Six Months

She came to him often now, and he thought it might be when she slept. He wasn't sure how he had deduced this from the lack of data he had, and he wasn't sure how long he had been capable of deducing anything.

One minuteless minute, he had been an observer, and then the next secondless second, he was capable of understanding whole worlds of nuance.

Do I hope that you can hear me, or do I hope that you have no awareness whatsoever? she asked him once. I can't decide which would be better.

Right now, he thought understanding was better.

I would give anything to talk with you, to hear your voice, she said.

Yeah, he wouldn't mind that, either. When she wasn't here, he fell back into the nothingness, but whenever she spoke, he was keenly, acutely, aware of himself as the receiver of her attention, almost like he existed only when she thought of him.

That was stupid, but it was the best he could describe his current situation.

I'll be back, she always said, shortly before he returned to the nothingness, and he trusted her implicitly.

Phalanx. He was on Phalanx.

The data was clear, the intel impeccable, and it simply felt right. A combination of factors made it abundantly clear where they were supposed to go in order to free Han, and that was why it was insufferably frustrating that High Command adamantly refused to approve Alliance funds for the mission.

"This is our chance," she told Carlist. "We don't know how long the intel will be reliable."

"We don't know that the intel is reliable," he replied.

"It came from one of Prisht's contractors."

Shaking his head, Carlist's lips were drawn tight. "And even she said it was a long shot, Princess, I read the report, too."

The quiet that descended after his words felt too heavy to bear, and she itched for movement, for traction, for a way to move past this impediment quickly.

"I can do this," she said. "I can."

But Carlist didn't jump to her side the way he usually did, and it took her too long to realize it. Seeing the hesitation in his gray eyes, she tried to plow through like an unstoppable force.

"Luke will be with me. Together we can—"

"Has it occurred to you that you might not be the best person to greenlight a mission of this sensitivity?"

Of course it had, but that was beside the point. "I am capable of rational thought, Carlist."

"I don't dispute that," he said. "My question was more about discernment in regards to Alliance funds and personnel involvement in a mission to which you are personally attached."

Part of her wanted to be incensed, and part of her knew she was lucky to have someone around to give her such insights, even when she might react badly to them. Opening herself up to the Force, she allowed the peace and permanence of its power to calm her desperation, and then revisited what he had just said to her.

Was she personally invested?

Yes.

Was it a good enough lead to endanger Alliance resources?

Debatable. Worth a conversation.

She breathed deeply, in and out, finding her center in a galaxy that was sliding into chaos by the second. As her only reliable ally in High Command, Carlist was her best chance to receive clearance to leave. If she was going to have any chance of getting this plan approved, she had to use sense and logic and reason.

"Phalanx has an Imperial weapons depot," she said after a tense moment.

His expression was full of wariness. She couldn't blame him. "It does."

"A big one."

Carlist's eyes narrowed.

"Maybe it would be a good idea to send Luke and me on a mission to prove our commitment to the Alliance?" she wondered aloud, but without truly wondering at all. She knew what their weapon inventories looked like. "A small test? I'm sure Mon would approve of the idea."

"It looks more suspicious to send you to Phalanx on a weapons run when Solo is rumored to be there, not less."

"Not if we're successful."

In the end, he agreed to send only Luke, Leia and Chewbacca on the somewhat ill-timed mission. The payout would be enormous if they were successful—over four hundred proton torpedoes—but it wasn't exactly a secret in High Command why the Jedi were going on such an impromptu mission to this location at this time.

Leia didn't care.

They departed Home One a day later.

"Are you sure this is a good idea, Carlist?" Mon asked privately.

He thought of many responses to that question, a spectrum of confidence in both respects: confidence in Leia and the opportunity to share his opinion of his young princess in confidence.

"No," he admitted softly. "But if we are to trust them and have others trust them, too, we have to give them an opportunity."

Luke tried to talk with her about the taboo topics during the flight, but she resisted.

"I can't think about Vader right now," she said.

And he knew that. He understood. He could feel how she simply had no emotional space at the moment for the soul-crushing weight that was their parentage.

