Summary: Rogue Squadron heads back to Hoth to defend an Intelligence Unit. But they get more than they bargained for.

Disclaimer: Star Wars, Rogue Squadron, and the rest are not mine. I write this for my own amusement. Jesina is my own, original creation.

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Chapter 27: Capable

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Inyri stopped short as she walked out of her quarters and nearly into Wes. He was practically bouncing in place, and she looked around quickly for any practical joke that might be headed her way. Not seeing anything, she looked back at his face. "What?" He'd been acting like an adult since the bombing – she should have known it wouldn't last.

"You and Hobbie, huh?"

She gave him a withering look, but wondered where he'd gotten that information. "No. Not me and Hobbie." Then she shook her head. "Who told you that?" Of all the people in the galaxy, Wes was the last person she wanted to know. And the last she'd expected to figure it out. Maybe Janson was smarter than she gave him credit for. Nah.

He frowned at her. "No one told me. Any fool can see it."

"Well, a fool you are, so…." She trailed off and started to walk away, but he stepped in front of her again.

"I'm serious, Inyri. Anybody who looks at him can see how much he cares about you. And you aren't exactly hiding how you feel, either." He was being serious. She could see it in his eyes. Probably out of concern for Hobbie.

"We're not together, Janson," she said, her voice deliberately icy. "So drop it."

"No." He studied her thoughtfully for a second and crossed his arms. "Why?"

She started. "What?"

"Why? Why aren't you together? Like I said, anybody can see he's…interested. And you can't tell me you aren't."

"We aren't, Janson. I don't have to explain why to you, of all people." She turned and went to sidestep around him but his next words stopped her cold.

"He's my best friend, Inyri. Don't hurt him."

She whirled around to face him again. "Don't hurt him?" she echoed, face red with anger. "Don't hurt him, huh? You want to know why we're not together? Fine. Because I've been hurt too many times before and I'm not about to get involved with someone I already know is capable of—" She broke off, hand flying to her mouth, eyes wide. "I have to go."

"No." Janson grabbed her, hands on both her arms. "Capable of what, Inyri?"

She put up a brief struggle but gave up. However immature he might be, Janson took great pride in his body – too much, usually – and kept himself in good shape. Not that he wouldn't have had one up on her even if he'd been in terrible shape. "You're hurting me."

He shook his head, his face an impassive mask. "I'm not holding you that tight. Capable of what, Inyri?"

"Let me go, Major." She was shaking, and he could see the tears in her eyes.

Slowly, he released her and stepped back. He didn't need her answer anyway. The look on her face was answer enough. "You know I need to go to Wedge with this."

"No!" She was openly crying now. "Please, Wes. Don't. It's – everything's fine. We worked everything out."

He hesitated. She was serious about not wanting him to go to Wedge. But if he was right about this – and he was positive that he was – Wedge should know. "I have to, Inyri. You know that." Not that it would be easy for him. Hobbie was his best friend, and he didn't want to think about what Wedge was going to do. "I'm sorry."

She blinked back the tears and nodded. "I need to go," she whispered.

He nodded and watched her walk away.

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Hobbie looked up as Wedge entered the mess, one of the few places undisturbed by the explosion, with Wes a few steps behind him. Wedge looked angry. Wes just looked…resigned was the best word Hobbie's mind could come up with. After a brief pause, presumably to find him, they headed in his direction.

He swallowed, knowing instinctively what this was about before they even reached his side. He looked quickly at Inyri, sitting at the end of the table with Teril and Gavin, and saw that she wouldn't meet his eyes. She watched Wedge and Wes for a moment before shifting her gaze to the floor.

Wedge was standing beside his table now. "My office now, Major," he said in a low voice that left absolutely no room for argument.

Hobbie stood slowly, glancing at Wes for a moment, who was looking back at him, apologetically but unsympathetically. He didn't know how Wes had found out, but he obviously had and had gone to Wedge with it. He shook his head slightly in an attempt to tell him that he didn't hold it against him, and followed Wedge out.

