Greetings readers! I am on my way to see The Force Awakens for the second time this weekend, and thought I'd put this up before I do. I'm leaving soon for a three-week trip, so you'll have to wait to see how the story ends...unless I feel inspired to post a chapter tomorrow. Stay tuned!
When he got back to Leia's door, another problem presented itself: no free hands to knock or sound the chime. He thought, I suppose I could Force-push the door open, then immediately decided that that was sleep deprivation talking. While the Jedi code didn't explicitly say, "Don't use the Force to break into a female being's bedroom in the middle of the night," it was definitely implied. He settled for a gentle kick to the bottom of the door.
Leia answered almost immediately. She had put on a robe over her thin nightdress, and Luke was slightly embarrassed by how relieved he was to see that. Even if we are just good friends, you can't expect us to carry on a normal conversation if I can see her—"Two cups of tea, as ordered," he said, interrupting that particular train of thought.
"Come on in," Leia said, "If we're both awake, we might as well not drink alone."
"I was hoping you'd say that," Luke said as he stepped inside. "If there's one thing worse than not being able to sleep, it's lying awake bored." He handed Leia her cup of tea. She took it and sat down on the edge of the bed. Her compartment was just as small as Luke's, but somehow she had wedged a tiny desk and chair into one corner. When Luke sat on the chair, his knees brushed against the bunk. It took some care to arrange his legs so that they wouldn't touch hers.
Leia took the first sip in silence. Luke searched for something to say. I can't tell if this is a good time or a bad time for small talk. "Maybe I don't want to know what we had to do to get this food shipment, but until I got here I hadn't had a proper cup of H'kak bean tea since I left home," he said.
Leia looked mildly surprised. "You had this type of tea on Tatooine?"
Luke nodded as he carefully brought the mug to his lips and took a sip just large enough to test the temperature. He was relieved that his hand could manage doing that much correctly. "Yes. It was my Aunt Beru's favorite drink, actually, so my Uncle Owen always made sure our kitchen was stocked. Even though he usually had to trade for it from off-world."
Leia chuckled at that thought. "Sounds like your aunt had him well-trained."
"Not exactly," Luke said, taking another small sip. "She would've done without it if she had to. When times were hard she even would say, 'maybe this isn't the month to buy tea.' But whenever my uncle and I went to the spaceport to shop, he'd make me search all over for someone offering a decent price on H'kak beans, even if we had other important stuff to get. Once I found someone selling, I'd call him, and he'd come and haggle, haggle, haggle. I never saw him drive such a hard bargain for anything else, and he was no pushover, either. No matter how few duggats we had to spare, somehow they were always enough for a month's supply of tea. And when we got back to the farm and unpacked what we'd bought, my aunt's eyes would light up every time." He hadn't meant to tell the entire story, but still he smiled at the memory. Sometimes Aunt Beru would say "you shouldn't have bought this when we're scraping for pennies" or "I told you I could go a month without." But she always gave Uncle Owen a kiss, after.
Leia was smiling too, to his surprise. She said, "Your uncle must have truly loved your aunt."
"He did," Luke said. "He loved her very much. And . . . he loved me very much too." He winced a little bit. He loved me my whole life, and the last thing we did together was argue. "Sorry, Leia, I didn't mean to start rambling. I don't talk about my aunt and uncle very much."
"It's all right. It's good to talk about happier days," Leia said. "Even if it's getting harder to remember them," she added softly.
Despite the fact that he had come to Leia's room specifically in hopes of getting her to open up, Luke was fairly surprised to see that it was starting to work. What can I say that will keep her talking? He took a larger sip of his tea to avoid answering right away.
Finally he said, "I suppose I shouldn't talk so much about the people I've lost. You've lost more than anyone."
"More than most," Leia said, a hint of defensiveness in her voice. "Not more than anyone. Everyone from Alderaan lost just as much."
Luke prayed that his next point would not come across as unimaginably cruel. "None of them were forced to watch, Leia," he said gently. "You lost everything you had, and then some." None of them were tortured first, either.
Leia avoided looking at Luke while she took a long drink from her mug. She was good at hiding her emotions—the best, really—but Luke could sense a monumental struggle in her. He could tell that she very much wanted to cry, but didn't think she should.
So how do I make a woman cry, but in a good way? He wondered. To his great surprise, Obi-Wan's voice answered the question: let her know she's safe.
That was certainly very strange. Ben, what are you doing here? I usually only hear you when I'm in danger, he called out through the Force. No answer came.
Meanwhile, Leia was still avoiding his eyes. "You don't have to play a princess with me," Luke said, as kindly as he could manage, "Please, look at me. Don't shut me out." Leia did look at him then, and her eyes were full of tears. He reached into the pocket of his pajama pants, pulled out a handkerchief, and handed it over without a word.
Seeing Leia Organa cry was an education. She somehow managed to be in control even when she was in the deepest kind of grief. Tears streamed down her face and she sobbed, but quietly, never losing her breath. The first time he'd seen it happen, Luke had wondered, why would anyone have to train themselves to cry silently? He'd tried very hard to avoid wondering about that for too long.
Leia took the offered handkerchief, wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and somehow managed to go right back to talking even as she wept. "Did I ever tell you that they made it my fault? They told me they'd blow up my home unless I told them where the Alliance was. So I . . . I gave up a base. An older one that we sometimes used as a safe house. They blew up Alderaan anyway," she said, her voice disturbingly calm.
Yet when I found her, she had mentally mapped out an escape route and was prepared to flirt with the first Stormtrooper to come through the door. She's one tough lady. "No, you didn't tell me that," Luke replied. Then, on a hunch, he added, "You didn't tell anyone, did you?"
