Equilibrium


The Falcon's hatch opened with a hiss and the cold air of Hoth hit Han with all the force of a proton torpedo. It bit into the exposed skin of his neck, into his face and hands, tore through his clothes like a feral pittin. He could see his breath in the freezing air, rising into the loud atmosphere of the loading bay like a billowing wind-sail.

"Oh, hell no," he muttered, once again shutting the hatch with a slap of his hand.

Out of all the planets and moons and space stations he'd seen, from the blazing hot deserts of Tatooine to the swamp-nests of Rangoroon, he hated the frozen ones the most. Heat bloomed and rippled through a human; it could be uncomfortable but it didn't pinch his skin, nor did it steal oxygen from his lungs like the cold did. And heat was easy to shake off: take a cool fresher or stand in front of a chiller for a bit and you were good to go. The cold made him curl up in his bunk for hours like a fucking glamloth. It took time to heat himself back up.

He'd seen the intel about Hoth, knew average temperatures and seasonal air pressure fluctuations. The day before last he had flown through a dense cloud cover to get to the planet's surface and into the hangar of a base that was a loose conglomeration of ice walls and supporting durasteel sheets.

He had known what to expect. The fact that none of that had really sunk in until this very moment pissed him off.

Is something wrong, Cub? Chewie's growl could be heard around the ring corridor, rumbling and deep.

Han sneered at the closed hatch. "It's cold."

It is an ice planet.

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "But we risked our tails for a few thousand heaters. Why am I still cold?"

Sending one last dark look to the hatch—directed not at his beloved baby but the frigid atmosphere beyond her bulkheads—he then stomped down the corridor like a petulant child. He hated the cold. Corellia's streets had been a hell of a place to grow up but at the very least the weather had been temperate: relatively warm in summer and cool in winter, but the kind that could be staved off by a stolen coat. Hoth was not a cold night on Corellia.

Grumbling to himself as he passed Chewie, he marched through the galley until he reached the captain's cabin. He opened the hatch, swept his eyes around the small space, and when he didn't catch sight of his intended victim, he moved into the fresher, figuring she was probably finishing up her daily routine.

"Le-ia," he said. It was almost musical—comical in its petulance—and he well knew it. "Why the fuck is it cold out there?"

She paused her deft twists and braiding fingers to look at him through the reflector, brown eyes catching hazel, a note of fond exasperation dancing between them.

"Because it's an ice planet?" she said and then resumed the quick pull-twist of her wrists.

Stepping into the fresher proper, he leaned against the hatch frame as he decided that out of the myriad of places to be on the Falcon, this was the most interesting. He had to admit he had far more experience taking down her intricate hairstyles than he did watching her create them. The effect was fascinating: the way she tilted her head this way and that, the magnetic pull of her fingers through brown tresses. How a long, wild curtain became a braided coronet: how the beautiful woman from their bunk became the fierce monarch with something so simple as a braid.

As Leia continued her work, Han got a little lost in the finesse of it. Lost until she suddenly turned, quick as a whip, to smirk at him.

"Do I need to explain what ice planet means, Commander?"

He blinked, then the fire of his surly anger ignited again. "Yeah, no, but those heaters we got at Nar Shaddaa—"

"—are being used in the Command Center and bunkrooms," she finished for him. "Places where people aren't regularly moving and will need the supplemental heat. We don't need them at the landing bay."

He frowned. "I spend more time in the bay than the bunkrooms."

"For my sake, I hope you'll at least spend some time in mine."

Her hairstyle finished, she turned to him. She had on the no-nonsense make-up she wore when she wanted to blend into the Alliance ranks: nothing fancy, nothing too colorful. She looked pale in the harsh lights of the cabin and Han wondered if that might be part of why she didn't seem too disturbed by the cold that lay in wait for her outside of the Falcon.

And then he had the most amazing thought, full of hilarity and promises of pranks and teasing.

Luke.

On an ice planet.

"Did you read any of Carlist's briefs?" she asked into his mirthful silence, chipping away at his good humor.

"Nope," he said, playing the game. "Why?"

She put her hands on her hips and while there was real frustration under her words, her tone held more amusement than anger. "If your pilots come to my office and demand heaters in the loading bays, I will be furious."

"No, you won't," he murmured and then losing the fight against his needy hands, he reached out to grip her waist. "You only get furious with me."

She swept her fingers over his clean-shaven jaw and he wondered if she missed the stubble from the past few days. "Not true. I am still quite furious at Jan."

Han shrugged, pulling her closer. "He's an asshole."

"He arrested you."

"Ahhh, that was at least two days ago," he said, careful to keep his voice neutral, blunting the edge. "Gotta let things go, Worship."

Leia made such an undignified snorting sound that it made him laugh, too, pressing a quick kiss to her forehead. He wasn't at all sure how today was going to go. Returning to command, to jobs and responsibilities for the both of them… he just didn't know what would be thrown at them, even though the charges against him had been dropped and they'd both been reinstated to former duties while they'd been holed up here. On paper, life was returning to normal. Just with a few new angles.

