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It was, of course, just his luck that he’d end up stationed on a giant hunk of ice. The humidity on Yavin IV hadn’t been his favorite thing—it made his starship-climate-control-accustomed joints ache in ways he’d never imagined and made his hair do unspeakably frizzy things—but it had been better than this bone-chilling cold of Hoth.
The worst part was that he couldn’t sleep on the Meteorite, the stolen Imperial shuttle that Intelligence had assigned him for missions, anymore. To keep the heating system running to the point where he wouldn’t freeze to death overnight in his own ship would have been a pointless waste of fuel. And if the Empire found them here, it would take less time to heat the engines up than to participate in a re-fueling frenzy. Not that he wanted the Empire to find them, even if it did mean they would have to find a new base. With his luck, they’d end up somewhere like Mustafar next.
And so Kallus found himself in a cramped room dug out of the snow of Echo Base, shivering in the warmest coat he had—which he was fairly sure had actually belonged to Cassian Andor, judging by the size and the name stitched into it. He must have packed it into the Meteorite in his haste to leave Yavin IV.
“Are you… knitting?” Hera leaned in through the doorway, her eyes bulging under her snow goggles. “Oh, this is too good.”
“I made Jacen a blanket, Syndulla. You know that I am capable of the occasional artistic endeavor.” What he didn’t tell her was that knitting had been prescribed to him as a stress-relieving activity by the medical team on Yavin IV after his rescue from the Empire above Atollon. And, somewhat to his chagrin, it actually did seem to be helpful.
“You know what they say, seeing is believing. What's that supposed to be? Baby bonnet for a Wookie?”
Kallus muttered something under his breath.
“Sorry, didn’t catch that.”
“It’s a hat for Zeb, okay?” Kallus held up the half-finished mess of bright orange yarn. “Actually, while you’re here… Ear holes? No ear holes? How much of their body heat do lasat lose through their ears?”
Hera shrugged. “Ask Zeb.”
“It’s supposed to be a surprise.”
“Ask the quartermaster? They should have some info on file. And get yourself a new parka while you’re at it, that one looks two sizes too small.”
Since arriving on Hoth, Kallus had been meaning to go to the quartermaster's office whenever he had a spare moment. But now that General Cracken had kicked him out of the Intelligence offices with strict orders to settle in and get some sleep and he actually had time to go, he couldn't bring himself to do it. That jacket and a few holos were all he had left of his friend and fellow Fulcrum agent, and Kallus couldn't quite bear to part with it yet. He could, he supposed, at least request a hat. Or a scarf. Or some earmuffs.
When he reached the end of his row, he looked up to find that Hera was still standing in his doorway.
“Was there something you actually wanted to ask me, or did you just come here to bother me?”
“Just wanted to make sure you were settling in. I know the cold, ah, isn’t your favorite thing.”
“Hera. I’m a captain in Rebel Intelligence and an ex-ISB agent. I can tell when you’re lying. What is it?” He picked up another row. “You can come in and close the door.”
Hera stepped inside the packed snow room and punched the door closed behind her. “I just… I needed a moment away from it all. The Ghost. Jacen. High Command. Not that I don’t love them—well, maybe not High Command—but sometimes you just need a space to breathe, you know? Somewhere there aren’t quite as many… memories. I don't want to impose—”
“Sit,” Kallus said, pointing to the other end of his bunk with one needle, and the general obeyed. Hera helped herself to one of his blankets, a scratchy black woolen thing that he had found tucked in a corner of the Meteorite. Standard issue Imperial. It was oddly comforting in its familiarity.
Hera ran her hands over the wool, grimacing. “Don’t you ever want something, I don’t know, softer? More colorful?”
“I have Garazeb for that,” he quipped, and was rewarded by a small chuckle. “Here, drink this.” He tossed her a flask that she unscrewed and inhaled a deep breath of.
“How is your caf still warm? Mine froze the second I poured it into a mug on the Ghost.”
“The flask’s thermally regulated. And quite well made.” It had, in fact, been a gift from Zeb when they figured out where their new base was going to be. He’d even gotten Sabine to paint one of her starbirds on it for him. “Sounds like you need to take up knitting too.”
Hera screwed up her face. “Maybe felting. That’s the one where you stab things until it’s the way you want it, right?”
“Kriff if I know. I can just make rectangles, triangles—and, well, maybe circles—with these.”
“Zeb is going to love it, no matter what it looks like,” Hera said, taking another swig of caf. “Do I want to know how strong this is?”
