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Coruscant, 3 BBY
The first word from Vel is as unnerving as the months of silence had been. It’s even worse because it comes to both her and Perrin.
They’re on their way back from some function in the Verity District. Kloris is taking the lower-lanes; slower, hoping they're too tipsy to notice. Their driver underestimates them in different ways — Perrin’s taste will never permit him to sink into the bland cushions of a Senate-issued limospeeder unless he’s truly in crisis; and it’s hard for Mon to even remember a time when her anxiety didn’t need to take the measure of a place, to find the seams and what hand might’ve stitched them, before she could let herself think.
She’s thinking about counterweights: Bail and Breha, their holdings in Mid-Rim, the kinds of pressure it will take to tempt the Ithorian voting bloc to do what would have come naturally five years ago and express outrage over the intersector tariff rate. Imperial power is, ultimately, an exercise in resource extraction from the terrified masses to the privileged few, who are even more terrified of losing their share — twenty years later, she can still hear the contempt in Ono Farr’s rich, metronomic voice as he named the dynamic, back when it was something they all thought they could prevent. Twenty years he’s been gone.
She’s still here, closer to three decades in politics now than two. Older than Farr and Amidala ever got to be, if by no means wiser. Mon catches her reflection in the window, clearer for the soft blur of speeder-lights in the humid city haze outside. It stabs at her, although it shouldn’t. All Mon is, this first season after the PORD renewal, is appearances. She’s wrapping herself in silver gowns and shining chains to make it known that she isn’t being a bad sport, that even Senator Mothma enjoys the fruits of empire.
But sometimes Mon forgets what time has actually done to her face. She catches it, for a moment, in the glass — the smoothness that’s been worn away, just the same as the Republic.
Perrin sniffs expressively, bored and fidgeting and, underneath, no doubt sensing a mood from her. Mon wrenches her eyes away from the window, and the tired smile is in place before she faces her husband. He gives her a crooked one of his own, poised no doubt to say something about how the newly-minted Senator Plada still looked hungover from his own investiture party, or about how the credits-only bar had been a battlefield tonight. The ping to their shared channel saves them both the trouble.
Is the house on Rion open? The hail reads. Thinking of bringing some friends for the fishing in a couple of days.
“Ha, bringing some friends for the drinking, if I know Vel,” Perrin says. “If she’s going, she’d better —”
Another ping.
Yes, I will restock the cellar.
Perrin laughs, still performing but taking more joy in it. He raises an eyebrow to her, as if to say, ‘It’s your cousin.’ Deferring to her, always deferring, whether it’s in indifference or in bitterness or in the rare spark of regard still between them. But with Vel, there’s also a hint of genuine caution. If he plays the good uncle, teasing Vel over eggs for being rakish and single, if he never speaks any of the dangerous words aloud, even Perrin knows that keeps her safe.
Mon remembers a night when she and her husband were still trying to be in love. He’d wanted to surprise her, home from his regiment’s posting on Sullust, only to find Vel, battered and dirty and hollow, curled up against Mon on the couch like it was the last safe place in the galaxy. She herself was barely an adult. But she’d finally coaxed her little cousin to sleep.
“She’s staying,” Mon had said, expecting an argument — Their position, Vel’s parents.
“As long as she likes,” Perrin had shrugged, agreeing immediately. He’d started to leave Mon to it, but he’d taken one more look back in from the doorway. Shaking his head, he’d added, “Poor girl. What a waste.”
Mon never did ask him what he meant.
“You don’t have any plans for the river house, do you?” She asks him, now.
Perrin gives her an incredulous look. “Darling, I have reached an age where I no longer need to pretend I enjoy being rustic.”
“What about your uncles?”
His laugh has a bite to it this time. “No, it’s Zeltros this year for them. And for me, once the first recess is called. I did mention.”
“I’m sure you did,” Mon breathes, and turns back to the window.
“I suppose Vel has a better chance of luring you out there to mud country than I do to a nice bloody rancor by the beach?”
“Would you be terribly cross about that?”
“Mon, if you left your desk for more than a day, I would put your cousin up for a medal,” Perrin says, sounding tired.
