Perspective
The galaxy spun and Prisht worked.
The Distributary was a living, breathing thing, an organism all of its own with inalienable rights and ebbs and flows. After the demise of Grouka the Hutt's empire, her business had changed; one by one, former Hutt smugglers had shuffled in, joining the growing coalition of pilots looking to work independently of the Imperial stranglehold on the market.
They'd been inducted, trained, and repurposed into people she trusted to work within her business. Salla Zend had once called it mild brainwashing. She wasn't entirely wrong. The Distributary needed to be protected at all cost; if one person was outed to the Empire, all associates were outed as well. So the price for such protection was re-education, and she was not bothered by the ethics of it.
She knew what slavery looked like. She'd seen it firsthand. And she had made sure her enterprise did not come close to it.
Prisht sat behind a simple desk: small, compact, functional. The walls of her office were bare, painted a striking white, and brackets held up holodisk filing systems in the most efficient manner possible, contracts ready for revision at a moment's notice. No wasted space. No useless clutter. Every centimeter of her office was utilized for peak optimization. Pure efficacy. She knew that with The Distributary growing vast enough with displaced Hutt smugglers, she would need a larger office in time.
More contracts, and therefore a heavier surveillance presence. More care to avoid detection from Imperials, yes, but also because certain other Hutt syndicates were moving in to lay claim to Grouka's former glory.
Cutting her eyes to the small security suite display at the upper right hand corner of the desk, she was startled to see it vibrating at a very low decibel. She was expecting no one in that particular entry point for another week at least, and any deliveries would arrive at their assigned berths through the containment area. This was someone without an appointment, either an unsuspecting passerby or someone who needed emergency assistance.
Narrowed eyes. Quiet breath. Absolute control.
Prisht waited.
A speeder, wide and old. Two humans, one female and one male. The male was of good build but dull to her eye: long, shaggy hair, a scarred chin, and between those two features were eyes that did not trust easily. The female was simply gorgeous. Slim hips, long limbs, soft dark skin and hair twisted up in a top knot. The exact opposite of the male in that her eyes were wary and yet warm and confident.
Prisht's heart raced. She stood suddenly and the too-small office disappeared behind her, the corridors within the underground labyrinth flew by unnoticed, the hum of the docking bays where business was conducted in a parade of utility was squashed in favor of a much more pressing concern.
Her entire empire disappeared—her life's work and the business she'd built from nothing—until she was standing outside a framework hatch, leading to a small control booth where toggles activated the massive turbolift from above. Hydraulics hissed, smoke burst from pipes within the docking bay and, slowly, through the viewport in front of her, the speeder came into sight. She waited until the speeder and its two occupants were safely moved off the lift before she stepped out of the control room.
"Greetings, Salla Zend," she called.
Smiling, the human cocked a hip and tilted her head. "Hello there, Prisht. Mind if we come in?"
The erstwhile smuggler had not returned to see her for quite a few months, not since she had decided to commit to the Rebel Alliance. The length of time did not matter to Prisht. Time was meaningless, time was abstract. All that mattered was that Prisht could see her now. Only that she eventually came back to hold her. Kiss her. What was time against those feelings for her beautiful smuggler? Time did not change people as much as humans thought it did.
Humans. So short-lived. So constantly hurried.
Prisht beckoned Salla closer, feeling warm beneath her light gray skin. "You, yes. The ugly male will wait here."
Han Solo opened his hands wide in a gesture of outrage. "Hey!"
She looked at him critically, at his size and his heavy presence—the way he commanded attention from everyone, everywhere—and found herself as unimpressed as ever. Human males! The most disposable of the spectrum of human genders. Feral weakness behind flimsy domination. No forethought. No understanding of the intrinsic relationship between sentient creatures outside of their desperate need to overpower them. Salla Zend had warned her not to paint a wide stroke against all human males, but Prisht found nothing in this male—nor any other—to change her mind.
There had been but one exception and the Jedi who had freed her must be dead by now.
"I could kill you, if you would prefer?" Prisht asked, figuring it was a fair enough offer.
