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Mina-Rau, 6 ABY
Vel paces. It’s twelve steps across the deck from end to end. She can feel Dreena watching her from inside, as surely as she can feel the wind cooling the caf in her cup. She forces herself not to look any way but forward, not to hear anything but the wind, louder and colder now the harvest’s come in. If she just doesn’t look, if she ignores the ominous clanking and wheezing metallic whines, then maybe…
There’s a bang so loud Vel can almost feel the soundwave slap the side of the house. It whips her head around, in time to catch a plume of exhaust covering the two mechanics and the speeder. Or what’s left of it.
"Yeah, so that’s dead,” Wilmon calls over, coughing and waving his hands furiously to clear the smoke. “But like, really dead.”
Bix is kinder, but confirms when Vel meets them in the yard. “It's parts, Vel."
"Poor old thing,” Vel sighs, patting the handlebars. “I hoped you’d make it to the end of the year, but it’s not to be.”
“Pretty close, though,” Wil sounds almost defensive on her behalf.
“‘Pretty close’ and a credit will get you a ride on the sky-tram,” Vel says, and shakes her head.
Worried about credits and end-of-year budgets, she thinks. I have become my ancestors’ worst nightmare in more ways than one.
That thought actually cheers her up — the most since Kleya went off-world three days ago (three days and nine hours, because Vel is counting). She thinks about calling in, but she won’t be able to tell the joke without breaking the news about the speeder, and she’d rather avoid distracting her partner in the middle of a buy.
Kleya’d been a little terser, stiffer, about this one, too. Not enough to worry Vel, but she suspects whoever this old Coruscanti contact is, Kleya’s angling for more than a line on mednog and vibroscalpels — however much it would be a help to the clinic here and the hospital they trade with on Tal Pi. The buys let them run supplies around the sector, mostly barter with folks who need what the New Republic is too tangled up to send, and what they do earn goes right into maintaining the equipment that keeps the group of them safe and hidden. But starfreighter fuel doesn’t refine itself, and it certainly costs more than a credit on Mina-Rau. So do speeders, Vel thinks, frowning.
“Or I’m happy to store it for you, for now, until you talk to Kellen,” Wil is saying.
“Sorry?”
“Give her a moment,” Dreena says, walking down the steps with a smirk and a fresh cup of caf. “Nothing will happen until the Intelligence branch returns, dja?”
“I’ll talk to Kellen today,” Vel says, ignoring Dreena, which Vel knows by now is what will amuse the Ghor woman the most. “No sense in putting it off.”
“Won’t he be busy with council prep?” Wil asks.
“That’s next week, I think,” Bix says, quickly. “Kleya knows for sure. She said she’d be back before.”
Kleya would know the comings and goings of the council by rote. The thought puts Vel in a better mood than is perhaps deserved, for someone taking the bones of a speeder to be junked. The landscape looks different to her as she drives, not just because she’s moving slower on the borrowed haul-and-carry from Wil. With the fields flat, and the light getting thin and sharp earlier in the day, the sky seems bigger — big the way it looked to Vel as a child, like a vivid, pale blue bolt of silk. It arches over the land and almost wraps around the village mounds. Not quite as beautiful as Kleya in blue… but very pretty.
So is the general store, garlanded inside and out with platted wreaths of wheat, partly painted Alliance red and braided through with different kinds of berries. There’s always a little bit of a festive air after the harvest comes in — a mutually unspoken pact to do a little less, eat a little more, and make sure your friends can do the same. But this is new.
Vel tries to remember any decorations ever being on any buildings, outside of Rau, and comes up short. The Empire never allowed more than Life Day and Empire Day as holidays here, and, as a result, real celebrations have always been more furtive and contained, as long as Vel’s been on the farming world. The council lights a bonfire at the top of the mound to signal the planter’s meeting’s done, about a week after Life Day, and there’s cider for the adults and spiced biscuits for the kids. But even last year, with the concordance freshly announced, the farmers of Mina-Rau had carried on as normal — perhaps waiting to see if the New Republic would actually sprout, or if the soil was still too wet for peace.
She brings it up to Aneth as they lean against crates around the back. Kellen’s deathgrip on his scanner doesn’t make him any less unweildy with it; the second time he almost topples over the spokes, Vel senses he’d be grateful to have his wife’s laughter redirected. She’ll take any goodwill she can get, with the parts buy, so she asks.
“The outside looks nice. Is it some variation on Life Day?”
“Life day,” Aneth snorts, shaking her head. “Stars, no.”
“Stupid name.”
“Idiotic name.”