She doesn’t say anything to that. Instead, Mon watches other speeders shine against the dark while Kloris pulls them, slow as a tractor beam, back home.
As they walk up the embassy steps, she answers the comms hail that of course the house is Vel’s to use for as long as she’d like, and a reply comes back almost immediately: I can’t thank you enough. We’ll catch up soon.
But after that, there’s silence. Across all the channels Vel uses, direct and not. Mon tries not to worry. She lasts a week. Then she ambushes Luthen.
*
She expects Kleya at the front of the gallery, standing unremarkable, but bright and sharp like the edge of a knife. She expects a certain circular choreography to bring her into the back — the, ‘He would love to see you, Senator, but he’s mid-restoration at the moment,’ and the ‘Well, I certainly don’t want to disturb him.’ The brown-haired girl is as deft as a dancer with minimal, contained gestures, ushering Mon forward even as she guides Kloris to look at a row of necklaces hung in the window. Mon expects some kind of unpredictable sourness from the man himself at her for turning up like this.
What she doesn’t expect is for Luthen to have a black eye.
“Are you all right? What happened?”
“I earned it,” he says, waving his hand like he can wave the bruising away, too. “I’ve passed word along to your cousin. I expect she’ll reach out.”
“She has. And then gone quiet again. It made me wonder.”
“We talked about this a long time ago. She makes her choices. You don’t always get to know,” He laughs like there’s now something ironic in that.
Mon drops her eyes to the table, to the brushes and bottles and tools laid out on top. The yellowing glow from the focus light makes all of them look more mysterious, more dangerous. It makes Luthen’s hands, leaning on the edge, look like the hands of a ghost.
“Is there anything you can tell me?”
For a beat, the two of them face each other from opposite shadows while lights buzz and power cells trill, indifferent, around them. There is a world where Luthen uncurls his fist and offers her something, where the line between them pulls tauter. There is also a world where he hoards his secrets, and the line slackens. They both stand there, knowing it.
“I’m not a messenger,” he says, his voice rasping like it’s also been hit. “Find her if that’s what you want to do. Just know she might not be pleased with you, either.”
“It’s not her I’m worried about. Trust has to work both ways, Luthen,” Mon warns.
He gives her a sad smile. “Rebellion doesn’t. You have to trust that if something was wrong, I would tell you. I would come to you directly.”
The smile goes wider, falser, as the mask of Luthen Rael, owner of Galactic Antiquities and Objects of Interest, settles into place. The one satisfaction Mon gets is seeing how much it hurts his face.
“Now, Senator, will there be anything else?”
“No, I think not.”
“You are welcome here at any time, day or night,” he lies, ushering her out to the front.
“Oh, I promise I won’t bother you for a good long while,” she replies, and means it.
In the week that follows, she asks Erskin to do a routine check-in with their estate agents — the properties on Chandrila, the apartments on Bar’leth and Hosnian Prime, all the little plots her father had kept picking up in the Kessel Sector. The house on Rion’s included, naturally. She follows up on the report herself. Garo tells her a ship landed just a few days ago. Her cousin and a party of friends. It stayed four days, and then the ship left again, although the caretakers had been told that the young Sartha and some of the party were going to remain through the end of the season. A couple of months, likely.
Luthen’s words turn in her mind as she watches her tea steep, after that. Find her if that’s what you want to do. Just know she might not be pleased with you, either.
It’s about counterweights, really. Vel wanting more people than Mon to know where she is, Luthen being protective of whatever Vel has been doing, but not of Vel herself — it tells Mon that her cousin is on some kind of break. The fact that she’s always done this very publicly, on Chandrila or Coruscant or Corellia, and is currently hiding away in the Outer Rim — that tells her Vel might be nursing an injury, stars forbid, or might be mixed up in something where she needs the alibi, but not the attention. Attention from her cousin the senator would be interference.
Mon runs a hand over her desk. The white lacquer is catching parti-colored beams of the sunset, coming through the windows. The reach of her hand stops in a band of deep, defiant red.
She makes her choice.
