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Irreconcilable, Perhaps

Chapter III: Snow Joke


When the last curtains of the northern lights finally faded in the night sky, they returned to their speeder. Neither of them said a word, as if doing so would destroy that precious moment that hung between them. They got into the craft's cockpit in silence, and Han flipped the lever to bring the engine revving back to life.

Nothing happened.

She heard his suppressed cursing through the radio and how he began flicking all sorts of switches and checking multiple settings. With a dull sense of ugly premonition, she finally asked, "Hey, what's going on?"

"What do you think?" It echoed back through the headphones. "The cart won't start. The cold has probably given her the rest."

"You're joking."

"Believe me, princess, even I wouldn't kid in a situation like this." The glass dome over their heads opened, and Han clambered out. "I'll take a look at the engine."

She released her seatbelt and followed him to the stern of the speeder, just in time to see him check the engine compartment and then kick the stubborn speeder.

"Oh yes, that will definitely get us out of here, Captain. Excellent job," she said ironically before biting back her words.

He turned to her, throwing both arms out before letting them drop unceremoniously to his sides. "Right now, nothing is going to get us out of here. Speeder's stood too long. The engine's colder than an ice cube, and the heater has surrendered. This thing won't make a sound before sunrise."

Leia threw her arms likewise in the air in frustration. "Wonderful!"

"We shouldn't have stopped!" he said, subdued, leaning against the vehicle.

"Yeah? Well, it wasn't my idea!" she snapped back.

"Yeah? Well, you weren't in a great hurry to get away, were you?"

"If I had known that you wouldn't be able to get the speeder going again—"

"As if we could have guessed that!" he snapped. "It's obviously a design flaw; these things aren't built for an environment as harsh as this."

"But we don't get anything better, so get used to it!"

There was a moment of silence while the two managed to cool their jets. Hotheaded tempers wouldn't do a thing against cold-bound temperatures. Leia felt the chill creep through her padded jacket. Shivering, she rubbed her hands together. "Then do you have a plan, you hero?" she asked irritably.

"Your Highness can't think of anything?" he shot back.

"You're the adventurer here, aren't you?"

He sighed. "As you wish. One thing's for sure, we definitely can't stay here. Without heating, we'll freeze to death in the speeder just as quickly as outside."

"How far is it back to base? I didn't check the positioning system."

He started pacing up and down while she stood in the snow with her arms crossed, watching him closely. "Too far," he explained. "And even if we make it back, the gates will be tight by then."

"Locked out," she stated. "In the ice desert. Without a heater. You really have a great knack for cheering someone up."

"I'm responsible for the facts, not the encouragement."

"Do you happen to be responsible for spectacular rescue operations? Like the Battle of Yavin, for example?" At the recollection, her sardonic undertones gave way to a softer sound for a moment, and there was something in her voice like approval.

"Well, at least I have an idea how we don't get ourselves killed. But I warn you, it's going to be a pretty uncomfortable night, princess!"

She squeezed her eyes tight to keep them from rolling. "I don't have a choice," she muttered.

But he had already turned away from her and had begun to rummage through the interior compartment of the speeder. He unearthed some blankets and a few other items, as well as two boxes of field rations, and passed an electric binocular into her hand. "Take a look around," he instructed her. In the meantime, he tied the blankets together.

She put the binoculars to her eyes. At first, she only saw white nothing around her, but with a few filters she finally managed to see the distant mountain sides against the dark sky. "What do you have in mind?" she asked, carefully scanning the horizon.

He threw a bag over his shoulders. "Wampa shelters, for example. Preferably abandoned. They're good hunters, so their excursion remains might make good food backup, but they're damn hard to kill."

"Great." She let her gaze wander over the plain and suddenly paused. "There is something."

"What?" He asked and started to take the binoculars from her hand, but she shook her head and zoomed in closer. She exhaled in relief. "Tauntauns! Probably the same ones we saw on the outbound flight."

Now he did take the binoculars from her hand—which she acknowledged with a frown—and took a look himself. "A whole herd heading for the rocks… That's good. Better than I had hoped."

