Leia finds a yellow-gold terylene jacket, soft to the touch and barely worn, on a shelf in a far corner of the personal goods storage room. The storage is tucked at the back of the great stone hangar, down a flight of stairs dripping with moisture that seeps from the rock. The room itself is bone-dry. Cracks in the raw stone have been carefully sealed, and a dehumidifying machine hums quietly by the door. Someone comes by every few days to change the standalone power cell. Otherwise, this space has visitors only when items are added, or when there is a need.
It's late in the evening on the day of the battle above Yavin, and the Alliance base has gone quiet.
This room, Leia expects, will be visited often tomorrow.
Personal effects are sent home, sometimes. It's not allowed, officially: the Alliance needs to keep traffic down. But carefully packed parcels get smuggled out in X-wing cargo spaces, emergency equipment left behind sometimes to make room. They get passed along from hand to hand toward whispered addresses or snuck along on undercover missions and delivered to commercial transports where, thanks to either extraordinary kindness or an extraordinary fee, they're stamped with a false origin and hidden among merchandise that's going the same way.
But not everyone earns that level of devotion. And some friends and lovers are practical souls: Gone is gone. The things we own are only objects, worth nothing more than their trade price once their owner has died.
Leia sorts through the stacks of clothing with efficiency, holding up shirts in search of one that will fit Luke's slight frame. She's not troubled by how these things came to be here. These people fought for the most important cause she can imagine. Whether their lives ended bravely, suddenly, or in terror, she has no doubt of the courage of every single one.
She passes over a loose-woven shirt in pale brown, even though the style is fashionable and the size seems right. Combined with the sand-yellow of the jacket, it reminds her too much of the outfit Luke wore from Tatooine. Desert colors. The colors of Luke's past. Of his childhood.
The next one is a deep, unfaded black. She spreads the cloth out over her own chest, finds that it's a little broader than her shoulders, hits about a decimeter below her waist. A neat placket hides the off-center buttons, and the collar lies smooth and flat. The fabric is just crisp enough to pass for formal.
Much better, she thinks, picturing the combination of colors with Luke's sun-bleached hair and blue eyes. She wonders if anyone's ever dressed him up, and exactly what he'll look like when she does.
"Tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock sharp." Leia's aware that she just walked onto the Falcon like she owns it. Han is sitting in the pilot's chair, feet up on the instrument console. He seems unconcerned about resting his heavy boots on the delicate controls. The co-pilot's seat is empty, but Leia can hear the sound of metal on metal from somewhere within the ship. Chewbacca must be working on something back there.
"You Alliance people are brave," Han says without turning around, "but there's something wrong with your sense of time. I thought you were honoring us, not torturing us."
Leia invites herself to settle into Chewbacca's seat. She's tucked the clothes for Luke into a nice canvas bag, which she sets beside the chair. The bag, also from the storage room, has a strong shoulder strap meant to angle across the chest, several interior compartments for gear, and a flat pocket for documents. There was a journal in that pocket when she found the bag, must have been missed when someone emptied it out. She thinks of trying to find out who the cloth-bound book belonged to, who it should go to, how to get it there.
She thinks about going back, taking it from the shelf where she left it, and feeding it to the incinerator.
"You have something to wear?" she asks.
Han turns to her, indicates the clothes he has on: black pants, black vest, and cream-colored shirt. After they escaped the Death Star, when their pursuers were defeated and the Falcon seemed safely away, he emerged from the ship's refresher compartment in what looked like the exact same outfit he'd been wearing all along. The only way she knew it was different was the smell: it hadn't seen the inside of a trash compactor recently.
Right now the shirt under the vest is wrinkled, and the collar is standing up on one side but mashed flat on the other. There's an oil stain making a blurred line across the front.
Han sees her looking. "I'll be presentable, Your Highness." He settles back in the chair, shifting his feet, and Leia notices now that his black boots are positioned very specifically, on the flat surfaces between the switches and push-buttons. "I've been to a ceremony or two."
It hadn't occurred to her, actually, that he would have. What she knows about Han is that he's a smuggler. That his morals are suspect. That he's foolish, impulsive, and extraordinarily brave. She can't picture him in ballrooms or Senate chambers.
She hasn't missed his Corellian bloodstripes, but she remembers her cultural studies lessons: they're given without ceremony. Besides, did he even earn them? She suspects that Han's a practical soul, too. Someone who earned the red bloodstripes wasn't likely to have a long lifespan. And corpses have no use for clothes.