"Okay," he said.

Phalanx was a dead end. Slave I had indeed been docked on the space station just two hours before the Falcon had arrived, but there was no sign of Han or Boba Fett to be found. And while the twins successfully relieved the Empire of the entirety of the four hundred proton torpedoes, their real purpose for the mission was unfulfilled.

High Command loved it.

Leia cried herself to sleep that night.

I'm sorry, she said. I'm so sorry, Han.

He wondered what on earth could make her sound so very lost. It itched at him that he couldn't do anything to make it better.

He thought of what he would say if he could.

Hey, I'm still here.

Better luck next time.

Give it a few hours. Nothing is as bad after you have some time to mull it over.

But he couldn't say anything, so he just listened to her heartbreak and tried to memorize it like a the rich textures of a Nubian work of art.

During a supply run to Nar Shaddaa, Salla briefly exchanged blaster bolts with a Mandolorian fitting the description of Boba Fett. He was uninjured and escaped before she could warm up the Intruder, and she returned to base, main hold full and with a mouth that spit regrets like her blaster spit energy.

"You look like shit," Mephi said upon her return.

His executive officer glowered. "I look like shit because I'm working to save Solo. Tell me, Mephi, why don't you look like shit?"

He didn't have a good answer for that question, and it haunted him the rest of the night cycle.

Luke tried to bring up the taboo topic again two weeks later. This time, she didn't outright refuse, and it was probably because she could feel how badly he felt in asking her. It was like he was back on Tatooine during the dry season; he felt stuck in an endless cycle of hope and disappointment.

It wasn't Uncle Owen promising him that he might go to the Academy next year. Now it was his own deep rage at how Ben Kenobi and Yoda had lied to him.

"Why didn't they tell us, Leia?" he asked, in a mimicry of what she herself had asked him weeks before. "What is the point of training us to fight him if they knew he would use this against us the first second he could?"

She didn't answer.

"He killed your parents," he said, brushing his hand toward his sister, and he could feel her gratitude that he chose to refer to Bail and Breha Organa as such, even though he thought maybe she was a bit too sensitive about that still. "He killed Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru."

Placing a hand on his shoulder, she chose to speak silently so as to respect his voice, loud and emotional. Because they created a problem that they couldn't fix, and they seem to think we are the only ones who can.

It was a beautiful insight, and one he hadn't come close to reaching himself.

"It's not fair," he whispered, impossibly tired of the anger that coursed through his body. "It's not fair, Leia."

And she, so tightly shielded from him so that he had space to vent, let him see just enough of her agreement to hold him over until the day she could actually talk with him about it all.

Leia. Her name was Leia.

He remembered it out of nowhere, coming from the nothingness like rainfall on Tatooine. Out of nothing and into nothing, but there it was. Her name, a sudden entity in the nothingness like it had always been there.

And shortly after that, he felt the first stirrings of panic as he realized exactly how confined, how trapped, how vulnerable he was in this endless nothing. Because if he had her name, he knew there was something outside of himself that he could never hope to reach. Leia existed. He didn't.

Endless time. Waiting.

Rieekan sent them to a slave market in Gabrillione. It was a mission that made Leia feel useful, made her feel like she was making a positive impact on the people who were most desperately in need in the galaxy. It had taken all of her training, and Luke's, and a hefty bit of luck that she must have borrowed from Han, but it lit an ember in her soul she had deeply worried had been extinguished.

Eighty-seven people had been freed and shipped back to their families, and the twins had left with enlightened hearts and two small kyber crystals.

"What do we do with these?" Leia asked.

And Luke, who had spent a great deal of time tinkering and exploring Anakin's weapon for three years before he had truly learned to wield it, had a ready answer.

"Lightsabers," he breathed, ecstatic. "We make our own lightsabers."

They saved eighty-seven slaves. Eighty-seven.

Mephi thought about that a lot, thought about how that was an unfettered improvement upon the galactic condition.

What did they get out of it? he wondered, because he had been taught all his life that the Jedi were liars and thieves and murderers. Some jewelry to help them make new lightsabers?