The fact that he and Leia were sleeping together was now public knowledge, and while that didn't bother him in the slightest, he knew it might cause some problems for her. It was part of the reason he had insisted on hitting planetside with the rest of the Echo Base crew but had sealed the Falcon's hatches for a day until his commission was reinstated. That would give the Rogues and Mercs time to get the gossip out of their systems.

And, too, Han and Leia had needed time together to just be. Their entire relationship so far had been anxiety-ridden and filled with secrets. To have a few hours to themselves, to wake up without an alarm and drink caf together, then tumble back down into the bunk just because they could…

It had been like solving a riddle he hadn't realized he'd been working on. Having a secret affair with her—dodging detection and trying to be subtle—had been hot as hell, but this felt more permanent, more sustainable. And with Leia those words didn't scare him to death.

"Are you ready for this?" she asked.

He narrowed his eyes. "Going Jedi on me already?"

"What?"

"I was about to ask you the exact same thing."

She grinned and he felt relief wash over him. Some healing had happened there, too, with the Jedi thing. Before yesterday—the way they'd started referring to the evacuation and ensuing revelations, even if it had been two days ago now—she would have closed up like a backlam oyster to him referring to her Force-sensitivity. Her smile was a good thing in his book, always, but smiling about this was a big step.

He took a second to consider her question. This had a lot of meaning here: a lot of hidden truths had swept through the Alliance like an angry tempest. And knowing the Alliance as he did, there was gossip infused into the truths, too, so that no one got the actual, full, gleaming scope of what had been revealed.

"No," he answered honestly. "You?"

She pursed her lips and looked at him. There it was again, that narrowing intensity in her eyes, the expansion in her gaze cut down to just him alone. He was her panorama, he could see it. He could feel her shift away from galactic freedoms and down to him, to his safety and the concern for what he felt. The weight of it was heavy but equal in importance.

And oh fuck how good that felt, to be important to Leia. Another missing puzzle piece to the chaos they'd been living in the past few months.

His chest filled with warmth, and confidence slid through his lungs, his heart, the nerves and the veins and the deepest, darkest parts of him. They could handle this. They could.

"Ready for you, yes," she whispered. "Not the rest of it."

He felt his grin tug at the right side of his lips and he kissed her instead of letting it take over. He had meant for it to be a warm, soft kiss, initiating nothing but their first day back to work. Simple. Easy.

But that wasn't something they did well at all. When the kiss ended, Leia pulled him close and swept her tongue over his bottom lip and into his mouth, tasting of toothpaste and caf. Her fingers slipped into the hair at the back of his neck and in turn Han settled his hands on her belt—the smallest belt he'd ever seen, god, Leia—and tried to remember that there wasn't time to start things up again after they'd just managed to pull themselves away from each other this morning.

"What time is your first debrief again?" she murmured into his smile.

Leaning down, he ran his lips up to the shell of her left ear. "The first one wasn't so much a debrief, Highness, I was already naked—"

She pulled away just to give him her patented shut-up-Han look. Grinning, he settled his hands on her hips. "In 30 minutes," he answered. "Not enough time."

Leia sighed, defeated by deadlines, but the lightness in her eyes was so good to him that it felt just like that old winter coat that first night of winter on Corellia. Except this wasn't stolen, this wasn't temporary, this wasn't his because he'd taken it from someone else.

A good man, she'd said. That was what she had called him. And for once in his life he actually believed it.

He pressed his forehead to Leia's, brushed a kiss there, and grabbed her hand to lead her out of the fresher. It might be a shit day but at the very least she would be back here tonight. No sneaking around. No lying. That was enough to give him some hope.

—0—

Leia's first steps into the Echo Base Command Center were full of bullheaded, stubborn pride, and she knew it, the ice crunching beneath her weather-treated boots as she passed through corridors of packed snow and ice shards. Half-finished light fixtures and haphazard durasteel support beams held too much weight and quickly-scrawled Aurabesh messages of impending danger could be seen on the hatches.

She didn't know what a wampa was and she hoped to never find out.

And the air. Oh, the air was like an inhaled, frozen paralytic. It stung and it bit, ruthless and angry over her entire body, even the parts protected from direct exposure. Her nose was already a red, blustery thing and she couldn't feel her fingertips, checking often to make sure they were still there. The chill sat deep in her lungs; she held onto the sensation to remind herself to stay vigilant on this new base.

When she entered the Command Center, however, the air was warm. The comms were alive, the sensor displays hummed with activity, and at least six techs were seated at as many stations. There might even have been more down the narrow scope of her line of sight; she couldn't see it all. Early warning systems here; data storage there, there and there. Tactical databanks and central communications, row upon row of equipment breaking the range of what she could discern: all of it snugly buried in wires and screens that quite obviously needed heat to function properly.

