Note: We're back! This is an extra-long chapter, both because it's been a long while since an update, and because the muse was being kind. Here, we move firmly into TLJ fix-it/gut rehab territory, as I steal a few good lines and make a few references to that film's events, but put them into a vastly different context. (Extra points for locating said references.) Many thanks to all the readers who have so kindly encouraged me to keep this fic going!
Wedge, Rey, and Luke arrive at the new base, only to learn some disturbing news. Meanwhile, Jaina and Finn race back to D'Qar to rescue Han and Leia, making use of the Force to help them even the odds. Leia and Jaina have a heart-to-heart about choices and consequences.
Chapter 6 - Not a Swan Song
Rey had a funny feeling as she pulled into the hangar with the rest of the Rogues. She couldn't put her finger on it, but something felt…off.
It was probably just the situation, all the tension being released now that they'd stopped preparing for the move to a new base, and were finally here. And flying with the Rogues was still a little new; Rey'd had to get used to flying in tandem with others, following commands rather than just winging it on her own. As much as she trusted Wedge and her other Rogue companions, she'd missed flying with her sister over the last few weeks.
Sister. She was trying that out, sort of, still in this little borderland between actually belonging to the Organa-Solo-Skywalker-Antilles family and feeling like a little stray animal they'd picked up along the way. It wasn't their fault; they seemed to take special care to include her in family gatherings and activities. But it wasn't quite the same as truly being their sister, their daughter, their niece. She hadn't grown up with Jaina; her own parents were a dim memory, a set of footsteps on a departing ship, a want that she'd never quite been able to give up. Rey belonged somewhere else, to someone else. Despite the truth she'd felt in Maz's words, a small part of her still wondered whether her family might come back to Jakku someday, and find her gone.
She was a long way from Jakku now. To think, after all those years of wearing someone else's helmet, doing sims in that crashed AT-AT, she was here with her own ship, part of a squadron. Wearing her very own helmet and her own flight suit in that garish shade of orange.
Rey finished her post-landing checks and climbed down from her X-wing. The hangar in the new base was vast, incredible. Even before they'd started evacuating D'Qar, there hadn't been this much activity. The whole place hummed pleasantly, and the feeling steadied her a bit.
And speaking of her squadron, it was time to check in. She left her R4 unit to wrap up the post-flight sequence and headed toward Wedge and Wes, who were chatting up ahead.
"Rogue Eight," Wedge greeted, smiling warmly. "Welcome home."
Rey liked Wedge, a lot; something about the way he treated her made some of her transition feel a little less awkward. They weren't close or anything—and Wedge never pretended that they were closer than they were, which she appreciated—but unlike others who seemed to regard her and Finn with some strange sort of awe, Wedge just acted as if she already belonged. Like she just needed the odd lesson in sabacc and a little more time on base and it would be like the Resistance had always been her home.
Home. Another interesting thought. Rey tried that one out, too.
"Rey-of-Light," Wes greeted, his smile a little more wicked than warm. The older Rogues seemed to have adopted this nickname for her, and while Rey didn't mind it—it was kind of nice to be thought of enough to already have a nickname—she still felt a little shy around Wes. He was tough to anticipate, maybe that was why. Brash and irreverent outside the cockpit, then intensely focused in the air. And constantly joking, though at times it was hard to tell if you were supposed to be in on the joke or not.
"Hi," she returned. "My mech is finishing up. Just checking in."
Wedge gave her a little nod, like a salute without the hand motion. "You're checked in." He cocked his head toward the back of the hangar. "Now if my husband would quit arguing with his droid, we could get dinner sometime this week."
Rey laughed, following Wedge's gaze to where Luke appeared to be having a spirited discussion with Artoo Detoo. Sassy little droid, she thought fondly. Once powered up again, Artoo had apparently been a little put out not to have been brought to Ahch-To with Luke and Jaina, so he had been giving Luke a lot more grief than normal. Or at least that was Jaina's take on the subject. Chewie claimed that Artoo hadn't changed at all: [He was always this stubborn, you simply forgot.]
She was just about to ask Wedge and Wes if they'd seen Finn or Jaina yet, when Poe Dameron came sprinting up to them, breathless. He was still in his flight suit; Rey hadn't realized that the squadrons for the last transport had even landed yet. It looked like he'd jumped out of the cockpit and run straight here.
"Rey, General, good, you're here. Where's Jaina?" Poe demanded.
He looked desperate, and Rey's off feeling from when they'd first landed returned, intensifying into an unsettled queasiness.
Wedge seemed to have caught on immediately that something was up, and his face turned intense and serious. "What's wrong?"
Poe struggled to catch his breath, then swallowed hard. "Leia, and Solo," he managed, looking from Wedge back to Rey, "didn't make the transport. I'm sorry."
There was clearly more to it than that, but Poe stopped to look around again. "We need to find Jaina, before—"
"She and Finn took the Falcon here," Rey supplied. "They came before us." She had thought it odd that Finn and Jaina hadn't been here to meet the Rogues, but perhaps they'd been assigned somewhere else.
Wedge clapped a hand on Poe's shoulder. "Son—what happened?"
Poe looked like he'd rather do anything than share this news. "They were in the shuttle bay. First Order bombed it. We were on the comm when—when it blew," he said. "I'm so sorry."
Wedge had gone pale, and Rey saw Wes grab his arm to steady him. Poe looked like he was on the verge of tears.
Rey just stood there for a moment, her mouth open. She wasn't really certain how to feel. It was all sort of surreal, sort of outside herself. She understood what Poe was trying to say—they're dead, I'm so sorry, we need to reach Jaina so she doesn't hear about her parents from someone else—but it was like his words were just rolling over the top of her head rather than penetrating her brain. The strange thing was that this news that should be crushing her, that the man she'd come to think of as a father was dead, again, didn't seem right. It didn't make any sense.
She hadn't felt it.
Would she have felt it? She'd felt Han's supposed death the first time, and she was fairly certain she'd never forget what that had felt like. But he was hidden in the Force now, and while she loved Leia, they weren't as close—
"They're alive," said a voice behind her, expressing the feeling, the hope that had been caught in Rey's consciousness. As Luke spoke, she felt something click, something fall into place.
"Oh, thank Force," Wedge said, grabbing his husband into a hug and clutching him tightly for a few moments. As he pulled back, Rey saw that some of the color had returned to his face. "You felt them?"
Luke nodded, but he still looked pretty serious. Poe still looked like he wanted to cry, now from relief, and out of instinct, Rey grabbed his shoulder and squeezed it. He gave her a grateful look.
