Chapter Nine
The Falcon managed to reach the Rebel base at Massassi without any further excitement. Leia draped the blanket around Lucy's shoulders again, ignoring her protests, and all six of them clattered down the ramp. Several Rebel troops approached.
It struck her that they were still radiating the same scent they'd picked up a few hours ago: garbage compactor. Lucy cringed.
The troops had either too much courtesy, or fearful respect of Leia, to mention it, and simply provided an armored speeder to take them to the hangar. Lucy tried to take in everything, but her eyelids kept drifting shut. Leia perched on the edge of the speeder, stiffly upright, and Han yawned.
The speeder came to a halt just as a silver-haired man caught sight of Leia. She jumped off and his remote expression turned warm. He strode over and embraced her, paying no more attention to her soaked, filthy gown than anyone else had shown.
"You're safe," he said, with very evident relief. Leia kissed his cheek. "When we heard about Alderaan, we feared the worst."
Leia, despite the kiss, was as unflinching as ever. "We have no time for sorrows, Commander," she said briskly. Lucy, who had taken a few nervous steps backward, stared at her in awe. Tatooine was harsh enough, but she couldn't even imagine the kind of environment that must have forged Leia.
The Empire, she supposed.
"- to plan the attack," Leia was saying. "It's our only hope."
The commander nodded. "We'll plug him in right away," he said, and gave the orders to a group of soldiers nearby, then glanced at Leia's organic companions. She gestured for them to approach, and grasped Lucy's elbow.
"This is Lucy Skywalker and Han -"
"Solo," said Han.
"Solo," Leia repeated. "They rescued me from the Death Star, at considerable risk to themselves. Lucy, Han, this is Commander Willard, a very close friend of my family's."
Willard, after one startled look, bowed to them both. "The Rebellion is indebted to you both. You will, of course, be rewarded."
"Thanks," said Han.
"I don't need a reward," said Lucy.
Willard smiled and offered every hospitality the Rebellion could provide, for the duration of their stay. "We'll have quarters prepared for your both," he said.
"No," said Leia quickly. Her composed expression didn't falter in the slightest, but her fingers dug into Lucy's arm. "That shouldn't be necessary. Lucy will stay with me, and . . . Captain Solo will be leaving anyway. Isn't that right?"
"Yeah," said Han.
Lucy was glad her sleeves were so thick. "If you'd like," she said, bewildered - until it occurred to her that hers was probably the first sympathetic face Leia had seen in her weeks onboard the Death Star. Certainly the first since the destruction of Alderaan. She tried to wipe every trace of pity off her face.
"I see," said Willard, plainly not seeing.
Leia wrinkled her nose. "You'll have to excuse us. We escaped through a garbage compactor," she announced.
"Of course." He seemed entirely unfazed by this. Lucy supposed a Rebel leader must be used to this sort of thing. "The debriefing's in two hours, if you - "
"I'll be there," said the princess, and marched off, dragging Lucy after her.
Leia almost breathed a sigh of relief when the doors slid closed behind them. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been properly alone with another person. Alone and safe: lying in a cell on the Death Star, awaiting her execution, hardly counted.
Her mind skittered away from her weeks on the Death Star. She couldn't afford to think about that, not when there was so much to be done. There would be time for grief later - or, perhaps more probably, there would be no time at all, but Leia was an optimist.
Of sorts.
She had no patience for useless fatalism, at any rate. Simply letting the worst happen to you in the conviction that it was inevitable anyway struck her as a sort of moral laziness. The future wouldn't look after itself; you had to hope and fight for what you wanted to see. Expect that you could make it happen. Leia lived with the intention of succeeding at everything she did; when she failed, it wasn't because of any failure of effort on her part.
Lucy cleared her throat. Out of habit, Leia tilted her head back to meet - the air above Lucy's head. Leia smiled and dropped her gaze to Lucy's, the blue eyes level with her own.
"I - I'm really sorry," Lucy said, turning red, "I know I shouldn't bother you, but could I borrow some clothes? I don't know any other women and the stormtroopers burned my house."
"I . . . what?" said Leia.
"When they came looking for the droids. They destroyed everything."
It took her a moment to put it all together. Then Leia stared at her, horrified. She'd ejected the droids, sent Artoo to find General Kenobi; instead, they'd somehow ended up with Lucy, and stormtroopers had tracked them to her doorstep. Nothing could have survived their search; Lucy quite literally had nothing but the clothes on her back. She was just lucky she hadn't been home.
"I'm sorry," Leia said, knowing the words sounded cold and dispassionate, even as guilt burned in her gut. I never meant this to happen. I never meant - I'm so sorry. She forced herself to relax her grip on the other girl. "If you can wait for me to bathe, I'll find you something."
Lucy nodded. Twenty minutes later, after Leia had scrubbed every bit of garbage off her skin, dressed, and incinerated her robes, the princess emerged to find her standing exactly where she'd left her.
