this is a disclaimer.
AN: shares a theme with "in a house without feelings".
still be love in the world
The temperature is several degrees below freezing, the snow is knee-deep, Lando and Wedge are arguing about something up ahead, their voices breaking the crisp silence of the open field like a hammer hitting glass, and Luke Skywalker hasn't been this miserable in what feels like forever.
Course, mostly everything that happened before Endor feels like it happened forever ago to him these days, so that's not saying much.
It's all rather unbecoming of a Jedi Knight, really. Yoda would not approve. Obi-Wan would be understanding, but sternly tell him to stop this nonsense just the same.
Luke stands in the middle of a field, wriggling his toes in his boots and thinking gloomily of his nice warm bed and his nice warm blankets and his nice warm sweatpants that he had to eschew in favour of these damn thermal things to come on this little walk, and gazes out at their tracks laid out behind them in the snow. Practically a path, in fact, trampled through the snow by the collective efforts of the newlywed Solos, Chewie, Luke himself, Lando, the Rogues, and Winter Organa and stretching back endlessly across the empty miles into nothingness.
Well, back to Lando's cosy little safehouse, at any rate. It's their latest RV point, a brief stop on the way back to the Fleet after a very successful raid on the Imperial shipyards in the Reshnin system, and of course Rieekan, poor innocent baby, had to go and say something like why don't you take leave while you're there in Wes Janson's hearing (Madine, uptight and humourless though he usually is, would have known better), and of course Lando, the sneaky bastard, had to go and say let's take a trip to the nearest village and have a look around in Winter's hearing, and here they are.
Freezing their butts off.
Again.
Luke hasn't felt this much like a whiny farmboy since he was a whiny farmboy, discontent and irritable, and he can't put his finger on why, exactly.
Mind you, Yoda would probably rattle off a list of reasons, all of which would have the potential to lead Luke to the Dark Side, and everyone knows there's no cure for that, right?
Leia pokes him in the back, and he jumps.
(As it turns out, putting their fingers on what's bothering you, exactly, is only one of the myriad of skills little sisters have.)
"You're doing that thing again," she says disapprovingly.
Luke arranges his face into an expression more Jedi-like than a sulk, and turns to look at her. "What thing?" he asks, trying and failing to sound puzzled-but-interested rather than petulant.
"That Jedi thing."
"Ah. That thing."
There's a strand of dark hair lying against Leia's cheek, curling out from under her red hat. Her face is flushed with cold and exertion, ruddy and alive and currently a little worried – about him – and a little stern – again, his fault. She knows how hard he can be to pin down when he doesn't want to talk about something.
But her face softens as she looks up at him, and she puts a hand on her shoulder. "Luke, what's wrong? Tell me."
Luke shrugs. Sulking's all very well and good when you're doing it in the privacy of your own head, but when it comes to repeating it all out loud it makes you sound like a prat.
"I don't really know," he says. "I think I'm just tired."
No, he doesn't.
Leia's eyes narrow. She can't read his mind, can she? Not yet. Luke can't do it at all to her, telepathic connection or not, and he's a Jedi Knight.
"No," she says, almost gently, "you're not."
And then, after a brief pause, "Has it occurred to you that maybe you're not feeling right because of – certain memories associated with the current climate of this continent?"
They're standing very close; all Luke has to do to touch his twin is to flick his fingers, really.
He flicks his fingers, and they stay on her waist, anchoring him.
"You mean that ice planet we were at a few years ago where I got my face torn off by a man-eating monster and then nearly died of exposure right before the Imps attacked and I saw you and Han for the last time before the big and oh-so-joyous family reunion in the sky?" he says.
It's a very un-Luke-like thing to say, even if it didn't sound so bitter. (He doesn't know it yet, but that kind of dry sarcasm won't come to him naturally till he's in his forties and has been teaching various packs of unruly kids the ways of the Force for over a decade. Not forgetting the children, of course.)
"I mean that, yes," Leia says patiently. Luke's the only person outside of politics that she wastes her precious stores of it on.
