Author's Note: And, finally, here's another chapter. God only knows when the next one will be out…hopefully soon- if it makes anyone feel any better (if anyone is still reading this to begin with) it's already half written. Also, as usual, thank you so, so much for the encouragement; it helps immensely and just plain brightens my days!

lateBloomer04: I'm really glad you liked the Leia-sneaking-off-the-ship thing- I was a little worried about it at first. And my apologies for not updating sooner, really- I know it's unforgivable, but I really just can't help it. Silly premed-ness.

The Real Leia: You're right, I really should write the chapters more than one at a time…but every time I finish one and am satisfied (which takes me forever, as you can probably tell) I'm always eager to post it right away because I know I've left everyone hanging for so long. Chapter 14 is definitely at least halfway done, so hopefully it'll be up soon. Dare I say by the end of the week? Probably I shouldn't say it, but we'll see. ;)

GreatOne: giggles So true.

CrAzYhOrSeGiRl88: Aw, I'm so flattered that you like this one better than the original. Not that I thought the original was particularly brilliant, as I'm sure you've gathered, but still…he was a professional writer and everything, and I'm just a silly little amateur. Anyway, I'm extremely happy that you like everyone's attitudes- I've been doing my best to get the characterizations as accurately as I can, but I definitely still need practice.

KnightedRogue: Yay for honest criticism! Don't ever hesitate to spill out whatever you think is wrong with my story, really- I'm not claiming to know what I'm doing after all. I'm thrilled to pieces that people actually want to read this stuff but more than anything I'm using this as a learning experience. Anyway, you're absolutely right about Leia- I tried to take that into consideration a little more while writing this chapter. I think the trouble is that I had kind of got her to where I wanted her to be in terms of emotions earlier than I thought I would…and then I kind of had to let the plot catch up to her. Oops.

Cookiemunster: Yes, definitely "plant". My bad. I shall go fix that right away. Thanks for catching that for me!

AnnaBelle JJ: Aw, thank you, I'm glad you think so! And I'm sure your stories are great- I'll come read some as soon as I've got a second and I'll be sure to review them and let you know what I think. :)

Aramor Lady of Mirkwood: Thanks! And I'm definitely a sucker for it, too…which you've probably noticed. ;)

Pixiepaige: Thank you! And I definitely do plan to continue. It may take forever and it may be the slowest story you've ever seen, but I would never abandon a story, even if it seems like it!

Chapter 13:

Han awoke from another night spent under the cover of some stupid tree in this stupid jungle in an extremely bad mood. He was skirting the edges of the jungle, having decided he had definitely landed his ship in a desert-like area. This meant that penetrating more deeply into the jungle wasn't necessary, but he had decided to continue his journey just inside of it anyway, so that he could sleep in its shelter and avoid being seen. He'd lost count of how many days he'd been traveling, and he'd lost count of how many days ago he'd lost count, too. His rations were running low, his emergency glow-stick had run out of energy a few days back (he had, naturally, lost count of how many), and the only reason his water supply wasn't running low was because he'd been lucky enough to find streams and other sources of water every day of his journey.

Even that piece of luck wasn't enough to lift him from his black state of mind as he sat up and winced at the soreness that permeated his body. His legs were sore from so much walking, his back was sore from sleeping on the hard, uneven ground, his ribs were sore from being poked all night by sticks he was too tired to remove once he'd lain down, and his head was sore from the constant dampness and the background noise of jungle life that never seemed to sleep.

On this particular morning, though, there was something slightly different about the background noise. And, as annoying as this particular routine had been for the past however many days, things that broke routine in situations like this were generally bad. Unless they happened to be rescuers…something he didn't feel was particularly likely at this point in time. He cocked his head to listen more closely to whatever it was that had alerted him, forgoing his usual morning eye rubbing and muscle stretching.

After discarding several other possibilities, he concluded that something was coming his way. Something that walked around on two feet and was rather large. For one wild moment, he pictured Leia trekking heroically through the jungle to find him. Then he realized that for that to be Leia, she would have had to have gained rather more weight than he thought possible in the course of the past few weeks. (At least, he thought it was weeks. He had, after all, rather lost count.)

And probably grown a dozen feet or so, was his first, not especially coherent thought as one of the largest things he'd ever seen thudded into his clearing, wiping out an entire colony of small trees near the clearing's edge.

Shit, was his second thought. His third was not a fully formed thought, but more of an impulse, one that made him grab his vest, to which everything important was attached (he hoped), scramble to his feet, and run as fast as he could towards the other edge of the clearing. He wondered fleetingly who would have the advantage: him because he was small enough to run through the jungle growth relatively unscathed, or the creature because it was large enough to simply overcome the jungle growth around it…leaving said growth very scathed indeed.