Rion, Six Weeks Later
The porter — Samm, he’d said his name was — drives her all the way up to the house and earns his tip by doing so in tactful, total silence. It’s two hours of trees. The smell of wet leaves and chill wind is so strong, even through the windows, that Mon can almost feel something sharp and alkaline settle into her clothes by the time they glide down onto the gravel drive. She’s all too happy to let a young man in a flatcap bustle about with opening the gate and hauling her day-bag onto the steps like it’s a full set of valises. The distant rush of water, the uneven stone pavers, the smell of woodsmoke coming from everywhere and also somewhere specific she can’t see — none of these are her domain.
Answering that yes, madame will take an hour to look over the house before they head back — that she can do. So she does it, as fluidly as breathing, and walks up to the old oak doors.
She’s been here just the once, right after the end of the war, when she’d allowed Perrin and some of his friends from the regiment to lure her with the promise that she could curl up all day by the fire with a history while they went down to the river. He’d thought the quiet might be nice for her, and she’d wanted it to be. But it was awful, really. With nothing to do that felt real, it was too easy to be menaced by phantoms — the people they’d lost, the ways Palpatine had outmaneuvered them. She’d been boring company, the cardinal sin.
No danger of that now.
The doors open before Mon touches the wood — she’d forgotten they swing out — and she has to take a step back. She catches her balance in time, enough to see something shining and reflective from one of the upper-story windows. But in the next blink, a hand is hovering near her arm, in case she needs it. Mon knows before she hears the voice.
“Steady there,” Vel says.
Her cousin looks… Mon doesn’t think gaunt is a fair word to use, because she looks fine. Healthy, her hair pulled back in a low braid, no visible marks on her. Mon lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. Even as she does, though, she sees what’s different: Vel looks her age. It’s maybe the first time she hasn’t seemed young, at least to her older cousin. But there’s nothing immature or babyish about the stern, focused stare this woman is giving her. Gaunt isn’t the word. It might be dangerous.
“I did try to call ahead,” Mon says, as mildly as she can.
“Word got to me this morning,” Vel replies, continuing to look Mon over as if she might have something hidden in her coat.
“You didn’t respond.”
“No,” Vel’s voice goes low and dry. “I’m supposed to be being very irresponsible, at the moment.”
“You’re doing a wonderful job, then,” Mon parries with some sarcasm of her own.
It gets somewhere between a scoff and a laugh from Vel, and she takes another step and calls out to the driver.“You’re alright to go back to your post, kid. I’ve got her.”
Mon turns to see the young man looking between them, confused, one hand behind his back.
“Go on,” Vel prompts, clearly an order. He flinches at her cousin’s voice, but recovers with a nod and doffs his cap to them. Mon thanks him, of course, but doesn’t miss the way his movements are choppy and rushed as he clambers back into the speeder; nor the way Vel stands absolutely still until he’s gone.
“You must know each other. He seems obligingly terrified of you,” Mon says.
Vel ignores that. “Does anyone know where you are right now?”
She holds up her hands, more than ready to explain after the two-hour trip from town. “Many people know that I’m on Rion for the day. About five know that I went to take a look at the house. All routine. All above board.”
“You being here for the day is routine?” Vel asks, no doubt biting back a ruder version of the question.
“The Senate is in recess for the month. So, as a series of favors to people whose names I won’t trouble you with —” Mon says, and Vel scoffs, shaking her head. “— I agreed to join the survey that goes out to the Rim on break. This term, it’s ‘waterway infrastructure and opportunities for innovation.’ Lowick, Toshara, Nepotis, Rion, Mykapo, and ending on Mon Cala so that everyone feels they haven’t been in the wilderness too long.”
“Then this is just a stopover on a committee trip,” Vel says, still guarded but her shoulders lowering. It’s the only invitation Mon will get and the only one she needs. She pulls Vel into a hug and whispers into her hair, “The trip is a stopover for this.”
When she pulls back, Vel takes a breath, eyes bright. “Well, you’d better come inside then.”