Luke shrugs nonchalantly. "No," he says mildly. "I'm fine with that."
Leia digs her finger in between his ribs; he winces and turns his face away.
"Listen to me, you arrogant prat," she says flatly. "And look at me while you're doing it! That's better. Don't forget, I was there after Yavin – we were probably the two most completely screwed-up people in the Fleet after that battle; I remember the nightmares you used to have then about Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen and I remember the ones you used to get after our charming little family reunion, and don't you dare try and shrug them off, Luke, because that's how they sink their claws into you, and once they do that you never get away from them."
Luke watches her silently for another few moments, aching for the certainty and the knowledge behind her words.
She's waiting for him to make the next move.
"There's trees here," he says.
Leia shrugs. "Doesn't make a difference."
He twists his mouth. The finger in his ribs becomes a hand on his chest.
"You're a human being, Luke," Leia says. "You're not somehow better than just because you've got a shiny new title and you think you understand more about what holds the universe together than I do. You're a person, and people have weaknesses as well as strengths."
Luke shifts his shoulders. He knows it, truly he does – his weaknesses are written in letters of fire in his mind, carved into it as if into stone, a list of things he does, in fact, have to be better than, but what Leia means is that he doesn't always have to succeed.
Luke knows a couple people who would disagree with her on that – violently, and with much poking of walking sticks.
"I'm pretty sure I've told you this before," she adds thoughtfully.
"I'm dense that way," Luke says with aplomb.
"You have expectations, is all."
"They need meeting!"
He puts a plaintive note into his voice, but Leia's not fooled.
"Not all the time," she says flatly.
Luke sighs.
"I mean it," she says. "I tell you this all the damn time, and you never listen –"
"Once a year, every year, on our chosen birthday, I get this speech," he says. "At least."
"The point was, you never listen," Leia snaps.
Something in Luke gives way, instantly, easily, every time worry for him drives her to anger. Making Leia angry makes him feel like a rat.
"I'm sorry," he says, quiet but sincere, and with his right hand he makes a gesture, an aborted sort of sweep and flick of his mechanical fingers. "It's one thing to know they were wrong, intellectually. It's another to believe it, sometimes."
"Kenobi and Yoda," Leia says. It's not a question – of course, it doesn't need to be.
In all fairness: "Mostly Yoda."
She reaches up, and puts her hands on either side of his face. He jerks back indignantly, cold leather gloves on his skin, but Leia's grip is rather firm, and Luke gives in.
"Do you trust me?"
He grins. His little sister, this is. "With my life. Never my sanity."
Leia smiles in spite of herself, merest flash before becoming serious again. "Luke," she says quietly, firmly.
"I trust you," Luke says.
She looked, he thinks, a bit like this when she faced him on her wedding day just before the ceremony and said, I'm ready: firm, solemn, determined, loving – except that she's not openly happy now, and she was then.
"They were wrong," Leia tells him.
It's not her brook-no-argument-Rebellion-Leader voice. It's her older-sister one.
He leans in and rests his forehead against hers; she winds her arms around his neck and hugs him tight.
They were (tell your sister you were right) wrong.
Sometimes Luke just needs reminding, is all.
"Hey," he says.
"Hmm?"
"Think I can hit the back of Han's head with a snowball at three hundred paces?"
Leia grins. "If you manage it I'll write your report for Madine."
"I adore you," Luke says cheerfully.
She kisses his temple. "I love you too."
(Luke hits the back of Han's head with a snowball at three hundred paces with a very tiny bit of help from the Force that he's fairly sure Leia didn't notice, and when Han catches up to him he gets a face full of snow for his trouble, but they both agree afterwards that the best bit was watching Lando wavering between despair at how quickly some of the most famous people in the entire galaxy could be induced to start acting like a bunch of adolescents on a snow day, and the urge to join in the fun. In the end, Leia solved his problem for him by catching him in the face with a snowball of her own.
They never did make it as far as the nearest village, actually.)