That … well. Skywalker had had his lightsaber the entire time between Yavin and Hoth and had never used it against anyone. It was hard to judge people too harshly for wanting to have a weapon to defend themselves, especially when it was a byproduct of the freeing of eighty-seven slaves.

Keeping a close eye on Leia meant that Luke was always in the training room with her. In moments of darkness, she wanted to train, to sharpen her skills. She was like an inanimate object, like a weapon: singly focused on a goal most considered hopeless.

She always had been, he supposed. He had never known Leia Organa before her world had quite literally been ripped from her. The difference between who she had been and who she was now was stark, however. because before she had been a martyr for the Alliance, a tragedy on display to garner sympathy for the Alliance. And now there was a woman with a very real, comprehensible problem: the loss of someone she loved.

It humanized her.

And Leia did not like that. She held herself to such a higher standard than anyone else that she often forgot that she, too, was allowed her own humanity. The failings and foibles of others were not acceptable when it came to her own life. This obsession, this dire need, was so enormously different for her, because it wouldn't necessarily benefit the cause for which she had pledged to die.

Selfish, that's what her current preoccupation was. And that was good, that was real. That was the reason the Force filled her in those desperate moments.

Yoda would have told her otherwise, but Luke felt a deep necessity in her actions that appeared to stem from the Force, not as a perversion of it. And maybe he was wrong, and maybe she was wrong, but hadn't they promised to forge their own path together?

If the old Jedi Order had known everything, why had they fallen? If they had really known everything there was to know about the Force, how could Anakin have destroyed it all so quickly?

They hadn't, he decided. They couldn't have.

Once they rescued Han, Luke very much wanted to ask Yoda some questions.

And so a month after the last sighting of Slave I, Luke awoke from a dead sleep in his spartan quarters to something like a buzzing in his ears. It roiled and twisted and bucked desperately, and he had the sharpest feeling that Leia was unsuccessfully trying to shield from him.

He didn't even try the Falcon. He knew exactly where she would be.

Stepping into the red-painted training room, he immediately saw what was frustrating her so much. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she had trapped her hands beneath her to restrict their movement. A series of objects levitated in front of her, bobbing and weaving as if on rubber strings, but it was nonsensical, a non-pattern that bespoke chaos and not a real training exercise. She would catch a falling object, hoist it back up, and then move on to the next one that fell sharply toward the deck beneath her. She was treading water in this simulation of training, the immediacy of the need at hand focusing her. But it was wildly apparent to him that Leia wasn't trying to train this way: her quick instincts were not rusty or in need of reinforcement at all. What she was doing was a last-ditch effort to survive an exercise that was supposed to be about maintaining control … and she was failing. Miserably.

Leia, he sent, trying not to startle her.

To her credit, she allowed all the objects in the air around her to softly float to the deck. And as Luke knelt next to her, she opened clear eyes to glance questioningly his way, but that belied the fact that she was shielding so hard against him that the buzzing almost had a harmony to it, layers and layers of frequencies all vibrating at once.

Trust me, she said. You don't want to feel this.

She was right about that, of course; he didn't want to feel the pain she was clearly shielding from him. What confused him is why tonight of all nights she felt the need to shield at all? Since Bespin, the floodgates had essentially been blown open. There was very little that he wasn't aware of anymore, though he was careful never to acknowledge it. She did him the same courtesy because they were grown adults and not children.

Maybe it would have been easier if they had been children.

I was thinking about Han, she told him, and that wasn't new either. It wasn't like he had been totally unaware that there was a more personal aspect to their relationship. They'd been sleeping together for over a year now. There had been a silent accord to just accept the weirdness and try to shield as much as possible when things became too … intimate.

"Of course you were thinking about him," he said out loud. You usually are.

No, this wasn't sexual. It was … she trailed off, and he felt a flicker of worry.

But he could sense that she was judging herself too harshly again, and felt like he needed to bully her into revealing whatever it was that was bothering her.

Just show me, Leia.

