The address Ben had given Leia wasn't hard to find. It was the only building left in a rundown industrial complex near the Kessel River. The flat smell of the water cancelled out the snow-scent in their nostrils as Luke and Leia climbed a flight of crumbling brick steps. At the top was an incongruously turquoise door, faded but still cheerful in comparison to its grim surroundings. The address was rendered on the lively door in gold paint, flaking now but so meticulously done it looked almost filigreed. Four Yavin Road. Luke knocked, then waited, and when his face reported some private signal the cousins went inside.

"Ben?" Luke called into the shadows, his voice brave and optimistic; perhaps only Leia could have detected the quaver in it. She linked her arm through Luke's and they moved, conjoined, into the arctic, dark, cavernous space. It smelled of paint, both old and fresh. As her eyes adjusted to the minimal light, Leia could make out a few canvas panels along one wall, staggered together. She thought of gravestones; she also thought of Han's overlapped shingles. Death, work. Leia shivered with cold, shivered with mingled foreboding and longing.

There was a quiet, exhausted cough; Luke and Leia turned to look where candlelight drove shadows back from a corner of the loft. This small space was softened with threadbare fabrics and textures in a mashup of epochs and cultures: Victorian fringe, Edwardian lace, French wine bottles holding melted-down wax. A Persian rug, cushions stitched with English cabbage roses. A Japanese paper screen. Canadian syrup tins holding fine Chinese brushes. The linking commonality was color: everything seemed to be chosen for color and in the center of this, on the carpet, a shape overlaid with an American patchwork quilt.

The frail shape shifted. Leia inhaled, and at her shoulder, she felt Luke tense. Ben had become a wraith. He tried to sit up and gave up, his expression flashing pain but also a small smile of relief.

XXXXXXXXXX

Han Solo paced the living room floor, a hand on his hip, the other working the back of his neck. He stopped at the window to stare out at the snow, falling heavily now; his eyes were a vivid, almost caustic green. He eyed the telephone balefully, agent of his troubles but silent now, wasn't it, when it counted? Han's hand twitched; he wanted to pull the phone out of the wall by its buzzing roots, but then what if Leia called? Damn squawkpiece was the only tool he had.

He was stuck. Han was stuck in his fear for Leia, when every instinct screamed to move, drive, seek, fix—he craved motion, action, and couldn't leave because he had to be here when she called, or sent him some note pasted into a book. Which Leia would; Han knew she would, because something was jacked up, and he'd like a damned head-start on getting her out. In the meantime, he had nowhere to look. Han moved into the kitchen like a declawed tiger, saddled with instinct but stripped of options, of tools, of weapons. He felt woefully unequipped except for the bitter internal commentary that had kept him sane in Korea.

Was Han angry with Leia? Yes. No. Yes! He couldn't be made this afraid for her without converting it to outrage at her, at himself. Outrage to be this helpless, that he couldn't immediately ensure that Leia was all right; outrage to plumb the depths of fear that love plunged you into. And as for Luke: well, Han would never hit him, but he sure wanted to put the kid in a six-hour headlock. Just skywalk ol' Luke up and down the block, neck tucked hard into the crook of Han's arm, lecturing his ass on common sense. And how bad Picasso sucked. Curse him to stay a virgin until at he was at least forty. Twist his ear near-off. Tell him he looked twerpy in his turtleneck.

It was juvenile but this nasty stream bubbled on, snide and effervescent, and Han went with it, hoping it would rush him away from the rocks of What if. What if. What if. What if. Night had fallen. The snow was falling too, thick and steady. Roads were icy and some, unplowed. And meanwhile Han, who could deal uncommonly well with physical threat, was trapped here in the land of theory, of worry. He was in here frettin' like some little old lady while the Bobbsey Twins were maybe stuck in a snowbank (Chrissake don't think of Leia's tiny shivering body) or stopped for a coffee, a piece of pie (Han both passionately hoped they had done this and resolved to kill them himself if they had). That thought, at least, gave Han a small task: he could call Chewie's again, and ask if Luke and Leia had shown up, though he knew Leia was never this thoughtless.

On the other hand: that one-line note, and after she'd promised...

Suzette hissed in annoyance when she recognized Han's voice. "Still ain't here, kid."

