Empty-Handed

Darth Vader stepped into Echo Base and the drums of war ceased their tireless pounding.

Everything stopped. The freezing wind. The bustle of the bay. The frenzied hearts and gasping lungs of all in the vicinity. For a breath, it was as if a battle wasn't being waged outside the base walls, as if the AT-ATs weren't decimating the ranks of infantry Leia had ordered out into the blinding white snowdrifts.

It wasn't peace she found in the silence. It wasn't confidence or a sense of inevitability. What was left was brutality, punctuated by a soft, slow, familiar wheezing.

Armor shining in the fluorescent lights, he stood tall and imposing on the other side of the enormous space from them. His sloped helmet turned this way and that, side-to-side in slow consideration, as he witnessed the still, shocked scene in front of him. Leia had the impression that this was the effect Vader held most dear. The fear. Whatever he was—human or monster or both—he thrived on power, on the clear delineation between who would live and who would die by his hand and his hand alone.

Control.

His presence was like a shot of adrenaline straight into her spine: too much energy for her body to contain and yet somehow absolutely essential. This was as elemental a fight as any against the most apex of predators, one who came for her and her brother alone amongst the ranks of Rebel prey. The most recent feast of many: scores of Jedi fallen in his wake.

And now Luke and Leia were all that stood between him and their underfunded, corkscrew, little rebellion.

She felt a moment of brittle nostalgia slip through her rippling anticipation, thinking of the pranks done and the parties held in the exact place where Vader now stood. Dak Ralter's X-wing usually docked just to the left, and there was a stash of illegal liquor hiding in a compartment under the Dark Lord's boots. She remembered watching Luke help a Merc with engine maintenance just a few weeks ago, a quick, friendly conversation that she had covertly witnessed as she snuck into the Falcon late one night. Hours of fragile entertainment on a base no one had wanted, but one that had proved to all how doggedly resilient the Alliance truly was.

Home? Not quite. Not at all. But it was still theirs, and she felt one surprising rush of anthropomorphic fondness for the extremes of Echo Base, the scroll of her life that had happened here, the terrifying way it was about to end.

"Surrender."

His voice rose above the silence like some sentient thunderclap, and, oh, that one word held power.

"Never," Luke said.

He sounded so certain, so confident. But the sight of her most hated enemy—the being who had held her shoulder down as her homeworld had erupted into light—made the breath in her lungs burn hot. Her left hand squeezed into a tight fist, an outlet for the build-up of kinetic urgency that raced through her veins.

With one big screech of metal-on-metal—a snowspeeder's inevitable demise outside the base walls, perhaps—the world resumed its chaos and the terror-filled stillness broke into blazing shards of color. Blaster fire erupted into screaming. Yelling of evacuation orders created an inescapable din. A flood of noncombatants rushed past them, trying to reach the transports.

This was a battle of pure animal instinct. Salvation as gruesome as any claw-torn flesh in the bush. Leia pursed her lips.

"Get out of here!" she yelled to a group of onlookers. "Now! Go!"

Ensign Fasa, a young Devonarian stationed in Medical, stopped to Leia's right, a tentative look in their eyes. "Ma'am? You are still injured. You must come with us—"

Putting her hand on their elbow, Leia gave Fasa her complete attention. "I'm fine. Go."

"But—"

Leia barked the order a third time, eyes completely set on the dark shape in front of her. They seemed uncertain, but Leia was resolute. She had no problem issuing commands at will. In some perplexing, unintentional way, her childhood had primed her for such a moment as this, in which her people needed her severity, needed her stone-cold leadership, even as she fought her own fears.

Because if Leia Organa was afraid, then there was something to be afraid of.

"You will not escape."

His voice triggered her deepest anger, her most private rage, as fulsome as any darkness he might have within. Fear and anger in conjunction, the most powerful—the most energizing—of incentives. The crucible by which she had been forged after losing everything at the hands of the Empire.

This monster would leave empty-handed today. Of that she was certain.

"You don't want them," she replied. "You want us. Let them go."

—0—

He had survived the Death Star. He had survived mission upon mission, years with the Alliance, and though he knew it would probably cost him his life, Wedge Antilles had never considered it much of a sacrifice. But to die on Hoth…

Ugh.

"Rogue Two to Rogue Seven, do you copy?"

Nothing.

"Rogue Two to Rogue Flight. I need an answer for those AT-ATs. Anyone copy?"

