Chapter Text
The last thing Rey says to Finn is, “I’ll see you soon. Over.”
The transmission crackles in the raging storm. He responds with a cursory, “Roger that,” not thinking that it will be the final time he hears her voice, and she hears his.
He knows they’ve screwed up when he sees the lightsabers flashing, up on the wall of the First Order base. Kylo Ren was not supposed to be here. Rey should have sensed him before they ever broke atmosphere. But he’s here, and he’s got Rey cornered between him and a platoon of Stormtroopers, and it all happens so fast that Finn thinks perhaps it’s not real, it’s a vision from the Force. Because he can’t have seen Rey’s double-bladed lightsaber go dark as Kylo Ren cuts her down. He can’t have seen the shape of her crumple like a pillar of sand. He can’t have felt that terrible ache blossom in the Force. It must be a warning. It can’t be real.
There’s more soldiers closing in on them. He orders the rest of the team to get back to the ship. They’ve screwed up. This was a trap.
“Captain—“ their young, Bothan pilot shakes his head. “Where are you going?”
Finn says, “To buy you time. Get out. Get home!”
And then he runs, raising his rifle to his shoulder and looking for cover, still thinking that if he’s just fast enough, strong enough, if he can access that reservoir of Force strength that he put aside to become an officer under General Organa, somehow, somehow, somehow he’ll save her—
It takes three squadrons to stop him firing. The rest of the team get away. Finn dies crouched behind a low wall of earth, with his finger still on the trigger, lying in the mud, in the storm, alone.
---[]---
Finn finds himself on a lakeside ringed by green, under a sky of blue and gold. There’s a strange sun sinking over the trees and stars just beginning to glow on the far horizon. Rey stands looking out at the sun, her hand shading her eyes. She waves to him. “There you are!”
He jogs towards her. She’s in a grey vest and trousers, her hair hanging loose, longer than it has been in years. Her smile outshines the sunset. “I’ve been looking for you for days,” she says.
“But I was just talking to you—” he starts to reply, but then he can’t remember where, or what they said to each other. He holds her tight, breathing in that long-familiar smell.
They live on the lakeside for a long time; a lifetime, or no time. It’s hard to measure time. The sun is always setting, and there’s no hunger anymore. Just Rey, and him. They talk, but they don’t need to speak, because they’re in and out of each other’s minds as easy as sharing a breath between their lips. They make love over and over, like they did when she came back from training with Master Skywalker and she said she was going to remake the Jedi anew. And the sun never vanishes, and the stars never fill up the space above, but soon they both feel it: this world is shrinking.
They can see the curve of the planet now, bending the trees away from each other, revealing more constellations in the sphere of the sky. The stars themselves seem closer, as close as the roof of a cathedral. Speech is getting more difficult, like struggling through mud. Their hands don’t seem as solid as before.
“I think we’re going back,” Rey says. She sounds unhappy for the first time since he saw her on the lakeside. “Returning to the Force.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” Finn holds her insubstantial face in hands that feel as thin as smoke. In the distance he can hear a creaking, the rumble of earthquakes, and the whisper of a high wind.
“Luke says every living thing that ever was is together in the Force,” she presses her forehead to his and closes her eyes.
“We didn’t have enough time,” he counters. “We were supposed to do more.”
“I know,” she whispers, and grabs his hands over her cheeks. “So come with me.”
They walk into the lake hand in hand as the planet collapses into itself.
---[]---
They have been dead for mere moments. Far away, General Leia Organa feels her brother’s apprentice as her life flickers out, and then soon after goes dear Finn, who has never let her down, who has brought them so many defectors from the First Order in his years under her command. She does not say anything to those around her. For the first time in a very long time, she isn’t sure.
---[]---
They have been dead for two weeks. Poe is helping the engineers test an X-Wing with a newly repaired left engine. It’s just a simple calibration lift-off; take her up, out of the hanger, loop round and land again. When he gets twenty feet up, the new engine gets twitchy under the throttle, and he tries to stabilise by adding a soft touch on the left reversers but he overdoes it and suddenly he’s lost the horizon and just manages to pull it back and kill the thrusters before he goes into a full spin. The ship has turned a full 180 and careens into the wall of the hanger. His instinct barely lines it up so he wrecks the paintwork and the new engine, but not himself or the cluster of cadets loitering by the stairs.
Fire personnel sprint down from the barracks up the hill and the controllers order the handful of other ships waiting in the air to hold their positions. They can all hear Poe over the radio, “Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit!”
Jessica Pava runs to the damaged X-Wing even though protocol says it should be emergency crew only. She’s never heard her commander lose his cool like that, not after dozens of minor crashes and near-misses. She sees him climb out of the cockpit and clumsily drop down onto the concrete. He tears his helmet off and hurls it aside, striding towards the open grass off the side of the runway as the fire crew hose down the ruined, smoking engine with foam.
“Poe!” Jess follows him, watching him stumble and lash out at nothing.
“Fuck. Shit. Fuck,” Poe crouches in the grass, digging his fingers into his hair. It scares Jess to see him like this. He’s Poe Dameron. He doesn’t get flustered. He doesn’t get scared.
“It’s okay,” she reaches him, kneels to slide one hand over his shoulder, under the edge of his flight vest. “The engine got too much juice, I saw it, the throttle wasn’t balanced. It wasn’t your fault.”
He shakes his head and she sees there are tears on his cheeks. He presses a hand over his mouth.
“Poe,” she grips his shoulder. “You lost people. We all lose people in this war, it’s okay to feel like shit about it. Cry about it. Take some time.”
He sobs and shakes his head again, and she’s never heard his voice as shattered as it is now, “Not them. Not those two. I got in too deep, Jess, I got stupid. I thought they were Force Fucking Magic and they’d never die.”
As she tries to stroke his hair, an uncomfortable gesture from her perspective when made towards her senior colleague, he tears away from her. He gets up on shaking legs and walks away from the runway, his hands hanging by his side. Her brave, dashing commander, the one who picks them all up when they can’t go on. Maybe this is a turning point. Maybe it doesn’t get better from here.
---[]---
They have been dead for nine weeks.
Leia listens to the Force when it talks to her, but she rarely takes its advice to heart. So she’s been ignoring the nagging sensation that she’s not alone even though it has been growing stronger for almost two months. Finally, she goes to Major Kalonia. Not in the med bay, of course. She asks her for a drink in the General’s quarters.
Once they’ve each got a glass of the best spirits this side of D’Qar in their hands and have been shooting the breeze for a while, Leia breaks it to her straight. “Doc, is there any way I could be pregnant?”
Kalonia considers her face for a moment, lips pursed, but she knows Leia’s sense of humour better than that after all these years. “You did a test?” she finally asks.
“Yeah, I did a test. Took one from your store room when you were out in the field yesterday. Still got the instincts of a spy, don’t you know,” she winks over her glass. All the wrinkles on her cheeks shift.
