Gold

When Leia was a little girl, a little princess, nothing was left out in the air long enough to tarnish. As soon as their duty was done, the elegant tiaras and circlets came off her mother's dark brown braids to be polished, cared for, put away, preserved. Leia had been impatient with finery—the dresses that her aunts liked to wriggle her into were uncomfortable, the hairstyles itchy, she couldn't move—but fascinated with the necklaces and crowns Queen Breha removed to become Mama again.

Occasionally she had been allowed to hold them, try them on her own head, before they were taken away. Her mother had offered a good deal of free reign in that area, much to her aunts' chagrin.

She's a five-year-old girl. Let her play a little.

They're not playthings, Your Highness. She needs to learn to show them respect.

She needs to show people respect. These things are beautiful, but they're only things.

Leia stared at the tarnished pieces of gold in her hands, questioning what to do with them now that they'd been removed. A perverse kind of tiara, a necklace she'd used to squeeze the life from a Hutt.

It was strange, but she didn't even need to wonder what her mother would think of her right now. She knew, somehow. Her mother the pacifist, the beautiful and ever-elegant queen, the firm but gentle ruler of a peace-loving planet, would not have batted an eye. Breha would have looked at her daughter, sunburned and covered in Hutt slime, and said, Some fights are worth it. Some fights are necessary. Listen to your heart, Lelila. It will tell you what is right.

She wondered, idly, what her aunts would have thought.

They would have died of horror, she decided.

But she hadn't, they hadn't died. He hadn't.

She looked over at Han, who had finally fallen asleep in his bunk. His skin was still pale, his body still shivering from the aftereffects of hibernation sickness. But he was here, and he was alive.

Lando had hated their rescue plan, even as he had fully supported it. "Leia, no," he'd said, when she'd insisted that she needed to be the one to pose as the bounty hunter, to bring Chewie in. "This could go wrong in so many ways!"

"Yes," Luke had agreed, "but it could go right in one way." Since Bespin, Luke had lost some of his sunniness, his golden optimism, but had gained this calm, confident voice that was useless to argue against.

Though Lando had tried. "I don't like those odds," he'd muttered.

Never tell me the odds, Leia had thought, and that was when she'd known for sure that they would get Han back.

White

After the blowing sands of Tatooine, the halls of Home One seemed almost impossibly white and sterile. Perfect for planning a surgical strike against the enemy, Leia reminded herself, but strange for the ragtag band of Rebels that had won so many hard-fought battles against the Empire.

She hadn't worn white since she'd been back. It wasn't that she meant anything by it, particularly, though she knew some would interpret it that way. And it wasn't as if she'd never wear it again. But it just didn't seem like her color anymore.

Of course, she didn't have many other sartorial choices; it wasn't like she could take time out from plotting the end of the Empire to go shopping. And as much as she loved Han's blue Corellian Dreadnoughts t-shirt— "my shirt, you gave it to me," she teased when he tried to take it back—she couldn't exactly wear that to a briefing.

"You gonna get dressed?" he asked her, as she stood in his cabin—their cabin—pondering her options one morning.

She put a hand on her hip and raised an eyebrow at him. "I think people might have trouble paying attention to Mon if I show up in this," she said, indicating the Alliance-issue skivvies she was wearing.

"I'm a fan," he said, snaking an arm around her waist and pulling her into a kiss. "But I see what you mean." He continued kissing down her neck, and Leia was tempted to forget the briefing entirely in favor of more of this. She breathed in deeply, shuddering a bit as Han kissed her in that spot behind her ear.

She almost whined as he pulled away, but he was grinning at her.

"Have to take a rain check, Sweetheart," he said. "Duty calls." He reached over to the stack of clothes on the bunk, fresh from the autovalet, and handed her a shirt and pants.

It was good to have a little color back in her life.

Green

Darkness used to feel like something she could slip into, unnoticed. One minute you were starlight, the next, nothing, gone for years before someone noticed your light had gone out.

But it wasn't that easy to slip away into nothing, Leia realized. Darkness had shape, and texture; it had a million greens and golds and bloodstained reds and deep blues behind it. And someone unafraid of the night could have been guarding your starlight for years.

Han could see in the dark. He had lived in the shadows most of his life, knew its safety and cruelty. He hadn't let her slip away, even when she'd wanted to. Even when he'd had to fight her to do it.

She'd bared her darkness to him before, in the confines of his cabin on their way to Bespin. My fault, she'd confessed. My mother, my father, my people. My fault.

No, he'd insisted, as many times as he'd needed to. Never. Not yours to hold.

This was going to be harder. This felt so much more fundamental, the darkness inside her from birth. I'm wrong. Angry. Fearful. Like him. We've already hurt you too much. Not again. Never again.

Under a grove of trees, the words spilled out of her, the darkness threatening to douse the firelight from the celebrations nearby. My father, she told him. And I have it, too. She steeled herself for his response, got ready for him to walk away.

Instead, he looked at her. Saw her, as he'd seen her so many times before, darkness and light, green and gold and blood red and deep blue. Unafraid.

He smiled and touched her cheek. "I love you," he said, and she knew it to always be true.