*
Mon only has vague memories of the house — darker wooden walls than on Chandrila, heavier chairs with sharper corners, rattier couches — but she does have an eye for staging. The first few rooms they move through have bottles perched on mantles, glasses tucked into cushions, the end of some holochess game still flickering, three tackleboxes left open on coffee tables. The scene speaks to a careless holiday — and probably has been doing so, unchanged, for weeks on end.
Once Vel leads her past a table with a rianza set scattered like crumbs, and through a sliding door, Mon gets the sense she’s reached the inner walls of her cousin’s makeshift castle. Everything’s suddenly much neater and utilitarian. Datapads in their charge ports, windows polished, not a chair out of place, and, Mon can’t help but notice, what is probably all of the house’s hunting rifles placed at convenient points along the wall.
“Can I get you water? Tea? Something stronger?” Vel asks as she takes Mon into the kitchen. There are two cups of caf on the counter, half-drunk, one datapad, and an old-fashioned drawing tablet with an illustration of something, maybe another damn tree, that Mon can’t quite see because of where Vel stops. When her cousin leans against the marble top, though, Mon can see the edge of the rounded handle of something, holstered to her belt.
“Well, have you actually decimated Perrin’s reserves?” Mon keeps her voice level.
“Just enough for appearances,” the corners of Vel’s mouth twist.
Mon lingers on the second cup of caf, by the drawing pad, and is sure Vel can read the question on her face. But before her cousin answers, another voice calls out.
“Vel?”
Mon turns and sees a young woman, similarly dressed to Vel, except her sweater sits looser on her frame. Dark hair, dark eyes, very beautiful dark skin. There’s something economical in the way she walks towards them, too. Mon’s seen it in old soldiers and the most surly custodians in the Senate Library — they only move with purpose.
Still looking at the girl, Mon hears Vel take a shuddering breath from behind her. “Mon, this is Cinta. Cinta, my cousin Mon.”
Ah. Well, that would explain pretty much everything about this situation, wouldn’t it? Vel’s never told her much about Cinta; it’s more than she’s said about any other woman, but that is faint praise for the almost despairing half-phrases Vel would let herself mumble like they were costing her a lung to say. She knows that Vel and Cinta have orbited each other for years; that Vel had really thought they could make a go of it together around the time Mon had been worrying out of her skin about the 400,000 credit shortfall; she knows Cinta, by contrast, had thrown herself into enough work for Luthen to vanish from Vel’s life without so much as a goodbye; and she knows that Vel won’t say a single bitter word against her for it.
So it feels particularly ironic that Cinta raises her chin just a little bit in challenge, staring daggers at Mon — no doubt for daring to have come here. Mon wonders if she even knows she’s picked up one of the tics Vel’s had since she was a child, but that doesn’t stop something spikey and unspoken moving between her and this fiercesome, arrogant girl. No Jedi powers needed to interpret what passes between them then:
I do not like you. — Well, I don’t much like you, either.
“How good to meet at last,” Mon paints what she knows is an infuriatingly serene smile on her face. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, Cinta.”
Mon takes a little pride that she can make the dark-haired girl blink. “Not too much, I hope,” Cinta says, her own political smile coming a beat later.
“Oh, just enough,” Mon says, like a promise.
“Will you be staying?” Vel asks. Mon softens her smile.
“No, not very long. Erskin’s making excuses for me, but I am expected back in town. I won’t cause you any trouble, I promise.”
“You’ll stay for dinner, surely?” Cinta says, frowning at her like Mon’s the outlaw here.
“I certainly wouldn’t want to impose on you two,” she replies, holding up her hands and putting weight on each word.
“You can’t impose when it’s your house,” the girl persists. Mon wishes she would make up her mind to either hustle the troublesome older cousin out or stop glaring at Mon like she’s in the Imperial Guard.
“I owe you a dinner, at least,” Vel adds, looking sheepish.
“Only if you insist,” Mon puts a hand on her cousin’s arm and squeezes, hopefully encouraging Vel that she can choose whatever she wishes. Vel, of course, looks to Cinta, and something wordless passes between the two of them.
Vel crooks a half-smile. “Probably important I have someone who can corroborate that I have caught some fish out here.”