Kalonia sighs. “General, I have good news and bad news. The good news is no, you and I both know that those days are well behind you. The bad news is that a high level of those hormones could, possibly, indicate a tumour—”
“No, no, no,” Leia raises her hand.
“—I know, that can sound scarier than a code blue shield breach, but—”
“It’s not a tumour,” Leia’s voice is the voice of the General, and Kalonia falls silent. “Doc, I know it’s not a medical diagnosis, but the Force is telling me something I didn’t think was possible. I’m two months pregnant. It’s done this to me,” there’s anger in her tone now, and she jabs her pinched fingers at her chest. “I don’t know how, but damned if I can deny it any longer. So new question. Am I in danger? Is it even possible for me to carry this thing to term?”
She can tell that Kalonia believes her (not on a medically trained and rational level, but that hardly matters right now). Leia watches her sweep her gaze across her, consider her General’s grey-white hair, her thin and crooked fingers, her hunched back.
After a long silence the doc says, “You’re okay. If you’re really two months in, your risk of miscarriage and maternal complications aren’t much different than they were thirty years ago. It’s just the conception that I can’t get my head around. General, I hope you believe me when I tell you that this cannot be your biological child.”
She does believe it. The depth of it is terrifying. You spend your life fighting a war that is so much bigger than you and what you learn is that the universe doesn’t care, the universe is merciless matter and energy and it doesn’t even know you’re there even when they’re burning a whole planet to ashes before your eyes. It makes you stop caring about people, after a while, except as numbers on your volunteer reserves list. The Force sees people like that but even moreso, Leia believes. It reacts – sometimes to things that haven’t even happened yet – but it doesn’t care. And to suddenly have that mind-crushingly huge, uncaring universe reacting inside her, inside her body, perhaps because of who her father was or because of who her brother failed to become... it makes a person feel very small.
“I bled a lot with Ben,” Leia says, and the sound of that name in her own mouth is more of a trial than the bizarre announcement she just made. “A lot. That’s half the reason we didn’t try for another.”
(Less than half the reason. There were a lot of reasons. She was busy. Han was unhappy. Ben was… Ben. It wasn’t a hard choice to stop there.)
“Then that’s a risk we’ll deal with when it comes,” Kalonia raises her brows. “That’s if you want to go all the way.”
Leia clicks her tongue and downs the rest of the glass. It burns in her throat. It might have to be the last drink she has for a while. That’s a horrible thought.
“I gotta talk to Luke first,” she says.
Kalonia’s brows somehow go up even further.
---[]---
She hails Luke on an encrypted frequency patched through several different proxies. She doesn’t know where he is, but he must be mobile, because he’s jumped into conversation range of their radios. They’ve been in touch like this several times since he became the last Jedi (again).
“You shouldn’t go through with this,” Luke says, immediately. No cautious probing from him. He knows Leia isn’t calling for platitudes. They’re too old and too familiar for that.
“Well, glad you believe me.”
“If you don’t doubt it, I don’t doubt you,” Luke’s voice is clear enough to feel like he’s right beside her. Damn, she misses him. She wishes she wasn’t too cowardly to tell him, but if he came back to her it would mean coming back to the war, and she can’t put that decision on his shoulders again.
“Luke, if the Force did this, maybe I should see how it plays out. It has to mean something—”
He cuts in with exactly what she’s been thinking herself. “Have you forgotten about the last time this happened?”
“Yeah. You and me happened. Well, one degree removed.”
He scoffs. She remembers a chatty, sand-haired boy too confident for his own good and smiles to herself. “I mean it, Leia. If the Force wants this to happen, it’ll find someone else. You’ve chosen a path with more than enough responsibilities for one person. Say ‘no’ to this one.”
“Don’t you have anything more, well, Jedi-ish for me?” she grumbles. “Any grand philosophies from the Old Order? Any messages from the life-hum of the galaxy? Any… feelings? About what this means?”
He’s quiet for a moment. “I wish I did. Maybe being your brother is interfering with my connection to the Force,” and he actually laughs. That’s Han coming through, she thinks. Luke could never bring himself to be that irreverent without Han. He hums. “We’re too old to be called into service now, Leia. And I’m not coming back to teach this one if it turns out to be the next Anakin Skywalker. I can’t do it a third time.”
“I know,” she says. “I know.”
And then, once they’ve both enjoyed each other’s silence long enough, she says, “Luke, I don’t this one is one. I think it’s Finn and Rey.”
---[]---
They have been dead for three months.
She tells no one else why she’s getting so fat, except Chewie, of course, who she outlines the whole situation to soon after making up her mind. He has been in and out of the Resistance network in the years since Han was murdered, doing smuggling runs in the Falcon with a series of unreliable co-pilots, helping Leia out when he can. Chewie assures her he would have made the same decision in her position; she wishes Han was here to clarify how literal he’s being.
She suspects a handful of people notice, but they don’t ask. Who’s going to ask their boss, an old woman with thousands in her underground network, hundreds of armed soldiers and dozens of interstellar warships at her fingertips, why she’s getting so fat? She cackles to herself just imagining it. And it’s not like she’s dressing to show off her figure anyway, these days. The change could easily be explained by too many bread puddings.
She goes to late-night appointments with Major Kalonia, as infrequently as she can get away with. Kalonia confirms that she is carrying twins, and that apart from a slight increase in her blood pressure everything appears normal. Outside of the med bay, Leia rarely thinks about the consequences of her decision. She could not have made it to this age with her sanity intact if she hadn’t learned to compartmentalise. All she worries about is how much her back hurts, and how she’s had to start wearing thick pads because of her bladder. She’s probably more tired, but she’d barely notices the difference. She’s been tired for years. Decades.
---[]---
They have been dead for eight months, and two days.
The first time Leia has to seriously consider her next move is during a meeting about restoring local representation to a system where they’ve helped drive out the First Order. It’s been a long meeting. They’re almost wrapped up for the night. Leia is starving. It’s been hours since she sent one of the younger captains to fetch a pile of dinners from the canteen. She rubs her back.
“You okay, Ma’am?” Poe asks. Since when does he call her ‘ma’am’? She must look even worse than she feels.
“Fine,” she grumbles. “Just been getting these spasms on and off all day. So we’ve got diplomats who’ve volunteered for all three of these planets, right?”
Someone starts to answer, but she’s stopped listening, having just processed her own words. All day. On and off. Increasingly often, say about, every half an hour now. Shit.
“Okay, okay, sounds great,” she waves off whoever was speaking without thinking about it. “Listen, I’ve just remembered a couple of people I gotta meet tonight. Can you all wrap the rest of this up without me?”
There’s a rumble of assent around the table. They’re all looking at her now, half a dozen sets of eyes (some pairs, one quad), people she trusts with her life. They know something’s wrong. Yet she can’t bring herself to tell them this stupid thing she’s done to herself. She gets out of her chair with a hiss, using the table for support.
