Chapter Text
Later, Leia will remember the going back to the farm with Ben—the wide sky, the late summer sun’s glare off the sands, the air drying her lips out, peeling and cracking. She’ll think: that was the last time I could breathe. She’ll think: that was the only time I ever knew how. But in the moment, it’s just her, and Ben, and the power converters in the speeder, the wind whipping by, the wholeness of something—something, whatever Ben has, whatever presses down on her, makes her too-full, too-empty. She’s bursting with it, drowning in it.
Leia laughs once, bright and fierce and crazy, on the way back. It gets caught in the wind and ripped away, but she thinks Ben hears it anyways. She doesn’t know what he thinks of it—she hopes he knows why. She hopes he can feel it too.
It all collapses at the door.
Uncle Owen is furious, bitter and hot and awful, and she can feel it now, she can taste it—or maybe she always could, and now she just knows what she’s looking for. But it doesn’t matter either way, because she can see the icy shudder in his body as he sees Ben. He goes freezing cold, then white-hot, seething, terrified, and all Leia can do is put her body in between the two of them.
“I went to him,” she says, even though she knows she’s earning about a year of groundings and maybe worse just by speaking. She doesn’t care. It’s not fair, what’s about to happen to Ben. And what’s the fucking point of staying un-grounded, un-punished anyways if she’s not going to see him anyways. “He had nothing to do with it, he just—he brought me back, see? You don’t need to make a big deal out of it.”
“He brought you back,” Uncle Owen repeats, and she knows by his tone and his face and the rest of the something about him that he doesn’t mean it, that he doesn’t get it.
“I’m sorry to have worried you, Mr. Lars,” Ben tries, even though Leia could have told him that wouldn’t work. Maybe he knows. Maybe he doesn’t. It’s hard to tell with Ben—he’s too many layers of a person put together, and half of them have been dried out, desiccated, destroyed. “It’s true what she says: I had no intention of calling her to me.”
“But you called her,” Uncle Owen says, as good as he always is at finding the part of something that makes him feel worst.
“Her powers have begun to awaken,” Ben says, and Leia doesn’t have to be a genius to realize he’s avoiding the question. Owen knows it too. “Unbridled, they will become a danger to her. It’s those powers that allowed her to hear me and search me out. If it had been someone else calling—”
“What I want to know,” Owen says, and Leia can feel the steel-hard core of him underneath the anger, the steady thing, the thing that’s never shifted, “is why you were calling.”
Ben looks at him for a long moment. He seems almost sad, almost not, but mostly he seems tired. Uncle Owen seems tired too.
"He needed help," Leia says before Ben can say anything to dig himself deeper.
Uncle Owen glances at her, then back at Ben. "Yeah, they always need help. Don't see 'em giving it out much in return though."
Leia huffs, disgusted.
"Mr. Lars," Ben tries, softer, more implacable. "Her abilities are already beyond what ignorance could safeguard. Leaving her untrained would place her into greater danger. If someone tried what I did, and she responded, she might be drawn into great danger.”
“She was in danger,” Uncle Owen says. “With you, Ben. Not with me.”
Ben looks at Leia before he looks back at Uncle Owen, a quick flash of his pale eyes, rings of sky around black holes, then back at Owen, then back at her, then at the door. “I’ll come back,” he says to her, eyes on her again, heavy and full, “Practice. Listen.”
“What?” she starts to ask, smaller and confused, fucked up and crazy, and then he’s gone, and the salt flats yawn wide with emptiness through the doorway.
She can feel more than see the tightness inside Uncle Owen, the string pulled tight, about to break. It doesn’t surprise her when he barks, "Why can't you just keep your head down and be safe?"
Leia feels something angry and hot welling up inside her, pressing again her ribcage like a balloon. Tears leak from her eyes, her fists balled at her sides. "You don't get it!"
He won't listen, he won't hear, his head's stuck too far down in Tatooine's endless fucking sand to even try and listen to what it's saying.
There's a soft knock at her door a little later. Owen is still raging downstairs, a clatter in the kitchen that wasn't even drowned out by Leia sticking her head in her pillow and screaming. Aunt Beru lets herself in, coming to sit on the side of Leia's bed, and putting her hand on Leia's back.
She rubs soothingly at the place between Leia's shoulder blades, a heavy, gentle rhythm that Leia knows was used to get her to sleep when she was just a colicky squidge of baby.
Aunt Beru sighs when the knot of muscle in Leia's back refuses to unknit. "He'll come around," she says. "He knows what you're saying is right. That's what makes him scared."
Leia pulls herself away in disgust. She hates when her aunt does this—hates when she lets Uncle Owen rage without stopping him, hates that she'd let Ben in like an old friend and then never said a word in his defense, hates that her reaction is always sit and wait, that she never once stands up and says no when she knows she's right and Owen is wrong.
