.

"I don't know if anyone's ever told you this," she says matter-of-factly, as she herds him into the common area, tearing off layers of snow-crusted coat and scarf and hat as she goes. As he collapses onto the bench beside the table, she grabs one of his boots, ripping it free. "But blue is not your color. You look like an Imperial ice-pop. Here, drink this." She snatches a steaming cup from AP-5 just as the droid comes within reach. "Slowly. Otherwise I think you might melt."

"I'm fine."

"No offense, but I'm not sure you're the best judge of that right now." She rolls her eyes, still practically a teenager at twenty-one, and yanks off his other boot so hard that she topples over backward. His knee twinges, but he forces it straight, stretching it. "Or possibly ever. AP-5, can you get it any warmer in here? Without the life support system actually breaking down, I mean?"

"It is already hot enough to melt my circuits," complains AP-5, but begins stiffly toddling away. "I suppose a few more degrees cannot make a substantial difference."

"I mean it, Sabine." He accepts the cup, and its warmth drives deep into his fingers, so hard that it hurts. Unpleasant, but that he can feel anything at all is probably, at this point, a good thing. "Go help the others."

"Hera assigned me babysitting duty. So deal with it, you big baby." Sabine throws one dry blanket over his lap, then drapes a second one over his head and knots it aggressively under his chin. "And now you look like my great-grandmother."

"Thank you." He risks a sip of the hot tea, which burns its way down his throat. He glances at the door; he doesn't hear the others, yet. How badly trapped is Zeb? "So very much."

"It's a huge improvement over ice-pop, trust me. Move over." Wincing, he slides deeper on the bench, toward its middle. To his surprise, Sabine clambers in beside him and throws her arms around him, chafing his arms with her hands. "I'm glad you're okay, you nerf-noggin."

"Would you believe," he says, "that is the second time I've been called that today?"

"Day's not over. You might get a third time in, before we're done." They both look up at the door for the source of the voice. Zeb looks nearly comical, wearing the unzipped sleeping bag thrown around him like the robes of the mystical Jedi wizards of the old days, Kanan and Ezra's forebears. He's moving under his own power, with Hera and Rex hovering just behind, but he holds his left arm close. When Rex maneuvers him into the bench opposite Sabine and Kallus, the sleeping bag slides away and it's clear the arm is badly broken, an angular piece of bone pushing through the skin. He catches Kallus's appalled look and affects a grin. "Told you it was nothing serious. Just a sprain, I think."

With field-medic efficiency, Rex cleans the wound and sets the break, binding it tightly with a bacta gel-cast for rapid healing. "I suppose it'd be a waste of my breath, telling you not to get in any trouble for the next two weeks while this bone sets."

"Dunno, Rex." Zeb leans back in the booth. When he puts his good hand out on the table, palm up, Kallus lays his own on top of it, and Zeb's fingers close around his. Beneath the table, Kallus stretches his bad leg out, resting his ankle on Zeb's knee. It doesn't stop hurting for the change, but it's a pleasant position to be in anyway. "I'd been thinking about spending the next week or two sleeping anyway."

Hera rejoins them not long later; despite the dark circles under her eyes, she's smiling. "We're in hyperspace for a six-hour hop, to rendezvous with the rest of the fleet." She folds her arms and leans against the common room wall, looking at all of their faces like she's trying to memorize them. When she catches Kallus's eye, her smile softens. "Like I said earlier. Whatever happens in the future, don't you forget: you're one of us now. You are a part of this family."

"Yeah!" Sabine pipes up, and elbows him lightly. "Our great-grandmother."

"Lovely," says Kallus dryly, to hide the pleasant ache in his chest. He doesn't deserve this, he reminds himself. Another chance at life. Another chance to be part of something—something worthy, something true. It’s true that he doesn't deserve this, any of it; but he reminds himself, too, that he can still learn how to accept it anyway. With his free hand, he slides his empty cup across the table toward her. "In that case? Your revered and beloved ancestor requires another cup of tea."