Wedge breathed in and out, his breath still a little harsh. He thought he'd lost Leia, Rey thought. They'd been all the other had for a long time, until Luke, Jaina, and Han had returned. "They're okay?" he asked again.
"For the moment," Luke answered.
"Okay," Wedge said, his composure returning. "We should still probably try to find Jaina, before she gets any ideas about—"
Jaina's not here, Rey thought, like it had just come to her.
"She already went back after them," Luke said. "She and Finn."
Wedge shook his head. "Of course she fucking did."
Finn didn't rattle easily, but as he double-checked the coordinates for the second leg in their sequence of jumps, he was still vibrating with the adrenaline of their exit from the new Resistance base. Jaina brought them out of hyper at the rendezvous, then almost immediately into their jump back to D'Qar. Finn sank into Chewbacca's seat, his heart still pounding.
Eyes on the viewscreen, they both sat silently for a few minutes as the stars transformed into long strands of light. Hyperspace was oddly calming, Finn had to admit. He felt his body settle a little.
That didn't mean they could afford to sit around mesmerized by the view. "All right," he said, finally breaking the silence. "What's the plan?"
Jaina looked at him like he had an extra head. "We're going back to D'Qar for Mom and Dad."
He turned the same look back on her.
After glaring at him for a few more beats, Jaina's face softened. "Yes, I know we need a plan for when we get there." She breathed out, an audible sigh. "I was a little busy getting the Falcon off the base."
Finn suddenly recalled Han's face when they'd reached Starkiller Base and Finn had admitted that he'd not had a plan beyond getting to Starkiller Base. There was a neat sort of irony in his being on the other side of that situation, he supposed. And at least this time he'd brought it up before they'd arrived.
"Okay, so—a mission plan. We can do that," he said. Most of his First Order training was in things like ground troop leadership protocols, but surely some of that knowledge could apply to this situation. They both knew the D'Qar base, and Jaina knew the Falcon and her parents. Although maybe not in a battle situation. "What do we know? What do we have to work with?"
The confidence he'd tried to project must have worked, because Jaina perked up, suddenly more engaged. "Well, we're pretty sure they missed the transport," she began.
"Right."
"And if we felt it in the Force, the First Order must be there already."
That's right. The Force had alerted them that something was wrong; could the Force help them figure out how to fix it? How did one consult the Force about things like this?
No matter. Save that for when we've exhausted what we know.
"When I was with—them. The First Order," Finn said, "we would come in after a bombardment. Cleanup, hit anything left behind, retrieve data or, uh, stragglers." He didn't love where he'd gotten that knowledge, but was grateful to have it.
Jaina nodded. She turned to the ship's computer and began pulling up maps, furiously flipping through menus and screens, until a familiar schematic appeared on the display. "Here," she said, tilting the display so he could see.
They went over the diagrams of the D'Qar base, making their best guesses as to where Han and Leia would likely take cover, what sections of the base would be bombarded, and possible places they could set the Falcon down long enough to pick the two of them up. Or more of them, if others had missed the transport, too.
"What are we looking at, you think?" Jaina asked. "A couple Star Destroyers? More?"
"Hard to say," Finn said, trying to recall what he'd seen in past actions, what they'd studied in his training. Fleet dynamics wasn't really his main area of expertise, but Finn found he had a good memory for some of those kinds of details. Maybe his habit of noticing things nobody else took mind of could finally be used for good.
He closed his eyes, thought back. "Probably more," he said. "It'll be Hux. Starkiller was his project." He opened his eyes again to look at Jaina. "He'll want to kill everything with fire."
Not that he'd ever thought this would be easy, but yeah. This was getting worse the more Finn thought about it.
"Kriff," Jaina swore. "Okay. We'll just have to do it"—she chuckled to herself, as if remembering a joke—"real quiet-like."
"Well, yeah, but how?" Slipping past what would likely be multiple Star Destroyers, and their fleets of TIE fighters, with no other Resistance ships in the system to draw their attention, was not exactly a simple proposition.
"We'll use the Force," Jaina declared.
"Uh—" Finn had a pretty good idea of what his expression looked like right now. That's not how the Force works!
But Jaina was undeterred. "When we went to Starkiller," she explained, "the planet was shielded. Uncle Luke used the Force to disrupt the shields long enough for us to get in—"
"But not so long that you'd be detected," Finn completed.
"Right." Jaina's voice was gaining in confidence as she spoke. "So this time, we use the Force to disrupt sensors until we can get on-planet without getting noticed. And then to help us run the blockade on the way out."
Okay, he had to acknowledge that that was slightly better than his plan to rescue Rey. Still an incredible risk, but if this Force trick worked, it certainly evened the odds considerably.
Jaina spent a minute fiddling with something on the display, then stopped and turned to Finn again, like she'd just thought of something. "Uh—when you went back for Rey. How did Dad and Chewie get you past the shield to get on-planet?"
"Uh." It had felt risky at the time, but now that he was repeating it out loud, it sounded even more ridiculous. "We made the approach at lightspeed. To avoid the fractional refresh on the shields."
Jaina turned her attention fully on him. "You approached the planet at lightspeed."
Finn nodded.
"How are you not a burn mark on the side of a glacier? No, don't answer that," she said, shaking her head and turning back to the display. She said something Finn didn't fully catch, but it sounded suspiciously like a curse.
"Not Force-sensitive my ass," she muttered, with a little chuckle.
Finn looked at her quizzically.
"Old argument," she explained. "I have something new to give Dad shit about when we rescue them."
"Credit for your thoughts," Wedge offered. No use pretending either one of us is sleeping.
Normally Luke managed his stress levels pretty well through meditation and the Force, but when he was agitated, there was something different about the way he lay in bed. He'd lie still—trying to avoid tossing and turning and keeping Wedge up—but Wedge knew that his mind wasn't quiet at all.
Luke turned toward him. "Thought you were asleep."
Wedge put a hand to his chin, and moved forward to kiss him lightly. "Your brain is loud, Love," he said, smiling.
"Sorry," Luke said, but Wedge shook his head.
"No 'sorry's," he said. "You want to talk about it?"
Luke sighed, closing his eyes briefly. "Maybe."
Wedge laughed. "Ah, I see. I get to pry it out of you."
He would never really force Luke to talk if he didn't want to; over their decades together, they'd struggled and stumbled through these kinds of conversations many times. Being in tune with the Force, feeling the connections between yourself and all the other life in the universe was great in some respects, but sometimes it made it all the more frustrating when you were struggling with something inside your own head, your own heart.
Sometimes, it's our job to make 'em be selfish, Han had said once, and Wedge wholeheartedly agreed on that count.
