Definitions of Destiny: Chapter 2
Title: Definitions of Destiny
Author: Caryn B
Fandom: Star Wars (film canon only - see notes)
Timeline: 6 months after RotJ
Pairing: Luke/Han, slash
Rating: NC-17 overall; this chapter PG-13
Warnings: None
The list of chapters is here
Chapter 2
It was just past dawn, and Leia had been in her office for barely an hour, yet the endless cycle of visits and meetings was already underway. The communications console was warning her insistently that she had unread messages, and her private comlink was beeping furiously. Two delegates from Belishar were waiting in the outer office, and somebody was buzzing determinedly at her door.
Threepio was flapping about, carrying an armful of datacards and holofoils. Bizarrely, he also held a mug of caf, balanced precariously on top of the stack. All things considered, it was the only thing that seemed to make sense, so Leia grabbed it, taking scalding hot sips that made her gasp. She drank it quickly, partly because there was no time to drink it at leisure, but also because she hoped that the anticipated energy surge would kick-in sooner that way.
That accomplished, she set about tackling the immediate demands. She wrested the ungainly pile of data from Threepio, and placed it carelessly down on the floor amidst several other, similar-looking heaps. All the space on the desk had long since gone, and if she tried to put one more thing on the over-laden shelves, they'd most likely collapse on top of her. It occurred to her that if Threepio brought her any more homeless records to adopt, there wouldn't be room for her at all.
She cast Threepio a beseeching look. "Find out who's at the door will you?" she asked, flicking her comlink on at the same time.
Han.
"I'm sorry." His voice sounded strange, with an echo suggestive of some vast, empty space. Leia remembered that he and Chewie had gone over to Roqqini in the south sector to check out the hangar bays, but knew she could only partly blame the location for the distance she heard in Han's voice.
"I know," she said. "It's okay."
"No, it isn't."
Leia hesitated, despite the fact that talking had become something they could no longer avoid. But doing so over a comlink first thing in the morning, with Threepio listening to every word and Senator Prell standing politely waiting by the door, wasn't a good idea.
"It's difficult now. Let's talk later."
"Call me when you're free."
She thumbed the comlink off, turned her smile back to automatic, and went to attend to Senator Prell.
****
"This is the place I had in mind for the fuel storage tanks," Lando explained, gesturing with his hand to encompass the whole run of dilapidated warehouses.
Luke studied them. They were certainly large enough, but whether they could manage to clear enough space around them to allow the Alliance ships to land was another matter. The whole area was a mass of rubble, and would need seriously heavy-duty equipment to shift it.
"There's this guy I know over in Jira. Owns a fleet of land-levelers. Thought we might charm him into lending 'em to us," Lando added, accurately deducing the potential problems Luke was foreseeing.
Luke gave him a grin. "You never cease to amaze me. How are we gonna charm him?"
"Ah, you know. Thought I'd leave that to you."
"Great. You mean abuse my position to get something for nothing?"
"I find most people wanna co-operate - given the right incentive. And who's gonna turn down the chance to help the last Jedi?"
"Don't you believe it. In any case, I'm not the last one, and I'm not sure how much meaning the term has these days."
"So you'll do it?"
"I'll give it a try, but I think we should offer to pay him something."
Lando threw his arms up in exasperation. "Luke - you've gotta get rid of that attitude! It won't get you anywhere but broke. In business, you don't start off by offering to pay people. You appeal to their better natures."
"Well... what if they don't realize they've got one?"
"So then you try something else. Giving 'em money's a last resort."
"It's just as well you're running this instead of me then," Luke said with amusement.
In order to examine the outbuildings more closely, they had to scramble across the rubble, watching out for vicious shards of transparisteel. The debris was the result of decades of accumulated neglect, combined with attempts by stone plunderers to raze the area to the ground. Once, this whole compound had been a military camp for the Arudine forces. During Imperial occupation, the local unit had been forcibly disbanded - its recruits either assimilated into the Imperial navy, or shot, depending on their ideologies. Having forced the Arudine people into line, a small maintenance force took up residence in Roqqini, leaving the old base to crumble away.
