Entry for SW Gen & Het Ficathon

[owl]

Title: A Book of My Tears
Author: jediowl
Rating: G
Characters: Luke, Leia, assorted Rebels
Summary: Luke having the tale of his Gallant Exploits winched out of him. Featuring Artoo the Hero, Alderaanian, hygiene on the Death Star and the reliability of written sources.
Written For: swhetgenathon, Character Prompt: Luke Skywalker, Story Prompt: First Meeting



It was Leia’s voice; the Alderaanian, of which Luke understood almost nothing, forced him to read the inflection rather than the words. She sounded happy, her words rapid and her voice lighter than he’d heard it for weeks. He smiled; Leia had been overworked lately, life in Echo Base wasn’t easy for anyone, and her relationship with Han seemed to be deteriorating by the day. Luke worried about her.

He stepped around the heat-conserving partition. Leia was sitting over her lunch with another girl, a new recruit Luke was sure he’d been introduced to, but whose name he couldn’t remember. At least he could be fairly sure of her home planet, he thought ruefully.

"Hi, Luke," Leia said cheerfully. "Sit down, it feels as though I haven’t been talking to you in a year. How did the mission go?"

"Oh, fine. Not a hitch. It was just babysitting, you know. The Rogues are starting to fuss about wanting a real mission."

"Don't blame the Rogues," Leia said. "You know you want it as much as any of them."

"Well, I do have to pretend to be a responsible commanding officer, you know."

Something beeped, and all three of them looked at their wrist-mounted comlinks.

"Oh, not again," Leia groaned. "Luke, we'll get to talk, if I have to make an appointment for it. Anan, Keiten."

"See you, Leia," Luke said, thinking Keiten, Keiten to fix it in his memory. He wondered how rude it would be to get up now, uneasily aware of the girl as an individual rather than as an auxiliary of Leia, for which there had been some excuse; their uniform fatigues were identical apart from the great gap between their rank badges, their hairstyles were the same, and even their colouring was similar. Her hair was a couple of shades darker though, her face more heart-shaped, the eyes grey or hazel instead of brown, now giving him an intent analytical look.

Luke decided that she must be feeling as awkward as he did, and said, making conversation, "How are you liking Hoth?"

"Isn't that the wrong question?" Keiten replied gravely. "I gather that the accepted opinion is a varying array of dislikes."

Luke wondered if he was being laughed at. "And what's yours?"

"Mild, so far, but I dare say it will grow. I find it all rather overwhelming, actually."

"What, the cold?"

"No, everything. I've not seen so many people at once for years."

In that case she probably was shy. Luke waited while she drank a few mouthfuls of kaff, and then asked, "How d'you know Leia?"

Keiten smiled. "How does she know me is what you mean. Well, I don't know if you know I'm from Alderaan—"

She spoke with a species of bravado, as if to deflect any proffered sympathy, so Luke didn't give any. She didn't leave a pause for it, anyway, but went on rapidly: "The Ruling Houses keep any connection they ever made, back to the dawn of time, or so. My grandmother was Viceroy Organa's—what's the word?—a person who takes care of a child—"

To Luke, who had gone straight from Tatooine to the Rebellion, this concept was entirely foreign. "Nurse?" he said doubtfully.

"Umm, well. Anyway, I don't remember ever not knowing Leia. I was a suitably trustworthy playmate, you see."

"What was she like when she was little?" Luke asked, genuinely curious. The only people he'd met who had known Leia personally before the Death Star were Alliance leaders like Dodonna and Mon Mothma, and he couldn't very well have this sort of conversation with them.

"Let me think. Bossy—she always knew best, you know. Very intelligent of course, very…focussed. She would go straight for what she wanted and never mind anything in the way. But you must understand that she was as hard on herself as anyone else. Harder, if anything."

"That hasn't changed."

"I rather thought it hadn't." Keiten poked at her plate with some distaste. "What do you suppose they do to these vegetables? Yes, Leia. She had the famous temper then, too. Fortunately, I managed to be on the receiving end infrequently."

Luke had been wondering whether the child's dislike he vaguely sensed had continued up until Alderaan's destruction, and all the two women had in common was what they had lost, but now Keiten gave a smile of unmistakeable reminiscent affection.

"Once she had decided that someone or something was her responsibility, that was the end of it. Settled forevermore. She never had much time for stupidity or—well, Imperial loyalties, but in those days she had a sort of "I'll wait, then" attitude about it, which she's lost now. And she used to laugh a great deal more then, but that's only to be expected, isn't it?"

She said this sorrowfully, but with a direct simplicity like a child's. It seemed to close that subject. Luke wondered, as he had many times before, what it was like to have your whole family and home and past destroyed like that. He didn't care much for Tatooine himself; everyone he'd loved there had been dead or gone by the time he had left it, but that was different from the planet not being there at all.

Keiten seemed to have finished with her meal; she was gathering up the crockery, together with the cup and spoon Leia had abandoned when she'd left. There was just a little too much for her to carry easily, so Luke took the cups from her, and she thanked him, casually. When they handed it over at the return hatch, she thanked the cookdroid too, absently, and then flushed up as she realised what she had done.

