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Yavin
She and Vel don’t talk much.
From the moment Kleya wakes up, humidity weighing down the air, there’s movement, activity. She sees base techs bringing in supplies, hears recruits running drill, smells the tell-tale metallic bite of ships refueling beyond the treeline. Life on Yavin doesn’t stop just because hers did. Against this noise and tumult, all she has left is her own silence.
Even the note Vel’s left for her — I’ll bring food and some kit back before 0930. C’s on the rest — asks nothing, demands nothing. It’s an odd, light feeling Kleya can’t name. What a profoundly strange thing to receive information and have no one waiting on her to understand, to plan, to procure, to direct. Maybe that’s the concussion talking. She’s worried it’s something else. But for the first time in her life, instead of staring it down and working at the problem until she finds a solve, Kleya wants nothing more than to slip back under that stiff yellow blanket.
So she does. She sleeps.
She misses Vel and wakes up to the fact of spare clothes, a water jug, and ration bars left on the table. She still catches the implied instruction that comes with them: Stay here.
She didn’t start speaking basic with him until after the second day, when she’d learned the keys of Luthen’s language: the little cast of his head that means he’s improvising, the way he blinks to process something dangerous. It didn’t take long. He was already a good liar, then, but Luthen the performer came later. She thought she’d always be able to see through the act; it was code they wrote together. But then on the old steps… Just be there, he’d said, and she — wretched, foolish girl — had believed him.
Sitting at the beaten-up baseboard table and looking at the rough-hewn wooden walls, Kleya feels no desire to move. This is exactly where she deserves to be, now that it’s too late. Maybe the most perverse thing about it is that Vel’s quarters have a language, too. She can’t help but start to pick it up.
There are the plants, for one thing. Two pots, on either side of the ratty tables — which themselves are possibly Sartha originals; certainly Yavin originals. Only Vel would encourage the vines to spring their own rebellion along the interior wall, would feel they had a right to it. One of the pots is chipped, but the cut in the ceramic is angled precisely at a cardinal direction, she’s not sure which. The handles of the knives stuck to a magnetic strip against the wall and the large rinse cup are angled the same way. There’s something stronger than routine here. Intention.
The magazine pouches of power cells, by contrast, are placed at textbook tactical points — within arm’s reach of both Vel’s bed and the spare bunk, in the dip that came from whatever salvage piece formed the doorway, just in the blind spot created by the arch. Vel’s either gamed out what a standoff in this space would require, painful romantic that she is, or tactically is just how she processes everything, now that she’s turned soldier.
Kleya runs a hand over the teapot, unshowy, but the nicest thing Vel owns. The teas on the shelf below are organized by height, giving some impression of domestic order even if most of them were originally lum and tabac tins. That, and the placement by the spare bunk, suggest that Kleya has monopolized the corner of the room made for Mon Mothma. Vel’s painstakingly maintained a space for her cousin to retreat to — maybe the least surprising thing that Kleya’s learned in the last 72 hours.
Half a ration bar and a cup of tea that smells mostly like Foless Blue are enough for her to retreat to the bed again, Mothma or no Mothma. When Kleya wakes up, it’s dark, and Vel is at the desk; whatever she’s working on, the thin scratching of metal on metal almost sounds like rain. Kleya watches, silently, long enough figure out Vel’s scrubbing rust off of an old transmitter. Their eyes meet and Kleya freezes. Vel just waits a beat, for what Kleya doesn’t know, and then, with a nod, turns back to her work.
It goes on like that. Kleya sleeps, tries not to be nauseous when she stumbles to the fresher, eats the rations left out for her in a state of muted surprise that they taste good. And she listens. She learns the wind rush before the daily (and nightly) Yavin downpours. She maps the routes in and out of base by the squelch of boots through mud and the snap of ropes straining against carrying poles. Maybe Luthen had been right about all their hidden bugs. Maybe it was just all noise. It’s only in the waspish, flickering buzz of the lanterns — when Vel’s brought back a whole crate of supplies to build medpacs and she’s only halfway through — that Kleya starts to hear what Yavin is, what it means.
She gets up and puts the kettle on while Vel is bent over the table, sorting compresses and bacta sprays. Plastic wrappers crackle. Bottles bump against each other and thump against the wood. Eventually, the water boils. Kleya pours herself a cup, and then, on impulse, another. It’s the first thing she’s done that hasn’t been plan or necessity in she can’t remember how long, but when she sets it down in front of Vel, all the redhead does is take a grateful sip.
“How’s your head?” Vel asks.
Kleya shrugs, and it only sends a small twinge up her neck and around her temples. “Better.”
“Cassian’s gone after Erso now,” Vel says. It’s a mark of how changed they both are — proud Chandrilan heiress and poised Coruscanti spymaster no longer — that that’s all she needs to say. Vel doesn’t profess her faith that whatever the superweapon’s weakness is, Cassian will find it; Kleya doesn’t pester for the whens and the wheres and the hows so that she can build the plan in her head, find its weak points, neutralize them, keep Cassian safe. Instead she takes a sip of her tea. It warms her throat going down.
“Oh. And.” Kleya blinks her eyes open (when had she closed them?) to see Vel pawing through a rucksack under the table. When Vel straightens back up, she holds something wrapped in a cloth out to Kleya. “This is for you.”
Unwrapping it, Kleya runs her fingers over the lukewarm metal and the two little rounded pips, set in a line.
“You’re not being impressed into the Alliance,” Vel adds, with the wry edge of a smirk. “But it’ll be easier for you to get around base with that than without it.”
“I’m free to move around the base?” Kleya doesn’t bother to keep the skepticism out of her voice.
