Note: Hi. :) The challenge dealt with showing, not telling and was given at Nerfherder's Playground.
Slight warning: This is post-Sacrifice. There is casual discussion of spoilers from the newest LOTF novel, so please refrain from reading if you are concerned with such things. Thanks!
...
It was a sign of the times that she was dressed in a cloak as dark as the shadows of the spaceport, her head down as she reached out and felt the brimming life soar around her. Her brother had always said that he "saw" lifeforms like heat signatures; jumping out at him from the background, easy to spot and easier yet to track and follow.
Leia, on the other hand, saw a blur where Luke saw pinpricks . She felt the hurried pace of the crowd that surrounded her, the individual Force signatures blending into the massive downpour of feelings and emotions that they projected. Saba had once told her that her oddities as an apprentice made her nearly impossible to instruct, and this particular trait was one the Barabel had simply not understood. To a hunter, the idea that Leia had difficulties sensing one particular individual out of the whole was ridiculous.
In places like this one, she had to keep herself less engaged with what she privately called her 'Force flood'. Keeping watch for her husband as he finished docking the Falcon, both keenly aware that they were wanted criminals and being actively hunted by the government they had helped build, Leia constricted her Force sense down to the bare minimum so that she could listen in on Han's heated conversation with the portmaster and get them both out of there.
"I could buy another ship for that price!" he was lamenting, dropping a glance at the Falcon, and then refocusing on the blue-suited man in front of him.
"The fees are the fees," the dark hair of the portmaster flopped to the side, hiding a pock-marked face and an unscarred brow. "I can't do anything about it."
Han sneered at the man, and Leia was reminded that she needed to persuade him to get his hair cut again soon. "Get much traffic around here anymore?"
The other man rolled his eyes. "Sir, its Coruscant law. Dock here or go home."
Han begrudgingly gave the portmaster his cred-chip, grumbling about extortion and bribery fees, then collected his bag and stepped up beside Leia. "Smooth," she said, and felt him grin halfheartedly under his mechanic's cap. "We need to go over 'inconspicuous' again."
He ouched under his breath, then said: "We're close. Keep an eye out, though."
He said it as if she wasn't already scanning the crowds, looking for the shock or terror that she recognized from the various times they'd been discovered in GA space. As if she'd let them be discovered on the one planet where they least wanted – but most needed – to be.
The Vongforming was non-existent at these levels; cool metallic surface covered floors and walls, and Leia conceded that it made her feel slightly safer than the plastered floor material that the Corellians seemed to prefer. Her heavy combat boots clicked as she walked, her cloak billowing behind her as the metallic, recycled air blew from hidden vents.
"I was thinking," Han said, and Leia leaned closer to hear him through the scarf tied around his neck. "That we need a game plan."
"For?"
"For Luke." They turned right and she caught the glint of Han's chrono as it glinted in the stringent lights. "Maybe he should come with us."
She knew why he suggested it; the same thing had crossed her mind. Though she had yet to see her brother since his wife's death, Jaina's reports pointed toward Luke being fundamentally shaken and unnerved, and Leia knew from her own private communications with her brother how unbalanced he seemed, how unstable. Luke was, beyond anyone else she had ever met, a careful and tenacious communicator. The fact that he was either completely bottled up or radiating pain through the Force bespoke an enormous shift in his mindset; the fact that it often swung from one to the other in the space of a few hours was downright frightening.
Leia's stomach twisted briefly at the thought of her sister-in-law; she violently pushed it back. Her pain had no place here; she could mourn later.
"Maybe," she said. "I don't think he's willing to run away."
"Maybe," he answered, "he needs to get away from the damn government and come be with us for awhile."
Han's voiced softened noticeably, as it often had in the days since Leia had felt Mara's death. He was the one person, outside of her brother and children, whom she could read like a book, with or without Force abilities. He was struggling with a sense of guilt, she knew, because his first inclination was to cling to her like a second skin and he knew that to be selfish and unfair. In a moment of almost-unprecedented candor, he had admitted to feeling relief that it was Luke - and not him - who had to deal with this particular roadblock.
He would never admit it to anyone else and had made her promise to take it to her grave, but Leia knew that he was still struggling. The fact that their relationship pre- and post-dated Luke and Mara's was something that had occurred to both of them.
"Maybe we should tell him that we're here," she said, because she was becoming morose and needed to brighten her spirits. "We're earlier than he thought we would be."
Han grunted in the affirmative, but was focused on the building signs to their right and Leia was unsure whether or not he had actually understood what she had said. He stopped abruptly, and crossed in front of her to approach a garish building crammed between two taller ones. At his look, she stepped behind him and went through the proffered door, entering their accommodations, the strong scent forcing Leia to cringe and to wipe at her eyes.
The room itself was old and dusty, an overabundance of flower print and wooden artifacts strongly reminding Leia of her Aunt Rouge's vacation cottage at the coast. Decadent manual appliances littered three rolling carts and the walls were haunted by oversized portraits of rigid, stern-backed women with large noses and fans in their hands.
Han set his bag down and began a house-wide bug sweep, removing sensors and piggy-back feeds from the inner lining of his jacket. He disappeared shortly after removing his chrono from his wrist and laying it down on the nearest armchair. The chrono made swift ticking noises, and Leia, familiar enough with Han's contacts at CorSec, assumed it was assisting her husband in the sweep.
She sat down in the armchair, opposite an opulent, old fashioned fireplace and studied the chrono. Its face had nothing on it except the time, blinking with the ticks it made. Fascinated, Leia brought her head closer, watched the numbers tick away, blinking and changing and moving ever forward, never going backwards and eternally set to Coruscant time.
She'd been considering the function of time quite a bit recently. Sometimes time seemed like an utterly useless thing – a measurement of regret and anticipation or a combination thereof. Time was not, in and of itself, valuable, but dependent on the use to which it was put. And rarely was it ever spoken of without an expectation of being put to use, as if time accomplished something.
In reality, time was produced by the chrono, and the chrono by a slave shop on Ord Mantell, a planet on which time is money. It is then sold to the military – where time is life and death – or to vacationers – who wish to make the most of their time – or to young people – who hope they can trick time and make themselves appear more adult than they are.
Would Luke heal with time? Most likely, though it would take more than that for him to come to terms with his loss.
Leia glanced at the chrono again, unsure whether she could straighten out her thoughts enough to come to a point. This new stage of her life – of her family's life – had fundamentally disturbed even the safest assumptions she had made about the universe. In what parallel galaxy was she in, then, where Jacen Solo hunted his own parents, shot at the Falcon with his mother, father, sister and cousin aboard? In which Han and she were hunted as traitors to the government they had helped build and then rebuild? In which they had to sneak to a planet they had helped rechristen as the capitol of the galaxy in order to comfort her suddenly bereaved brother after the death of a woman she had half-considered indestructible?
She sighed, caught the last blink of the chrono, signaling that Han was finished with his initial sweep. The passage of time had not done her any favors. She stood up and moved toward her holo headset, finger poised over the 'send' control as she carefully considered her words. After a few moments, she pressed the control and waited until her brother's image wavered in and then solidified.
"Leia," he said, and he scratched his beard thoughtfully, his gray tunic sticking to his body despite the vented air pushing through his hair. "Now's not the right time to come to Coruscant. Security is tight – "
"It's alright," she said, and she felt Han enter the room, cross to her, tightly grip her shoulders. "We're already on Coruscant. And – " she looked behind her to Han's wrist, where he had reattached the chrono, " – I think right now is the perfect time to see you."