“No.” There was one other thing Kallus had inherited from Andor. His caf supplier contacts. And the caf they dealt in was strong enough that Sabine had once classed it as either a biological weapon or a paint stripper.
“Probably shouldn’t have much more of this, then, or I’ll be up all night.” She screwed the cap back on and placed it on the table next to his bed. “Never thought I’d be coming to you when I needed a friend to talk to.”
“Never thought I’d be knitting in a Rebel base on Hoth with you sitting on my bunk,” he shot back, earning another smile.
They sat in companionable silence for a while, broken only by the clicking of Kallus’ needles. Hera was just starting to nod off when the door hissed open again and Zeb stumbled into the room, frost coating his whiskers. Kallus, having heard Zeb’s footsteps moments before, had swapped out the hat for a multicolored scarf he intended to gift to Sabine.
“Karabast, it’s cold out there—am I interrupting something?”
“Just arts and crafts and nap time,” Kallus said as Hera blinked awake.
“Cracken kicked you out again for working too much.” It was a statement, not a question, which perhaps spoke to how often Kallus found himself in such a situation, regardless of where in the galaxy they were.
Kallus held up the scarf. “And so I’m doing my own work of making sure we don’t lose anyone to frostbite on this kriffing ice box.”
“That’s very noble of you. You are going to sleep before you go back to Intelligence, right? For at least a couple hours?”
Under identical glares from Zeb and Hera, Kallus was forced to surrender. “Fine. A couple hours.”
“How long did Cracken lock you out for this time?”
“Ten hours,” Kallus confessed.
“Then you’re sleeping for at least five of them. Hera, hide that caf.”
“You can’t hide it, I’m right here—”
Hera tucked the flask in her snowsuit. “You want it, you're going to have to fight me for it.”
“That’s not fair—”
“Life isn’t fair,” Zeb and Hera chorused. Kallus chucked his ball of yarn at Zeb’s head.
“Fine. But if you’re going to make me sleep for five whole hours, we’re all getting dinner together beforehand. And you are going to eat an entire bowl of whatever soup the mess has, General Syndulla, or… or…” He glanced to Zeb for help.
“Or we’ll report you to Rex,” Zeb supplied.
Hera narrowed her eyes. “Oh, so it’s blackmail self-care, now, is it? Alright, if Kallus here gets his sleep and I eat my soup, what will you do?”
“Me? I don’t—”
“You will go to the quartermaster and get a scarf. Or some gloves. Or both.” Kallus finished off his row with a flick of his needles. “Or this will be yours instead of Sabine’s.”
Zeb’s ears flattened. “I have fur, there are other beings on base that need it more than me—”
“You had frost in your whiskers when you got into bed last night, and you hadn’t even been outside.”
“How do you know that, you weren’t even here—”
“I am an Intelligence officer, I have my ways.”
“Fine. If you sleep a full five hours in here, I’ll request a scarf in the morning. But I’m starving, so we’re going to the mess now to get some dinner.”
“Hear me out. If we bring it back here, it’s a smaller space and between the body heat from the three of us, it will be much warmer than the mess hall.”
“Alexsandr has a point.” It was still strange, even after three years, to hear Hera call him anything other than “Kallus” or “kriffing menace.” She still called him "Kallus" and "kriffing menace," but the former was what almost everyone in the Rebellion called him and the latter was usually said with resigned familial affection these days. “The mess hall is an ice cave. Literally.”
They piled back into Zeb and Kallus’ room with containers of some sort of meaty soup, canteens of steaming hot tea, and an entire loaf of sourdough bread. Some intrepid soul had been carting the Massassi Group’s much-lauded sourdough starter through all their temporary bases and, by some miracle, had even managed to keep it alive on Hoth so far. Kallus had once laid eyes on the famous Rebel starter during an evacuation—as of then, it had been packed in a large tub with one of Sabine’s starbirds and “Yavin Yeasties! (do not touch or I will personally serve you to Vader on a plate, I swear I will, don’t kriffing try me)” painted on it. The Keeper of the Yavin Yeast was a secret that even Kallus didn’t have the clearance to access.
But he hadn’t been a Fulcrum agent for nothing. Though he had told no one—not even Zeb—Kallus knew that the Yavin Yeast belonged to Fenn Rau. It was possibly the most highly prized piece of intel he currently possessed.
He huddled under the blankets with Zeb and Hera, slurping soup straight out of the container and contemplating sending Rau his compliments on the bread, just so the Mandalorian would know he knew. He didn’t completely trust Rau not to put a vibroblade in him to keep his secret though.
“You two need a table in here. And some chairs,” Hera said.