Han hated when Suzette called him kid—though he didn't call Luke Kid in a patronizing sense (though Han was gonna start, oh yeah, the second Luke and Leia were back safe from this little trick) Han bristled to be addressed this way himself. He hadn't been a kid since he was three, certainly no woman's kid, and if he'd been forced to give up on childhood's protections he sure as hell would reject its diminishments.

He wanted to smart Suzette back, vent his pressurized mix of fear and anger, but when he opened his mouth nothing came out except a thin snarl, the sound of that helpless tiger in a leg-hold trap. Suzette sighed with an impatient decency that wouldn't have been out of place from Han himself. "Listen, Solo. I'll call if I see them, alright? You got my word." And she hung up. Han hung up too, so gently that it was an unconscious hedge against destructive panic. If he hung up too hard, as hard as he wanted, he'd end up beating the receiver through a cupboard. Leia, goddamnit. She had some nerve, Her Worship: freakin' out over his skinned knuckles and here she was leaving him a note and running around in inclement weath—

No. No, they were probably on their way home now, Ben in the back. That wheezing jalopy of Kenobi's had probably packed it in on some—whatever the hell trip artists went on, and—and, shit. That was another worry, wasn't it? What if Ben's Ford Frankenstein or whatever the fuck had broken down in Akron, Ohio? It was freakishly easy to picture the wonder twins rocketing across states, across the night to the rescue. Jumpin' outta high windows into God knew what. Now Han almost hopped from foot to foot with obstructed kinetic energy. It itched and burned in his arteries, his pressure points. He wanted to do jumping jacks, cook it off like in the army but wouldn't that be somethin', if Luke's Buick pulled up then and Leia saw her husband, wild-eyed, exercising like the rookie dogface he'd been.

Son of a bitch. Han went back to pacing, so rapidly and hard that it was almost a march. He growled under his breath, his unconscious sound of frustration. Solve this, he demanded of his brain, but all his mind-voice had to say was a helpless, Leia. Jesus, Han thought, that's all you got? His mind-voice was just like the phone: yap yap yap 90 percent of the time, then keepin' schtum when it counted.

Leia, Leia. His worrying internal voice seemed to take on a younger timbre, a glimmer of real despair. Damn it, call me. Sweetheart. Wouldja ple—

This is what he'd been afraid of, when Han opened to love, to need. Han needed Leia, even broke enough from his rigid emotional ranks to say he did—hell, he went AWOL from most of his own life—because she was his wife, and he loved her, and damn it all he was trying to do something right. Han moved through the kitchen, dragging his hands through his hair. Somewhere out there tonight, Han knew Leia needed him, she had for weeks! Only she kept that word locked up tight behind her pretty white teeth, with the other stuff she wouldn't say.

Except to Luke, apparently. Him, Leia could need openly.

Abruptly Han leapt to the mute phone, picked up the receiver, pressed it to his head. Stared blankly at the number wheel until the dial tone bleated. His eyes contracted into tight, furious crescents.

"Don't charge her ramparts," Han seethed into the mouthpiece, in a simpering, blistering voice. And he hammered the receiver down in its cradle with enough force to crack the Bakelite handle.

XXXXXXXXXX

Leia and Luke knelt on either side of Ben, taking the older man's hands in theirs. Staring at the paint webbed into Luke's knuckles, Leia felt herself reach out to her cousin. She knew he was afraid, but still Luke radiated only his natural, implacable compassion, even as Leia bit back her own panic. Every soft question Luke and Leia asked—What is it? What's happened? Ben, are you all ri—went unanswered. Ben radiated warmth but he did not talk, as though rationing his breath for something else.

Ben's hands were stained with paint, too, and garden dirt, as they always were. But this layer was thicker, recent. When Luke helped Ben sit up, moving him more clearly into wavering candlelight, Leia flashed on what was different. Ben was not stained with his normal ochres, charcoals, gray-purples, blacks—the elegant but somewhat subdued spectrum his work was known for. No, Ben was streaked like a celebration. His arms, his face, his neck bore dots and streamers of color, blues and reds and violets and yellows, corals and pinks—like confetti, like fireworks at Alder Glen, like Leia and Luke's shared birthday cakes. Leia thought of her father's copies of National Geographic. She'd read, as a child, that people all over the world had historically observed joinings, births, funerals with anointment of their wisest in holy pigments. Ben looked like the last, Leia thought with wild, rising grief, of some dying ritualistic order. A shaman, a druid, a seer, a healer. An old knight guarding the Grail.

