Author's Note: Apologies, as usual, for the tardiness of this chapter. And many, many thanks, as usual, to the kind people who took the time to leave reviews. I appreciate it so, so much.

GreatOne: Heehee, my thoughts exactly!

Cooking Spray: Why, thank you. I'm glad you think my characterizations are at least a little better than Mr. Wolverton's. (I really wish they had gotten someone a little more appreciative of the Han/Leia relationship to write that novel, but…oh, well.)

DrScully42: Aw, thank you! As to the number of chapters…I'd say I'm about halfway finished. Halfway or two thirds, I'm not sure. There are still a good ten chapters or so to come, though, I think.

The Real Leia: Thanks! Well, Han & Leia fans like to make fun of the original COPL because, in my opinion, the plot was presented in such a way as to be completely unrealistic and improbable and everyone seemed so out of character that I personally had to keep looking at the front cover to make sure I was really reading Star Wars and not some really weird romance novel. I'm not entirely sure you can get the COPL text online for free…but you could try your local library; I know mine has it.

CrAzYhOrSeGiRl88: Aw, thank you so much! You're very kind. And I shall endeavor to update as often and as quickly as possible.

DarthLady14: Thanks and I definitely plan to!

Stormygurlz: Thanks so much! I'll do my best with updating, and I'm really flattered that you think my characters have depth!

Chapter 12:

The table at their evening meal was a somber one after a full standard week of fruitless searching. Well…fruitless might not be exactly accurate. Chewie had discovered some interesting species of pant that had turned out to be edible. Or, at least, non-toxic. The humans had concluded from the adventure that edible was another matter entirely. And all had found evidence of the civilization that they assumed had made Luke's signpost…and, chances were, sent him the strange messages.

None of that changed the fact that no one had seen so much as a footprint in indication that Han might have passed through. Luke risked a glance at his sister (she had been growing steadily more volatile as the past few days had worn on) and sighed. Supporting her head on her fist, she was chewing desolately on the stew Chewie had made out of this whatever-it-was plant and staring down into her bowl, obviously not seeing it.

"I was thinking tomorrow we could take the first few hours of daylight to try to set up some kind of visual signal or something, in case he's wandering around in the forest or something," he proposed, saying the first thing that came through his head in a half desperate effort to focus her attention some something semi-positive.

Leia looked up at him slowly, still chewing on one of the leaves in her stew. Luke had to admit that even if you were taking an active interest in your meal, the leaves weren't exactly tender.

"Won't that lead any other people on this planet to us, too?" Isolder asked reasonably, effectively quashing the conversation. Given a few seconds reflection, Luke had to concede that if the natives should happen to be unfriendly (and there was a very decent chance of that), attracting them to their only means of transportation with no one left behind to guard it was probably not the cleverest of plans. Leia nodded silently and went back to staring at her stew.

As had become their custom, they parceled out the area each pair was to cover the next day, and that was the end of any pretense of conversation for the evening.

X X X X X

Two standard hours later, Isolder had retired to his Battle Dragon for the night, Leia, whose turn it was to have third watch again, had gone to her bunkroom, and Luke and Chewie were left in the main hold. Luke was reluctant to go to sleep when Chewie had taken first watch and was likely to "forget" to wake Luke up for half of his shift. Of course, Luke understood that that meant he could reasonably avoid waking Leia up until just the last hour or so of her shift, but it still made him feel a little guilty. That night, it turned out to be for the better anyway.

"I found more traces of the natives today," Chewie said without preamble after a few minutes of clearing the remnants of their meal off the table together. Luke looked over at him quickly.

"When?"

"After we all got back, just as it was getting dark. When I went out to collect leaves, remember? I went into a little clump of trees and plants and stuff to try to get to the more tender leaves and I found some footprints. Signs of a struggle, too. And I'm pretty sure there was some kind of blood on the leaves," he concluded.

"Blood on the leaves we ate?" Luke asked, having processed that, with a disturbing flip of his stomach, before anything else.

"No. Blood on the tender leaves. That's why ours were like plasteel."

