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“Did you see that?”
Beru looks up from the vaporator part that she’s tinkering with. Blasted thing is only two years old—they can’t afford to keep replacing pieces at this rate. Luke skids to a halt in front of her, a smudge of his lunch still on the corner of his mouth. She reaches forward to rub it off, and Luke backs out of her reach.
“No, Luke,” she says, wiping her hands off on the front of her shirt. “I’ve been inside.”
The corner of her mouth twitches as he all but dances in place from excitement. Luke’s seemingly endless energy makes Owen nervous. He thinks Luke will get himself into trouble one day. Beru doesn’t necessarily disagree, but for now, when he’s safe at home, she sees no reason to try to dampen his spirits.
Until, of course, Luke speaks.
“An Imperial ship! I don’t know what kind, but—”
The moment the word Imperial leaves his mouth, Beru is already moving. Luke makes a noise of protest as she scoops him off his feet, but she barely hears it. Her blood thunders too loudly in her ears for that.
“Ow!”
Her hearing comes back when Luke squirms particularly hard, his face screwed up. The way she’s holding him under his arms must not be comfortable. Too bad. She bursts into his room and sets Luke down.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asks, voice suddenly small.
Beru’s heart twists. Trying to calm her racing heart, she drops to one knee and places both her hands on Luke’s shoulders. There’s no time to reassure him.
“I want you to stay in this room for the next hour.” Her voice shakes. Beru takes a few breaths and the next sentences comes out steadier. “If I’m not back by then, find Ben Kenobi.”
She doesn’t bother telling him where to look. Beru knows perfectly well that Luke and his friends run all around the wastes when they think their parents aren’t paying attention.
Luke’s brow furrows. “Crazy old Ben?”
“Luke. Promise me.”
Her tone must be solemn enough to jar him into obedience, because he nods, quick and sharp.
“I promise.”
Beru allows herself the time to kiss him on the forehead before she bursts out into the punishing suns at a dead sprint, headed for Owen.
Breha is the one to find Captain Galin.
She drops to her knees beside him in the dirt, a scream building in her throat that she won’t let escape. Breha already knows—Galin would have run a million miles if he’d thought that he could protect Leia—but she has to be sure.
No pulse.
She squeezes her eyes shut for just a second—long enough to ground herself. Then, she reaches for the comlink.
“Bail. She’s gone.”
It takes Breha a few wobbly moments to find her feet again. Then, she flips the comlink open again to alert the guard that one of their number is dead. She does it with the steady, even voice of a queen, even though all she wants to do is collapse.
By the time she emerges from the forest, Bail is running down from where he’d been searching the cellar. He sweeps her up in a hug without saying a single word. It feels like the night Bail had returned from the first meeting of the Senate under the Emperor. Of course, that night, she’d been able to settle Leia in his arms to calm him.
“We’ll find her,” Bail breathes into her hair. “We’ll find her.”
They stand there on the edge of the forest holding each other until—as per usual—Breha is the first to regain her composure.
“There’ll be a ransom.”
At least she hopes so. No one in the galaxy knows their secret. But if they do, and the people who took Leia are Inquisitors—
“No one knows,” Bail says quickly, intercepting her thoughts as he always does. “There are plenty of other reasons to kidnap our daughter.”
She can’t help but crack a smile at that. “Always the optimist.”
But as the day drags on, no ransom arrives, and the sinking feeling in Breha’s stomach only grows worse.
Ten minutes after the encounter, Owen’s hands are still shaking.
He’s rather proud of himself for concealing the fear so well when he’d had a lightsaber to his throat. Owen has never liked a bully (a trait that, despite himself, he’s passed on to Luke) and that woman hadn’t been any different. He’d been honest—Owen doesn’t have any particular love for the Jedi— but he wasn’t about to condemn Kenobi to death. That isn’t the sort of person he is.
Right now, though, the man who’d dared laugh at an Inquisitor feels very far away, because no matter how deeply he breathes, he can’t stop his hands from shaking.