Luke turned on his back again. "I don't quite know what it is, that's the thing."
Wedge turned to his back, too, and took Luke's hand.
"Okay," he said, resisting the temptation to ask follow-up questions. Was it Leia and Han he was troubled about? Or Jaina and Finn, running off half-cocked to rescue them? Or were those worries somewhere in the background, and it was something else?
"Just feeling kind of—useless," Luke said.
Well, that was understandable. The Resistance wasn't really in a position to risk everything to go back for the four of them right now, and Wedge knew Leia wouldn't have wanted them to do so anyway. They'd have to talk Chewie down when he got back from Kashyyyk—fuck, he was going to be beyond pissed off at all this—but mostly, they'd just have to wait.
Maybe Luke'd had enough of waiting. He had come back for Han in a hell of a hurry. Of course, that had been in response to a vision…
"You didn't—see something, did you?" Wedge asked.
Luke turned back towards him again. "No, no. No visions," he assured Wedge. "I just—I don't know."
Another thought came to Wedge. "This about your training session today?"
Luke had come back early from this morning's session with Rey and had disappeared for a while to meditate. He'd seemed a bit off, which wasn't surprising. Even if most of their family hadn't been in danger halfway across the galaxy, they were all still adjusting to the new base and all the changes that had taken place over the last couple of months.
"No. Well, I don't think so," Luke amended. "I mean—it didn't go great. But I think that's more of a symptom."
"Mmm," Wedge affirmed.
Their quarters were quiet for a few moments. Luke's hand, the flesh one, was still in his. Without looking, Wedge could trace the veins running through it, the roughened skin that gave way to the softer pads of his fingers. He used to worry, in those years apart, that he'd forget the feel of this hand in his, that what he knew of his husband would fade each day, until the last sands of it had washed away.
Like the wave returning to the sea. Ahch-To, a planet of oceans. Luke's home for the last four years.
Understanding dawning on him, he looked over at Luke in the dark. "It's okay to miss her, you know. To worry about her."
Luke blinked a few times before answering. "Leia?"
Wedge smiled. "Her too. But I'm talking about Jaina."
Luke didn't say anything to that, but he didn't correct it, either. That usually was a sign that Wedge had hit on the crux of the issue.
After a long pause, Luke finally responded. "I don't why I can't let it go," he admitted. "There's nothing we can do from here."
"True," Wedge agreed.
"And I'm trying to remind myself that she's grown up." He paused. "She really is a powerful Jedi, already."
"And a hell of a pilot," Wedge noted. "And an impulsive eighteen-year-old. Whose DNA probably still gives the ol' Alliance High Command nightmares. That's a lot of brave and reckless in one being."
Luke chuckled mildly at that one.
"And you miss your kid," Wedge continued.
Wedge didn't have the Force, but he could practically feel Luke's reaction to that. "She's not my—"
"I'm not saying that to slam Han or Leia," Wedge interrupted. "Jaina has parents, good ones. But you've been raising her for the last four years. And now she's gone and jumped into a dangerous situation and you can't be there to help her."
That seemed to resonate.
"Find your water on your own," Luke muttered.
"What?"
"If you chase the krayt into its cave, you'll have to find your water on your own," Luke said. "Something Uncle Owen used to say."
"Thought Beru was the one with all the quotable wisdom," Wedge said.
He could see Luke shrug a little. "Most of it," he said. "Owen's was...a little more blunt."
"Mmm," Wedge replied. "Guessing you were fond of krayt caves?"
"No," Luke protested. Then, after a pause, "Not real ones."
"Of course not real ones," Wedge said. "I've heard enough about Beggar's Canyon to know that you probably ran into enough metaphorical caves to give your uncle a few coronaries."
"I was a good kid," Luke protested. "He didn't know about most of them."
"Right."
They were both quiet for a few beats, then Wedge spoke. "You would do the exact same thing in her shoes."
"And you wouldn't?"
"Oh, I think you know I would," Wedge acknowledged. "That's why I fit into this family so well."
That elicited another soft laugh from Luke.
"Speaking of family," Wedge said. "There is someone else here on base who could probably use you right about now. You know, desert kid, crack pilot, strong in the Force?"
Luke sighed. "Rey."
"New audience for all your Tatooine wisdom," Wedge teased.
"Shut up," Luke said, elbowing his husband in the ribs.
"What? Some of it is good stuff. But seriously," Wedge continued. "All her closest folks are on D'Qar or the Falcon right now. Or Kashyyyk." He paused. "How bad was that session yesterday, anyway?"
Luke made a nondescript little noise of frustration, and Wedge nearly laughed. He'd heard Luke do this before, but he hadn't really realized until now how similar it was to the little noise Leia made when she was especially frustrated.
"That bad, huh?"
"It's not her fault," Luke said. "It's just not working. It's like—she actually gets into the Force, and then as soon as she realizes it, the connection drops. She's doing things right, there's just some kind of thing stopping her."
Another likely source of Luke's agitation. "You think it's you."
"Mmm...maybe? I'm not saying it's my fault, just like—she does better with Jaina, or even Finn around. Maybe it's a trust thing."
Wedge considered that.
"Could be," he agreed, 'But also sounds like a little head-in-cockpit issue to me." That was a very common problem among rookie pilots, especially ones who were very gifted; some of them would ace the sims, then get into an actual cockpit and begin overthinking everything, like they couldn't see beyond their own viewscreen. That was where having a good wingmate—especially one who could shake you out of that overthinking spiral—was essential.
Although interestingly enough, overthinking things hadn't even been an issue for Rey when they were flying. Her instincts were incredible, even before she'd learned how to work with the rest of the squadron. And she seemed very comfortable with herself once they were in the air.
Luke seemed to have followed that thread further, too. "She was actually accessing the Force while we were flying," he noted.
Wedge just let that sit there for a moment.
"Maybe we should try something else," Luke said.
Wedge turned onto his side again and smiled, propping his head up on his arm. "You just solved your own problem, didn't you."
"Almost," Luke said. "And I had help. But enough for tonight."
"You going to be able to sleep now?" Wedge asked mildly, though he threw in a slight eyebrow raise to suggest otherwise.
Luke definitely caught it. "I could. But I think we both have some better ideas," he said, pulling Wedge into a kiss.
"Okay, you ready?" Jaina asked, her hand on the lever for the hyperdrive.
There was no point in pretending. "No," Finn said, "but let's do this."
Jaina laughed. "I'll guide, just listen to my voice." She pulled the lever, taking them out of hyper and back into sublight, but Finn only saw a few stars before he remembered the first direction: Find me.