Luke chuckled briefly, glad to hear that at least Chewie hadn't been under the impression that he was feeding them "the tender ones". Having satisfied his curiosity in that department, he turned his mind to more important things.

"Human blood?" he asked, wondering if they could determine from that information that the natives were of a humanoid race even before he thought of Han. Chewie blinked.

"I don't know. We don't have analysis equipment here, so I thought it would be useless to take some. It wasn't enough blood to be fatal to a human, and it didn't go off on a trail, so if it was a human, chances are they stopped the bleeding before they lost too much blood…"

Luke picked up the train of thought:

"But whatever it was, it means that somewhere there's something dangerous enough to cause something else to lose blood, because I can't think of any situation in which someone would loose blood voluntarily."

"So I was thinking we shouldn't tell Leia. We can tell Isolder, so whoever partners with her in the future will be aware of the possible danger and be careful. That way, she'll be safe but she won't worry about Han more than she has to," Chewie concluded. Luke nodded, deep in thought. Han…

"It wasn't enough of a struggle for it to have been Han's blood," Chewie said half-jokingly. Luke could see the sincerity of the statement in his eyes, though. He let the train of thought drop from his mind.

"I don't know how we're going to convince Isolder to let one of us partner Leia for the next few days in a row, but I'd rather one of us did," he said to divert Chewie's train of thought from Han, too. While he waited for Chewie's answer, the thought that nobody even considered the possibility of finding Han tomorrow or the next day.

X X X X X

While Luke and Chewie sat talking in the main hold, Leia was lying on her bunk, fully dressed. She couldn't believe things had gotten to the point where she couldn't even find the strength to undress herself at the end of the day. And not physical strength. Indeed, her body was so restless that it seemed to want nothing more than to get up and run around or something. Her mind, though, and her heart, seemed unable to do anything but silently cry out Han's name and wait for sleep. If she could just sleep quietly, without dreams…for a really long time…until someone found Han and brought him back to her. In fact she didn't really want to wake up unless it was to the quiet sound of Han's breathing next to her, or to the sensation of warmth, his back against hers.

No, the still-awake part of her mind protested, no one was going to find Han for her. She had always taken as much responsibility onto her self as possible, to save others the trouble, and to make sure no one but her was left with responsibility and the possibility of failure. Others had gotten so used to it that she was considered by some to be unstoppable, invincible, with never-ending reserves of strength. And she had gotten so used to it that she almost never considered the possibility that she might need help, might not be able to be everything for everybody without even the slightest bit of help from anybody.

Well, now I need it, she thought. And it was true. She couldn't e unendingly selfless. She couldn't give everything up and still be of use to herself, let alone the rest of the galaxy. And now, it was possible that she had lost the bit of selfishness she had allowed herself, only to discover that that one bit was the one she absolutely couldn't do without.

She fell asleep with that thought settling as a dull ache in her heart. That thought and the ever present, never-ending refrain of my fault, my fault, my fault…

X X X X X

Leia awoke the next morning to the sensation of cold, damp pressing against her cheek. Her pillow was wet with tears, her face lined with fatigue and her whole body heavy with despair. She opened her eyes, which were sore from the crying she must have done in the night, during her dreams, when such weakness could be permitted, as she wasn't awake to prevent it.

I can't go on like this; the thought appeared in her head as swiftly as if she had summoned it there. She hadn't, though, and so she took a moment to roll it over in her mind like a taste on one's tongue. It was a bitter taste. This has to stop. I can't imagine myself to sleep every night and wake up crying. It's ridiculous. She wasn't aware of the thought process that carried her to the inevitable conclusion. She didn't pay attention as complicated thoughts flitted through her head without her notice. She turned her conscious mind back to what its subconscious counterpart had been doing to see the result, though. The entire conflict resolved itself on one word, cried out in anguish. Han!

