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Un’hee gasps for breath, arriving at consciousness with the desperation of someone whose last waking moment was crashing into red earth. It is hot. Dry. And for a moment she thinks her ship is on fire.
“Un’hee?” she glances over at Ezra. The Grysk population became too great for the galaxy and so the Republic united with the Ascendancy. Since then, Ezra has served as the Ascendancy Delegate in the Republic Core.
“I’m alright,” she wheezes around the yoke of the navigation chair pressed uncomfortably in her ribs. “You’re bleeding,” she says.
“Yeah,” he touches his temple and leans away to throw up. “Definitely a concussion.”
She pushes herself up out of her chair. They landed at an awkward angle, the ship forty-five degrees with the earth below them. Using the low ceiling as a brace, she makes her way over to her friend. “We need to get out in case the fuel catches fire.”
He nods. “You go, I’ll follow.”
In the end, he uses her as a crutch and they make their way out of the ship and into the blistering light of whatever planet they landed on. “It’s so hot,” she gasps. Her eyes are having a hard time adjusting to the high noon light of two suns and whatever moisture on her skin is being lapped away by the arid environment.
“Great. Sand,” Ezra whines.
It is then that they realize how dire their situation is. There is nothing. Absolutely nothing on the horizon for as far as the eye can see. The heat ripples the distance and ruddy plateaus bisect the crystal blue sky.
“Do you think the comm still works?” Un’hee asks, looking back at their truly mangled ship.
Ezra shakes his head and winces. “We can try, but I don’t think so.”
It doesn’t and they don’t have any equipment to make an emergency repair—they dropped it to try and avoid tracking missiles. So, they are faced with the harrowing options of dying in the ship or dying trying to wade through the desert. They pick the latter.
Ezra wraps her up in fabric from his robes, citing that though she may be blue, skin is skin and will burn under such harsh light. They pack up what water they have and start walking. The sand is a light dusting overtop some sort of soft rock so the journey is not strenuous on their muscles, but the further they walk, the hotter it seems to become. Spindly weeds crop up here and there, tall prickly plants tower over them as they pass by and boney birds start to fly over them with interest.
“I don’t like this,” Un’hee says.
“They have no interest in eating us,” Ezra says casually. “Let’s just keep moving.”
They walk for three days before they run out of water. On the fourth day, they both collapse from weakness. A building dances in the warped horizon, but Un’hee doesn’t believe it. This isn’t the first mirage she has been tricked by. It is too hot.
Hysterical laughter overcomes her. Eli always told her how dangerous deserts can be, and she never believed him. Funny, how her father’s birthplace will be her resting place.
“Hey!” someone shouts and she hears the rumble of a hooved animal approaching. Good, let her death be swift. “Hey, you alright?” The man’s voice twangs in the same way as Eli’s. She looks up. It is him. Her dad, sliding off some beast she can’t name and rushing to her side.
“Dad?” she asks.
He pulls back her makeshift mask and gasps. “Are you a Chiss?”
She nods.
“Don’t hurt her,” Ezra growls, trying to push to his feet.
The man brings a canteen to her lips and she gulps down the lukewarm water. He pulls it away and she whimpers. “Now, now,” he says softly and suddenly she is a child, waking from a nightmare. “If you drink too much, you’ll just get sick.”
He moves over to Ezra and gives him water as well. “Let’s get you back home, c’mon now.” He helps Ezra up onto his animal and situates Un’hee in front of Ezra. “Just hang on, Sugar’ll do all the work.” He takes the reins in the animal’s mouth and walks them back to the house that wasn’t a mirage after all.
Un’hee could cry with joy as a woman meets them at the front porch and helps them off the animal. “Always pickin’ up strays,” she tuts, but helps Un’hee up the stairs anyway.
They are set on the couch as she flutters around to get them water and cold compresses. “Coulda had a heat stroke, lucky Jonah found you,” she says.