And while it didn't at all resemble the order and sterility of the Death Star—the uniforms the staff wore were obviously mismatched and pulled together in a hurry—it did look and feel like a functioning nerve center of an Alliance base. From this room they could command their defenses. From this room they could anticipate an Imperial attack. From this room they could survive snowstorms and avalanches. Or so High Command claimed.

"Good morning," she said.

"Sir," the comm specialist said with a nod and then returned to her work.

Leia swept her eyes around the center. She identified engineering modulators and noticed the controls on several sensor displays built into the middle of the room. She watched a tech fiddle with some wiring in the corner next to what she assumed was the ion cannon feed. Ten people in total… and not a single one of them seemed interested in idle gossip.

She exhaled in quiet relief. They'll follow you, Han had said. She had believed him then, but it was good to know that he had been right.

"Your Highness."

She turned around and smiled. Holding his cold-weather gear in his hands and inclining his head in a nod, Carlist walked toward her. She had to fight the emotion that tried to bubble in her throat, the gratitude she wanted to express but couldn't. War had a way of smothering the tenderest moments.

"General Rieekan."

"Welcome to Echo Base," he said. "The heaters turned out to be quite the advantage."

She nodded. "Good. They were not easy to obtain."

"Nothing ever is."

He let her take in the activity—the humming of voices at work, the thrumming of instrumentation—and smiled at her when she focused on him again.

"Okay," she said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Status report?"

"We are at seventy-six percent optimum power capacity here in the Command Center, ninety in the bays. Southside generators are working well enough."

"What about defenses?"

His eyebrow twitched. "Shield generator is the first problem we have to address now that we're here."

"What's wrong with it?"

Carlist pointed to a tech station on the far end of the room. "It holds steady at forty-five percent power, but fluctuates from thirty to eighty percent when we push it."

"That's not so much a shield as a very expensive net."

The shield generator hadn't been her boon; the Rogues had managed that one with the help of that very mysterious Targeter agent who seemed to wander around large Alliance payloads like a phantom. From the specs sent to her early on in the planning and establishment of the base, the generator's power source was some kind of engineering feat—reactors scavenged from a… had it been a Dreadnaught? The details were fuzzy; she'd read them while Han had been in active seduction mode. In any case, because of suboptimal installment, the generator was a concern. Forty-five percent was not going to protect them from the kind of weaponry the Empire could bring to bear on them.

"Exactly," Carlist agreed. "I've requested a more powerful generator from Mon Mothma but she's put us on requisition hold until the rest of the base is operational."

She grimaced. "Great. And our supply chain?"

"Nonexistent. I suspect that is why you are here with me. You're going to have to start from the ground up."

Her lips fell into a grim line. Procurement was not her forte but it was something she was experienced at organizing. The Alliance typically used donations and captured Imperial supply ships to stock their bases: everything from bacta to food, and water to weapons. Smugglers, mercenaries, sympathizers… All of it had been arranged into a delicate tandem operation to keep the rebels alive the past months on Home One.

It was impossible work on even the best of days.

The network they would need on Hoth, though—the pure bureaucracy of it—was a staggering feat to contemplate.

"Do you have a list of our available contractors?"

Carlist didn't answer for a few moments, and she turned away from the shield display she had been studying to throw him a questioning look.

"There is no list because there are no contractors," he admitted at length.

Leia struggled to process the information, the general's grave expression. "Then how are we supposed to continue eating?"

She was only partially kidding. They'd been rationing on Home One for months.

"A good question," he said. "And one I'm sure you will take great pride in answering for yourself."

She fought the urge to groan. An entire base. An entire base with only the supplies they had on hand. How long could they last until she could find contractors to smuggle supplies to them? Six months? Four?

"What do we need?" she asked.

"Oh, a thousand different things. Speeders aren't acclimating well to the cold, so we're using a local species for scouting runs. We could also use more tech-insulation."

"Of course we could."

"Water won't be an issue, but we only have six weeks' worth of rations—"

Her mouth fell open in shock.

"—so I imagine that is where we should probably start," he finished.

Her voice came out completely monotoned, a war waged on her royal dignity won only by pure stubbornness. "Six weeks."

Carlist nodded. "Six weeks. Cold weather gear is fine for now but we both know how fast supplies run out when it comes to clothing. And who knows when or if we will be receiving a new batch of recruits."

Her head felt like it was going to explode, the logistics of such an enterprise stumbling through her brain like it was weighed down with lead. Six weeks to source food and gear. Six weeks to find a new fleet of contractors, to find the fuel and the credits to pay for it all.

A nightmare. That's what this was. A nightmare.

But Carlist was not done.

"The Rogues have been trained in the snowspeeders and have done three atmospheric runs so far, but they're complaining about sluggish maneuvering."

She tried to maintain her polite mask. "Aren't they always?"

"Indeed. And Jan has decided to remain with Gilad on Home One."

"He what?"