They shake their heads in near union and watch Kellen, determined to do it himself, fumble with getting the side storage off.
“I’ve never noticed folks here to truck much with Republic holidays,” Vel observes.
“Well, they Core-made, aren’t they?” Aneth says, as if it’s obvious, then casts a sidelong look at Vel — who is also Core-made, however settled she is on Mina-Rau. “And there’s still a lot to be done around here,” Aneth adds, to smooth over the awkwardness.
“Always,” Vel says, not disagreeing. “But the garlands are nice, anyway.”
“Beela’s doing,” Aneth nods. “Bonfire night was always good enough for me. But some of the younger folks want to bring back the old days. The Ruaxian days, with gifts for true loves set under the crann nollag and all.”
She gives Vel another glance, lingering at the scars that poke past her sleeve, and the stiffness of her leg. “I suppose they’ve earned the right to try, after everything,” Aneth says, reflective.
Vel hums. “Well, if we can help at all, tell Beela I’d like to.”
“I will, but she won’t take it. You all do more than enough — stop yanking at that coil, old man, it’s not a root,” Aneth switches back to scolding, her most comfortable register.
Vel ends up spending the whole afternoon there. She gets a hail just as the sky goes gold that Kleya is on her way back, due to land first thing in the morning. She has to mask her good mood if she’s to do any haggling over price; she mostly manages it by breaking down those parts of the speeder headed to the crucible, as many of them as she can with a vibrosaw, anyway, while Kellen packs away what he wants to keep. Vel doesn’t realize how long they’ve been at it until it’s Beela, back from Rau, who brings out a water jug for both of them. She stays outside with Vel while Kellen goes to count out the credits from the safe.
“Your woman’s back, then?” Beela asks, companionably, and Vel blinks in surprise.
“Tomorrow,” she answers, and the heat on her cheeks a second later explains how Beela found out. It’s hard not to read news from Vel’s face, when it comes to Kleya.
“Oh, that’s just in time.” The blonde gives Vel a grin.
“For what? For a Rauxian day?” Vel guesses.
Beela nods. “One of the twelve’s tomorrow. Nollaig mór. The council wants to debate bringing it all back for next year, as public holidays instead of just old Rau things. But I don’t see why we have to wait. Every planet has to have something like our twelve days. Gifts. Songs. Food. Lights, to let you know you’re almost out of the dark.”
“Sounds like Yule, on Chandrila,” Vel confirms.
“What’s that one like?”
“I liked the gifts fine,” Vel shrugs, “but I hated the rest of it. Having to get dressed up like a doll, being trapped with family putting on airs. Endless toasts. Bad music. A big log indoors, for some reason.”
Beela gives her a shrewd look. “You’ll like it better now you have folks to give something real to.”
Vel returns the freckled woman’s gaze, tamping down the edges of a smile. “That is a pitch for me to take your father’s credits and spend them again right here and now,” she says. The younger woman laughs.
“Kleya’s been eyeing that signal board we have in the back. For months now.” Then, with the swagger of a born saleswoman, Beela turns and walks back inside.
Kriff, Vel thinks, then, still holding the vibrosaw in her hands. Kriff, she thinks over the ride back to Wil’s, then the walk back to hers. Kriff, she thinks, depositing her takings from the general store in the trunk by the kitchen. Kriffing fucking kriff, she thinks, trying to get one of the coralberry shrubs around the garden to bend, and then abandoning the idea of a wreath to just hang branches around the doorframe. Kriffing idiot, she thinks, curling up in the bed alone for one last night.
Vel has the tea set out before the sun rises, and a speech bubbling over and over in her mind, ready to solidify as soon as she hears the hiss of the ship’s stabilizers outside. She’s not so modest as to think it isn’t a decent one, either, with plenty of bits about what she and Kleya have built together, and about the sense of home she wants Kleya to have, and about how anything Vel has is Kleya’s, whether she asks for it or not, any time of the year — but it would be nice to have at least one day every year where Vel gets to show her.
All right, maybe the thoughts are too jumbled to pass muster for Mon, but Kleya’s never seemed to mind. She always seems to know, anyway, and yet still look at Vel like whatever Vel says is a nice surprise. Like her thoughts matter.
