Clockwork Living
If Han flashed through the days and nights after Ord Mantell in fits and starts, then Leia lived them sequentially, in painstaking—and painful—detail.
When she opened her eyes in the morning, it was to the punishing life of a committed soldier. Sleep clung to her lashes, her head felt too heavy for her shoulders and she was so tired that she often simply stayed in bed through the first alarm. She fought the morning like a dying woman gasping for breath.
And then the fullness of the day ahead would mock her: the meetings, the datawork, the briefings. It was an inane slog, this life in the trenches: predictable and routine and hard. It had to be done. It was her responsibility.
But none of it sparked a shred of her typical revolutionary zest. She couldn't find it. It had been misplaced, lost somewhere, perhaps even stolen in the dark of the night. She had become a machine.
There was nothing worse than a fervorless rebel. For Leia, there was just the work.
Always the work.
On this particular morning—two days after her personal life had disintegrated into nothing—she struggled to pull herself together. This wasn't a cascading loss as it had been with Alderaan: steep inclines with jagged edges at every turn. And it wasn't a deep, constant heartache she felt, either. That came and went, like the ebb and flow of the tide, catching her unaware in strange, discordant moments of weakness.
No. Instead, she felt hollow, absent a core. Like some torturous giant had reached in and pulled out her spine, the bones that gave her body shape. A thunderous excavation. A tremendous wavering.
But even if she didn't have a shape, she had a rebellion. A job to do. Her life's work: her father's life's work. The specter of a new galaxy just outside her grasp, ruled by law and equality, free of corruption and greed. That was enough.
Irritated, she sat up and swung her legs over the side of her bed. Maybe cot was a better word for the small, hard surface on which she now slept, having traded her larger bunk for this one. They had needed the larger one in Medical.
She felt every restless, fruitless minute of attempted rest. Yet it was another day of the same drudgery, one in a long procession of them, and she was needed. The defense shield generators were malfunctioning again, there had been a surprising shortage of caf supplies the past three days, and four more Alliance members had been charged with insubordination. Echo Base was falling apart in front of their eyes.
And all of this was happening at the precise moment she needed distraction. For that, she was grateful; if she kept busy, if she kept moving, perhaps she could avoid feeling anything at all.
Leia ran her hands over her face and stood, trying to find any enthusiasm in her spartan, sterile quarters. It was like she was surrounded by the icy-white harshness of Echo Base even here, where in the past she had sought refuge in quiet moments of communion...
No.
Swallowing around a sudden lump in her throat, she pushed the memories away in favor of dressing. Those were designated nighttime activities, a time when she allowed herself human emotions. Once the alarm rang in the morning, any such humanity was supposed to disappear into the tumult of the day's struggles.
Hair up. Make-up on. Time to move.
Corridor after corridor flew by her, faceless entities passed, and she was exactly as personable as a Two-One-Bee. A morning debrief with the commander of Yellow Squadron—the unfortunate soul who had to punish four of his pilots simultaneously—then a scheduled hour of analysis dedicated to somehow solving the shield generator problem. After that, a quick ration bar to hold her over until the next ration bar she would eat, after her shift in the communications station was done.
And then she had her daily strategy meeting with Carlist, a block of time to go over the crisis of the day, to divvy up responsibilities in a command structure full of them.
This was something of an unpredictable roadblock in her desperate desire to cordon off certain thoughts during the daylight hours. Not because Carlist ever asked her any leading questions but because he didn't: she knew he was worried. She knew she should probably confide in him, if only to have it out in the open, but.
It was just.
No.
She forced herself to focus as she stepped into Carlist's office, just across the corridor from her own. Compared to her sterility, his office seemed properly lived-in. Organized but a tad chaotic, the room looked more like the workspace of a university professor than that of a general of a guerilla force attempting to overthrow a government.
"Princess," he greeted her as the hatch slid closed behind her. "You're early."
"Early is on time."
He smiled. "Perhaps I've lost track of such productivity. This datawork is going to kill me."
She doubted that very much, but let him have his self-conscious chuckle, ready to move on. "The shield generator can't be repaired with the materials we have on hand."
Startled, he looked up from his datapad.
