From the safety of her dream she watched him put a finger to his lips, and with exaggerated care he stepped out into the corridor just behind Darth Vader. Storm troopers were behind him, but they did not alert Vader to his presence. Han strolled nonchalantly for a few steps and then scooted forward in small, quick steps, very close to Darth Vader. He stepped his boot out, clamping something underneath his sole. The troopers continued to file past, directing the blank stare of their helmets at his boot and what he was stepping on.
Leia fidgeted from her hiding space, straining to see what he was doing. Finally space opened up. Han stood, unworried and sure, his hands on his hips. Leia stared at the retreating back of Darth Vader, wondering what Han was up to, when she saw it.
Vader's cape was unraveling.
A teeny satin thread streamed from Vader's back along the corridor, stopping at Han's boot. He met her gaze and winked conspiratorially and Vader stomped away, the little thread merrily calling itself to Han's boot.
He shifted his weight, and the black line sprung out from under his sole and trailed after Darth Vader. Han made a comical face, an exaggerated 'uh-oh' of surprise, and dashed to give it chase. Leia joined him, her hand on his forearm, alarmed he would give them away. Han stooped to gather the thread. He wound it over his fingers, round and round, until it formed a small skein. Then he slipped it off his fingers and continued to roll it in a ball. Again he took slow nonchalant steps, following Vader, who never seemed to notice that his cape was growing inches shorter by the moment.
Leia walked alongside him in the corridor, giggling with mirth. Vader looked so silly. Han took care not to cause much tension on the thread so Vader never noticed the pair.
Eventually Han decided they had enough yarn and he yanked at the string between his hands, breaking it.
"Come on, your Highness," he whispered in her ear. He opened a door and they sneaked inside, where it was close, dark, and warm. A single bulb from the ceiling lit the pair.
"Vader unraveled," she giggled, feeling so good. She wasn't certain why, but it was a decisive blow against the Empire. She and Han were invincible, untouchable. It was a wonderful feeling. She looked up at him, so much taller than she, and such a part of her victory.
She held her hands up and Han began to wind the satin thread in a pattern over her fingers and around her palms. When his fingers came near to touching hers she stroked his with her thumbs. He was focused on his weaving, his lips slightly pursed, eyes deep green and intense.
Kiss me, she said silently.
The thread was soft and silken, heavenly against her skin.
"Who knew Vader was so delicate, eh?" Han commented, now weaving the filaments in her hair.
The touch of his fingers in her hair….she bent her head forward, allowing him this closeness. She waited, standing closer to him. She wanted him to read her mind. Kiss me, she implored. Please, just kiss me now.
She felt warm and heated, the hypnotic effect of his hands moving in her hair causing her to deepen her breathing.
"There." Han's voice was as silken as the thread he wove through her braids. "Now you have a bit of Vader in you. You're beautiful."
"Han," she breathed into his chest. She put her hand up, and the lighting showed how much darker his complexion was against the white of her own skin. She felt his answering heat underneath her fingertips, the firmness of his sternum under warm smooth skin. "Han," she breathed again. "I want to kiss you."
He answered with a wordless gesture, his hands moving down the back of her head to her neck and shoulders. She sighed into him, mouth open, her desire telling. They stayed like that, breathing, kissing, tasting, until the height difference caused her neck to strain.
As if feeling her discomfort he picked her up and she wrapped her legs around him and she held on for dear life, her hands moving through his hair and over his shoulders very much like he had done for her while he used his lips to explore her face and neck.
Noises came from outside the door. They broke apart and she told his eyes, "I'm supposed to be fighting."
"You are," he said and was going to kiss her again but the door opened and Luke Skywalker said, "Come on you two! The garbage masher is this way!"
"Leia?" Luke called from outside her cabin door. He knocked again. "Are you in there? We're getting a transmission."
She woke, panting and flushed. "What?!" She bolted off the bunk, dashing for the door, and the dream dissipated like steam hitting cooler air.
Luke's eyes were frank and assessing and friendly, not at all like Han's. "I said, a transmission's coming in. 3-PO came and got me."
Leia felt disoriented, trying to shake off her dream. Her first thought was why the droid hadn't roused her first. "Is it from home base?"
"I don't know. It's encrypted, though. Chewie says it could be a contact, wanting to hire. 3PO says it's going to take a few hours to decode it."
