Leia Organa needed a moment to breathe. The air in the base mess hall was heavy, choking. It burned her lungs and parched her throat. Too warm. Humid felt like a kind word for the way the air hung unmoving in open spaces, for the reason why her shirt stuck to the sweat on her back. Breathing felt like a chore: the stale, metallic taste sitting in her mouth like a curse.
No one wanted to work in this environment. The sluggish stupor of the personnel stationed on Alphra-2 was antithetical to the business of warfare. Were they fighting a war? No. Were they melting into brawling factions? Yes.
She sighed and left the hall, shaking her head. Every single sentient creature on this base was miserable and argumentative. Schisms were appearing in the ranks: they'd had to administer two demerits for infighting this week alone. The mechanic crews were close to revolt. Their supplies had been drastically diminished a week ago after Jan Dodonna had shipped a majority of Alphra-2's engine lubricant stock to another base.
Between that and the seething heat, the crews—and by extension the pilots—were finding ways to stall work and halt productivity. They'd staggered their mealtimes so that the mess had to remain open around the clock, draining resources the Alliance didn't have. They'd found a sudden need to run increasingly-ludicrous sims instead of performing their scouting missions. The Rogues in particular had become fascinated with repainting their X-wings, a long process of stripping the former white and red stripes and loudly debating their new designs.
The corridor ended and she found herself standing on the base perimeter. Free from the stifling duracrete walls, she took a deep breath of the open jungle. The air here was just as humid, just as warm, but with a hint of sodden earth. This smell reminded her of a garden at work, fierce efficiency in absolute contrast to the torpor inside the base. The earth was always working; the plants were tireless. Roots carried water to stems and leaves unfurled, lived and died in one short season. A humming energy of ruthless existence lined every breath she took and it felt... it felt...
She closed her eyes. Home. It felt like home.
The palace at Aldera had been a living organism of chaotic activity, its individual organs working in their symbiosis to govern the planet. Her mother may have been its head, and her father may have been its mouthpiece, but thousands of other beings had worked with, against and for each other to keep the planet's heart beating, her blood flowing, her nerves firing.
Living on a military base should have felt the same. Leia had thought after the destruction of the Death Star that utility would rule supreme for the rest of her life until a lucky Imperial shot killed her. The Alliance was outmanned, outgunned and barely surviving. Surely strict economy, routine, the stark realities of war would define life on a Rebel base. Surely this was the place for symbiotic relationships.
Lifting her head back, she studied the tree canopy above. Wilted green leaves dripped a cloudy dew to the forest floor. Alphra-2's yellow dwarf star was never visible from the ground: intense atmospheric moisture and a thwarting magnetic field hid the star behind a low grey blanket of clouds. The jungle thrummed with life and industry, but the scenery lacked the beauty she remembered from Alderaan's southeast continent. No soaring mountainscapes, no deciduous forests, no clear, running streams through sustainable cities.
It might remind her of home, yes. But she doubted she'd ever feel completely at peace on a planet again.
Disillusionment weighed on her. It had been six months since her life had radically changed for the worse, after a data package with the Death Star plans had been placed in her hands. Her home was gone. She had nothing to her name. The Empire had put a price on her head so large that High Command had permanently grounded her, fearing for her safety if she happened to be captured while off-base. They'd been outraged when she'd rejected their offer to send her to a safehouse somewhere on the Outer Rim.
But she hadn't been able stand the thought of hiding while men and women died for a cause that she championed. And was she worth more than anyone else in the trenches? Absolutely not. In fact, because of her tragic circumstances, she was probably more valuable as a martyr on the front lines than a sad myth that disappeared after everything went to hell.
Footsteps interrupted her train of thought: loud, insistent on the stone floor behind her. Leia struggled to pull on her royal mask, felt it click into place with the same sluggishness that permeated the rest of the base.
"I have no idea, Chewie. The damn magnetic field is fu—uh."
Leia turned. In the low light of the cloud cover she could just barely discern the lines of Captain Solo as he walked toward her. His shirt was open two buttons too many and his sleeves were rolled up just below his elbows. His hair looked ruffled, like he'd somehow found a breeze in this stagnant atmosphere. He was holding a commlink in his right hand. It squawked twice, then made a garbled hissing sound. Solo glared at it, flipped the frequency to a dead channel and shoved it into his pocket.
"I can't get a decent call out. What the hell kind of operation are you running here?" he said.