“Jonah?” Un’hee asks—the name rings a very distant bell. There was a time, once, when her father told her about his family but she doesn’t remember what his brother’s name was, but Jonah. Jonah sounds familiar.
“That’s me,” he says, kneeling beside her. He looks so much like her dad—grey temples and a warm smile. “Jonah Vanto at your service.”
Tears spring to her eyes. “You’re my dad’s brother.”
“Your dad?”
She nods. “Eli Vanto.”
He looks like all the air leaves his lungs and he shoots to his feet. “I have to get back out there,” he tells his wife. “Make them comfortable.”
Un’hee doesn’t remember much else as she is claimed by unconsciousness.
~
It is night when she wakes. She hears Ezra’s laugh from downstairs and she rises groggily. Her clothes are still caked with the ruddy earth, but a yellow dress and sweater are folded at the foot of the bed for her. She changes, grateful for the clean fabric against her dry skin and makes her way down the stairs.
“There’s the sleepy head,” Ezra says with a smile. “I know we’ve already met, but allow me to introduce my pilot, Un’hee.”
“Good to meet ya,” Jonah sits at the head of the table, pipe resting between his lips. “Ya hungry?”
She nods wordlessly.
His wife quietly rises from the table and brings Un’hee a bowl of soup. The night has brought a chill to the air, for which she is grateful. Trying to remember her etiquette training, Un’hee does her best not to slurp down the food like a starved creature. Ezra continues on the easy conversation about how grateful he is to have landed so close to the Vanto homestead.
Un’hee takes her last bite of soup and Jonah clears his throat. She looks up at him. The similarities are too great. His eyes are exactly like her father’s. His cheeks are covered in a faint stubble, his hair swept messily. “So, Eli is your pa?”
“Yes.”
Jonah nods, emotion flickering across his face. “Y’know when he left… I reckon our dad would almost be pleased to know he has a wife.”
Un’hee feels her face twist. “I don’t have a mother.”
Confusion washes over his features.
“He adopted me. I lived with him for a while until he and his partner settled down. I spent my mid-age years with both of them.”
“I see,” he says. “How—how is he doing?”
Un’hee’s throat constricts. “I’m sure you know about the war?”
He nods.
“He was killed in the battle for Csilla, our capital. His partner, Thrawn, was killed in action not too long after.”
He reaches across the table to take her hand. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Yours as well.”
He shrugs in a way that her father used too when his emotions were in any way addressed. And it hurts how similar he behaves. “I lost my brother a long time ago. The Empire told us he died long before the Republic came to be.”
“I understand,” she says. “You resemble him greatly.”
He smirks. “We always got that. Everyone assumed we were twins. Y’know… I might still have some of his stuff out in the warehouse. Want to take a peek?”
“Yes! I would love that!” she says and casts Ezra a glance. He nods.
She follows him out to the warehouse in the backyard. The air is crisp, and two moons light the path to the four warehouses lined up so neatly. Despite the late hour, droids mill about as Jonah leads her up to the first warehouse. He pulls open the door and ushers her inside.
Crates on crates line the walls of the facility. Like the only other Vanto she has known, he strides up to the box he needs and pulls open the lid. “Here.”
She peers inside.
To anyone else, it would be an unremarkable collection of goods. To her, it is a treasure trove. There are shirts and pants folded neatly in the upper quadrant. In the lower quadrant is an Imperial uniform with a rank plaque of a single square.
Besides the clothing items are datapads and books and data cards and pictures. It has been ages since she has seen a picture printed on flimsi. Ages longer since she has seen her father look so young. The last time she saw him, he had grey hair and faint wrinkles around his eyes--she had been reassigned to Ezra, at his request, and she was livid. They stood across from each other, anger fueled by love for each other, and now... Now she is twenty, too old to be considered an orphan, but just as alone.