Taking a deep breath, he tried to forget the chaos they would be facing in a few moments and focus on finding Jaina's presence in the Force. Not as easy as finding Rey, or Leia, or Luke, or even Poe, since Jaina was hidden, but they'd practiced beforehand, and he knew where to focus. And his hand was touching hers; physical proximity, she'd said, would help.
He found her, or the shadow or the shimmer of where she was, and felt her presence grasp his. Jaina had more experience with the Force, and she'd been with Luke when he'd done something like this before, so she was leading them through this as well as piloting the ship. "I could use a second who's strong with the Force, though," she'd said.
As Jaina steered the Falcon, they made their way through to the atmosphere, and then towards the planet surface, making minute shifts in the energy fields around the ships, just enough to blend into the rest of the space dust as they moved. They were small enough in comparison to the other ships to evade visual scanning for a while, but they'd have to act quickly as soon as they got fully on-planet.
He wasn't quite sure how they'd done it, but before long they'd slipped past the Star Destroyers (four of them, at least—he'd been right about Hux holding a grudge) and were well into following a massive troop carrier on its trajectory when Jaina abruptly dropped their connection. Finn's attention snapped to the viewscreen ahead.
"I need you on guns," Jaina said, and Finn hesitated only briefly before running out of the cockpit and to the upper turret.
"I'm in," he said, adjusting his headset. He could already feel the ship banking to avoid fire—they must have been spotted. But the flight was smoother than he'd remembered from Rey's piloting, despite Jaina being alone up there. Maybe because Jaina wasn't trying to learn the ship and fly it at the same time?
"Good," Jaina said, and he could see that she was engaging on the front guns as well. "I'm turning on that comms channel so we can hear them, 'k?"
"Got it," said Finn, firing and narrowly missing a pair of TIEs. Damnit, he'd thought he was getting better at this.
There was a crackle from one of the speakers, and then Finn heard the First Order comms chatter begin to come through. During the brief time the Falcon had been on Starkiller Base, Chewie had evidently found a way to tap into one of the First Order's channels. Jaina had turned on a secure passive channel to pick up that feed, so that they could at least attempt to monitor what the First Order was doing during the fight. It wasn't much, but they needed every advantage they could get.
It was a little tough to focus amid the orders and reports coming across the First Order channel, the twists and turns of the ship as it swung past a series of TIEs and towards the first of the likely hiding places for Han and Leia, and the occasional impacts to the ship. But Finn had managed to take out a few TIEs and successfully defend the Falcon thus far. He needed to up his hit percentage pretty quickly if they were going to have a chance of staying alive for much longer, though.
Jaina narrowly evaded another hit, then shifted direction again so that they were going straight up into the sky. Finn sure as hell hoped she knew where she was going; he'd sort of lost track with all the twists and turns.
Unlike Rey, Jaina wasn't arguing with him as she zipped through the ships to their first destination, just shouting the occasional "Got 'em!" and "Yes!" as Finn picked off ships. Then she made a quick dive, and Finn realized that they'd made it to the first likely pickup spot—the auxiliary shuttle bay.
Which had been blown to embers.
Jaina said they weren't dead, Finn thought, as his breath caught. She would've felt it if they were gone.
"Not here," Jaina said over the comm. "Nothin' we didn't expect," she reminded him, although it sounded like she was reminding herself of that too.
A split second later they were climbing again, then spiraling through a hail of fire on their way to the next stop.
"Use the Force!" Jaina called through the comm. "It'll help!"
Use the—for this?
Finn normally needed more of an anchor to access the Force—finding someone's presence, for instance—but as soon as Jaina mentioned it, a vivid memory came to his mind. The first time he and Rey had really connected, during the frantic battle to escape the TIEs chasing them on Jakku.
He let go for a second from the tension, the chaos, and as he connected with the Force the barrage of sensory input organized itself in his mind; he was here, hitting the trigger and swinging the guns into position, but he was also out there, finding the next target and anticipating Jaina's course with the Falcon.
They were whipping around, up and down and flipped sideways and rounding in on themselves, but he kept hitting TIEs, more and more each round. And between his hits, Jaina's shots from the main guns, and the continual course changes to evade fire and occasionally turn the tables to attack position, they were...winning? Sort of. For now. Although at the moment, winning basically meant surviving long enough to find Han and Leia.
Boom! Another TIE fighter met its end.
"Great shot!" whooped Jaina.
The First Order commanders were absolutely losing their minds, if their comm chatter was any indication. Orders and counter-orders and curses were streaming across the line, although Finn was only paying slight attention to them. Until he heard one of the commanders say, in a rather tentative voice for a First Order officer, "It appears to be...the Millennium Falcon, sir."
"Follow that ship!" a voice demanded, and Finn instantly recognized it. Kylo Ren. Not the heavily modulated version from behind the mask, but the voice of the angry man in the woods, punching his own wounded side and demanding the Skywalker lightsaber.
Shit, shit, shit. Finn forced himself to breathe, tried to re-center himself in the Force. Not that he didn't expect Ren to be here, just—they needed to get to Han and Leia before he did, for certain.
And Jaina had just stopped shooting. Maybe she recognized the voice, too.
A blast from one of the TIEs grazed them; the ship had mostly maneuvered around it, but Jaina's lightning-fast responses from a few minutes ago had suddenly slowed way down.
No, no, no, come on, Jaina. Don't freeze up now.
"You still alive up there, co-pilot?" Finn asked. Something told him he probably shouldn't say Jaina's name, even though the First Order shouldn't be able to hear them on the Falcon's internal comm.
If Jaina had frozen up, that must have snapped her out of it. "I'm here," she said, her voice sounding a little less confident than before, but her shooting returning to its previous pace.
"Not over yet," Finn said, partly in reassurance, partly to get her head back in the game. "Still got a pickup to do, right?"
"Right." The Falcon made a sharp dive, then turned toward the field just outside one of the auxiliary bunkers, where a troop carrier was descending.
Finn wasn't sure which ship had Ren on it, but Ren had clearly seen that last move. That snarling rasp came over the First Order comms feed again, at a near-scream: "Blow that piece of junk out of the sky!"
And Finn heard Hux himself order all available ships to follow.
Well, we knew it wasn't going to be easy. But despite the danger, Finn had to grin at the idea that one damn ship—this thing Rey had referred to as "garbage" and they'd stolen in pure desperation—could strike such a response into the heart of the First Order.
"They really hate this ship!" he laughed.
To his relief, Jaina immediately responded with a wry chuckle of her own.