"That's not my assessment, you understand," she continued. "I pulled in Marcos and Filnette to consult."
"And they say it can't be fixed."
His tone dripped with disappointment and it would have made her smile if only she had one. "Yes."
"Can we repair it with materials we don't have on hand?"
"We need something called a firmspace applicator. And even then, we might only be able to boost it by eighteen percent."
She had no idea what that meant in the larger, more specific field of energy distribution; her education was in political science, not engineering. And while she had picked up some very valuable knowledge of late, her expertise largely fell outside the complicated field of ion-stabilizing physics.
Listen to the experts, her father had opined. No good leader claims to know everything.
"I'll arrange a joint meeting," she added. "But we should have a plan before talking with them."
"If it's something that we need to acquire from the Distributary, we should pull in the Mercs, too. They should know how to find … whatever it is. A firmspace applicator."
"Of course."
She made a note in her datapad, satisfied. Her voice had been pitch-perfect. She had been practicing. I am functional outside of Han Solo, she thought, then quickly rebuked herself for thinking his name because—
Pain.
The bloom of heat that opened in her chest was horrifying and instantaneous. One moment, she was calmly discussing base business with her High Command partner, compatriots in the trenches of their own assured destruction. And in the next, she was standing on the Millennium Falcon, trying in vain to absorb the horrifying words that fell off his lips like some decaying proclamation.
Maybe you were right. Maybe it's not worth it.
She saw him there, sitting impossibly in Carlist's office, with shoulders rolled forward and eyes that were clear only in their utter emptiness.
Piercing her chest in sure blows, his words were anguish-ripened and hard, and it took all the strength in her stomach to keep from laughing in disbelief as death knells rang in her ears.
Maybe it's not worth it.
Oh, he was a liar, all right, sitting there in hard-hearted obstinance, nursing his tumbler of whiskey and his own vulnerability like they could protect him from this … this horror of despair that washed over her.
The tide was rising fast. Perhaps the shock was wearing off. The sharp pangs in her stomach were deeper, somehow more visceral than the occasional ones from her nearly-healed abdomen.
It's. Had he said the wrong word to try to save her from the truer blow? Had he in fact meant you're?
Maybe you're not worth it.
No, no. That was a losing game. She knew better than to fall into the trap of her own muted insecurity.
Do you?
He loved her. Of that she was completely… Well, she was almost certain. She used to be. Han did not lie. He wheedled and gambled and hedged but he was no liar. He might be acting like he didn't, might say words that sounded unaffected, but it was obvious that her suffering had killed something inside him.
She felt a thrill of dark, listless humor that ran over her skin like a harsh winter wind. He finally understood what true vulnerability felt like, did he? The root of her battle? To open himself to someone so completely that her death would collapse the wreckage of his emotional fortitude? To know how empty and lonely it could feel to whole-heartedly trust someone else?
She didn't have the graciousness to feel pity for him, but, oh, goddess, she wanted to hold him to her so tightly that he would never again imagine stepping away from her. And then she wanted to scream at him for the pain he had inflicted.
Carlist ripped into her thoughts like blaster fire. "What is the status of our detained pilots?"
Pull it together.
Her mouth moved. She answered him in clear, concise terms, about the allegations and the Alliance charter and how she had been very firm with Commander Ubari about how he needed to proceed to squash the insolence running rampant in his group or lose command entirely. But the truth was that she was stuck deep within, listening to the man she loved rip her heart into tatters for no good reason at all. She heard his deep voice. She saw icy green eyes.
She saw a man acting with such cowardice that she could barely recognize him as Han Solo.
"Drunk and disorderly," Carlist muttered. "How do they have enough alcohol for one pilot to manage it, much less four?"
"Pilots are nothing if not opportunistic."
Trauma did strange things to people; of that, she was very familiar. And in one respect, his response had been nearly a clone of hers. She had closed off from others, too, had shut down all sense of connection to anything but the cause she would certainly die for. Hypothetically, it was a good strategy in that it protected anyone from ever feeling pain again.
Now, as she lived through the receiving end of that approach, she could testify to its illogicity and selfishness.