Sighing, she dropped her shields and regretfully invited him into whatever fresh nightmare she was experiencing.

Han was out of carbonite, his body connected to at least five monitors, a steady beep ringing ominously through the medcenter. A TwoOneBee fussed with an IV line, but Leia's focus was clearly on the brainwave sensors arranged in a ring around Han's head. The sensors were designed to light up when they picked up any brainwave activity.

They were dark.

Han's heart beat, and his lungs breathed, but there was nothing there to resurrect.

The longer he stays in carbonite, the more likely it is, she told him, and he understood why this was so much worse than the idle fantasies he had assumed she was trying to hide from him. Because this … this was clearly a possibility someone with knowledge had shared with her.

I talked with a medic yesterday, she answered. Aaya said she had been doing some research on her own.

Luke was both horrified by the images Leia was showing him and impressed by the medic's courage in approaching Leia with such heartbreaking news. How likely is it?

Four to ten percent chance now, but it increases by the week, she thinks.

Tempting as it was, he didn't allow himself a single moment of reassurance, because he knew how it would feel to his sister. The percentage didn't matter to her; the simple possibility was unacceptable.

Do you still feel him in the room?

She had been trying to hide the fact that she was regularly visiting Han when she slept, but he strongly believed that the dreamlike blue-white room was something akin to the truth of the situation. She often shielded him when she visited Han, but he had seen enough to know something was real about it.

Was Han actually in a room that only Leia could access? Some bubble in the Force that held him safe? He didn't know enough about the Force to say for sure. It was fascinating and breathtaking and beautiful and heartbreaking all at once, a pantheon of labels to define what was essentially the illegal subject of love for a Jedi of the old order.

The old ways, again. Luke rolled his eyes at himself.

Yoda did not like Leia's connection to Han. He was explicit about that. But Luke understood Leia in a way their master didn't, and he could feel how much the Force was supporting her in her hope. She struggled with the Dark Side, yes, but it was the Light Side that emanated from her when she went into that room with Han, and he would believe the Force over Yoda any day of the week.

All he knew was that the vision—bubble, whatever—was a lifeline for his sister, and he would not let that lifeline be severed, no matter what.

Yes, she answered his question. He's there. But he doesn't react or talk or show awareness.

Mirroring her fears, then. I can see the problem, he sent.

"What if we're too late?" she whispered. What if he isn't the man he was?

He didn't answer, sitting with her in the darkness, knowing in his heart of hearts that it wasn't too late but that she was allowed the very human and reasonable fear to exist so that she could move forward.

Maybe that was why the Jedi fell. Maybe they repressed the bad and the good. Instinctively, he rejected that sort of legalism, that dynamic of a binary that was too simplistic for real life. It wasn't how the galaxy worked, rules and regulations and strict controls that balanced good and evil against fallible sentience.

It was so much more complicated than that. Leia herself proved it.

Whatever happens, I'll be there, he told her. You are not alone.

Another lead, this time through a contact of Calrissian's. Whispers of Boba Fett landing on Koroscu to refuel.

The twins added it to a galactic map they had loaded in the dejarik projector on the Falcon. One lone red snake wound itself through the holographic galaxy, and Leia had the oddest sense that the snake was mocking her as she trailed after it, every bend and curve of the journey yawning wider and wider as the weeks wore on.

Mephi walked in on a planning session to rescue his commander that he had not been invited to join. It was only Mercs in attendance, shoved into a small corner of the mess hall where no one else paid them any attention,

"This is important," Salla told him. "Get out."

Hesitating, he glanced among his brothers-in-arms, and saw that over half the squadron was in attendance. There was a map projected onto the table they surrounded, and he was shocked by the amount of data it displayed. Red lines tore through the galaxy at large, connecting maybe twenty-five dots that seemed to signify Fett sightings

"This is data from the Jedi?" he asked breathlessly.

"It's none of your business, is what it is," Frali sneered. "Go fuck yourself."

He walked away slowly, keenly aware that he was most definitely on the wrong side of not just his own flight but also the Rogues who glared at him as he exited the mess hall.