Dropping his hands, he crossed his arms, and leaned against the speeder in a sign of wary acceptance. "Uh. No, thanks."
Surprised, Prisht turned to Salla.
"Has he learned to behave himself?" she asked. "I expected more stubbornness from him."
Salla's grin was wide. "Doubtful. Mistryka can do many things but taming Slick over there is a different kind of battle."
"And I very much remember that you don't like to repeat yourself," he shouted. "I'll just… call Chewie on the Falcon."
"Oh," Prisht said, ignoring him. "Are they lovers?"
"Yes," Salla said, lower now that she was close. "You missed your chance, Prisht."
Grimacing, she nonetheless reached her hand to grasp Salla's, pulling her into her arms. For a brief moment Prisht felt almost too warm to be held, felt her body loosen and her limbs grow soft. Salla Zend smelled of soap and freshly-cleaned sheets, offering safety with some indescribable quality. So supple, her skin felt like Tansian silk, addictive to touch, and her voice in Prisht's ear was low enough not to be overhead. I've missed you, she murmured, and Prisht felt what she imagined humans must feel in their rambunctious, hormone-laden frenzies: like a shroud had been pulled over her head and, oddly and surprisingly, a burden had lifted from her chest.
"My love," she said and then pressed her lips to Salla's.
—0—
The whole scene felt familiar, except they were not on Home One and Leia was decidedly more emotionally stable than she had been the last time. For one, the training room on Echo Base was not sloppily painted red. It was a bright durasteel gray that reflected too much artificial light, so much so that it took her some time to adjust to the glare, and when she moved her eyes too fast, a sharp stab of pain would erupt from behind her retinas. Wisely, the designers of the training room had installed an actual floor—she imagined hand-to-hand combat drills on ice and shuddered for several different reasons—and there were convenient warming stations set up in the far left corner, too.
That was where she found Luke, standing beneath a red gamma light, only his head visible over the round plastex tube that gave his poor blood the heat it needed. She tried hard not to laugh.
Luke was suffering significantly on Hoth; he was much more at home on the arid desert planets. Tatooine's heat had prepared him well for the places where water was a life-or-death procurement and where knowing the signs of heatstroke served personnel well. Even the humid jungle of Yavin IV had been an acceptable environment for him.
But his background had done little to prepare him for this planet. They had been on Hoth for weeks now and while Chewie had whined and Han had growled under his breath—do I have that right? Maybe it's the other way around—Leia often caught Luke standing near an environmental stabilizer or in one of these heating stations. He had also taken to spending off-shift hours with Chewie on the Falcon, making use of the battered ship's life-support heating system.
She wondered how Luke had managed without his main source of heat since the Falcon had departed for Nar Shaddaa yesterday. She knew she had struggled to sleep last night, but that was for an entirely different reason.
"How long have you been in there?" she called out to him.
He smiled his boyish grin and it warmed her as surely as the heating station would have. "I've been through three cycles."
"Three?"
"The calibration is off," he answered. "I did two cycles and then started to sweat. When I started to get out, the sweat froze to my skin and I jumped back in."
Staring at him, her mirth attempted to take over and she utterly failed to suppress it.
"It's not funny!" he said. "I might be stuck in this thing forever."
The whine was too much and threw her into full laughter, unrestrained and free. "That's why you are supposed to do one cycle at a time. Everyone got that warning in their base debriefs."
"I gave one of those base debriefs. I just wasn't warm after one cycle," he lamented. "If I die in here, you can have my lightsaber. Just don't let Han play with it."
She walked over to the warming station and pressed the emergency release button. The plastex tube dissolved and she grabbed Luke's hand and forced him into a jog beside her.
"You need to find a solution to this problem," she said as he fell into step with her. "Chewie told me you spent an hour warming up in the Falcon's fresher a few days ago."
He huffed. "Chewie needs to mind his own business."
"I have eyes and ears everywhere, you know. There's no escaping my concern for you."
They lapsed into a companionable silence, broken only by the gradual increase in their respiration. It was nice, talking to him like this, allowing herself to accept him as family without existing under a veil of secrecy. Not everything could be taken so lightly; she still wasn't able to converse with Luke about Alderaan or her parents very often. She wanted to. She did. But the words got stuck in her throat whenever she tried.