“General Organa?” Poe’s out of his chair too, reaching out to her.
She looks at him, the one person she should probably have told out of everyone on this whole base. She sighs. “You know what, I might just head off to my quarters for the night. Poe, can I talk to you outside before I go?”
“Sure,” he glances round the table and follows her into the corridor.
As soon as the door has closed behind her, Leia leans into the wall and lets out a long, slow breath. She suddenly realises that she does not want to do this. She does not want another child. She is not a mother any more. “Commander Dameron, get me to the medical bay and call Major Kalonia. Keep things as low profile as you can.”
So when he refuses to leave the med bay, it’s Kalonia who breaks the news to him.
---[]---
Poe has been sitting outside the ward for about three hours. Kalonia has cordoned it off to all visitors. Someone runs past him. He recognises Wanoul, a physician’s assistant who usually manages field triages. She’s followed closely by Skits and Ayenee Tore, a couple of dogsbody nurses. They all slam through the doors of the ward, Avenee still pulling on pants over his nightwear.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Poe yells at the swinging door. He can hear frantic voices on the other side and the hiss of the sterilisation taps. He swears and gets up, sticking his head through the door.
The ward is completely empty after the lull in offensives they’ve had for the past few months. Kalonia had pushed the handful of overnight patients into the larger ward; they were nothing more serious than a cracked rib and a cadet being observed after an allergic reaction. At the far end of the row, Poe can see a cluster of activity. Skits is handing gloves to the new arrivals. Avenee is wheeling over a machine with oxygen tanks. Kalonia leans over a bed. There’s another nurse already here. Poe can’t see the General.
Poe slides into the room, washes his hands in the sink and sprays them with steriliser before jogging closer. “Major, can I help?”
“Out!” Kalonia twists towards him and points an accusing finger at him. “Get out!”
She’s in a gown that’s soaked to the wrists in blood.
“Oh, no, no,” Poe shakes his head and takes a step closer. “What’s happening? Is she okay? General, talk to me—”
There’s no reply. Kalonia is already turned back to her patient. As the assistants dance between the bed and the supply bench Poe gets a glimpse of bare legs, a mess of grey hair, and more blood. There’s machines beeping like panicked droids and Wanoul is saying a lot of words that Poe knows (because he’s carried a lot of a injured pilots into the med bay) are not good words.
Poe reaches out for the nearest bed to steady himself. His General was fine when he saw her three hours ago. She was making plans. They have had a good run this season, have made progress against the First Order. For once it looked like everything was on their side. And now he sees a flash of her face, the eyes closed and the mouth panting. She looks old and getting older fast.
He looks away and sees there’s a human baby laid in the middle of the neighbouring bed. No paediatric incubators in a military medical wing. The baby is pale, almost grey, slimy, wrapped up loosely in a silver emergency blanket. He stares at it, frowning, wondering if he’s hallucinating. He had understood and believed Kalonia’s explanation when he arrived here with the General, but somehow seeing the evidence is different. There shouldn’t be a baby in this place, it’s just not right.
The baby wriggles, eyes tightly closed, kicking open the blanket.
“Hey, hey,” Poe goes to it and picks it up, notices it’s a girl. He wraps the blanket more tightly around her and cradles her to his chest.
“Doctor, should we prep a surgical room for Caesarean—?” Wanoul asks. Poe is kind of confused by that. Is this thing in his arms not the General’s?
“No. Stabilise Leia first,” Kalonia wipes her forehead with the sleeve of her gown. One of the machines is suddenly getting more insistent. “Skits – pull that mask over – blood Oh-Two’s dropping – Fuck. Ayenee – defibrillator – now! Now!”
Ayenee runs for the supply closet. Skits is strapping a clear, plastic cup of the General’s mouth and nose. The baby in the crook of Poe’s elbow is whimpering.
“Second one’s coming,” Wanoul says from the end of the bed, where she’s got a stack of gauze pads soaked crimson. “Major, I don’t know what—”
“No, just—”
“The head’s already—”
“Hold it—”
“I’m sorry—”
Wanoul is reaching for a fresh pad with her left hand and holding the head of another child with her right as it lies on the end of the bed, unmoving. Twins. Poe realises the General has twins.
“Her mother died giving birth to twins,” he says faintly, having heard the story from someone at some point in the years he’s worked under Organa. Nobody hears him.
With both hands, Skits takes the baby from Wanoul and looks around. They see Poe and stride towards him, hands outstretched, and he just manages to open up his other elbow before the boy is deposited there. He’s grey too, but browner than his sister, and his fists flex on his chest.
“Where’s my defib? We’re losing her!” Kalonia shouts.
“I’m getting a new battery!” Ayenee has ripped off his gloves and is frantically scrambling through a drawer of the supply bench.
And then the boy begins to cry. His sister takes it up a moment later. Poe stares down at them both, two yowling little creatures that seem as loud as a ship’s rockets.
A moment later Kalonia says, “Heart-rate’s looking more regular.” There’s a note of surprise in her voice.
“Bleeding’s slowing,” Wanoul adds.
Kalonia looks around at her makeshift delivery ward, finishing her survey on Poe and the two screaming children. “Okay, tell me when you get any sign of the afterbirth. Let’s get a line in and start fluids.”
“Is she gonna be okay?” Poe asks. “Is the General okay?”
Kalonia shoots him a glare, and sighs. “We’ll see. If she is, I can assure you she will not be happy you saw her like this.”
---[]---
For a few weeks, the babies live in a little room next door to General Organa, in a crib made out of an old suitcase, with a walkie-talkie taped to the side. Another walkie-talkie tuned to the frequency reserved for this purpose (the ‘Baby Band’, the cadets call it) is in the big mess room where most Resistance members spend their free time. When the babies cry, someone in the mess room – there’s a small group of cadets and pilots who always end up volunteering without ever actually putting their name to the job – goes down and figures out what they need. If it’s formula, they radio through to the kitchen to get some warmed up. If it’s a diaper change, they do it themselves on the table near the crib. If it’s neither, they take the crying baby, or both, for a walk around the base.
Leia has a radio on her belt tuned to the Baby Band as well, so of course she tries to be the one who goes to the little room. But she’s trying to run a Resistance at the same time and sometimes she just can’t leave her post. Sometimes. More times than not. And of course, she’s off base a lot as well. There’s no helping it.
Poe is one of the pilots who is unofficially on the roster, and he jumps to the sound of the Baby Band lighting up as often as he can. Of course he does. Leia called the babies “Rey” and “Finn” from the beginning. He doesn’t get it – none of them do – but he’s always trusted the General’s instinct, right to the edge, and he believes in those names in a way he can’t explain. But Poe is on base less than thirty hours in the average week, and he spends most of those sleeping. He tried to take a walkie to his bunk, but Leia told him to cut it out. She needs him to get his sleep.
“It’s not good for them,” Kalonia warns her, during a check-up to confirm she’s clawing her health back to where it was before the birth. “A different face every visit. Stuck in that little closet most of the time.”
