The hardest part about living on Lira San was nearly everything about living on Lira San. When Zeb had first suggested coming with him, not letting on to the big surprise, Kallus had jumped in with the same impulsive resolution with which he'd made every reckless decision about his life since that night on Geonosis. On his home planet, the old timers referred to a "sea change," taking their repulsorcraft out on the choppy oceans and returning with strange new wisdoms. The war had come, Separatist and Republic troops battling for ground, and the sea had boiled, and the tattered remnants of his family had fled, but the words stayed inside him.
Kallus had gone to sea on Geonosis and returned with wisdom, even if that wisdom told him to leap in with both feet on behalf of a Lasat he'd previously tried to kill. Zeb had asked him to come to Lira San, and Kallus had said yes, and now they were here until the next time the Ghost was planning to visit, which might be years.
He'd leapt, and he was here, and everything was difficult.
A gangly Lasat youth, a female from the looks of her hair and clothing, gabbled at him in a gutteral tongue.
"Sorry," he said with a disarming smile. "I don't understand." He gestured with his arms open. She gave him a dirty look and walked away.
Kallus looked around himself. This was a marketplace, full of people talking and shouting and selling their wares, and arguing over price. Among the throng of tall, furry, purple bodies, the one person he knew was buying their dinner for tonight, not that Zeb was visible right now. Back when they'd lived on the ship, or traveled together from Rebel base to Rebel base, he'd been easy enough to pick out in a crowd even with a dozen other species around. Now Zeb was just one face among a sea of Lasat faces, and Kallus wondered what the changes would be when he returned to shore.
A different youth, a younger one, possibly male, tugged at his sleeve. He growled something.
Kallus shook his head. "I don't understand."
Zeb emerged from the market, a sack tucked in one arm. He gave a friendly growl at the youth, who nodded and scampered away. "I told him to come get you." He dug into the sack and pulled out two deep red fruits. "Wanted to know if you wanted to try these."
"What are they?"
"Not sure. These didn't grow on Lasan." He grinned widely. "We'll have to see if we like them."
Kallus fell into step beside him. "As long as you didn't get more of that meat." He'd been ill for over a day.
"Nah, not until I find out if it's the food or if we got a bad cut." Zeb wrinkled his nose and didn't comment further.
Two Lasats walking past greeted Zeb, who rumbled a greeting back at them.
"I think I got that one," Kallus said. "Was it 'good day'?"
"Mostly, yeah." Kallus beamed. "But not really." Then he deflated.
"I'm honestly shocked you understand as much as you do," he said. "I thought this planet's population left Lasan thousands of years ago."
"Lasan was the colony world. Lira San is the home planet, and home language. There's some drift, and a lot of Standard that got mixed into what I grew up with, but it's not that different." He nudged Kallus against the arm. "You'll pick it up."
"I will try." He gave a promising smile to Zeb.
They returned to the small house they shared. He remembered little of Lasat architecture from when they'd exterminated the planet, but he recalled the high-reaching beams that crossed from room to room, and how 'room' had been more of a suggestion than a true separation by any walls. The design must have been brought with them from their culture here. Zeb moved with ease from beam to beam, all four limbs in use as he went to their cooking area. Kallus walked, his own arms barely strong enough to transport him from one end of the room to the other, and his feet far too weak to grasp in their place. Lasats came up to him frequently, peering in curiosity at his pale, hairless skin, but his boots attracted even more attention.
Lost in this thought, he said nothing as Zeb chatted while unpacking dinner supplies. "This looked pretty good. We had gourds like these back home. You throw them into the fire, then crack them open and eat once they're roasted. I got us some fish, too. It's the same breed as we had on Lasan. Guess the colonists brought them. It's good with sauce. I couldn't find the sauce though."
Kallus busied himself with lighting the fire. The mechanism was well advanced of anything he'd seen even during his visits to the Core. Lasat technology always startled him with the blend of what seemed primitive and what the rest of the galaxy would pay dearly to own.
Zeb finally noticed he was having a one-sided conversation. "Hey. You all right?"