She hoped that freedom came with time. Bail and Breha Organa would eventually be drawn into the equation of their shared history, but two years was a very thin margin to accept painful losses, and Leia had about two billion of them when it came to her homeworld's destruction. Add to it that it seemed her parents had known the complicated answers to the questions Luke and Leia now had, and she felt reluctant to talk too much about any of it.
"How are you doing without Han around?"
Leia didn't answer right away, choosing instead to stop their warm-up jog and move to the center of the floor. Two long, thin canes had been set there, and she wondered if Luke had been planning something specific when he asked her to meet him for a few combat drills.
"I'm fine," she finally said. "I'd rather he felt productive, and I'd much rather he be responsible for establishing a secure supply network so we don't starve or freeze to death here."
"Too late," Luke grumbled as he crouched to pick up one of the canes.
"Hush. No one else is having the same problems you are."
"No one else is from Tatooine."
She shook her head and took hold of the other cane on the floor. "Is there a reason we're using these today?"
Luke nodded. "I thought maybe I could show you what Ben showed me. And then you could show me whatever you know about fighting with swords."
"I never fought with swords," she hedged.
He cocked an eyebrow.
"It was an epee."
Luke laughed and Leia couldn't hide her slight smile. She knew her privileged background was a source of amusement for Han and Luke, how she sometimes slipped into her Coreworld accent or arranged her eating utensils into proper order. It would have been easy to become self-conscious about it but for the very careful way all of them deftly tip-toed around the subject of Alderaan.
"Okay," he said. "An epee. Teach me."
With an open expression on his face, he hefted the cane in his hand, neatly catching it in his other palm and drawing it in a circle as if to demonstrate his cunning handwork.
She sighed. "Look, I hated fencing. My tutor was an uptight parliamentarian and her lessons were long and useless in actual combat. I don't know what you could possibly learn from me that would help—"
"You learned something, though," he interrupted. "Between the two of us, you got to learn how. We're lucky if I turn on the lightsaber the right way."
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Ask Chewie. I almost impaled myself."
She peered into his eyes, wondering if the Wookiee would back up the story and deciding to ask him when he came back.
"Fine," she said on an exhale. "But I am not responsible if you fall asleep."
Luke smiled and gripped his cane with both hands, an eager wiggle to his step. Rolling her eyes, she stepped close and batted his left hand away from the cane.
"Dominant hand only," she said. "The other is up and away from the blade."
He frowned. "But lightsabers need—"
"We aren't fighting with lightsabers," she spoke over him. "I'm teaching you what I know of polite, rule-laden use of the epee. Choke up if it's too unwieldy."
He mimicked her, putting his grip farther down the cane.
"Now separate your feet and bend your knees."
After he had assumed a decent stance and moved his left hand out of the way, she started him on footwork, the quick step-step-step of a proper advance. His feet were sloppy, heavy and full-throated, and she had to backtrack her instruction into weight placement. How the ball of the foot created fleet-footedness, secured a quick rhythm. When he failed at that, too, she had him put down the cane and practice basic calf-raises, simply rising onto the balls of his feet without rolling the ankles out or tweaking the knees.
"This doesn't feel like fencing," he said on an exhale as he struggled. "My calves are killing me."
"That's because it isn't fencing," she said, walking around him. "This is dance. You need to understand your feet first."
And Luke, sweet, eager Luke, simply shrugged. "Didn't have much of that on Tatooine, either."
And that much was obvious. Why would a moisture-farmer need any such training?
"I liked dance better than I liked fencing," she said as she resumed her exercises with him. "At least in dance I didn't feel like what I was doing was a lie."
"What do you mean?"
"Fencing always felt like a facade. Aristocrats pretending to be veterans of combat. No one actually uses an epee in a real war. It's a glorification of violence from a bygone era."
"Except the Jedi."
She smiled. "Right. Like I said, a bygone era."
Bending down again to pick up the discarded canes, she handed one to him and assumed her en garde stance. She advanced without moving the weapon, snap-snap-snap, only her feet, and now the dance disappeared, no longer a bourree but an attack.