“Newborns sleep twenty hours a day,” Leia frowns, waving her hand. “I’ll work something out when they’re older.”
“General,” Kalonia hums. “You chose to go through with this. Work something out now.”
But a few weeks turns into twelve and the babies are smiling when they hear Poe’s voice but they’re not responsive to the makeshift toys the cadets dangle in front of them. They make noises at each other and try to hold onto each other when picked up, but they seem to merely tolerate the affection of adults.
Leia cradles Finn after a feed late one night, watching his big, brown eyes roam the room until he sees Rey sleeping in the cot nearby and relaxes.
He’s so beautiful, soft-edged, his dark skin so warm, every part of him perfectly symmetrical. She feels absolute love for him, and terrible pain resurfacing beneath it.
She remembers Ben at this age, and how he looked strange to her even then, his limbs too thin, always breathing through his mouth, and she worried about him for reasons she couldn’t explain. She took him to doctors and physicians in the hope that they could give him some pill to cure a childhood illness that never manifested. She blamed herself for years. She’d worried him into an anxious child, and the anxious child had driven his loving but impatient father away, and the fatherless boy placed all his griefs in the lap of his distant uncle, and look what had happened. Look what happened. It was her fault. Later, she wondered if her fears had been a premonition, if it had been a warning from the Force, but what the hell was she supposed to do? Drown her baby to stop Kylo Ren? Eventually those questions became too much. She threw herself into running the Resistance and let the guilt slip under the water.
She kisses Finn’s head, and he twists away from her, reaching out for his sleeping sister.
“We must all seem like strangers, huh, kid,” she murmured into the soft brush of his hair. “Too many parents is as bad as none at all.”
Over the next few days Leia evaluates the shrinking pools of Resistance members who have taken charge of the kids, but she can’t spare any of them for a full-time shift.
When Chewie drops by with a shipment of plasma missiles they need for the border patrol, she runs late to a meeting so she can greet him at the dock and see how he’s going. He’s piloting the Falcon alone. He ditched his latest crew three days earlier. Untrustworthy, he explains. He didn’t want to take them to a Resistance base. He notices she’s not pregnant anymore. She tells him everything went fine, and he asks why she hasn’t got a baby, then?
“I can’t take a baby to diplomatic meetings,” Leia shakes her head at him. “Let alone two.”
Chewie tells her to get a nanny, or at least, she’s pretty sure that’s what the word means. She misses Han every day.
“Yeah, I’ll just advertise that on the interstellar network,” she laughs. “Come join the Resistance, spend all day cleaning throw-up out of your flight uniform.”
Chewie shrugs and says he’d do it, if she paid him.
Leia blinks at him. “Really?”
He nods. He says it’s hard to find a decent crew these days, and maybe he needs a break from smuggling. Just for a few years. She remembers he was always good with Ben. Wookies have got a temper, sure, but they know how to measure it when they need to.
“Really, really?” she repeats.
So Chewie takes the job full time. The falcon sits idle in the back hanger, and the babies are moved into a new bunkroom with Chewie. There’s always more work than people, so the Wookie manages the Resistance’s externally sourced supply routes when they’re asleep. Poe still insists on babysitting as often as he can (“C’mon, General, you can’t let Wookie be their first language,”), but the rest of the group who used to keep their ears pricked for noise from the cot are clearly relieved.
The change is slow but undeniable. The kids smile more, they babble more, they stare into Leia’s eyes when she holds them up to her face. They’re growing so fast, now. Ben grew fast too, Leia tries not to think.
---[]---
It has been just shy of four years since they died. Leia walks through a game of tag – or perhaps it’s a game of catch, she can’t be sure – on her way to central control. Poe and Oddy Muva are chasing two laughing, screaming toddlers through the corridors, as a handful of infantry join in on their way to a briefing. A wadded-up strip of papyrus armour is tossed back and forth from a pilot to a soldier and back towards the children, to groans from Poe that they just broke the rules. Finn charges off with the ball held in front of him in both hands.
Leia pauses to watch. She rarely thinks of the unspoken Others, but it comes back to her now, how Finn once told her his earliest memory was of walking through the snow in lines with other children. She thinks of how Rey always spoke of her missing family in abstracts like she’d created them out of a picture-book, and when pressed to recall a happy anecdote from childhood, described a favourite meal or seeing a flower behind glass for the first time, and never mentioned any people with whom she shared the moment. Now the little girl with Rey’s name is swinging between the outstretched hands of two young infantrymen, yelling for them to go higher. And she has a brother who will never leave her, never abandon her in the desert like scrap, and Finn has a sister who will fight for him and beside him no matter where he goes. Maybe the headquarters of an insurgency isn’t the best place to raise children but for fuck’s sake, it could be worse.
Finn bumps into Leia’s legs, bounces off but keeps his balance. He looks up at her with wide eyes. And then, clutching the ball to his chest with one hand, he raises his other arm and touches his forehead in an unmistakeable salute.
“Gen’rl Organa,” he says. Leia’s breath catches in her throat.
Poe has arrived behind him, and crouches to touch his shoulder. He points up at Leia and says in a voice he might use to describe a particularly bright nebula in the night sky. “Finn, that’s your Momma.”
Finn looks at him with all the scathing that a three-year-old can manage. “I know.”
Leia lets her breath out again with a smile.
---[]---
It has been five years since they died.
The Resistance evacuates the D’Qar base with a couple of days notice. It’s sad to go, after it has been home for near on a decade, but this used to be the norm much more frequently. Some of the newer recruits are in a bit of a mess but everyone else has done this at least once.
Leia sends a squadron to chase down the First Order scouts that they caught scanning the planet for their precise location. They make it out to one of D’Qar’s moons before the scouts turn around and engage them. There’s a handful of fighters waiting to back up the scouts, hiding behind the ice-covered moon’s shadow, and it turns bad quickly.
“That’s two ships down,” Ensign Goode reports while Leia is coordinating the pack-up on the ground. But Leia’s always got an ear on the cans, and Goode’s next words stun her. “Black One is mayday, mayday. Black one is down. Contact lost.”
Poe Dameron is gone.
There’s only one squadron up there, so Snap is in charge on the ground. “Black Two, take command.”
Leia goes to the terminal and follows the traces of their ships. But she’s got an evacuation in progress and she can’t leave it for one pilot. Not even Poe.
They destroy all the scouts and fighters, which might buy them some time. When the heat is off about an hour later and the squadron’s been recalled, Leia gets on the radio and calls Black Two, Oddy Muva. “Black Two, what can you confirm the loss of Commander Dameron?”
“He took a grazing hit, General, I think it cut the central hydraulic line and he couldn’t control his angle. He went down over the moon.”
Leia takes a breath. “Is there any chance he could have survived? Has his ship’s locator beacon been activated?”
