Leia considered her words carefully as they went along, a flickering hologram for some advertisement or other throwing prisms of multicolored light through the skyway. It felt like walking through a kaleidoscope. Beneath them, thick ribbons of hover traffic levitated almost at a standstill, a true Coruscant traffic jam in three dimensions.
“I’ve been feeling discouraged lately,” she admitted. “Knowing…what we know reminds me of how much there is to be done. When I let myself get discouraged, though, I don’t see the opportunities to actually accomplish something good.”
He weighed her words for several paces more. She liked the comfortableness of the silences between them. “You’re always asking what you can do for the greater good.”
Nonplussed, Leia nodded.
“You know, every once in a while, it’s okay to just live for yourself.” Kier held up a hand, forestalling her objection. “I’m not telling you to be, I don’t know, selfish or trivial. You’d never want that; that’s not who you are. But it’s all right to just, you know, be a person. Every once in a while, you can let go and live in the moment. I think you have to. Because if you’re carrying the weight of the worlds every single day, you get tired. You don’t have your strength when you need it most, because you already burned yourself out.”
That sounded…much too familiar.
He continued, “It’s okay to want some things just for yourself. To go out and have fun once in a while. To be glad your world is secure, and the people you care about are safe.”
“Sometimes it feels like we don’t have a right to be happy when so many others are suffering.”
“We don’t have a right not to be happy, if we can be.” When she stared at him, Kier nodded. “I mean it. If we all live in fear and misery all the time, his victory is complete.”
She knew whom he was referring to. On a public walkway on Coruscant, it would be suicide to use Palpatine’s name openly like this. Besides, they were learning to understand each other without words.
Quoting an Alderaanian philosopher, Leia said, “Strength through joy.”
Kier grinned. “Exactly.”
“Got any suggestions?”
“Let’s see.” He pretended to consider the situation seriously for a long moment. By now they were walking very slowly. “We could…go to the Glarus Lagoons together, the next time we’re home.”
The Glarus Lagoons were known for their spectacular scenery and sea life. Located in one of the thin ribbons of Alderaan’s climate that was warm enough to be called balmy, the lagoons drew many travelers who longed for heat, sunshine, chances to swim or dive—or the famously romantic atmosphere.
She tilted her head. “You and me.”
Once again she glimpsed the shyness she’d seen in him at first, back when she didn’t even understand it was shyness at all. “If you’d like.”
Leia didn’t answer right away. There was something about his face when he looked at her like this, that mixture of uncertainty and hope and something else she couldn’t name but recognized within her own heart. This silence wasn’t comfortable at all, and somehow that made it even better.
“I would,” she said. “I’d like that a lot.”
The smile returned to his face. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Maybe she didn’t have to fight the entire Empire every single day. Maybe it was all right to find out who she was besides a senator-in-training or a princess. To find out what it meant to just be Leia.
Step one in being a totally normal person with totally normal concerns was to spend more time hanging out with friends, doing nothing. Leia had become comfortable with the people she’d gotten to know in her pathfinding class, but they still mostly spent time together on expeditions or in quasi-official gatherings tied to the Apprentice Legislature. Time to try doing something purely social, for no purpose besides wasting time, having fun.
But she hadn’t expected to be “hanging out” quite so literally….
“Imagine you’re carved of wood!” Amilyn Holdo held herself firmly in the splits, despite the fact that she wasn’t on the floor but suspended in midair, held aloft by brilliantly colored scarves she’d acrobatically twisted around each leg. “Unbending! Unyielding!”
“Unbelievable,” muttered Leia, who had only just managed to wrangle herself into a seated position without feeling like she’d topple four meters to the floor at any second.
Apparently this was a Gatalentan calisthenics practice called skyfaring, which was said to make their entire world stronger. The supposed reason for this was that advanced practitioners could meditate in place, “unmoored to the ground,” and so enhance their spiritual well-being and that of those around them. Leia thought the real reason was that the weak hung themselves in these damned scarves, and only the strong survived.
She also wasn’t sure she was going to make it into the “strong” category. As far as she could tell, skyfaring mostly involved pale blue leotards and a disregard for human life.
“All right,” Leia muttered to herself. “One leg out. You can do this.”
As she awkwardly reached out with one foot, trying to snag the nearest scarlet scarf, Amilyn easily unwound herself from the splits. She kept one leg tethered as she let her body fall back until she was suspended upside down. For someone so awkward and ungainly on the ground, Amilyn possessed considerable grace midair.
“Remember,” she said in her odd, singsong voice, “you’re made of wood. Strong but organic! Life force–made material!”
I’m carved of wood. I’m carved of wood. Leia bent her knee and made a circle with her leg, capturing the scarf just right. For one instant, she felt a flicker of understanding of what “carved from wood” might actually mean. Encouraged, she eased herself into one of the lunging stances. Her sides ached, but she could keep her balance.
“That’s it!” Amilyn clapped her hands together. Her long hair (currently magenta) streamed down from her head like another of the bright scarves. “You’re getting there!”
In a rush of confidence, Leia extended her arms to complete the pose—
—and then spun out like a cyclone for a long second before she tumbled onto the floor. Fortunately the surface was so springy she bounced once before making a soft landing. Still, she groaned as she flopped down with her limbs splayed wide.
Amilyn rotated down to her, slowly spinning along the length of a pink streamer with such elegance that if Amilyn were anybody else, Leia would’ve assumed she was showing off. She simply flowed into her position at Leia’s side. “You didn’t hurt yourself?”
“No, just drank deeply from the cup of humiliation.”
“Don’t be humiliated.” Amilyn had a funny, crooked grin. “You did very well for your first time, especially as an offworlder. Even natives don’t get the swing of it until they’re five or six, sometimes.”
Leia made a mental note to look up the child mortality rate on Gatalenta.