The silence on the comm was more telling than any answer would be. He could see snowspeeders, he knew the Rogues were still somewhat operational, but there just wasn't enough intel for him to know who was out there and who had already fallen.

So many of them had fallen.

"Rogue Two to Rogue Eight, do you—?"

His comm hissed and now he wasn't even sure if he could call out. The AT-ATs had all but eradicated any defense the Rebels could muster. The shield generator had dropped five minutes ago. The ion cannon was—well, there wasn't one anymore, now, was there?

I'm gonna die here.

Ah, but hell. It was bound to happen sometime. At least this way he could take a few Imperial bastards out with him. He just had to hold out long enough for the transports to clear atmosphere.

—0—

Imperial troops have entered the base! Imperial troops have—

The transmission was cut with a hiss, lost in the wilds of static. Salla winced and then slashed the feed, unwilling to listen to what would surely become a chorus of screams from doomed Alliance personnel stuck in the Command Center.

Eyeing the field of battle in front of her—the wide, open blues of a perfectly frozen afternoon—she took stock of the birds in the air. Rogues in snowspeeder, Mercs in their sluggish freighters. A constellation of smoke, an explosion of durasteel. Debris littered the snowdrifts, a makeshift, perilous burial ground for the foot-soldiers who had been the first to retreat after the AT-ATs had shown up.

What did you expect? she asked the dead, and Rebel leadership, and Rieekan and Leia specifically. What did you expect to happen after we slipped unscathed from Vader the last time?

She knew how very much he would burn to the ground to kill the Jedi. And the only thing she could do now was try to keep her own flight in the battle for as long as those transports needed her.

"Trak!" she hollered into her comm. "Hurry it up, or you're gonna be a crater in the snow real fast."

"You wanna come down here and give me a—"

A bright plume of dark smoke jettisoned from her starboard flank, and now Salla could see all that was left of Trak's mess of a freighter as it belched fire into the clear blue sky.

Oh, fuck, she thought with a sinking feeling in her gut. Oh, goddamn.

This was not a battle. It was a massacre.

It was vengeance.

—0—

Vader swept a hand to his phalanx of snowtroopers and they disappeared into three branching corridors from the bay, leaving the Jedi alone in the madness.

Suddenly, it felt like no one was left, though Leia knew that wasn't true. Every fighter, every pilot, everyone was either fighting or evacuating or dying in the battle-plain of Hoth's surface. The bubble of activity hid them away from the terrified eyes that watched them, as people ran, as pilots lifted off, as techs screamed for fuel and supplies. The world spun as it always had: into utter pandemonium.

But the confrontation narrowed her focus into a pinprick. Like a beam of light through a tapered hole, she had her target and stubbornly blocked all else. Keep him distracted. That was all they had to do.

With a slight heft of the blaster in her hand, Leia brought it to bear and fired. A snap-hiss broke the stillness and a red glow speared the chilly air: a lightsaber parrying her opening shot with a cleanliness that looked effortless. Nonplussed, she fired again, and again, and again, a deadly diversion until Luke's barrage could begin. Rocks, scrap metal, engine parts: all of it found Vader's armor in a swirling maelstrom of activity.

Glancing blows, of course. They were in no way able to actually harm him. But it was enough for them to split their enemy's focus, to take his attention away from the people who ran past them.

A deflected bolt hit the snow at her feet and she didn't dare flinch at the horrific accuracy of such work, clearly an effort on Vader's part to demonstrate his mastery. With a flick of her head, she stepped directly into the melted mark, playing his symbolism game with the same relish she had done in the Imperial Senate. Any subtlety Vader had to his name was wasted, anyway. What was it to be coy and a genocidal maniac?

"How long do we need to hold him off?"

Luke's voice was strained. "Ten minutes, if we can."

That would be ideal, at least. Enough time for the last transport to finish loading, for the infantry—what is left of them, anyway—to scramble and secure a means of evacuation.

"Ten minutes from now?" Luke asked. "Or ten minutes from when we started? Because I feel like we've been—"

A blaster bolt from a passing tech disappeared into Vader's palm, and the sight was so surprising that Luke didn't finish his sentence.

"You have learned," Vader boomed, and then squeezed his fist. The tech dropped to the ground with a sickening crack, dead before she even hit the snow.

Swallowing, Luke and Leia looked at each other with similar expressions of alarm. She had always thought it something of an urban legend, this ability of Vader's to kill without touching, but now—

Consider your anger, you must. The effect it has.

