Chapter Text
Leia pretended that she didn’t hear the knocking on her door. She could be in the ‘fresher. She could be napping after spending half her night going through reports to make sure that not one distress signal had been left uninvestigated. She could be back in one of the conference rooms trying to create a census of Alderaan’s surviving ex-citizens. She ignored the second burst of knocking as well. Having a private room aboard the Home One as the Rebellion moved their base was a privilege of her rank. Most people didn’t know she had taken a junior officer’s berth complete with a tiny desk and comfortable chair instead of larger suite that doubled as meeting space. Her uninvited visitor did not need to know that she was sitting only six paces from the door.
Just four days ago they had found another shuttle crammed with three families that had been visiting relatives in Bespin. The Empire was questioning every person found on a ship with an Alderaan registration and Rebel intelligence said that most of those citizens were never seen again. The Empire was still searching through her people to find the Rebellion. If she stayed at the tiny cramped desk and focused on her datapad, the cramped room felt nothing like her prison on the Death Star.
Most visitors only knocked once. They would rap against the door several times and before she bothered to stand up they would be long gone. A few would repeat the knocking for a while but no one had lasted more than twelve standard minutes.
Thirty-eight standard minutes later, the odd little cadence of a knock was still sounding every two minutes. She hadn’t been able to spare any focus for her datapad for the past half-hour and refused to admit that she was grateful for the distraction. Her eyes had been staging a rebellion of their own by seeing the world as blurred and overly bright. Leia carefully entered in the series of passcodes that left her datapad useful only as a paperweight. She tucked it into desk’s locking drawer before sliding her chair back into place.
Leia knew how to make most of the Rebellion’s ranking officers give her space. Most of the others were too shy to approach her. Han had chatted with her when he saw her in one of the hangars but he wouldn’t want to wander through the star cruiser’s long and monotonous corridors trying to find her door. He preferred to fly missions all through the journey and not stay more than a night or two before he and Chewie headed back out.
Luke was staying close. He had gone with Han a few times, she knew, but only because Leia read most of Han’s after-action reports. They were a nice contrast to some of the floridly written intelligence reports that a few rookies kept submitting. Han’s were either insultingly short or rudely detailed. When Luke went along, they tended to be rudely detailed and funny enough that they made her smile.
Her soft-soled shoes were comfortable for everything except stomping. Stomping across the narrow confines of her room was petty and below her dignity. That made stomping worth the shock of vibrations in her feet. She slammed her hand against the door control.
Luke was sitting cross-legged on the floor outside of her room with his lightsaber balanced across his left thigh. He had his back to the wall and half of his attention on his datapad. He was playing one of those games that simulated flying a ship. From the way he was settled very comfortably into his seat on the hard floor, he had actually been knocking on her door with the hilt of his lightsaber. Luke tilted his head back until he was looking up at her even as his fingers continued to move over the datapad. From the increase in faint noises coming from the game, he was possibly doing better when he wasn’t looking at the display.
Leia had already decided that she didn’t have it in her to be vicious. She was tired and Luke already had points in her book for not blurting out something awful that was meant to be comforting. “What do you want?”
Luke paused the game and took all of his attention away from the datapad. “When’s the last time you ate?”
Leia frowned when the answer didn’t come easily. “This morning.” She wouldn’t mention that she’d had three meals total in the last two days. “You don’t have anything else worth doing?”
He shrugged. “Probably not? Even if there is, it’s nothing that couldn’t be put off a while. I haven’t seen you in days and I was worried.”
Leia was half a step back before she realized that he wasn’t going to say anything else. He wasn’t going to say that it wasn’t like her to be alone or that her parents wouldn’t want her to grieve or that Alderaan deserved a strong princess. He would just say he was worried. She was still mad at too many other people to respond to his concern with calm words. “I can handle myself. I’ve been busy making sure that no one is overlooked while we try to find all of the people that were off-planet when Alderaan was destroyed.”
“I know you can handle yourself.” Luke stood in one effortless motion. He clipped the lightsaber hilt to his belt and tucked his datapad under one arm in the next moment. “But… if all I can do is bring you something to eat, or keep you company while you work, I’ll do that. Other than going with Han once in a while, I’m not good at what the Rebellion needs right now. I fly some of the drills and help with maintenance but that leaves a lot of time. I’d like to help you if I can.”