Maybe someday she'll get to know Han's history, and all its truths and shadows, but somehow it feels wrong today.
Today he is a Hero of the Rebellion, and she is the Rescued Princess, and it's simple, and she wants to leave it at that.
"Does Chewbacca need anything?"
"Chewie!" Han hollers, again without turning his head. There's an answering roar from down the hallway. "You need anything for this big deal tomorrow?"
Leia can't understand the response but it sounds like a negative.
"Wookiee formalwear looks a lot like Wookiee battle gear." Han shrugs. "Clothes just mat the fur."
"All right." Leia starts to get up, reaching for the canvas bag.
Han jerks a thumb it. "That for the kid?"
"He doesn't have anything," Leia says.
Han swings his feet down as he reaches out a hand, grabbing the bag from her. He's up and out of his pilot's chair and heading for the common room before she can even try to grab it back.
Han dumps the bag's contents out on the dejarik table. The table stutters to life, k'lor'slugs and Mantellian savrips doing battle around crumpled fabric and toppled boots. Han whacks it with the flat of his hand, there's a sizzle of static, and the images wink out again.
Leia watches him paw through the things she's picked out. He holds up the jacket, unfolds the lovely black shirt, nods at the pair of tall, polished black boots that she made sure were the same size as the heavy, thick-soled ones Luke was issued with his pilot's fatigues. There's also a tanthtar-leather gun belt, silver-buckled, that will sit neatly at Luke's trim waist. Not raffishly low like that… contraption Han wears.
"Where's the rest of it?" Han asks as he tosses the gun belt back on the table. Leia's annoyed to find her face going warm.
"The kid blushes when he sees a pretty girl," Han says, "and you're going to stand him up in front of the entire Alliance without pants on?"
"I went through the whole storage area," she says, aware that her tone sounds defensive. "I couldn't find any that would fit him."
"Don't you have friends who could loan him something?"
Leia sighs. "Have you seen him? He's so tiny it's ridiculous!"
Han raises an eyebrow at Leia, all 1.5 meters of her.
"Yes," she says, "and I've got nobody I can borrow pants from, either."
Han eyes the grey tactical pants she's wearing today. Leia is still a Princess even here on base, but her patience with long white dresses has a limit.
"You got those from somewhere," he says reasonably. "Don't you have a quartermaster, or whatever you call it around here? You know, the guy who supplies your soldiers with uniforms? That have pants?"
"I wanted him out of uniform," Leia says, then corrects herself as Han leers at her delightedly. "I wanted you both out of- Stop that!"
Han's mouth twitches as he makes a visible effort to stop grinning. "Yes, Your Worship. Your wish is my command."
Leia wishes she could be sure he wasn't still referring to his own meaning for out of uniform. "You and Chewbacca and Luke, you came out of nowhere. You represent new energy, new hope that more planets will join up and support us."
Han snorts. "You're the one who represents a planet, sweetheart, not me." A moment later his face falls, and he seems to realize what he said. "Sorry."
"I wanted you to look different. Stand out." She ignores his apology, just like she ignored the words that came before it. "You're right, I can't leave him half-dressed." Han sniggers again, and Leia folds the shirt and jacket briskly, tucks them back in the bag, and lays the belt and boots on top. "I'll go see what's at uniform supply."
She's at the foot of the landing ramp when Han calls, "Wait."
She stops, looks back, doesn't see him.
"Hold on," comes his voice again. "Don't go anywhere."
A few minutes later he's there with something in his hands. Folded fabric, a rich brown color. "They'll fit," he says, and walks back into the Falcon.
Leia shakes out the pants to see if they will fit, and they look about right. Too long for her, the waist a little wider than hers but not by much. She can't imagine they've ever fit Han.
There are yellow Corellian bloodstripes down the sides.
She goes to look for Luke in the sleeping room where he's been assigned, a tiny cubicle in a maze of makeshift rooms under a high stone ceiling. She has her own space just like it two levels down, closer to the command center.
The outer perimeter of this floor, far above the flight deck, offers views of vines and trees that go on until they disappear beyond the curve of the planet. The warm air in the hallways carries a sweet smell from something blooming out there in the jungle. It's humid, too. There's a fine sheen of water on the cool durasteel surface of the door labeled E-15. The name Skywalker has been hastily stenciled below the number in blurred, blocky Aurebesh.