The voice was not from her memory, though she distinctly remembered the conversation with Yoda in wet, bedraggled training clothes one misty Dagobah morning. And she wasn't sure why the disembodied voice felt the need to come to her now: the words felt discordant among the mayhem in the bay.

And it wasn't Luke's voice, or Luke's words, who laced her firefight with misdirected Jedi advice. She wasn't sure that she was comfortable with the thought that Yoda—or Obi-Wan or anyone—was capable of getting into her mind when she needed clarity.

Continuing as if nothing untoward had happened, as if he hadn't just killed a woman from twenty meters away without a blaster, Vader spoke again in his deep voice, more a philosophical murmur than a statement addressed to them. "Interesting."

Leia resumed her blaster fire, concerned only in holding his attention. She didn't dare consider the repercussions of such nonchalant murder, such blatant disregard for life. Nothing could surprise her about Vader, anymore.

Ducking to avoid a resurgence in Luke's whirlwind assault, she tried to keep an eye on the menace in front of them. The strained look on her brother's face made her grimace in sympathy, the toll such a display of telekinetic power was taking on him. He was so talented but clearly out of his depth. She knew how it felt for energy reserves to fade: the shake in the arms, the quavering need to push through, regardless of injury or fatigue.

Five minutes, she tried to tell him through the nothingness he claimed could facilitate communication. She knew she didn't succeed. It was too ephemeral for her, too unshaped. Her blaster whined with repeated usage, the pow-pow-pow coming as fast as her trigger finger could pull. Wild shots, without any kind of aiming, but simply meant to culminate in total bombardment.

Her hand began to ache, but she kept going.

A startled crash from the far side of the bay, a feeling like someone had turned up the artificial gravity, and then Luke's storm of debris simply ... stopped. Hung in the air. Motionless. As if a mischievous goddess had turned the entire scene into a moss-painting, like the Ob Khaddor masterpieces she had visited on Alderaan. Alive but not. Growing but somehow contained.

Controlled. Handled. Fearfully and completely under a master's spell.

"What are you—?" she said, shock evident in the breathlessness of her voice.

"I'm not."

Leia's eyes found Vader again, the dark humanoid shape standing across a barren floor of packed snow like an unwanted admirer at the Fete Cotillion. Her heart rose in her throat as he maintained the startling display of power, mesmerized, as it dawned on her what he was doing.

Yoda had not displayed such power in her presence. No one had displayed such power in her presence, though she was hardly in the habit of socializing with the Jedi.

But this… this was an unfathomable demonstration of power. Beautiful. And wholly bone-chilling.

"Come with me."

The voice floated on the icy air, a feather on a soft breeze, and Leia's back broke into tremors.

"The assault will end if you surrender."

She gripped her blaster, ready to respond, but it was Luke who found his voice first. "No," he said with his own kind of power, a steeliness underlying his foundational empathy. "No, I don't think we will."

"You would let your rebellion fall?"

"Rebellions don't fall," Leia said. "Autocracies do."

There was a pause, a frozen moment in time, and then two words. "Very well."

With a wave of a dark, gloved hand, the cloud of debris fell to the ground, raining from its stilled perch like a hailstorm of Kartyss. Leia ducked, a hand over her head, watching as durasteel hit the packed snow. Clattering echoed around them, pings issuing from hydro-spanners and plating and the odd blaster charge. A yelp from her left and she glanced to see a refueling tech buckle under the weight of a heavy piece of durasteel sheeting, blood spreading beneath him in the blinding white of the ground.

"No," Luke whispered. "He just—like it's nothing—"

Leia didn't answer, couldn't answer; her voice had been stolen from her, the shock rising as she resumed her futile blaster fire, as Luke hefted another piece of durasteel in the cold air, panic clear on his face. In her peripheral vision she could see the flood of people ebbing, the tide going out. Just a few more moments, and then they could try to escape. Just a little longer…

Please be ready, Han, she thought.

—0—

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear..."

Ignoring Threepio's persistent rambling, Han watched the scene with terror gripping the empty space in his chest. Luke and Leia and Vader, all in the same place, like some nightmare fever dream from which he just couldn't wake up. Crushing the controls with unsteady hands, he watched and waited and tried to remain in control of his breathing.