"I'm fine. What kind of sauce?"
Zeb wrapped the parcel of fish in a cooking wrapper, setting it above the heat, and stuck one gourd directly in the fire. Then he turned to Kallus and folded his arms. "What's going on?"
"We're making dinner."
This earned him a glare. Kallus gave a half-hearted shrug. "I finally understand how you must have felt all those years."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that I don't belong here. I don't understand anything the other Lasats say to me." He gestured at the ceiling. "I can't climb the architecture. I don't fit in here." He saw the growing disappointment on Zeb's face, and said quickly, "It's fine. I'm getting used to it." He offered up a smile. "I have to say, it's amazing watching you here. You're in your element. I know I couldn't have fit in half as well if you dropped me at some random human colony. We've only been here a few months, but you seem like you were born here. I can't tell you how happy I am to see that."
Zeb dropped his arms, and turned to poke a skewer at the fish to turn it. "Sometimes I forget what an idiot you are."
Kallus felt his face pull into an annoyed frown. "I'm trying to learn." He grumbled his way through the same greeting they'd been given on their way home. "I'm sorry if I'm not learning fast enough."
Zeb set the skewer down and batted him on the head. It was a light bat, more a ruffle than a slap. He'd lived among humans and near-humans for a long time, and he'd learned how not to hurt them. "Like I said, idiot." Kallus glared at him again. They didn't argue much these days. The odd friendship they'd developed was built on too much bad history to risk bickering. Too much stress might be enough to break that bond. Before he could say anything, Zeb said, "Since you haven't noticed, no, I don't fit in here at all. I can get through a conversation, but I'm missing a lot of the words, and half of it is gestures I haven't sorted out. Gron says the same thing happened to him and Chava. They're still figuring things out, and they've lived here for years."
Lasat faces weren't the easiest to read. Kallus had a lot of practice reading this one. "Sorry. I'm sorry. No, I hadn't noticed. I thought you were happy."
"I am. But it's weird. I haven't been around this many faces that look like mine since..." He dropped the sentence between them awkwardly, and he avoided the end, poking at the fish again. There was no anger in his words. Even the grief had drifted into an acceptance Kallus couldn't imagine reaching had their situations been reversed. But the sorrow was still there, and they'd known each other long enough for him to know it wasn't gone.
"You see them, and you remember the loved ones you lost. And it's hard because you want to belong here and have those good days back, but they're not the people you lost, and you don't say the right words and they know you don't belong, either."
"Something like that." Zeb was never good at the whole feelings business. "You know, for someone who doesn't speak the language, you're getting good at figuring things out."
He gave Zeb a tender smile, the kind he saved for when it was just the two of them, here in their house or back on the ship in their cabin. "I've been practicing figuring you out."
"We don't have to stay. I've got that long-range comm Sabine rigged up to contact Hera. She could be here in a couple of days, and we could go back." Warmth filled his voice as he mentioned his friends, and the thicket of his emotions became clear. Even here on this planet with millions of other Lasats, Zeb was homesick, and he missed his family on the Ghost as much as he missed his first family back on Lasan.
Neither of them knew much about handling complicated emotions. They'd been warriors for too long, focused on the fight. Conflicting desires had no place in battle, not if they also had the desire to survive. Thinking about it this way, there was little wonder they'd washed up on these strange shores together. Never mind their species, their language, or even the time they'd spent on opposing sides of the war. In too many ways, they were each the only person in the galaxy who understood the other in the ways that mattered.
Zeb was offering him a way out of his discomfort, a way back to where the faces looked more like Kallus and not at all like himself, and there was no question but that they'd go side by side. Some emotions were not complicated at all.
Kallus asked, "Can you give me more lessons in the language? I don't know enough to leave the house without you. Those young ones in the market kept trying to talk to me. I'd like to be able to talk back."
Zeb used the skewer to remove the fish from the heat, and then to pull the charred gourd out of the flames. Kallus pulled down two of the thick wooden trenchers they used to hold food on this world. Zeb portioned out dinner between the plates.