“No doubt,” Mon chuckles.
“Vel, I’ll take care of the lines at the river. You two catch up,” Cinta says, softer than before, but still eying Mon like she might turn into Mas Amedda at any moment.
“Just mind the slope,” Vel’s voice softens, too, and Cinta gives her cousin a nod and a half-smile of her own that Mon can tell is for company, that would be warmer if Mon weren’t here. The two cousins stand for a moment, looking at the space where Cinta was, after she’s gone.
“There now, you’ve survived,” Mon jokes, patting Vel on the shoulder.
“What?” Vel asks, blinking.
“Meeting the family.”
“Oh. That,” Vel shrugs. “It’s not — We were just worried. I know you’d be careful, but we weren’t sure if you’d be alone or if it really was you or what.“
Mon pulls her into a hug before Vel can waste more breath on her worries. When she pulls away, she says, “On second thought, I think we should open Perrin’s most expensive bottle of wine.”
*
Even with the wine, even sitting in what Mon has to admit are comfortable rocking chairs by the bay window in the kitchen, even with the view of the river below them running in bands of icy green and slate blue, like snakeskin, Mon learns more from the spaces between what Vel says than what she reveals about Ghorman.
Some of it, no doubt, is training from Luthen. As long as she’s in the senate, there are things about her younger cousin’s life that are safer for both of them she doesn’t know. But some of it, Mon thinks, Vel can’t actually bring herself to say. She’s read the official Senate report, and heard more than her fill of the propaganda line from all the holonews services in the hallways: Ghorman terrorists holding up an imperial aid convoy, planting weapons in order to implicate the administration, provoking unrest and separatist disunity. Whatever the truth, whatever Ghorman resistance movement actually exists and however violent it actually is, it doesn’t surprise her that Luthen would take an interest, nor that Vel would somehow pay the price.
“They locked the planet down for about a week, after,” Vel says, rubbing at her face without seeming to realize she’s doing it. “We were able to hole up in one of the silk factories outside Palmo, thanks to friends, but — but it was bad.”
I was terrified, Vel means. I’m exhausted thinking about it.
“I’m sorry,” Mon murmurs, all she really can say.
“Not your doing,” Vel waves the sympathy away. “And being able to come here? Mon, it’s been… I can’t think of a better place.”
Mon has to put effort into smiling, not frowning, at that. It’s been a godsend. I don’t think I would’ve made it, otherwise.
“I’m glad.”
They both turn to hear a screen door open from somewhere in the back of the house, although Vel doesn’t seem worried. It must be Cinta, coming up from the river.
“Glad I sent a hail the day of, before they locked down comms,” Vel shakes her head like that was the one good thing she’s ever done. “Wouldn’t’ve been able to get word to you at all.” A little bit of red creeps onto her cousin’s cheeks, too.
“Well, regardless of the circumstances, I’m glad the two of you have had some time,” she says — and she really is. Mon has spent enough of her life caring about her cousin. She likes to think she’s honed an ability to know when someone is going to hurt Vel. The question is if Cinta is like that. And, first impressions aside, it is still that. A question.
“Me too,” Vel says, almost a whisper.
“I should wash my face and let Erskin know I won’t be joining the committee dinner.”
“The master’s open, just at the top of the stairs,” Vel gestures, unnecessarily, out and upwards.
“You haven’t been using it?” Mon asks, just a hint of reproach in her voice.
“No, we’ve —” Vel catches herself and properly blushes, this time.“Guest room on the first floor’s nice enough.”
“Whatever you like,” Mon teases, kisses the top of her little cousin’s head, and walks to the stairs.
She’s made it to the landing between floors when Mon hears some rustling from above. Cinta must have retreated upstairs to avoid her, and yet here the dreaded senatorial cousin comes. Mon makes a silent vow, whatever is about to happen: One, she will say as little as possible; two, she will say nothing that she wouldn’t in front of Vel; and three, she will say nothing to Vel about it afterwards, either.
Mon takes one, steadying, deep breath — and pushes open the door.