Awareness was approaching, and there were moments of memory now. Loose, disorganized clips of images and sounds from his past life. He could think about the nothingness. He could occasionally picture his life before in flashes of excitement and color.

Sometimes he could see her face, and when he did, he started to panic.

Where am I?

But then her face would fade away and he returned to the nothingness as if falling back asleep.

But the waves were getting louder, setting an ominous tone for his blank spaces as they came over him.

After weeks of covert lobbying, Gial was finally allowed to take command of the twins' Jedi endeavors. In one sense, it showed progress: High Command writ large had been next to useless to them, left unmoored after Leia's resignation and the worry about how exactly to use their burgeoning power. On a purely strategic front, it was an improvement. Having a chain of command was better than not when residing on an Alliance base.

Having earned a little trust back was even better.

But it also meant closer scrutiny over their movements. Gone were the days of harried calls to Carlist and a quick response to any and all Fett sightings. If they wanted to go after Han, they had to find a reason to do so that prompted the Alliance's Jedi to action.

It was frustrating work, but it was forward movement, and that was all that mattered.

Are you really here? she asked into the room.

He didn't answer, but then again, he never did.

"You realize all of us will have to desert in order to go after him, right?"

Salla stared at Kral for a hot minute, before shrugging.

"You win some, you lose some," she said, and it was blase and appropriate as hell.

Gial sent the twins to Bothawui to assist the Alliance sympathizers on a secret mission. Luke and Leia didn't know what the mission was, exactly, but they served as muscle for a very hairy transaction that went south just an hour after planetfall.

Figured.

"I hate Bothans," Leia had whispered to her brother, as they covered a frantic retreat with lightsabers that were so new that her hand hadn't quite adjusted to the grip yet.

Luke, still struggling with his prosthesis but improving by the day, side-eyed his sister as the whirl of her blue blade cut through the shoulder crease of the nearest stormtrooper's armor. "I don't think that's very Alderaanian of you."

"Sure it is," she replied. "My father hated them, too, after they kept stalling his repatriation bills in the lower chamber."

Bail, he translated for her in their silent bond, and he was lucky that they were ambushed in that moment, because he knew her fury would light the night sky brighter than his green blade ever could if she hadn't been distracted.

After they had recovered the data package the Bothans had secured for them and were safely ensconced in the main hold of the Falcon, she let him have it.

"Bail Organa was my father," she snarled. "Nothing will ever change that."

I understand, he replied.

"I can acknowledge my genealogy while still choosing to recognize the man who raised me."

Nodding, he accepted that, knowing she was correct.

She exhaled, and he could feel her turn inward, trying to ascertain if that was all there was to her anger. When she came back to him, she was calmer and a bit sheepish.

I'm sorry, she murmured. That was too much anger for the situation.

He smiled gently. Me, too. I won't do that again.

Grateful, she wrapped her arms around him, and he thought that maybe they were getting better at this sibling stuff.

Prisht called Salla on a secure frequency three weeks later, and the lieutenant's heart skipped a beat.

For a couple different reasons.

"My love," the Chev said in her low voice that resembled a growl. "The bounty for the ugly man has now surpassed the threshold. Boba Fett will deliver soon."

Salla jumped out of her chair. "How soon?"

"I do not know," she said. "And I still do not understand why we are so consumed with rescuing Solo. He is, at best, a moderately attractive male of his species."

Chuckling to herself, Salla sprinted to the Falcon to relay the news, but not before signing off with a smirk.

"Funny. You've said that a few times now," she laughed into the comm.

Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Salla and Lando once again met in the Falcon's main hold with as much anxiety and anticipation as before but the smallest sliver of hope, too. The timeline was right. The hours were counting down. All they needed was a plan and they could actually act on all this pent-up anxiety and pain.

"We need someone on the inside of the palace," Salla suggested.

Luke and Leia glanced at each other, the same thought occurring to them both.

"How many Mercs could reasonably be planted?" he asked out loud for the benefit of the others. "Without it looking suspicious, I mean?"