She lost the battle against her patience then, the tone of her voice so flaring and angry that the comms op specialist beside her jumped and looked over her shoulder.

"Echo Base is under our direct command, Princess," Carlist said.

She tilted her head and nearly demanded an explanation until she remembered where she was and the ears that had no business knowing about the cavernous divide between their leaders. "I see," she said with perfect aplomb. "General. Would you mind showing me where our offices are located?"

Carlist's eyes gleamed with not-so-hidden amusement but he nodded and led her out of the Command Center and away from prying ears. Down a corridor, something called the South Passage, into a circular nest of small offices, the temperature dropping noticeably as they walked, the durasteel beams shining in sheets of ice and snow, and Leia suddenly understood Han's whining this morning. The cold was the default here, not the exception. She would have to get used to that.

When they reached a hatch with her name scrawled on a piece of flimsy and pinned into the ice, they waited until they were both inside before the real emotions burst forth.

"Oh, he's a snake," Leia said. "What reason could he possibly have for staying on Home One?"

Carlist leaned against the closed hatch. "An even split in High Command. You and me here on the ground, Ackbar and him on Home One, in a pocket of the Mid-Rim that no one's ever heard of."

"No one had ever heard of Hoth, either," she bit out.

"True," he said. "But I think the relative popularity of naval and terrestrial bases is beside the point."

Leia moved past Carlist to sit behind the only large piece of furniture in the office: a massive plastex desk that looked collapsable for easier transport. Eyeing the ice above her, she thought the desk would offer no protection in case of a cave-in.

"He's decided to avoid me entirely."

Since nearly three quarters of the Alliance's forces had been deployed to Hoth, it would make more sense for Jan to be here as well. And while Leia had no say in what the tactical side of High Command saw fit to do, her specialty—supply and procurement—should have been consulted about this change in personnel. That left only one possible motive for his decision.

Coward, she thought.

"Perhaps he doesn't like the cold?" Carlist offered, pulling her away from her old, bubbling anger.

Quiet descended as she considered Jan's motives. She didn't truly believe that the old general was afraid to confront the consequences of his now very-public elitism, but his actions threw his mindset into question. He had acted out of an ancient understanding of sexual politics, out of privilege and classicism, and he was sure to feel some kind of embarrassment because of it. As well he should.

But that didn't explain his decision to remain with Ackbar. He wasn't the type to avoid tense situations and Han was not in the habit of carrying grudges, particularly when he had been vindicated. He'd be an insufferable gloat but harmless in the larger scheme of things.

It all came back to avoiding her, either because he had violated her trust by looking at her medical records or because of the information he'd gleaned therein.

Let it go, Han had urged her only this morning. When had he become the emotionally-intelligent one?

She shook her head, making a conscious decision to fight the crisis of the moment, and grasped her humor with both figurative hands despite the onslaught of new duties and the pusillanimity of Jan Dodonna.

No one could overwhelm her but herself. She was bigger than that.

"Should I take this as a literal cold shoulder?" she asked Carlist.

"Relations in High Command might be chilly for the time being," he immediately replied. "Best bundle up."

She cracked, shaking her head with a small grin. "At least we won't have any debate over scouting schedules."

Jan and Carlist had been arguing for months over how to use the fighter squadrons. Equanimity aside, finding the right balance of mechanical upkeep and continuing education for their pilots had been a difficult battle between them. Carlist could now do what he wanted with the Rogues and Mercs without interference from Jan.

"That is true. It eases things for Green Flight, too."

She nodded, understanding the scrutiny High Command had maintained on the Alderaanian general's oversight of that particular squadron, the way they'd breathed down his neck about military protocol and dissemination of critical intel when it came to Han's group. Unfair, of course. But that appeared to have been a thing of the past.

"Thank the Force for small favors," she answered. "Alright. Have a seat. Let's discuss how you expect me to supply this base in six weeks."

—0—

She didn't have much time to eat since she had skipped lunch in lieu of finding her bearings in her new role on Echo Base. Supply and procurement was going to be substantially more important on Hoth than it had ever been on Home One; rationing of edibles, for instance, would be exponentially more difficult to oversee in such a cold climate, where a solid layer of fat could be the difference between survival and hypothermia for the warm-blooded Alliance personnel. Hoth had no natural resources to speak of; all food had to be obtained off-world, which cost credits for fuel and for whichever smugglers they could recruit to haul for them. And that was just for food. Never mind for weapons or bacta or fuel cells for the generators or the tech insulation Carlist had mentioned...

She still hadn't solved her biggest issues and suspected she wouldn't get much sleep tonight either. Too many donors to comm. Too many glances at the Alliance coffers. Too much to solve in one sitting, but she'd be damned if she would let this problem lie unsettled for too long.

Han had commed her twice, had sent her messages that bordered on enraged when she'd told him she hadn't found the time to eat. She would have tried to eat a ration bar at her desk for the dinner hour, too, if she thought she'd get away with it, but she knew she wouldn't be able to trick Han like that. He knew her far too well now.

