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“Get on the ship!” Yue was indignant as Suki ran in, still firing her blaster after her. She shoved the throttle forward and the Falcon took off, wonky as always. Suki looked furious as she brushed herself off, coming forward into the cockpit.
“I had them,” she complained, not looking at Yue as she took the parts of her blaster apart to clean them, her filthy oil-stained rag.
“You were going to get shot in the head,” Yue replied coolly, doing her best not to snap.
“Aww, I didn’t know you cared.”
“I don’t but the Falcon needs an oil change and I don’t know how to do that.”
Suki sharpened her tongue against the edge of her teeth but kept quiet. Which was amazing in its own right, Yue had no idea she knew how to do that. She certainly loved talking too much the rest of the time.
She worried the flesh of her chin between two fingers, pulling it away from the bone and letting it loose until it hurt and she went back to pushing the cuticles down on her nails, “I’m setting coordinates for the Yokoya system. In the Earth sector.”
Suki rolled her eyes at her, “I know where the bloody Yokoya system is. And don’t forget it’s my ship you’re piloting here.”
“I can’t forget, what with all this grunge and mess around.” She spied a bra tossed to the ground next to a grey sock that had once been white. “Pick those up, please . It’s the least of the cleaning you need to do, for the sake of hygiene .” She wasn’t obsessed with neatness, but leaving your underwear on the floor was just disgusting, thank you very much.
“I could kick you off at Home One next chance I get, princess .” Back when… before Agna Qel’a had been obliterated, princess had been a title of honour she’d buckled under at the best of times but did as much as she could to rise to it. Now it was all she had left of it. She blinked away angry tears and pressed the final switch to send the ship into hyperspace, white streaks covering the windows all the way up, and got up, doing her best to breathe through it.
“I’ll leave you to it, Captain .” The amount of vitriol she could pack into it would never be enough but she could see the confusion and apology in Suki’s eyes as she passed by.
“-e! Yue!” She slammed her door shut and sat on the bunk, doing her best to roll the tension out of her back and stroked down her face with hands that were more callused now than they’d ever been. Today was not a fucking day for this.
She emerged an hour later, still in hyperspace, hungry and needing to use the ‘fresher. The galley smelled really good and she breathed it in. Normally ship food was tasteless and freeze-dried but they’d just come from a market and she could almost taste the roasted bantha with all its accompanying vegetables and spices. It smelled so familiar but she couldn’t quite remember why.
Suki was standing over the oven, frowning over a cookbook, written in a familiar language that nearly made Yue to cry to look at. Agna Qel’an script, the beautiful flowing lines of a language that was on life-support, being translated into Suki’s own Southern Common Earth so she could cook a recipe for her.
Suki turned around quickly, as guilty as a child with a sweet in their mouth, “Yue! I’m sorry for what I said. I uh. Got this for you at the market. It’s probably not perfect but it should be good? Maybe? I don’t know.” She tucked her hands away into her pockets and swayed a little, “Please say something.”
Yue couldn’t. Her throat was too thick with grief but also happiness. Suki had tracked down a single recipe book and ingredients just to make her dinner from her own, extinguished culture. It wrenched her heart in ways she didn’t completely understand.
She couldn’t say anything but smiled through her tears and just hoped Suki understood what she meant. She was alright, really. Sometimes.
Suki tried not to roll her eyes as the princess laid into her again, “Have you ever heard of punctuality?”
“Not even if you shoved the concept up my ass, Yue.”
Yue blinked in disgust and her lips shifted like a worm on cocaine, “That would be the only way anyone would want to be near that area, Captain. Can we go or must we remain here to argue?”
Suki didn’t quite storm into the cockpit but she came close, fiddling with the Falcon’s processes until the gangplank came back up to the ship. Yue was braiding her hair away, weird and genetically improbable. Apparently she’d originally been dark haired but her parents gave her over to the Moon Spirit when she was an infant because she was sick and her hair came in white. Then, when Agna Qel’a died, it started coming in black again, like an odd opposite ageing situation with white ends and not roots. She hadn’t cut it since Agna Qel’a had been destroyed but it was so long now she probably had to soon. There were only so many kinds of braids that could hold up and protect that kind of hair at the length it was, almost to her knees if she let it out.
Suki liked it though, as inconvenient as it was. She usually let it curl around her hands when they were making out or fucking. It had gotten caught in the springs of her cot though more than she’d ever liked it to. And sometimes when they cuddled it got stuck in her armpits which was both mildly gross and a little weird. She’d only tried to broach the idea of cutting it the once with Yue, which was when she’d been told about the Moon Spirit thing, but Yue couldn’t never cut her hair again. It was unsustainable. That didn’t mean it was a conversation she was looking forward to having though.