"Damn right they do."
This might be it. It wasn't the first time Han had had that thought; far from it. He'd thought those words about a hundred times during the Rebellion, a good handful of times since leaving with Chewie again. He'd definitely had the thought during that episode on the Eravana, when the rathars had gotten loose. He probably should've thought it a few times while on the run with Jaina, but keeping her safe had been his (and Chewie's) first priority then, so he hadn't had time to really think about anything on most of their closer calls until after they'd gotten away.
And oddly, the thought hadn't occurred to him at all on that bridge at Starkiller Base. His only thoughts then had been of that bit of light he hoped he'd seen in Ben's eyes, then his own heartbreak at watching Ben himself extinguish it, forever.
But now, even as the First Order ships swarmed around them, far more firepower than necessary to take down two solitary Rebels, Han grinned.
"Well, if we gotta go out, least we're goin' out together, Princess," he said, making a quick glance back at her between shots. They were back to back, Leia still as good a shot as she'd been at 23, disabling transports and picking off troopers despite how outnumbered they clearly were. Han did his part—his DL-44 was no slouch, and he was still a pretty decent shot himself—but the troops were drawing closer by the moment.
"We're not really about to die until one of us declares our love again," Leia quipped, still firing, and Han was tempted to blurt out his declaration right then. Though, if this time really was the end, he'd rather say I love you to her face.
Leia paused her fire briefly—Han wouldn't even have noticed, had he not happened to glance back at her again between shots—and a moment later she laughed softly, shook her head, and fired a shot in a completely different direction than where she'd been concentrating.
"I know," she said, giving the well-worn but always tender response to Han's unspoken words. "But don't count us out just yet."
The words were barely out of her mouth when Han heard the whine of a very familiar ship's engine. A second later, the Millennium Falcon swooped down low beside them, scattering the troops with a barrage of firepower and leaving a neat perimeter around Han and Leia before swooping back up into the sky.
Han laughed with relief, though he could barely believe that the Resistance had managed to come back so soon. Hells, he would've assumed them dead too if he'd been on the other side of that comm, hearing that explosion.
"Your people came through, eh?" he asked, but as soon as he said it he realized he hadn't heard or seen any other ships. The Falcon was alone.
"Remember how we were hoping your daughter wouldn't get any bright ideas?" Leia said pointedly, as if Han hadn't witnessed Leia herself do a thousand things just as foolhardy and brave.
The Falcon returned for another sweep, now with two TIEs in pursuit, and it occurred to Han that perhaps they were all going to die together. You know, as a family.
The fire from the Falcon and the TIEs had taken care of the immediate wave of ground troops, but Han could see another troop carrier landing just outside the perimeter. He gave a little jerk of his head in its direction and grinned at Leia again.
"Guess we still got it. All these stormtroopers for little old us," he said.
Leia gave him a fond look, though she'd already started redirecting her fire toward the troop carrier's engines. "Our reputation precedes us," she said dryly. "So flattered."
"Your reputation, more like," Han said between shots. "I'm a washed-up old smuggler these days, remember?"
"If you're fishing for a compliment, Captain," Leia said, scanning the sky again, "I'm a little busy at the moment."
Just then, the Falcon's hum returned, this time in attack position, and Han looked up just in time to see one of the TIEs plummet from the sky and crash to the ground about two klicks away.
The Falcon made a swift dive and immediately changed course back in their direction, taking out the engine of the troop carrier he and Leia had been targeting, then swooping around back to attack position.
"The kid can fly," he said proudly, though at the same time he worried that few other people would ever get to see that, given the First Order's imminent advance. Unless the rest of the Resistance was just behind them, none of them were going to last very long out here.
Leia was tugging on his sleeve. "Like her father," she said. "Can you run?"
Just then Han saw that the Falcon had made another low sweep to the ground, and while the ship hadn't fully landed, he could see the ramp starting to extend.
Getting too old for this shit, he thought, the vague memory of their long-ago escape from Seymarti in his head as he ignored the pain in his leg and joined Leia in running for the ship.
They'd only just climbed midway up the ramp when he heard a voice yell, "Go, go!" The ship took off again, and the ramp closed, depositing him and Leia in a heap in the main corridor.
"You all right?" Finn asked, extending a hand to help Leia up. It had been his voice, a minute ago.
"Han hurt his leg, but otherwise, yes," Leia said, adjusting her stance to stay standing as the ship continued to bank and accelerate.
Finn's face broke out in a big smile. "Good." He glanced back towards the cockpit. "I gotta get back to the guns."
"Need a hand?" Leia asked.
Finn looked a bit surprised to hear that offer, but immediately shook it off and flashed that joyful smile again. "Yeah, we could use you, c'mon."
A moment later, Finn and Leia were dashing down the corridor to the gun turrets, leaving Han to hobble on his own into the cockpit. Damn , he'd really done a number on his leg, hadn't he?
He wasn't sure what he'd been expecting—maybe some combination of Jaina and Rey, or Jaina and Luke, maybe even Jaina and Wedge or that Dameron kid—but definitely not Jaina piloting the ship in a heavy firefight all on her own.
"Hold on!" she called into the comm, and quickly took the ship into another neat spin. Han grabbed the back of the navigator's seat to keep from toppling over, then stumbled his way into Chewie's seat.
"Didn't anybody ever tell you to strap in?" she asked in a sarcastic tone, though her smile said that she was genuinely happy to see him.
"Aren't you supposed to be at the new base?" he shot back, although he did strap in, and just in time.
"Heard you needed a ride," she said coolly, steering the ship into another dive. Cheers came over the comm, as Finn and Leia took out another couple of TIEs on the way down.
Jaina raised a hand toward the co-pilot stabilizer controls, and the lever adjusted on its own. Ah. That was why she'd done so well without a co-pilot—she was using the damn Force to help her fly the ship.
This kid. Pretty mind-blowing, ain't it? he used to say to Leia, when the kids were infants. We made a person. Hells, that was nothing compared to the fact that they'd made a person who could do all this.
He tried not to think of his other kid, or the shell of what used to be Ben. There was nothing but that...Sith, or whatever, calling himself Kylo now. He was in this battle somewhere; Leia had felt it. Maybe in one of these ships that were desperately trying to kill them.
He shook that off, for now.
"Good to see you, kid," he said, looking over at his daughter fondly.
Jaina grinned. "You too, Dad. But we've gotta get out of here."
Han did a quick check of the shields, then took over the main guns. "Ain't gonna argue with that."
Jaina had never been so happy to hear the sound of the hyperdrive, and see the stars streaking past them as they made the jump. She sat back in her seat for a moment, letting out a deep breath of relief.
