Chapter Text
The pain hit her first. A deep burn from within as her lungs desperately rasped for air. The heavy fog that was hidden by the darkness only made the air too thick for her lungs to draw a breath. Still, she heaved. Desperately willing her lungs to draw in just enough air for her to get back up on her feet. But that never came and it was only when Leia grew got used to the violent pain of respiration that she noticed the deep hurt that lingered throughout her body. Feeling as if the world had shattered her from the inside out and abandoned her here.
As she lay in her pain, Leia became aware of a low-pitched hum that filled her surroundings. Constant, the noise reverberated. Destined to hit the end and fold back into itself. Beyond that there was nothing.
Leia waited as patiently as she could for her vision to return. Under the influence of the circumstances, she couldn’t tell if mere seconds or an eternity had passed.
Any minute now, she thought to herself. Any minute. She repeated, over and over, until the words lost all meaning. A quiet panic seized her heart, Leia felt like a womprat pinned by an apex predator.
She turned the circumstances over in her mind -- possibly multiple broken bones, an inhospitable environment, and compromised vision -– that left her with one very desperate solution.
Leia closed her eyes and tried desperately to go through the motions of what little had been shown to her.
Leia felt herself reaching out, reaching out across the void with the force to a beacon beyond. It was less fragmented than she had remembered, a fluid familiarity in the way she cut across the expanse of the force and pulled at the sliver of consistent light that Leia knew would come to help her.
“ Leia…”
The noise filled her surroundings, reverberating alongside the everpresent hum before disappearing altogether. It sounded… strangely familiar. Leia’s head felt as foggy as the atmosphere, the viscous air keeping her consciousness too heavy to string together the bits of information.
“ Leia, ” The noise called again, simultaneously clearer and weaker.
Leia knew this noise, knew that it held some special importance to her or, perhaps, had once been valuable to her. Her mind strained with effort, trying to flip through old memories and tie the noise to anything but she was drawing a blank. Where there should’ve been a lifetime of memories, good and bad and worse, there was nothing. The deeper Leia dug, the quicker she came to the emptiness– as if she had never existed before this moment. Still, that couldn’t be true, the emptiness that Leia felt was foreign. Besides the incessant nudging of the force let her know that something was wrong .
A wave of new pain, shiny and red, washed over her and threatened to drag her beneath its tide. Something sharp pierced her calf and pulled hard. Leia only realized she was moving from the soft gravel rolling past her ears. Something was dragging her by the leg.
“ Leia !”
A roar shattered the silence– drowning out the hum and the echos of her name. The beast's roar petered out to nothing. It hung in the air, reverberating but remaining loud. Furious even. Leia could sense the being through the force, massive and vaguely reptilian it loomed over her body, Leia could feel the tears rolling down the corners of her eyes as the beast continued to pull and drag her further into the abyss. Leia wanted to defend herself, knew that it had to be now before she was too far gone but when Leia called upon the force, nothing came. What little grasp she had slipped through her fingers, completely spent on reaching the light that had disappeared along with the force.
If the force had abandoned her here, there was no hope at all. Her mind scrambled through half-formed ideas, death was not an option. Leia had an order to restore, a padawan to return to.
A gasp ripped through her body, pain searing through every nerve as Leia’s mind connected it all together.
The voice.
It could only be…
Luke.
Leia’s eyes shot open, her heart beat skipping when the waking world was as dark as the one in her dream. She rolled over easily, swatting around in the darkness for the light dial. A short-lived, half-baked wave of relief washed over her– moving was a good sign. She winced when she finally managed to locate the dial and turn it up, the sterile white light flooded the room and blinded her. Even with the unexpected pain the familiar sight of her bedroom was another relief.
Leia sat up in bed, her chest still heaved with a renewed appreciation for clear air. She dropped her head into her hands, desperately trying to comb through the remnants of her dream before it slipped away to nothing.
What surfaced was the pain of the dream– of the acrid air, the burn of a wound, and most significantly the pain of emptiness where there should have been plenty– and her fear that had forced Leia to call out her own name for help.
It had to be Luke.
Leia flung her covers off, kicking aside the slippers she kept by the bed and running towards her office. There was a cacophony of beeping in the office, a barrage of New Republic communications, it was a miracle they hadn’t woken her up in the middle of the night. Leia threw herself into her desk chair and began searching for the comlink that only Luke had the ability to contact.
Drafts of bills and interdepartmental communications were strewn across her desk, the usual orderliness had been sacrificed to a recent emergency committee meeting. Leia sorely wished that she had restored order to her desk when the opportunity had come to her. Now the mess only slowed her down. Unsure of where anything could be Leia’s only option was to sift through the mess. It only took a few carefully moved stacks of documents before Leia gave up entirely and began to fling things off of her desk. The need to prove that her nightmare had been nothing more than the result of a late meal made her frantic and uncaring for the precision she usually practiced.
“Oh! Mistress Leia, I didn’t know that you were awake.” C-3PO called as he walked into the room. “Shall I get the latest reports–”
Leia let out a frustrated noise and without thought grabbed the closest object on the desk and flung it across the room. The glass decoration shattered against the durasteel wall beside C-3PO showering the droid in fragments of glass.
