The morning found Emma back in the command centre, listening to the comm chatter as Robin Locksley led Rogue Squadron out across the plains of Hoth in the newly-refurbished air speeders. Regina was in the middle of it all, her eyes full of fire that was directed at no one in particular. At least, no one currently present. If Hook ever made it back to base, he was in for a lengthy lecture.
In the meantime, Regina was expending the extra energy on pacing through the command centre, barking orders, scanning through reports, overseeing the launch, and double-checking the search grid. Since the squadron had left the hangar, there wasn't much left for her to do, but she was doing it anyway. Robin had conducted enough search-and-rescue missions to know what he was doing, but Regina Mills was not one to sit idly by while others did all the work. She was on the comm, demanding updates, conferring with Robin, tracing the squadron's progress.
It hadn't escaped Emma's attention that Regina always seemed to be as involved as she could be in every one of Rogue Squadron's missions.
Emma herself had ushered Leroy out of his seat and taken over the comm station, trying to stay calm as she waited for the report of a sighting.
The pilots were mostly silent, trying to reach Hook and Neal on other channels, but over the squadron frequency she could hear occasional terse reports. Leroy and the others had already calculated the area that it was possible to cover by tauntaun and on foot, but Emma had instructed them to widen it. There was no reason to expect Hook to stick to any normal limitations. If his search for Neal had required going farther, then he would have done exactly that.
Rogue Squadron was now more or less methodically combing through that area, bit by bit. Emma hadn't told them to give it their all. They were probably just as eager to find Neal as she was; he was one of them. Even Hook, for all his contrariness and tendency to win every sabacc game, was generally an accepted part of the group, as much as he was willing to be. They'd flown more than enough missions together over the past few years.
If Hook and Neal were out there to be found, the Rogues would find them.
She was just reassuring herself of that when there was a crackle, and Will Scarlet's voice sounded in her ears. Mid-sentence, as if he – or possibly one of the others – had only just remembered to switch to the general frequency for this. "... I've found something... not much, but it could be a life form."
Emma's heartbeat quickened even as her brain automatically went into expectation-dampening mode. It could be one of Hoth's indigenous creatures. It could be nothing at all, just a glitch in the T-47's old and possibly malfunctioning sensors. The techs said those should work fine, but they'd all thought that about the repulsors at first, too.
"The rest of you stick to the pattern," she instructed, probably needlessly, but her nerves were strung too high now to stay silent. "It could be nothing."
"Copy," Robin's voice came, but Emma could hear the hope in the man's voice.
And then Will's voice was back, and there was no mistaking the smile in his voice. "Echo Base, this is Rogue Two. I found them. Repeat, I found them."
"Are they okay?" Emma demanded. She was vaguely aware of Regina coming up behind her, shaking her chair a little as she grabbed the backrest and leaned over Emma's shoulder to listen in.
"Captain Jones seems fine," Will replied, sounding more like he was having a chat than giving a report. But then, he always sounded like that. A year in the Rebellion hadn't managed to shake that out of him, and Emma privately doubted whether anything ever would. "Little snarky, maybe, but I'd call that a good sign."
Something deep within Emma seemed to untwist itself. "Yeah."
"Hold on, I'll see if I can patch you through."
There was a pause, then a crackle of static, and then Hook's voice. "—arning you Scarlet, don't you dare—hello?"
"Hook." A flood of relief washed through her, followed and chased away immediately by anger, which was squashed in turn by renewed worry for Neal. "Are you—is Neal there?"
"He's still asleep," Hook said, his voice sounding tinny and distant and, yes, snarky. "Nice to hear from you, too—-"
"What happened?" Emma demanded, not in the mood for that right now.
"I honestly don't know," he told her. "I think he must have encountered one of the locals. He's a little banged up, and I've had to medicate him to combat the effects of exposure."
Emma's heart skipped another beat. "A little banged up", in the Killian Jones dictionary, could mean anything from a few bruises to a broken leg and cracked ribs.
"But it doesn't seem critical," Hook went on quickly. "Don't worry, Swan. He'll just have to—wait, I can hear Scarlet's speeder now. I'll send him back with Neal as soon as he lands."
"I'll have a medical team waiting in the hangar," Emma said, turning to glance up at Regina. The other woman nodded at her and took out her comlink to give the order. Emma stayed put, channel still open. "Are you okay?"
"Aye," he assured her, and she wasn't sure, but she thought that the snark had disappeared entirely now. "I'm fine, though rather cramped from spending the night in this contraption. It's labelled a two-man tent, but I'm reasonably certain they must have been using dwarfs when they measured it out. False advertising, if you ask me."
"I'll talk to the supply people about relabeling them," Emma told him drily, fighting the smile that wanted to break out. Usually, his grousing elicited nothing but eye-rolling from her, but right now, she was still too busy being happy that she was hearing anything at all from him.
"Good." There was a rustling noise in the background. "Time to go. Goodbye for now, Swan."
She liked that a lot better than this is it. Not that he needed to know that. "Don't think you're off the hook," she warned him. "See you soon."
She keyed off before he could answer, turning her attention to everyone else. Robin was already heading over to join Will, and the rest of the squadron was on their way back. She stayed long enough to get Will's report on Neal's status, which was about as nebulous as Hook's had been, and then she left the comm station to Leroy and headed down to the hangar bay.