He thought he was protecting her? While the physical pain of being torn apart by shrapnel had been more intense than this, she had a hard time forgiving him for the emotional quagmire she found herself in. The complicity in her own distraction and the sleepless nights. The inferno that burned in her chest whenever her mind wandered.
This was his fault. She was suffering with or without him.
"I suspected Ubari would have these difficulties," Rieekan was saying. "I don't know what Gilad saw in him when he offered him command."
"We have to work with what we have."
—and that was the worst part. He was self-righteous in his cause. Stubborn. Recalcitrant. How did he not see the parallels between her grief and his?. And he had rallied against it with fire and fervor for years. Years. He had stormed every fortress and marshalled every troop he had in his disposal to get her to trust him. And the minute—the instant—he was confronted with his own vulnerability, he capitulated to his pain. Hauled jets out of emotional danger. Risked her pain to avoid his own.
Stupid bastard. She had invented that mistake. She knew exactly how useless it was to try to avoid pain.
"I just wish he'd listen," she murmured mindlessly.
Pausing in his perusal of the piled flimsies on his desk, Carlist looked up. "Who?"
"Ubari," she said, though she had meant another. "He needs help and won't accept it."
Gray eyes caught hers and, oh, there was Uncle Carlist, the man responsible for her safety for seventeen years before she had moved to Coruscant. The man who had seen through her attempts to hide her relationships from him. Uncle Carlist, who had quietly slipped into a paternal role when she had needed him most, as she had moved into the role of an adult child to help him cope with the loss of his wife and two sons on Alderaan.
He knew. He knew to whom she was referring, and it sure as hell wasn't Commander Ubari Dnask.
"Are you ready to talk about it?" he asked.
There was true hesitancy there, in his voice. She had a choice. She didn't have to tell him anything. She appreciated the way he always let her decide, how he valued her perspective enough to not demand.
But she was not capable of discussion at the moment. The ghost-like chill lingered in the echo of her every step—a malignant shadow, an incorporeal tease—preying on her intent to soldier on, as she had before.
"No," she answered. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Can you talk to someone else, then?"
A certain blue-eyed, sandy-haired twin brother, perhaps? "I'm fine."
Carlist nodded, worried eyes watching her. And then it was like he put on a mask, the lines around his eyes and mouth deepened, his chin rose higher, and now he was General Rieekan once more.
He understood the necessity of work.
"Just do me one favor," she added.
"Anything."
She licked her lips, unsure, then trudged ahead, a bulwark against the storm. "If he asks you for an extended leave, don't grant it to him."
"Why not?"
"He will try to return to Tatooine."
Rieekan furrowed his brow. "That's a death sentence."
She nodded but didn't reply. The seed of doubt had been planted by Salla, but it rang as true to Leia as a bell. He wasn't going to leave the Alliance because of her; he would leave the Alliance to call off the bounty hunter who had nearly killed her.
Nearly?
Her request of Carlist was treason. She should never have brought him into the situation in the first place, and she definitely should never have gone against Han's interests, no matter how ridiculous they were. Sneaking behind his back to keep him on base? It bled with desperation.
But what choice did she have? She didn't trust him not to get himself killed.
The only thing that might be worse than this purgatory would be losing him to some suicidal attempt to protect her.
"You want me to lie to him?" Carlist's eyes were large. "That doesn't sound like you two."
"There is no us. And yes. Lie to him, if you have to."
He opened his mouth in reply but she turned on her heel and walked out of the office, unable to face what she had just admitted.
There is no us.
What a token of surrender that admission was.
No.
Back to work.
A meeting with the environmental team on the blizzard that was to hit tonight. Another one with the structural integrity supervisor on the stability of the South Passage. Some nonsense with Threepio about flooding in her quarters. She didn't give it a second thought.
Time rolled by in a straightforward line of predictability, and she did the same. Images would hit her in odd moments of wayward focus; she would banish them in favor of the task at hand. Then the cycle would repeat itself, over and over, a punishing effort to sanitize the situation and keep it safely quiet from the Alliance.
She functioned perfectly well in the daylight hours and suffered alone in the dark. How very royal of her.