He knew what was happening to him, why his body felt like one solid knot of inaction. He knew the medical term from second-hand experience, watching his Imperial companions in the Navy return from bloodbath-conquests, their dead eyes, their quiet, unused voices. This was what happened when humans locked down tight in their most base impulses, the need to run, or fight, or freeze. This was neurons firing and muscles clamping and the most eternal manifestations of inner conflict at the fore.

But who the fuck cared what was happening to him when she was out there, exposed, fighting for her life—?

"I'm going out there," he muttered.

He hadn't expected them to hold Vader this long, to be completely honest. He had figured it would be more a bait-and-switch kind of play, but no. The trickle of evacuees was slowing and yet the scene in the bay was just as awful as before: a small hurricane of flying metal and blaster bolts with Leia at ground zero.

And those two insufferably courageous optimists were aiming for complete survival, everyone in their transports safely hitting lightspeed. It was an impossible goal, but of course that would be their plan. Nothing could be less surprising than Luke and Leia fighting to the bitter end.

Have faith, Chewie said next to him in the copilot's chair. He is not advancing on them. He wants them alive.

It didn't make him feel any better. "Dammit, Chewie, lemme go grab them—"

"I do believe Chewbacca is correct," Threepio said. "He has not pressed his advantage."

"Shut it, Goldenrod."

You did not have to let him aboard, Chewie reminded him, but that only served to make Han angrier. He didn't know why he had made the droid board the Falcon, either. It had been a moment of pure instinct, perhaps layered with concern for Leia's seemingly constant companion of late. He didn't know.

Leia.

Her blaster spit fire like one of those old Myrian dragons the kids on the streets used to talk about. Some avenging goddess out there in the snow, and it wasn't helping, she wasn't helping, because she had told him to wait here but how could he wait when she was in such obvious danger?

He couldn't.

Standing, he turned and rushed to do … something. He couldn't just sit here. He had to move, he had to act. This was torture, just waiting for them to come to him, to win or lose the battle he could barely watch with his jaw tightly clenched.

No. No, he wouldn't just wait. Even in his dismal state. Even at war with himself, he wouldn't let her—either of them—get hurt.

Before he could reach much farther than the navigator's chair, a massive Wookiee arm reached back and stopped him in his tracks. Chewie secured him by the shirt at the back of his neck, hauling him back toward his seat. With a loud curse, Han tried to wriggle free, cursing his first mate to no avail.

You will not be able to help, Cub.

"Yeah? Watch me."

She needs me. They need me. I can help. I can do something—

But the Wookiee didn't relent, holding his human fast. He would not hesitate to use you to get them to comply.

And the reality of the situation hit him with such force that he stopped struggling. Chewie was right, of course. They had seen how Vader disposed of anyone who tried to help Luke and Leia in the bay. They were the only ones who were remotely safe from a suddenly-broken neck.

Have faith, Chewie repeated.

Han tried not to blink, afraid of what he might miss, heart in his throat and a million regrets on his tongue.

—0—

With a sudden jerk, Leia's blaster flew out of her hand and into the ice wall to her left, wedged firmly enough that it was useless to try and pry it loose.

"Do not rely on useless means," Vader said. "I've seen what you can do, Your Highness."

Gritting her teeth, she reached for the nearest hunk of durasteel she could find—the inner hatch of a ship, easily twice as heavy as her own body—and released a breath. Focus, she told herself. Focus.

It was as if time stopped again, but she didn't have the mental space to care. She tried to slow her breathing, tried to channel the strength that flowed from Luke like his own river of power. She imagined a fist tightening over the hatch, gripping it surely with strength and certainty.

Breathe.

And then she had it, the hold on the hatch as confident as if it was in her actual hand. She opened her eyes and threw her arm to the side in parody of her own control—it was so much easier for her to do it mimicking the movement itself, why hadn't she thought of that before?—and then swept her right hand in one fast movement directed at Vader. Skidding, the hatch shot away from its berth with startling velocity. It was so fast that she had trouble keeping track of it with her eyes, and she focused instead on her tight fist, praying go go go.

It was by far the largest thing she had ever moved telepathically but it was so simple once she could envision it in her mind. Once she could picture it behind her eyelids. Once she realized she could use her arms instead of Luke's flat, still way of moving objects, the shaman-like way he had thrown debris into the air.

She noticed a wobble in said debris, and she silently apologized to Luke for pulling some of his resources away.

Moving swiftly over the ground—she didn't think she was good enough to actually lift it, but movement was movement and she wasn't picky—it flew toward Vader with a vicious, slicing sound. Closer and closer, it seemed to gain speed. It wasn't anything she was doing, it was by some other means, some other force that was out of her control. Something larger than herself.