He had run for what felt like most of the morning, and was actually only just under a standard hour, when he noted that he could no longer hear whatever the thing was behind him. In fact, the jungle's background noise had subsided back to its routine, mind-fraying decibel level. He decided that that made it an opportune moment to sit down for a moment, rest, and enjoy (sort of) a ration bar. It was then that he realized two things. Firstly, he was missing his glow stick. It wasn't as if that was too much of a problem, since it had, after all, ceased to function. But it had been comforting to have it around just the same. The second thing he realized was that he had seen things like the one that had chased him this morning before. When his eyesight had come back, with much coaxing through creams and ointments (which had stung, no matter what Leia had said), after his bout of hibernation sickness, one of the first things he had wanted to see was a holo of the thing that Luke had fought in Jabba's palace. Lando hadn't been able to stop himself from recounting the story over and over during their trip back to the Alliance fleet, and Han had become quite curious about what the thing actually looked like. So when his eyesight had finally returned completely, a few days before they had reached the fleet, Lando had shown him the holo, telling Han that it was the best he could do on short notice- he wasn't sure how to procure a real one, since he didn't know where they came from, these rancors.

X X X X X

"Chewie," Luke shouted as he ran down the corridor. Chewie answered with a muffled rumbling sound, opening his eyes slowly and fixing Luke, who had stopped to stand in the hatchway, with a one-eyed stare.

"It's Leia," he offered breathlessly, by way of explanation, "she's gone."

"Gone?" Chewie echoed groggily.

"Yes, gone," Luke reddened slightly, "I fell asleep during my watch and she must've snuck out to go look for Han by herself while I was…not paying attention." If Chewie could have rolled his eyes, Luke was sure he would've.

"Go let Isolder know. I'll go have a walk around the ship to see if she left any tracks, and we'll decide what to do from there," Chewie said. Luke nodded and rushed off to the cockpit to comply.

"Isolder? Luke here. We've got a bit of a problem. It seems Leia…um…left, by herself, during the night. To find Han," he spoke into the crackling comm, barely having waited for an answer.

"I'll be there in a minute," Isolder answered. A beep signaled the end of the transmission and Luke sat back in the co-pilot's chair, reaching out with the Force to see if he could detect Leia among the sea of life on this planet. Usually it wasn't too hard to pick out his sister from other living beings in a location, even when she was trying to conceal herself (and he very strongly suspected she was doing so at present), but this jungle was so distractingly full of so many different kinds of life forms that he couldn't find her. He turned his mind instead to the other life forms and hoped Leia wouldn't run across any that meant her harm.

The main hatch slid open a few seconds later to reveal Isolder, looking slightly less meticulously groomed (and rather more flustered) than usual.

"Here," he said without preamble, thrusting a sheet of flimsiplast still warm from the printer into Luke's hand. "I ran the life-sensor through a check to see if it could detect any lone humanoids in the area. There're a few floating around and they're not distinguishable, one from the other, in terms of species. I printed out a map of where they were," he finished, indicating the flimsiplast Luke was holding with a sideways flick of his head.

Luke looked down at it. Two of the dots were within a few miles of each other, in a southerly direction. The other was in a direction slightly north of straight east. He was distracted by Chewie entering the room before he could decide exactly what the map meant they should do.

"There are some very faint, well-hidden tracks going sort of to the north," he said.

"She took the time to hide her tracks?" Luke said incredulously.

"Not necessarily," Isolder put in, "there are also two people to the south- maybe she's not to the north or northeast at all. Maybe those aren't her tracks."

"In which case she hid them really well, since there aren't any tracks to the south except ours," Chewie retorted in annoyance. Stupid cub insisted on coming along and now he's going to make us lose Han's princess, he thought angrily. Luke caught a mental whiff of his old friend's mounting annoyance through the Force and decided that the situation needed to be calmed down as soon as possible.

"We can search in both directions," he said in what he hoped was a soothing tone, "we don't want to put all our Corusca's in one shipment, after all."

The cautionary expression usually used to explain the benefits of back-up plans to children in terms of Corusca gems had the desired effect, and both the wookie and the Hapan relaxed visibly, each taking a small step back from where they had been all but angrily yelling in each other's faces a moment before.

"I think, under the circumstances, we could justify going out and searching alone," Luke continued, "but I think one person should stay behind at the ship, in case Leia comes back. That way, the two people who go out searching can report in every so often, too." Isolder and Chewie nodded reasonably.

"I'm going to try finding those two people," Isolder said, pointing at the sheet of flimsiplast the map was printed on.

"And I'm going to search to the north- where the tracks are," Chewie put in with, Luke later thought, admirable restraint. For his part, Luke was on the verge of protesting that they had no right to simply decide without him that he was going to be the one stuck behind at the ship when he remembered that they sort of did…it was mostly his fault that Leia had been able to run off without alerting anyone to her departure.