Zeb perched comfortably between a series of tilted beams. Kallus sat on a cushion he used on the floor.
"What did they say in the market?" Zeb asked, the trencher on his knees, tipped fingers delicately pulling apart his hot food into bites.
Kallus thought back to the sounds the first Lasat had made, and mimicked them to the best of his ability. Zeb repeated the words back to him. "Yes, that was it. What does it mean?"
"'You have strange feet.' It's the boots."
"I'm not walking around barefoot. How can I tell them they're foot coverings?"
Zeb chewed some of his roasted gourd in thought. Then he gestured and grunted. Kallus grunted back but Zeb shook his head. "You have to use your hand."
"Like this?" He grunted and gestured.
"Like that, yeah. It means you've got wrappings on your feet." He scrunched up his face in thought. "What did you say?"
"I said sorry in Standard." He opened his arms at the same time, the way he did before.
Zeb snorted at him. "That word with that move sounds like you told him to blow off."
"Her, I think, but I'll try to remember that for next time. What about the boy you sent looking for me?" He tried making the words he'd heard earlier.
Zeb didn't reply at first, busying himself with his meal. "Ah."
"Did I mess it up?"
"No, I think you got it." He took a big bite, chewing loudly. That was a Lasat thing everywhere, Kallus was learning, the better to show appreciation for the food.
"What was he saying?"
"He said, 'Your husband has a question for you.'" Zeb crammed another bite of food into his mouth, a rather larger bite than before which would require a lot of chewing.
Kallus paused with a bite in his hand halfway to his lips. He set the food down again. "Oh."
He thought about the words again. The grammar in the language was unusual but not unique, with nouns first, descriptors following, and verbs straggling along at the end. That meant the first word had been the important one. He said that one out loud again now, stepping his toes into unfamiliar waters.
Zeb said, "It's just some misunderstanding. Don't worry about it."
Worry hadn't been anywhere near his thoughts. "You didn't talk much about Lasat traditions before we got here. What's the..." he sorted for words, "…the etiquette for an official bond?"
"Dunno about here. Back on Lasan, we had this ceremony. You take turns reciting the verses from the old books for about half an hour, then the Mystic in charge of the ceremony talks to you both, challenging your reasons for getting married, then your family has the same argument with you, then you both tell the guests all your reasons and they shout back if they agree or not. Then there's a feast, and after you eat you go back to your home together for three days and have a lot of sex." Zeb's face went soft in nostalgia. "I was in the honor guard for the last royal wedding. Everything took three times as long but the guards got to eat the leftovers from the feast for a week."
Kallus took a bite of his gourd now that it had cooled enough not to burn his fingers. The roasted flesh of the vegetable tasted nutty and rich. He imagined it mashed with some salt and a pat of bantha butter. A meal idea for another time. Tonight he finished his food quickly.
"That was good. We should get more."
"I brought back a couple. We can make another one tomorrow. It could use some salt."
Kallus smiled, taking Zeb's trencher to the basin and scrubbing both with a hand getting more used to this every day. "You should contact Hera."
"Right." The mix of emotions had returned, a little excitement at the prospect of seeing the people he loved, a little regret that he couldn't stay.
Kallus returned to where Zeb was sitting, and with some effort, climbed into a cluster where the beams crossed beside him. "Sabine said she'd be traveling with Ahsoka. It will take Hera a while to track them down." Zeb nodded, not understanding. Kallus took a breath. "In the meantime, we can start our language lessons. Why don't we begin with the readings from the old books? After that you can tell me what I ought to say when Chava is arguing with me, because honestly, I have no idea what goes through that woman's mind. By the time your family gets here, I should know how to speak, and you can walk them through what they're supposed to say. If Ahsoka comes with them, I'll ask her to stand for my family."
Zeb's expression started out muddled with confusion, gradually melting into nervous delight. "You sure?"
They were pushing out to sea together, not for the first time. Kallus couldn't ask for better company on the voyage. "I've never been more sure of anything."
end