Proud, she glanced up with a slight smile.

And then the smile fell as the hatch turned on its axis, picked up speed, and soared toward them.

It was thirty meters from them and it moved fast. Trying to regain hold of the hatch, she gave up when she realized Vader's hand was also outstretched. She had no hope of winning that battle. Small personal victories meant nothing in the larger scheme of the moment.

Think.

"Leia," Luke murmured.

"I know, I know."

She couldn't stop it with the Force. She couldn't shoot it. She didn't have any other resources, nothing that she had ever been taught could counter a Force-propelled slab of durasteel heading her way—

"Stop focusing on what you can't do and focus on what you can," Luke said from beside her.

And with a click, she had it. Reaching out with her hand, she unclipped Luke's lightsaber from his belt and pressed the ignition switch with a movement that was so natural, so organic, that it felt as if she had been training with it her whole life.

Blue light enveloped her. A spirited hiss at her fingertips: a blaze of beautiful color cocooning her entire form. While it was heavier than her epee, it was far more fluid, too. And when she quickly sliced the coming hatch in two, she felt a thrill in her stomach.

This is my father's lightsaber, too, she thought.

Rotating her wrist, she cut through the icy air with the blade until it fit her stance, hand in glove. It hissed and spat as it cut through the packed snow at her feet and oh goddess it was like someone had tossed her into zero-G without a suit and without the very human fear of the inevitable.

She could see them from a distance, could see the scene as if she, too, was the last person to load the transport. Luke with his hands outstretched, waging an invisible war with visible objects, and she, strong and still with a spitting blade of blue fire in her hands.

For the first time, she felt something akin to cohesion with her brother. For the first time, she understood what Yoda meant by balance. They were not good yet, no, but they were good enough for this moment, for this small battle. To save lives, to guarantee the escape of her father's life's work.

And then … smoke.

—0—

General Rieekan was the last to set foot on the transport. He had stayed in the Command Center until it cleared, providing cover fire for his personnel as the snowtroopers had entered the structure. And then he had sprinted across the floor of the bay faster than he had run in years, stopping only when he had caught sight of Luke and Leia facing Vader alone.

His heart squeezed in his chest, wanting more than anything to go to their side, to lend support. But he forced himself to keep running, to reach the transport.

Once he hit the ramp and it began to close, he breathlessly grabbed his personal comm and immediately entered the only frequency that mattered to him in that moment.

"You better be telling me that I can grab her and go."

The voice was tight, clipped, full of anger and anxiety, and a small part of Carlist wanted to celebrate the obvious worry in Solo's tone.

"We're clear," he shouted into the comm. "Get them out of there."

A relieved exhale and then the sound of engines roaring to life. "About fucking time," Solo said. "Falcon out"

He dropped the comm with a wheeze, hen crawled to the nearest hull, breathing hard, praying to every goddess he knew—and a few he didn't—that the trio of humans and one brave Wookiee would find their own way off-planet.

—0—

Turning her head, Leia caught a thread of menacing gray-black coming from a closed hatch behind them, one of the entrances the snowtroopers had gone through only minutes before. It suddenly became abundantly clear what their orders had been.

"He's smoking us out," she said. "He wants to catch us in flight."

Luke nodded. "He just might manage it. I can't keep this going forever."

A piece of snowspeeder plating sailed toward them; she quickly caught it with the Force and redirected to the side, much easier with a corresponding arm movement.

But it was still difficult. Heaving a breath, she barely caught the chime of her comm, forgotten inside a pocket at her hip. She considered ignoring it—she was far more interested in other matters at the moment—but remembered Han's final snarl as he had stomped out of the South Passage.

"Are all transports away?" she asked without preamble.

A pause, then an unwelcome voice with a welcome message. "Just lifted off," Han answered. "Get the hell out of there. I'll cover you."

Snapping the comm from her mouth, Leia started to warn her brother of the intended plan, only to be interrupted by a swath of fire erupting between them and Vader. She ducked on instinct and then, coughing, grabbed Luke's elbow.

"That's it! Let's go!"

The sound was ear-splitting, the whine of the Falcon's repulsors and the firing of the belly gun creating a cacophony of warring sounds. A true scene of destruction, she noted: smoke thick in the air and fire around everything.

"We need to split up."