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Wedge sat down behind his desk, folding his arms across his chest, and leaned back in the chair. Hobbie stood stiffly in front of him, trying to remember when, if ever, he'd last felt this uncomfortable with this man. He couldn't think of any other time.

"Wes was…heckling, I suppose is the best word, Inyri today, about you – asking her if the two of you were involved." Hobbie opened his mouth but Wedge held up a hand. "I don't care if you are or not." He paused and reconsidered. "Well, maybe I do, but not at the moment."

"Inyri told him no, and wouldn't explain why – and told him that she didn't have to explain why to him. At which point he reminded her that you're his best friend and told her not to hurt you." He studied Hobbie for a second. "You know what she said then?"

"No, sir," Hobbie said, wondering again when he'd last been so formal with Wedge when it was just the two of them. He swallowed hard again. This wasn't going exactly how he'd expected.

"She told him that she'd been hurt in the past and wouldn't get involved with someone who she already knew was, and I quote, 'capable of' and then stopped, and started crying." He stopped speaking and looked at his friend expectantly. "You have any idea what she almost said?"

"No, sir," he replied again, just barely able to continue to meet his CO's eyes.

"I don't believe you for a second. Wes has never been a very good liar, and you were always terrible at it. Which is why I could never understand why he involved you in his escapades. Every time, you were the dead giveaway."

"I don't know what she was going to say, sir," Hobbie said, maintaining the formality.

"Fine. I don't know for sure, but it sure seems to me like she was going to say something along the lines of not getting involved with someone she knew was capable of hurting her. You have any idea why might say something like that?"

"Yes, sir." He was shaking now, the weight of what was happening resting heavily on his shoulders.

"Feel like telling me?" Wedge cocked his head to one side, studying the other man.

"Honestly, no, sir."

"Stop calling me sir," Wedge muttered. "You know, she nearly killed Tycho and I when we asked her if you hit her. I know you know about that, by the way, so don't bother pretending you don't know what I'm talking about. I really believed her that you hadn't."

"I didn't, Wedge."

Wedge regarded him skeptically, eyebrow raised. "You're going to tell me that now?" he asked, slightly incredulous.

"I didn't hit her. I almost did, which is about as bad. I was angry at you and Tycho about that blasted sim you made me run and she tried to calm me down and I couldn't see straight because I was so mad, and I sure as Sith could think straight. She told me to calm down and I turned around and swung at her. I managed to pull it just in time, but…." He stopped speaking, out of breath from having told the whole story without pausing at all.

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Wedge leaned back in his chair, arms still crossed. He hadn't expected this. He was glad that Hobbie hadn't actually hit Inyri – for any number of reasons – but he wasn't sure that this wasn't, as he'd just said, almost as bad. "Has anything like this happened since?" Wedge asked.

"No. You haven't made me relive Hoth since then," Hobbie retorted. Then his eyes widened and he looked away.

Wedge was taken aback. Hobbie had a point. He couldn't imagine his friend ever hitting a woman, no matter how upset. But thinking back to the day this had happened, he remembered wondering if the sim had pushed Hobbie over the edge. From the looks of it, it – they – had come dangerously close to that. "We made a mistake," he admitted.

Hobbie didn't hide his surprise – not that any effort he might have made could have been successful. "Excuse me?" he asked, blinking.

"I said we made a mistake. We screwed up. It was Jesina's idea to run you in a Hoth sim, but I don't think what we did was exactly what she had in mind. And Iella thought it would be cruel, but I didn't listen to her. We made a mistake. And while I'm not about to take responsibility for what you did, it puts it in a different light."

He paused. "I could take any number of disciplinary actions against you," he said, "and I want to make certain that you're aware of that. But I'm not. I'm going to consider what happened as extraneous circumstances and simply move on. If it happens again, though, not only will I have no choice but to take action, but I'll turn you over to Gavin myself."

Hobbie cracked a smile at that, and Wedge just barely managed to hide his own. Gavin was easily the most protective of Inyri out of all of the Rogues. That wasn't to say that the others weren't protective of her.