“Shit,” She hears the curse as she takes in the room: the curtains pulled back, her bag placed on the dresser, the bed midway through being made. The sheets are on, but Cinta's bent over the pillows, one hand on her chest and one hand wrapped around the duvet like she means to strangle it. She looks up, spots Mon, and Cinta’s face falls into the mirror of another expression that Mon’s seen on her cousin over the years — a face that says of course this would kriffing happen to me right now.
Mon only has a second before either she or Cinta has to say something. The air is heavy with some sort of pine-scented candle and potential mistakes. Cinta doesn’t seem the type to suffer politesse or appreciate euphemism. Vel’s voice comes back to her, the last time they’d discussed whatever she and Cinta are to each other. “If she wanted to see me, she would,” Vel had said, as if that was that. The best thing Mon can do is either apologize and quickly leave Cinta to whatever the problem is. Or —
“Tell me how I can help,” she says, as clipped and direct as she’d hoped she’d be. If this agent of Luthen’s likes orders, well, Mon can give them just as well as he can.
Cinta narrows her eyes, calculating, then winces again. She takes her hand away from her stomach and looks at it. The hand is clean, but even from the doorway, Mon can see a dark splotch on the otherwise olive sweater. “Shit,” Cinta repeats, scowling first at the sweater, and then at Mon like she’s the one who’s started bleeding.
Mon steps into the room and shuts the door behind her. “Is there bacta?’
“The cabinet in the fresher,” Cinta gestures towards the door, and it costs her another wince.
“You’d better come in, dear,” Mon says, deciding to act and not parse where the endearment’s come from, all of a sudden.
“I’d meant to make up the bed in case you stayed the night. Vel’s been wanting to talk to you for — “
“Hold that thought,” Mon interrupts, gesturing with a bacta patch for Cinta to raise up the shirt so she can see the cut.
Except it isn’t a cut.
There is an unnervingly straight surgical line running vertically down the girl’s chest, mostly healed but still slightly raised, then a more concerning set of stitched-together knots, almost like a small constellation of starbursts, just below the line of her sports bra. It’s one of these that’s opened at the bottom, bleeding slowly.
“I can —” Cinta starts, quietly, reaching for the bacta.
“No,” Mon says, firm. She kneels down on the rug so she’s level with the bleed. “I will. Three. Two,” and then she plants the bacta into place and holds it for the few seconds it needs to stick. She keeps her hands there a couple of seconds longer, watching what are clearly slugshot wounds — there are enough hunters in the family for even Mon to know — rise and fall with the girl’s breath.
“You’ve done this before,” Cinta says, somehow sharp even when she’s implying a question.
“Imagine Vel, three feet shorter and with three times less impulse control,” Mon replies. In the next moment, she remembers she’s done this for her own daughter, too, that time at the Silver Sea when she skinned her knees on the rocks. The horrible truth is that sometimes Mon forgets she’s a mother; more and more, now that Leida’s left the house.
“There,” Mon whispers, finally, taking her hands away. “Will it need new stitches, do you think?”
Cinta takes a deliberate breath in through her nose and out again. “The patch should be enough. Vel’s due to check them tonight, anyway.”
Mon meets Cinta’s eyes, then, just before she straightens up. They are stormy and shining and yet also, unmistakably, appreciative. Merles. Mon’s read this girl wrong. There is a simmering anger there, yes, but one that Mon can’t fault because everyone who hates the Empire, from Bail to Luthen, carries it to varying degrees. What she'd interpreted as Cinta’s animosity towards her, however, is probably closer to a kind of urgent focus. It comes to Mon that Cinta probably has her own questions and doubts; is Mon Mothma actually Vel’s one good cousin, or is she just slightly less rotten than the rest of their miserable family?
“You’d both know best,” Mon says, looking away first.
Which is how she feels, not sees, the hand at her elbow, helping her to her feet. “Thank you,” Cinta says, quiet, and Mon gets the sense she must tend to speak softly when she’s saying things that matter.
“For all of this. I can’t…” she trails off, looking up at the ceiling and laughing a bitter little laugh. “I can’t ever repay you. I can’t make the damn bed, still.”