"Five of them are on good terms with Jabba," she responded. "It would be considered a weirdly full house, but not something that would trigger anyone's itchy blaster hand."

"And how many unfriendlies?"

"So many," Salla offered to Leia with a roll of her eyes. "Jabba himself, his entourage, any random hangers-on looking to get spiced out for the night. You may have as many as twenty unknowns in the palace walls at any given time."

"And the rancor," Lando added behind the hand covering his mouth. "Don't forget that thing."

Making a note to ask for clarification later, Leia sat back in the booth. "Twenty against us three, plus potentially five Mercs," she said, indicating herself, Luke and Chewie. "It's not a great set-up, is it?"

Luke shook his head. "And the danger to Han himself."

The congregants in the hold quieted down, thinking about the mechanics in trying to rescue a man trapped in carbonite while being outmanned six-to-one. He was both vulnerable and difficult to transport in his current state. Do they free him first, taking the risk that he might come out of the carbonite immobile and in need of ambulation? Or keep him in stasis until they could transport him to a safe space?

Important questions.

"The Mercs can go immediately once we're clear from High Command," Salla said into the silence.

"If you get clear from High Command," Lando countered. "And that's a big fucking if."

"Leave that to me," Luke said. "I'll talk with Ackbar, see if there's an angle we can use to get clearance. Leia, will you talk with your medic friend, see if she would mind going with us on the mission?"

Nodding, she seemed to grow smaller, and they left her to her own devices.

"You still need to have eyes on the ground," Lando replied.

"If I'm seen on Tatooine, people will know immediately what is happening," Luke murmured. When Salla eyed him speculatively, he added, "I haven't gone home since the Death Star."

I will be caught immediately and sold for my bounty, Chewbacca growled.

Salla pursed her lips. "Blacklisted," she said, pointing to herself.

"I killed a Hutt a year ago," Leia said softly. "I doubt very much that I can go anywhere near Jabba anonymously."

Her sentence appeared to put the nail in Calrissian's coffin, and he scowled in her general direction.

"Fine," he muttered. "I'll go."

Footfalls on the deck barely preceded the newcomer, but the twins were already prepared: Luke searching the man's aura and Leia with her lightsaber in her hand. It took a few seconds for Salla to realize who had rounded the bend in the corridor, and she sighed when she recognized his features.

"Not now, Mephi."

But the man was looking at the twins carefully, noting that Organa had not ignited the lightsaber and that Skywalker was now softly smiling, as if he knew what Mephi was about to say. With a snap of her holster, Organa put her weapon away and sat gaping at him before he even had a chance to say anything.

"Really?" Skywalker asked. "You'd be willing to take that risk?"

Salla's eyes swept between Mephi and the twins, back and forth, until her impatience got the best of her. "What risk?"

And Mephi, feeling for the first time like he was thinking clearly, said, "I used to work for Jabba, and I can get you two inside safely without anyone dying."

Later that night, she breezed into the blue-white room, closer to optimism than she had been in months. It's time to get ready, Han, she told his sleeping form as she sat next to him on the bed.

He didn't move, didn't respond, and Leia took that as some kind of good omen, because surely no change meant he wasn't deteriorating the way the medic warned he might?

I'm coming, she said. You'll be safe soon. Just hang in there.

And Han heard her. He heard the tone, and the stress, and the anticipation, and the hope. And he knew who she was, knew he loved her, knew that when she said safe what she really meant was out of here.

Where am I? He thought. Why am I not safe here?

A blurry, disorganized line of panic rattled in his chest, and it occurred to him finally that he had a chest—and hands and legs and a brain—and that those things should be able to move.

Should.

Suddenly everything felt so much more terrifying, as Han Solo realized for the first time in six months exactly what had happened to him.

He wanted to scream, like he had with the scan grid, but he didn't even have that small relief. It was just panic. Confinement. An invisible hold on every part of him and an inexhaustible amount of time ahead of him.

Hurry, he wanted to say. Hurry, Leia, please.

But she didn't hear him, and so he suffered alone.