"That's not to say you won't have to answer to anyone else," Wedge said, voicing Hobbie's thoughts.

"I know. Thank you, sir," he replied, reverting back to formality.

"Enough already," Wedge muttered. He'd heard the word 'sir' more times in the last week – between Corran and Hobbie, mostly – than he had throughout the rest of his career. From the squadron, anyway. "Get out of here."

Hobbie had one foot out the door when Wedge called him back. "Yeah?"

"I'll tell Wes to lay off you and Inyri," he said. "What you two do or don't do is your business. And I'll try to keep them from starting one of their betting pools, but I don't know how successful I'll be. For the record, though…I think you both could do a lot worse."

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Hobbie knocked nervously on Inyri's door. He heard a muffled, "Just a minute," from within the room. Even through the door, he could tell that her voice sounded strange. He waited, fidgeting and moving from foot to foot, until she opened it.

He stepped back, surprised at her appearance. She'd obviously been crying and hadn't cared enough to try to hide it – or had known she wouldn't be successful if she did. Her face was red and streaked with tears. He guessed she'd been lying down – her hair was mess and her jumpsuit was creased and wrinkled. She had a tissue in her hand and was dabbing at the corners of her eyes.

He slipped past her and into the room, letting the door slide closed behind her. Then, even as she tried to step back away from him, he pulled her close and put his arms around her. "It's okay."

She buried her face in his shoulder and he tightened his grasp on her trembling body as she shook her head. He felt her hair brush against his face and strained to here as she mumbled, "No, it's not. I didn't mean to say anything. He just made me so mad and I just lost it. Janson's good for that, you know."

"Yeah, he is." After a moment he stepped back, keeping his arms around her. "We need to talk about that."

"I know. I didn't mean it but…."

He cut her off. "Inyri, I think you did."

She shook her head. "No. Wes just made me angry. I wasn't thinking."

"Kind of like me that day?" he asked gently, and she nodded. "Inyri, when people get angry they do things they wouldn't normally do and they say things they wouldn't normally say. A lot of times what they say is true, though – even if they don't realize it. You wouldn't have said that if you didn't feel that way at all."

"Hobbie, I'm dating you, remember?" She leaned back against his arms so she could see his face more clearly. "I wouldn't be if I really thought that."

"So you aren't at all afraid of me?" he asked.

She hesitated just a moment before saying, "No."

But that moment was long enough to convince him that he was right. "Inyri, we need to talk. You need to tell me the truth." He led her over to her bed and sat down, pulling her down with him.

She looked away. "Hobbie, you almost hit me. What do you expect?"

Her sudden turnaround hit him like a slap in the face. He'd been right, but he hadn't expected to be that right. He expected something more along the lines of 'maybe you're right.' Not 'what do you expect.' "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't want to hurt you. Besides…." She trailed off and shrugged. "It doesn't matter. I'm never going to completely trust anyone. I've been through too much for that, and I've gotten used to the idea. So I need to accept it if I'm ever going to be happy." She smiled through the tears still in her eyes. "I may be screwed up, but at least I know it."

He tried to smile but couldn't quite manage. "Inyri, I know you have problems trusting people. I wasn't around you before you joined the Rogues. But I've heard a lot about how you met them and what you did to help them. I know your past. And I know you don't trust easily. And I know that what happened between you and I didn't go a long way toward helping. I've told you that. And I don't expect you to trust me suddenly, overnight. But I hope that I can get you to trust me, somehow."

"Hobbie, I'm not going anywhere. No, I don't completely trust you. But I don't think I'll ever completely trust anybody. And yes, right now, whenever I'm with you, the fact that you almost hit me is in the back of my mind. I know that there's an explanation – you went a little crazy. And I know that it's not your fault. But that doesn't make it go away."

"What can I do to make it go away? Inyri, you told Wes you wouldn't get involved with someone capable of hurting you." He paused. "Well, you started to anyway. So why are you?"