Oddy is silent. You lose a lot of friends in this job, they all know that. But Leia has known Poe since he was four years old, the same age as the babies. A few shy of forty years. Finally Oddy says, “His last mayday call said he was losing pressure in the cockpit. Even if the crash somehow didn’t kill him, and I’m sure it did… the temperature down there is negative a hundred Celcius. Oxygen less than one percent. He’d be braindead in twenty minutes and frozen solid in thirty. I’m sorry, General.”
“Thank you, Black Two. See you back at base.”
She goes back to the evacuation, goes into a trance of multi-focus efficiency that has come in handy many times before. About twenty minutes later, a mottle-skinned cadet in training gear comes running up, gasping for breath. “General. Sorry. Sorry to bother. There’s a – a situation – ”
“I’ve got about twelve of those on my hands already, cadet, you’re gonna have to be specific,” she barks.
The cadet catches her breath and points down the corridor he came from. “With your, uh, your kids.”
Leia isn’t having it. “Chewie can deal with it. Just get them off the planet.”
The cadet looks between her and the corridor. Leia isn’t sure about his non-human expression, but the body language seems frantic. “Ma’am… Chewbacca… he threatened me with severe bodily harm if I didn’t fetch you immediately…”
“You speak Wookie?”
“No, but Medic Wanoul is there too, and she translated.”
Chewie wouldn’t call a medic in the middle of an evacuation if something wasn’t serious. Leia pauses, tells Snap to take over for five minutes, and follows the Cadet back to the kids’ room.
She can hear Rey howling from several doors away. When she enters the room, the first thing she takes in is the mess. Their small hanger of clothes has been knocked over, paper scattered across the floor, and several precious coloured crayons crushed into the grill under Leia’s feet. Rey is in the centre of the room, thumping her fists and knees on the threadbare rug. Her screams fill the small space like buffets of wind. Wanoul is squatting on the floor, trying to talk to Rey without making a gap in the screams. For a moment Leia cannot even spot Finn, but finally she sees him tucked into the corner between the wall and the end of the single bed that the toddlers share, a blanket wrapped completely around his body but for two little sock-clad feet sticking out the bottom.
The four year olds have been drilled for an evacuation several times since they were old enough to walk, and are used to the occasional emergency retreat into the bunkers at the bottom of the base. Rey has a bit of a temper when she’s tired or hungry, but not in four years has Leia ever seen a tantrum like this. Chewie is shoving clothes into the suitcase that the twins have been taught to pack in an evacuation. He has evidently decided he will simply carry the children and all their possessions to the evac ship.
Rey becomes aware of Leia and raises her head, stretching her arms to Leia. “Momma! Momma, help me!”
Leia crosses the room, grabs her arms and hauls her up onto her feet. Rey’s eyes are red and her cheeks dripping tears. “Rey. We are in an evacuation. You need to pack and go with Chewie.”
“No! No,” Rey turns the word into a long howl like an animal and screws up her face again.
“Look at me, this is very serious,” Leia does not quite shake the child, but she lowers her head and gives her arms a squeeze. She has to shout over Rey’s screaming. “We need to go.”
Chewie growls something over the racket. Leia turns to look at him. “Poe? What do you mean, they want Poe?” when Chewie shrugs, she turns to Wanoul. “Who the hell told them about Poe?”
“What about Poe?” Wanoul frowns. “Can you get him? It’s the only thing they keep asking for. Both of them.”
Leia groans and realises with a sinking grief what has happened. They sensed it. But they’re so young! Even Ben showed no signs at this age… Maybe the shock has awakened something in them that time alone could not.
“Sweetheart, Poe’s not coming with us,” she pleads with the sobbing Rey. “Poe’s gone. I’m sorry. We can talk about this later.”
“He’s not. He’s not. He’s needs us,” Rey wails, and when Leia stands up and tries to lift her she struggles and kicks out so hard that Leia will find bruises on her shins tomorrow. She is really scared now that Rey will hurt herself.
“Please, Rey, please,” Leia’s back hurts, and she doesn’t have the strength to lift the girl while she’s fighting her.
Rey goes suddenly quite, reduced to a soft whimpering as she continues to thrash in Leia’s arms. It’s not for Leia’s benefit, however, but because Finn has begun to speak. From the corner by the bed the edge of his face appears over the curve of the blanket and he sniffs, “He’s so cold, Momma. Poe’s so cold. Please, can we go help him? Please!”
Leia feels the grief turn to fear like a broken bone digging into her throat. She looks at Wanoul. “Has anyone talked to them in the last hour? Anyone? How can he know where Poe went down?”
Wanoul just shrugs, and Chewie answers her. No one has been into the children’s room, and they have not left it.
Leia grabs Rey’s face. “Rey, look at me,” she waits until she has the girl’s gaze. “I want to help Poe. But you have to help me first, okay?”
At last, the tantrum seems to be subsiding. Rey blinks away tears, wiping at the snot under her nose.
Leia nods at Chewie. “Find two of the ships ready for evac and gets Rey on one and Finn on the other. Make sure they’re search and rescue capable. Get the coordinates from Oddy Muva where Poe went down and have them do a fly-by over the moon, looking for a beacon.”
“Why two?” Wanoul asks.
“Because there’s no point going down there unless both kids pick the same heading,” Leia straightens up her aching back. She holds out her hand to Finn. “Come on, baby, let’s go find him.”
Chewie, rumbling his discontent, picks the suitcase up under one arm and heads out at a jog.
---[]---
In a tiny med-bay on board the largest evac ship, Leia leans towards Kalonia in the cramped ship’s corridor. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”
Kalonia glances through the window where Poe Dameron lies bandaged and dozing. His cheeks and the tips of his nose are a fierce red with frostbite, and there’s red bleeding through some of the patches that cover his cuts and bruises. One leg is propped up away from his body, wrapped in casting tape and a steel cage.
“That famous luck of his must have pushed itself to the limit,” Kalonia shakes her head as she turns back to Leia. “He managed to set the autopilot to land before depressurisation knocked him out. Snap said it looks like his manual hydraulics were cut but not the autos. The ship dumped itself in a snowbank, or an icefall hit it right after he crashed, it’s not clear. Either way, the snow sealed the breached cockpit. BB-8 switched life support to the auxiliary tank to bring oxygen close to normal. Space was small enough that his body heat kept him going long enough for us to find him. BB-8 too.”
“He’s Shara’s son, that’s for sure,” Leia mutters.
Kalonia nods. “That leg won’t ever be the same.”
“Will he fly again?”
It’s a fair question for a friend to ask, but she knows it sounds like a General reckoning her assets.
“We’ll see,” Kalonia says quietly.
Leia heads back to where Chewie is holding two very small hands. Finn strains away from the wookie, towards the door of the med bay. Rey clings to Chewie’s leg, sucking on her thumb. Leia summons them with a twitch of her hand and Chewie releases him. They both bolt for the door, bumping against her in the small corridor.