Standing back inside her doorway helped Luke’s offer sound better. She liked the Home One, really, but she felt tiny and insignificant in her private quarters. That was only a tiny step up from feeling panicked and claustrophobic in crowds but it was at least a private place to lose her mind. From what she knew about Luke, he wouldn’t ask imbecilic questions about whether it had hurt when Alderaan was destroyed or whether she missed her parents or if she was okay after being captured.
Even better, Leia was fairly certain that Luke would leave if she told him to go away. He might repeat the offer another time but he wouldn’t barge into her rooms or try to coax Artoo into opening her door.
If Luke joined her, she would at least have someone on her side the next time someone thought they should suddenly tell her how they had been very close with her parents. Leia’s parents had made it quite clear which people they considered friends. Her mother was the queen—had been the queen. It was dangerous to presume just anyone would be a personal friends of the monarch.
Leia resolutely did not consider that she would always be a princess, now, because there was no Alderaan to await a new queen. “Has anyone invited you to the senior officers’ mess yet? I’d say destroying the Death Star qualifies you.”
“Mostly I eat with the pilots when I’m on drills and sweet-talk the cooks when I’m not,” he admitted cheerfully. He didn’t say a word when she locked the door to her room and checked the lock twice. He only started talking when they started walking down the corridor. “I’m from a desert planet on the Outer Rim. They like figuring out which spices and dishes I’ve never seen. Sometimes, though, I get to surprise them. I could’ve stuck a whole handful of steelwood pods in Arko’s mouth when I told him I’d had steelwood candy-flowers before. It’s not that hard to find on Tatooine.” His mouth twisted in a frown. “People wouldn’t think of exporting it, really, because that’s seen as a slave crop.”
Some senators would still be shocked that slavery existed. Leia’s parents had never shielded her from all of the darkness in the galaxy, though, even to the point of letting her join the Rebellion. They told her the flaws of the old Republic they hoped to avoid after restoring democracy. She knew slavery wasn’t only tucked away on rim worlds. It just seemed odd that Luke would be so aware of the bad. He seemed so untouchably good-natured and naïve.
Luke shook his head before she could think of how to reply. "I went a little overboard with the mint first time Arko let me cook my own food. There was just so much of it.”
Leia liked mint and nearly every cook onboard had decided that they would shove sugary foods toward her given half a chance. “Have you had any of the desserts with mint?”
Luke tilted his head away. "Dessert?" he asked, somewhat doubtfully.
For the first time in days, Leia repressed the urge to smile. She nodded seriously. “Dessert. I know that people have been worried about me but everyone else has been too shy to stay or too pushy. They keep telling me how to feel or telling me how lucky I am. Mint frosty treat is the least that people can give us instead of platitudes.”
“Mint frosty treat doesn't sound like something that'd happen on a desert planet."
“It sounds like something that should happen on a desert planet,” Leia replied. “If this Rebellion actually works…” She hesitated. She’d only heard Luke mention what happened to his aunt and uncle in passing. He had to know it was her fault but she wasn’t ready to change the conversation to the apology he deserved. “Well. My parents always said slavery is one of the reasons that the Old Republic failed. The Republic’s core worlds thought they were doing so well that they could afford to ignore that some people were starving or enslaved. When the Emperor’s gone maybe the Hutts will be next to lose power.”
"That'd be nice, but..." He fiddled with the data pad and wouldn’t meet her eyes. "You, the Republic... you can't just sweep in and rescue people."
“Of course not,” Leia agreed immediately. She shook her head to clear the image of swooping in from the sky and waving around a lightsaber like she was some kind of Jedi on behalf of the Republic. It sounded like something from the Hero Without Fear holos that her mother had watched with her. “But I was a Senator, before the Senate was dissolved, and I suppose I’m still a princess. I can make sure someone working to end slavery has political support and send resources to the right people.”
Luke’s sudden smile was shocking in its sharpness. "Teach me how to be properly sneaky in a political way and I’ll help. I know the people who'd be best leading a Tatooine-sized rebellion if they don't get killed first." Strangely, he said that in a fond tone of voice. "But the best people to overthrow the Hutts are also the worst people to talk to political muckety-mucks, unless you want people getting stabbed for saying hello on a bad day."
“I’ll teach you all the politics you want. Besides,” she replied, nudging him in the side slightly. He was the first person she’d touched in days. “You’re one to talk. You can’t just sweep in and rescue people?”