He lingers at the market until he’s able to hold out the credits to buy the new part Beru had sent him for without it being patently obvious that he’s frightened. The woman behind the stall, who’s known Owen since he was a little boy, doesn’t meet his eyes. Come to think of it, everyone’s been carefully looking past him since he was targeted.
Are they afraid his bad luck will rub off on them? Or are they ashamed that they failed to intervene?
Owen briefly considers not returning home, on the off-chance that he’s being followed, but it wouldn’t be hard to find out where he lives, and if the Inquisitors come knocking, he wants to be able to greet them with a blaster himself.
Purchases in hand, he hops in the speeder and heads for home. He’s only about a klick away when he spots her. Beru is dripping with sweat and so red that he thinks for a moment that, despite lecturing Luke about ten times a day about sunburn, she’s burnt herself. But when he kills the speeder’s engine, it becomes clear very quickly that she’s been running.
Owen is so troubled by the look on her face that he actually gets out of the speeder. As soon as his feet touch the sand, her arms are around his neck.
“Did someone tell you?” he asks.
Beru looks like she very much wants to cry, but she knows better than to waste water in front of a moisture farmer. “About the ship? Luke saw it.”
Of course he did. One of these days, that boy is going to get himself into trouble.
When Owen doesn’t respond immediately, Beru’s eyes narrow.
“Tell me what?”
Owen knows perfectly well that if he doesn’t tell her, his wife will extract the truth from someone in town. As he explains what happened, her mouth tightens into an increasingly thinner line and her grip on his shoulders becomes increasingly tight.
“We have to get back to Luke,” she says when he’s finished. “I told him to go to Kenobi if I didn’t come back.”
When they arrive back at home and find that absolutely nothing has changed, Owen has to stifle a sigh of relief before his too-perceptive wife notices it. Luke emerges from his bedroom, completely unfazed by the experience, and asks what they’re having for dinner.
Some moments—like when he’s on the business end of a laser sword wielded by a maniac—Owen wishes that they’d told Ben Kenobi to keep walking. But other moments—like when he’s watching Luke follow Beru around the kitchen—he couldn’t imagine anything else.
Getting off-world undetected is somewhat more complicated than Bail had imagined. Breha had demanded to be the one to go, but Alderaan needs its queen more than it needs its senator, seeing as the Imperial Senate is something of an oxymoron. Besides, Bail knows Obi-Wan better, and he’s not nearly as afraid of guilt-tripping an ex-Jedi as his wife is.
He makes it to Tatooine in one piece—remarkable, considering that the freighter he’d ridden looks like it’ll fall apart if someone so much as sneezes on it—and disembarks into blinding sunlight.
Obi-Wan had sent exactly one message to the Organas upon his arrival, giving the coordinates of his new residence. Bail and Breha had committed them to memory, deleted the message, and destroyed the comlink for good measure. He hopes he remembered them correctly.
He’s in the middle of renting a speeder when he hears a familiar name.
“Luke!”
A blonde woman darts through the crowd, clearly in pursuit of a boy about Leia’s age. In fact, after having spent an entire war surrounded by the odd coincidence that seems to follow Jedi around, Bail is willing to bet that he’s precisely Leia’s age.
Bail snags him by the arm, mostly operating on instincts well-honed with Leia. The woman’s eyes go wide when she catches up with them both, but when Bail releases Luke, they soften somewhat.
He should get his speeder and go. But seeing Luke makes something in Bail’s heart tighten.
“My daughter is always running off,” he says, with some difficulty.
If Luke’s aunt—because that is who she must be—notices the way his voice catches, she doesn’t comment on it.
“He's a handful,” she says with a smile. “Thank you.”
The tightness in Bail’s chest only grows as she leads Luke away by the hand. When he rents his speeder for entirely too much money, he heads out into the desert with a deeper resolve than before. One day, he’ll see the siblings reunited.