Vel stares at her, levelly. “You’re free, Kleya,” she says.
Kleya looks back down at the rank plate. “This is for an officer. A captain.”
“It is,” Vel says, with a fierce little nod. “What you do with it is up to you.”
A beat. The lights still buzz. The wind reverses directions, like it’s heaving a sigh. It’s going to rain again soon.
Kleya walks up to the table and sets her cup down. She takes one of the canvas bags stacked on the chairs and starts filling it — bacta patches, compress, medstick, stimshot, bandage roll, medshears, gloves. She can feel Vel’s eye on her and the little sounds, the rustling and shuffling of objects on the table, that normally wouldn’t even register seem like they’re peaking in her ears. She seals the case and, silently, hands it across the table. She hopes she doesn’t have to say anything. She isn’t even sure that she can.
Vel takes the medpac, turns it over, and then gives Kleya a once-over with those sharp blue eyes of hers. Whatever she sees, she sees. Then she puts the pack in the pile with the others and starts on the next one. Kleya starts on hers. And with something unspoken but settled between them, they work through the night together.
Home One
Retreating doesn’t mean the same thing as running.
Kleya sees the mistake in so many of the pale, shocky faces she passes in the corridors. It’s all gone wrong and they’re still afraid — afraid any second their lives will collapse into metal crunching and blasters sizzling, into terror and the void. The Alliance losing cohesion, devolving down to ants picked off one ship at a time? That would be running.
But retreats have a logic to them. They have logistics. They have planned rendezvous coordinates and backup coordinates. They have hidden supply caches and paid-off safe houses and hospital tabs on worlds where the local magnates are willing to be friendly with the Empire’s enemies. They have warehouses moved overnight, by smugglers who are starting to realize, because she is making them, that the Alliance is bigger game and a fairer partner than any of the Syndicates. The rebellion survives to the extent it can lose and keep moving.
It’s not that different from running the network from behind the gallery. This time, Kleya doesn’t have to worry about sourcing any objets d’art.
She doesn’t see much of Vel. Hasn’t in almost a year. It was never a question of them serving together. Every day before the evacuation, Vel would run herself to a melting point on Yavin, on drills or inspections or patrols; then she’d bring back things needed for the newest Pathfinder squads and fix them until she was too exhausted to be conscious. Kleya knows it was more productive than stims or drink, but she never mistook it for virtue. Closer to keeping a fire alive, and it’s no challenge to guess which one (who’s) Vel is still tending. Kleya herself knows how much you need to burn, to change, to take onto yourself like an overloaded pack, so it doesn’t feel like the light will go out for good. And then it’s just the way you are.
Vel does this through action, direction, targets. She’s gotten plenty of them, since Yavin, and Kleya’s determined that her most insufferable agent will again. But this is the phase of the war — the tangled lines and compounding tradeoffs and charged implications on encrypted datapads — that Kleya was made for.
She gathered people over the last year who are made for it too, or are learning to be. Dreena, steady and invaluable; the Mirialans, Shreyas and Sai, who finish each others’ sentences and between them probably know where every screw is on Home One; a gruff Sakiyan named Naskh who Kleya is sure has an eidetic memory even if he plays it down; the three kids, Asha and Rachin and Kazuo, who all work efficiently despite all of them having a crush on Skywalker.
It’s been weeks since any of her team bothered going to mess, if they’re not off-ship scouting new supply lanes. Someone brings food back to the consoles; they work and they talk through the snags and delays; they trade off leaving to supervise intakes or loadouts and to sleep. They wake up and they do it all over again. Kleya takes the work to Rieekan and Ackbar and Mothma, and she sets the lines of what is possible for them, what Command actually can command.
It’s just Kleya and Naskh awake tonight, sketching out a route to string fuel loads from their caches in the Gordian Reach back to the fleet, when Rachin storms in.
“It’s kriffing Sartha again — oh, apologies, Major,” He says, aiming the last part at Kleya, who he must not have spotted until she stood up.
“Sartha?” Kleya asks at the same time Naskh says, “Again?”
“Yes, sir, one of the Pathfinder commanders.”
“I know who she is,” Kleya says, maybe too evenly.
“Well, she’s down there right now. Going through the medpacs and the repair kits set aside for a Condition 1 and blocking one of the elevators, I might add.”
“Stars,” Naskh shakes his head like this isn’t news to him.
“I know she’s old guard spec-ops or whatever,” Rachin waves Vel’s experience away, “But we’ve got cabling from the raid on Ulzana that needs to be sorted when it comes in, in two hours. Be anal about your unit’s gear when we issue it, I beg you!”
“I’ll take care of it,” Kleya says.
“Sorry, sir,” Rachin mutters. “She’s a terror.”
Kleya’s mouth doesn’t move — although the expression she’d have made five years ago to hear Vel earnestly described as ‘a terror’ would have put Luthen’s laugh to shame.
Except when she steps into the supply hold, it’s not amusement, or even annoyance, that Kleya feels. A whole crate of emergency supplies is unloaded and scattered post-impromptu inspection. Vel is faced away, elbows on top of a leaning stack of hardshell cases. Her head’s bowed into her arms, fists curling and uncurling. Her posture would read as barely contained fury to most, but Kleya knows better. She takes in the stray hairs that have escaped from Vel’s bun, the stains on her ratty tank-top from Yavin — her back is more muscled, since the last time they were in a room together, Kleya realizes with a blink; the cut of her delts and biceps more defined, too.
Vel turns and sees her there, before Kleya’s quite realized she’s been caught. Luckily, the Chandrilan doesn’t hide her shocked, slightly guilty look, and Kleya knows that she can mask hers.