They were alive. She was alive, Finn was alive, and best of all, Mom and Dad were alive. Here, together, on the Falcon.
She'd even mostly kept her promise to return the ship without a scratch. Mostly.
She turned her head to find her father looking at her, a slight smile on his face. "What?" she asked.
"That was some flying," he said.
"Thanks," she said. "You okay? Is Mom okay?"
He gave her a surprised look. "You didn't hear her over the comms? More than half those TIEs we took down were her handiwork."
"Yeah, I heard her. But she'd still do that injured, you know that." She'd heard her fair share of Rebellion stories as a kid, mostly about things that had become the subject of inside jokes, life on base, that sort of thing. When they did talk about battles or missions, which wasn't often, the details they included were on the lighter side of things, and many of them involved things like Mom's attempt to "walk off" a dislocated shoulder, or the time she'd tried to report to her shift half delirious from the Dantoonian flu. Mom would always go down fighting, was the point.
Just then, the cockpit door opened, and the woman herself burst in, Finn right behind her. Leia hurried directly to Jaina and immediately opened her arms, offering a hug.
Jaina surprised herself with how much she wanted to cling to her mother, how much she needed to feel her embrace. She let herself go for a few moments, felt the Force settle around them both as she burrowed into Leia's arms.
Leia finally let her go with a light kiss to her forehead. "I'm fine," she said, in answer to Jaina's earlier question. "Your dad is the one with the injured leg."
Jaina's eyes darted back over to Han. "Dad!"
"It's fine, it's fine," he insisted.
But Leia's face was firm. "Med bunk, Han. Now."
It was damned near a miracle that they'd made it off D'Qar in one piece, which was probably why it had taken until Han was well into having his injured leg scanned for anyone to ask where their first jump was taking them.
Jaina's brow furrowed at the question, like she wasn't sure why Leia was asking. "To the rendezvous," she answered. The of course was implied; Finn himself wasn't certain why they would jump anywhere else.
"Oh, shit," Han said, and all but vaulted off the med bunk, clearly forgetting the scanner still attached to his leg.
Leia stopped him and immediately took charge. "Han, stay there. We've got it. Jaina, come on, we've got to pull out of hyper and find another place to jump," she directed, already taking a brisk stride back toward the cockpit.
"But why—" Jaina began, with a quick glance to her father's scowling face before heading after Leia.
Finn wasn't sure if he should go with them to help, or if his job was to keep Solo from hobbling after them, or what. "Should I—" he began.
"Can you run a navicomputer?" Han asked him, and when Finn nodded—he'd programmed the coordinates for a couple of their jumps—Han waved him on to follow the two women.
When he got there, Jaina was in the pilot seat, Leia at the navicomputer, already in action.
"Okay, I think we can drop out of hyper at Bimin Three without colliding with anything," Leia was saying.
When she spotted Finn, she immediately waved him over. "I need you to find us a safe place to jump on the Cerean Reach hyperspace lanes, and program it in immediately. We'll need to be ready to jump in the next 5-7 minutes for this to work."
"Got it," Finn said. He could see why Leia was so effective as a general; in a crisis, she got right down to business, inspired confidence. Even if he still wasn't sure why there was suddenly cause for another crisis.
Leia left Finn and took the co-pilot's seat. "When Finn's ready, you'll drop us out, and I'll immediately jump us to the new coordinates," she instructed Jaina. "Understood?"
"Understood," Jaina answered. Her voice was tight, tense, but calm.
After that, things went very quickly. Finn got the coordinates for Elbara Nine and programmed them in; two minutes later, Leia gave the word. The stars reappeared for a split second, then immediately lengthened back into the streams of hyperspace. Jaina's and Leia's reflexes were quick—quicker than the ship itself, which lurched on its way out of hyper and lurched again as they made the next jump.
The cockpit lights went out shortly after they went into sublight for the second time.
"Hit the back panel, with your fist," Jaina said to Finn. "Over the door."
Finn did so, and the lights and displays came humming back to life again.
"Huh," Jaina said. "I thought we'd fixed that. Oh, well."
"Fixed what?" Han asked, opening the door and limping his way into the cockpit.
"I told you, we had it covered," Leia said impatiently.
Han held up his hands. "What? I'm fine. Scanner's finished, I put some bacta on my leg, it's fine. Came to see where we are. And what the hells you're doin' to my ship."
"We're in the Elbara system," Leia said. "And your ship is just fine. We just had to hit the trick panel again."
"Oh yeah," Han said. "Sometimes she just needs a little love. 'Specially if you make her haul ass out of hyper mid-jump." He patted the panel in question for good measure, as if he were comforting a pet.
"Yeah, so why did we have to drop out of hyper?" Jaina asked. Finn wasn't quite sure how to interpret the look on her face; she seemed furious, and bewildered, and sort of mildly annoyed all at once.
Han's face turned from jovial to stern. "You know how easy it is, getting a tracker onto a single ship during a fight like that?" he asked. "Even the Falcon . They track us back to the rendezvous, we make it that much easier to find where everybody else is."
"Oh," Jaina said. Any indignance in her voice was gone.
"Oh," Han mimicked. He looked at Finn, and then back at Jaina again. "How in hell'd you two get off the base, anyway? Surprised they were lettin' anybody take off."
Finn stayed silent for the moment. It had definitely been Jaina's idea, but he didn't want to throw her under the speeder.
"We had a clearance code," Jaina said. Finn noted that she didn't give further details.
He wasn't the only one. "Whose clearance code?" Leia asked, although she didn't look upset the way Han did, merely curious.
"Dad's."
Leia gave Han a look, and Han looked like he was trying to defend himself and reprimand Jaina at the same time. "I never gave her my—how'd you get that code?"
Jaina raised an eyebrow at him, her look now more defiant than apologetic. "'I do what I want, Your Worship'? It wasn't that hard to guess."
Given the tension in the air, Finn thought it best to stifle his laugh.
"Also, I saw you put it in a couple times and I memorized it," Jaina said, more quietly that time.
Han flopped down in the navigator seat, taking all that in. "So, you two steal the Falcon— "
"You gave me the Falcon to fly!" Jaina protested.
"On a one-way trip to the new base," Han said. "But all right. You take the Falcon off the brand-new base, unauthorized—"
Jaina looked like she was going to protest again, but fell silent when Han pointed a finger in her direction. She wasn't going to win an argument about the clearance codes, anyway. And Han and Leia didn't even know that bit about using the Force to keep Lieutenant Tico from stopping them—
"Unauthorized," Han repeated, continuing, "and pop right into the middle of a First Order invasion, alone, and you think you're gonna just sweep in and waltz on back to the new hidden base? Were you tryin' to get yourself killed?"