Next, to the training room with Luke, where she could lose herself in the emotional stability of her brother and their shared frustration with Yoda's lies. They had often worked on their levitation skills together, finding it somewhat easier when they worked in tandem. A shared burden. When she attempted any kind of psychokinetic work alone, she could lift three to four small objects at a time. When she worked with Luke, they had been able to levitate Artoo with relative ease.
He had more natural skill than she did, of course, but she was steadily improving. And he still struggled with their work on fencing. That was no surprise, either. If Luke was the soul of their twinship, she was their tightened fist.
The thought had often come to her that she should call their sessions lightsaber training already. That was what it was, wasn't it? They hadn't turned the thing on yet, but she supposed it was only a matter of time.
It felt inevitable. The whole thing, her whole life, felt inevitable to her now.
They learned new things about one another in these sessions, too. Luke had one benefit over her when they fought: he had started to predict what she would do. He sidestepped when she lunged, he attacked when her thoughts would drift. They didn't know if it was because of familiarity—sparring partners often fell into the same trap—or if it was more about his gifts, some part of his innate empathy and the power he had unleashed in himself.
Lightness. Airiness. That was how these sessions felt to her, like a raft in the lake in which she drowned. Blessed control.
And since Luke hadn't brought it up the past few days, she had to assume her efforts to block him from her searing pain and confusion were working. He had said she had a natural shielding prowess before Dagobah, but she was focusing tightly on it of late, trying to protect him from the maelstrom. The entire premise of this infernal algorithm of overscheduling was based on a deep desire to keep her brother out of it.
Unfortunately, it appeared Luke wasn't interested in much more than gossip today, as evidenced by his greeting.
"Chewie says something happened."
Standing in the middle of the training room opposite the wide transparent wall to the corridor, he looked older to her than he had yesterday. Strong shoulders, a noticeable bulk to his biceps, eyes that held more weight. She remembered their earlier meetings in this room—his scurry out of the heater in the corner, his failures and hours of work to remedy them—and saw with a sudden inhale that he had a center mass. More in control. Less her student than her partner.
Time, again. Not a monotonous crawl for her brother, but a constant hill to climb, obstacles to overcome. A steadfast surety that the future was always moving them somewhere better than the present, instead of a way to calculate the minutes until the deed was done. If she steadily marched from one point to another, then Luke was on the upswing of a parabola, a rising phoenix with time as a weapon.
"I'm sure something did happen," she answered him. "It's a big base and we're at war."
"Don't try to be cute," he interrupted.
She arched her eyebrow at his confidence, but kept her deflectors on. "I hardly try."
But her effort to avoid the conversation failed spectacularly. Luke was intent, worried: a hurricane of concern.
"What is going on between you and Han?"
Pain.
The name hit her like a durasteel beam. She couldn't speak for a moment, trapped by her brother in a realm of speechless discomfort.
The gaping, brittle loss she felt in a time of such massive destruction. The emotional tidal waves. The grief, oh, the grief. The sleepless nights and desperate focus on clockwork living. How she fought for calm when her chest was a canyon of hurt. How her fingers would sometimes ache, inexplicable by any rational account aside from frostbite, but no, it wasn't as simple as an environmental change in circumstance.
How she cried angry, helpless tears when she was alone, longing for the very source of her heartache. The hands that had gripped the whiskey. The eyes that had burned so coldly.
"Do we have to talk about this now?" she gasped.
Hollow and desperate for movement, she settled into her starting stance for hand-to-hand combat: feet wide, hands up, chin tucked to protect her neck. Her body moved without her consent, but, yes, this offered a reprieve.
His lips drew into a tight line at her efforts. "Leia, you are burning."
Their eyes met and she realized he wasn't asking because he had heard gossip. Burning was a surprisingly apt word, and it meant only one thing.
"Damn it," she muttered, and dropped her hands.
"I know you've been blocking me," he said. "I swear, I only just noticed it a few hours ago. You're getting better at it—"
"Don't patronize me."
"What is going on? It's like someone set off a thermal detonator in your head."
Scowling, she resumed her combat bearing. "No. Let's go."
He looked wary and concerned at her response, but slipped into his favored stance, anyway, probably trying to placate her.
"Maybe you need me," he offered with a lunge. "Maybe I can help."