The Alliance had arrived on Arudin a month ago, and was slowly rebuilding the original sheds and residential buildings. There was still a great deal more to do, but Lando had stepped in to speed things up. He'd already transformed the neglected base into something usable in the short space of time they'd been here. Whatever his methods - and some of them probably didn't bear too close an inspection - they were undeniably successful. It was just as well, because the fall-out from the Battle of Endor, and the death of the Emperor, had been immense. It had exacted its own price from them all.
After Lando had gone, Luke wandered back slowly through the suite of crumbling rooms. Everywhere had a peculiar, earthy smell of decay, intensified by the early evening dew that had begun to settle. Plant-life had started to intrude and colonize the floors, tendrils forcing themselves up through ever-widening cracks. Shattered panes of synthglass had a framework of greenery that was beginning to block out the light. It was like every other temporary base they'd had. Even Hoth. There was always a sense that nature, if left to its own devices, would take over completely. With Hoth, of course, it would only have been ice. And predators.
But now they had more ambitious plans. To turn this place into something other than a thrown-together base. It was going to become a home for as long as it took to return stability to the galaxy, and maybe as long as it took to gain freedom for Coruscant. But the question Luke had to consider was whether it could, or should, be his home too.
He pushed aside a tangle of thick stems from one of the windows. The view gave out directly onto the main complex of the old base. The huge rectangular structure was a buzz of activity, in sharp contrast to the isolation of the abandoned outbuildings. He could see people rushing about, maintaining ships, delivering supplies and meeting transports carrying the endless flow of visiting dignitaries from across the galaxy. Somewhere inside, three stories up, would be Leia, immersed in the habitual chaos that'd been their everyday companion since Endor.
Luke wasn't alone in finding it hard to believe that only six months had passed since then, because it was beginning to feel like a lifetime. For a while, everything had seemed to fall apart. The orderly Imperial navy had become, in the space of the seconds it took for the Emperor's body to fall down the reactor shaft, a band of disparate factions led by war-mongering and power-hungry individuals. Spread throughout the galaxy, these factions vied with each other as to which could control the most number of planets. It went without saying that all these splinter groups were hostile to the Alliance. The only bright thing about the fragmentation was the fact that the Imperials hadn't yet seen the benefits of re-grouping en masse. The Alliance had to make sure that never became a viable possibility.
After news of the Emperor's death had spread round the galaxy, there'd been simultaneous uprisings on hundreds of worlds, many of them looking to the Rebel Alliance for security and leadership. They'd struggled to deal with this in the only way possible - by setting up a provisional council to channel requests and to allow interested worlds to make their views known. The strain of occupying such a position of trust came close to being intolerable. Only now had things started to settle into a routine of sorts, and it helped that they had a more-or-less permanent base from which to operate.
Their long-term intention was to help rebuild the Galactic Senate, and there was a deep-set feeling that it should meet again on Coruscant. The reasons were primarily symbolic. Many alternative worlds were central enough and had adequate facilities to fulfill the role, but the freeing of Coruscant would send an unequivocal message to the galaxy. That the Empire was truly dead, and a new era was underway. Coruscant, the world that had once symbolized democracy, would once again belong to everyone. The problem was, the core planet was still under tight Imperial control. As an objective, Coruscant was high on their list, but they had to tackle things one at a time.
For Luke, it had also been a process of tackling things one at a time, but he was torn between wanting to keep constantly busy, and craving the time and isolation to think. And there were so many things to consider. The shock of accepting Vader as his father had hardly diminished, and it existed alongside something that felt like grief. It didn't specifically stem from Vader's death and the loss of a father he'd never had the chance to know, but from the whole futility of Vader's later life.
