Chapter Thirty-Five The Starfarer #2
And it was more than I could put into words, but luckily I didn’t have to, because he understood and kissed me again in reply, as if to say, Of course I came back. It was the kind of kiss that was soft and comforting and languid, the kind of kiss that took its time because he wasn’t going anywhere.
He was staying right here.
The kiss filled my heart so full, the encroaching fear dissipated like an echo in a cave, and what remained was what always remained—the parts of me that were knitted together from all the years I’d lived on the Starfarer.
The parts of me that couldn’t diminish, couldn’t die, even when faced with things so dark they smothered everything else they touched.
Home.
“Honestly,” he murmured against my mouth, “I learned it from you—”
“Ah! Is that the saber I’ve heard so much about?” Maz came up to us and picked up one half of the crystal. She inspected it in the light. Sian and I immediately sat up and separated, and she slid a sly look between us. “Don’t get uncomfortable on my account.”
A blush ate across my cheeks. The tips of Sian’s ears went red.
She grinned, eyes dancing. “Vek told me you were a good egg, my boy.”
Sian’s embarrassment washed away in a wave of surprise, and he looked like an orphan boy who’d just heard someone say his parent’s name. “You knew my mentor?”
“Crossed paths a few times,” Maz replied, setting the broken crystal back on the stump. “We agreed a lot on the reclamation bit of her work. The galaxy is worse off without her in it.”
He swallowed thickly. “Yeah.”
Maz hummed. “You know, I haven’t seen this saber in years. It’s a pity that that warlord destroyed it.”
“He didn’t care,” Sian replied. “He thought it wasn’t Luke Skywalker’s.”
“It is.”
Sian gave a start. “What?”
Maz hummed, putting her hands behind her back.
“Heroes are never as stagnant as their stories. They’re just people, even if they are called to greater things, and in their different seasons they take up many different weapons.
In the end, some are lost, some await new owners, and some find themselves in the precarious hands of new stories. ”
I looked down at the bits of the broken one, its crystal soft and golden. New stories? I liked the possibility of that.
“So my mentor was right,” Sian whispered. He blinked, tears at the edges of his eyes. “She…always knew. She knew it was his. She just didn’t know where it belonged, with Luke Skywalker missing.”
The old woman leaned in close, as if to whisper a secret. “There is a Jedi temple on Tempes. It belongs there.”
He sat up straight, excited, until he realized—“Oh. I can’t return it in pieces.”
Maz clicked her tongue in thought. Then she snapped her fingers. “Ah! I think I know someone who can help. At the Black Spire Outpost on Batuu.”
He snorted. “Can they fix lightsabers?”
Maz grinned and replied, “I’ll tell Savi to expect you.”
So Sian would be leaving. Really leaving this time.
Sosha’s people had given him a ship—it was a clunker, but it’d get him where he needed to go as long as he didn’t need to get there fast. And now he had a heading, a destination: Batuu.
And then he’d be gone—forever gone—out of my life just as suddenly as he came into it.
The thought pulled at something in my chest, deep and yearning and as old as I was.
Something that had as much to do with Sian as it did with the going.
There was a whole galaxy out there, and for a moment I’d glimpsed it, and it was beautiful.
“Maybe the Force be with you,” she said with a playful wink, squeezing his shoulder, and walked away from the party into the darkness of the woods, like a ghost dissipating in mist.
I never saw her again.
Daaric really owed me a better story about his time before the Starfarer. With a boss like that? There was no way it wasn’t full of at least two near-death experiences.
“Oh! That reminds me.” I took the celestialabe out of my pocket and handed it to Sian. I’d snatched it from my dresser drawer when I got the datatape earlier. “Can you tell me what this is?”
He turned it over, inspecting the letters carved into it and the different star charts. “Aaaah, is this the infamous celestialabe you wanted to return?”
I stuck out my tongue at him. “Imagine if I hadn’t.”
He grinned. “I can’t. You’re not the stealing type.”
I mocked a gasp. “I steal some things!”
“Sure, and what do you steal?”
“This,” and I kissed him quick on the mouth and won that argument immediately. I decided that I liked winning arguments with kisses. “So is it real? The celestialabe?”
His attention dropped to my lips, and then he cleared his throat. “Sadly not. It’s a tourist trinket from the Corellian Engineering Corporation. Before the Galactic Civil War, they gave these out to kids who aced a navigation quiz.” He handed it back to me. “You’re more authentic than this thing.”
I slipped it back into my pocket. Maybe it was just a trinket, but it had given me some good luck, I thought, so why not keep it. “Well then, this authentic celestialabe would like a dance.” I pushed myself to my feet and offered him my hand.
He accepted it without a moment of hesitation. “I thought you’d never ask.”