Lucy took a tentative step forward, then stopped. "I don't - I just meant to ask if you could spare any clothes, until I can get my own. I don't want to . . . I'm filthy."
"I know - that's why you're going to take a bath now," said Leia. She overrode Lucy's inarticulate protests and dragged her to the bathroom, ordering her to disrobe while she ran another bath. Lucy had only unbuckled the stormtrooper belt, however, when she froze, gaping at the water gushing out of the faucets.
"You can undress behind that curtain, if you want," Leia told her, then remembered just where Lucy's destroyed home had been. "Oh! Do you mind water? There's a sonic shower, if you'd rather -"
"No!" Lucy exclaimed, then flushed again. "I mean. I, ah, I don't mind. It's just - on Tatooine, I could buy a house with that much water. Just washing my hands, back on the Falcon, felt . . . decadent, I guess."
Leia blinked down at the water. She'd been raised to be conscious of the privileges of wealth, but she couldn't say she'd ever considered water one of them. Lucy reached out, then snatched her fingers back, looking embarrassed.
"I'll go look for some clothes," said Leia. "You can put yours . . . um . . . are you attached to them?"
Lucy laughed. "No," she said, taking two cautious steps towards the tub and peering inside, her fingers closing on the rim. "I didn't even usually wear these, but skirts aren't practical for wandering around the Jundland Wastes."
"Right," said Leia, in perfect incomprehension. "Just call for me when you're ready, okay? And scream if you start drowning."
She left Lucy to work herself up to using what appeared to be a small fortune by Tatooine standards, and raided her wardrobe for clothes. It was almost a relief, to occupy her mind with something so trivial - though, of course, it was hardly trivial when you didn't have any. Leia dug through her drawers, trying to imagine how much an ordinary girl, or at least a girl brought up in ordinary circumstances, would even want.
A dozen sets should be fine, Leia thought. We can buy more later. We'll both need things that fit properly, anyway.
Lucy had said something about not wanting to bother her, but Leia ignored that. It never even occurred to her that the niece of a Tatooine moisture farmer might not expect to be welcomed by a princess. If it had occurred to her, Leia would have dismissed the thought immediately. Thanks, in some part, to Leia's actions, Lucy had lost her home and nearly everything she owned, and she'd responded by risking her life to save her.
Han had done nearly as much, but he hadn't lost anything to the Rebellion - and besides, he was quite happy to be paid in money. Lucy couldn't be repaid at all, but Leia could at least provide for her, take her under her wing. It wouldn't be a burden: would never have been, probably, but certainly not now, when Leia had no one left but generals and handmaidens. She'd like a companion - and she liked taking care of people - and she liked Lucy herself, without even much knowing her.
Well, she knew enough. Lucy had more than proven herself in the few hours they'd known each other, and besides, they'd crammed more living into those hours than most friends did in a decade. It was only natural to feel a certain camaraderie - there were just some things that people couldn't live through without becoming friends. Leia suspected that escaping a planet-destroying battle station was one of them.
She preferred not to think what that would imply about Han Solo. He wasn't . . . he wasn't like Lucy. Where Lucy shared Leia's allegiance to the Rebellion, all her ideals and convictions, Han had no loyalty to anything other than himself. He couldn't be trusted, and next to that, nothing else mattered.
"Princess?"
Leia started up. "Are you done? If you are, there should be two buttons on your left - the top one will drain the water, and the lower one will dry you off."
"Um - all right." There was silence, then a faint whoosh accompanied by a yelp of surprise. Leia brought her a robe and undergarments, averting her eyes while Lucy dressed. Belatedly, it occurred to her that she could have just as easily summoned one of her handmaidens to do all this. She just didn't - Leia paused. She felt something odd around Lucy, a sense of . . . familiarity, almost, of belonging. She didn't want anyone else looking after Lucy, and she didn't want anyone else near her right now.
"I - I didn't expect you to take so much trouble, L - Princess Leia," Lucy said, pushing her hair out of her eyes. Leia noticed idly that it was as long and heavy as her own, and wet, looked almost dark.
"I think we've been through enough together to use first names," she said. "Though I suppose I could call you Miss Skywalker if you'd like."
"No, I - Lucy is fine," she said, and gave a nervous laugh. "Leia."
Leia led her out to the main chamber, chattering all the while. She didn't think she could bear any silence between herself and another person, or any mention of - things she couldn't think about. Lucy seemed inclined to be quiet, but Leia kept talking anyway.
"- and here's the mirror, I thought you might want to hold them up to your face or something. I didn't know if you had any particular preferences about colour, or . . . Well, I had no idea about anything, so I thought you could just choose for yourself." Leia threw the doors open wide.
"I . . . I'm not picky, really," said Lucy, blinking at her reflection. "Anything you don't want should be fine."
"I can't say I particularly want any of these. It's not my . . . it doesn't make any difference to me."
"Oh." Lucy smiled. "I like black and white. And red. And blue. And yellow. But I'll be happy with anything that fits."