“Now be gentle, guys, he’s still sick,” Leia calls to them.
“Yes, Momma!” two reckless voices, paying her lip-service. She smiles as Kalonia opens the door and they slide through the gap.
She has to get back to the control centre. She knows from experience that sleep is a long, long time away for her. But she waits for a moment to look through into the warm, yellow light of the med bay.
“Kids!” Poe is awake, his voice tired and a little slurred from the painkillers, but he pushes the blankets down to his waist and sits up. Finn and Rey bounce to the side of the bed and reach for him. He throws out his arms and pulls them up into the small bunk, even though she can see him wincing from all the way over here. “I heard what you did. I’m so proud of you, my clever babies.” He kisses the tops of their heads.
“We love you, Poe,” Rey wraps her arms around his neck and he feigns choking until she loosens up, giggling at him. Finn echoes her as he cuddles against Poe’s side, “We love you!”
“I love you too,” Poe hugs them against his body, tips his head back so they don’t see him blink back a couple of tears. “Thanks. Thanks for coming back for me.”
---[]---
They lose a pilot a few weeks later on a routine patrol, while they’re squatting in a marshy region of a smuggler’s paradise planet. Search and rescue comes back after two days with their heads bowed and bags under their eyes.
“His last transmission said he was having mechanical issues,” Snap tells Leia. He wants to continue the search for another day. “He was going to try and dump in the swamp.”
“No one can detect his emergency beacon,” Leia points out. “We have to call off the search. This area’s too dangerous to spare the ships any longer.”
“Not yet,” Snap pleads. “General, can’t the kids do their Force thing? Like they did with Poe?”
Leia looks at him. She doesn’t even know what to say. It doesn’t work like that. No, that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that they’re four years old.
“It’s worth a try, right?” Snap pushes.
How can she argue about the weight of responsibility to him – to people who volunteered to die her service? Instead Leia croaks, “It doesn’t work like that.”
She goes to Poe afterwards and asks him what people have been saying in the mess hall, in the bunkrooms, in the long stretches watching empty perimeter feeds.
He grimaces at last. “They say they’re gonna be just like Luke Skywalker when they grow up. But even better. They say they’re gonna save the galaxy.”
This is the way it starts.
Too soon, too soon.
---[]---
It has been six years and ten months since they died.
A secret always gets out sooner or later, especially when all the relevant parties can sense a change in the balance of the intergalactic power that binds together all living things. And so the Order comes sooner rather than later: these children, if they exist, should be removed from the custody of the enemy and brought to the Supreme Leader.
The Resistance central base is on the windswept Maridun, where the disperse water and unceasing weather means grasses dominate the ecosytem and all megafauna have long been driven extinct by the various sentient species that have eked out a living here. It’s a planet old by the life span of a planet, with a slow, near-dormant core that has reduced tectonic movement to a minimum for a few hundred million years. Weather has worn down the mountains and the valleys to an endless, flat tundra and there is no permanent habitation beyond the occasional pirate port. The base is set up in one of the larger mountain ranges, but by most standards it’s barely more than a spine of rocky hills stretching for a thousand miles around a band just above the equator.
But even at this miserable edge of the galaxy, there are spies, and Kylo Ren is patient. He will go alone; he has his reasons, buried deep in his own mind. The driving mechanisms behind his thoughts are shattered, like his face. He is good at separating the pieces these days, for his own sanity, and to protect them from his Leader. But he cannot strike the heart of the base while That Woman is there. She will know. She will know.
He waits until his spies tell him she is leaving (no one can say where, it does not matter, he does not want to think on That Woman for long, for it spurs some of the old cogs that have not spun in years). Then he takes a stealth ship and slips through the Resistance patrol ships like oil over the surface of a lake.
He thinks it may be difficult to find the children. He barely believes they exist, and certainly the rumours cannot be true about their origin. They are Force-sensitive foundlings, he supposes, adopted by That Woman simply for the spiteful purpose of keeping them from a greater destiny. He may have to go deep into the base, kill many Resistance fighters, which is good but inelegant. A wasteful journey for a prize he does not believe will be worth the rumours.
But he senses them before he even lands and disembarks the stealth ship on a silent, black speeder. By the stars! Stronger than even Snoke suspected. Stronger than the cursed pair that his grandfather bore. As strong as his grandfather? He wishes he knew. Strange – impossibly strange.
He waits in the hilltops above the base. He is not disappointed. The children pay the border no heed, crawling through a well-worn dip under the razor wire while a sentry waves them on with a wink and a finger to his lips. Ren watches them through a long-distance scope as they go wandering far past the fields and roads of the Resistance hive. No one accompanies them. The area is isolated and empty, with little danger besides a few half-hidden streams, steep gullies and some sharp species of grasses.
He watches them climb into the hills, stopping only to hunt for insects and lizard-like creatures, catch them in their hands and carry them until they get bored and then let them fall to the ground, forgotten. They have biscuits in their pockets and they stop to eat them by a small, tannin-brown pool, throwing stones into its depths. He can see their faces now, snapping images with the digital scope and blowing them up to inspect them. There are crumbs around their mouths and their hands are dirty, not just with the dust from their walk but with motor oil and ink. Their clothes are a patchwork of hand-sown adaptations of Resistance garb and hand-me-downs from child-sized species. They sport matching lengths of hair, the girl’s chopped into a fringe and a short bob, the boy’s an afro in all directions. They are never more than a few feet from each other.
Ren looks at the small faces and covers the girl’s eyes with the pad of one gloved finger. He remembers the pain of a lightsaber slash across his cheek, and a pair of brown eyes as the light left them on that rain-sluiced wall seven years ago. The different parts of his mind are waking up, each piece of the machine whirring, but they are not in sync. He will take the girl and leave the boy; his orders were to bring both to the leader, but he will find some excuse for that failing. One is enough.
He lowers the scope and reaches out for the girl with the Force. Come along, he whispers. Come this way. It does not remind him of another voice inside the skull of a boy called Ben, many years ago, because Ben is long dead.
The girl raises her head as if listening. She gets up and walks away from her brother, clambering over the rocks, her feet following a thread that only she can feel between her fingertips.
Come to me, he hums, and she wanders through the tussocks and over the ridge. She crouches onto her heels to skid down the gully towards his speeder. She walks between two cliffs and comes out on the plateau where he waits.
When she sees him her eyes go wide and she takes a step backwards. She reaches her hand behind her, searching for a brother that is not there. Realising she is alone, she opens her mouth to scream. But he has already crossed the distance between them. He raises his hand and touches her forehead with one finger. Her eyes fall closed and he sweeps her up with one arm before she hits the ground. Limp in his arms, she is heavier than he expected. Somehow he thought she would be made of paper, yet she seems to weigh just the same as she did the last time he took her away (he would never admit, of course, that his body is weaker than he was that day on Takodana).
He turns towards the speeder, and as he does so he hears a small voice cry out. “Rey!”