When she signed off from her terminal at 1800, eyes weary and brain overrun with inventory data and engineering requests, the chill had crept into her bones, not helped by her mindless lack of food. Leia was gratified to realize that because of its proximity to the bunkrooms, the main mess hall was heated, but for one brief, glorious moment she stood still, soaking up the warmth like an amphibian on a sunny beach.

"Your Highness," a voice said from behind her, and Leia, opening her eyes, stepped aside to let the ensign through.

Grabbing her food—more than rations, thank the goddess, but it was still a congealing mess and she wasn't certain it was much of an improvement—she went searching for Han in the din of the hall. A hand rose, waved, and she was surprised to see Han utterly surrounded. In the very center of the room. With five people sitting with him at his small table and an empty chair across from him that couldn't have been more clearly designated hers than with a sign written in sixteen languages.

Making her way through the hall, she could feel stares at her back, but she chose to think of the attention the same way she thought of the eyes trained on her during political speeches: a kind of food all its own, fodder for brilliance. A result of good intentions and an opportunity to express truth.

This is who I am and this is what we are, she thought to them, proud.

Han's circle of dining companions included very familiar faces. Chewbacca, of course, blue eyes gleaming as he glared at her. She suspected Han's preoccupation with her daily food intake was seconded, and perhaps even surpassed, by Chewie's. To Han's left sat Salla, resting her chin on her hand as if the whole business bored her. Then Wedge, eyes fascinated as he watched her approach, and Wes, a broad, white smile breaking through like the sun on an overcast day.

And finally Luke, eagerness under strict control as he lifted his fork to his mouth. She had no idea what he had done in the past day, how he had processed their new reality. To Leia he looked like he was tempering his reactions, like he was trying so hard to be calm. It was endearing and she felt guilty for making him feel so reticent, so careful. The least she could do after their big familial reveal and the sullenness that followed was ease his mind over dinner.

"Hi," she said and sat down.

"Finally decided to join us mere mortals?" Han asked, then tossed her a crudely-wrapped package. Catching it in midair, she saw with delight that it was one of Chewie's baked goods.

"Gruesome was worried about you," Han continued.

"Uh-huh," Salla mumbled into her water. "Chewie was worried."

You are too small, the Wookiee growled, ignoring her.

Cocking an eyebrow, Leia was thrilled with the tone he used, his familiar rumble. "And you are too big."

Chewie grinned and the rest of the group followed suit, dispelling the tight, curious air that surrounded them all. She could still feel eyes on her back, but at the very least the tension had been mitigated by Chewie's heart and consideration.

"No lunch," Han said, never one to drop the subject. "High Command rationing food again?"

Luke blinked, then his eyes tore right to hers, worried. "That's a joke, right?"

"It's a joke," she confirmed. "The commander here thinks he's a comedian."

"Hey," he defended. "I'm hilarious."

She offered a sweet smile. "You're annoying, is what you are."

Han made a show of dropping his fork onto his tray as he opened his hands wide, an outrageous look on his face that didn't go anywhere near touching his eyes. And then she caught the quick wink directed her way, the sign that his incredulity was for show, that he wasn't actually offended, that he was going to go along with her gambit to ease the tension.

No one said they had to change for anyone. Their relationship was predicated on interactions exactly like this one. The contention. The battle of wills. The only difference between then and now was that the conversation would end with a walk back to her assigned bunkroom and not a very public, very hurtful argument that would leave them both reeling and frustrated.

"Annoying, she says." Han's voice got louder, pulling others in, setting the stage. "Annoying!"

"You're being a little annoying right now," Luke chimed in.

Salla tossed her head of hair, wild and free today to stunning effect. "Come off it, Slick. We all know who the real star of the show is, anyway."

Thank you, Zend. I find myself to be quite humorous, Chewie murmured, the punchline and the deliverer all in one.

Wedge and Wes looked confused and Han looked… well, annoyed, but Luke, Leia and Salla all laughed, the dry spirit of Chewie's humor a kind of heat all on its own.

"Somebody better muzzle him soon or I'll shoot him," Han asked. "He's been like this all day."

I have been like this for much longer than just today, Chewie said. Just because you have been sulking around for the past few months does not mean I have been, too.

"The hell do you mean, sulking?" Han asked, but Leia could tell it was more for the benefit of the non-Shyriiwook fluent members of their dinner party than an actual question.

"Sulking or skulking?" Wes jumped in.

"Both," Wedge answered him with a quick, kind look directed her way.

Leia frowned. "Definitely not skulking. Biding our time."

She turned to Luke, eyes questioning. He shrugged. "A little bit, yeah."

"I'm not clear on the rules, but aren't you supposed to be on my side here? Considering?"

Leia's eyes remained trained on Luke's and she could feel the air around her stretch thin, could feel the surprise laden in the mouths of everyone around them. Still, everything else dissolved into nothingness for her. Of no concern.

