Chapter 21: Chapter 21: Construction and ideas
They didn’t come back up the slope empty-handed. Leia arrived on the plateau with a sling of fruit bumping against her hip, two coconut shells tied together with vine like awkward canteens, and a thick coil of fibrous lengths draped over one shoulder. Her palms were sticky with sap-resin, and her forearms had the faint pink scratches of living things that didn’t appreciate being harvested.
Luke climbed beside her with more wood than seemed reasonable to carry...straight lengths he’d already cut lower down and balanced like a bundle of spears. He moved like the weight didn’t matter, but Leia noticed the slight tightening in his shoulders and the way his breath came a touch deeper on the last few steps. They crossed the last stretch of grass and stopped behind the crescent of boulders where they’d chosen their campsite. The rocks broke the wind the same way they had before...still a breeze, but no longer a constant shove. Leia set everything down carefully, as if the island might take offense if she dropped it.
“Okay,” she said, brushing hair back from her face. It immediately tried to escape again, whipped by the plateau air. “We have...”
“Food,” Luke said, nodding at the fruit.
“Water,” Leia added, lifting the coconuts.
“Fibers,” Luke finished, tapping the coil on her shoulder.
Leia exhaled. “And three hours.”
Luke’s gaze flicked toward the temple entrance behind them...dark and still, as if it wasn’t listening.
“She’s checking in,” he said.
“She said she would,” Leia replied. “Which means she will.”
Luke huffed a quiet laugh, the kind that acknowledged an opponent’s competence. Then he set his bundle of wood down and rolled his shoulders once. The work became the point. It had to.
Leia crouched and began sorting their supplies like a quartermaster: fruit to one side in the shade of a boulder, coconut shells near the planned fire ring but not close enough to be knocked over, coils of vine and palm fiber in the center where she could reach them. She turned one length between her fingers, testing. It was rough, but it had a good bite to it...fibers that wanted to cling.
“Ration the lashings,” she murmured more to herself than to Luke. “We’ll need them for the frame first. Roof comes later.”
Luke watched her hands, then looked at the ground and stepped off distances in long strides, measuring without measuring.
“If we set the sleeping platform here,” he said, pointing toward the most level patch behind the boulders, “we can anchor it against the rocks. Less movement.”
Leia nodded. “Raised platform first. That’s non-negotiable.”
Luke’s brow lifted. “Bugs?”
“Bugs,” Leia confirmed. “And damp. And whatever decides our warm bodies are interesting at night.”
He grimaced. “Fair.”
They worked out the shelter shape with simple gestures and shared assumptions: a lean-to angled away from the prevailing wind, a low windbreak wall along the open side, a sleeping platform raised on four corner posts with crossbeams...something sturdy enough to last and simple enough to build with a lightsaber, a knife, and determination. Luke picked up one of the longer straight lengths and held it upright.
“We need posts,” he said.
Leia pointed to a thick, straight trunk they’d dragged up with them. “That’s the best one. Four posts, plus two for the main ridge beam.”
Luke reached for his lightsaber. Even unlit, it looked like a promise. Leia watched his thumb hover over the activator for half a second...then he clicked it. Blue light snapped into existence with a clean hum that cut through the island’s noise, and the blade threw crisp shadows across grass and stone. Leia felt her body react the way it always did when she saw it: a flicker of awe, a flicker of fear, and a deeper, steadier sense of usefulness.
Luke moved like he’d done this in his head already. He planted his feet, angled the blade, and cut down through the trunk with a smooth, controlled sweep. The smell of fresh-cut wood rose immediately...sharp and green. Then he cut again, and again, the saber slicing cleanly, leaving ends so flat they looked planed.
Leia blinked. “That’s… almost unfair.”
Luke glanced at her, a corner of his mouth lifting. “It’s finally useful for something that isn’t fighting.”
“Don’t jinx it,” Leia said, but the humor helped. It loosened something tight in her chest.
They set the first post into a shallow pit Luke dug with a flat rock and stubbornness. Leia gathered smaller stones and packed them around the base, pounding them down with the heel of her hand.
“Stability,” she said, as if she were reminding herself what stability looked like.
Luke held the post steady. Then...without warning...his free hand lifted slightly. The post… didn’t move.
It didn’t sway with the breeze. It didn’t wobble when Leia shoved another stone in. It simply stayed upright, as if gravity had decided to take a break.
Leia’s eyes narrowed. “You’re doing that.”
Luke’s expression shifted into something focused and quiet. “Yeah.”
“You make it look...” Leia searched for a word and landed on the most annoying truth. “...easy.”
“It’s not easy,” Luke said. His voice was calm, but she saw the faint tension at his jaw. “It’s just… familiar.”