"That shouldn't be hard. We're nearly the same height, and -" Leia, holding an olive-green dress up to Lucy's face, paused in front of the mirror. By some coincidence, their postures were identical at their moment - spines straight, shoulders thrown back, chins lifted a little - and she could see that the crown of her dark head was just about level with Lucy's. She didn't think there was a quarter-inch of difference between them. "Actually, we are the same height. And about the same size, too."
For a moment, they just stared at the mirror, inexplicably arrested by their paired reflections. It wasn't as if they even resembled each other that much: just big eyes and high cheekbones and soft chins, and even those were different - Lucy's eyes a clear blue where Leia's were dark, her tanned skin drawn tight over the cheekbones where Leia's cheeks were pale and round, a cleft in her chin where Leia's was smooth. They were just shaped the same, like the same outline filled in with different colours.
"You're thinner than I am, I think," said Lucy, her expression at once gratified and unsettled.
"I've lost some weight," Leia said lightly. "I imagine you're closer to my size than I am - we'll both need new clothes. I don't really like brown, do you?"
Lucy opened her mouth, then shut it again.
"Not really," she said, and glanced at the pile of gowns strewn across Leia's bed. "The white dress is pretty."
"Which one?"
Chewie had taken a much-needed nap after their arrival. When he woke up, four hours later, he immediately asked where Lucy had gotten herself to. Han scowled.
"How would I know?"
The Wookiee promptly listed seven reasons why Han should have some idea where Lucy had gone. She was their friend, after all - and quite evidently incapable of looking after herself.
"Aw, hell, I don't know," Han muttered. "Her royal princessness dragged her off and I haven't seen her since. They're probably sitting around gabbing about whatever it is that women talk about. Hair or something."
"Ow!" said Lucy.
Leia yanked a comb through her hair. "Sorry," she said cheerfully. "I've only combed my own hair a few dozen times in my life, and never anyone else's."
"It's all right," said Lucy, wincing. "I wouldn't be much better - my aunt always did mine."
Leia glanced over Lucy's head, meeting her own reflected eyes. "Your aunt? You have family?"
"Not any more. The stormtroopers killed them," said Lucy. The comb stopped moving for a moment, and she dared to move her head, looking up into the mirror. She didn't need the Force to read the princess' pale, stricken face. "It's not your fault, Leia."
"I didn't realize that anything - but I should have. I should have known," Leia said, more to herself than to Lucy.
"Ben - General Kenobi to you - said it's impossible to anticipate everything," Lucy told her. "Even for someone with as much wisdom and experience as he had. You can't be that much older than I am. How old are you, anyway?"
"I'll be eighteen on Empire Day," Leia admitted. "Repulsively enough."
Lucy blinked at their reflections. "That's funny," was all she said, before shaking her head. "Who managed your hair? Your handmaidens?"
"Mm-hmm." Leia hit another tangle and grimaced. "Your hair must be as thick as mine. It's miserable to keep up, isn't it? I'd have chopped all mine off ages ago if I didn't have people to help me with it, and Al - I wasn't living in a desert."
"It's horrible," Lucy said hastily. "We didn't have time to brush it more than a few times a week and I didn't want it like my - didn't want it short. If I hadn't put it up somehow, I'd have probably passed out from the heat." She considered Leia's dark coils of hair. "I never thought of putting it over my ears, though."
"I wanted something that made me look like a senator, but wouldn't get in my way when I got into trouble," said Leia. "I found it on some old holos, from before the Empire –- one of my father's friends in the Senate wore hers like this sometimes. I always admired her, so it seemed a nice tribute, too."
Lucy felt a prickle of interest. "Oh, who was she?"
"Senator Amidala."
Lucy's eyes widened. "Amidala?"
"You've heard of her?" Leia seemed to be trying to look unsurprised.
"No, never. It's just . . . that's my name. Lucy Amidala. I suppose my mother must have admired her too, or something. What was she like?"
"She was one of the youngest senators in history," Leia replied instantly, "and she was one of the first people to oppose the Emperor, even though she helped put him into power in the first place. She died about the same time as the fall of the Republic, though, so nobody really hears about her." She frowned. "Nobody knows how she died, either, just that she was pregnant. I wouldn't be surprised if he had something to do with it."
"I don't know much about the old Republic, except the wars, but she sounds impressive," said Lucy. "The Emperor started as a senator himself, didn't he?"
"Yes. In fact, he was originally the senator for Amidala's own constituency. They came from the same place, and he mentored her when she was a girl and helped her with her early career."
"That sounds . . . horrifyingly creepy," said Lucy. "So how did he end up becoming Emperor, anyway?"
Leia made herself comfortable. "Well, it started with the blockade of Naboo by the Trade Federation, when Palpatine was still Senator - "
"Wait, what's a trade federation?"
Jedi Master Misty Sman-Esay: I'll leave the shipping up to you all to determine! And we'll see how everything works out with the Death Star. :D
sw1fan: Thank you!
Imperial Dragon: Thanks. They do have some rather special ones.