Mon squeezes the girl’s arm, same as she’d done to Vel’s an hour and what feels like an epoch ago. “Make my cousin laugh at dinner, and we’ll call it even.”
Cinta nods, ferociously — Gods, she must do everything that way — and whispers, “Deal.”
*
It’s a deal fulfilled well before dinner, to Cinta’s credit. When Mon comes back down the stairs, the girls are still in the kitchen; Vel’s starting to pull out spices and a pan for the fish currently sitting raw on a cutting board. Cinta’s “supervising,” mainly by nursing the cold cup of caf. Her cousin’s chuckling and shaking her head at something the dark-haired girl’s said; their shoulders keep bending towards each other, slightly, from opposite sides of the counter. Perrin would say they’re both hooked and preen until someone complimented him on the fish pun. Mon just takes up the wine again and offers Cinta a glass.
“Oh, she doesn’t drink unless— “ “—Sure, why not?”
The girls speak at the same time and contradict each other, then have another wordless staring match to get their story straight.
“Just a small pour,” Cinta says, and Mon complies.
It’s nicer than a senator should care to admit, following their lead. Vel cooks, Cinta offers to clear off the bigger dining table, but they end up eating at the little round one off the kitchen. Mon sings for her supper by telling as many stories as she can remember of that summer before the move to Coruscant, of a tiny Vel running around like a hellion and trying to climb anything taller than her. Vel accepts it with a silent, wry humor, and Cinta, smirking, pushes her plate closer to Vel so she can steal the blue carrots Cinta hasn’t eaten.
“Well, I know you both probably can’t say too much,” Mon says, when the plates are all picked clean. “But do you have a sense of where's next?”
They don’t look at each other to compare notes this time, but Vel flexes her hands and worries her bottom lip. Cinta takes a slow, deliberate breath.
“There are a couple places. Mid-Rim, probably. Places where we can do some conditioning, get back in shape after lazing around here so long,” Vel says, trying to play it off with a shrug at the end. “And after that, we’ll see.”
But Cinta stays very still and gives Mon another calculating look. “How much do you know about Jan Dodonna?” She asks, like it’s a test.
“Jan Dodonna? I know he was a decorated veteran who has stolen some war-era hardware and is playing pirate somewhere in the Rim,” Mon lets her eyebrows rise. “At least, that’s the Empire’s story.”
“At least that’s the Empire’s story,” Cinta repeats, and purposefully leaves it there.
It takes every ounce of training, every day she’s spent on the Senate floor, for Mon not to say something she’ll regret, or that Vel can’t answer — Why would you do that, joining Dodonna would be throwing your life away, I’d never see you again.
“What about Luthen?” She asks, instead.
“Luthen,” Vel says, with venom in her voice, “is only interested in doing things Luthen’s way.”
“It’s not enough anymore,” Cinta adds, and Mon wishes, suddenly and irrationally, she hadn’t helped this woman earlier today. What kind of being can carry wounds like those, still cracking open, and hunger for more violence? Who wouldn’t be grateful to have survived?
“He’s gotten careless,” Vel says, shifting in her seat like she’d jump Luthen if he were here. “You should be careful with him, Mon.”
“I know,” she says, because what else is there to say? Mon can’t stop her cousin from running right into danger, as she’s always done. Vel can’t tempt her to quit fighting the way that she knows how — with subtle pressures and sideways smiles. There are too many ghosts she’d be letting down, if she stopped.
They sit in a silence that’s not awkward, but uncomfortably aware, until Vel, fidgeting, gets up to rinse the dishes. She offers to fly Mon back, after, but Cinta — what a stormy contradiction, this woman is — tells her she shouldn’t rush back, that the stars are a vision from the deck at night, and that it wouldn’t hurt their cover if they lit the firepit again. Mon realizes that she is three glasses in, to Cinta’s half, and relents.
It’s just the two of them out there, for about twenty minutes, while Vel cleans. Cinta starts the fire, and Mon looks up at the stars. They are beautiful, and the night is calm, while still feeling alive in the way the woods do. It’s nothing that particularly moves her, but she can appreciate it academically — it’s like when people admire the view from the embassy windows, a view it is now impossible for her to see. Mon wonders if there’s a view of the galaxy that would inspire awe in her, still, or if Coruscant’s ruined that part of her, too.