Then there was the memory of the power that had coursed through him in the Emperor's throne room. Provoked by Vader's threat to Leia, he'd done what Yoda had told him he must never do. He'd attacked, with violence and anger. And it'd made such an astounding difference. He'd tried since then to imagine the unimaginable - if he'd gone on to kill his father, what would he have become? Even though Han told him thinking like this was pointless because he'd done the exact opposite, he couldn't just turn the thoughts off. It was undeniable that he'd come very close to losing himself.
With that in mind, there was the issue of Leia's training. All he could do was to pass on what he'd learned, as Yoda had asked him to do. He had to hope that it would be enough. Luke wasn't concerned about Leia's approach. She didn't exhibit any of the signs that Luke saw in himself, and which troubled him as manifestations of qualities Yoda had told him to guard against. While it was true that he was much calmer now and not so prone to reckless gambles with his own life, he'd never succeeded in ridding himself of those tendencies completely. And for someone meant to be the embodiment of Jedi containment and control, why did he still have so many all-too-human emotions? Like anger, impatience and stubbornness. Not to mention a degree of loneliness that seemed out of place, seeing as wherever he went friends and well-wishers surrounded him.
Aside from these issues, Luke knew he needed to make plans for the future. Flying with the Rogues was important to him, but it didn't seem to meet the criteria that Yoda had laid down. No adventure. No excitement. He wasn't supposed to want any of those things, but the idea of shutting himself away from everything didn't appeal either. But maybe that was the idea. Maybe the element of penance was intentional. Ben and Yoda, living out their last years in solitude and self-discipline, had made it look that way.
Luke hadn't spoken to anyone about this in detail, although it was obvious to him that those close to him knew his feelings were far from clear. He also knew they wouldn't want him to leave. He looked around him again, trying to envision this place full of people and machinery and droids. Tried to imagine what it would be like to turn his back on all of it and embrace a very different kind of life. The visualization didn't feel right, but that didn't mean it was wrong.
Luke glanced at the darkening sky. Time to head back, check in with Rogue Flight's mechanics, and let Artoo know he was home.
chapter 3
Author: Caryn B
Fandom: Star Wars (film canon only - see notes)
Timeline: 6 months after RotJ
Pairing: Luke/Han, slash
Rating: NC-17 overall; this chapter PG-13
Warnings: None
The list of chapters is here
Chapter 2
It was just past dawn, and Leia had been in her office for barely an hour, yet the endless cycle of visits and meetings was already underway. The communications console was warning her insistently that she had unread messages, and her private comlink was beeping furiously. Two delegates from Belishar were waiting in the outer office, and somebody was buzzing determinedly at her door.
Threepio was flapping about, carrying an armful of datacards and holofoils. Bizarrely, he also held a mug of caf, balanced precariously on top of the stack. All things considered, it was the only thing that seemed to make sense, so Leia grabbed it, taking scalding hot sips that made her gasp. She drank it quickly, partly because there was no time to drink it at leisure, but also because she hoped that the anticipated energy surge would kick-in sooner that way.
That accomplished, she set about tackling the immediate demands. She wrested the ungainly pile of data from Threepio, and placed it carelessly down on the floor amidst several other, similar-looking heaps. All the space on the desk had long since gone, and if she tried to put one more thing on the over-laden shelves, they'd most likely collapse on top of her. It occurred to her that if Threepio brought her any more homeless records to adopt, there wouldn't be room for her at all.
She cast Threepio a beseeching look. "Find out who's at the door will you?" she asked, flicking her comlink on at the same time.
Han.
"I'm sorry." His voice sounded strange, with an echo suggestive of some vast, empty space. Leia remembered that he and Chewie had gone over to Roqqini in the south sector to check out the hangar bays, but knew she could only partly blame the location for the distance she heard in Han's voice.
"I know," she said. "It's okay."
"No, it isn't."
Leia hesitated, despite the fact that talking had become something they could no longer avoid. But doing so over a comlink first thing in the morning, with Threepio listening to every word and Senator Prell standing politely waiting by the door, wasn't a good idea.
