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The night weighs on her like a metal shroud, and Leia is afraid to close her eyes.
There is no darkness, waiting for her there. She knows already what she will see, when the real darkness around her grows too heavy. She will sleep. She will sleep, because her body and mind are exhausted, and that exhaustion is stronger than her will. And in sleep, she will find not darkness but the brilliance of the death of her homeworld, painted in fiery light on the backs of her eyelids until this planet’s foreign sunrise brings her back into the cold comfort of day.
The hard Alliance-issue cot is Darth Vader’s loathsome armor against her back. The ancient air conditioning whines, and all Leia can hear are his slow, mechanical breaths. A laugh from the hallway warps and twists into a darker memory—a cold finger on her cheek; a Grand Moff’s cruel sneer.
“He’s dead,” Leia whispers to herself, and pulls her knees in to her chest. It’s supposed to be a comfort, but it isn’t. He’s dead means Tarkin’s dead , but also Father is dead. General Kenobi is dead.
Darth Vader is, maybe, alive.
She tries to think of happier things, but most of her happy things are sad now. Memories of Alderaan, her family and friends—they are happy memories, she knows, but it doesn’t make her happy to remember them. She thinks of Luke, then. Luke, and Han. Chewie, and Wedge, and all the too-few others who somehow managed to survive.
Mostly, though, she comes back to Luke. His lips on hers. His smile. This isn’t entirely a happy thought either—he smiles so rarely. But she can wrap her arms around her own body and tell herself they’re his. It doesn’t really help; the nightmares will take her eventually. But Leia tries to tell herself it does.
***
She sees him almost every day, but she never really knows when that will happen. There are too few pilots now, and Luke is needed. And Leia is needed too, for other things.
She sees him in the mess hall, the next morning, balancing a tray with one hand while the other tries and fails to hide a yawn.
“Late night?” she asks, but what she’s really saying is Again? and Still? and You too?
“Not really.” Luke shakes his head, and looks away. But she’s already seen the red in his eyes, and the sad little tilt of his smile. She doesn’t say anything about it though, and he doesn’t say anything to her, even though she knows her own night is written all over her face. He doesn’t have to ask, because he knows.
She sees him again, in the hangar that evening, about to go out on patrol. She watches him, as he takes to the skies of Yavin, and wonders if he loves it the way he did. He does his duty, like everyone here, but she can’t imagine a world where it doesn’t also hurt him—to get back every day into the cockpit of that X-wing, where he killed so many people ( Imperials. They were Imperials. ...with families and friends and lovers. Imperials. ) and saw so many of their comrades fall.
And then it is night—too soon, always too soon, and the others have gone back to their rooms to sleep.
Leia goes back to her room and curls back into a ball, and thinks of Luke, and those Imperials with families, and all the hundreds of millions of families on Alderaan. She thinks of Vader, and when she closes her eyes, his torture droid hovers and darts and gleams. She doesn’t remember— can’t remember, can’t remember —exactly what it did, what he did to her. If she sleeps, she will remember, and wake up with faded traces, like the ghosts of Alderaan etched deeper and deeper in the dark on the backs of her eyes.
She doesn’t sleep.
She stands and dresses in the dim half light and twists her hair into a long, simple braid. This aches too—the thought that it isn’t enough to serve custom, the thought that those customs are dead.
“Don’t think about it,” she whispers to herself, but the thought of forgetting still scares her. She doesn’t want it to always have to hurt, but she’s a little afraid of it stopping. The hurt is real. The hurt is here. The hurt is Alderaan, living on.
Leia knows and doesn’t know where she is going, the way she remembers and doesn’t remember the torture droid. She hopes and doesn’t hope that Luke will be back from his patrol. She knows, on some level, that he will be.
“Leia.” His face lights up. His eyes, at least, do, but the fine lines around his mouth don’t really smile. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?”
She shakes her head. “I wasn’t tired.” And he hears what she’s really saying, too.
They stand there in the hangar, looking everywhere but at each other, and Leia wonders what she was thinking, coming here. Luke isn’t the only pilot to have just come back, and everyone else is staring. She can’t exactly ask him to follow her back to her room.
“It’s late,” he says. “I’ll walk you back?”
“Yes,” Leia answers. “Please.”
***
She doesn’t really ask him to come in, and he doesn’t really ask if he can. It happens naturally, like so many things between them—so many things she wants, and can’t say aloud. So many things he knows about her before she does. She feels relief, and none of the shame she probably should.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asks. “I know you haven’t really been sleeping.”
“You haven’t either.”
“I haven’t either,” he admits, and sits beside her on the bed. “I see them all the time,” he says. “My aunt and uncle. Ben. And I keep thinking about all those people...”
Leia finishes the sentence: “...on the Death Star. Luke, you did what you had to do.”
“I know,” he says. “But I still don’t like it.”
Leia nods, and takes his hand. There’s grease under his nails, and his sweaty hair is clinging to his forehead—not something she’d usually find attractive. There’s something about him, though. Something about Luke. The things that would be flaws on anyone else are perfect and beautiful on him.
“I see Alderaan sometimes,” she confesses. “Or Tarkin, or Vader.” She shudders. Luke’s hand in hers doesn’t completely erase the memory of the cold of Vader’s glove. But the more she focuses on his touch, the more it seems to warm her. He’s here, and that does outshine her pain.
Luke doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t really have to, and maybe it’s better that way. No “will of the Force” or “a meaningful sacrifice” or any of the other empty platitudes that everyone else feels obligated to give. She thinks that someone, somewhere on Alderaan, had to be sitting with someone like this. Looking forward to the rest of their lives, just as Vader and Tarkin snatched them away.
Leia doesn’t really mean to lie down, to let her head fall heavy to Luke’s lap. She doesn’t really know what she mumbles—empty words that mean something like I needed this and something like Please don’t leave.
“Shhhh,” he says, and strokes her hair, lets his fingers trail down her cheek. And the mantle of the night seems to lift, or grow lighter, and when she sleeps—because she can’t not sleep—she is greeted by darkness alone.
***
They wake in a tangle: Luke’s arms around Leia, Leia’s head on Luke’s shoulder, their hands and feet and other undressed places making skin-to-skin contact where they can.
“You stayed,” she says, and wishes it didn’t sound so much like a question.
“You slept,” he says, and kisses her—just a brush of his lips on her cheek, but it warms her in the cool morning air.
“Did you sleep?” she asks.
“Yeah,” he says, like he’s almost surprised at the answer. “I slept, and I didn’t even dream.”
***
She doesn’t ask him to come back, and he doesn’t ask her to let him.
But when she gets back to her quarters, after a meeting that went too long, she finds him there, half asleep, in her bed.
He’s showered tonight; she can smell the soap on him, and his skin and hair are soft and warm and home .
“You came back,” she says, and nuzzles against his bare arm. Her nightgown is long, but sleeveless and thin, and her skin touches his in a million different places all at once.
“Mmmmm,” he says, his breath warm on her neck as he wraps his arms around her like a cocoon.
Leia’s memories are heavy, in these moments before sleep, and Luke’s arms around her can’t lighten them.
But they let her wrap those memories up, let her set them down for a moment—not to abandon them, or leave them behind, but give them to tomorrow for safekeeping. Just long enough for her to heal here, with Luke, in the temporary sanctuary of night.