Leia looked back down at the post, at the packed stones, at the shallow pit. Then she reached for the vine coil and began separating lengths with practical ruthlessness.
“Fine,” she said. “Then we use your familiar to make my job possible.”
Luke snorted softly, but he didn’t argue. They set the second post and the third. By the fourth, their hands were moving in rhythm: Luke cutting and holding, Leia packing and planning. When it came time to lash the crossbeam across two posts, Leia dragged the first thick length of vine across the ground and stared at it.
It wasn’t thread. It wasn’t silk. It wasn’t a clean spool of anything. It was stubborn, living fiber that fought her fingers. Leia wrapped it once around the beam, pulled, and felt it slide.
She frowned. Luke steadied the beam in midair...an impossible thing, hovering an inch above where it should rest...as if he were giving her time. Leia took a slow breath and forced herself to stop brute-forcing it. Stop treating it like rope. It wasn’t rope yet.
She split the vine into thinner strands, stripping away the outer bark until she had several long ribbons. She tested the tension. Better. Luke watched, silent. Leia began braiding.
Three strands first...simple, reliable. Then she added a fourth, weaving it through at an angle so the braid thickened without losing flex. Her fingers remembered patterns her mind had filed away as irrelevant years ago. Muscle memory surfaced like a half-forgotten song. She looped the braid around the beam, crossed it back on itself, and pulled.
This time it bit. The vine tightened, rough and hungry, and the beam stopped sliding. Leia’s breath caught...not with surprise, but with something that felt suspiciously like recognition.
Luke’s eyes flicked from the braid to her hands. “You’ve done that before.”
Leia gave a short, humorless laugh. “Not with vines.”
“Still,” Luke said, and there was that quiet note again...impressed, like he’d just discovered a secret door in a wall he thought he knew.
Leia kept working, tightening the lashing with controlled pulls that distributed tension evenly. She didn’t answer right away. The memory came anyway.
It started with clean light, not jungle glare. With a room that smelled of polished wood and faint perfume, not sap. With fabric that slid between her fingers instead of fighting. Leia’s hands kept braiding while she spoke, as if it was safer to let her fingers carry the emotion.
“When I was little,” she said, “Breha taught me.”
Luke blinked. “Your mother.”
Leia nodded, eyes on the lashing. “Not taught like it was a duty. It was… a hobby. For a while.”
Luke’s expression softened, curiosity overtaking the fatigue. “You had hobbies?”
Leia shot him a look. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”
Luke held up one hand in surrender. “Sorry. It’s just...when I met you, you were leading a rebellion.”
“And before that,” Leia said, voice quieter now, “I was being trained to look like a princess even when I didn’t feel like one.”
The braid tightened under her fingers. She adjusted the angle, made a second wrap, and kept going, building a lattice of tension and security.
“When I was about… nine? Ten? Breha decided I should learn the old Alderaanian styles,” Leia continued. “Weaving. Embroidery. The ceremonial patterns the royal family used. Threads that meant something...family lines, regional motifs, political alliances hidden in color and stitch.”
Luke listened without interrupting, which was its own kind of respect.
Leia swallowed once. “We didn’t have time often. Once or twice a month, maybe. But when we did…” Her voice caught, almost imperceptibly. “It was just us. No advisors, no Senate briefings, no guards hovering like shadows. Just a frame, a basket of thread, and her hands guiding mine.”
She pulled the lashing tight, knotting it with a twist that locked it in place.
“She laughed when I got frustrated,” Leia said, and there was a ghost of a smile in her mouth that didn’t reach her eyes. “Not at me. With me. And she told me that no matter how complicated the pattern looked, it was always made of simple movements repeated with intention.”
Luke’s throat worked. His eyes had gone distant...not away from her, but into a place where he was imagining something he hadn’t known he was missing. Leia didn’t say Alderaan. She didn’t need to. The absence sat between them anyway, quiet and enormous.
“I didn’t use it much after that,” Leia finished, brisking her tone like she was folding the memory away so it wouldn’t cut her. “Turns out the galaxy rarely asks you to embroider in the middle of a war.”
Luke’s voice came out rougher than before. “But it’s helping now.”
Leia nodded once. “It’s helping now.”
For a moment, Luke’s Force-held beam wavered...just a breath of motion, like his concentration had slipped under the weight of what she’d said. Then he steadied it again, jaw tightening, eyes focused.
Leia reached out and patted the beam as if it were a reassuring shoulder. “Don’t drift,” she told him lightly. “I’m not finished tying.”
Luke managed a small smile. “Yes, General.”
“Don’t start,” Leia warned, but there was no bite in it.
They moved on to the second crossbeam. Leia braided faster now, confidence rising with repetition. She began making shorter lengths to conserve material...measured lashings, not wasteful wraps. Where the vine strands frayed, she dabbed a touch of resin into the fibers, sealing them so the braid held.