"We were trying to rescue you! Which we did, you're welcome, by the way!" Jaina shot back.
"Great, but did you even think to ask why they didn't want you flyin' off base? Why you even needed a special code to leave?"
Finn was guessing no, given that he hadn't really thought much about that part either.
"I—they didn't know, and we didn't have time to explain! And it doesn't matter, I'm sure they'd want to go back for the leader of the whole godsdamned Resistance—" Jaina's face was turning pink.
"Yeah, you didn't think, I got that. And I get wanting to help, but—what the hell good does it do anybody if you lead the First Order right to the new base? Doesn't help the Resistance if you rescue Leia but the whole lot of them fits in the damn Falcon, now does it?"
Finn could see that Han was angry, but he could also feel that Han was—scared by what they'd done. Scared as hell.
And Finn suddenly had a sinking feeling. "Are you saying—we might have given away the base on the way there?" Security had been pretty adamant about no ships leaving. Had they just put Rey, Poe, and all the rest of the Resistance at risk?
Leia finally cut in. "No," she said. "If there really was that kind of danger, they wouldn't have let you take off at all. No matter whose clearance codes you had."
Finn felt an incredible weight lift from his chest. At least they hadn't completely screwed that up.
At Leia's interjection, the argument had stopped, but the tension between Han and Jaina still hung in the air. Nobody spoke for a good few minutes.
"Well," Leia finally said, looking back and forth between her husband and daughter as she stood up, "I can't believe I get to be the one saying this, but I think we all could use a break."
"Uh, so we're just going to hang out in the system?" Jaina asked, motioning back at the viewscreen. There wasn't much going on here, true, but she was right; it was probably a bad idea to just stay here indefinitely.
"We're going to make another jump, to an old hiding spot," Leia said. "And then we're going to eat something that isn't a ration bar and get some rest."
"Good idea," Han said, his tone significantly gentler than a few minutes ago. "What'd you have in mind?"
"Smugglers' cave in the Moddell sector," Leia said. "Your favorite place. Go on, you and Finn go find us something to eat. Jaina and I have it from here."
She turned to Finn. "Thank you," she said, putting a hand on his arm. "For this, and for before."
Despite the palpable stress Finn could still sense in the room, something in Leia's eyes, in her presence, calmed him. He felt—seen.
Finn smiled. "Sure."
Han seemed to be regretting the harshness of his words a few minutes ago and was awkwardly approaching Jaina.
"Hey, Jai. I'm—thanks. For coming after us."
She nodded.
Han grinned, a more tentative smile than usual. "That's what, three I owe you now?"
Jaina smiled, but it didn't quite reach her eyes. Her voice was a little subdued. "Yeah. That's right," she said.
Han gave her shoulder a quick pat before heading toward the door. "C'mon, kid," he said to Finn.
Finn looked back at Leia.
"I've got this," she repeated, taking Finn's place at the navicomputer. "You take care of that old smuggler. He gets grumpy when he's hungry."
"I heard that!" Han called from the corridor.
"You were supposed to!" Leia called back, as Finn followed Han to the lounge.
Rey trudged through the corridors, on her way to meet Luke for another morning of Jedi training. She was still getting used to the new base, to the influx of new recruits to the Resistance, the sheer presence she could feel around her. She needed better shielding.
And she missed Finn and Jaina like hell.
Thankfully, she'd been spared the Ahch-To dreams the last few days; she wasn't sure how she'd be coping if she had to watch Luke toss that kriffing lightsaber away every night. Although it seemed an appropriate metaphor for how her Jedi training was going these days: nowhere. Starts and stops, that was it. The joy of connection, followed by that 'saber hurled into the sea.
The room Luke had reserved for them was a gorgeous space, full of sunlight, but Rey was too preoccupied during her Jedi lessons to really enjoy it. She and Luke had been tiptoeing around each other these last few days; she was pretty sure he was enjoying this about as much as she was, namely, not at all.
When she arrived this time, Luke wasn't in his usual meditation position, sitting on the floor; he was sprawled out in a chair, reading something on his datapad.
He looked up, and grinned. "Hey. Thought we could do something a little different today."
"Different?"
He raised a finger to pause her while he made a quick call on his comm. "Hey, it's me," he said. "On our way."
Where?
He got up. "C'mon, let's go fly," he said. "I hear you're the one to beat on the sims."
Leia rapped gently on the floor panel. After a pause, the panel lifted, revealing Jaina in the smuggling compartment that had been her occasional hideout for three years. After they'd jumped to hyperspace again, Jaina had only joined them in the lounge briefly, clearly preoccupied from their earlier discussion.
"May I?" Leia asked.
Jaina took a quick glance up—likely checking to be sure neither Han nor Finn were around—and then silently shrugged, moving aside so that Leia could climb in beside her.
Much of the compartment was as they'd left it: a pair of plush cushions on the floor against the wall, the sleeping mat and pillows, the fairy lights strung around, the Star Sirens poster tacked up to hide the other secret compartment where Jaina had kept her personal valuables.
Jaina was watching her take it all in—and the thought that immediately came to Leia's mind was Goddess, she's grown. As if she'd expected Jaina to turn 13 again the minute she stepped back in here.
"It's still the same," Jaina said.
Leia nodded. "I'm surprised. Thought for sure they'd have stripped it all bare." Not that anything in here was worth all that much, but still. It wasn't like Ducain or any of the others who'd stolen this ship to leave things intact. Maybe they'd just never found this space.
They were both silent for a few minutes. We're relearning each other, Leia reminded herself. Although in her experience, that was a lot of what being a parent was; children grew and changed so much all the time. You thought you finally had things down, and then suddenly what worked yesterday was completely wrong for what they needed today. Much less four years later.
And although Jaina had many of Han's qualities and mannerisms, right now she reminded Leia very much of herself. So much so, that part of Leia was still that sixteen-year-old struggling with her parents and their secrets and their fears and hopes for her, wrestling with the right thing to do; and part of her was the mother of an eighteen-year-old, trying to support her and keep her safe as Jaina grappled with all those things too.
Jaina was now sitting on one of the cushions, and Leia took a seat beside her. The contrast between Jaina's dark clothing and heavy boots and the fluffy pink cushion cover they were sitting on almost made Leia want to laugh, though it also underlined one of the things she'd come down here to say.
"You scared the crap out of yourself, didn't you?" Leia asked.