The older man laced his fingers with theirs, vivid color rubbing off onto younger hands. Leia smoothed the white hair from Ben's face, and saw with a gasp she only just suppressed that one side of his face was slightly slack. She and Luke made sudden, stricken eye contact. They needed to call an ambulance; she scanned the space for a phone, and met mostly darkness. "Ben." Luke's voice shook; Leia stroked Ben's brow. "We need to take you to the hospi—"

Ben smiled at them with such serene refusal that Leia felt her eyes fill with tears, felt her chest fill with desperate resolve. Oh, Leia was tired of marshalling herself, tired of strength being her involuntary response. Ben was dying, and she wanted to weep, free and unimpeachable, like a child. She wanted to grieve in peace, reprieved from responsibility. At home. With Han. She wanted Han. Leia needed Han, and there was no phone.

But Ben had his own plans. He inclined his chin at the canvases propped against the walls. Luke stood, picking up a saucer that held a burning candle. Ben turned to Leia; she caught her breath at the love and insistence she saw there, in his face. She rose. Together the cousins crossed the wide expanse of dark.

Luke knelt before the small collection of paintings. Leia picked up a palette studded with old wax stubs, and Luke lit them with his candle, the new light still warm but much clearer, illuminating the canvases. None of these were wet, and dust ran across the tops of the ones at the back. Some of the images were literal, some were abstract; Leia didn't respond to visual art the way Luke and Ben did, yet she could see the way the works seemed to move and breathe—to throb, to live—with light and stroke and color. Luke's touch to the paint was feathery, quizzical. The canvases bore no signature. "Not yours," Luke said, the words carrying to Ben in the hushed space. Luke let out a breath, shaking his head. "Ben, these are...these are..."

Leia felt an eerie sensation up her spine; youthful and grievous, all at once. A touch, an announcement of a presence, paused and formal, like someone awaiting introduction. Leia thought of the social debut her mother had wanted for her and that Leia refused: the appearance on the staircase in a frothy dress, the stilted dances. The endless potential breeding matches with ideal young men, all of them impeccably pedigreed, some of them tall and even handsome. But none of them with tousled hair and an off-center grin, shifting colors in his eyes, a ridged mark on the chin. A wry, tilted, skeptical slant to the lips.

I want Han here. I want

"Hers," Ben managed.

And something in his voice directed their attention, made Luke and Leia turn as one and move to where Ben's syllable seemed to point. As they approached the long far wall of the loft the candles in their hands guttered as though with rising force of spirit, or of shock. The pitted plaster wall was dominated by a massive canvas. The work of decades, the work of a lifetime, smelling of new paint, the final strokes still fresh. Color—it was riotous with color—passionate, furious, emphatic, tender. Shades as bright and deep, varied and rich as the produce Ben had tended and reaped and shared, every year, from the earth. The painting gave off such power that Luke was awed into exhalation. Leia gasped in that lost breath, anguished and reverent.

It was a woman, a very young woman emerging from waves, emerging from what Leia recognized at once as Alder Lake. A small, playful sprite in an antique bathing suit Leia recognized from that box of Naberrie clothes—she knew the suit as a faded pink; here, it was urgent heartsblood red. Luke and Leia reached for one another's hands, and held on. It could have been either of their lost mothers, this beautiful figure, radiant and alive and rising from the water, her face brimming with youth and laughter and some wonderful secret that set her huge brown eyes alive forever.

"Mother," Luke whispered.

Leia shook her head, knowing the truth even as Ben said it. This was a person she had never known, but recognized all the same. And now the tears overspilled her eyes, but she could not speak; her store of words was barred to her, all at once. It was Luke who, still holding Leia's hand, turned to Ben and waited, his face filled with pain and a sort of kind, divine demand.

"No." Forcing himself upright on the floor, Ben swallowed a lifetime of love and grief. "It's Breha."