“We’re under attack!” C-3PO exclaimed the droids gold plated hands already raised to cover his face. As quickly as he could, the droid backed out of the room, calling to the empty house to take cover and something about ‘knowing the war wasn’t over yet’.
Regret tugged at Leia as she watched the retreating protocol droid’s panicked shuffle throughout the hallway. C-3PO was more than justified for jumping to panic, Leia’s home office looked as if it had been subjected to an Imperial raid. With sudden clarity, Leia blinked before pulling open a drawer under the nearly cleared desk. Sitting atop a stack of blank scratchpads was the comlink Leia had been after. Leia snatched up the device and clicked it open, but no recent holorecordings were displayed. Instead, a hazy blue-filled figure that was vaguely Luke shaped under the massive cloak lit up the room.
Leia tried her best to focus on the words as the tiny blue version of her brother relayed them.
Luke was fine. There had been a minor confrontation, but Luke was fine. No new information, no new artifacts. Luke was traveling back to Yavin-4.
The same message ended and played over. It all would’ve been reassuring to Leia if the communication hadn’t been from several rotations ago and the customary follow-up holo of Luke confirming that he made it back to Yavin was missing.
Frustration pooled in the pit of her stomach; between the non-stop beeping, a screaming droid, and the infuriatingly calm disposition Luke put on for holos Leia felt herself edging closer to alerting the entire senate to send a welfare check on her hermit brother. But that would be insane and unfounded. How could she go to a panel of her colleagues with nothing but a nightmare and a silent comlink?
With a soft inhale, Leia set off in search of C-3PO and hoped she could catch the droid before he put the entire New Republic on high alert for sleeper cell attacks. It took a few tries before she found him in the kitchen, metallic hands poised to punch in the chain code for the senate’s security force. The droid was doing as well as anyone expected under the pressure of a possible attack. C-3PO was proof that no amount of experience could fracture a droid's programming. Once the droid’s finger hovered over the last number in the sequence Leia closed the space between her and the droid and switched off the communication system.
“3PO, we’re not under attack but I need you to listen to me,” Leia managed, hands attempting to wave away the barrage of concerns coming from the droid. Leia turned her attention to the comlink in her hand, worrying its edges as the droids concerned wound down to silence. Though she had never sat down and contemplated an action plan Leia found herself making up her mind. Settling for a half-formed plan that would at least help her gauge the severity of the situation. “I need you to contact Han, let him know to get back to me as soon as possible.”
Leia hesitated, unsure if worrying Han with the details was worth a quicker response.
“Oh! Right away mistress,” The droid began shuffling away, seemingly taking her hesitant silence as the end. Leia’s hand shot out to grab the droid's wrist.
“Tell him… tell him that it’s about Luke. He might be in trouble.”
Leia couldn’t receive the droid’s malady of concerns and turned away from him, without another word she set the comlink down on the kitchen counter and switched the device on. The bright blue light filled the room and Leia took her cue by clearing her throat and standing.
“Luke,” Leia began, folding her hands neatly in front of herself. She was acutely aware that her attire of sleep clothes was less than presentable if the message were intercepted, but this was an emergency. Besides, it was Luke and a small part of her took comfort in the fact that her sleep set was matching. “I’ve had a very unsettling… vision. Send me a confirmation that you are alive and well within the next 6 standard hours. Otherwise, I will have no choice but to assume that you’re in desperate need of your sister to save you.”
As the words left her mouth, Leia knew they were wrong. Abrasive and stilted, with none of the teasing lilt she reserved especially for Luke and Han. She was worried and it showed.
“May the force be with you.” Leia gave a small smile to the device and, hopefully, her recipient.
She reached forward and ended the holo, as the blue light cut out Leia knew had failed to soften the edge in her words.
Alone in the kitchen, Leia had no distraction from her worry that washed over her in waves, each growing bigger in the solitude of her apartment. Leia hoped Luke would respond soon, she needed Luke to respond soon. A shiny hurt started at her fingertips, it traveled up her arms and filled her like black ice as the worry conjured images of Luke half-dead. They all lead perilous lives, somehow she had come to accept but never consider the possibility of having to grieve Han and Luke.
Out of the corner of her eye, the faint swirling of a hazy blue fog began to form into something more solid. There was a sudden noise in another room and Leia glanced in the direction of the noise, when she looked back the blue haze was gone entirely. Leia reluctantly added ‘seeing things’ to her growing list of problems to address.
“Mistress Leia!” C3-PO hurried into the kitchen. Grateful for the interruption, Leia straightened up and pushed aside her thoughts. “I tried contacting Master Han Solo, but it appears they are unable to receive any transmissions.”
This was admittedly less worrisome than Luke’s radio silence, this Leia was accustomed to. Still, the timing couldn’t have been less fortuitous. Leia dropped her head into her hands, the last thing she wanted to do was alert the New Republic and set in motion something that couldn’t be undone nor forgotten. As it was, they were having a harder time grappling with the notion that Luke and Han –- and Leia, by mere association –- weren’t liabilities to the reconstruction efforts.