The flight back to the base was, in many ways, the worst part of the entire ordeal. For one thing, Killian had to sit in the gunner's seat, which meant facing backwards; for another, while Robin was inarguably a good pilot, he still didn't do everything the way Killian would have done it.
And then, of course, there was the prospect of what awaited him at the end of the flight.
Still, he'd found the lad, hadn't he? Saved his life. And he hadn't gone against orders, technically. In fact, technically, he hadn't even broken any rules, because he'd quit. He wasn't bound by any of their rules anymore.
And Emma hadn't sounded all that mad...
He grimaced. No, she hadn't, but that was probably just the initial relief. She now had all the time it took him to get back to the base to remember all of the reasons she had to be mad at him.
She wasn't in the hangar when Robin brought the speeder to a smooth but, in Hook's opinion, slightly too fast landing in the hangar bay. Smee was, pacing back and forth, loping over to them as Killian vaulted out of the gunner's seat. Moments later, he was spitting Wookiee hair out of his mouth as he was enveloped in a rib-crushing hug.
"It's all right, you big—pfft!" Killian managed to free his good hand and wipe it across his mouth, feeling the stubble there. "Really, you're making far too big a deal of this."
Smee was growling admonishments, undeterred by his captain's discomfort.
"Yes, well, the lad had gotten himself into quite the predicament," Killian said. "What was I supposed to do, sit back and hold her Highness's hand while we worried about him?"
Smee rumbled something.
"Fine," Killian said stiffly. "Next time, we'll hold a meeting first and decide on the most sensible course of action while he freezes to death. I'm sure he'll die comforted that at least we didn't do anything rash in an effort to save his life."
Another rumbled remark, this sounding a little miffed.
"There's no need to be so overdramatic, either," Killian told him. "I made it, and so did Neal. Where is he, anyway?"
The answer was predictable: they'd taken him to the medcentre, and Emma had gone with them. With a sigh, Killian disentangled himself from the Wookiee.
"I'd better check on him."
Smee growled a question, and Killian shrugged. "All I know is that he suffered injuries and exposure before I found him. I have no idea what happened to him. He was in no state to explain anything."
At least, he amended silently, not in a way that meant anything. All that babbling about blue fairies and Dagobah and Tonk or Tink or whatever it was hadn't exactly shed any light on the situation.
When he reached the medcentre, it was to find that Neal had already been submerged in a bacta tank. Emma stood nearby with the MD droid, nodding as the droid showed her a datapad and explained something. They both looked up as he entered.
One look at Emma told him that she wasn't mad. At least, not openly. She seemed to withdraw into herself as she looked at him, her chin coming up in a familiar way.
"Hook."
"Swan." For a moment, they only looked at each other, seemingly stuck in the silence between them. Killian cleared his throat, inclining his head toward the tank. "How is he?"
"Lacerations on his face and upper body," Emma said, her voice all business. "Like from an animal's claws, they said."
"One of those Wampa creatures maybe?" he suggested.
"Maybe. Although that would beg the question of how he's even still alive."
"It's Neal," he said.
She conceded that with a shrug and the shadow of a smile. "Right. Aside from that, he's suffered exposure, but nothing bad. Looks like you got to him just in time."
Killian looked over at Neal's still form, floating upright in the tank, distorted by the convex glass. His dark hair swirled around his face, partly obscuring it, but Killian could see the angry welts marking his pale skin. Killian had checked and taken care of the wounds as best he could with the medkit from his survival pack, but he hadn't even tried to figure out where they'd come from. If Neal really had run into one of those creatures...
Either way, it was starting to hit him just how close this one had been. He didn't like it one bit. It felt... he wasn't sure how he felt. But he knew that he didn't like it.
The kid had irritated him from the moment he'd blown into his life, all wide-eyed and innocent and full of idealism. It had been one crazy idealistic crusade after the next, one terrible plan after the next, and when he wasn't gushing over the Rebellion, he was gushing about his Jedi training... or the princess. It was, at times, like having a puppy as a little brother.
But Neal believed in him. That was a whole other level of annoying, but to Killian's immense frustration, it also made it twice as hard to let him down. It was the same with Emma. Her brand of idealistic fervour was different, a little more realistic, but it burned just as brightly. It was really no wonder that the two of them got along so well. And that made the whole thing even more annoying, petty and jealous and stupid as that particular thought was.
Maybe he was getting soft. Maybe he'd fallen under the spell of whatever magic Neal supposedly had. Or maybe, somewhere deep in his cynical heart, Killian just didn't want the galaxy to lose another idealist. Especially not either of these two.
"Aye," he said softly. "It would appear so." He hesitated. "Send word when they wake him?"
Her eyebrows arched. "Will you still be here?"
He didn't flinch, but it was a close thing. "Considering that my ship's aft repulsor motivator is currently in pieces, I have little choice in the matter," he said as lightly as he could manage. But then he sobered a little, and nodded. "Aye. I want to make sure he's all right."
Emma's expression might have softened a little; he couldn't quite tell. "Okay."
He left her there, watching over the young man in the tank, mixed feelings swirling inside him with every step. Overall, though, he thought that he felt a little lighter.