"It's difficult now. Let's talk later."
"Call me when you're free."
She thumbed the comlink off, turned her smile back to automatic, and went to attend to Senator Prell.
****
"This is the place I had in mind for the fuel storage tanks," Lando explained, gesturing with his hand to encompass the whole run of dilapidated warehouses.
Luke studied them. They were certainly large enough, but whether they could manage to clear enough space around them to allow the Alliance ships to land was another matter. The whole area was a mass of rubble, and would need seriously heavy-duty equipment to shift it.
"There's this guy I know over in Jira. Owns a fleet of land-levelers. Thought we might charm him into lending 'em to us," Lando added, accurately deducing the potential problems Luke was foreseeing.
Luke gave him a grin. "You never cease to amaze me. How are we gonna charm him?"
"Ah, you know. Thought I'd leave that to you."
"Great. You mean abuse my position to get something for nothing?"
"I find most people wanna co-operate - given the right incentive. And who's gonna turn down the chance to help the last Jedi?"
"Don't you believe it. In any case, I'm not the last one, and I'm not sure how much meaning the term has these days."
"So you'll do it?"
"I'll give it a try, but I think we should offer to pay him something."
Lando threw his arms up in exasperation. "Luke - you've gotta get rid of that attitude! It won't get you anywhere but broke. In business, you don't start off by offering to pay people. You appeal to their better natures."
"Well... what if they don't realize they've got one?"
"So then you try something else. Giving 'em money's a last resort."
"It's just as well you're running this instead of me then," Luke said with amusement.
In order to examine the outbuildings more closely, they had to scramble across the rubble, watching out for vicious shards of transparisteel. The debris was the result of decades of accumulated neglect, combined with attempts by stone plunderers to raze the area to the ground. Once, this whole compound had been a military camp for the Arudine forces. During Imperial occupation, the local unit had been forcibly disbanded - its recruits either assimilated into the Imperial navy, or shot, depending on their ideologies. Having forced the Arudine people into line, a small maintenance force took up residence in Roqqini, leaving the old base to crumble away.
The Alliance had arrived on Arudin a month ago, and was slowly rebuilding the original sheds and residential buildings. There was still a great deal more to do, but Lando had stepped in to speed things up. He'd already transformed the neglected base into something usable in the short space of time they'd been here. Whatever his methods - and some of them probably didn't bear too close an inspection - they were undeniably successful. It was just as well, because the fall-out from the Battle of Endor, and the death of the Emperor, had been immense. It had exacted its own price from them all.
After Lando had gone, Luke wandered back slowly through the suite of crumbling rooms. Everywhere had a peculiar, earthy smell of decay, intensified by the early evening dew that had begun to settle. Plant-life had started to intrude and colonize the floors, tendrils forcing themselves up through ever-widening cracks. Shattered panes of synthglass had a framework of greenery that was beginning to block out the light. It was like every other temporary base they'd had. Even Hoth. There was always a sense that nature, if left to its own devices, would take over completely. With Hoth, of course, it would only have been ice. And predators.
But now they had more ambitious plans. To turn this place into something other than a thrown-together base. It was going to become a home for as long as it took to return stability to the galaxy, and maybe as long as it took to gain freedom for Coruscant. But the question Luke had to consider was whether it could, or should, be his home too.
He pushed aside a tangle of thick stems from one of the windows. The view gave out directly onto the main complex of the old base. The huge rectangular structure was a buzz of activity, in sharp contrast to the isolation of the abandoned outbuildings. He could see people rushing about, maintaining ships, delivering supplies and meeting transports carrying the endless flow of visiting dignitaries from across the galaxy. Somewhere inside, three stories up, would be Leia, immersed in the habitual chaos that'd been their everyday companion since Endor.