Silently, because it feels like she’s cornering a roe who’ll bolt at any sound, Kleya takes some of the cases scattered around the floor and starts stacking them next to Vel’s pile. A part of her wants to reach out and put a hand on Vel’s shoulder, touch her arm, calm her down somehow — another part of her wants to do more than that, but it needs to shut the fuck up.
Vel watches her, stock-still, but Kleya keeps at it. When she’s cleared a path, she stops and looks Vel in the eyes. They’re that sharp, deep blue, like the sky Kleya hasn’t seen in months. Vel looks back at her, inscrutable for once, then lets out a breath like she’s been holding it for months herself.
“If you’re done,” Kleya says, “then come with me.”
Vel obeys, and it’s not until the lift is halfway back up that the redhead, almost as an afterthought, says, “Didn’t know you were here.”
“It’s a big ship,” Kleya tries to keep her voice even, nonconfrontational. “Last I heard, you were on Ithor.”
Vel nods. “Your hearing’s good. We evac’d four days ago.” Then, lower, “Kriffing waste.”
With effort, Kleya redirects the sigh she wants to sigh through her nose. Only four days. She checks the casualty lists as they come in, and keeps her eye on deployment updates once a week; anything beyond that would be an indulgence, and she doesn’t regret the rule she’s set. Still, it’s annoying she’s a few days off.
“What are we doing?” Vel doesn’t ask the question until they’re in the rec-room-turned-workshop, and Kleya is pulling out a crate from under the table.
“Starting with a diode.”
Kleya removes one and sets it on the cold metal surface. Vel looks down at the piece, then up at her, but doesn’t ask — and Kleya doesn’t answer. When they talk too much, they start reaching for each other’s throats. There was a time when Kleya liked it that way, too. But Luthen is gone (Cinta is gone). There’s too much to do and not enough of them still alive to do it. Vel said just enough on Yavin for Kleya to begin stitching herself back together. Now she lays out the radio parts and their sequence. She explains the variable capacitor from the hypercomm rod, the technique for getting the magnet wire to coil, the best angle for the tap.
Vel is surprisingly good at it. Her hands are steady, strong and precise despite the half-healed blaster burn on her left. It’s not that her breathing gets noticeably calmer, or that her muscles fully relax. But from about halfway through the assembly, Kleya can still see it in her counterpart — an easing of something. It’s not quite like looking in a mirror. Maybe a dusty one.
“We always need more comms,” Kleya says.
Vel keeps her eyes on the work. “Recruiting me, are you?”
“No. I already did that, once.”
Vel barks one single, jaded laugh.
“Whenever you need to be busy, come here. Do this,” Kleya says, softer, sounding more to her ears like a wish than like an order.
Now Vel looks at her, exhaustion clear but her expression even harder. “It’s not about being busy,” she starts, but Kleya interrupts.
“Of course not. It’s about keeping them alive.”
Vel laughs again, almost choking on it. “Trying to,” She says the two words like she’s turning a knife in on herself; in that instant, Kleya knows not only that she guessed right, but when Vel’s fixation with preparedness must’ve started.
It all comes back to Ghorman.
She wishes there was something to say. She doesn’t have the words. She’s lost the right to Cinta’s name. All Kleya has is a bin of solderable circuit boards, and the hum of the ship’s engines, and memory.
“Well,” Kleya speaks before she’s thought of it, let alone thought better of it. “‘Remember this. Try.’” She pushes the bin across the table to Vel, who, with a very shaky breath, takes it. They lapse into silence again until the radio’s finished, and even for a beat after that.
“Kleya —” Vel starts.
“Don’t mention it,” Kleya says first.
Hoth
Luthen had a saying, back when they first started moving artifacts. Whether they were slogging through the mud or beating away bugs in the dense, muggy forests, he’d call it ‘bringing them in from the cold.’ It irritated her, at first, how wrong a description that was; he’d scoffed and said that lots of untrue things were true. He was right. But a small, petty part of her is validated now, on Hoth. Even with Echo Base, there is absolutely nowhere one can be brought into that isn’t still bitterly cold.
And yet, Kleya is being brought in.
Cracken’s grudging return to the fleet — the man has never met a meeting he wouldn’t rather be a dead-drop — and half the command casualties at Mako-Ta have wiped the board of the Alliance’s infosec priorities. Now the old wolf is sorting through the next cohort of egos: The performatively calm Madine, the timed explosive with a title named Leia Organa, the brash Bothans, Delto always doing his best impression of Dodonna. One of the few things that unite them is none of them still care about Luthen.
So, with her knowledge of old cells and friendly enemies, Kleya has been invited to be a different kind of shopgirl, now — to provide information if not ideas. She makes herself seem useful, sensible, measured. She listens to them all the way that interest accrues; a silent, neutral force in the background, saving for the day when she does speak. She’ll be heard.
When Kleya has reached her limit with the limits of rebel intelligence, however, she tucks herself and her datapad into a corner ledge with a heat vent, just inside the stables. They’re never isolated to the point she’d look conspicuous, but it’s maybe the place where everyone is most likely to mind their own business. They’re going out on patrol or coming back from patrol or serving a rotation mucking the stalls and, whatever the case, they’re trying to do it as quickly as possible.
Almost everyone.
She sees Vel there enough that the woman is as regular a feature as the support beam Kleya leans her head against. She knows Vel sees her, too — they’ve spent too long scanning the corners of rooms like their survival depended on it, because it did. Half the time they don’t say anything to each other. Kleya’s eyes will just flick up from her screen to catch Vel affectionately cursing the tangled fur of a tauntaun or reaming out a recruit, with real fury, for letting the water buckets freeze. Kleya will hear a snort from Vel’s general direction and realize that she has, perhaps, been staring into the middle distance while she thinks instead of safely down at the datapad.
