NOTE: If you recently received a notice of a new chapter, and are wondering why you're seeing the previous chapter 9 here, the new chapter is chapter 9 now, and this is now chapter 10.
So here Leia was on the Millenium Falcon again, running from the Imperial forces. On the run, again. Two years spent searching for a location so well-hidden the Empire couldn't hope to reach them, narrowly escaping time and time again. One year spent in the repurposed smugglers' hideout on Hoth, the icy cold armpit of the galaxy. And then there had been strange transmissions, an Imperial probe droid, AT walkers, and the base was lost. Even if they had been miraculously able to fight the Imperial force to the last man (Vader had off-handedly pointed out that the fleet's flagship was the Executor, formerly his to command as leader of the Imperial armed forces), the base's only real selling point was being hidden, and that was gone.
So the Rebels packed up and left. There had been a battle of course, there were always battles to delay the Imperial advance while the base was packed, scoured for clues, cleansed of anything that could be useful to the Empire. And then they left.
So it was Leia, C-3P0, and Chewbacca. And Han, and she wasn't prepared to think about being alone with him. Alone except for the paranoid droid and the walking rug. Nope, not prepared for that line of thought.
Luke was safer to think about, except she had kissed him in the infirmary, a few days back. It was meant to… to be something, but mostly just felt kind of gross. She should have kissed the Wookie. Or Vader. No, definitely the Wookie.
Vader had said something odd in his last transmission, following close behind Luke as the two had left Hoth with their X-Wings. He had passed along a message that they would be delayed regrouping with the Rebel forces, and would try to catch up. But first they had to pay a visit to somebody. Vader was cryptic at the best of times, and Leia would have pressed him for more information, if not for the ongoing evacuation. He and Luke had been spending a surprising amount of time together recently, between lightsaber sparring and drilling with Rogue Squadron. Never any social interaction, barely any interaction at all outside of those activities really. Leia wasn't worried about Luke, Vader was fairly solidly attached to the Rebellion by now, had he intended to betray them outright, it was long past time. And nobody took the idea of Vader as a spy seriously anymore. The former Darth was many things; inconspicuous was not among them
And he had helped save Luke's life on Hoth. Vader and Han had gone out looking when Luke failed to return from patrol, and had dragged the more than half-frozen Jedi back to Echo Base. Leia and Han had monopolized Luke during his recovery, but she knew Vader had visited him.
She'd checked the security logs.
Oddly, Vader had chosen to visit Luke only at times when the young Skywalker was asleep. He would stand over Luke's bed for several minutes, and then leave. But once, the security recorders had picked up a frustratingly cryptic bit of mumbling.
"On Dagobah all this time. Yoda was always crafty, it makes sense"
Leia knew that name from history lessons. The good ones she'd had with her father, not the appropriate Imperial sanctioned lessons her tutors had provided. Bail Organa's daughter could never be taught any lessons that might be considered subversive, after all. But her father had told her of Yoda, the Jedi Master who had led their order, and General Obi-Wan Kenobi, and other heroes of the Clone Wars. The Jedi pogrom following the fall of the Republic had officially killed every Jedi in Imperial space. Executed as traitors, officially. The official story claimed that Palpatine's ruined face, scarred and ravaged, was due to an assassination attempt at the hands of a number of Jedi Masters. She had mentioned that in Vader's hearing once, he had snorted loudly though his breathing apparatus and muttered something about lightning and lightsabers as he passed.
And that wasn't the only odd thing about Vader. Really, once you became accustomed enough to the man's presence in the same building as you to stop being terrified, he was a strange man, one given to spending most of his time outside of meetings with the High Command in unused storage rooms. If it wasn't lightsaber practice with Luke, then it was meditation. She had once walked in on him, while looking for Han to berate him for his sloppily filled out paperwork, and had been shocked to see the ex-dark lord with his helmet removed. She had caught only a short glimpse of a bald, scarred head before yelping out "Sorry!" and leaving. It had felt wrong to see him so exposed, especially when he clearly was going to such lengths to avoid being seen. Or sometimes he would take a droid or speeder, damaged to the point of being on the scrap parts pile, into a room, and come out with a functional piece of machinery. The engineers and mechanics were convinced that Vader had Force machine repairing powers, one particularly brave young man had even begged the Sith to make him his apprentice. Vader hadn't dignified that with a response.
And now Vader was with Luke, and neither of them were here, or with the fleet. The galaxy was a big place, and a quick visit could mean anywhere. But she remembered the snippet of captured audio, in which Vader had mentioned Dagobah. There were stories about that place, and not pleasant ones. It was the kind of planet the Emperor might build a summer home on. But she trusted Vader, at least enough not to believe that after all this time he had at last decided to bring Luke to the Emperor. Maybe they were going to Dagobah, maybe they were going to see the legendary Master Yoda. If Obi-Wan Kenobi could have stayed alive on Tatooine for two decades (before dying less than two weeks after joining the Rebellion), who was to say Yoda couldn't be alive and hiding on Dagobah. The best hiding places were the ones nobody wanted to look in.
The rest of the Rebel forces were hopefully already at the rendezvous point, expecting them any time. They would be delayed with the Falcon's hyperdrive out of order. But Han had a friend in a nearby system, one the crippled Falcon could barely limp to. The ship would be repaired and they would catch up with the fleet. And Luke and Vader might be back by then, if they were really going to Dagobah, it wasn't the sort of place anybody willingly spent long periods of time on.