"I hated it," she continued. "I hated how unnecessary it was. I was in no danger of someone kidnapping me from the Winter Palace with an epee. If they came, they would do so with a blaster set for stun. So it all felt very hollow."
"Why did you compete in it if you hated it so much?"
Sighing, she beckoned him her way. "Come at me."
He shuffled forward, a bit smoother now but with a hiccuping kind of rhythm that belied how unused his muscles were to this kind of movement. He would be sore tomorrow.
"My father liked it and I was good," she answered him. "Epee especially. It was the only form where I could attack my opponent's whole body."
Luke laughed. "That sounds like you."
"I know," she said. "Put your hand back."
He complied with a quick sorry and she continued.
"The other forms all had rules about not attacking the limbs or the head or the wrist. And if I had to be competing in anything, I'd much rather be able to fully attack anything I could reach. Imperials shoot everywhere."
"Everywhere is right," Luke muttered, then a thought occurred to him. "It's interesting your father liked you in fencing. Do you think he was trying to train you for—?"
He trailed off as Leia tumbled into memory, going back to conversations between father and pre-adolescent daughter, how necessary he said it was for her to learn, how she would thank him one day, how fencing taught unique lessons about life and protection.
"I don't know," she said, and then as quick as the snap of an epee, she demanded, "Put your hand back."
—0—
There was a moment as he walked down the Falcon's ramp.
As she stood there.
When Han remembered to breathe for the first time in a week.
"Sweetheart," he announced. "Did you miss me?"
The air bit his exposed skin and her hair was a perfectly-sculpted masterpiece and he felt like the galaxy had jumped ahead without him. And yet she was right there, at the base of the ramp, like she had told him she would, before he had left. Somehow that was the biggest surprise of all.
"No," she replied, but her kiss told him otherwise. "I didn't miss you at all."
—0—
The galaxy spun and Prisht was patient.
Her business had changed once again as she'd shifted to help the Rebel Alliance. The markets had moved as well, prices fluctuating on Nar Shaddaa and Jabba the Hutt continuing his attempts to cull her associates from her roster.
But she was a shrewd business-being. The beauty of her enterprise was in its freedom to evolve and change as circumstances demanded. And her newest endeavors were sound, if exceedingly dangerous should she be caught.
She hadn't made the Alliance a priority; she'd simply allowed those contacted by Han Solo's squadron to use her berths to network and source the supplies they needed. Curious, the way traffic had not tapered off. Even more curious, the way new sources had been brought into the fold, through either genuine desire to support the Alliance or to snub their noses at the Imperial system. Just last week a contract for regular shipments of bacta had been granted to a small farmer from Thyferra, funnelled through her docking bays and into the hands of the Alliance. That was a tremendous haul for all parties concerned: for her commission, for the farmer and for the rebels, all.
And so she sat behind a larger desk, in a larger office, with her files neatly organized into holodisks that lined one of the five walls, walls which were now painted a slightly darker shade of white—the last time she'd been here Salla Zend had called it eggshell but Prisht did not eat eggs—and there was still no wasted space. She did not decorate so much as she attacked, and that is what she had done here. Her business was entirely founded on clean schedules, secrecy and zero waste. And so was her office.
This time, when the security suite on the upper right hand corner of her desk buzzed, she was not as startled as she had been six weeks ago; she had been expecting this arrival all morning.
Salla Zend, she thought with a tenor of impatience and pleasure.
Arriving at the docking bay, Prisht engaged the toggles for the turbolift, which brought the speeder down, down, down into the bay, then receded and closed off the ceiling hatch as surely as if it had never opened. When the eager hum of machinery was cut off with a quiet jerk, she opened the hatch with a wave of her hand and stepped through with confidence.
Her hair was down, a curtain of the richest black Prisht had ever seen. The sleeves of her flight suit were rolled up to her elbows and she was absent from any male companion, a decided improvement from her last arrival.
"My love," she called from the hatchway. "You are late."
