Title: Best-Case Scenario
Era: Return of the Jedi
Genre: Missing moment - Endor
Warnings: None! Squeaky clean, this one!
Author note: July 08 Monthly Challenge: Nerfherder's Playground
The forest was annoyingly ... significant. It's presence was so enormous, so overbearing, that you couldn't treat it like terrain or ground to cover. It demanded a kind of begrudging respect that even Han Solo couldn't laugh off.
"What is with you and your damn trees?" He said anyway, aiming for Chewbacca's back but sure that the other three members of his shuttle crew could hear him. Chewie's answering growl was lighthearted, genuinely pleased, an expression meant to convey how years away from his homeworld, from his culture and species and family, made missions like this one, worlds like this one, a homecoming of sorts.
"Well, keep it down," he said. "You want the whole navy on us before this party even gets started?"
"You're making more noise than he is," Luke said, grabbing a spare set of detonators off the supply rack of the shuttle. "Did you need the 4-LBs or the 8's?"
Han grunted, nodding toward a stack of the 4-LBs. "See, here's the thing though: I'm the general. I get to talk. You have to listen. That's how it works."
The last member of his squad - and the one he was most interested to not have here - rustled around a supply pouch next to him, dumping the contents onto the forest floor with a huff and a swipe to her brow. "You are lying to yourself if you think that's the case." He looked at Leia, raising an eyebrow. "Name just one time you listened to a general, besides Carlist."
"Why 'besides Carlist'?" He wondered. "And I'm a general. I don't have to listen to other generals."
She grinned, repacked the supply pouch and moved past him. He motioned for the rest of his team to hurry up and start moving with them, anxious to get away from their arrival point. According to their mission parameters, they were to meet up with the larger team at 0800 hours the following day closer to the shield generator, meaning they had two hours before the sun set and they had to set up some sort of watch system for the nighttime shifts. He never slept well on missions like this one; the threat of imminent doom tended to weaken his normal habit of catching a couple hours of sleep whenever he could safely do so. He also knew that it was stupid to let one person pull the whole night-watch shift, so he had to go about the motions of creating a shift schedule for tonight.
Beyond that, he had no idea what to expect from tonight.
He took the lead, scouting out various sheltered areas and dips on the valley floor, watching for soft visibility or good places for sharpshooters and the like. It was precautionary - no one knew they were here - but he knew from long experience that the situation you didn't anticipate was the one that got you killed later on. Endor was pretty enough, but he wasn't here for pretty and he'd be better off not recognizing it in the first place.
An hour of hiking up mostly flat land brought him to a relatively secure area, about two klicks south of where the Imperial bunker was supposed to be. They had reached some sort of plateau, though the ridge was covered by two overhanging tree-behemoths. The bush could be cleared away cleanly enough, he thought; the only concern was that they weren't close enough to the bunker to keep an eye out for the larger squad. It was a fifty-fifty shot - either pitch camp here for the time being at a pretty damn good spot, or keep trudging along and hope they'd find an equally good spot closer to their destination.
He played it safe, dropping his pack and taking off his jacket right where he stood. The others knew him well enough to do the same and immediately set off to work, clearing bush and finding sun-warmed earth to stake for their bed-setting. It didn't take long, and after an hour of setting up basic amenities, they had rations spread out like gourmet dishes and crude bedrolls arrayed across the clearing. Two enormous water filters were brought in - kest only knew what the Imperials had leaked into the ecosystem around here. It wasn't the best camp any of them had ever pitched, but it worked, and Han started opening terrain maps and powering up two sets of glowrods by which to read them.
Han had been at it for an hour before the muffled conversation between his teammates became white noise. His eyes hurt, but he wanted to check the maps once more. The valley was supposed to dip here, but he thought that perhaps the bunker was actually a little more north than they'd anticipated, based off the noises of the launch pad they couldn't quite hear, and if that was the case, it might take them longer to find the accompanying squad.
He didn't hear her footsteps until she stood completely over him, overshadowing him by a much wider margin than she ever had. If he had been in a better mood, or, rather, if they'd been anywhere else, he would've commented on it. Instead, he ignored her, and refocused on the map.
She shuffled down to sit beside him, her side right up against his, in a familiar enough position that he knew instantly what she was about to say. She didn't surprise him much anymore; he wondered if that said more about him or her, and whether it even mattered.