She nodded, not at all surprised by the information. "Is there kaf?"
"Yeah, there's a pot on the fire. Come on out and sit. There's actually some sunshine," Luke told her.
Sunshine was a fleeting experience on this planet and Luke was taking it as an omen. The sunshine, the message…things were starting to happen. There was a shift, and he felt his training would take a new direction very soon.
He regarded Leia sidelong as she poured a cup of kaf and squatted to take a seat on a stump Chewie had dragged up for the campsite. He wondered if she sensed it too, but she'd kept her thoughts close to herself since they'd arrived.
He felt a distance between them. Maybe I'm guilty too, he reflected. He knew the inaction made her feel powerless and the open-ended question of Han's fate still bothered her. She didn't seem to want to let him go. She asked Chewie about Han often, things she had read in the logs, or about things she found during inventories.
Luke was sure Han was alive, and he told her as much, but he had little else to offer her. He was sure Han was alive, because Han always was. Luke struggled to understand her grief, because she had never allowed her feelings for the smuggler to show before.
In the three years since Luke met Han, the smuggler had often left, and they'd have no news of him. It was a conversation he and Leia had a number of times, the probability Han would be killed or captured, but it hadn't seemed to bother her much. Maybe it was because at least she'd had gotten to bid him farewell. Or maybe because it was something she refused to acknowledge, deep down. Intellectually she could discuss it, because the probability any one of them could be killed or captured was high. Maybe it wouldn't be real to her until it was real.
What was real to her, though? Luke thought about Leia on the Death Star. She had been slated for execution. And she had told him since then, since Alderaan's destruction, that she was dead inside. Maybe, symbolically, she had been executed. And so killed or captured might just mean being like Leia. Dead inside.
The thought broke his heart. He was determined to reach her.
Experiences shape one's view of the Force. His conversation with Yoda drifted back to him. Leia's experiences were vastly different than his. A life in the public eye, no shields. Except the Force, Luke clarified. Living in peacetime, preparing for war. Then internment.
"Leia," he said. "How long were you a prisoner on the Death Star?"
She turned to him, surprised and discomfited. "What? Why do you want to know that?"
Luke shrugged. "I don't really know. I just never asked before."
"Well, it didn't really matter, did it. Since you were the one who released me."
"Yeah." He smiled at her. "Best thing I ever did."
She smiled back. "Best thing that ever happened to me, too." Leia sobered. "I'm not sure. Not long. Something like three days."
"Not long. But long enough, right?"
"Mmm." Leia's eyes were clouded. "I underwent interrogation with the mind probe, with Vader attending. Then Tarkin, briefly. They were just waiting for the paper work to go through before execution.
"What was it like? I mean," Luke hastened to speak after she set wild eyes on him, "were you left alone? Or did they do other stuff, stuff to … to break you down?"
"Stuff."Leia looked at her hands. In three years she had stopped thinking about it. Covered it, like a bandage. "Why, Luke?"
"Do something with me, will you? Before this all breaks up?"
"Breaks up? What do you mean?"
"The transmission. If it's from home base, you'll want to go, won't you?"
"Well, yes, of course. But, Luke, you're here too… I'm not going to -"
"Things are changing, Leia. I can sense it. Sit with me. Just this once, sit with me and the Force. Together."
Leia squirmed and looked into the ashes of Chewie's morning fire. "I don't know, Luke..."
He leaned forward, elbows on his thighs. "I do, Leia. I do," he repeated reassuringly. "There's nothing to be afraid of. You use the Force to know people. It's your beauty. And you use it to protect you. It's not going to let you down."
Your beauty. He had never talked to her like that before. Leia was aware, from Han's teasing, that Luke thought he'd fallen in love with her the moment he saw her in R2D2's holomessage. But as they came to know each other, his love manifested itself in just knowing her, just having the grace to call her one of his best friends. He loved her, wholly and completely, but he was not in love with her.
"It'll be OK," he confirmed.
He was so earnest, so young, so untouched. And yet he had changed so much. "Alright," Leia yielded.
Happily he jumped to his feet. "Great! Come on, I know just the place."
She took his outreached hand. "Are we going channeling?"
"We'll go for a walk."
They moved together past the banks of the swamp, deeper into the growth where it was greener and darker. Luke was no longer in the mood for conversation, so she contented herself with following him, enjoying the speckling dots of sunshine on leaves and patches of earth.