He glimpses the boy coming through the gully, padding footsteps turning into a run. Kylo Ren would ignore him, for the speeder is not far and the boy’s legs are short, but then he hears the crackle of a radio.
He turns back and throws out his hand to knock the walkie talkie from the boy’s grasp. So they were not entirely unsupervised. He should have spotted it on the scope. The radio flies away, smashes against the rocks nearby and drops to the grass, still buzzing static. The boy gapes at his empty hands, and then he breaks into a sprint directly towards Ren.
Ren turns back to the speeder again, but there are small hands latching onto his belt and hauling on it. “Let her go! Let her go!”
He pushes the boy off easily with one hand, but he gets up again and grabs the trail of Ren’s cloak. The child is dragged through the grass towards the vehicle, one of the knees on his worn trousers ripping open. He is yelling loud enough to echo against the rocks.
Ren looks down at him “Go back,” he says, pushing the boy away with the thrust of one foot. “Go back to your mother.”
“Give me my sister!” the boy growls, grabbing for his ankle.
“Go back and be a better son,” Ren says, and the walls break down between two machinations in his mind. He did not want the girl, he simply could not take the boy, could not take another son from That Woman.
He must eradicate sentiment.
Ren waves his hand. The boy is thrown backwards by the Force, landing among a thick cluster of tussock twenty feet away. Ren hears the gasp of air leaving his lungs. He heads for the speed, walking faster now.
“Come back!” the boy pushes himself out of the grass, wheezing from his half-winded chest. “Rey!”
The girl stirs against Ren’s shoulder. He starts. She should not have shaken off the trance so quickly. Suddenly she begins to struggle in earnest. “Get off! Help! Finn, help!”
She is snarling, lips pulled back from her teeth as he seizes her with both hands and tries to hold her close. She is horribly real and alive, so different from the sterile, mechanical, military world in which he has lived for so long. And then she looks down at his hip and kicks out. “Finn, catch!”
As her foot strikes it, the lightsaber breaks from its clasp on his belt and flies through the air. Ren spins to see it land in the boy’s hands, looking absurdly large. He holds it out from his body, considering it for a moment with wide eyes. His thumb moves towards the button.
Kylo Ren has a vision, which is not a premonition from the Force, but a mere flash of manifested fear; the boy too small to wield a full-sized lightsaber, lying glassy-eyed in the grass with a hole burned through him.
“No! Stop!” he cries, throwing out his hand again. The strength of the push is dangerous. The boy’s eyes roll back in his head and he slumps into the grass, still clutching the lightsaber with one hand.
“Finn! Finn!” the girl screams, frightened now. He drops her onto the ground, holding onto her upper arm hard enough to bruise. There is no excuse left. If he brings the girl alone, Snoke will know that he felt compassion for the boy, that he left him helpless. He would have failed.
He takes them both.
---[]---
Poe limps back from a shift in flight command. He has not flown in two years, but he works the bad leg every day, gaining strength (or so he convinces himself). He doesn’t need his cane for short walks anymore, just for the long days in the flight instructor school where he’s training the next generation of pilots. He greets Jess in the big intersection that leads to the hanger. She is heading out on patrol. He kisses her cheek, and she wrinkles her nose at the scratch of his thick beard, her eyes smiling.
“Where’s the kids?” he asks, looking around. “I was gonna take them for lessons.”
Poe has decided to try and teach the babies (as the pilots still call them, since they are the only permanent children on the base) for basic schooling; their letters and numbers, and weapons safety. He manages about an hour a day, a handful of days a week, until he or the children get sick of it. Jess is not convinced they are learning anything yet except how to distract Poe.
Jess shrugs. “Probably hiding from your boring lessons.”
“Seriously,” he looks around again. “They promised they’d meet me here.”
“I think they were at breakfast. I’ll see you in a few hours.”
Poe wanders around until he finds Snap. “Has anyone seen the babies?”
Snap shakes his head. “They went off into the grasslands again, I think.”
“Did they take their walkie?”
“They always take their walkie. They know how much trouble they’ll be in if they don’t.”
Poe sits down at an empty station and tunes into the frequency of the children’s radio. Snap is looking over his shoulder, pretending to be busy with some maps. “Hey, Finn, Rey, how far away are you? I gotta take a sleep shift in a couple of hours.”
He waits for the familiar, little voices babbling over the radio, usually fighting over holding the handset and just intelligible enough to communicate. There’s nothing but silence. Poe thumbs the button again, “Kids, I mean it, if you don’t tell me where you are, your momma’s gonna hear about it.”
Nothing. Snap leans over. “Maybe they’re down in the basement,” he suggests. “Or they dropped the walkie into a stream.”
Poe does a quick circuit of the base, asking anyone who doesn’t look too busy for information. The consistent story is that the kids wandered off a few hours ago, away from the perimeter. Poe is starting to worry. He doesn’t worry about them very often. There are two of them – even if one got into trouble, the other would come looking for help. What can possibly be wrong?
Maridun has a fifty-hour day-night cycle, of which there are ten hours of solid sunlight left today. That’s a lot of time before the freezing night. But Poe wants to get his sleep, and he doesn’t trust anyone on the base to make a concerted effort to find the kids in the meantime. By the time he wakes up again there will be very less than an hour before the temperature starts to drop.
He has one of the techies activate the emergency beacon in the walkie that he had made for the kids. The pings are loud on the search module; they’re not more than a mile away. That’s a relief. Poe takes a speeder and a cadet called Karé off into the hills to pick them up.
Up into the hills and over a ridge, the pings tell them they’re metres away from the spot, but there’s no sign of the kids. “Finn. Rey. Talk to me,” Poe says into his radio, and hears his voice echoing back to him.
They find the walkie in the grass. It’s still working, but its panel is scratched and hanging off busted screws as if its been smashed against the rock. Poe feels real fear for the first time.
“Finn!” he bellows into the empty gully, and across the tundra below, leaning heavily on his cane. “Rey!”
Karé kicks half-heartedly at the grass. “They probably got lost and dropped the walkie, Boss. We’ll get a patrol ship to do a thermo-scan of the area.”
Poe’s heart is beginning to race. He looks up the gully. He limps over the uneven ground to the edge of the plateau where they’re standing, looking over at the steep slope beyond for the shape of two small bodies. He’s already imagining the crunch of Finn’s skull against a rock as he tripped and rolled down the hill, imagining crimson splatters on Rey’s unconscious face. But the slope’s not that steep, and really, he knows from his own rough-and-tumble childhood that it takes a lot to hurt a kid bad enough that they can’t move or cry for help. He knows how loud Rey and Finn can scream when they want to.
As he looks back towards the cadet, his gaze slides across the grass nearby. He lugs himself over to the other side of the plateau. There’s a rectangular patch of wilted grass, flattened and faintly brown.
“Look at this,” Poe crouches down on his good leg. “There was a landspeeder parked here.”
