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On Yavin 4, Kleya keeps it together.
She lets the medics treat her injuries. She repeats the information she already told Cassian Andor to the rest of the rebel leaders. She settles into her newly-assigned sleeping quarters, which she shares with a pair of Sullustan mechanics who seem genuinely happy to have her. She starts to learn her way around the base, and she wears her fake smile like familiar armour.
But before the gash on her head has even healed, Cassian dies on Scarif, and another person who knew Luthen Rael — who actually appreciated how much he’d done for this moon and everyone still living on it — is gone.
And just as she’s started to struggle back onto her feet, life kicks them out from under her again.
For years, Kleya’s life was about information management.
She stood at the radio and let the knowledge flow through her, but always with her hand on the tap. Kept the circle as small as possible — her and Luthen. Everyone else got what they needed to know, and nothing more.
The same went for their names. Only she and Luthen knew who they started out as. Now it’s just her, and when she dies too, that’ll be the end of it.
But here on Yavin, it’s expected that she’ll share everything she knows and everything she’s done. And everything she continues to do going forward. There are assignments and duty rotas, designed to put her to use and bond her with her new comrades.
It’s even more cloying than the humidity. She misses the gallery, with its locked doors and its Coruscanti air conditioning.
An hour after hearing the news about Scarif, Kleya finds Vel in the little house she shares with her figurehead cousin. The Chandrilan rebel is sitting at the table, cleaning her blaster. The motions are practised enough to seem automatic, but when she looks up, the hint of redness around her eyes is unmistakable.
“Kleya,” she says. “So you heard.”
Kleya watches as Vel folds the cleaning rag and puts the blaster away. There’s no sound of anyone in the other room — they have the place to themselves.
“Where’s Mon?” she asks.
“Busy. There’s a lot happening right now.” Vel notices the narrow look Kleya’s giving her and snorts. “She doesn’t tell me all of it either.”
That’s another thing Kleya can’t get used to — not being told things. She and Luthen told each other everything. It was everyone else who had to beg for information. Kleya’s not about to start begging for it now.
“Wasn’t looking for her anyway,” she says.
Vel’s gaze drops to the object in Kleya’s hand, an octagonal bottle the colour of amber. She raises her eyebrows. “Where’d that come from?”
The stupid truth is that Kleya swiped it from a stranger, some loudmouth captain from Keyorin. An impulsive, pointless theft — that’s how far she’s fallen. She didn’t even particularly want the liquor, but some petulant part of her just wanted a familiar taste of subterfuge. Something nobody else here would know about.
And it was easy to take. Far too easy. These people aren’t suspicious enough. They don’t understand that too much trust will get them killed.
“It was a gift,” she says. “I ran into an old contact.”
Vel stares at her for a long moment. Kleya stares back, daring her to say something.
But the other woman just rises from the table with a sigh, pulling two metal cups out of a nearby cupboard. She pauses, turning one of the cups over in her hand.
“Last time I saw Cassian, we drank to the dead,” she says.
“Then we have even more to drink to now.”
Vel sets the cups on the table, and Kleya fills them.
Kleya knew Luthen was her only chance of survival, but that didn’t mean she trusted him.
He saved her, but only her. Left the rest of them to be gunned down, and while she didn’t know what he did in the minutes before he found her, she could make a solid guess. She hated him for that. If he was going to keep her around to try to stem his own guilt, she wasn’t going to make it any easier on him.
But it turned out they worked well together. Kept each other moving.
It was only later that she realised he saw her as his only chance at survival too.
“I’m surprised you came here tonight,” Vel says, two drinks later. “I never got the impression you even liked me.”
Kleya glares at her. So much for ‘I have friends everywhere’. But there are friends, and then there are friends.
“You must know other people in this camp,” Vel continues. “Wilmon, Mon. Some of Bail Organa’s people, if they haven’t all gone with him to Alderaan.” She pauses and gestures to the partially-drained bottle. “Your very generous former contact.”
It’s true that Kleya could have gone to Wilmon. They’ve never been close, but she knows that he’ll be grieving too. But he’s got Dreena there to help with that.
Kleya raises her cup to her lips and takes a long, slow drink. Keeps going until she can see the bottom.
“I’m here because you knew him,” she says.
She doesn’t clarify if she means Cassian or Luthen. Even she doesn’t know which one she means.
Here are some of the things that her life with Luthen gets her: lessons in firing a blaster and piloting a ship; an eye for a good deal; fluency in an ever-growing number of languages; a scar from a botched explosive on her left thigh; fine clothes and finer manners; a sparse but comfortable room in the back of the antiques gallery; invitations to the most glamorous parties in Coruscant; more secrets than most people could even dream of, and yet that amount of secrets is still not enough, will never be enough.
She does not get friends. She does not need friends. The work the two of them share leaves no space for that. They have assets, they have contacts, they have sources. They have an innumerable number of enemies breathing down their necks. Kleya has a man who pretends to be her boss, and Luthen has a woman who pretends to be his assistant, and they do not have anything else.