Leia knocks on the door. There's silence from behind it. He's not in either of this floor's lounges or the ones on the floor below. She knows he hasn't been assigned to a duty station, he's not even officially a member of the Alliance yet.
She finds him right where, if she'd thought harder about it, she might have looked first.
He's down on the main floor, in the great open space of the hangar, sitting in the cockpit of his X-wing. It is his, official papers or no. Pilots bond with their starfighters, learn their capabilities and their quirks. No one is going to take that ship away from him. Not after he showed what he and it could do together.
She can just see his tousled hair below the open canopy. He's hunched down a bit, looking straight ahead past the control bank. When she climbs the ladder to the cockpit, he greets her with a smile.
She holds up the bag. "For tomorrow," she says, and for the first time wonders if he'll be insulted because she didn't think he could dress himself.
Luke swings himself up out of the cockpit and balances on the edge, legs dangling beside the ladder. He's back in his clothes from Tatooine, which should look strange against this dedicated war machine. Somehow, it doesn't.
She holds out the bag to him and he takes it hesitantly, then gratefully, with an embarrassed duck of his head. It throws off his balance a bit. He examines the contents for a moment, then lifts the strap over his head and one arm, so the bag rests at his hip. "I was wondering what I was supposed to wear tomorrow," he says. "We didn't dress up much, at home."
He hasn't unfolded anything or even asked about the sizes. Leia thinks, with a pang, that maybe he's never picked out his own clothes before. The wrapped shirt he wore from Tatooine is clearly too big for him… a hand-me-down, maybe, or something he was supposed to grow into.
Leia doesn't know much more about Luke than she does about Han. A boy from a desert planet, she knows that. A daredevil in a canyon-hopper, reflexes like a Loth-cat. Biggs filled her in on that part, when she'd reacted with horror at the idea that Luke would be assigned to fly a starfighter.
Luke is, today, the Hero of the battle of Yavin, and Leia resists the urge to wrap him up in a blanket, mother him a little, take away some of the lost look that's shadowing his eyes.
"You alright?" she allows herself.
"I'm good," Luke says, and his smile chases the shadows away for a moment. "We did pretty well, didn't we?"
"Yes," Leia says, and decides to go ahead and reach a hand out to his shoulder. "You did."
"These are yours, aren't they?" Luke asks Han as they stand at one end of the Great Hall, high above the jungle on the temple's top level. Green plants hang from the stone walls around them and the air feels thick with moisture. Han looks trim and dashing, with his black vest and low-slung gunbelt. Chewbacca's fur is clean and neatly groomed, the sunlight making it shine.
"Not that yellow thing," Han says. "Not my color, kid."
Luke persists. "The pants, though. They look like yours."
"Yeah, they do." Han answers without looking at him. He doesn't say anything more.
"Well if they are yours," Luke begins, speaking to Han's profile, and Chewbacca cuts him off with a growl that sounds like a warning.
They wait in silence after that, although after a bit Han does offer Luke a half-smile and a shrug that says, This is really something, isn't it.
Luke smiles back, Yeah. It sure is.
Luke brings the clothes back to Leia early the next morning.
"I found the laundry center," he says, when she opens the door to her sleeping room in answer to his knock.
He must have been up late, or very very early. There was no social time after the ceremony, everyone immediately dispersing to help ready ships and supplies for departure. Luke was right there with them, packing spare parts into crates and helping to fuel up the remaining starfighters. Leia, busy making sure the work stayed on schedule, saw him in passing a few times, his hair stuck to his forehead and his shirt marked with sweat.
Today's going to be a long one, too, and she's not quite ready for it yet. Her hair is still in one long braid down her back. She's glad she's already dressed, at least. And in work clothes, not that fussy, pristine white dress from yesterday morning.
Luke's khaki-colored, Alliance-issued tactical pants and short-sleeved, buttoned shirt are similar to her own. Neither one of them has a proper uniform right now, but he will, soon enough. Her own clothing represents her role outside rank, an Alderaanian Princess who could move in both military and diplomatic circles without really answering to anyone.
Her former role, maybe, now that Princess Leia no longer has the strength of a world behind her.
Luke lifts the strap back over his head and holds the bag out to her.