Jaina's head sprang up, and she looked directly at Leia. Her eyes were part defiant, part terrified, but she said nothing.
Leia suddenly had an inkling of how frightening it must have been, being her parent. But she carried on.
"You didn't know," Leia said. "It's not your job to know all those details, about how we keep the Resistance secrets, a secret. We have security clearances for a reason." She chuckled lightly. "Although your father is about the last person I'd expect to be defending those rules."
Jaina's face became slightly less somber at that, but she didn't smile.
Leia let the silence linger for a few minutes. She could continue talking, but she had a feeling that if she waited, what Jaina needed from her would emerge.
After a while, Jaina took in a big breath, and let it out again, looking down at her lap as she began speaking.
"You and Dad were in trouble," she said. "I felt it. I couldn't just wait until—but I didn't think. How much I might've kriffed things up. Gotten you and Dad killed. Or Finn. Crashed the Falcon."
"Gotten yourself killed," Leia added. "I know. It all hits you, doesn't it? After the adrenaline starts to wear off."
"I could've wrecked the whole Resistance," Jaina continued.
Leia put a hand on her daughter's arm. "No, you couldn't. And if you could, it wouldn't be much of a Resistance in the first place."
Jaina looked up, and Leia continued.
"I'm not saying I'd recommend what you did. It was impulsive, and not thought out, and there's a lot of ways it could've ended very badly. And it's not over yet."
Jaina nodded. She still seemed shaken up, troubled, but Leia knew that feeling didn't just go away in an instant. There was some kind of balance to be struck here, with confronting your actions enough to take responsibility but not so much that you were just berating yourself for every mistake.
She put her hand on her daughter's and squeezed it lightly.
Jaina squeezed back, but that defiant look in her eyes came back as she looked at Leia again. "I'm not sorry I came after you," she said.
"I'm not asking you to be," Leia answered immediately.
She had to just look at Jaina for a moment, to marvel at this person she'd birthed, the way she used to when Jaina was a little girl and some complex sentence would just fall out of her mouth. But now Leia was marveling not at some precocious eloquence, but just—the ferocity and love coming from her daughter. It was just so Jaina she could cry.
She might, honestly. It had been an emotional day, and she'd not really granted herself the time to experience any feelings that couldn't be channeled into their escape.
Yep, here were those tears, right on time. Leia didn't attempt to stop them. She did quickly wipe her eyes before speaking.
"Sweetheart. You saved our lives. I'm not going to regret that, and I sure as hell wouldn't ask you to," she said, squeezing Jaina's hand again. "And neither would your dad."
Jaina breathed out, like she was trying to control her own emotions. "Okay."
They were both quiet for a moment.
"There will be consequences. Won't there." Jaina stated it, more than asked it.
"There always are," Leia answered. "Just like there were when I pulled something like this."
At Jaina's slightly surprised look, Leia smiled. "What, you think you're the first Organa woman to get in over her head? You're more like me than either of us probably want to admit."
That elicited a smile, at least. Though Leia could sense an undercurrent of something else going on here, too.
Jaina focused on Leia again. "I felt it in the Force," she said. "I just—it felt like I had to go. That it couldn't wait." She bit her lip. "I trusted the Force, but what if—" Jaina stopped herself before saying more, but Leia caught the end of that thought, loud and clear. What if that was wrong? What if that's what happened to Ben?
Leia was a little angry with herself for not anticipating this—hells, he'd been in that battle, maybe Jaina had even sensed him. Hopefully Jaina's concealment in the Force was still intact and he hadn't sensed her.
She'd worry about that later. Leia had about a thousand thoughts about how to respond, all bombarding her mind at once, but then she took a page from her recent Force training and worked on calming her own mind before answering.
Once she did, the words came more easily.
"I know that feeling, Jaina," she said. "When you feel that pull—when even when people are telling you not to go, that nothing can be done—you know that you have to find a way. I didn't know it was the Force, back then, but I knew what I was called to do." She remembered those urgent conversations with Evaan, who didn't even like her very much at the time, and that feeling of rightness pervading her system, even as she'd planned to defy orders and escape the base to find her people before the Empire did.
"I don't know everything there is to know about the Force, by a long shot," Leia continued. "You probably know a lot more. But I do know that as strong as that feeling is, there's always a choice of what to do about what the Force is telling you. About how to use that power, and for what. And those choices aren't always easy." She smiled at Jaina. "But I trust you. To listen, and make that choice for yourself. And live with the consequences."
"He was there," Jaina broke in. "He was—he tried to shoot us down."
"I know," Leia said sadly. "You felt him?"
"Sort of," Jaina said. "I heard him over the comm, and then I felt—Uncle Luke was right. There's no Ben left." She looked ashamed. "I couldn't move for a few minutes. Finn had to shake me out of it."
"Understandable," Leia said. "To freeze up, I mean. You haven't heard or seen him for a long time."
"Yeah."
They sat there, silent for several minutes. Jaina looked down at her lap again, the hand not clasped in Leia's tracing small patterns into the fabric of her pants. Their hands had been the same size, when Jaina and Luke had left; now Jaina's were larger. She'd inherited at least some of her father's build.
"Jaina?" Leia made her voice softer, to avoid startling her.
Jaina looked up again.
"Even if you were wrong about what the Force was telling you. Even if it had been a mistake to come—that's not how turning to the Dark Side works."
Leia could hardly believe that she was about to hold forth on the Force, much less the Dark Side, but Jaina seemed interested, so she continued.
"It's a choice, but it's not just a single choice. It's not a single action. If it were—" she chuckled wryly—"I would be in some serious trouble by now. And I don't know what all those sacred Jedi texts you were reading say, but wanting to keep the people you love safe isn't itself a bad thing."
Jaina smiled. "They don't say that," she said.
"Good. Because if they did, they'd have to fight me."
They both smiled at that half-serious declaration. Though Leia still had one more serious thing she wanted Jaina to hear.
"You're not Ben. You never were. You're not me, or your dad, or Luke. And nobody wants you to be." She held Jaina's hand tighter. "You're going to make your own choices, good and bad ones. You're going to make your own way."
Jaina nodded. She still seemed unsure, but that was understandable, even without the Force in the mix.
They both felt the minute shift in the ship that indicated the switch from hyperspace to sublight. An opportune time to change the subject.
"Did we ever tell you about the first time your dad took me to the Monsua Nebula?" Leia asked.
"I won't stay quiet, I won't stay quiet
'Cause stayin' silent's the same as dyin'
I won't stay quiet, the flicker's burnin' low This is not a, this is not a swan song…"
-"Swan Song," Dua Lipa