Three Who Lived

Luke Skywalker was done with handshakes and pats on the back. In the past day he had more of them than he could have ever accumulated in three lives on Tatooine. Only days ago he was living on the insignificant desert planet with his aunt and uncle and wishing for adventure to take him off that rock. Now he was the Hero of the Rebellion with the medal to prove it, along with everyone's new best friend.

The young man walked through the large room in the ochre-colored Rebel base, avoiding the dwindling revelers as best he could. The large golden medallion that had been presented to him by the princess bounced against the yellow jacket and black shirt that the Alliance had given him , an honor and an annoyance.

Han had initially refused the honor, along with Chewbacca, citing with an unusual amount of vehemence that the people who really should have gotten the award were the ones that didn't make it back. Luke couldn't disagree with the smuggler. Out of the thirty ships that had launched from the jungle base, only three had made it back. Twenty-seven pilots had paid the final price for their cause and Luke Skywalker could barely name more than three of them.

Of those three it was Biggs Darklighter that he had truly known.

"Hey, Sky... Luke!" The voice with a tight Corellian accent floated over the diminishing crowd. "Over here!" The voice belonged to a pilot only a few years older than Luke but already a seasoned veteran. Wedge Antilles was sitting at a plasteel table, mulling over a bottle of some sort of liquor with the other surviving pilot and a blond woman seated next to the latter man. Both of the pilots were still in the flight suits that they had worn during the battle and during the large medal ceremony just hours before.

Luke pulled the wooden seat away from the table and sat down next to Wedge. "Wedge, Keyan. How have you two been?" Luke hadn't seen the other two pilots since their own medal ceremony the night before.

"I've been better," Keyan said. His voice was thick with a rural Agamarian accent and he scratched at his light brown hair. "But I've been worse."

"Alive," Wedge chimed in as he rose his glass and took a sip.

"Alive," Keyan agreed and took a drink of his own glass, followed by his companion.

Luke felt his stomach sink deeper down his body. He was alive when so many were dead, not just Biggs. His uncle and aunt and been the first, their bodies charred and indistinguishable from each other as they lay where the stormtroopers had shot them. Obi-Wan was next, his mentor of only a day had filled his mind with lessons of the Force before being cut down by the same vile man that had murdered his father and shot down Biggs. He took the offered glass from Wedge and took a drink of the watered down liquor. "Alive."

"You look like you're sick of all the attention you're getting," Keyan's companion, who had introduced herself as Lynia, one of Mon Mothma's aides, said.

Luke gave a half laugh. "You can say that again." He shook his head and a strand of his dark blonde hair fell into his eyes. "Everyone's calling me a hero just because I was the one who made the shot. It could have been Gold Leader, or Commander Dreis."

"Don't be so hard on yourself," Wedge said. "You did your job."

"Who were they? The ones that I didn't get to know?"

"Good beings," Wedge said. "Some of the best that the Alliance had to offer."

"That's for sure," Keyan added.

"Jek Porkins, the burly one," Wedge began. He took a quick drink from his glass and refilled it. "One of the best dogfighters in the Rebellion. A good man, too, you just wouldn't want to be across the table from him in a Sabacc game." Wedge laughed at some distant memory.

"I barely even got to say 'hello' to him," Luke said.

"That's war, Luke," the Agamarian pilot said. He looked down at his own glass with a somewhat far away stare. "You don't get know people half as well as you'd want to and when you do, they can still die."

"To Porkins." Wedge raised his glass and toasted to the memory of his friend.

Luke took a sip of his drink before clearing his throat. "Biggs Darklighter was my one of my best friends growing up. He was always better at the rest of us when we were flying our speeders back home, and he let you know it, too. He wasn't bragging, though, not really. I always thought it was just his way of trying to get you to improve."

Wedge and Keyan both gave a slight laugh at that and nodded their heads. Biggs had always been one to make an impression on people quickly and his recent comrades were no exception.

"To Biggs," Luke toasted.

"I've lost more friends than I'd ever thought I had, but yesterday two of them died. Puck Naeco and Hamo Blastwell." Keyan reached up and massaged his forehead as Lynia gently placed an arm around him. "No one even saw what happened to Hamo, so I guess I'll drink to him."

The third pilot took a second to compose his thoughts. "Hamo wasn't just an instructor, he was a friend to everyone who knew him. You could go to him with your problems and he'd be there if he thought you had a problem." Keyan raised his glass slightly. "To Hamo," he toasted.

Luke took another drink to another man that he didn't know. Lynia had wrapped an arm around Keyan's shoulder to comfort him as he mourned the loss of a close friend. A strange sight caught his eyes for a fraction of a second as she toasted: the briefest hint of hesitation at the gesture before going through with the salute.

"I guess I'm the only one who hasn't said anything yet," Lynia said. "There was only one pilot up there that I really know, and he made it back." She took a drink from her nearly empty glass to steady her nerves. "My brother was a fighter pilot for the rebels before any of you joined up. Before there was even an Alliance, just the various cells across the galaxy. Mon Mothma had a small fleet that she kept hidden while she was still in the Senate. They were attacking an Imperial supply convoy when my brother got a TIE on his tail. He didn't make it back."

She wiped tears from her eyes and raised her glass as high as she could manage. "To Jabez." Luke could only stare as she quickly finished the rest of her drink before quickly heading away from the table.

"Um, I'd better go and make sure that she's okay," Keyan said. He looked back towards the direction that she had fled with a look of concern on his long face. "She really doesn't like talking about her brother. That's the first time I've heard all of it..."

Keyan walked quickly away from the table and towards where his companion had disappeared to, leaving Luke and Wedge alone at the table. "If you live for more than this battle, and from what I've seen you're a real Likely to Survive if I've ever seen one, remember that." Wedge pointed in the general direction of the two that had just left. "Years pass and it never gets easy."

Luke looked at the older pilot with a sober look on his face. "I will."

"At the same time, there'll be some that won't take kindly to you: a newcomer destroying that thing and living while so many people that they knew for years didn't make it back. It's just something that happens to new pilots, and I was no exception. Don't let it bother you, they'll come around."

When Luke left the table a few minutes later, he rolled the information and advice that Wedge had given him in his mind. The lift towards the top of the ancient temple moved slowly as his mind raced.

The lift exited to the open air of Yavin 4, the burst of humidity of the jungle world hitting Luke in the face as he stepped out. The large gas giant that gave the moon its name loomed large in the night sky, casting a deep red-orange hue along the surface of the satellite while several of the planet's other moons showed as smaller dots in the sky. Tatooine's binary suns had been a common sight to him, having spend all of his life under the heat and brightness of those two stars, but the sight of Yavin and so many of its moons in space nearly took his breath away.

The burning piece of Death Star wreckage as it streaked through the moon's atmosphere caught his eye and he watched the impromptu meteorite before the friction dissolved it completely. They had struck a huge blow against the Empire yesterday, but they would be back. Maybe not soon, but the Rebel's hidden base had been discovered. For now, though, they were heroes, every one of them, even the dead. Biggs, Jek, Hamo, Jabez and the others killed yesterday joined with Uncle Owen, Aunt Beru and Obi-Wan in his mind as the true heroes, the ones that had died to get them where they were today. He stared out into space, towards the faint white cluster of stars that was the Galactic Core and knew that the war had just truly begun.