He blinked but otherwise didn't move, his stare contemplative, unsure. She hadn't been able to bring herself to actually say the word but she'd insinuated it in a very real, very obvious way. Aren't you supposed to be on my side here. Brother?

"Maybe I would be if you two hadn't waited a week to tell me and lost me the betting pool."

Like a thermal detonator, Luke's voice broke the tension into bursting peals of delight so loud that the Falleen sitting at the table across the mess hall looked up, startled. Wes nearly choked on his food, Salla's smile broke through her typically hard veneer, and Chewie leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms.

"You waited a week?" Salla asked. "How? Why?"

Chewie whuffed loudly. Yes, why?

"Don't you start." Han pointed his ready index finger at his copilot.

"How?" Wes repeated, turning to Luke. "No, seriously. How did you not know?"

Luke lifted his eyebrow. "I knew. I just—"

"Because even before I saw them in the Falcon's cockpit, I knew…" Wes trailed off at the matching looks he received from Han and Leia. "... nothing," he finished. "I did not see you in the cockpit. Could have been—probably was someone else, you know?—and I wasn't sure which hatch I saw you leave that morning, Solo, could have been anyone's—"

Leia put a hand to her forehead. "Please stop."

Cockpit! Chewie said, then repeated it louder. Cockpit!

"I didn't, we didn't, no, pal—"

Salla laughed in delight. "Oh, shit, Princess."

Leia pursed her lips and sent a slow warning look to her friend, who immediately put up her hands in surrender.

Chewie was not so easily quieted, however.

We drew a map, Cub! We set our boundaries for mating locations and the cockpit was strictly off-limits!

Mortified, Leia's mouth hung open, gaping at Han and Chewie without a single word to say in her defense. Han's eyes slid to hers and though there wasn't an ounce of apology in them for hiding that conversation from her, she did detect an undercurrent of amusement.

"Who are you gonna listen to? Him or me?" Han asked Chewie. "We didn't do anything in the cockpit."

Chewie growled wordlessly to himself as Wedge leaned in. "I mean, why not?"

"Wedge, Wes, please. As your C.O., I'm ordering you to shut up," Luke said, looking queasy.

"Yes, please," Leia murmured.

"No, but that's got to be like the coolest place to do it, though," Wedge continued, heedless of their pleas. "That ship did the Kessel Run in thirteen parsecs—"

"Twelve," Han and Chewie both said, though they were busy glaring at each other.

"Okay, twelve," Wedge amended. "Like, that's sexy, man. You can't tell me that isn't sexy as hell."

Salla stuck her finger in Wedge's face. "You have no clue about women, do you, Antilles?"

"I know things."

"If you knew anything, you wouldn't have just said that—"

Their voices rose, accompanied by the nausea-inducing conversation that Chewie and Han were having on the other side of the table that thankfully only a scant few people in the mess hall could understand. Leia wanted to crawl beneath the table, embarrassed to have such a frank discussion about her private life voiced and speculated about right in front of her. Such topics were so far from the delicate nature of Alderaanian nobility and from the halls of the Imperial Senate, in which sex was only discussed for the purposes of blackmail.

And yet there was also something accepting about it, too, even as she fought hard not to let her blush consume her entire face. Mortifying, of course—she would have gladly eaten rations for a month rather than have this conversation in the middle of the mess hall—but also oddly solidifying. Affirming? Confidence-inducing?

She wasn't sure she could name the feeling. She wasn't used to feeling this way. Then again she was finding all sorts of new feelings nowadays, and she had promised herself not to avoid any of them.

Luke turned to Leia. "Do you want to get out of here?"

She exhaled, relieved, and nodded. "Follow me."

She picked up her tray and led Luke down a snowy corridor into the landing bay. The temperature dropped noticeably by the time she keyed the Falcon's ramp controls, hurried to seal the hatch and soak up the environmental stabilizers' hard work.

Sitting at the dejarik table, she eyed Luke as he followed suit, looking gingerly around the main hold. It took her a moment to catch onto what he was thinking.

"Of course not," she answered his silent question, and then bit into something that sort of resembled cold mashed tubers but with even less flavoring. "What kind of woman do you take me for?"

Luke grinned. "More adventurous than I probably think?"

She didn't dignify that with an answer and let the quiet air surround them with heat and comfort. Belatedly she realized she probably should have taken him to her office; the Falcon was not her actual home, and she had her own quarters, too; eating there was perfectly acceptable.

And yet: why would she do that? To preserve some kind of false idea that she wasn't at home on Han's ship? That she hadn't relished the chance to be alone with him and Chewie before she returned to duty today?

Let it go.

"How was your day?" she asked him.

Luke chewed a rubbery piece of bread and then sat back into the booth. "Flying those snowspeeders is like flying aerodynamic rocks. They lose altitude out of nowhere. No chance of an upgrade?"