"You need to give it a rest," she said. "You're going to drive yourself crazy." He gave her a look, and she chuckled, shaking her head. "More so than you already are, then."
He set the maps and the glowrod down, rolled his shoulders backwards to stretch out the middle of his back. "You would call this 'being responsible' if I wasn't doing it."
"Sure," she said, mimicking his movements and stretching, too. "Except you are doing it, so I need to remonstrate. Ancient code of princess ethics."
He didn't bite, a little too weary for cutthroat banter. "This isn't going to work."
She looked at him.
"The timing is off ... we'll be lucky to find everyone else before we locate the bunker. And we're scheduled so tightly that we can't allow for any deviation, which is disastrous and one of those things you learn the first day at Carida. I have this voice in my head telling me to back out now, before my head get served on a platter. On Endor." He shook his head. "Of all the places to die, I wouldn't choose Endor."
"Where would you choose, then?" She asked.
"Dunno. Somewhere not here."
She was quiet. There were a lot of things he liked about Leia. One at the top of his list was that she knew that sometimes words weren't worth it. When she did speak, her voice was more contemplative than anything, completely nonplussed at the discussion of his death. "On Alderaan, if someone died, you'd tell them to rest in peace." She hmm-ed, and a soft sense of calm ran through him. "I always thought that was backwards."
He turned his head to look at her. "Why?"
"Because," and she looked him straight in the eye when she spoke, and all he could think was even now, she's beautiful, "why would a dead person care about peace? That seems like a living concept, not one for death."
"You don't want peace when you're dead?"
She shook her head. "Actually, I'm really hoping for oblivion. For nothingness."
He was surprised by that. All the people she'd lost, her family, her friends, her whole world, and she hoped they didn't exist in some happy afterlife? "For yourself, you mean. Not for everyone."
"Well," she said, and she rested her hand on his knee. He leaned into her a little more. "That's not it, exactly. Yes, I'd really hope there's no true punishment for me. But, for them, I'd rather think they just ... went away. That they didn't know."
Ah, he thought. They shouldn't know that their sacrifice meant absolutely nothing, not if we fail. "Understandable."
"So telling someone to 'rest in peace' ... I'm just not so sure that's a good thing to say."
He reached his arm around her, pulled her chin in with his left hand, pressing his lips under her jaw momentarily. When he leaned back her eyes were closed. "You could always say what the spacers say."
She hmm-ed again; this time she was pressed against his side, her mouth tucked into his neck, the sound vibrating through her to him. It felt intimate; he wasn't sure when this physical familiarity had become the norm. "Clear skies?"
"Clear skies." She was warm, and he found himself drawn into her mind, the way she saw things, made her so infuriatingly fascinating to him. He couldn't quite figure out what this thing was between them, though he knew they both felt it, and he was finding himself content with whatever ride they were on. It didn't make sense to him, and he was sure as hell it didn't make an iota of sense to her, either, but they were here, wherever here was, and so he was okay with it. "No peace involved."
"Sounds good," she said. She kissed the scar on his chin before moving towards his lips. Her kiss wasn't urgent, but it was passionate, reminding him that he had a hell of a lot to come back to after this mission was over. When her lips lifted off his, her hands were in his hair and she had moved to his lap. She looked straight at him, with that intriguing - and brutal - honesty of hers, and her eyes warned him that what she was about to say, she meant. "I can't be captured."
He nodded. It was simple as that.
She looked at him, tilting her head to the side. "Neither can you."
He nodded again.
"It's ..." He was surprised when she stopped herself. "I have a best-case scenario in my head for this mission. And I know it probably won't happen that way, and a million things will change before we get to the end of it - however that turns out. But, for the first time in a long time, I have an idea of how I want this to go, and there is no resting in peace for you or me." She pointed a finger at his chest. "No clear skies. Do you understand me?"
He did. "Of course."
It was as close to an emotional outburst as she would ever come, he thought, which made it all the sweeter, all the more worthwhile. What she was really saying was that she loved him, and he'd better not do something stupid to screw it up. It was plain as day on her face and in-between the letters of her words. Don't mess this up, she was telling him. We have bigger and better things in store for us.
"I won't," he said, speaking again. He settled her down next to him, as he checked that Chewie was up and ready for night-watch, and ran his fingers through the coils pinned to her head, her eyes closed and her breathing deep. And he thought about what she'd said, and then what she meant, and fell asleep thinking that maybe he was thinking in best-case scenarios, too.