Luke’s smile widened. "I'm a Jedi now, right? Well, will be anyway. Jedi are supposed to sweep in and take care of the evils no one else can. My aunt said that's why the Empire had them killed.”
“My parents said that the Jedi lost their purpose. The Jedi worked as the Republic’s negotiators and peacekeepers and enforcers and forgot that the Jedi once stood for something beyond being someone’s force of bodyguards and generals.” She still could picture the look on her father’s face when he described the slow end of the Republic. “Before the Emperor took over, the Senate voted to give him power over the Jedi.”
"Well, once you start following rules instead of morality, you forget what's important." Luke turned toward her when she didn’t respond. He didn’t slow his pace a hair even while walking backwards. Both of his eyebrows rose when she still said nothing. "This is where you splutter, lecture, or tell me I'll learn now that I'm off the farm, by the way."
“If I cared about rules, I wouldn’t be here. I would try to do my best within the Senate and I would have been done the moment the Senate was shuttered. I care about results and doing the right thing so I joined the Rebellion.” She could still picture her last fight with her parents. It had been embarrassing that her mother had been teary-eyed with pride and her father had hugged her after they let her argue with them for two hours straight. They had to know that she was joining the Rebellion because of her own convictions, not theirs.
Leia slowed. The corridors in a ship looked mostly uniform. She had thought that it was a happy coincidence they hadn’t passed anyone after the first minute and poor memory that had her walking farther than expected to reach the senior officers' mess. Now she was wondering why they still hadn’t reached a landmark. After the thought crossed her mind, she realized that there were no landmarks to see. “This hallway doesn’t have any doors.”
Luke slowly turned in a full circle and stopped with his back to hers. She knew without looking that he had a hand on the hilt of his lightsaber. She had her blaster drawn.
Several breaths later, Luke relaxed. Breathing was all she could hear past the pounding of her heartbeat in her ears. “Can you feel it?” he asked quietly.
Leia glanced over her shoulder at him. “Feel what?”
“The Force.” His chin had lifted slightly and his eyes were closed. He looked like he was listening to a song. “It’s asking you, too.”
Leia bit down the reflexive protest that she was no Jedi. She had read the old articles about signs of Force-sensitive children. She had never made things levitate but she had always had an uncanny knack for cold reading. With the way her parents had kindly but persistently refused to say anything about her biological parents…
Nearly every one of her sudden intuitions or mild precognitions was an accident. She decided on a whim to give one of their trusted intelligence agents a false lead. The same false information appeared in Imperial hands quickly enough to warn the Rebellion they had another traitor. She would just know that someone around the corner was waiting to harm her and she would signal one of her companions to have blasters ready.
She also had known that Darth Vader hated her. He had torn through the shields she’d never consciously felt with flames of cold hatred and anger that burned where they touched.
“Just… listen,” Luke said quietly. “Don’t think about it too much. It’s a little like using your peripheral vision but with all your senses.”
She tried to remember the itch in her shoulder blades that came with some intuitive leaps. When that didn’t work, she tried relaxing instead and did her best to not gape at the difference of sensation when she stopped trying to feel something specific. Listening to Luke seemed easier than trying to feel the Force. Luke felt calm; he was rock-solid in who he was, she thought, and trusted that the feeling all around them was good.
With Luke at her back, she re-holstered her blaster and closed her eyes. She didn’t know how something she couldn’t see or touch could ask a question without words but she could feel the offer. She could learn something that she would need to know. She would come back to her own place in the galaxy with nothing changed. Alderaan would be gone and her parents would be dead and she would still feel that part of her was missing. But if she agreed, she would have knowledge that would help her cause.
Leia was not going to spend years wondering what she would have learned if only she’d taken the chance. Yes, she decided. She might have gone alone but she would rather go with Luke at her back.
When she opened her eyes, she wasn’t in the strange unending corridor with no doors. She was still back-to-back with Luke but this hallway looked nothing like an altered version of the Home One. Even stranger, two people were staring at them that definitely had not been on the star cruiser.
Luke had been the only Jedi aboard their ship. He was possibly the only Jedi in the galaxy. Now they were standing on a narrow causeway looking at two Jedi, and one of them looked quite a bit like the main actor from the Hero With No Fear holovids.