"Everything's here," he says. "I picked it all up from the laundry myself."
"You didn't have to do that," Leia tells him. "They would have delivered it to your quarters."
"I'll bet things get lost sometimes, though," he says. "At times like this?"
Who were his aunt and uncle, Leia wonders, who brought this young man up to be so earnest? And how could the Empire have been allowed to destroy them? "You can keep the shirt and the jacket if you want to."
"Whose are they?" he asks for the first time. "I can bring them back to them."
When Leia hesitates to answer, Luke says, "Oh."
"They don't need them anymore," she says gently, searching his face. The shadow's still there, but no more than yesterday. Luke may be green, but he knows what he's gotten himself into. "You might as well take them. The boots and belt, too"
"All right." He holds the bag by one edge and reaches in, takes out the brown trousers with their yellow stripe, neatly folded. "These go back to Han though, don't they?"
"They do," Leia says.
"I'll find him."
"Make sure to get something to eat on your way," she tells him. "We'll want you ready to take off in the first wave. There won't be much time once you report to the hangar."
Luke nods. "I will. You're getting out soon after?"
"As soon as the support teams are away. You'll get your instructions from your squadron commander."
Luke settles the bag back across his chest. "Thank you for these." He turns to walk away, then turns back. "They said we're docking the starfighters on an Alliance capital ship, until we know where the new base will be. I'll see you there?"
"I don't know yet," Leia says, and it's partly because there are Command decisions still to be made, and partly because she has some decisions to make, herself. "But," she promises him, "we'll see each other again." She's grateful he doesn't pursue it, because she honestly isn't sure when.
Han isn't at the Falcon. Luke asks around until he finds him in the dining hall, crouched on the floor, putting plates into storage cartons.
"The Falcon's already had her preflight check," Han says gruffly. "They asked everyone to pitch in. So I'm pitching."
Chewbacca gives a cheerful howl and wave from across the room, where he's stacking cartons on a transport cart. The room is mostly empty, tables and chairs packed away. A few pieces of flexiplast wrapping litter the ferrocrete floor. There's one small station near the door where breakfast, in the form of ration packs, is being handed out to anyone who stops by.
Luke reaches into the canvas bag. "I brought these back," he says, offering Han the neatly folded pants with their yellow stripes down the sides.
Han looks up at him. For a moment Luke thinks he's going to say, "Those aren't mine." Instead he stands, brushing dust from the seat of his own red-striped trousers, and says, "C'mon."
Luke has to hurry to keep up with him. Chewbacca watches them leave, a worried tilt to his head.
"Where are we going?" Luke asks as they cross the hangar bay, past techs and admin staff heading for their posts.
Han just says again, "Come on."
Han drops the Falcon's landing door manually, with a complex series of switches that Luke doesn't quite follow. They wait while it lowers on its hydraulics, letting out a squeak mid-way that makes Han wince. "Have to fix that," he mumbles, sounding pained, like his ship might actually be hurting. Luke's not sure he meant to say it out loud.
Han leads the way past the corridor to the cockpit and on down the main hallway. The interior of the ship looks as worn as ever but it's neat, tools stowed away and all the compartments closed tight. The Falcon looks shipshape, ready for its next journey. Luke's not ready to ask if that will be with the Alliance.
They continue on through the common room, past the refresher, past the crew quarters where Luke (and Leia too, he thinks) slept like the dead on the way to Yavin, to a part of the ship he's never seen before. There's a small storage room here, barely enough room for one person beyond its narrow entryway. The walls are lined with flat, unmarked compartment doors.
Luke's still holding the neatly folded pants with their yellow stripes down the sides. Han opens a cupboard door, lifts something out, and passes it to Luke, who has to adjust his arms quickly so as not to drop what turns out to be a stack of clothing, a gunbelt resting on top.
They return down the hallway in silence.
Back in the common room, Luke looks around for a flat surface, then deposits everything on the dejarik table. When it flashes to life, he goes ahead and slaps the edge to shut it off again.
Han slides into a seat at one end of the lounge bench, slouching down and kicking his feet out beneath the table.
Luke sits at the other end, the stack of clothing in front of him. The gunbelt is Corellian-style, wide-buckled like Han's, with a strap leading down to a leg holster on the left. Tucked in the holster is a blaster, sized for a small hand. The top of the holster is charred. The blaster's handgrip is blackened and melted.