It ended up that she had procrastinated enough on the hair thing that Yue had realised this all on her own. Suki could go another day without having her head bitten off. She would live.
“I think it’s time,” Yue said, trailing a curl of white hair around her finger that would sit at her waist if left to lie loose.
“For what?” Suki lifted her head away from the base of Yue’s throat and hadn’t altogether been listening.
“To cut it.” She looked sad, “I think I’m ready and I don’t want to trip up on it and die or be captured by imps, at least. The Rebel Alliance is more important to me than my hair.”
“You know,” said Suki, rubbing a patch of dead skin off her knuckle, “We could have a funeral for it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know how Agna Qel’a funerals work but that’s why you’ve held off, right? We could keep the hair and when we get to a nice planet for it, do whatever you guys did- do with their dead.”
Yue narrowed her eyes, inspecting a split end. “We bury them with flowers. It’s not dissimilar to traditions on Naboo, actually, only with less water ritual.”
Suki had no idea about funerary traditions on Naboo but if it helped Yue she could pretend like she did and research it later. “Do you want to do it now?”
Yue nodded, “Better sooner than later.”
Suki ended up shaving it off into little more than a centimetre of length. Yue said that if it was going to be cut then to do it properly and she looked quite happy after, with her almost bald head. It was the first time Suki had ever had longer hair than her and now she was the one getting it stroked through and pulled along long fingertips. When they were packaging up the hair, which was both heavier and messier than expected, Yue even managed a weak joke about finally discovering life without a hair routine, even though she cried into Suki’s shoulder afterwards.
They had three days of hyperspace travel to reach Naboo.
“Apparently the old Queen was married in secret around here,” Yue told Suki, who was looking around the old lake house in awe, “It belongs to the government, but I called in a diplomatic favour, and my father was always friendly with the Naboo queens.”
“Wasn’t Agna Qel’a and Naboo part of the same human exodus?”
“I think so, at least that’s what they teach. Might explain the similarities in culture. The Naboo have a far more bloody history though, and their relationship with the Gungans has mostly been unstable at best. It was decent enough for a time, they even had a Gungan representative in the Senate, but it fell apart later with the Empire.”
Suki nodded. Yue had seen her in the ship over the last three days hiding what she’d been searching for on her pad, and she had a suspicion about the content now. She rubbed the back of her head. It felt lighter now. She hadn’t felt her scalp against fresh air in years. It was odd, but ever since she’d cut it it was like she’d finally let them go. She’d remember them forever, of course. She could never truly let go of all of them. But she wasn’t holding it in anymore, clutching at her grief like it would bring them back if only she was sad enough, missed them all enough.
Now she was just Yue. She had no people living to represent, and she couldn’t hold onto the corpse of a dead planet forever, but she could be herself, and live for all of them, and mourn them as they went beyond where she could know them.
She burned the hair - she’d soaked it in fuel so it would burn on water - and set it to float. It smelled terrible, but for every particle of smoke and every strand melted away to the bottom of the lake, she felt freer, as she knelt in the dirt of the shore, and let it seep into her bones, her hands pressed into the tiny tide.
Suki held her as she cried, and she could hear her crying with her when she stopped to breathe or to try and compose herself before losing all of it anyway.
They’d burned the hair a few hours after dawn, but the sun was beginning to set by the time they made it back to the house, and washed each other carefully with soft damp cloths, and Suki washed her bare scalp for her, after Yue had rubbed pooja oil through her hair, and rinsed it clean, and wrapped all her new wounds - how on earth she constantly had some open injury, Yue didn’t understand, and she was pretty reckless herself.
They fell asleep without putting the covers over themselves until Yue woke in the night, completely freezing, and, on failing to wake Suki too, rolled her to the side of the bed, and got beneath the quilts and sheets, and managed, somehow, to get her beneath them too, all without waking her. She’d seen Suki sleep through a meteor shower though, this was hardly surprising. But still a little extraordinary.
Suki made her breakfast in the kitchen before she left, and she’d clearly researched what she was doing, as she cracked the eggs straight into the oil where the fish was frying, and hadn’t let her even move to get them both water while she made her childhood breakfast for her.
Yue had failed to smile, she couldn’t quite manage it, but she kissed every knuckle on her left hand instead, and every finger tip on her right, “Thank you. It’s perfect”
“Always, I do try, you know?” Suki laughed.
“You can be very trying.” But that just made her laugh harder until Yue couldn’t help but join in too.