Work Text:
"I can return to this later if you need me to leave," said Kleya, with the indifference of a woman who had no intention of doing any such thing.
The sun had set on another frigid day on Hoth and once again Mon had seen none of it from her windowless office cell deep in the ground. She glanced at the hour at the top of her datapad and tapped her nails against her desk. She still had a few minutes before her meeting with Vel, but she was anxious and distracted and it was making her irritable. An unpleasant but inevitable cocktail of emotions when preparing to engage in one of Chandrilan's many cultural traditions.
Kleya muttered under her breath and deliberately dropped something expensive looking on the floor beside the gloves that she'd tossed away earlier. Mon allowed herself a moment to smile at her frustration.
"I won't make you leave," said Mon, "as well you know."
Kleya shrugged her narrow shoulders, attention firmly fixed on the scattering of electronics and wires around her. Mon assumed they were in some kind of order, but could not for the life of her identify any of it. It seemed the radio that Kleya had taken it upon herself to fix was a bigger job than anticipated.
"You'd leave me here with all this sensitive data?" Kleya clicked her tongue and picked up something circular, eyeing it critically. "Draven wouldn't like that. Who knows what I might do?"
"I won't tell him if you don't," said Mon. The lights overhead flickered and Mon pulled her coat more tightly around herself. "I rather think we'd both like to avoid that headache."
A quite huff of breath, visible in the cold air, as Kleya said, "The powerbank is fried."
"What?"
"The powerbank," Kleya repeated, holding up the device in her hand before discarding it. She let her head fall back against the wall behind her with a too-loud thunk. "It will need to be replaced."
Mon opened her mouth into an 'o' shape and then said, "Please consider it my top priority."
She was pleased when Kleya cracked a smile at that. She'd been cranky all day - something about the planet's magnetic fields behaving erratically and it disrupting their communications network. Mon had been worried when it had been explained to her, but Kleya had assured her that it was a fixable problem, if inconvenient.
"How much longer can I expect my office to look like the inside of a tool box?"
Kleya finally looked at Mon, an eyebrow raised. "Until I find a new powerbank."
Mon should have expected that answer.
It had become something of a routine for Kleya to show up at odd hours, situate herself on the floor in the corner of the room and then treat it as if it belonged to her. They rarely spoke more than a few words, unless one of them had grievances to air that simply weren't safe or polite enough to share with anybody else, but Mon had come to appreciate her presence. Crave it, even. Very few people trevalled this deeply into the base and the feeling of isolation could begin to feel suffocating at times. It was far too quiet. Too close and cramped. Too much like a-
The lights flickered again with a fizzing sort of whirr and Mon shivered.
Time to meet Vel.
She rose from her chair, ignoring the way her joints popped with each movement. A life on Coruscant had not prepared her body for extreme climate changes and she was adjusting to life on Hoth even more slowly than she had done to life on Yavin, which was not something she had imagined possible.
"Will you be back before the days end?" asked Kleya, and Mon might have believed she didn't care either way if not for the furtive little glance thrown in her direction. An unexpected warmth sparked inside her.
"Yes, this shouldn't take more than an-"
There was a loud crack and the room was plunged into darkness.
"-hour."
Kleya sat bolt upright and scrambled to her feet. Fuck.
"Don't move," she said. "The floor is covered in hardware." It wouldn't do for the leader of the Rebellion to break her neck tripping over a relay coil that had rolled away.
"Yes, I had noticed the debris you've spread about," said Mon, just a little too casually. "Thank you."
Kleya shuffled towards the door, pushing everything within reach into the wall with her foot. She counted as she went. Only a couple of things missing - wires, Kleya thought. Nothing that would do any harm or take any damage if stood on.
She reached the door and stretched out her fingers, feeling along the seams. She tried to dig her nails into it in an attempt to pry the thing open, knowing it wasn't going to work but feeling the need to make the attempt anyway. It didn't budge. How many times had she told them to install manual overrides inside the rooms.
The office was pitch black and without the constant hum of the generator she could hear her own heartbeat and Mon's rapid breathing. She rested her forehead against the frozen door and then banged on it with her fist. Mon gasped in surprise.
"Is anybody out there?" she called. Her voice echoed loudly around the small space.
Futile. Nobody was out there. The rebels found it creepy this deep into the base and avoided it if possible. Pathetic, superstitious nonsense.