Luke sets the gunbelt aside. Below it are two shirts, narrow-collared, one in a pale grey and one darker. Both have frayed spots at the seams and the hems. Next is a pair of brown boots, scuffed and scarred, but shiny where polish would still take. There are a few pairs of socks and undergarments folded beneath them, and then a canvas jacket in a near-black color, the shade of carbon scoring on an X-wing's fuselage. The dark brown pants that Luke wore to the medal ceremony make up the last of the pile.
"Who was he?" Luke asks.
"I don't know."
There's a soft noise from the entryway. Chewbacca leans in, voicing a rising tone that sounds like a question.
"It's ok, buddy," Han says. "I'm good."
Chewbacca ducks back out again. His footsteps diminish in the direction of the main cargo bay.
"We picked him up on Taris," Han says, taking up the gunbelt and running it through his hands. "He said he was a bounty hunter, then he said he was a smuggler. Had a cough that said he'd been there a while." He shrugs, setting the belt back down. "The place was all swamp gas and yellow smog, I don't blame him for wanting out. His clothes looked Corellian. His accent wasn't, but I guess we ignored that.
"Kid was cocky, said he knew his way around a blaster, wasn't bad at fixing up the ship. He knew we were paying him cheap, and he came with us anyway."
Han's leaning on his elbows now, forearms on the table's surface, eyes fixed on the small pile in front of him. "He was just a kid. Eighteen, nineteen, I don't know. Died in a fight three days later. He couldn't even get that blaster out of the holster in time to fire."
Luke picks up the brown pants. He runs a finger down one of the yellow stripes. "I thought these were given for skill in battle."
"Yeah," says Han. "No idea where he got them."
Luke's hand goes to the blaster at his own hip, lifting it part way from its leather holder and then settling it back again. "I've used a gun before, Han. A sandbat will take your eye out. If a Tusken Raider doesn't take your head off first."
"Yeah," says Han, "and womp rats aren't much bigger than two meters." But he smiles as he says it, and Luke smiles back. "They looked good on you. Keep 'em. If anyone's earned those stripes, you have.
"Now go fly your X-wing," Han adds, making a shooing motion with one hand.
Luke stands, reaches out to grasp that same hand. "You're coming with us, aren't you?"
Han's grip is firm, and he doesn't let go right away. Then, "We've still got those debts to pay off, kid. We'll catch up with you."
Some of the pilots have already assembled by the time Luke jogs across the hangar, toward the remaining starfighters clustered at one end of this long, high-ceilinged room. Two days ago this place was crowded with ships, bustling with techs and support crews. Today, again, there are crews up on ladders and settling astromech droids into place. They work with the same brisk efficiency. They call to each other as they did before. There are the same sounds of engines and servos and hydraulics. But today, all those sounds echo in the great open space.
Each pilot has been issued a cargo cube for personal belongings. As they arrive, they hand them off to one of the techs, who weighs them, marks them, and stows them on a cart, to be brought along on a personnel transport. Luke's contains one black shirt, one yellow jacket. One pair of tall, highly polished black boots. A few undergarments. And one pair of dark brown pants with yellow stripes down the sides.
When he hands the cube over, the tech weighs it and looks at the numbers on the scale, then looks back at him with empathy.
The pilots stand in a rough half-circle, awaiting word that it's time to go. Luke's dressed as they are now, white flak vest over orange flight suit. There are a lot of pieces to a pilot's gear: gloves, emergency flares, safety webbing, transmitter. It's easy to keep it organized when you hardly own anything else.
"Skywalker," they greet him, reaching out hands or clapping him on the shoulder. He returns the greetings with the two names he knows: Antilles, Farlander; and does his best to hold on to the names of the others as they give them. Luke hasn't even joined up properly, not yet, doesn't have a rank or a pay grade or a permanent assignment, but they'll be watching each others' backs up there, on the way to the Remembrance.
As he climbs into the cockpit of his starfighter, Luke catches a glimpse of the Falcon. There's no sign of Han or Chewbacca. Or of Leia, although there's no reason to expect her there. There's just the ancient freighter, sitting at the far end of the hangar, metal dull and dented, looking like home.
Luke runs the last of the pre-flight diagnostics, notes that everything's normal, and joins the line of T-65 X-wings rising up on the fire from their fusial thrust engines, into the late-morning sky.