"Because everyone is capable of hurting everyone else. You may not believe that, but I do. I come from a different world than you do, Hobbie. And its a different world in more ways than you could ever understand. Where I come from – and I don't just mean Kessel; I mean the whole lifestyle I had before the Rogues – people like Booster Terrik are as nice as you get. And Booster can be one mean bastard if he wants to be. He was on Kessel for part of the time I was there. He can be so cold. But he's like a father to Wedge and he'd die for him or Mirax in a heartbeat. Everyone has two sides and for a lot of people you don't see both of them. But everyone does. And everyone is capable of turning on anyone if they're in the wrong place at the wrong time. And Force knows we have a lot of wrong places and wrong times, Hobbie." She was no longer crying now.

He was listening intently to everything she said, wondering if she ever talked to any of the others, even Gavin, like this. Probably not, he decided, and felt lucky that she was confiding in him these thoughts, because he knew it had to be hard for her.

She stood, growing restless, and began to pace across the floor. "Hobbie, you have to take what I can give. And you have to give me time."

"That I can do," he said softly, biting his lip.

"Can you?" she asked. She'd never poured her heart out like this to anyone before and was kicking herself for doing it now. To her, it was like getting hit by a blaster bolt in the side and then leaving that side wide open for an enemy to exploit the weakness. "I know it's a lot to ask of you."

"You can ask me anything. Force, Inyri! I'm in love with you." He froze as the words came out. He wasn't surprised by the sentiment. He'd warred with himself over what, exactly, he was feeling. What surprised him was that he said it. He hadn't intended to. He'd wanted to wait until Inyri seemed more secure in what was happening between them.

It surprised her, though. Her eyes went wide and she dropped bodily into the chair across from him and just stared. Finally, after a long moment of silence punctuated by the darkening of the room as a cloud moved gradually between them and the sun – probably bringing yet another storm – she asked softly, as if slightly afraid, "What did you say?"

He chuckled, a little at her stunned expression and a little to cover his own nervousness. "I said I love you."

She stared at him, blinking rapidly as her brain tried to process what her ears had just heard. "You…you do?" was all she could manage to say, and she blushed furiously.

He nodded slowly. "I didn't even mean to say it now. I didn't want to put any pressure on you. And I don't want you to feel like you have to say it back…." He trailed off, not wanting to make things more awkward than they already were.

"I…I don't know what to say," she murmured. "Hobbie, I don't think I…."

He silenced her by pressing a finger to her lips. "Shh. Don't say anything. I don't expect you to feel the same way now. Weren't we just talking along those lines a minute ago?"

"Yes, but…."

"No," he said gently. "Nothing's changed from a few minutes ago. You have a lot to work through."

"Yeah," she mumbled. "I guess."

"It's okay. Please, Inyri. Take your time."

She nodded. "I really do care about you."

"I know. Otherwise you wouldn't have been crying when I got here. Unless, of course, you were crying over some other dashing Rogue."

She grinned. "Yeah. Janson told me that he's in love with Jesina and that I have no chance."

"I almost buy that," Hobbie replied, glad to have been able to bring a smile to her face, even if it was just her trademark sarcastic smirk.

"No kidding," Inyri joked. "I think it's obvious to everyone but them."

"I'm pretty sure they know it too. They've got some problems of their own to work out, stuff from years ago."

"Speaking of problems," she began but hesitated, "I guess Wes went to Wedge?"

"Yeah, but it's all right. Wedge made it very clear that he could get me in trouble but isn't going to – unless it happens again. But in that case, I think he plans on leaving it to Gavin to decide what to do with me."

"He'd break you in half," she replied, laughing.

He grinned ruefully, but inwardly wore a broad smile induced simply by hearing her laughter. "I know." He sobered after a moment, though, and asked, "Are we all right?"

She smiled. This time it was a genuine smile, full of affection rather than sarcasm. Then she rose slowly out of the chair and advanced on him. "I'd say we are." She straddled his legs, sitting on his lap, and kissed him gently.

As he leaned back onto the bed, pulling her with him, he smiled and returned the kiss, glad that they were both in better moods than when he'd come in here.