Well, Vel can do a surprise. She takes a big, grounding breath as the ship touches down, knowing it’ll be exactly two minutes and forty-four before Kleya steps through the door. She sets her shoulders, like keeping the kettle warm requires the concentration and courage of a multi-stage infiltration. She reassesses the state of the living space, making sure nothing’s out of place and also that nothing looks too prepared, that there’s no sign of the ambush in waiting. But she’s ready. It’s Mina-Rau Yule, whatever it was Beela called it, and they live on Mina-Rau, so in about two seconds, Vel is going to turn around from the kettle, and she will absolutely and completely get one over on —
Her mind goes blank. Vel knows the tea is poured and her eyes are wide and Kleya’s walking through the door — and she’s here, she’s alright — but there’s only one real thought Vel can process, and she isn’t doing a great job of it.
“I should’ve warned you about the hair,” Kleya starts, defensive.
Vel fumbles without speaking, because how does language work again?
“It’s alright if you hate it,” her partner winces. “It’ll grow back.”
Vel has to breathe. That’s an important thing that humans need to do. She should be doing that.
“I should’ve known the deal would get stupid when Graf wanted to meet at the worst club on Ord Col. And I really should’ve known when those idiots from the Calimondretta collection showed up,” Kleya starts putting her things down, still powering through the explanation. “With Korribanian shears, of all things. There’s hundreds on the market, but you get to say they’re pre-Kurian, and Graf was drunk. So he wanted to try them, and then everyone who wanted his business had to as well.” She rolls her eyes. “He really thought I wouldn’t, so the good news is he threw in a bunch of spare —” Kleya stops in front of her, radiating anxiety like the steam coming off the teacups. “Vel? Can you say something?”
Vel didn’t follow much of that, but doesn’t fight the protective instinct to run her hands over Kleya’s arms, shoulders, to take her hands. She’s solid, unhurt, warm in the light of the sun. “Are you all right?” Vel narrows her eyes and asks, anyway.
“I’m fine,” Kleya nods. “Are you?”
She is. She is more than fine now, but Kleya starts speaking again before she can answer. “My hair does grow quickly. It won’t stay like this. I know — on Ghorman — “ and as Kleya trails off, Vel can read the unspoken fear in those bright brown eyes. Cinta.
Ah. Vel honestly hadn’t been thinking of that similarity, at first. Now that she is, it does pull at something near her ribs. A twinge. But the memory of seeing Cinta from across the plaza always does, whenever it surfaces, and it’s happened enough over the years that Vel has learnt she can, for the most part, keep her heart there — in the soaring, terrifying, impossible joy of seeing her first love again — and not in the pain and the waste that happened after.
“She was beautiful with short hair,” Vel says, with a quiet smile, and wraps her arms around Kleya. “And so are you. It’s not the same.”
“After I realized, I worried it might —”
“No,” Vel interrupts, firmly, and Kleya almost falls into the hug in relief.
“Good,” she sighs, pressing into the crook of Vel’s neck. “That’s good.”
Vel closes her eyes for a moment, savoring having Kleya back, exactly where they’re both meant to be. Then she tests running a hand through the short(er), shining waterfall of brown that flows to just past her love’s chin.
“I like it,” Vel says. “Just surprised me, that’s all.”
Kleya brightens in a way Vel doesn’t miss, and a teasing light comes into her eyes. “Well, I won’t cut it now for anything less than five gravmotor alternators. The rate’s been established.”
“I can’t get some sort of loyalty discount?” Vel’s mouth twitches as she asks.
“Mmm. I’ll consider it. Depends on how valuable a client you —”
Vel kisses her first.
“Welcome back,” She says, after, running her hand through Kleya’s hair again. She could get used to this.
“Good to be back,” Kleya says, like she could get used to this, too.
They sit, and sip at the tea until it starts to cool, right as the sun hits the window glass enough to glare. The light goes fine and almost wheat-like — there’s no escaping it on Mina-Rau — in color, and, somehow, makes it feel easier to breathe deep. Vel almost wishes she could curl up like a cat in a sunbeam, hearing Kleya talk through the rest of the trip. She settles for leaning back in her chair and doesn’t sit forward again until Kleya makes note of the clusters of berries and greens hung around the door.
“You’ve been busy, too,” Kleya gets up to examine one of them. "It looks lovely."
“It’s a bit silly, but it is a holiday today, I’ll have you know,” Vel says, smug.
“Nollag shona dhuit,” Kleya smiles, reciting something, and Vel can’t help but laugh. Kleya would already know not just when any event of significance would be happening on Mina-Rau, but what to say.
“Beela’s been working on you, too, then?”
“On Bix, mostly. I had to swear a blood oath to her I’d be back by today. Apparently, we’re all having a Dinner,” Kleya says, hitting the last word so hard Vel can hear the capitalization. “I’m to bring you, the color boards I picked up for the kids, and warming spices so Dreena can mull something.”