She watched him storm to her place on the perimeter line. "No one can get a decent call out. Not just you," she said, holding her ground.
"Seems pretty stupid to me. What are the patrols using for communications?"
Leia's brain flashed to an image of the Rogues congregating at their sims, the schedule completely packed with unnecessary training runs to forestall any such patrols. The last scenario she'd glimpsed as she walked by this morning had been emergency crash landing protocol, classification: comet.
"Alliance member frequencies," she said instead, thinking, if you don't like it, you can either join up or ship out, Captain.
Solo swept a hand over his face. "Great. That's just great."
She expected him to storm off again, go pick a fight with Chewbacca. But he just stood beside her, staring at the jungle. Leia felt uncomfortable, small in his silent presence. She felt like he was trying to force her to leave before him. She set her chin and resolved to stay, welded to the stone beneath her feet with pure stubbornness.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes. Leia heard an avian screech somewhere to her left. The moment dragged on, warm, wet earth seeping through the air between them. Interminable moments drifted by them. How long was he going to stand there? Didn't he have something better to do? Wasn't there a rookie to hustle? Some woman to take back to his ship? Adventure to chase?
"Nice out here," he finally said.
She couldn't help but laugh, disbelieving. "You think this is nice?"
"Well, no," he admitted. "This place is just one step up from Gladithir. You ever been?"
Leia shook her head.
"Gladithir is like a trash bin that no one has emptied in fourteen years. Except it's rich in urbenite, so the big mining corporations keep lifting their worker settlements higher and higher up as the smell gets worse."
"The settlement air gets worse by the year, even as they raise the platforms?"
"You got it. This place reminds me of that. Trying to make something decent that has no business being decent."
She nodded, agreeing with that assessment but adding in useless personnel to the list of things with which the Alliance had no business. "Then why did you say it was nice?"
"Jungle," he said, gesturing as if it should be obvious to her what he meant.
He settled down to sit on the stone and Leia followed. The oppressive weight of contention eased as they stared at the wild edges of the vegetation. She had no faculty for predicting what Solo would do; she found it easier to just be on her guard around him and be pleasantly surprised when he didn't act like an idiot. This oddly companionable behavior was a nice change of pace from their usual interactions but she didn't expect it to last.
"Luke's looking for you," Solo said suddenly.
She shook her head and folded her hands together between her knees. "I needed some space."
"The kids acting up?"
She felt her lips turn up. "Yes. And I suspect you are to blame for it."
Solo threw his head back and laughed. "You think that shit about repainting the ships is my fault? Sweetheart, I haven't painted the Falcon in … ever."
He might have her there. His commentary on decency seemed in-character at least, judging by the clear lack of a facade on the old freighter. "Don't call me that."
"What?"
"Sweetheart," she said. "It's derogatory."
She looked at him: actually looked at him for the first time since he'd sat down next to her. The stubble on his jaw made him look dangerous. So did the scar on his chin. His careful utility, the way he seemed on constant alert, felt hazardous to her health or maybe her sanity. His muscles were always coiled to spring, like his finest-honed reflex was action and consequences be damned.
Leia reconsidered the vitality of the jungle and recognized that same hardened survival instinct sitting right next to her. If anyone could find compatibility with a frenzied fight for existence, she supposed it would have to be Han Solo.
"Derogatory. Huh," he said, but offered nothing else.
Oh, but he was acting strangely. Was there something about this forced companionship, their shared hatred for the Alliance's lackluster standstill, that made him introspective? Perhaps he needed distance from the awful idleness, too?
"Where did you come from?" she wondered.
His eyes widened and she saw firsthand how she pressed his emotional trigger. His lips pressed together into a displeased, tight line and the muscles in his neck tensed. "Somewhere," he replied.
She nodded as if he'd actually answered her. "I've heard somewhere is lovely in the fall."
Han snorted indelicately. "The northern pole is nice. Equator not so much. Big insects. Water tastes strange."
Leia marveled at this exchange, small jokes back and forth between herself and a man she could barely stand. Not tentative, no. There was no hesitancy here. This wasn't even a battle. This felt like flirting but without the sense of hope that she remembered accompanying flirtation in her youth.
If this moment had a flavor, she'd say it was bitter desperation.
"You really didn't have anything to do with repainting the ships?" she asked, curious.
He shook his hands. "Nope."