"So?" She tired of waiting for explanations.

"Tauntauns often retreat to caves at night to keep warm. If they move to the rocks, it means there's probably shelter there, maybe for us, too. And it's not too far..."

"A shelter that we'd share with stinking tauntauns? This lucky day really seems to be getting better and better."

"I can pack you off into a Wampa cave."

She sighed, then grabbed two tied blankets and stomped off. "So, what are we waiting for?"

Together they set off. The frozen snow crunched under their boots as they trudged on tirelessly, their eyes fixed on the mountain range that seemed scarcely any closer. An endless expanse of ice and snow stretched in radius around them.

Every now and then, Han would raise the binoculars to follow the path of the small herd of tauntauns far ahead of them.

"What would you have done if we hadn't found a cave? —Which, by the way, we haven't found yet," she added as she trotted to pull alongside him.

"Set up the emergency tent in the middle of nowhere," he explained, pointing to a small bundle that he had thrown over his shoulder. "But that would've been a damn cold business."

"Ah." For what must have been the hundredth time, she straightened the string that held the blankets on her back. It was already cutting painfully into her shoulder.

Han paused until she caught up with him again, then made as if to take it from her. "Give it to me, princess. You're probably not used to—"

She put her hands on her hips. "Don't you dare, you..." in her indignation, she couldn't think of a suitable insult.

He quickly raised his hands in defense. "All right, all right, just wanted to help!" She merely snorted and trudged on, and he followed her with a shrug.

After another half an hour, which she spent toiling silently through the knee-high snow, rubbing her arms over and over again, Leia listlessly allowed Han to remove her luggage without resistance.

For a while, she even convinced herself that the rocks would never get any closer, that they would wander through the biting frost until they finally froze to death. But she would have bitten off her tongue, quicker than the cold, rather than voice her doubts. An infinite amount of time passed before they actually reached the range of hills.

"Finally," she gasped, rubbing her hands together. Not that it did anything. The cold seemed to have penetrated into her very bones. "Where—where did the tauntauns go?"

Han pointed to the right, where the ground rose toward the slope and a lot of rubble and rock lanced through the blanketed snow. "This way."

They balanced carefully on the uneven ground, and when Leia almost lost her footing, he grabbed her arm just in time.

"Thanks," she said, smiling slightly, though her adrenaline rush didn't abate for some reason.

"Never mind."

They smelled the tauntauns before they could properly see the entrance to the cave in the gloom. The stench was unmistakable, even in the numbing air. Leia wrinkled her nose slightly but, by now, she was so frozen that she would have slept next to a Wookiee to warm up.

The tauntauns had huddled in groups a few meters from the entrance and looked up only briefly when the two people entered. Docile by nature in the barren lands, the snow lizards knew little fear of creatures smaller than they. They soon curled up again and paid little attention to the strangers.

Han and Leia made a camp a little away from the animals by spreading the blankets. Here, where they were protected from the cold wind and the body heat of the tauntauns had already warmed the air slightly, they regained some of their own body heat. Nevertheless, Leia put one of the blankets around her shoulders and pulled up the collar of her jacket again. Han sat down next to her.

"Do you remember when I said something like this could be very romantic?" he said.

"Do you remember when I said I didn't find it at all romantic to be stuck with you in the ice desert?" she immediately countered. "My feelings have not changed in that regard."

"Too bad."

Her scoff turned into a yawn, and she lifted a numb hand to rub the corners of her eyes. "Are you sure we won't freeze to death here in our sleep?" she asked.

Han shrugged and grinned. "We just have to do it like the tauntauns."

Before she had time to get a biting word in edgewise, he had already put an arm around her and pulled her close. For a moment she struggled, but then she just lay there, thinking about what would happen if either of them woke up cold. Eventually, she lay her head against his chest.

"All right then," she muttered, although it didn't sound as snappy as intended. After all, it was just so as not to freeze to death. Was that not so?

When Leia fell asleep, there was a slight smile resting on her face.