“Mistress Leia- did you hear me?” The droid sounded worried. “Shall I repeat myself?”
“No, 3PO. That won’t be necessary. Thank you.” Leia responded shortly, all the moving pieces that complicated what should be a simple choice weighing on her mind. “I’ll manage from here.”
The droid turned away whispering a soft ‘oh my’. When he reached the door, C3-PO briefly turned back around clearly on the verge of speaking. He must have thought better of it because he just as quickly turned back around and left the room.
Leia rubbed small circles into her temples, a small peace offering towards the building migraine. She only needed to wait six hours. If neither of them responded then Leia would have no choice but to travel to Yavin herself to assess and strategize from there.
***
The soft click, hiss of the durasteel doors to Leia’s office sliding open alerted her to an unexpected guest. She shoved the comlink into her desk drawer, feeling too much like a child trying to squirrel away a broken toy but the device would certainly bring on questions she didn’t want to answer.
Leia’s eyes were trained on the hallway, foolishly full of hope that Luke would walk through with some tatty artifact or relic cradled in his arms. Leia wanted to throw her arms around Luke’s neck and tell him never to scare her like this again. Leia wanted to hear his drawn-out stories of his “adventures” on Yavin, as boring as they were. Leia wanted-
Instead, Leia heard the soft squeak of soft-soled shoes on a durasteel floor heading straight for her office, bypassing all protests from C3-PO in the hallway. Leia stood up abruptly, her chair pushed out behind her.
“Senator Pithran... to what do I owe this unexpected visit?” The tension between her shoulders dissipated. This visitor was an inadequate one. With one arm Leia waved the Rhodian delegate into a chair. Leia leaned forward on the desk, balanced on the tips of her fingers as the senator took a seat.
“Senator Organa, I’ve come as a spokesperson for the entire committee for Inter-Planetary Aid. We simply do not have the capital nor the resources to be allocating this much relief to outer rim planets.” The Rhodian drew himself to his full height as he reached the end of his point. Leia was amused that one of them had been impressed by his words. “I’m here to request that the committee be dissolved.”
“I’ll spare you the unnecessary repetition, Senator. I’ve made my point clear countless times. This relief needs to be immediately sent out to the outer rim planets-”
“We are in a period of peace, Senator. Planets suffering from trade embargos and imperial colonization are becoming a thing of the past.”
“I find it interesting that you’ve only taken issue with inter-planetary relief funds now that your own population has recovered from the brink of destruction with the assistance of this committee’s efforts. The best efforts of the New Republic can only go into effect if our feeblest are given the resources to grow.” Leia’s train of thought was interrupted by the soft mechanical beeping of the comlink in her desk. Without a moment’s hesitation, Leia began ushering the Senator out, hands doing everything short but hastily shooing him away. “I hope you’ll excuse me, Senator, I trust that you’ll do everything in your power to remain true to the New Republics ethics.”
Once the Rhodian cleared the doorway, Leia hit the lock on the panel. Quickly pulling out the comlink from its hiding place and accepting the transmission. The woosh-woosh of her heart nervously pumping blood was all-consuming as the device scrambled to accept the message from across a galaxy. The blue glow filled the room and the self-assured posture, half-cocked eyebrowed specter of Han greeted her. Leia felt her hopes fall just a little bit, realizing she had once again been holding out hope that it would be Luke.
“Leia,” Han started, her name always sounded coarse and rough coming from his lips. As if it pained him to be so forward as to speak her name with tenderness. “We would’ve gotten back to you sooner, but we were pinned down in Hutt space. Chewie’s charting a course to Chandrilla as we speak, but that’s still a few standard days.”
“That’s- that’s not soon enough, Han” Leia sighed, in the background she could hear the Wookie adamantly voicing his own concerns about the Jedi. “Just chart the course to Yavin-4. I’ll find my way out there as soon as possible.”
Han gave her a skeptical look and took the briefest of pauses before speaking, clearly turning over the words in his mind to find the ideal way to communicate his thoughts. “Please tell me you’re not going to fly over there yourself.”
So much for carefully selected words.
“I’m perfectly capable of flying my own ship, Han. You’re not the only one who can hit buttons and pull levers,” Leia breezed out with a soft huff. A soft smile formed on her lips as her barbed words made their way across the galaxy and caused her fiancee’s arms to cross. Before Han could get a retort in, Leia cut him off. “Han, please. You focus on making it to Yavin-4, Luke needs us.”
Leia ended the holo just as Han’s expression soured. The soft wash of blue dissipated into the antiseptic wash of fluorescents. Alone, the buzzing feeling of anxiety started up again. Without the need for bravado, Leia felt her confidence fleeing as quickly as a mouse droid from the wrath of a blaster.
The flying she was fine with. The landing was an entirely different story. The worst possible outcome would be a crash landing on the Yavin.
She hit the panel once more. Half-baked plans became permanent as she made her way to the hanger. Leia could live with the odds of crashing the landing. After all, if her brother was there… she’d just extend her stay. And, if not, she could always just borrow one of Luke’s more utilitarian models the New Republic had bestowed upon him as part of their sorry-we-can’t-support-you-more, here’s-something-you-didnt-ask-for gift basket.