"No."

"Don't know why I asked," he said with a quick smile. "How was going back to work?"

"Exhausting. We have a thousand supply issues. I don't even know how to start solving that problem. There's no procurement facilities here. No inventory. No contractors. I'm going to have to perform a miracle to get a supply chain going."

"No contractors?"

She smiled grimly. "Any of them who were loyal enough to brave the cold are on Han's roster. Everyone else stayed with Home One."

"With Dodonna and Ackbar."

"You really can't blame them," she said. "But it puts us in a bind."

She ate another bit of mash to give herself time to respond without the flame of anger that instantly arose at the mention of that name.

"I'm toying with the idea of contacting Prisht, just to see if she can help us with sourcing material but I don't want to have to fly in and out of Hutt Space for ration bars and soap. The cost of that would be astronomical."

"Why is it harder on Hoth than it was aboard Home One?" he asked.

"Because it takes months to create a supply network," she said. "Even if we could use our older donors and sympathizers to source the cargo, we'd have to find smugglers reliable enough to be given the location of the base. And everyone here has been assigned as defensive for the moment, until the base is self-sustaining. Our shield generator is a mess."

And they only had six weeks of supplies. Maybe if she'd been given six months, even three, she could have pulled it off with some success. But where could she even begin to put together a reliable supply network for a secret base in the Outer Rim, with no habitable systems nearby to cull for resources and no trusted contractors or sympathetic fueling stations from which to find material? Not to mention she had very little in the way of credit or funds with which to buy said supplies or pay for shipping—

"What about the Mercs?"

She lifted her eyes to Luke's, tilted her head, "What about them?"

Luke seemed to shrink a bit. "Why couldn't you use them for the supply chain?"

She silently encouraged him to elaborate.

"The Mercs are co-assigned scouting and defense with us, right? But we don't have enough snowspeeders for both the Rogues and the Mercs. Their ships can't be doing much better than our X-wings in atmosphere, right? Problems with insulation?"

"Right."

"The only tech that is capable of doing more than just atmo entry on this planet are the snowspeeders, and Command already has us flying those rocks. What are the Mercs gonna do while we scout? Shovel snow all day?"

"Most of them are former smugglers," she murmured. "Probably have leads on sourcing supplies."

Luke shrugged. "Probably."

"And we wouldn't need dead drops since they could haul them directly from their sources."

"Freighters are also a lot less conspicuous if you scheduled them right. Anyone who sees them around here might figure it's a smuggler's nest."

"Prisht might be more willing to help, too, if Salla is involved," Leia added, leaning back in the booth, a small smile on her lips. "It could work."

He smiled back, jabbing the air between them with his fork. "Just don't blame me when Rieekan agrees and your boyfriend is gone all the time."

"Oh, goddess, please don't call him that."

"What am I supposed to call him?" he asked, teasing. "Lover makes me want to throw up."

Her stomach turned. "Me, too."

"Not your consort, not a man-of-the-night—"

"A what?"

He furrowed his brow. "Is that a Tatooine thing?"

Leia laughed, shook her head. "Do you mean sex worker?"

"You pay them and then they—"

"Yes, that's what a sex worker does," she said, still laughing. "You call them men-of-the-night? How very poetic."

"Shut up."

"Do they only work at night?" she pushed, delighted. "What happens if I want one during the day?"

"Shut up," he grumbled, shoving a forkful of mash into his mouth. "You're as bad as your man-of-the-night."

"Man-of-the-morning, too."

His fork clattered onto his tray, outrage clear on his twisted expression. "God, Leia, stop."

"—the afternoon, sometimes, when I can find him—"

"No brother should have to hear this."

He said it with such ease that it took her a moment to realize what he'd actually said. How he'd identified himself. By his expression—his wide eyes, parted lips—she could tell he hadn't actually thought his statement through.

"I, uh, I didn't mean—"

"I am not ready to fully accept the Force-potential thing," she said in response. "Soon, perhaps. I'm working on it."

She set her fork down, leaning her elbows on the dejarik table.

"But I fully accept you as my family," she finished. "As my twin."

It was as if she told him that he'd actually won the Rogue's betting pool pot. Enormous eyes in a face that could hide neither the extraordinary love nor the eagerness he felt. And it occurred to her, then, that Luke Skywalker had probably resigned himself to never having a family of his own after losing his aunt and uncle.

Their aunt and uncle?

She would have to ask him about that later.

"That's good," he said with his genuine and starlit smile. "Doesn't it feel kind of right? Being family?"

"I don't know about right." There were far too many unanswered questions about their past for right to be her description of choice. "But I think I might like having a brother."

He held out his hand, palm-up on the table and she clasped it in hers, squeezed. "Good," he answered.

Removing her hand from his, she resumed eating the questionable meal in front of her. She chewed and chewed, thinking she needed to find a smooth way to ask him some questions about his family, her family now, how they'd gotten to this point. Still, it was a delicate matter and any discussion of Alderaan could spiral into heartache if she let it. Now was not the time...