“Well, good to know I rank with the supplies,” Vel jokes, shaking her head.
“I may or may not have asked for a little opsec,” Kleya admits. “I have something for you, too.”
“Do you, now?”
“Mmhm. It’s on the ship.” This woman, Vel sometimes has to remember, survived years of the most dangerous insurgent work in the heart of the Empire by being able to school her face into something inscrutible, aloof, guileless — which means that right now she is deliberately trying and failing to look innocent.
“The ship,” Vel repeats. “Meaning that I’m going to have to spend an hour unloading everything in order to find this mysterious gift, and you won’t have to do any of the heavy lifting?”
Kleya shrugs, cup of tea held up to hide her little smirk. “‘Know your way out before you go in.’”
Well, it’s hard to argue with that. Or with Kleya, when she’s clearly so pleased. So Vel doesn’t waste any more time. She gets the hand-cart and the hover-dolly out from the shed; then she starts carving dirt ruts through the yard, bringing the medstores inside and sorting the mechanicals along the wall, for now. At some point, she notices that Kleya’s changed and come outside to lounge on the steps and watch the progress. Vel’s never been the theatrical cousin, but she has no problem taking off her jacket, then, despite the winter chill, and working in shirtsleeves. The red on Kleya’s cheeks, when Vel brings the last box down the ramp, is reward enough.
Although the mystery box isn’t bad, either. It’s not a large crate, maybe the size of Bee’s charge port, but much heavier than the old droid. Vel suspects it’s something for the shed, and starts to head back there for a hammer to open it, but Kleya presents one to her first.
“Proud of yourself, aren’t you?” Vel angles the claw into the gap between box and lid.
“Just open it,” Kleya says, stone-faced save for the light in her eyes.
Vel does, and removes a protective foam layer to see… oh, stars. Oh no.
“The reason I bothered with Graf is that he, like you, has a soft spot for vintage speeders,” Kleya’s saying from over Vel’s shoulder, impossibly fond. “A whole warehouse of them, including some very rare, very well-made coil drivers and model-specific repulsor cells.”
Vel’s stomach feels as heavy as the hammer, and has traveled to somewhere down near her knees. These are the perfect replacement parts for her old speeder, ones she never even thought of trying to source; not worth the time or the money, with how few there are out in the Galaxy. Of course Kleya’s found them.
“These are impossible to — I really hope all this cost you was a haircut,” Vel says, weakly.
“The haircut, and some of the old fractal parts I’d been holding onto,” Kleya admits.
Vel straightens up, aghast. “Some of those came from the shop.”
“I know,” Kleya says, sounding far too calm to Vel’s ears.
For the second time today, her brain short-circuits, trying to put together what’s just happened. The chances of them — both of them — going for these specific gifts, and at the specific prices they paid? Vel’s not sure the exhaust port on the first Death Star was narrower. “You wanted to do a full build to boost the channel range on the other side of the Rim,” she says, shoulders slumping.
“I know that, too. I’m the one who told you,” Kleya says, humor still spiced in her voice.
“Kleya —”
“This is more practical and it makes you happy," Kleya interrupts. "The logic is unassailable.” Vel can’t help but laugh.
“I’m sorry to say, love, but I think I may have launched an assault on your logic.”
“What?”
It’s always cute, the way Kleya’s face scrunches up when she is genuinely caught off guard and yet feels safe enough to show it. So Vel smiles as she says, “Come with me.”
Vel leads her inside, and, despite the absurdity of the moment that’s about to come, relishes that Kleya follows. She flips open the trunk and gestures inside. Kleya peers in, and while this isn’t the ideal outcome, the way her jaw drops is pretty funny.
“You didn’t,” Kleya stares in disbelief down at the signal board she’s never quite been able to justify buying.
“I did.”
“Vel, tell me you didn’t dip into the walk-away stores for this, did you?”
“Course not,” Vel holds up her hands, then ticks off the comedy of errors one at a time. “The speeder died while you were away. I stripped it for parts. Kellen was generous. And I’ve had an eye on an old Firehawk in Rau I could restore in exchange for some cross-planet hauls, so I thought the best way to spend the extra was to get something nice for you.” Vel’s mouth twitches again. “The logic was unassailable.”
Kleya shakes her head, rueful. “What a pair we make.”
“There is room to improve when it comes to us and holiday gifts,” Vel agrees, and Kleya, chuckling past the understatement, presses Vel’s hands in hers.
“We’ll do better next year.”
Kleya’s smile lights up her face brighter than any fire, to Vel, and dearer than any gift. But still. “Challenge accepted,” she says.