Kleya realises she’s been rambling when Vel clears her throat and reaches for the bottle again.
“You should be grateful,” she says quietly. “You got to have those years together. Be grateful for that.”
It’s been years since Cinta died on Ghorman, but even now the look in Vel’s eyes makes it obvious who she’s thinking of. Agreeing to send the two of them there together was Luthen’s call. Kleya told him it was a bad idea. She thought personal feelings were more likely to lead to mistakes on the job. Caring about someone else that much makes people go off-script. They take unnecessary risks. Compromise their judgement.
Although that wasn’t what got Cinta killed in the end. She was always a professional, even up until the last moment. Kleya respected her. But it was Vel who loved her.
“That’s different,” Kleya says.
Vel finishes pouring and sets the bottle down. “It’s always different. Every time.”
She once asked Luthen if she was his daughter now, and he said only when it suited them.
Right now, it doesn’t suit her. All this grief. She doesn’t know what to do with it. She used to be able to harness it, transform it into a useful anger that kept her moving through the darkness and the flames, but right now even that feels beyond her. It’s like her hand is still on that tube in the hospital and every day, every new loss, just pulls the rest of her further and further away, stretches her thinner and thinner until she feels like she’s about to snap.
She doesn’t get to tell him about what happened on Jedha or Scarif, about anything she’s learned since she came to Yavin. Even if she tries here, if she really tries, if she makes connections and makes decisions and makes even a fraction of the impact the two of them had together, Kleya will never get to tell Luthen about any of it.
She was with him for longer than she was with her family. When she was still a child, she used to console herself with the idea that the worst had already happened, and that meant she’d never have to go through that loss again. Her skin was hardened now, and she had no room left for childish weakness.
Maybe she was more naive than she thought.
For the second time, Kleya wakes up in Vel’s bed with a killer headache.
She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to will the world out of existence, but the noise of it is insistent — someone loudly washing pots and pans at the nearby communal tap, the roar of an engine firing up in the distance. The relentless clicks and chirps and grunts of Yavin’s varied wildlife.
Eventually she works up the nerve to crack open one eyelid, and the sun coming through the windows immediately punishes her for it. She takes in the scene around her — one cup on the table, another lying on the floor. The octagonal bottle is empty.
Vel is asleep on the other side of the room, sprawled on top of a folded blanket. Her face is turned away, but her breath is slow and steady. Still sleeping.
Kleya finds her boots next to the bed and her heavily-patched, Yavin-approved work jacket hanging on a hook by the door. She’s just slipping it over her shoulders when a voice makes her freeze.
“Oh no you don’t.”
Kleya turns to see Vel sitting up on the blanket. She doesn’t look nearly as bad as Kleya feels. The division of the contents of that bottle must not have been very even.
“You were really going to sneak out?” Vel says. “After I held your hair back for twenty minutes last night?”
Ugh, she’d forgotten about that. Vel’s sympathetic hand on her shoulder as she retched. What else has she forgotten? What secrets did she reveal? Whatever it was, it was definitely too much. If one of her assets displayed this level of sloppiness, she’d consider them a risk that needed to be taken out immediately. But maybe that’s the sort of thing they like here in Yavin. Maybe it fits right in with all the earnest, back-slapping camaraderie.
She’s sure she wouldn’t have gone back to the start of it, to that moment when he found her hiding in the ship. That’s something she knows she’ll always keep to herself, no matter what. But when it comes to the rest of it — all these awful thoughts and feelings that spill out of her like blood from an unstaunched wound — Kleya can’t be sure how much she’s let slip.
She watches as Vel gets to her feet and rolls up the blanket. She refuses to beg Vel not to say anything.
It turns out she doesn’t need to. “Last night stays in this room,” Vel says, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Kleya focuses her gaze on the window, sees an endless snarl of plants and rushing people. “How very generous of you.”
Vel crosses the floor and shoves the blanket under the bed, then hesitates, still kneeling. Kleya’s thinking of making a break for the front door when Vel finally speaks again.
“Do you ever think about what your life would be like without all this?”
All this. All this, meaning everything, meaning Kleya’s entire life. Without all this, the person she is now wouldn’t even exist.
“No,” Kleya says, and this time she’s being honest.
Vel stands up. “Then keep going. Mon didn’t come back at all last night, and whatever’s happening today, whatever the fight looks like right now, that’s what Cassian and Luthen died for.” She takes a deep breath. “And if not for you, none of us would have gotten this far. So pull your socks up.”
Kleya scoffs. “Pull my socks up? That’s your advice?”
“You get one night and that’s it,” Vel says. “Save the rest until after we’ve won, yeah? They need us out there.”
More engines roar to life in the distance. Vel rolls a crick from her neck and then strides over to the front door.
“Is that how you do it?” Kleya asks.
“That’s how I do it,” Vel says. She reaches for the door handle. “Now move.”
And when Vel opens the door and lets in the noise and the humidity and the morning sun, Kleya moves.