Salla smiled, teeth white and gleaming in the overhead lights, and ran the last few steps to where Prisht was perched, kissing her hard in welcome without a single word. She tasted of sweet-fire candy and Prisht felt like she could absorb the opposing flavors into herself if she tried hard enough. Such heat with such delight; that was who Salla was to her. A dichotomous mess that was still uniquely reliable.
"I'm here to make sure the contracts are still viable as previously agreed upon," she said against Prisht's lips.
Prisht ran a light finger down Salla's neck. "They are indeed viable. Is Mistryka satisfied with our work?"
"She is indeed. She sends her best regards."
"Good," Prisht said and kissed her again. "Is that all you have brought me? Your princess' satisfaction?"
Safety, yes: such existed in the space between the two of them. But Prisht also felt desperate, a keen longing to run her hands through her lover's hair, to feel her lips on her ear, to be able to abandon the structures of business and let the lines wave in their simple, chaotic orbits.
"Unofficially I am here for my own satisfaction," Salla Zend whispered.
Prisht opened her hands, felt her lavender eyes shift into darker shades of purple. Heat and desire ran through her body, warmed her cold blood, made her come alive as very little managed to do these days. Oh, but Salla Zend spoke fire, and consumed as surely as any flame.
"Then it is good you left the ugly man on your mysterious base," she murmured and returned to Salla's lips.
—0—
"Can you deflect stun bolts?"
Luke's question seemed to come out of nowhere, stopping the epee drill with all the suddenness of an actual stun bolt. Taken aback, Leia dropped her stance and cocked an eyebrow at him.
Where had that thought come from? She had no idea.
He was improving, slowly and methodically, with every passing day. His footwork in particular had made great strides and he was starting to understand the very basics of swordsmanship. She still harangued him about form, about his feet, hands, back. About his open, slack jaw. About the way his eyes would shift when he was about to attack. About telegraphing his intentions with every step he took.
It was slow work. Leia had spent nearly every day with her brother, trying to help him improve with the same speed she remembered from her childhood days. The cavernous divide between how she had trained on Alderaan and how Luke trained now was so enormous, and so treacherous a path, that she often had to remind herself that Luke was a different person.
Sometimes he surprised her: those rare moments when he'd hide his intent or when she would be distracted by, say, memories of her time with Han the night before. He would harness the moment, strike when she was vulnerable, and that's how she would see glimmers of his potential, the fighter he could be if he could just focus on his opponent instead of looking so far inward. It was slowing his progress down.
But then again... What was the rush? As she had said weeks ago during their first training session, she was not training him to use a lightsaber. She didn't have the knowledge to do that. She was only killing time between the establishment of a functional base, between supply orders and parts requisition, between times when Han was on-base and times when he was out commanding his squadron. Who cared if Luke Skywalker ever learned how to parry with an epee?
Can you deflect stun bolts? He had asked, and she had the ludicrous thought to answer in the affirmative.
But that was not helpful. Leia tilted her head, lowered her cane. "With an epee? No."
Luke shifted his stance and automatically resumed his individual footwork drills as was his habit when she took herself out of sparring.
"Remember how I told you Ben had me train with a remote?" he said. "I'd heard that Jedi could deflect stun bolts with their lightsabers."
Ah, yes. This made more sense to her. "I imagine that would be a great skill to have."
"When I tried, I failed miserably," he said with a light laugh.
She considered the idea, what the fundamental difficulties would be in parrying stun bolts with a lightsaber. It seemed like it would be very intense and advanced work; anticipating where another person would shoot was not simple swordsmanship. That was more like Luke's colors: nebulous and discerning.
"That doesn't sound like a lesson in parrying stun bolts," she said after a moment. "It sounds like a lesson in humility."
"Maybe," he admitted. "Or maybe it was a test."
She blinked. "A test for what?"
Luke licked his lips and resumed his calf-raises, knowing where he needed work and using his time to multitask. When he next spoke, he was thoughtful. Resigned.
"You didn't know you were Force-sensitive until you manipulated energy with your hands and shut doors without touching them," he said. "I knew I was Force-sensitive—really knew it—when I heard Obi-Wan's voice in my head making the shot that destroyed the Death Star."