Sometimes, though, Vel brings whatever she’s working on closer to the heat. They talk. Blockade weak points, the state of the base maintenance queue, the morale of the planetary cells still operating in the mid-rim. Hoth suits Vel, even if she’d bite Kleya’s head off for saying so. She has equipment to maintain and idiots to train and the most ornery animals in the galaxy to spoil with bits of ration cube, and, several times a week, the howling white void beyond the caul of Echo Base to patrol and protect.
Kleya still notices tells. Vel wipes her hands on the cleaning rag in the same pattern, ties rope off at the same angle, gets snappish when third squad tries to store some of their gear in the empty stalls. But she’s not working herself past the point of exhaustion. Neither of them are. The cold catches you first.
She tugs the collar of her coat up higher. The heater’s flagging in its eternal, thankless war against the ice. It makes it easier to hear the delicate metallic gear cranks turning, as Vel recalibrates one of the electrobinocs.
“Who are those going to?” Kleya asks.
“Into the gear pool, until the next transport comes in. They might be assigned then.”
Kleya nods. Asked and answered. She’s halfway down the next datagraf from Dreena before Vel speaks again.
“You don’t like it. Consolidating forces here.” Vel’s face is still, and more open than Kleya’s seen in a minute.
“Do you?”
“Doesn’t matter what I like, really,” Vel shrugs, and Kleya’s about to frown, but her counterpart surprises her with a grin first. “See? I can go deflection for deflection, Marki.”
“Can you?” Kleya lets one eyebrow rise.
“Mmm.” Vel hums, doing a bad job of looking neutral.
A beat.
“All right, then,” Vel caves first. “Everybody else on base finally freezes, and general orders are yours to give. What’s different?”
Slowly, Kleya sets her datapad down and to the side. She knows Vel clocks the deliberateness, but she ignores that, tucking her knees under her chin.
“Hoth is a target. They’ll smash it eventually, and we want them to. They need to burn the resources finding it. They need to feel like they’ve destroyed us and then throw out their competent commanders when they realize that they haven’t,” she says. “But we need to operate like we have much less time here than we think we do.”
“The bulk of the Alliance hasn’t even been here three weeks.”
“The bulk of the Alliance shouldn’t be anywhere until just before we strike.”
“We can’t go back to hiding in ones and twos on hillsides,” Vel points out. “There’s too many of us now.”
“That’s our advantage. Command has to stay on the move, but most of us can embed with planetary cells. We need to start a thousand fires everywhere.”
Vel tilts her head. “Like where?”
“Where there’s strategic infrastructure. Half the old enterprise sectors are boiling. We tried Kuat, but there are lesser spaceyards all around the rim that suit our size better. Abtin, Pasargade. If I could, I’d go to Sullust myself.”
Vel sets the binocs down in a box at her feet. She gives Kleya a nod — Why Sullust?
“The atmosphere is toxic. Everything is either subterranean or on orbital docks. But the docks can’t function without the settlements.”
“No air superiority underground,” Vel’s eyes go as bright and biting as the ice.
“Exactly. They’re useless without it. And the resistance there is practical. We wouldn’t even need to bring starfighters, just ammo and intel expertise. It’s not like —” Kleya catches herself, and Vel takes a sharp breath right after. They both heard what she didn’t say. It’s not like Ghorman.
“If we helped them, they could do it, and we’d have a rally point for when the time comes,” Kleya finishes, lower.
There’s a beat where Vel doesn’t respond. It isn’t even that long, probably, but it makes Kleya’s skin itch. Against all instinct and training, she speaks.
“What about you? Mothma gets trapped in one of those giant robes of hers —” Vel stifles a laugh “ — And you’re Chancellor of the Alliance now.”
“Stars help us,” Vel deadpans.
“What do you do?” Kleya pushes.
There’s a long beat. Properly long this time. Vel rubs at her hands in that deliberate pattern. When she turns back, the redhead faces her with an expression Kleya can’t name.
“I’d go with you to Sullust.”
“Vel —”
“I mean it,” Vel says, mildly and somehow with force, too. “You convinced me. And when you’re right, you’re right.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to qualify that last statement?” Kleya feels the corner of her mouth tugging at her cheek.
“I believe I said when.”
“What if I’m always right?”
Instead of the joke landing, however, Vel stands, fixing her with a stare that is startlingly immediate and strong. The heater hasn’t kicked over yet, but it feels warmer, all of a sudden.
“You should talk to Command. I’d back you, for whatever it’s worth.”
“Now that last statement, you should take back,” Kleya says, for once in her life trying for lightness.
“Why?” Vel frowns.
“Because I’m not the only one who owes you a planet-sized favor, Sartha. You should spend them more wisely.”
“Ah. Spoiled rich girls never spend wisely.”
Every muscle in Kleya’s body goes taut. “Who’s called you that?” She almost hisses the question.
Vel’s smile is too gentle, too sad. “Nobody here.”
“You’re not,” Kleya says, and, when Vel’s expression doesn’t change, she stands up and says it again. “You’re not. You’re one of us.”
“Us,” Vel tests out the word.
Kleya’s nerves are on fire, but she tamps down the instinct to move. She stands there like an idiot, fists curled at her sides, worried she’s guessed wrong — until Vel turns her head and in an instant, like a light switching on, becomes insufferably smug. “Maybe the rest of us should hear about sending you to Sullust.”
“They’re not giving Luthen Rael’s assistant a field command, Vel,” she scowls.