Luke wasn't alone in finding it hard to believe that only six months had passed since then, because it was beginning to feel like a lifetime. For a while, everything had seemed to fall apart. The orderly Imperial navy had become, in the space of the seconds it took for the Emperor's body to fall down the reactor shaft, a band of disparate factions led by war-mongering and power-hungry individuals. Spread throughout the galaxy, these factions vied with each other as to which could control the most number of planets. It went without saying that all these splinter groups were hostile to the Alliance. The only bright thing about the fragmentation was the fact that the Imperials hadn't yet seen the benefits of re-grouping en masse. The Alliance had to make sure that never became a viable possibility.
After news of the Emperor's death had spread round the galaxy, there'd been simultaneous uprisings on hundreds of worlds, many of them looking to the Rebel Alliance for security and leadership. They'd struggled to deal with this in the only way possible - by setting up a provisional council to channel requests and to allow interested worlds to make their views known. The strain of occupying such a position of trust came close to being intolerable. Only now had things started to settle into a routine of sorts, and it helped that they had a more-or-less permanent base from which to operate.
Their long-term intention was to help rebuild the Galactic Senate, and there was a deep-set feeling that it should meet again on Coruscant. The reasons were primarily symbolic. Many alternative worlds were central enough and had adequate facilities to fulfill the role, but the freeing of Coruscant would send an unequivocal message to the galaxy. That the Empire was truly dead, and a new era was underway. Coruscant, the world that had once symbolized democracy, would once again belong to everyone. The problem was, the core planet was still under tight Imperial control. As an objective, Coruscant was high on their list, but they had to tackle things one at a time.
For Luke, it had also been a process of tackling things one at a time, but he was torn between wanting to keep constantly busy, and craving the time and isolation to think. And there were so many things to consider. The shock of accepting Vader as his father had hardly diminished, and it existed alongside something that felt like grief. It didn't specifically stem from Vader's death and the loss of a father he'd never had the chance to know, but from the whole futility of Vader's later life.
Then there was the memory of the power that had coursed through him in the Emperor's throne room. Provoked by Vader's threat to Leia, he'd done what Yoda had told him he must never do. He'd attacked, with violence and anger. And it'd made such an astounding difference. He'd tried since then to imagine the unimaginable - if he'd gone on to kill his father, what would he have become? Even though Han told him thinking like this was pointless because he'd done the exact opposite, he couldn't just turn the thoughts off. It was undeniable that he'd come very close to losing himself.
With that in mind, there was the issue of Leia's training. All he could do was to pass on what he'd learned, as Yoda had asked him to do. He had to hope that it would be enough. Luke wasn't concerned about Leia's approach. She didn't exhibit any of the signs that Luke saw in himself, and which troubled him as manifestations of qualities Yoda had told him to guard against. While it was true that he was much calmer now and not so prone to reckless gambles with his own life, he'd never succeeded in ridding himself of those tendencies completely. And for someone meant to be the embodiment of Jedi containment and control, why did he still have so many all-too-human emotions? Like anger, impatience and stubbornness. Not to mention a degree of loneliness that seemed out of place, seeing as wherever he went friends and well-wishers surrounded him.
Aside from these issues, Luke knew he needed to make plans for the future. Flying with the Rogues was important to him, but it didn't seem to meet the criteria that Yoda had laid down. No adventure. No excitement. He wasn't supposed to want any of those things, but the idea of shutting himself away from everything didn't appeal either. But maybe that was the idea. Maybe the element of penance was intentional. Ben and Yoda, living out their last years in solitude and self-discipline, had made it look that way.
Luke hadn't spoken to anyone about this in detail, although it was obvious to him that those close to him knew his feelings were far from clear. He also knew they wouldn't want him to leave. He looked around him again, trying to envision this place full of people and machinery and droids. Tried to imagine what it would be like to turn his back on all of it and embrace a very different kind of life. The visualization didn't feel right, but that didn't mean it was wrong.
Luke glanced at the darkening sky. Time to head back, check in with Rogue Flight's mechanics, and let Artoo know he was home.
chapter 3