“Could have been a patrol,” Karé suggests.
“It’s not one of ours – too small. Compact enough to fit in a small ship,” Poe looks up at the ridge and points. “From the top of the gully you’d have a clear view of the whole base and the surrounding area. With a good scope you’d spot the kids, if you were waiting for them.”
Karé leans over, propping his hands on his knees. “You’re paranoid, boss. No ship could get into this hemisphere without us spotting it.”
“Maybe,” Poe straightens up. He tunes the walkie to central command. “Goode, it’s Poe. Did any of the controllers report anomalous signals in their sector in the last twelve hours? Anything passed off as space junk or the like? I’m thinking there’ll be a matching signal in the last two hours.”
“Roger that Poe, I’ll ask around. Urgent?”
Poe takes a second, swallows, thumbs the transmission. “Urgent. Thanks.”
By the time they get back to base Poe is due to start his sleep shift in less than an hour, but he knows he wouldn’t sleep even if Snap wrestled him into bed himself. He’s trying to get the analysts (who handle all classified intel, including from Resistance spies and interceptions) onto the situation but they want to know how long the kids have been missing (no one is sure) and say they won’t devote resources to them until someone’s done a thermo-sweep of the area (they haven’t). Poe is sure they’re not just lost. He’s sure of it. He’s just starting to raise his voice when Karé taps him on the shoulder.
“Commander,” the cadet’s tone is flat and serious compared to his bored mood up on the ridge. “It’s the General.”
A ringing starts in Poe’s ears. He takes the handset and raises it to his mouth. “General Organa,” his voice comes out as a croak and he clears his throat. “Afternoon, General. I thought you were offline for another few days.”
“I know, Poe, so don’t tell anyone I’m calling or they’ll all start bothering me,” the General sounds warm, only a little on edge. She’s on what Poe thinks is her first holiday in about ten years. Maybe she’s just calling to assure herself they can run the Resistance without her. “Everything alright down there?”
“Of course. Of course,” Poe can’t exactly tell her anything else when he’s the only one who seems to think anything is wrong.
“Great. Good job,” he can hear the smile in her voice. A matching smile twitches at the corner of his mouth. If Leia thinks everything is fine, then everything is fine. “Listen, uh, I have a bit of a foolish question for you.”
Poe’s throat closes up. He can’t even make a squeak to acknowledge that he’s listening, but she mumbles on regardless. “I just… I know it’s probably just anxiety about being away from command, but I have a bad feeling about the babies. Have you seen the little terrors today? They’re not… I don’t know, sick, or anything?” she sighs down the line and mutters. “Don’t I just sound like an old woman.”
“General—” Poe manages to rasp. “I – I don’t know what to tell you, but—”
Instantly, her tone is not a mellow vacationer, but a general, his General. “Dameron, tell me. Now.”
“They’re missing. They wandered off the base a few hours ago and no one’s seen them since. I found their radio near some landspeeder tracks that don’t belong to us, and there’s two blips on the patrol scans that suggest that maybe the stealth ship that caught us off guard in Sullust last year could have breached our perimeter. General, that’s a worst case scenario, but I think… I think it’s possible someone was spying on the base and took them. Took them off planet.”
A moment of silence, and then she says. “It was him. I felt him… one degree removed, an echo, through the kids…”
“General…”
“I’m coming back right away. Get all the intel you can.”
---[]---
Leia had gone to visit Luke for the week. It is a long time to be without her responsibilities. It makes her feel light-headed, like some deep-sea creature coming up towards the light, unable to bear the world without the pressure of a million tonnes of ocean above it.
Luke had gripped her shoulders when he saw her, smiled at her through his beard, which was longer and greyer than ever. He looked well, living in a small commune not far from Maridun, living under the name Lore Tekka (claiming kinship to an old friend too dead to dispute it). She couldn’t imagine what she looked like to his eyes.
But she’d still found a way to make the visit a business trip. She couldn’t break the habit of a lifetime. She had an ulterior motive.
“No,” he’d said, as they sat drinking tea by a freshwater lake. “I’m not going to train them.”
“I know it’ll be hard to see Rey. I know how much she meant to you,” Leia pressed. “But they’re strong, Luke. Stronger than I could have imagined. I don’t think I’m up to the job of teaching them to control that strength.”
“You chose this,” Luke says, which seems cruel, but she’s asking a cruel thing of him. He turns towards her and his eyes are full of kindness. “You taught Ben well, before you sent him to me. I was the one who lost sight of him, Leia. We don’t have to make that mistake again.”
“Luke, all I can teach them is to lock up their talents, to keep the Force sleeping inside, isn’t it a waste—”
Luke’s mouth turns down sharply and he looks out over the lake. “Don’t start that. They’re six years old, by the Stars, they’re not soldiers you need to arm.”
She pulls in a long, slow breath. “You’re right. You’re right.”
But she cannot shake the feeling – the fear – that they were sent to her for a reason.
They’d spent the day reminiscing, and for the first time in a long time Leia wondered if there could be a life for her after the war, if the war ended in her lifetime. Then the unease had begun to spread in her gut. She’d dismissed it as anxiety about her absence from the base, until it had become so distracting she had to call home, just to check, just to alleviate her fears.
And her worst fears were true.
---[]---
She is back on the base and it feels like slipping back into her body. Her arms are a thousand pilots, infantry, engineers, her eyes a hundred analysts and spies, her feet are the ships and the speeders, her body is all the medics and cooks and cleaners that are no less precious for not being on the front line. Luke travelled with her, unannounced on his arrival, brushed aside as a strange companion. All focus is on Leia and her orders.
“I’m so sorry,” Poe is one of the first to reach her, of course. “I’m sorry, General, I’m sorry, I let them go wherever they wanted with nothing but that walkie—”
“That’s enough,” she snaps at him, and reaches out to grab his shoulder. “We all watched them go wild. You think the First Order couldn’t have grabbed them from right out of your classroom if they wanted to? Of course they could have, and you’d be dead then instead of sorry. Get your head locked down, Dameron.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“They took my babies,” she growls, turning on the spot to address them all. “They took my babies so they can turn them into Sith and I will not let that happen!”
She sends her arms and eyes in search of any information, any hint of where he has taken them. She has a dozen extraction teams suiting up, waiting for a location. But in a pause in the action Luke takes her elbow and turns her aside to say softly, “I’ll go after them.”
“No, I can’t ask that of you.”
“I’ll go,” he repeats, more firmly. “I’ll go alone. And I’ll bring them back,” he glances around. “You’ve got good people, Leia, but they’re not ready for a fight with Kylo Ren.”
She holds his gaze. “Alright, I’ll give you a First Order ship we captured a few months ago, we’ve got some stolen access codes as well,” she says. “Get me confirmation of their location and I’ll send a team in after you.”
He nods, and they embrace. She can feel his spine even through his robes, and she feels short and fat in his arms.
Too soon, too soon.