"The sims?"
His sudden bark of laughter surprised her and she shot a glance back to his face. She'd seen him smile, of course, but none of that had seemed natural. The way he looked right now was something else entirely. His eyes were guileless. She had to take a breath; the contrast between what she'd thought she'd known about Han Solo and the way he looked at that moment was so clear to her.
"No. Well, I didn't until Antilles started asking me for impossible training scenarios."
"You were definitely creative," she said. "The last one I saw was some nonsense about crash landing on a comet."
"You know for sure that was me being creative?"
Leia returned her eyes to the jungle, feeling a flicker of annoyance. If he was implying that he'd actually done it—crash landed a ship on a comet—he was being flat-out ridiculous. Comets were small, nearly-invisible, icy dust balls hurtling through space without a predictable trajectory. Landing on one was akin to her running into the jungle in front of her with her eyes closed and stopping randomly on a dry patch of land. A statistical impossibility.
"It's either creativity or insanity," she said.
Out of her peripheral vision she saw him nod. "Little of both."
He leaned back on his hands, reclining with apparent comfort as he looked at the canopy above them. Leia pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. Her guard was slipping and she probably should be more careful about that, but the quiet between them was nice. Leia didn't consider him company: he didn't want anything from her and didn't really care about her, either. Talking to him had had all the benefits of being alone without actually being alone.
She suddenly realized that Solo's usual loud extroversion might be something of an act. Or, if not an act, part of a balance. Did he need distance to temper the rest of his energetic displays around others the same way she did?
"Corellia," he said, apropos of nothing. "That's where I'm from."
Leia nodded. She'd known, of course. The Alliance had run a full background check on Solo the minute the Millennium Falcon had come out of hyperspace at Yavin 4. Though the security sweep had been extensive, the resulting information was suspect, conflicting: as confusing as the man himself. The only thing she'd been absolutely sure of was that he was Corellian; his accent had given him away from the moment he'd started yelling at her in the detention block. She was fairly certain the note about his time in the Imperial Navy was accurate, too. Most of the Alliance pilots were Imperial defectors.
"I know," she said. "I meant 'where are you from?' in a more liberal sense."
"Ah," he said, but didn't say anything else.
"Why won't you join us?" Leia asked. She looked at the damp earth at her feet, pushed the toe of her right boot into the mud. It was a question that plagued her. If he was acting like a decent human being, she might as well try to get some answers.
"Why would I?"
Leia turned to him. "For safety? For the cause?"
"Safety? Hell, I'm safer having the freedom to leave whenever my contract expires," he said. His voice was so blasé that her skin itched against it. "And the cause? What cause?"
She scoffed. "The cause. The only cause worth fighting for. Nobody is safe until the Empire is destroyed."
"I'm well aware of that, Sweetheart. I've lived in this galaxy a lot longer than you have."
"Don't call me that. Don't you want a better place for the future? For your children?"
"Don't have 'em, don't want 'em. Problem solved," he said.
Leia's mouth dropped open. "How can you be so…. How can you not care?"
He shrugged. "Easy, Sweetheart. I just don't. Who lives, who dies? I don't care. Everybody does both."
She stood up, boots planted in the earth. The mud splashed her pants but her anger was so hot, so furious, that she hardly noticed.
"Do not call me that."
Her voice was so incredibly quiet, a vast gulf between what she felt and how she said it. She needed distance from him, from his awful apathy, the likes of which she couldn't understand. They were kilometers apart. Not on different sides of the spectrum, but on entirely different wavelengths altogether.
How could anyone live the life she presumed he had lived and not want to make a difference?
He didn't reply, just stared up at her with a frank, disinterested look on his face. The heat swarmed across her chest like flying, biting insects. The air choked her again, burned her lungs, pressed down on her chest like a weight. She tried to take in the earthy smell, tried to find that industriousness around her, the hum of life moving forward. But all she could see was another impasse. Another breach between her intent and his indifference.
Without another word she walked past him, back into the corridor, and left him sitting on the stone steps, staring into the jungle with cold impassivity.
She had no time for this. For any of it. She had a revolution to lead. Jungles and crippling heat were no reason to hide and remember better days. And she'd be damned if she let a few miserable pilots destroy the only hope the galaxy had for real change.
Leia marched over to the flight simulators and set her chin high. This ends now, she thought, and called the pilots to her with a loud, clear voice of command.