In one of the photos, A woman with fiery red hair has her arm thrown around Eli, both are grinning at the camera. She flips over the back and, in a handwriting that brings a pang of grief to her chest, she reads:
Pyro's promotion
Another photo looks like a graduation shot. It is an entire group of young humans in the same uniform, save for a blue face in the center. Her father stands to his left.
Group 219, Class Graduation
Glory to the Empire
“What made him enlist?” Un’hee asks softly.
Jonah sighs, runs his hands through his hair, “Ma and Pa always said he was supposed to find shipping connections to grow the business… but he never came home so I reckon there was something else happening.”
“He said he didn't get along well with his parents.”
“I reckon that's as close to the truth as you ought to know.”
There is one more printed photo, a group of people crowded around Eli, on the back it says it is in celebration of his promotion.
She rifles through a few more things, a caf cup from an art museum, a few wooden puzzles likely from his childhood. She picks up the datapad.
“May I have this?”
Jonah nods. “You can take whatever you'd like.”
She takes the datapad, all of the paper photos, the caf cup, and one of his civilian jackets. It smells unfamiliar, of harsh soap and time passed, but she takes it anyway.
She follows Jonah back into the house where he turns in for the evening. She has no interest in sleep, but rather exploring these lost fragments of the one person who ever loved her. The house is dark what with everyone having turned in at this late hour, but finding a charger for the device isn't difficult. In the room they have deemed hers, she plugs it in and waits for the screen to light up.
It's encrypted, because of course it is, but she is her father's daughter. She unlocks it with only a little effort. Grief, long pushed down, claws its way up her throat. She never told him she loved him before he left--he stood in the doorway, leaving to go to war and said that he loved her. All she could say was that if he really did, he would let her stay by his side. They both knew the risks. She hisses.
It's so stupid. This is his entire life. It was his life, from back then. There are data matrices tracking things she doesn’t understand—shipments, money, people. It is completely inconsequential. She shouldn't be this emotional over now meaningless data. She opens up the photo folder and sobs outright.
There is an encrypted file, one that takes more effort, but inside… Inside are hundreds of pictures of him and Thrawn together, or just of the man himself.
One of Thrawn sitting across the table reading the menu while the other hand caresses a caf mug. The lighting is dim and blue, an overcast day on a plant Un'hee will never name, nor visit. But the photo itself is warm, she can feel her father's love for this man in its simplicity.
Another is of the both of them at some sort of hiking trail. It brings a smile through her tears as she remembers the way her dad loved to hike and though Thrawn never voiced his opinion one way or another, he always tagged along.
Another of them at a city, both dressed in bright linen shirts. They look ridiculous, Thrawn with silly green glasses and her dad smiling widely for the camera, and she thinks of how nobody has ever known them like this. In love. Tourists. Men capable of softness when all they have known is war.
She misses them. She thought maybe because she is an adult, that missing her parents would somehow lessen as she aged. It hasn't. Every day, she wakes up wondering what their thoughts are, what they are up to, what they would think of her training with Ezra.
A soft knock on the door brings her to the present and she already knows it is Ezra. “Come in,” she whispers.
Ezra enters and sits beside her. “Your grief is loud tonight.”
She holds out the datapad.
“Ah.”
“I know… I know attachment is bad, but I miss them.”
“Attachment isn't bad,” he says softly. “It's the obsession with keeping that is bad. We must let it all go. They were once here, and you loved them, but now we must let their memories pass by us and remind us of the joyous time together.”
She nods. “Sometimes I wish there was a way to show others how amazing they were.”
“Isn't there?”
She looks up at him. “Not that I know of.”
He chuckles. “You, Un'hee. For others, their memory lives on in you.”
“I wasn't…” She wants to say that she wasn't their child, but she was. Eli held her every night when she had nightmares and when she caught the flu they took turns sleeping at her bedside. She's good at math, better at languages. She loves art, especially painting and remembers painting the scene hanging in the living room of the now empty apartment.
“I want people to remember them as kind.”
Ezra puts a hand on her shoulder. “Because of you, they will.”