"We—we always had droids at home, you know, but I always would talk to them and so on—the boys used to laugh madly at me—"

"Brothers?" Luke asked, thoughtlessly.

"No, cousins." Her face had taken a closed, guarded look, and Luke cursed his tactlessness. "Anyway, I can't help feeling as though they're real people. Hence the politeness."

"I know what you mean, because I'm just the same about my astromech, Atroo-Detoo, although not so much the politeness because he's very cheeky mostly."

She laughed. "It's nice to know I'm not unique, Luke—it is all right to call you that?"

"Oh stars, yes, please, do, Commander Skywalker off duty always sounds so court-martial, I always think."

They were out of the mess-hall now and walking over the duck-boards of the frigid corridor. When she was standing, Keiten was only three inches or so shorter than Luke, with a long, rather coltish stride.

"The astromechs act practically as our co-pilots in the one-man starfighters, you know. They do calculations for us, and repairs on the fly. I've lost count of the number of times Artoo's saved my life. I won't let the tech do memory wipes on him; it would feel exactly like murder."

Keiten exclaimed in suitably horrified fashion, and Luke went on, "He's been with me almost three years now. He was Leia's to begin with, but after the Death Star plans—"

"Oh! I didn't like to ask Leia, but I'm wildly curious to know what happened—how you met her first."

Luke grinned, self-deprecatingly. "Surely you must have heard by now?"

"I've heard about three different versions, but they all seemed like pure holoflick stuff."

"I can't imagine what they've been telling you, when I think of how improbable the real thing was," Luke said. "Look, where are we going? We'll get frostbite tramping about in the cold like this. How about the officer's rec room?"

"Is that all right? I'm a very lowly person, you know."

"Oh, don't talk so silly, you're commissioned, aren't you? It's pretty much no decor anyhow, the real brassy brass hats don't come in there. You aren't on watch now?"

"I've the night watch, actually. I'm going to bed in an hour or so."

"I can't say that I'll make much of a job of it," Luke said a few minutes later as they settled themselves beside a decrepit and unreliable flight simulator, shoved in to be out of the way. The officers used it as a game, and it had recurring and occasionally hilarious faults. The trampling of two-thirds of Hoth's personnel changing places rose in the corridor, shaking a few fragments of ice from the ceiling.

"Here goes, anyway." He brushed ice from his cheek. "I came from a planet called Tatooine, in the Outer rim, Arkanis Sector, about a parsec from the Corellian Run."

Keiten's expression changed from interest to abstraction as she evidently scanned a mental Galactoscope.

"Anyway, that doesn't really matter, because I've started from the wrong end of things. Leia had got hold of the blueprints of the Death Star on Ralltiir, and she was doing a series of short hops, to avoid pursuit—"

"Oh, I know all about that. I was in Supply and Procurement for two years before I was transferred, and I'd been working supply runs for them since I was sixteen."

"Oh," Luke said. Keiten was a much older hand than he had supposed. "Well, Leia. Vader caught up with her over Tatooine. She was in a fast corvette, but with nowhere near the firepower it takes to seriously bother a Star Destroyer—oh, of course, you'd know all about that too. So when the ship was about to be taken, she shoved the Death Star plans into Artoo, and he and Threepio—you know Leia's protocol droid?—he and Threepio got into an escape pod and dropped down to the planet. Leia had been trying to get to Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine, you see, and as long as the plans got into his hands they should have been all right."

"Not General Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Jedi? My grandmother used to tell me stories about him—not often, because it's dangerous to know too many Jedi stories, but still—He was a friend of Bail Organa and they used to call him the Negotiator."

"Yes, that's him," Luke said, pleased that here was someone who had heard of Ben in the old days.

"I never thought that he could possibly be still alive."

"He isn't, not any more. He died on the Death Star."

"Oh."

Luke resumed, "The droids were picked up by scavengers and my uncle bought them for the farm we had."

"Nerfs and banthas and things?"

"No, a moisture farm. Tatooine's a desert planet. Anyway, Artoo got himself out to Ben's place. Leia had recorded a holo asking him for help. Ben wanted my to come with him to Alderaan, because he'd been great friends with my father, and he was going to train me as a Jedi." Luke frowned and decided to skip over the next part. Even three years later, he didn't want to think about what he'd found when he'd gone back to the farm. "The pilot he found to take us there was Han Solo."

Keiten grinned suddenly. "That Han Solo?"

"The one and only. Well, we turned up and there was the Death Star. They tractored us in, but luckily we were able to hide in the smuggling compartments Han had—"

"I knew it," Keiten interrupted, her grin widening.

"Once we were inside the battle-station, we knocked a couple of stormtroopers on the head to get their armour. We found that the tractor beam couldn't be disabled remotely, so Ben—Obi-Wan—went off to do that. But when Artoo was hooked up to the main computer, he found Leia's name in the prisoner lists."

"Artoo's starting to look like the hero of this story."