She sat up and swung her legs over the side of what the builders of this ship seemed to imagine was a proper bunk. It wasn't, but that was down in the bottom ten of things she cared about at the moment. Within ten minutes' time, she was dressed, with the stormtrooper's belt that had so shocked her Prince strapped around her waist. She noted with cold distance that the blasters were full and the pouch in the back held enough ration cubes to last her as long as three days if she was careful with them. Taking four canteens from the storage closet, she filled them with water and hoped they wouldn't be too heavy for her to carry and cause more thirstiness than they could alleviate.

She seemed to awaken as she looked around the room, fully dressed and half wondering how she had gotten there. I have to find Han, she told herself. I can't keep coming back to the ship and going back to sleep and eating and resting while Han could be dying out there. I need to find him and kiss him and hold him and tell him I'm sorry…so, so sorry. She had given herself to other people for as long as she could remember. But she couldn't go on doing so forever. Eventually, she would just break down and all she would be good for was a series of red eyes and pillows soaked with her sadness. And so she hoisted the canteens onto her shoulder and left the small cabin silently.

She tiptoed past the cockpit and felt a flash of remorse sting her. Her brother, no doubt exhausted by her mad determination of the day before (the past week, even), had valiantly strapped himself into the pilot's chair straight up and downed the two cups of kaff that now rested on the console so that he could stay awake through her shift as well as his own. It had all been in vain, though, since he was now snoring peacefully, slumped against the crash webbing with his head pillowed on his own shoulder. He would have an awful crick in his neck when he awoke, Leia noted ruefully and thought a moment about making some sort of loud noise as she left so that he would wake up and it wouldn't be quite as bad. But then he would have that much more of a head start on catching up with her and convincing her with his reasonableness that she was being rash. He would bring her back to the ship, and another day would go by without anyone finding Han. So she left him, the flash of remorse coming again as she envisioned how worried he would be for her.

The hatch slid open silently and Leia reflected, as she stepped out into the thick jungle air of this stupid planet, that the hatch's silence was quite possibly the only good feature about this ship, aside from the fact that it did, surprisingly enough, actually run.

X X X X X

"Oh, blast," Luke swore when he awoke and focused his eyes on the chrono that dangled precariously from the cockpit's left bulkhead. "Blast." To his acute embarrassment, his face flushed as he absorbed the fact that it was a full hour and a half after his shift in the cockpit had ended…and the last time he remembered being conscious was fifteen minutes after its beginning. He ran a quick visual check over all the systems whose indicators were displayed on the control panel; he still wasn't really awake enough to do more than check for menacingly flashing red lights. Thank the gods. At first glance, everything seemed to have been running smoothly during his impromptu nap. Best of all, the ship's surveillance system didn't seem to have picked up anything unusual, either, so despite the fact that the surveillance system was one of the most paltry he'd ever seen (which was saying something, considering the number of afternoons he had spent at Anchorhead bent over crummy old systems with his friends) that, hopefully, meant that everything was fine. He breathed a sigh of relief as he stood up and stretched.

By the time he was walking down the short corridor to the lone bunkroom, where Leia slept, he had convinced himself that everything was fine. Nothing alarming had happened during his shift, and on top of that, he had (sort of) covered half of Leia's watch for her. And she needed the sleep, so it was all for the better. He passed the main lounge, where Chewie was sprawled on the couch, snoring softly. On the other side of the corridor, a little further down, was the 'fresher, whose hatch yawned open; nobody had been able to fix the closing mechanism so that it actually closed. Luke reflected that it seemed like such a long time ago that he would have been amazed at this ship, when now he felt nothing but disdain for its cramped quarters and dilapidated systems. Well, he had Leia to thank for that, at least in part. At the thought of Leia sleeping peacefully (more or less) in her bunk for a few extra minutes, a small grin crept hesitantly onto his face as he palmed the bunkroom's hatch open.

"Rise and shine, little sister," he called cheerfully into the darkened bunkroom, letting his eyes adjust to the dim lighting. That's funny, he thought, from this angle it almost looks like her bunk is empty. He stepped a little further into the room, trying not to step on any of the clothes strewn around the floor.

"Leia?" he called hesitantly. He squinted at the bed, and then swept his gaze around the rest of the room. Nothing…

His next words were his most heartfelt of the trip so far.

"Oh, blast!"