She'd asked Norai's mom about it once, when she was helping out with the twins so Norai could finally wire up a new set of vaporators in the east field. Norai's mom had been quiet for a while, looking off towards Anchorhead. Then she’d told Leia to go check on the babies and not to worry about things that didn’t concern her.
Leia doesn't tell Beru to go away, but she buries her face in her pillow again and refuses to speak. A few minutes later, when Beru gives a sigh and Leia hears the door shut behind her, she finally breathes out.
Ben is leaving. She can feel him above her, moving away, away, away. Now that she knows what he is, how he feels, she thinks she'll probably be able to feel him all the way to the Jundland Wastes. It doesn't make her feel a lot better.
She gets down on her knees, kneels like Ben showed her, and closes her eyes. She tries to think of nothing, just black, the lights dancing behind her eyes. There’d been a trick, when Ben did it—a breath in and then a breath out, another breath in and then everything, everything coming in.
Leia takes a breath in. A breath out. All she can feel are the angry tear tracks on her face, the salt making her skin feel tight.
She’s out on the west edge of the vap field when Biggs catches up with her too many days later. She can see the big cloud of dust from a mile off, stealing three minutes of shade underneath the speeder before she has to get to work on the secondary valve. It’s late in the day already, the second sun peaking above the horizon, and normally she’d be back and napping by this time. But the work’s gone slow today. Her fingers keep fumbling.
Biggs pulls up beside her, making her cough as dust and salt fly up over her before she can roll out from under the speeder. It takes a few seconds of hacking and spitting before the taste is out of her mouth, and by then she can see his face peering at her, upside down.
“What the hell’s your problem, Biggs?” she mutters, glaring at him, and he grins at her. The mustache he’s been trying to grow for two years is finally coming in. Leia thinks it makes him look weird and old—she told him that, too, and he’d just grinned anyways.
“What’s your problem, Wormie?”
Leia kicks out at him, catching him in the ankle, and he winces.
“You’ve got a mean jab, Lei, anyone ever tell you that?”
Leia huffs and rolls out from under the speeder, squinting at him in the bright suns as she pulls herself up. “What are you doing all the way out here?”
“Heard you made a break for it—went into the Wastes,” he says, grinning.
She wrinkles her nose, pulling her hood over her braids. “How’d you hear that?”
“Your uncle told me when I dropped by. He doesn’t seem very happy about it.”
“Yeah, well, when is he?” Leia snaps her goggles back down over her eyes and goes to work on the valve. It’s stuck shut—the sand got into the threads, and then the salt got into the cracks the sand made and started oxidizing the thing to kark.
She can feel Biggs lean over her shoulder, her breath on her ear, the side of her face. With a hot, mortifying feeling, she shivers. “Pretty crazy of you. Can’t imagine what’s out there, either than baby krayts and sand people and weird old wizards.”
“Why don’t you go take a hike and find out?” she snaps, suddenly annoyed for real.
He leans back. She can feel him being offended, the small thread of hurt and the larger thread of confusion, dismissal, and something—something else too, at the base of it, something he’d come here to say before—
She turns around, and it disappears.
“Uncle Owen grounded me,” she says by way of apology. “Says he won’t let me go back to Tosche until I’m twenty seven. I’m going to be stuck on this farm fixing janky, karked up, vaps for at least the next few months.”
Biggs grins. “I think we can find a way to fix that.”
Leia whoops into the night air. Biggs is driving, the speeder flying who knows how fast across the salt flats. Her legs are tucked on either side of him, feet flat on the single seat, her hands clinging onto his shoulders so she doesn’t fly off the speeder behind him.
They reel into the canyon with Biggs drifting around the first sharp turn before screeching to a halt. Aytin is already there, and his girlfriend Lukho, and so is Brei, and Sep, and the weird imp-fanatic Leia thinks is named something starting with a G.
“You brought the kid?” Sep says as she hops out, and Leia glares at him, opening her mouth, but Biggs gets to it before she can.
“You brought that ride?” Biggs nods at Sep’s speeder, a baby-blue thing scratched up beyond all belief. He keeps losing—bad. Leia doesn’t know where he scrounges up the cash for the spare parts to keep fixing it after every time he crashes.
It doesn’t make her feel a whole lot better, not until she flicks a look at the imp-lover and Biggs winks at her and calls, “You sure you’re good for it this time, Gara?”
Gara blinks, offended. “Yeah.”
“What are the stakes then?”
Leia stands back as Biggs hashes out the pot. It’s not big—it never is—but every time she gets involved everybody lays down too much and then gets bitter about it just because they couldn’t outfly Biggs.
They land on a number, and then Brei goes off to the finish line to judge and Luhko and Sep shoot off a couple minutes later, jostling for first. Gara and Aytin start chatting, and that just leaves her and Biggs in the dark, her rifle slung over her hip just in case, and the night sky spreading out wide above them.