"Oh, yes, definitely. Anyway, you've met Han, you can probably imagine how thrilled he was to be marching into the detention centre of his own free will. We put Chewie in binders—there's no way he was going to pass as an Imp—and in we went. Leia'd been within a few hours of being executed, but the first thing she said to me was, 'Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?'"

Keiten laughed. Luke went on, "Unluckily, we'd forgotten to make sure that we had a way out of the detention centre again. We were being backed up into the cell bay as the Imps came in. I think it was at that point that Han and Leia started their first fight, about two seconds after they'd met."

"Nothing changed there, then."

"I think they've deteriorated, actually. Anyhow, Leia took charge and blew us an escape route through the nearest bulkhead. Turned out it led into a garbage compactor."

Keiten had been laughing harder and harder throughout this speech. "I'm sorry," she said, wiping her eyes. "I'm sure it's not funny to you."

"Only with hindsight. The next thing that happened, I was almost drowned by some sort of swamp creature that was living in the trash."

"The construction hygiene must have been really bad on that thing," the girl said seriously.

"Not as bad as the design of the exhaust ports. Well, you know you're in trouble when even the local ferocious wildlife clears off. What saved me from the tentacled monster turned out to be the sides of the garbage masher closing in. We tried to brace the walls, but that didn't work. The doors were ray-shielded and wouldn't open from the inside."

Keiten, propping her shin on her hands, leaned forward. "Let me guess: Artoo hacked into the central computer and let you out."

"Got it in one. After that, all we had to do was to get back to the Falcon." He stopped, remembering what the return had cost.

"But it wasn't that easy?" Keiten prompted.

Luke blinked. "It wasn't that easy. That's when Obi-Wan was killed. Vader did that himself." But she wouldn’t want to hear about that, nor about his uncle and aunt, charred corpses on their own doorstep.

"Well, you've probably heard about Yavin," he said. It still embarrassed him, rather, to talk about his role in the battle. People generally acted as though his success had been due to genius, or some god-like status, instead of the Force. He thought Keiten might have guessed this, because she said quickly, "Oh, I know all about the Battle of Yavin. I mean, Wedge has told me. I mean, I believe Wedge, as an eyewitness. Which I wouldn't, really, if it had been—well, some of the others."

Luke raised his eyebrows. "Wes, you mean?"

"Yes." She smiled. "I don’t mean that he's dishonest, he just doesn’t tell the truth."

"Is this some fine distinction in Alderaanian grammar that I don't know about?"

"Oh, you know what I mean. He doesn't mean you really to believe the stories." She folded her arms, slim beneath her quilted sleeves, across her chest. "You should write all that down, Luke."

Luke's surprise must have shown in his face, because she continued, defensively, "It's important. It could be the turning-point against the Empire."

"If we succeed, now," Luke said. "What if we don't?"

"It still happened. It's still important that you—we—tried."

"It matters to us. Not to anyone else, if it doesn't work."

"Oh, that's too simplistic!" Keiten said, eyes lighting to enthusiasm. "You can never tell what effects, what cross-connections—I'm sorry, I'm being insufferable about this, amn't I?"

"I wouldn't have expected you to have thought about it," Luke said, surprised.

She flushed. "I suppose that's a yes, then. I do apologise; I was brought up by an historian, and I suppose the state of mind has become ingrained."

"Of course you weren't being —what was it?— insufferable," Luke said, more forcefully than his wont. "Go on with what you were saying before that."

"It wasn't terrifically profound," she said, twisting her gloved fingers together. "It was just that even having a record of what we're doing now, in the Alliance, might change things in the future, have some effect. I write things down, when I can, but you're much closer to the centre of things."

"And more likely to buy the farm at any moment?"

"Since you mentioned it, I suppose so."

Luke eyes her doubtfully, finding it hard to believe that anyone could be so influenced by anything that was merely written that they would take any belligerent action against the Empire; remembering Ben putting up his sword, and the smell of burning flesh drifting on the wind, and whatever unimaginable horrors Leia had suffered, Alderaan smashed to fragments.

"That wasn't what brought you in, was it? Anything written, I mean?"

"No. I—it was practically the family business. Like Leia."

"I can't imagine anyone doing anything as risky as joining the Rebellion on the strength of things written in books."

She recoiled away from him a little, back straight like an angry nexu. "I don't mean a political thesis on the advantages of a democracy compared to a dictatorship! I mean what they've done, and the people who died, and what we do about it. And sometimes, the things you can't forget, the things that aren't for the ones who come after, but for yourself and the ones who you won't forget."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean—you're talking about Alderaan, aren't you?"

It wasn't a question, but she answered it all the same. "And other things." Her face suddenly lifted in enlightenment. "I'll bet there was someone who used to say to you, 'You can't believe everything you see written down, it's all a load of Imp cant.'"

"You sound like my Uncle Owen," Luke said, and then laughed shortly as the credit dropped.

"It's different, you see, when it's true," Keiten said, getting to her feet. "Thank you for telling me about the Death Star."

She was practically out of the door when she turned her head back, her hand on the jamb. "Also not propaganda, even if it's not written down," she said, very sweetly, and disappeared into the corridor.