“What, are you too good to eat soup sitting on a bunk?” Kallus retorted.
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. We all are. We're adults.”
“It’s my room, and I’ll eat soup on the bed if I want to. There are more blankets here.”
“Zeb, tell him.”
“Nah, he just likes doing anything that goes against Imperial protocol.”
“The Empire had a protocol against eating in bunks?”
“The Empire had a protocol against soup.” Kallus clutched the warm container to his chest, feeling the warmth spreading slowly through his body. Or perhaps the warmth came from leaning up against Zeb. “And friends.” Well, technically it had been against ‘non-ration food provided in an official capacity’ and ‘compromising attachments.’
Zeb plucked at the scratchy wool blanket from the Meteorite. “Did they have a protocol against actually warm blankets, too? No wonder you were so cold on that moon, if this is the sort of flimsy fabric they’ve got.”
“It’s not like most officers spend their nights planet-side somewhere without environmental controls.” Kallus clutched the dark blanket closer around his shoulders as he took a swig of tea.
“Next supply run the Ghost gets, I’m buying you a decent blanket.” Hera was halfway through her container of soup, and—glaring at Zeb—she pointedly dunked her bread into it and crammed it in her mouth, so that her next words were somewhat garbled and less dignified. “Don’t argue. Call it a Life Day present.”
“Fine, but you also have to find me a knitting pattern for someone with lekku that you would actually wear.”
“Deal.” Hera grinned as they shook on it. “And I get to pick the colors for both.”
“That seems only fair.”
Warmed by the hot food, Kallus’ eyelids began to droop for the first time since landing on Hoth some three days earlier. Zeb’s embrace was warm too, and Kallus let himself start to drift off. Large purple hands gently pried the flask of tea out of his grasp before he could spill it, and he turned into Zeb’s chest with a sigh.
“I set an alarm for five hours,” he murmured. “Don’t you dare turn it off.”
“I should be getting back to the Ghost—”
“Haven’t they assigned you quarters in the base?” Zeb’s voice echoed under Kallus’ head.
“Not yet, I just landed this morning.”
“Grab your blankets and come back here. It’ll be warmer. Chopper’s invited too, if he promises to be on his best behavior.”
“I don’t want to intrude—”
“’S not intruding,” Kallus muttered. “Invited you.”
For the briefest of moments upon waking, Kallus was tempted to snooze his alarm before years of strict habit took over. He was pleasantly warm, perhaps owing more to the fact that he was curled up against Zeb’s chest than that he had all five blankets from the Meteorite piled on top of him.
Hera had a sleeping pad on the floor next to them and was snoring lightly under a heap of bright orange and pink blankets, Chopper powered down in the corner.
Unbidden, the memory rose to his mind of limping into a sterile, space-cold room where the only color was the soft yellow glow of a meteorite. Strange to think that he had now spent more years of his life bunking with the Spectres than actively chasing them across the galaxy.
He attempted to extricate himself from the lasat’s arms without waking him, but to no avail.
“Don’t tell me it’s morning already,” Zeb grumbled, reaching out to catch Kallus’ hand.
Kallus’ feet hit the icy floor, sending an unpleasant chill up his legs. “I have to get to Intelligence,” he insisted, prying Zeb’s fingers from around his wrist. “Shh, don’t wake Hera.”
Too late on that account as well. They were all light sleepers these days.
“Hmm? Are we under attack?”
“No, go back to sleep,” Kallus whispered, grabbing Andor’s parka and tiptoeing around her sleeping pad.
Hera gave him a sleepy thumbs up from under her pile of blankets. “Find us a warmer base for when this one gets blown up.”
“I was thinking Tatooine. You know how Garazeb loves sand in his fur.”
“Fuck me,” Zeb’s voice rumbled from under his stack of blankets.
“Not while Mom is in our room, idiot.”
Hera groaned. “Please, you two are both older than I am. I regret ever making that joke.”
“What about General Mom?”
“Alexsandr, if I didn’t need this pillow for warmth, I would be throwing it at your face right now. So just… just pretend that I did that.”
“Ow!”
“What?”
“You said to pretend I got hit with a pillow!”
“Go bother Crix and Airen and let me go back to sleep!”
“Yes, sir!” The mocking salute that Kallus threw was wasted on the lump of blankets that was Hera. “Garazeb, you'd better be wearing a scarf the next time I see you. Hera, we’re getting dinner again tonight. Bring Rex and Wolffe if they’ve landed by then.”
Kallus closed the door behind him before Zeb or Hera could argue with him and shook his head. So this was what life on Hoth was going to be like. Honestly, it might not be too bad.