She processed that while running through her opening drills, the physical exertion a good vehicle for a clear mind. Luke wasn't wrong. It didn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things—they still didn't have anyone to teach them and anyone who might know about the Force had been executed long ago—but it was an intriguing thought.
"Can you tell me more about seeing people's colors?" she said through an exhale. "I admit, it still seems very incomprehensible to me. Like auras, almost?"
The past few weeks had been about listening to each other, seeing each other from a different perspective. Luke, her friend, had told her of his childhood years ago, had explained the deaths of his aunt and uncle and of the old hermit who he now believed had watched over him his entire life. But the other Luke—her twin brother—had nuance to his story because now it was her story, too. And while she had only started to open up to him about Bail and Breha Organa, he had regaled her with stories from Tatooine's wasteland for hours. He was far more open than she was. Far more willing.
Leia started running through the advanced epee drills by herself: the lunges, the parries, the quick, tight blaze of controlled fury she remembered from her youth. She was starting to feel an anxious desire to run away but she had promised Luke to try and she wanted to share this with him. She needed to keep moving
Stay busy, she demanded of herself, but stay.
Luke sat on the ground, elbows on his knees, watching her with interest. "I don't know how to explain it," he said. "It's not something I can control and it's not always in colors. It's just that sometimes people begin with a certain energy and then will shift to another and that means that they feel something more."
"More than what?"
"Just… more. It's not a sophisticated enough skill to tell me what they're feeling. It's more like an indication of how deeply they feel at the time. And it's not coded: they don't always switch colors. It's very nebulous, I guess. Very abstract."
Leia harnessed the power of her breath and moved through a quick thrust combination. She wasn't as precise as she had been as a child—her years as a senator and then a rebel had obviously dulled some of her technique—but it still felt good. Heat and blood and oxygen as she pushed her muscles, as she tried a wider range of motion. The cane was thicker than her epee, nowhere near balanced in weight, but it was something to hold and something to use and something to focus on.
"The first time I met Han he looked like he was spontaneously combusting."
Turning her head, she exhaled and looked back at him. "What do you mean?"
"I didn't trust him," he said, looking at her with those soft blue eyes. "Ben had found him and Chewie in the cantina, and the minute he spoke, his whole body just erupted in red."
Pressing the end of the cane into the floor, Leia leaned on it.
"Before that day, I had never met anyone whose color looked like that who didn't want to kill me. Sand people were always red, so I automatically took it to mean that they were dangerous."
"Obi-Wan didn't look red to you?"
Luke shook his head. "He mostly just stayed a cool, still blue, except when he talked about my father's—our father's—death. And even then it wasn't a red, it was… just like… wind whipping across the sand dunes. Turbulence."
Interesting, Leia thought. She walked to him and sat cross-legged in front of him. "But Han was red?"
"I realized after I met you that the red doesn't mean bad. It's just that some people feel things more deeply than others."
Well, that certainly could be the case. Han's whole mercenary facade was based on the idea that he didn't care about anybody or anything. He had worked hard to develop that front and it had worked well for him, kept him alive.
The problem, as she'd realized in the intervening years, was that Han felt things very deeply. He wasn't an empath and even though he had given no indication that he could sense what others felt, he felt his own emotions with wholesome disdain. Somewhere along the line he'd been taught that love, loss and pain were dangerous and so he had adopted a careless mask. Knowing Han as she did now, she thought he probably figured he would fake the apathy until it was real.
And then Luke's last words sunk in. "After you met me?"
He was staring at her, patient and guileless. "Your color is pretty obvious, Leia. Even when you try to look like you don't care, you seem to be feeling something."
"Is my color red?"
"I'm not explaining this well at all," he said. "I'm making it sound like different colors mean different things and that's not… It's not that simple. I wish I could show you."
She waited, watching him struggle to put into words something he had always seemed to know, a fundamental truth that no one else understood. How alienating that must be, Leia thought, to see evidence of someone's hidden truths but not be able to explain it to anyone else. Did he ever feel like he was invading their privacy? Did he ever refer to it and receive looks of suspicion?