From in here she had no way of knowing if this was a base-wide power cut or if it had just hit the lower floors.
"Wonderful," said Kleya, and she heard Mon breathe out a slightly hysterical laugh.
"At least Vel will know to look for me if I don't show up soon."
"Assuming Vel isn't stuck somewhere too," said Kleya. Mon had nothing to say to that it seemed. "Well, there is nothing to do but wait and hope we don't run out of air before someone notices that you're trapped down here." She didn't delude herself into thinking anybody would notice her own absence.
Mon made a choked sound. "Is that likely?"
"That someone will notice you're missing?"
"That we'll run out of air."
"Oh. No," said Kleya. She could still feel an icy cold draft coming in through the bottom of the supposedly hermetically sealed door. Shoddy workmanship. "You can move now."
"To where?" said Mon, but Kleya could already hear her taking minute footsteps back towards her chair. There was a loud clatter as Mon's hand brushed the desk. "Oh dear."
Kleya rolled her eyes but couldn't suppress the smile at the thought of the ever poised and graceful Mon Mothma knocking datapads over in the dark. "Never mind. Stay there."
She pressed her back to the wall and slowly stepped sideways around it, sliding around one corner and then another until she knew she was facing Mon's desk. She could still hear Mon's breathing, too fast to be normal.
"Speak."
"I'm not a dog, Kleya."
That would do. Still not quite close enough. She took another step to her left and then shuffled forward slowly, arms held outwards and groping ahead in the gloom until she hit-
Mon squeaked when Kleya's hands found the back of her heavy jacket.
"Calm down," said Kleya. "It's just me."
"I know," said Mon with a shaky exhale. "Apologies. You startled me."
Mon reached around her back and captured one of Kleya's hands in her own. Her fingers were as cold as Kleya's were and Kleya felt obliged to give them a comforting squeeze before pulling her gently backwards.
"How do you feel about sitting on the floor?" asked Kleya.
"Better than I'd feel about standing in one place for however long this takes," said Mon.
So Kleya guided her backwards towards the wall and, more awkwardly than necessary because Mon wouldn't let go of her hand, slid down it until they were sat side by side, legs stretched out in front of them.
"Well," said Mon after a moment, "this was not how I planned to spend the rest of my day."
She toyed with Kleya's fingers as she spoke, the pad of her thumb rubbing soothing circles as she went. It had been a very long time since anyone had touched Kleya and the contact felt strange. Nice, she settled on, but still strange. Not how she remembered it. But then, had anybody ever touched Kleya as tenderly as Mon was touching her now? Her heart gave a funny little lurch at the thought. Thankfully, through the impenetrable blackness, Mon wouldn't be able to see the way her cheeks had reddened.
"I'm sure you and Vel can reschedule," said Kleya.
Mon hummed, and leaned closer into Kleya's side. Kleya found herself not minding at all. "I'm afraid that isn't the case." She sighed. "We were planning to spend the turn of the year together."
"The turn-"
"In Chandrila," Mon clarified. "We follow the Galactic Standard Calendar of course, but we too keep track of our journey through our star system. Ours is a slower orbit than most life-supporting planets in the galaxy."
Given everything that Kleya knew about Chandrila, that did not surprise her.
"How long do you have?"
"Not long," said Mon. "It may have already passed. I'd given myself fifteen minutes to reach my quarters. Vel was bringing a bottle of…well, she claimed it was Chandrilan brandy, but I suspect it's Corellia's finest revnog mixed with food colouring."
Kleya didn't doubt that was true. While Vel had a lot of capital among many of the recruits, having trained several of them personally, she didn't have anything worthy of trade for a bottle of real brandy. "Well, I'm sorry you're reduced to spending the new year with me, and sober no less."
Mon chuckled fondly and nudged her shoulder. "Kleya, you have surely realised by now that there is nobody else I'd rather spend my evening with."
It was like a cold, sharp shock to her system. If Mon noticed, she did not react. Instead she kept tracing soft patterns into Kleya's hand, stroking her fingers over the crescent tips of Kleya's ragged nails.
In the beginning, she'd snuck into Mon's office to escape the wrath of an unsuitable and impractical supervisor, taking advantage of the surety that she would not be turned away. After that she'd visited Mon's office because she found it easier to concentrate with another person beside her. For such a long time it had been just her and Luthen, and despite her desire for solitude, Kleya had been unable to adjust to a solo act as smoothly as she'd anticipated. She'd tried to work among her fellow engineers and had found each and every one of them severely lacking. Too loud or too messy or incapable of keeping their interminable string of petty gripes to themselves.