“Then it’s a good thing that’s not what you were, Kleya,” the redhead shoots back. Kleya sighs. Her breath twirls in front of her face, before it fades from white into nothing.
“I’ll think about it,” she says. They both know that she means something else.
Sullust
She jolts back the world, but not back to awake. Everything’s blurry. She feels a hand, cool, against her head, her jaw. A voice. She leans into it. Everything else feels heavy. Wrong. Hurts. Her pulse knocks against her bones, like it’s going to break them. Like flame’s running through her, cracking her into pieces. The fire. She needs to hide.
“They’re burning them,” she hears herself anyway, rasping, she’s not sure to whom. Luthen’s gone. Everyone is gone. But someone should know. “They’re burning —“
“Shhhh. I know, love. I know,” the voice says, and another hand, it feels so nice, rests on her forehead. “Just lie still.”
She doesn’t understand the words together, can’t make them make sense. It doesn’t matter. She feels the cool feeling on her face, and then, for a while, nothing else.
She’s looking at rocks, she realizes — rocks and lantern-light — before she realizes her eyes are open again. She’s burning, her pulse still a wrecking ball, punching down her spine and across her side. But it’s less than before. If she stays very still, maybe she can stumble her way back towards thought.
A person appears in her field of vision before she gets that far. She blinks. Vel. Her face is dirty and she looks tired. She must be overworking herself again. Something must have set her off.
“Kleya?”
Kleya tries to answer, but there’s a knot in her throat. She can’t work her voice past it, just a low, strangled noise. Why? What’s happened?
“I need you to try and drink some water for me, all right?”
All Kleya can do is blink before there’s a canteen at her lips and Vel’s hand, tipping her towards the metal. The water tastes stale, earthy and warm. It’s wonderful. Vel guides her head back down, after, and that feels wonderful, too.
She blinks again. Vel is there, holding the canteen, asking her to drink some water. Kleya frowns. She just did that. But the canteen is already at her mouth before she can say anything, and the water cools her throat going down.
The next instant, it’s like all the hum and noise lifts off of a track, or the receiver isolates to the correct frequency. The holocaster behind her eyes finds focus, and Kleya sees it all again: Sneaking up with the Sullustian underground from their tunnels, the schematics for the control tower being wrong, having to improvise; the charges working too well, too close; the sparks, the noise, bolts sizzling as they flew; hearing Dal and Arne screaming, smelling something burning as she ran; Vel shoving her around a corner in the dark, true darkness rushing up to meet her.
“Well, fuck,” Kleya says to the rocks above. She hears Vel’s mirthless chuckle.
“Welcome back.”
“Where and how long?” Her voice is hoarse enough, Kleya pre-emptively scowls at the answer.
“I used the last charges to collapse the rocks behind us. Think we made it into a dugout on one of the support tunnels. Imps would’ve found us, otherwise. It’s been a couple of days.”
“Can we get back to the main line? To base?”
“We’re going to try.” Vel sounds angry. Good. That’s good. “I’m almost round this bastard kriffing boulder in the way.”
Satisfied, Kleya tries to raise herself to sitting — immediate regret. A fire flares to life again, starting at her side and shooting pain through every part of her.
“Don’t you dare move,” Vel presses her back down, hands firm and voice shaking. “That hit took my whole medpac to clean.”
“I’ll leave the field work to you, then,” she breathes. Vel stays beside her for a second, then nods and moves out of view.
For a minute, all Kleya does is breathe. She adds curling and uncurling her fist, the one with the scar, to the program first; then, she introduces a muscle-clenching fury that the bacta patch stuck to her side can do nothing about. Luthen always said she was too smart for shootouts; that if she found herself in a firefight, something had gone horribly wrong. Based on how biting it feels, this blaster burn agrees with him.
Fuck it and fuck him. Pain isn’t a wall to climb over or a target to shatter. It’s a current, deep and relentless and moving. She’s swam it for decades. Kleya tests the new parameters, takes stock. She finds where the skin’s warmest and the levels spike — right flank, right hip. She won’t be much help to Vel. But she twists herself a little, enough to watch their six while Vel hammers at the rock. She holds, and she looks, and she forces the part of her mind that’s crying to count some fucking coins.
On the second drawer, fourth row — reign of Empress Teta, pre-conquest — Vel returns from her nemesis the boulder with her new best friend the canteen. She gives Kleya one scathing look, then kneels down to check the bacta.
“I’m fine,” Kleya lies.
“‘Course you’re fine,” Vel agrees, eyes bright. “If you weren’t, I’d kill you.”
Kleya scoffs with enough force she has to lie back flat on the balled up coat — Vel’s, probably. She lets Kleya hold the canteen herself, this time, as she drinks. There’s a tired, pathetic beat. Neither of them moves. Somehow, it still feels like progress.
“I’m sorry,” Vel says. “I’ve been holding out on you.”
“What?”
The redhead produces a cylinder from her pocket. A medstick. “I only have the one left.”
“Save it for when we move,” Kleya says, although the ‘we’ is entirely aspirational. It’s Vel who’s going to have to move her, and it’s going to hurt like all the hells, and it’ll be better for both of them if Kleya is out of it for as much of that as possible.
“We’re ready to move,” Vel replies, with an apologetic half-smile.
“Oh,” Kleya blinks. She shivers, even though she’s still too warm.
“Just deep breaths, all right? I’ve got you.”
“Vel.“ She wraps her hand around Vel’s arm. Vel stills, tilts her head to the side. She’s listening.