Maybe it's not worth it.
She sidestepped and bent her knees, awaiting a more aggressive attack from him, biding her time.
"I know it won't change anything, but that amount of pain can't be good for you."
"What pain?"
The crack in her voice was so obvious that she couldn't even take herself seriously. Clearly, he couldn't, either.
"Oh, come on," he said through gritted teeth. "You're like a volcano."
Wondering when he had cause to know what a volcano looked like, she rolled her neck, tense from the hours of stress. And the lack of sleep. And probably the very pain to which Luke referred.
"What if it affects our training?"
That comment was enough to pull her out of own considerations. She laughed humorlessly as he lunged again. "Please tell me you aren't more worried about me going dark than you are about my heartbreak..."
She trailed off, embarrassed to have said such a word out loud. Heartbreak. As if it wasn't also frustration and pain and a searing need.
"What heartbreak?" he prompted.
With a soft exhale, she dropped to a crouch and kicked his dominant ankle out from under him. He staggered back ruefully as she stood and danced back into position.
"Look," he said, low. "I know you're trying to compartmentalize. I know, because I've seen you do it, over and over again, for three years. And I'm worried about the training, yes, but I'm more worried about you."
"There is nothing to worry about."
"What happened?"
"I'm fine."
"What happened?"
"The Death Star interrogation wasn't this persistent."
Her last, dying hope for a reprieve: shock. Maybe he would let it go. Maybe his sensitivity to her pain might—
"Stop deflecting and tell me what happened."
She tried to offer a quick retort but it was like she had suddenly swallowed sand. The words were caught, grit in her throat, the grains scratching against tender tissue until her most trusted instrument, her voice, was worn and bleeding.
Maybe it's not worth it.
Without thinking, she reached out a hand and sent a smashball flying in the air toward Luke's head. He neatly sidestepped it and tilted his head, impressed.
She wanted to smack that expression off of his face. He was too calm, too staid for this scene. In this room, she was not the reliable clock, lurching into seconds and minutes and hours with perfect rhythm. She was chaos and it was… it was awful. The breadth of uncontrollable feeling, whatever it was. Not anger. Not the seductive call to hurt another, or to take, or kill or conquer.
You know the way out.
It was a hard, angled sense of too much. She shook with it, the fullness of feeling, the wavering lines of an unruly need to move, to manifest, to deliver.
Her palm to his chest, a duck and an elbow to his solar plexus, her shoulder into his chin as he bent forward. And then he was across the room from her, meters away, staring at her in shock as she heaved and fell to her knees with a soft groan.
Maybe.
Shaking, her gaze swept across the room and noted a pair of wide orange eyes through the window into the corridor, before she rolled and rushed over to Luke.
"I'm so sorry," she panted. "I'm sorry."
He seemed dazed but not injured, the only lasting effect a slight hitch in his breathing where she had hit him.
"Did you just—?"
But she didn't want to think about that, either. "Are you okay?"
Reaching down, she helped him stand, unable to watch him seem so large sprawled on the ground like that, but didn't answer. She was at war with herself; talking to Luke would be the very definition of breaking her oath to move endlessly forward. But every effort she made seemed doomed to fail. She had done nothing but feel.
She felt so alone. So defeated. Humiliated. Heartsick. Anxious and angry and joyless.
"Maybe it's not worth it," she whispered, as if confessing to a cardinal sin.
Luke was patient, letting her find her words.
"That's what he said to me, just before he told me to leave the Falcon."
The feeling of defeat in her chest was so strong in that moment that she thought she might choke on it. She could hear his words endlessly, a horrible echo in a haunting cavern.
And when she found her words, there were only two. "It's over."
Lifelessly, her voice hung in the air between them. The burning intensified and she was quietly on fire, utterly helpless to stop it.
"I—" he began, then shook his head. "No. That makes no sense."
His posture on the Falcon. The coldness in his eyes. The grim twist to his lips.
Luke tried to wrap his arm around her shoulders, to comfort her, but she stepped away. She didn't want comfort. She wanted to understand. She wanted to go backward in time, before she had stepped in front of that blaster bolt, before Dagobah.