She doesn’t notice that Cinta’s slipped inside until she steps back out with blankets and offers one to Mon. She accepts, and they watch the sky together.
“Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,” Mon barely catches the words, said under the young woman’s breath.
“And yet, methinks I have astronomy,” she completes the line. “You know the old masters.”
“Not well,” Cinta deflects, immediately. “I thought you would, though.”
Caught, Mon’s only defense is to smile. “Guilty.”
The silence creeps back in between them, as Mon contemplates what she could, or wants, to say. That Vel doesn’t care about any of that? That Mon loves her cousin, but knows they’ve always belonged to different worlds?
“It was my father who loved history, poetry,” Cinta confesses, with some effort. Mon blinks at the girl, who stands, stone-faced, looking out into the night. “It felt like he had a line for every minute of the day. I only remember pieces.”
“Was he a poet himself?”
“No,” Cinta says, barely shaking her head. “Architect. But he’d always joke that he had to be the artistic one, since my mother was a doctor.”
Mon hums. The past tense is unmissable. It’s all too easy to guess the why behind it. And it makes what Cinta says next all the more significant.
“I think he would’ve liked you a lot.”
“I’m sure I would’ve liked him. I have all kinds of boring questions about columns and shape language I’d ask.”
“It was important to him. Family,” Cinta pronounces the word like it’s the very first time she’s saying it aloud. “It’s important that Vel has you.”
Mon turns, right into the laser-beam stare Cinta’s fixing her with. “And you,” she says, softly. It’s as much of a benediction as she can bear.
But the silence is comfortable when Vel comes outside with yet more blankets, and a pot of tea. They stay out there in the deck chairs long enough to notice the stars sinking, slowly, as Rion turns its face slightly closer to its sun. They talk in hushed tones, mostly her and Vel. Her cousin asks about Coruscant, about Leida, in bursts and snatches. For once, it feels safe for Mon to answer because it all feels far, far away. Eventually, a chime goes off from inside the house.
“Midnight,” Vel scowls, and Mon blinks heavily. They’d let themselves stay up well past when they’d planned. Vel still has to get her back in the morning.
“I’ll make up the bed for you. Just give me a moment.”
“Oh, Cinta already —” and Mon turns to look at the original bed-maker, but the girl is fast asleep, a blanket pooled around her lap. Vel smiles — a full, real smile — when she notices. She stands, seemingly unsurprised, opens the door, and then comes back and bends down. She puts a hand on Cinta’s shoulder, just heavy enough for pressure, and whispers, “Arms ‘round me, Cin.”
Mon turns away. She hears the sleepy mumbles and the grunt of effort as Vel picks up her lover and carries her to bed. It’s still intimate enough to squeeze at Mon’s heart. She can’t remember being carried, although she must have been as a child. She doesn’t miss that kind of affection, not usually. Her friends, her collaborators, those true souls who still value freedom and democracy, these have always been her partners in the truest sense of the word. How risky, to find it all in just one other person. How brave.
But then she thinks, as Vel steps outside again, light catching on her hair, her baby cousin always has been the brave one. Mon smiles, knowing this is likely the last night the two of them will spend under the same roof. Unless the stars align again — or the empire gets exponentially crueller, which is more likely— then for a long time, their paths will be profoundly separate ones.
“Thank you,” Mon says, unwilling to take the first step down hers just yet.
“Course,” Vel waves a hand away, broadly, as though it’s been nothing.
“It suits you.”
“What does?”
“Taking care of someone you love.”
“Ah, well,” Vel shrugs off the compliment. “Still work to be done.”
“Still,” Mon says, and stands. She doesn’t finish the sentence, sees in Vel’s eyes that for once, neither words nor action is necessary. They both know.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, cousin,” Vel says, firm, a promise.
“Tomorrow,” Mon agrees with it, both the wishes and the sadness in that word. She hopes they live to see it all.