"Right now your color—what did you call it? Your aura—is like mist," he whispered. "You're projecting it around me."
Wondrous and terrifying, his truth. From her point of view, they were sitting across from each other, sweat cooling onto their skin. There was no mist, no color. Only Hoth's cold air and the feeling of mysticism interrupting the rigid structures of the real world.
"And you didn't think this was related to the Force before you met the droids?"
He shrugged. "I didn't know anything about my father then. How could I have possibly known about the Force?"
She struggled to understand, struggled to comprehend the enormity of what he was telling her. The pure vagueness of his talk of colors… that it wasn't about colors at all. That it was about their substance instead. Or that he could differentiate intent based entirely on this metaphysical sight of his.
"What are you thinking?" he asked, low.
She licked her lips. "I was thinking about how alienating that must be for you."
"Hmm. What else?"
"I was thinking that I've never seen anything like what you are describing. I've never seen someone's aura or mist or anything like that."
Luke sighed. "And you aren't trying to give me anything? Trying to offer me anything?"
"No."
She was baffled. Offer him? She empathized with him, sure, but it wasn't as if she could help him in any way. She was living in the physical world while he seemed to be standing between two different ones, and it was beyond her ken to fully comprehend what he was talking about.
"And you've never looked at Han and thought he was… shouting for your attention?"
That made her laugh. "Well, he does that quite literally."
"He does it metaphorically, too," he said around a soft smile. "Like a child. Exactly how you would imagine he'd feel when he sees the Falcon. Happy and excited and dying for attention."
Leia tucked her smile away, a little uncomfortable with Luke knowing so much about how Han saw her or how she saw him. She imagined how useless their efforts had been to hide their relationship from Luke, how fruitless it had been to try and deceive someone who had a grip on a world she couldn't yet grasp.
Disturbed, she tried to shift away from the topic of Han. "Did you tell Obi-Wan about this?"
Luke rolled his eyes. "I didn't have the chance."
Quiet settled between them, calm and easy. Leia was content to let Luke think, to let him express whatever it was he needed to express. She was no empath, either, but he looked conflicted about something, softly disturbed, his seriousness so unlike his usual buoyancy. She saw it in the way his shoulders rolled forward, in the faraway look in his eyes, in the way his right index finger tap-tap-tapped on his shin with a speed his feet would envy.
"It doesn't make sense to me," he whispered at length. "We're twins. How is it that we experience things so differently?"
She thought about that, considered the stories her father had told her of the brave Jedi Masters he'd known during the Clone Wars, the way his voice would turn reverent and his eyes would glimmer. She could understand it better now, listening to Luke talk about his gifts. Like her father, she couldn't fathom how doing such things was possible.
"My father used to tell me stories of the Jedi," she admitted around the lump in her throat. "He talked about them in a lateral sense, because he had known some of them but had no concept of how they did what they did."
Leila, the Force isn't good or bad, right or wrong. There is no morality behind it. It just is. The Jedi were simply the ones who would learn to wield it.
"They were healers and teachers, knights and masters," she continued. "It would stand to reason that there were personal strengths and weaknesses to the Order."
"You think we have different strengths."
She nodded. "And weaknesses. I think that's pretty obvious, don't you?"
Luke settled into quiet again, then broke his own silence. "There is so much we don't know."
She hummed and let the moment linger, sitting with a brother who understood the galaxy in a completely different way than she did.
—0—
Han missed her with an ache that shocked him. Not because he was surprised that he loved her so much that being away felt like a part of him was missing, but because of how fast that had happened. He'd been a smuggler, and before that an Imperial cadet, and before that a pickpocket, and in none of these iterations had he felt like he was missing a limb when he slept. Nothing like the way he felt when he needed to hear her voice calming him down after some stupid meeting.
But now it was all Leia, all the time. And he wasn't sure how to deal with that.
Chewie, the great philosopher, called it growth.
This is what it means to be committed to another outside of yourself, he had said.
"This is what it means to go fuck yourself," Han replied.
Damn Wook knew too much about it to let him stay in denial. He had grinned with massive canine teeth and a glint in his blue eyes that told Han he would drop it for now but the conversation was not over.