Luke adjusted his approach too. Instead of holding the beam perfectly still, he shifted it subtly into place, lowering it at the exact moment Leia cinched the knot, as if they were doing a dance and he’d finally learned her step.
“Okay,” Leia said after the last knot of the frame. She straightened and rolled her shoulders, feeling the ache there. “Platform supports next.”
Luke reignited the saber, cut four shorter beams, then paused as if thinking. He extended his hand, palm open. The four beams lifted from the grass at once...rising slowly, controlled, hovering as neatly as if invisible straps held them. Luke rotated them in the air, aligning them to the frame. Leia stared.
Luke caught her expression and looked mildly embarrassed. “It’s easier than carrying them one at a time.”
“It’s also infuriating,” Leia said, but she wasn’t angry. Not really. “Because if I’d known you could do that, I would have made you carry me up the hill.”
Luke barked a laugh...real this time, a quick bright sound that startled a bird into flight somewhere nearby.
“Noted,” he said, still smiling.
They set the platform beams and lashed them into place, Leia’s braids turning into a web of functional geometry. She tested each connection with a hard tug. Nothing shifted. Good. Then came the roof.
Luke cut palm fronds into long sheets, careful not to shred them. Leia laid them in overlapping layers angled downward, just like Breha had once shown her with silk...each piece covering the seam of the one below. The same logic, different material.
They worked faster now, aware of time without staring at it. The sun had edged across the sky, shadows shifting along the boulders.
They worked until their hands stopped feeling like hands and started feeling like tools. The platform frame held. That was the first victory...quiet but real. Four posts sunk and packed with stone, crossbeams lashed tight enough that the whole structure answered a hard shove with stubborn refusal. Leia tested every joint as if she didn’t trust success unless it survived her skepticism. Luke watched her do it without comment, only adjusting the Force’s invisible grip when she leaned her weight into a beam that might have shifted.
It didn’t.
“Good,” Leia said, more to the wood than to him.
Luke nodded once, and his focus didn’t loosen. Not yet. They laid the first stage of the sleeping surface next...not a full deck, not something elegant, but enough. Luke cut shorter lengths with the lightsaber, ends clean and flat, then floated them into place with careful, almost delicate telekinesis. Leia laced them down with braided fiber, threading lashings through gaps, locking the beams in a grid that wouldn’t slide apart under a restless sleeper.
Her fingers were raw by the time she finished the last knot. She didn’t complain. She just flexed them once, shook out the ache, and reached for the next length of vine.
They weren’t building a home. Not yet. They were building a place to stop bleeding energy into the elements.
When the platform was solid enough for a cautious sit, Leia lowered herself onto it slowly, testing the give. The beams creaked once...a living sound...then settled. Luke climbed up beside her, lighter on his feet than she was, and for a moment they both just listened.
Wind. Grass. The distant waterfall’s steady voice. The temple behind them...silent as a held breath.
Leia looked up at the half-finished roof frame. “Shade next.”
Luke followed her gaze, then stepped back down and reignited his lightsaber with a soft snap-hum. He moved to the pile of palm fronds they’d dragged up earlier, and cut the tough midribs cleanly so the leaves would lie flatter. Not hacking, not wasting. Controlled sweeps, like he was practicing forms against a patient opponent.
Leia took the prepared fronds and began layering them, working from the lowest edge upward so water would run down and off instead of collecting. Each frond overlapped the last by a hand’s width, the way Breha had taught her with silk and ceremony...except now it was green and rough and smelled like the inside of the jungle. Luke lifted the ridge beam with the Force a fraction at a time while she worked, keeping it steady in a way that made her job possible. Every time her braid cinched, he lowered the beam a hair, letting the lashing settle into its final tension. Like tightening a ship’s rigging. Like setting a bone.
They added a second layer to the roof where the wind hit hardest, doubling up where gaps would matter. Leia stuffed smaller leaves into seams, then dabbed resin where the fibers frayed, sealing them down. It wasn’t pretty. It wouldn’t win any Alderaanian festival prizes. But when Leia stepped back and looked up, the sun no longer hit her face in a direct glare.
A patch of shade...shallow but present...fell across the platform and the ground beside it. Luke took a step under it, tilting his head, watching the light break through the layered fronds.
“It’s going to leak,” he said.
“It’s going to leak less than the sky,” Leia replied, and that earned her a small, surprised smile from him.
They moved on to the windbreak wall next, because Leia had insisted that a shelter without a windbreak was just a roof with delusions. Luke cut a stack of straight branches, and Leia arranged them along the open side behind the boulders, weaving smaller fronds through the gaps like a rough lattice. The wall didn’t stop the wind completely, but it slowed it and redirected it. Made the shaded space feel less like standing on a cliff and more like being inside something they’d chosen. When they were finally satisfied enough to pause, Leia dropped to the platform again and let her shoulders sag.