Kleya suddenly feels too drained to say any of it — Sullust’s freedom at sake; its importance to the Alliance fleet and the fate of the rebellion; what would happen to them if they’re caught; what has to happen, if Vel only has a moment. She knows Vel will lock down, get stubborn, tell her it isn’t a conversation. She doesn’t know what Vel will do, if it comes to it. That would have made Kleya furious once.
Instead, she takes Vel’s hand in hers.
They’re filthy, sweaty messes, the both of them. But Kleya rubs the callouses and brushes the dirt off as best she can, in the way she knows helps Vel center herself, helps her think — left to right, under then over. Vel’s breath catches, recognizing the pattern, but she allows it. Left first. Then right.
“Don’t be stupid out there,” Kleya says.
Vel crooks a smile. “I’ll try.”
“I don’t want to wake up and not see you,” She tries to scold, but her voice sounds broken. Her eyes sting. Weak. She hates this.
“I’ll be there,” Vel whispers. Kleya, with the effort of punching out a pulse code, squeezes her eyes shut.
The next thing she feels is the weight of Vel’s forehead, resting on hers. Just breathing. Just there. Kleya could swear it is that touch, even before the hypo, that slows everything down and carries her away.
When awareness comes back, Kleya’s on a camp cot in dim, greenish light. The Underground, then, as opposed to underground. She lies there, breathing in the whirling eddies of recycled air, idly curious if her eyes will adjust or if she’ll pass out again first. The burning, the running, the fear, the exhaustion? For once, it all seems like it belongs to some other, distant stranger, for whom she feels vaguely sorry. Everything beyond the blanket tucked up to her chin, and the medcuff she can feel around her arm, might not matter at all.
Except that’s not true. Even before the name comes, even before any words occur, Kleya knows to look for her. She turns her head — and there is Vel, ridiculous, arm flung out, face scrunched up. She’s sprawled on top of another cot, angled towards Kleya and sleeping like it’s a race she can win. With difficulty, Kleya twists an arm free from under the blanket. She reaches.
She can’t get to Vel. Not even close. Her arm flops like a cable she has to reel back and rest on the edge of the sheets. It doesn’t matter. She lets her hand relax, palm open, angled out. The message, such as she can send it, is in motion. Kleya closes her eyes, knowing Vel will see it just as soon as she wakes up.
Endor
She has so many ‘afters’ now that the word is starting to lose its force. After they came, after he found her, after they started, after the gallery, after Aldhani, after Ghorman. After Luthen. After the Death Star has become after the first Death Star, and there’s likely a lesson in that. After the retreat, after Hoth, after she realized she —
The whole frame of the shuttle rattles as it docks with the Riposte. Kleya readjusts her collar against her neck and slips her shoulder into the loop of the duffel, so it will rest on her good side. The hiss of the ramp swinging down is almost like an exhale, and on the next breath, she tastes the salty tang that’s always part of the air on a Mon Cal ship. You stop noticing it after a day or two. It’s oddly reassuring to be reminded.
For once, she takes the hover-cart up three levels of the MC80, so she only has to limp around a corner to get to the NavOps wing. Dreena warned her there’d be an ambush waiting, even with all they have to do on the battle clean-up and the salvage, which is why she took the earlier shuttle hop. If they’re the ones who are surprised, and she saves her stamina, it won’t be hard to make the inevitable quick exit. As with all her other ‘afters,’ though, life surprises Kleya instead.
It’s nice, actually. There are choicer rations that Naskh, Sai, and Rachin must’ve smuggled to them from Home One — fresh berries and a bottle of a damson-infused gin she hasn’t seen since Coruscant — but otherwise no one makes too much fuss. Asha rushes to give her a sideways hug, like the girl will melt if she hesitates, and everyone else settles for clapping her on the shoulder, laughing too easily, and getting Kleya up to speed with the state of the debris field around Endor.
Wilmon and a couple of his friends from the mech pool have invited themselves up with a handle of rev as an offering, too. So even though it’s the middle of the cycle, they drink to welcome Kleya back; there’s another for Kazuo, who got his wish to see action only to vanish in an instant with the rest of The Liberty; the third is for Dreena and Wil, about to transfer to the strike force headed into the Core. There aren’t any more toasts, but Kleya and Wilmon touch half-full glasses, the once — the sound fills in for everything and everyone the two of them can’t name.
Every being in the room offers to help bring her kit to her new quarters, but Kleya claims the right to do it herself. She should know the route (she’s already memorized it), and if she can do it with a pack (the handicap either negated or increased by the drinks), then she can do it under any circumstance. The protests against her logic dissolve into a debate about the efficiency of the Riposte’s climate controls, and, using the general lament for longer-lasting coolants as cover, Kleya makes her escape.
Thankfully, there are no complications. She does break a sweat getting to the officers’ wing, but that’s expected. The heroes and all the interesting people are gone from Endor by now — off to liberate Naboo or Bothawui; Kleya hears that the most annoying ones are headed to free Bespin, because that will certainly keep the imperial war machine reeling. Regardless, no one pays any mind to another mild-looking, transferred officer moving down the corridor. She keys open the door expecting to see the standard two-bunk setup for field ranks: lockers and a folding table on the left, refresher on the right.
“Shit. You’re early,” Kleya hears the words before her brain catches up. In the next blink, she processes — Vel, standing over something on the table, blue eyes wide, like she’s just been caught mid-heist.
“There was a supply run earlier in the day,” Kleya answers the question because she’s not sure what else to do. The door starts to slide shut, so she jolts to key it open again; only then, remembering the more practical solution, she steps inside.
“Efficient as ever.” Vel steps around the table and gives her space, while trying very hard not to smile. “You look good.”