She turned, eyes frantic, thinking Luke sounded insane. "There is no way—"

"No, listen to me. He wants both of us. Do you really think having us together in one ship is going to be much of a challenge for him?"

The smoke was heavy in her lungs, and the crash of an annihilated corridor seemed to loudly call their plan into action.

"Luke—"

"Leia," he interrupted. "Go with Han. I have Artoo and my X-wing. I'll be fine."

Eyes stinging from the smoke, she felt like her head was spinning. Too much energy, too many lives on the line, too much to consider … and all she wanted was to make sure her people made it safely to the rendezvous point.

"Be safe," she murmured.

"May the Force be with you," he replied.

And then she slipped the lightsaber into his left hand, turned and ran full-hilt toward the waiting ramp of the Millennium Falcon.

—0—

The Rogues had been decimated. There was no other way to interpret the situation, and Salla wasn't interested in trying. She thought she had seen Wedge's X-wing hit hyperspace just before the Intruder, but she wasn't sure about any of the others. Despite what the Mercs had tried to accomplish, too many of their ships were built for freight or for dogfights in vacuum, not in atmosphere.

They, too, had sustained serious losses.

Salla watched the starlines flit by her, a lump in her throat that had nothing to do with her ship or her travel through hyperspace. In six hours she would reach the rendezvous point and be able to see what the cost of the evacuation had been.

And she had no idea what had happened to Han, Luke or Leia. Reports from transport personnel—and from the stragglers she herself had taken in before lifting off—were conflicting. Some said Vader himself had entered the base. All said that brother and sister had been paramount in ensuring the evacuation of the command center, a feat that she didn't doubt in the slightest. Rumors would fly, she knew, because people were people and the Alliance's most efficient wartime strategy was gossip, but it didn't settle her nerves at all.

She sighed and focused instead of recording a message to Prisht, assuring her love that she had survived what would probably be seen as a massive Imperial success within the hour.

—0—

Running faster than she had ever run in her life, Leia hit the open ramp of the Falcon with a swipe to the interior door mechanism. "I'm heading to the turrets to cover Luke," she panted into the intercom. "Go. He's taking his X-wing."

She didn't wait for a response. Rushing into the entrance into the turret, she scrambled down the ladder and settled at the controls, powering up before she even had the chance to pull the headset over her coronet.

Han's voice crackled to life the second the comm unit was activated. "Why the hell did you split up?"

She narrowed the scope of the crosshairs and pressed the trigger, creating a splay of fire to contribute to the already smoke-filled bay. "Just get your hunk of junk out of here and leave Luke to me," she answered.

A loud snap sounded through her headset, a childish display of Han's outrage, and she winced as she watched Luke sprint into the fire she had created, a pathway toward his docked X-wing.

Another crash, then a low rumble that was too low for her comfort. She swiveled the turret gun to aft, targeting where Vader had once stood, but found nothing there. She fired anyway.

The Falcon shook, then seemed to cough with mechanical fatigue.

"Would it help if I got out and pushed?" she asked.

She could hear the frustration and anger in his tone, the tension so taut that it sounded like his voice might snap in two. "It might."

She rolled her eyes and fired again, keeping an eye out for a slim, orange-clad figure in the smoke of the bay. Vader himself had seemed to disappear—no caped black pillar of evil anywhere that she could see—and as the Flacon rumbled her lift-off sequence, spotting her brother became Leia's last goal.

Come on, Luke, she thought. If there was any chance he could hear her… Come on.

And then a flash, a scramble up a rickety ladder, the firing of thrusters and one last, magnificent, silent confirmation. I'm fine. Go!

"He's in!" she yelled into her headset. "Go, go, go!"

Without a word in response, the Falcon seemed to erupt in energy, shooting out of the gaping entrance to the bay with a lone X-wing in tow, clearing the wintery bluster of Hoth in one brilliant angry arc, into a sky full of Star Destroyers.

Author's Note: Ah, battles. The relief to be done with this particular chapter is strong, I won't lie. Everything feels so weighted here, like one misstep might make me tumble, because this is a movie we all know by heart. Nevertheless, here we are, and I'm happy to have arrived at some version of the trip to Bespin. What the fuck, right?

The next chapter of Specter will be posted Sunday, August 1st.

And, finally, this chapter is dedicated to a lovely lady who was born on this day a few years ago. Happy birthday, dahling! You're the bestest and also Anna Karenina was terrible. Love, KR