"You were hurt and he must blame himself," he said. "He's pushing you away—"
"There is no excuse for that," she interrupted. "Anyone who is capable of saying such things to someone they love—"
"—is in pain," he finished.
Narrowing her eyes, she whirled to face him. "He's in pain? He is?"
How many times could she be dashed across the rocks before she stopped trying to keep afloat? She was tired of graciousness. She was tired of reliability.
Luke's compassionate answer was truer than it should have been. "He wouldn't say anything like that otherwise."
Falling into childish habits she had long since outgrown, she bit her thumbnail and paced around the room, feet slipping on the mat Luke had unrolled for them.
You were dead, there, at that table, for forty-three seconds, he had said. That was the crux of the problem, she had decided. It was the confluence of all that was dividing them. He was no longer willing to accept her risking her life to protect his, and there was simply nothing else that could break through that blockade.
He was allowed to love her that much, but she wasn't allowed the same. Unless, of course, she was wrong and he didn't love her—
No. She would know if he didn't.
"I have gone over that conversation endlessly," she murmured, turning to look at her poor, bewildered brother.
For two nights straight. For hours, the minutes ticking by in a sad parade, even as she told herself she could separate her days and nights like tidy little files of soldiers.
"I've decided I only know two things for certain," she continued, careful and slow. "First is that he is terrified that his actions almost killed me."
There was no denying his panic on the Falcon, no denying the volume of his self-proclaimed guilt. She couldn't understand it, but she could recognize it. It was akin to a very familiar guilt she carried.
"And the other?"
She swallowed. "He knew what to say to break me, and he used that knowledge indiscriminately. Without hesitation."
He knew her worst fear had been that all of this—all of her—wouldn't be enough to counter the insanity she brought with her. That maybe he had fallen in love with her before a destiny had been set at her feet. Maybe he could accept a victimized princess—a criminal, a traitor—but could not widen that acceptance to a woman who worked within a universe that he simply didn't understand.
And he had known that she wouldn't fight him. He had known and used it against her, anyway, to take the ground from beneath her feet, to give himself the advantage.
It didn't matter which was the case. It didn't matter that he would die for her, or that she would die for him. It didn't matter that he loved her.
He had known those exact words would destroy her because she had let him in enough, had shown him her worst fears, had confessed them to him in a million small ways. In the quiet bliss of his bunk. In whispers against the skin above his heart. In the sharp, horrifying moments after a nightmare.
He had used intimate knowledge against her, as only he could have.
Maybe it isn't worth it.
Stillness pervaded. She couldn't move; the air was too heavy or maybe the gravity of Hoth had suddenly changed. Either way, she was paralyzed, incapable of action after the sheer breadth of her confession, though every cell in her body wanted to run. Her muscles cramped. Her lungs refused to expand. It felt like the very blood in her veins halted its ceaseless travels.
When she found her voice again, it was broken. "If that is love, then I want no part of it."
She left and hid in her barren quarters, in which sleep wouldn't come and the hours were long. And empty. And meaningless.
Alone.
Maybe it isn't worth it, he had said. And he had been right. Nothing was worth this war-within-a-war. Nothing was worth the pain. Nothing was worth hours spent in isolation, and speculation, and heartache.
Time would trudge on, as it always did. The clock would tick by, the seconds would carry her away.
It was time to get to work.
Author's Note: Well, we had some fun in the reviews page last month, didn't we? I appreciate the passion with which my readers responded to Han and was particularly happy to see the temperature come down once I requested a detente. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for respecting my agency as the author of this story. Hopefully you are here because you enjoy it and because you recognize it as free entertainment coming from an amateur author with too few minutes in a day to devote to anxiety over fanfiction.
And anxiety was exactly what I felt last month. So much so that I am writing this author's note three days before the first of the month. And if you know me, you know I am a stickler for deadlines. I am hitting this one by the skin of my teeth.
All of this to say that I love your support. I am so happy this story inspires intensity. I am sorry that we are in a moment of anguish for our beloved characters. And I am most excited to move on to the real conflict of this story, and that is the inevitable collision with canon ESB.
The next chapter of Specter will be posted Tuesday, June 1st. Thank you! -KR