He brought her to a knoll. Maybe it had once been a rock outcropping, eroded by rain, sifted over with compost, grown soft and velvety with moss. It was a lovely spot.
"This is one of my favorite places," Luke said, echoing her thoughts. "Let's just lie down," he said. She took his example and stretched out beside him. He grabbed her hand, gave it a squeeze. "Close your eyes, Leia, and take big inhales, and just see where your mind takes you."
She lay there, trying not to feel silly. Luke was sometimes so serious. He held her hand, and his breathing was deep and even. Under her, Leia felt the cool moss and the undulations of the knoll in her back. She directed her gaze at the sky, feeling the sun on her face, warming her from within, and she watched the trees stretch to the sky and sway in the wind.
She thought of trees. Giant majesties like on Kashyyyk, spindly sun-starved ones here on Dagobah, the woody texture of the ones she climbed at home on Alderaan, Han with hands on a vine, ready to swing off a limb.
Han.
Floating with her in a free fall, adventurous, inspired, his hands and lips caressing her skin, throwing her bombs and weaving Vader's fiber in her hair.
Free fall…..you're beautiful….love. His eyes, the gesture of sacrifice, your beauty. Luke's loyalty, solitude….she frowned. Luke. There was sand, and like Chewie's holochess board there were players. C-3P0 had the rear center spot, and he was rooted and motionless, while she and Luke, Chewie and Yoda approached their opponents: Darth Vader, bounty hunters, a large green being in the opposite center spot, the Emperor.
Han… whose side was he on? He was close to the opponent's edge, a square away, challenging the center spot.
She opened her mouth to warn him and he sent a warning of his own with his eyes.
Sand, whirling and roaring, funneling into a cloud, obscuring all. Sunshine, suns…..unbearable heat of wood under her feet, fading. Life. Life. Love.
Feelings floated over her. Some strong, others weak, some conflicting. Love and tenderness, hatred and isolation. Faces swam before her along with the emotions. Luke and Han and Chewie and Yoda. She couldn't separate an emotion with a face; everyone seemed to have them all.
Beside her, Luke was awed by Leia. Her free association of friends and what she connected to them was beautiful. He linked into her Force, feeling his own double its power, taking him, showing him.
There was Tatooine again, the howling sand. Show me, he urged the Force. It sailed him along the desert plains. Past his uncle's moisture farm, through Ben Kenobi's house, through the canyons he used to race in, back out to the endless expanse of sand. A skiff, bodies, or people, or both; he couldn't tell. Loud determination, fistfuls of sand, fierceness, desperation, desolation, longing. Longing.
He gasped. He knew.
He bolted upright, found Leia's shocked eyes, knew she had seen it too. "I know where he is," he shouted. "I have to tell Chewie!"
Leia followed him as best she could, watching his back as he disappeared into the jungle. She wasn't sure she knew the way back but she was sure she wouldn't lose Luke.
He was a part of her, somehow.
She had the feeling she'd just undergone a life-transforming event, and was reeling, dazed. There was a new dimension to her consciousness. She saw things broader, bigger, wholly. The vines, the jungle, specks of sunshine and little Dagobah occupying its spot in the galaxy.
Luke had shared the Force with her.
No, that wasn't right. She saw, now that he had disappeared from her sight, that the Force was still with her, companionably. Gentle and trustworthy.
Yoda had insisted it was there, that it had been all along, that she had used it.
Your beauty.
The Force told her how lonely Chewie was, how worthy Han was, how pure Luke was. And Yoda even… Yoda's heartache.
What do I do with this, she wondered. She could see the others so clearly, but when it came to her own heart, she had trouble clarifying her feelings. Clear head, cloudy heart Yoda had told her. But that had been before, only moments ago. Everything had changed now. While she walked, smelling the campfire, she let the Force help her clear her heart.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Luke's footfalls thudded through the jungle. He ran as fast as he could, his arm flailing against branches, and felt like his stride was beyond his control. When he broke into the clearing where Chewie and Yoda sat talking quietly, he was completely out of breath.
Leia heard Chewie's questioning growl. Luke's voice carried as if he were standing right next to her. "Han's on Tatooine." She finally caught up with him and stood next to him in support as he panted, "I know it. I saw it. He went to Tatooine."