"I knew you were adopted," Luke said, taking the first step forward. "Do you think your parents knew?"

"About you?"

He nodded. "I don't think Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru knew about you. They were always really secretive about my parents but, I don't know, I feel like they probably would have raised you, too, if they'd known."

"They sound like good people."

"They were," he replied.

Leia dropped her eyes, pushed her mash around her tray without eating it. The heartache wasn't going to be hers tonight, apparently. The same day that billions had died on Alderaan, Luke had lost a much smaller everything. It was easy to forget that sometimes.

"Were they related to your parents? Did they ever tell you?"

He shook his head. "Uncle Owen's father was married to our grandmother. That's what he said, at least."

"Do you know how you came into their charge?" she asked. "How old were you?"

"They always said my parents died right after I was born. I didn't even know about my father being a Jedi Knight until Ben told me."

She tried to imagine being Owen and Beru Lars, taking in a newborn who wasn't even of their own blood. She tried to imagine a scenario in which they'd known Luke's twin existed out there somewhere, a scenario in which they hadn't even known he had a twin. She tried to imagine how one old man fit into this picture.

"Did it ever occur to you that Obi-Wan might be your father?" she asked, slipping into deeper, more speculative waters.

Luke snorted, amused. "Of course it did. I've thought about that a lot."

"But?"

"The way he talked about my father… Do you remember what I said about seeing people's colors?"

She nodded.

"That's not a recent thing." He pushed his food away and clasped his hands. "I've always had this weird sense about what people were thinking. It wasn't much use on a moisture farm, that I can tell you."

"I bet it wasn't."

"So when Ben started talking about my father being a Jedi, I could tell he was being honest. The colors did change when he talked about how he died, though, that Vader had killed him. It's always bugged me."

"My father specifically told me to find General Kenobi when I got my hands on the Death Star plans," Leia whispered. "Is it possible he was sending me to you, as well?"

"It's an awfully big coincidence that I was the one to get your message."

Leia exhaled and leaned back into the cushion of the booth, thinking. This was frustrating to her, these unanswered questions, the way she wasn't sure they would ever know more about their history than the fragments they had at the moment. Their last link had been Obi-Wan, and Obi-Wan had had two motivations at the end: to bring them together and to keep them safe.

Which made sense. Vader had annihilated almost all the Jedi, all of Obi-Wan's people, his entire way of life. Like Leia, Obi-Wan had been a lone survivor of genocide.

"How did Obi-Wan know Vader?" she asked, curious.

Tilting his head back, Luke looked at the upper hull of the Falcon. "Ben said Vader had been his student."

"Watching over you might not have been about family, then," she offered. "It might have been about guilt."

"Or that he was waiting to send me off to fight Vader. I've thought about that, too."

She hadn't thought about that at all and it made her stop, made her heart crash in her chest. If Obi-Wan had been waiting until the right moment to train Luke, it had obviously been hastened by Leia's message. Perhaps she had never been a part of the equation at all. Perhaps Luke had been destined to be the Jedi hero and she was meant for another life entirely.

Maybe Obi-Wan hadn't even known she had existed.

But if that was the case, why had the Organas adopted her? If she was also the progeny of a Jedi Knight, they would have known she'd come into contact with Vader at some point. Why would they risk everything to adopt her when so many other children needed homes?

No. They were important. She could feel it. There was a missing piece to their history in Obi-Wan's inadequate explanation. Either he himself was their father or he and Bail Organa had plans to reunite the twins at some critical point.

"If Obi-Wan had been our father, he made a ridiculous choice in giving me to the Organas," she said. "There is a connection between my parents and Obi-Wan that we don't know about."

Luke tapped his fingers on the dejarik table, the exact tell Han had disclosed to them both just a few days ago. She smiled, then hid the expression. "Who else knew your father?" he asked.

"You mean, who else is alive who might know what happened?"

That was a short, short list. Carlist had been a part of the Alderaanian palace guard for as long as she could remember, but he had also been as surprised by the twins' revelation back on Home One as they had been.

"When you talked with Carlist about the holo of the marketplace, did his aura change?"

She felt awkward calling it an aura, but that was what Luke described. She resolved to learn more about this gift of his at another time.

Luke shook his head. "Not that I saw. He seemed as surprised as the rest of us."

Leia licked her lips and rapped her knuckles against the table as a distraction. When she next spoke, her words were resigned.

"Then there is only one person I can think of who might know something," she said.

He leaned in. "Who?"

Leia sighed, swallowed, then answered.

"Mon Mothma, of course."


Author's Note: Thank you for your lovely comments on the previous chapter! They mean a great deal to me and are a constant source of motivation. The next chapter of Specter will drop Tuesday, September 1st. Thank you once again to AmongstEmeraldClouds for her tireless editing work. We will see you in the fall! -KR