Sighing in defeat, Han tucked his chin to his chest and thought about what Leia's hair smelled like after a fresher.
—0—
The galaxy spun and Prisht worried.
She was confident in her choice to add a full thirty percent increase in workforce to her existing operation for the pure benefit of the Alliance. It was hard, grueling work but it was also work done with a clear conscience. And it was lucrative besides. Her associates paid their dues and the loading bay schedules were full to the brim. Clandestine trades had begun to happen and she took her share from those as well. Bacta for foodstuff; hauling freight for a lead on ammunition.
Such was war. She had no qualms.
Instead she worried about the rumors she had heard. She did not engage in them, did not seek them out. But they were rampant in the corridors of The Distributary, traders from offworld telling stories of dark promises of bounties, of rewards on the head of one man. And while bounties did not bother her, she feared the safety of her contracts should one of her associates take it upon themselves to fulfill them.
"My love," she said as soon as the speeder hit the deck-plates of the bay. "There has been a development."
Salla Zend jumped out of the speeder, looking resplendent in shirt and trousers, high boots and hair wild around her head. "And what's that?"
Prisht waited until the lift clicked into place above them. "Jabba the Hutt has increased the bounty on Han Solo," she said once the bay was secure and quiet.
Orange eyes widened and then narrowed. "How much?"
"Over five hundred thousand for Solo, another two thousand for the Wookiee."
Salla Zend took in the information as she always did: quickly, calmly and with a decided glint of action to the quirk of her lips. "That doesn't surprise me. Surely Jabba knows who Solo is working for."
"You do not understand," Prisht said. "The reward has drawn the attention of a particular bounty hunter named Boba Fett. The Mandalorian is dangerous, my love."
Lifting a hand to Prisht's cheek, Salla Zend pursed her lips and looked decidedly less-than-concerned. "Okay. I'll let them know when I get back on base. Are we done with business now?"
Prisht blinked and settled into the safe haven of Salla Zend's lips, even as the doubt and worry receded to the background of her dimmest, darkest brain, ready to protect as surely as to attack if threatened. Do not get caught, she thought to the ugly man. Do not destroy my business with your foolish attachments.
—0—
Luke dreamt of dark greens and browns, of heat and methane, of mist and smoke. The scene was completely foreign to him, like the dreams of falling—the ones he'd shared with Leia—but without the terror. This was intriguing, mysterious. Not safe, not by any stretch of the imagination, but familiar, almost.
Luke.
He turned as if startled, even though he didn't truly feel that way. He felt… tethered? Entranced. As if he was always supposed to turn, as if his body was a simple thing and reacted on animal instincts.
Luke.
The man wasn't far away but his voice sounded as if he was speaking from a great distance. That didn't surprise Luke, either. He'd been dead for almost two and a half years now.
"Ben?"
You will go to the Dagobah system.
"Dagobah system?"
He'd never heard of it. Then again, there was still much he didn't know about the galaxy.
There you and your sister will learn from Yoda, the Jedi Master who instructed me.
Luke frowned. The concepts were simple but questions flew around the inside of his skull like may-gnats. He and Leia. Learn. Yoda, who had instructed Ben.
They would learn about the Jedi. They would train.
Hope. It lit him from the inside-out, beyond the lines of his physical body, and into where he'd fallen asleep aboard the Falcon. The dream started to ebb away, ripples in the image signifying wakefulness. The old master wavered into nothing and Luke was suddenly awake and staring at the Falcon's crew cabin hull, the durasteel rivets rusted and the seams haphazardly coated with sealant.
"Yoda," he whispered.
"The Dagobah system."
Author's Note: Happy Birthday, Specter! Our baby is now one year old, and we are proud of her! Thank you for hanging in there, dear readers. We know how difficult the past few months have been and that people are feeling some apathy to fic in general. We are grateful to you for continuing on this journey with us; we're in it for the long haul and will be here if you need a Specter-hiatus.
Special thanks as always to AmongstEmeraldClouds for her superb editing work and her generally superb friendship. The next chapter of Specter will be posted Sunday, November 1st. Thank you, again! - KR