Mon though… Mon's complaints were never unjustified. She didn't feel the need to fill the silence with idle chatter, but when she did have something to say it was always worth listening to. And she always seemed to know instinctively the level of interaction Kleya could tolerate on any given day. She was, in a word…
Perfect.
Kleya swallowed and said, "How is the turn of the year usually celebrated on Chandrila?"
There was a rustle of fabric as Mon shifted. "The same way most things on Chandrila are celebrated. With a lot of pomp and circumstance and truly astronomical quantities of alcohol."
"Hence the brandy."
"Hence the brandy," Mon agreed. Kleya could here the smile in her voice. "A shot at the beginning of the ten second countdown and then a second shot and a kiss at the stroke of midnight."
"Brandy wouldn't be my first choice of spirit to throw back," said Kleya. Then she frowned. "You weren't planning to kiss Vel, I hope."
"Of course not." Mon nudged her shoulder again. "The drinking would have sufficed."
"And then you'd have come back to work blitzed," said Kleya. "Leaving me to pick up after you."
Mon laughed, as Kleya had hoped she would. Whatever had frightened her so much when the lights had gone out seemed to have faded, though she had yet to release Kleya's hand. The longer she held on, the less Kleya wanted her to let go. "You understand that it would take a lot more than a thimbleful or two of revnog to touch me? The ability to hold one's liquor is of great consequence if one wishes to be respected on Chandrila."
Yes. Kleya had discovered that herself at the wedding. It seemed as though the entire planet thought of drinking as a national sport.
"I don't suppose you have any alcohol stashed away in your desk?"
"Alas, no," said Mon with a heavy sigh. "I have a bottle of wine hidden under my bed." Kleya filed that information away for later. "And I favour a shot of wine even less than I do the brandy." A pause. "No matter. It will have passed now. I've missed it."
She sounded so achingly sad that Kleya's heart sank. If there was anything she could have done then-
She stopped and sucked in a deep breath. Well. Maybe there was something she could do.
"Perhaps not," she said, pleased that her voice remained steady. Calm. "Start the countdown. I think we're coming up to it."
Mon laughed, though it felt less easy than the last one. "That's very kind, Kleya, but there is no need. There's always next year."
"And how far away is next year?"
"A little over two Galactic Standard Years."
Kleya rolled her eyes. Maybe Mon wore it well, but needless martyrdom was nobody's best look.
"Start the countdown."
"We don't have any alcohol."
"No," said Kleya slowly. "We don't have any alcohol."
It took Mon a moment to cotton on. When she did, she let out a breathy oh. It was too late to take it back now, but Kleya could not quite suppress the spike of fear when Mon did not immediately respond.
Then.
"Ten."
The relief was almost overwhelming.
"Nine. Eight. Seven."
Kleya pulled her hand out of Mon's grasp and awkwardly pushed herself up and onto her knees.
"Six. Five."
She reached out carefully to where she thought Mon's face might be, wishing that there had been at least enough of a glow that she could make out Mon's outline.
"Four."
Her thumb pressed against Mon's icy cold nose and she came to an abrupt stop. No. Incorrect.
"Three." Mon's voice contained a touch of amusement now.
She slid her hand to where it should be, palm now cradling Mon's cheek. Her heart began to beat rapidly against her chest.
Mon's breath hitched. "Two."
Kleya leaned in as slowly as she dared, using her own wrist as an anchor.
"One."
It was Mon who closed the gap between them. Lips cold and chapped and desperately soft. Kleya's eyes fluttered shut and a faint noise of pleasure escaped that she would later deny making.
Neither of them seemed to feel the need to take things any further, but Kleya recognised the embers of something that felt a lot like promise starting to burn low in her stomach.
Mon had been the first to lean in, and she was also the first to pull away. Breaking their connection for only a moment before she moved forward to rest their foreheads together. Kleya felt herself breathing far more heavily than such a chaste kiss deserved. She swallowed, and ran a trembling thumb across Mon's cheekbone.
"Happy New Year, Mon."
She felt Mon smile into the darkness. "Thank you, Kleya. With you here I can almost believe that it will be."