“I thought you’d be on Home One, or with one of the advances.” It’s against everything Luthen taught her to reveal she guessed wrong, but Kleya does it anyway. She knows Vel had to take over for her on Sullust after she was evac’d. She knows once the fleet rallied, Vel went with it to the Zuma sector. She is only in this moment realizing that she could’ve chased the trail past not seeing Vel’s name on a casualty list. Why didn’t she? When has she ever been afraid of knowing something?
“I’m not,” Vel says. Although the bar is low given the last time the two of them were in a room, Kleya catches how good she looks — fit and whole, that breathtaking mix of sharp and soft in her face, startlingly clear-eyed in the way only Vel is. Kleya’s hand is still at her side, but she can feel it itching, so she redirects. She drops her own eyes down to the half-built radio on the table. Her fingers trace the cold metal and ghost over the copper wires, trying not to think about —
“I meant to have it finished by sixteen-hundred for you,” Vel gestures to the comms. “A welcome back.”
“Glad to be back,” Kleya says, surprised by how deeply she means it. Suddenly, Vel looks sheepish.
“I tried — the times I could make it out to the medical cruiser — you weren’t —“
“I know. You had to go back,” Kleya keeps her voice steady.
“I did.”
“Then don’t feel bad about it.”
Vel scoffs, but good-naturedly. “I can feel bad about anything.”
“I’ve noticed,” Kleya deadpans.
“There. Now she’s back.” Vel grins a smug little grin, hand flexing at her side. Kleya doesn’t even think the shorter woman notices the tell.
Something sharp and warm stabs at Kleya. A spark. How did she miss it before? She sees the cipher to all the ways Vel slices herself up through overwork and vigilance. The class shame and survivor’s guilt, the grief for Cinta that Kleya’s spent years treating like a deflector shield, all probably don’t help. But Vel must have started making herself small very young, in order to squeeze into the shapes she thinks other people will tolerate from her. It’s the only way she thinks she doesn’t get left alone.
“I’ll let you get settled,” Vel’s saying, starting towards the door.
“Wait,” Kleya grabs Vel by the arm. She feels the muscles there twitch and stiffen. “We should finish it.” Kleya lets go. “The radio.”
“If you like,” Vel blinks, surprised.
“I would.”
Vel shifts to the side to give Kleya pride of place next to the tools. They begin to work. It reminds Kleya of Yavin, how loud, how much, the quiet there was. Like standing on the edge of a cliff battered over and over by the sea, even though it was just a muggy jungle hut. Sometimes untrue things are true.
There’s a similar precipice, here and now, but it has nothing to do with noise. It’s not the coil winding in Kleya’s grasp or Vel fumbling to open the box of screws. It’s not even every time their hands brush. There’s a static, shocky something just from their hands getting close — which of course they are, because the room is cramped and the table’s dented — that has always been negative volume, dark matter; the invisible evidence of an idea too dangerous to name. Kleya’s too warm even contemplating the edge of that thought, and Vel’s breathing too shallow.
With a pop, the box top erupts out of Vel’s grasp, spilling screws everywhere. She swears, and with real force.
“You’re fine. It’s fine.”
Vel laughs darkly. “It’s not.”
The shorter woman looks about ready to bolt out of her skin. She swears again. It stands in for the thoughts Kleya can see as plainly as the braid down Vel’s back. They’re things Kleya herself might have said once — you have no idea how this works, everything you’re doing right now is wrong.
Now, Kleya rushes to make it right. She recaptures all the little bits of metal, while Vel scoops up the pieces that fell onto the floor. When the redhead stands back up, Kleya has rearranged everything on and around the table, including herself, so there are clear lines, structure, space to breathe — like Yavin, in miniature.
“Better this way?”
Vel blinks heavily, looks up at Kleya, blinks. Her brows come together, and Kleya’s about to flip the switch from practiced calm to repressed panic. Vel looks up again — the light in her eyes is so bright — incredulous.
“How do you always know?” Vel says, no louder than the air circulating around them.
“I pay attention.”
“Why?” Vel moves around the table to face Kleya, shoulders set in that old stubborn cast of hers.
“You deserve as much,” Kleya says with more than a hint of her old sharpness. When Vel looks skeptical, she adds the reminder, “You are aware: You saved my life. Twice now.”
It doesn’t land the way she hopes. The light in her counterpart’s eyes shutters. “You don’t owe me anything, Kleya,” Vel says.
“I’m not worried about owing you,” Kleya snaps. In a blink, Vel’s moved closer, looking through her like the redhead can see all the way to the start, to hiding in the vents of the troop transport, to Luthen with the knife.
“What are you worried about then?” Vel shoots back. Her eyes are darker than Kleya’s ever seen them, a storm that only needs one thunderclap to break.
“Saying something I do not have the right to say.” It’s as close as Kleya can get.
"Kleya." Vel’s even closer to her now. “Say it.”
The kiss is sudden. Slight. Over almost as soon as Kleya’s worked up the nerve. It’s obeying one last order; it is, probably, the end of a sentence.
She draws back, to give Vel space and to give herself room to move for the door; Kleya’s memorized the way out, both on the ship and for the inevitable exit she has to make from this. She’s known the shape of it for years, ever since —
Vel is kissing her. Vel is kissing her. Vel is holding her face and kissing her. Vel is kissing her.
(Vel’s kissing her!)
They pull back after, however long after it is, for air. Kleya can feel her whole chest working to breathe, but there’s a warmth running through her that makes it better than fine.
“I didn’t know — I wasn’t sure —” She starts.
Vel’s laugh interrupts her. “Did you forget? You’re always right.”
Kleya can feel Vel’s hands where her neck meets her jaw. She remembers feeling what that means: Safety. Relief.