It’s dark in the canyon, and two of the moons haven’t risen yet. None of them show above the dark cliffs. Leia looks up, breathes in. Stars are spangled across the sky in great loops and swirls, a glimmering mass like fabric, or water.
Tatooine is bright—that’s one of the things everybody says. Bright, and hot, and dry, but bright, really, mostly. Two suns, and three moons. It’s almost never dark enough to see the stars.
“Why did you go into the Wastes?” Biggs says after a moment, quiet.
Leia is silent for a long while, thinking. That’s one of the things she likes about Biggs—he catches the rhythm, just like she does. Knows when to talk. Knows when not to.
Then she shrugs, rubs the back of her neck. “Was just curious, is all.”
“Curious about what?” Biggs asks, turning to her. His eyebrows are up. He knows it’s weird—she knows it’s weird.
Leia thumbs the barrel of the rifle, bites her lip. Breathes in. “What would you say if I said I heard someone calling?” Breathes out.
“I’d call you nuts, probably,” Biggs says, snorting.
“Yeah,” Leia says. She feels a little bit like a can’s been crushed somewhere inside her. “Yeah, I would too.” She sighs, times it out, forces herself to say, “I got stir-crazy, you know? High season’s coming and Uncle Owen’s got me out on the vaps all day. I needed a break.”
Biggs laughs. “You got a weird way of taking one.”
“I know.”
Luhko zooms in after a little longer, judging for Sep and Brei. Sep should really be judging—he lost, Leia hears from Luhko—but he’s a sore loser and never judges fair after he loses. It’s a shame he’s one of the only decent flyers around; if they stopped racing everybody they hated, it would just be Biggs and Luhko and Aytin. And her, sometimes.
Biggs races Brei next, then Gara and Aytin go, then Sep and Brei. Luhko pulls out a pack of cigs while they’re all waiting around and offers one to Leia. She takes it, even though the lamta leaves always leave a bitter taste in her mouth, no matter how much wortwood they put in it to flavor it.
Above her, one of the moons rises over the lip of the canyon, outshining the stars. Biggs gets back from his round judging and she can see the his sun-darkened face turned pale in the moonlight. His eyes are deep, almost black.
Sep peels out in a huff, having lost too much. Brei and Gara take off. Aytin and Luhko sit in their speeder, shadowed by one of the arches in the canyon walls. Then it’s just her and Biggs again.
Leia looks at the moon—huge, far away. She wonders what it looks like up close. All her study modules are made in the mid-rim, manufactured by the Empire in its push for universal education. She’s seen scans of the moons of Chandrila, Corellia, Alderaan. No one’s scanned the moons of Tatooine, probably. She can’t imagine who would have bothered.
There’s something welling up inside her in the quiet dark. She feels hungry; she feels full. She wants—she wants something. She wants Ben, more than Ben. She wants to be on the speeder with him again, heading home. She wants the well of him.
“What did you want to tell me?” she asks Biggs. She doesn’t look at him. Instead, she looks at the dark figure of Aytin-and-Luhko, her arm around his shoulders, his arm around her waist.
She can feel Biggs blink next to her. Can hear the baffled amusement in his sigh. “You’re a perceptive kid, you know that?”
Leia thinks she might cry. The moon wide above her, and the desert quiet, quiet, empty and full. And she’s a child in the middle of it, her lungs burning from the cig.
Biggs is looking at her. Then he’s looking away. “I enrolled.”
“Enrolled,” she says. She knows what he means but she wants to make him say it.
“In the Imperial Academy. I’m going to be a pilot.”
You’re going to be nothing, she wants to say. You’re going to be a washed-out farm boy from a backwards planet and you’re going to feel the same fucking way about everyone there that you do when you see the stormtroopers fucking around in Mos Eisley.
But it’s mean, and she doesn’t even know if it’s true—not really. She wants it to be, but that’s not the same thing.
“Congratulations,” she says, and then because she knows he’s going to start on her, going to go Aw, Lei, don’t be like that unless she really is happy for him, she adds, “You’re going to be fucking killer.” And that time she means it.
He grins at her, and maybe he means it too, or maybe he’s just guilty for leaving her, for knowing that she— And she’s just a dumb kid. So he asks, “You want to drive on the way back?” and she says yes. And she does.
Biggs goes fast, goes crazy, but it’s always measured, calculated. He’s like that. He picks the daring choice—racing Beggar’s canyon, enrolling in the Academy—and then he does it all careful and neat.
Leia pushes the speeder, brings it all the way up and then further. She doesn’t race in canyons—doesn’t have the reflexes for it, doesn’t have that weird focus that all pilots do—but she can do this: fly fast, unstoppable, under the desert moon.