Luke extinguished the lightsaber. The sudden absence of its hum made the world feel louder. Leia reached into the sling and pulled out one of the sunset-colored fruits. She turned it in her hands, tested the skin with her thumb, then tore it open with a firm twist. The scent that rose was sweet and sharp.
Luke sat beside her and accepted the other half without comment. They ate in silence for a few bites...not because they had nothing to say, but because their bodies had become too honest to pretend they didn’t need the calories. Leia drank from one coconut shell, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and exhaled. The shade above them shifted with the wind, dappled light moving over Luke’s face like ripples.
“It’s functional,” she said.
Luke looked around...the platform, the roof, the half-woven wall, their small pile of supplies tucked under cover. “It’s a start.”
Leia leaned back carefully, resting her head against one of the posts. It felt solid. Real. Something that wouldn’t vanish when she blinked.
“We can improve it later,” she murmured, and it sounded like permission...not to be complacent, but to survive.
Luke took another bite, swallowed, then stared at the roof as if calculating angles.
“We still have time,” he said suddenly.
Leia opened one eye. “We do?”
He glanced toward the sun, then toward the temple entrance, as if he could sense an invisible countdown. “We’ve been working fast. And she gave us three hours.”
Leia’s mouth twitched. “So what do you want to do?”
Luke gave her a look that said he wasn’t amused...and then his expression shifted after wiping the sweat off his brow, as if getting an idea. “We hadn’t bathed today yet,” he observed.
Leia gave him a flat look as she nodded slowly. “True...I guess we have been busy, Luke.”
“Exactly,” he said, pushing himself up. He was naked aside from his combat boots, the same as her, and streaked with dirt and sweat from handling the freshly cut wood. “And we’re quite sticky by now. The shelter is functional enough. We have time to wash ourselves clean.”
Leia didn’t move, but her expression shifted from tired contemplation to sharp awareness. She tilted her head, looking at her equally filthy brother beside her. The truth of his statement was written all over their skin, in the salt lines drying on their necks and chests. A slow, sultry smirk spread across her lips.
“Go back down to the lake?” she asked, her tone surely sounding deceptively light. “That does sound…like a productive use of our time.”
Luke just nodded, but her smirk widened. He started to turn toward the path.
“I could be persuaded,” she called after him, her voice dropping into a mock-innocent lilt that was completely transparent. “But only under one condition.”
He stopped at that and glanced back, a question on his face.
Leia stood up, stretching her nude body with deliberate casualness, all sweaty skin and coiled muscle. “We bathe together.”
Luke blinked. The breeze moved between them, carrying the scent of cut grass and warm bodies.
“No separate pools this time,” Leia clarified, her gaze steady and full of intent. “No private ledges. The lake is big enough to share.”
He was silent for a beat. Then Leia saw the immediate, physical effect of her words. Even in a somewhat tired state, her brother’s body responded. Her eyes tracked his cock growing to full mast with open pleasure, and a low chuckle escaped her as he shook his head, a mixture of wonder and surrender.
A faint blush crept up his neck, but he held her gaze. “So, your condition is communal bathing,” he said slowly.
“My condition is efficient bathing,” Leia corrected, stepping closer.
She then traced a line through the sweat on his chest with one finger, voice low. “I seem to recall you basically agreed that we shouldn’t pretend we have anything to hide from each other now that we are officially lovers too, remember? So, it would be...unsanitary to ignore that lesson now.”
Luke’s throat moved as he swallowed. He caught her wrist, not to stop her, but to anchor her touch. His own skin was hot under her fingers.
“We did finish early,” he conceded, his voice rough. “If we’re using the rest of the time as a break before we meet back with Master Belaerys…” His eyes roamed over her body, taking in the sheen of sweat on her collarbones, the dust smudged on her thighs, the determined set of her mouth. “…Then maybe it’s practical to get any…distracting thoughts out of our systems first.”
Leia’s laughter this time was a rich, delighted sound that echoed against the boulders.
“See?” she said, stepping into the space he’d created for her. “You’re getting wiser with experience.” She leaned up, her breath warm against his jaw. “I like that very much.”
Luke released a low chuckle of his own, one that vibrated through his chest and into the hand she still held. He brought her fingers to his lips and kissed her grimy knuckles. Then he let go and turned away, starting toward the winding path down to the lake without another word.
Leia watched the muscles shift in his strong, bare back as he walked. Anticipation hummed under her skin, brighter than fatigue.
She followed him eagerly, leaving the shelter and their worries under the dappled shade.