X X X X X

Already several miles away, Leia marched energetically through the jungle. It seemed to be thinning, she noticed, which was a definite improvement from the thick, entangling growth she'd been dealing with all morning. She took a deep breath and almost smiled. Despite the fact that this planet was hiding Han from her somewhere, there was something calming about it…even when one was trudging through the depths of its jungles. A glance at her chrono confirmed her suspicion that it was about time to break out the rations again. She chose a log that looked at least moderately dry and sat down, taking a moment to breathe deeply and admire the luscious display of life around her before unzipping her pouch and extracting an energy bar.

She was thinking something along the lines of whoever said that hunger is the best seasoning was definitely right to herself when something shiny caught her eye mid-chew. Odd, she thought, I wonder who uses durasteel around here. She would've dismissed it as her imagination (after all, who or what could possibly have any use for durasteel around here?) but it really did look like something metallic.

For some reason, her heartbeat quickened as she stood, walked over, and bent over whatever it was. It was definitely durasteel, which meant it had definitely belonged to someone sentient at one point, since Leia knew for a fact that durasteel was sentient-made. She battled with herself for a moment over whether or not picking up the unknown object was really as foolish as her first instinct told her before the logical part of her mind overrode the impulsive part with a well reasoned but you don't want Han to come across bits of you if this is a thermal detonator (not that she gave herself particularly good odds if it was and she didn't touch it), or, worse, die because you weren't there to rescue him.

Sighing, she took out the scanner she'd impulsively grabbed from Isolder's personal store of technological gadgets. Whether he was consciously trying to insert himself into her daily life by leaving his possessions in the lounge of their ship or whether he was simply becoming increasingly comfortable with everyone, Isolder had been leaving more and more belongings all over their borrowed ship, so Leia quickly overridden her guilt that morning and taken his top-of-the-line scanner from his jacket pocket and attached it to her belt. Now, she flipped it on and raised her eyebrows appreciatively when it turned on in less than the ten or twenty seconds she had come to expect from any piece of technology more complex than the average chrono. If only Isolder could just finance the New Republic, we'd have so much…stuff. She quickly stomped out the small but insistent voice in the back of her head that tried to remind her that they could indeed get Isolder to finance almost anything the New Republic needed, with just a little compromising on her part. But it wasn't a "little" compromise, as so many of the council members had tried to convince her. It was the rest of her life, and, no matter how much she loved her job and the New Republic, she couldn't give it up.

Which was why, when, six and a half seconds later, the scanner pronounced the object un-reactive, not poisoned, and not likely to explode in her face and she scooped it up from the ground and recognized it, her breath caught in her throat and her eyes brimmed with half grateful and half fearful tears. A standard issue Rebel Alliance glowstick, re-made to include wires for two extra power packs and one extra fluoro-rod could only belong to one person on this gods-forsaken planet. And that one person was the one she wanted, more than anything in the universe, to find.

Han's alive Han's alive Han's alive Han's alive, was the refrain that ran over and over through Leia's mind, blocking out any other rational thoughts she might have had. Feverishly she turned the glowstick over in her hands several times, remembering what Han had shown her one lazy afternoon back on…where had that been, anyway? Endor, she remembered, after a few moments of dedicating a small portion of her mind to recovering the memory. After all, where else had she permitted herself to spend afternoons in nothing more productive than spending time with Han? It had been one of those afternoons, one of the ones soon after she had learned of her parentage, when she had been doubting her life and her very sense of self and Han had taken her out into the forest to show her that she needn't embrace this mystical new power Luke had made known to her if she didn't want her.

"When you're in a forest, like this, it's real easy to track sentients, especially clumsy ones," he'd told her, slipping his arms around her waist and kissing the back of her neck. Pointing to the ground, he'd shown her where one of their own soldiers had apparently dropped his ration pack. "See how it's covered with dirt and stuff? That means other things have traveled through here since they dropped it; that's how the dirt got there. And if it's covered with unbroken leaves, you can tell it's been there long enough for them to fall on it. If it's covered with broken leaves, that means that something probably stepped on the leaves after they fell, too." They'd knelt down to examine the leaves together, and, after Leia had successfully estimated that the ration pack in question had probably been dropped before the battle had taken place a few days before. When Leia had shown signs of getting upset with the soldiers under their command for being so careless, Han had lain her down on the ground, where they had broken more than a few leaves while Han melted and molded her until her body felt so soft that she had thought that anyone could have stepped on it without leaving the faintest imprint.

Now she could feel a flush creeping up her neck to redden her face as the memory of that afternoon washed over her. There was no dirt on the glowstick she'd found. It had not been covered with leaves, crushed, bent or otherwise. Han had passed through here recently, perhaps within the past few hours. Han's alive, the happy thought came again, and I love him.

She savored the thought as she held the glowstick to her chest as if it were a valuable treasure. She was close- it would lead her to the most valuable treasure of all. She would find Han, have him in her arms, maybe even before nightfall. A smile played across her lips and she closed her eyes to savor the moment.

"Up hands!" came an unfamiliar but unmistakably hostile voice, ripping through the peaceful fabric of the air to disturb Leia's first truly happy moment in weeks.