Leia shook her head. "I suppose I didn't."
"Why not?"
She took a sip of her tea while she thought about that. "At first, I couldn't believe it had happened. I shut it out of my mind for as long as I could. Then later it was too horrible to bring up." She blew her nose again and took a deep breath. "It's hard, even now, to really understand it. What happened, and how. It's not that I lost a lot in that moment, it's that I lost everything. Everything from the first nineteen years of my life was gone in an instant. My family, my school records, the waitress who served me kaf once, my favorite dresses and foods and vehicles, the childhood friend whose tooth I knocked out roughhousing, every man I ever danced with, every voter who wanted me to be senator. All of it was gone so quickly that I still haven't processed each loss." She looked down at her teacup and sniffled. "I guess maybe I never will."
At a loss for words, Luke leaned forward and laid his good hand on Leia's shoulder. She reached up and laid her hand on his. For a long few moments, they sat there in silence.
It was the princess who broke it first. "I had a good life, on Alderaan. I had a happy childhood, at least at first. I still have my good memories. My mother brushing my hair while I recited poetry when I was small, my father teaching me to fly my first speeder, watching him make speeches on the holo, waiting for him to come home so he could tell me what he'd wanted to say instead. He would toe the imperial line in public, then tell me about the truth with a wink and remind me, 'It's all our little secret, princess!' But now all my fond recollections of playing in his study, reading in my bedroom, reviewing my lessons on a particular plaza or eating a picnic under the shade of a certain tree are tainted by the knowledge that none of those places exist anymore."
She sighed, and added, "Some people around here have dreams, hope for what they'll do and where they'll go when the war ends. But I just can't even imagine it ending."
"Neither can I," said Luke, and it was true. "It's strange, since I've only been with you four years, but I feel like I've been at war forever. I have these moments when I look around and I don't even recognize myself or anything in my life." That was more than I meant to say. Oh kriff, you came here to calm Leia down, not complain about your own problems.
Leia didn't seem offended, thankfully. She said, "How do you mean?"
Luke took a deep breath and a swallow of tea, pondering how to express it. "On the last day I spent with my family, I ended up storming away from the dinner table in a huff. My uncle and I couldn't stop fighting. I wanted to go to the Imperial academy. He wanted me on the farm. We had that same fight about three thousand times."
He took another deep breath. "The next time I came home, I found their bodies burned to ashes."
He paused to wipe a tear out of the corner of his eye. "Life at the farm wasn't so bad. I had my own speeder and a skyhopper to play around with. I was pretty good at fixing things. I had some friends around. Biggs Darklighter, do you remember him? I thought the day he left for the Academy was the worst day of my life. When a worse day came, he had just been for a visit and told me he was going to jump ship for the Alliance.
"But then in one day, there was no farm anymore, no skyhopper, no family. I left the planet with nothing but the clothes I was wearing, two stolen droids, and my father's lightsaber. And then Ben died, and Biggs died, and I blew up the Death Star . . ." He trailed off. It wasn't murder, they were trying to kill you and everyone on Yavin, he reminded himself, but it was never easy to believe.
With a shake of his head, he finished what he had meant to say. "And then eventually I left those clothes behind while evacuating one of our temporary bases. All I had was a uniform. Every friend I made was living on borrowed time and more of them died every month. I left Hoth with a stolen X-wing. My father's lightsaber was the last thing I owned. Then the hand I held it with got cut off," by a monster who claims to be my father, "and now here I am, wearing Alliance-issued pajamas and Alliance-issued sneakers, drinking Alliance tea, no lightsaber, no ship, nothing to my name. Not even all of my limbs are my own, this hand was paid for by the Alliance. And my best friend Han is . . . well, he's not lost for forever, but he sure isn't here, either." He saw Leia's eyes watering again at the reminder, and he reached out and squeezed her shoulder again in an attempt to comfort.
She nodded and said quietly, "I know exactly how you feel."
Luke swallowed the last of his tea before continuing, "Yet I know I haven't even been through a tenth of what you've been through. Leia, you've suffered so much more than I have, yet over and over I find that you're the one comforting me. Since the very first day we met."
Leia drained her mug and set it on the desk. "It's a bad habit of mine," she said. Luke chuckled softly. Leia added, "It can take my mind off things, keep me from sliding into despair."
"I understand," Luke said, "Believe me, there's been more than one occasion where I've been glad to have you take care of me. But you can't keep it up forever."
Leia wiped the last of her tears away and smiled slightly. "Maybe I don't have to, if you're going to show up at my door with tea in the middle of the night and sit with me while I cry."
No, you don't. You shouldn't have to. "I came over here tonight to tell you . . . I don't want you to feel . . . I mean, Leia," Luke ran a hand through his hair while he looked for the right words. "I'd do anything for you, Leia, and I hope that when you need something, you'll tell me." If he had been less exhausted, Luke would have tried to decide why saying those words terrified him more than fighting battles ever had.
To his surprise, Leia's first reaction was to reach out and take his hand. "Oh, Luke," she said, and then hesitated. She stared off to one side, and Luke could tell she was fighting for control. He held onto her hand, ran his thumb over her knuckle, and silently willed her to relax.
At length, she finally turned back and met his eyes. "I think you know by now that I'm not very good at talking about how I feel. It was never part of my duties as princess," she said. "But the closest thing to family I have left in this universe is you." She swallowed hard. "So if I can't tell you what's really going on, I can't tell anyone."
Luke gave her hand a squeeze. "You can tell me. Anything."