She rests her forehead against Vel’s and wraps her arms around her waist rather than confirm or deny the charges. The next words brush her skin, as Vel says, “I thought you weren’t interested in anyone, let alone —”
Kleya’s kiss interrupts her.
“How about now?” Kleya feels the corner of her mouth tugging at her cheek, and she lets it spread, like a waveform’s peak, into a smile.
Her back is against the locker, suddenly, but it’s not as important as Vel’s grin — insufferable, ridiculous. The smug Chandrilan has no idea how beautiful she is when she says, “Wouldn’t say no to more verification.”
“Then let’s talk.”
Ferrix
There’s not much left of Ferrix. The Empire leveled Rix Road a year after the riot — the bricks around the main squares all demolished and the buildings replaced with concrete blocks; the salvage and parts shops centralized; the fields walled with electric fences. The grammar of oppression is written into the landscape now. It’s part of the dust in the air. Still, Kleya thinks you could tell a story of the rebellion through what has survived.
Maarva Andor’s house, for one. Whether arrogant or superstitious or inept or all of the above, the cowards never tore it down.
She and Vel are here for the season because Bix and Wilmon can’t be yet, with the harvest coming in on Mina-Rau and Dreena rehabbing from the crash on Jakku. Kleya’s clearing the data trail to make ownership claims, re-establish titles, tie off all the fiddly bureaucratic knots the New Republic’s decided to hold over — the first of surely many mistakes it’s going to make. She’s on the case for an increasing number of Ferrixian exiles. Kleya doesn’t mind. It’s like gathering provenance for pieces at the gallery, but different, too. Ordinary. Or, a better word: it’s peaceful.
Vel has taken up all the storm and all the activity for both of them, in fairness. They take a walk in the morning around the repurposed barracks, now short-term housing. Then she troops out to clear the salyard of its rusted debris, or to wage a campaign to subdue the mold and to properly insulate (Vel’s still aghast it didn’t have any) the Andor home. Sometimes Kleya works from the dented shop desk where Bix used to ship contraband to the network. Sometimes, on bitingly cold days like today, she curls up on a chair by their unit’s window; Kleya doesn’t move until her side starts prodding and protesting, reminding her she isn’t 25 anymore and can no longer function on schemes and spite alone.
About the time Kleya needs to stretch, Vel comms that she’s been asked to lend a hand at the new brickworks, and she won’t be back until late. It's no bad thing. It gives Kleya time to reset the apartment a little. They have some conflicting instincts, Kleya’s found in the year since Vel meant to drop a welcome back gift in her quarters and never left. Small things she wouldn’t waste a thought on — whether cups go rim-up or rim-down, how to correctly make the bed — and also more salient concerns about the best place to keep the blasters and how often to restock the medpac. She lasted about two seconds through Vel downplaying the things that set her off as “stupid” before making it her mission to show her partner how much Kleya wants the things that make Vel feel good. Safe.
It’s meant an amount of conscious correction on Kleya’s part, not always successfully. It’s meant trying. It’s also meant swearing vengeance on the planet Chandrila but Vel doesn’t need to know that.
Even with the rugs they’ve spread on the floor to break up the endless imperial white, Kleya hears Vel come back after dark. It’s nice, to sit against the bed’s headboard and listen to Vel moving around the main room. She doesn’t need her eyes to see the redhead staggering to yank her boots off, rolling up her sleeves before she washes her hands, going to make tea before seeing that Kleya’s already left a cup for her on the warmer. Kleya makes one valiant attempt to finish the section of the municipal logs she’s wading through, and is happy to be interrupted by a kiss that tastes like woodsmoke and Foless Blue.
“Hi.”
“Hello.”
“There’s food if you need.”
“Grabbed a bite before we headed back. They’re keeping that place stocked, I’ll tell you that for free.”
Kleya puts her datapad aside and shifts so Vel joins her on the bed.
“It makes sense,” she says. “Now that the infrastructure’s installed and the delivery schedule from the Core is set, they have a lot of bricks to fire.”
Vel takes Kleya’s hand and weaves their fingers together. “About that.”
“Yes?”
“Rashi told me they’re starting with a column and a walking path or something where the hotel used to be. Pride of place for those who died in the riot. But they want to broaden it out, too.”
Kleya nods. That also makes sense.
“He asked me if there was anyone we’d want included. Besides Cass, of course.”
“‘We?’ We’re not from Ferrix,” Kleya points out the obvious to give herself more time to get her head around the topic.
“With love in my heart for Bix and Wil, thank the galaxy we’re not.”
What a ridiculous woman. Kleya doesn’t bother to hide her fond look as she asks, “Then — why would we?”
Vel shrugs in the way that suggests she has, in fact, overthought the answer. “Maybe — especially since he was here that day — for Luthen?”
A beat. She doesn’t mean to, but Kleya still feels her muscles lock down and her face go still. If she says too much, moves too fast, she’ll start to smell the antiseptic.
“It’s your call,” Vel’s saying, with one encouraging squeeze of her hand. “It might not be the right thing. But I thought you should know.”
“I love you,” Kleya says the words before they’re a thought, has just enough space to breathe before they kiss. “I need you to know that, all right?”
Vel smiles a little sideways smile. “Didn’t doubt it.”
“Still,” Kleya gets the shake in her voice under control. Mostly. “I could stand to say it more.”
“You do, love.”
The next kiss is slower, both reassurance and promise in the shared language that’s truer than any other they speak. But when they break apart, because Vel is Vel, she adds, “Give me five minutes to unpack, and we can find some additional ways.”
“We have time,” Kleya teases back. She loves that Vel knows exactly what she means.