Saga - Legends Surviving Hope (OCs, Completed 5/16, Author's Notes Up)

Title: Surviving Hope
Characters: Galen Wentlas (OC), Anya Wentlas (OC)
Timeline: 3 ABY, Weeks following first half of Empire Strikes Back
Summary: After getting the news of their daughter's death in the Battle of Hoth, Galen and Anya Wentlas head to the now deserted battle ground to recover her body and run into something unexpected... Sequel to Survival Instinct and Recovering Home.

***


The office of the Alliance assault frigate Resurgent Dawn was silent despite the presence of two people inside of it. They sat behind a desk made from fine Alderaanian oak, it's now rare dark surface polished to an impeccable shine. The shine reflected the blue light coming from a circular holoemitter over the office, an icy sheen covering the walls.

The holo depicted a human family in obviously happier times: three darker-skinned adults and one fair-skinned man standing next to a small girl. All five of them were grinning heavily. It had been taken during a vacation to the Killik mounds nearly a decade ago, the fair-skinned male thought. His wife, his nine year-old daughter and his in-laws had enjoyed their brief respite from duty on that day and enjoyed the beauty of the spitcreted towers created millenia previously. Of the people in the picture, only two...

He squeezed his wife's hand tightly and choked at the lump in his throat threatening to strangle him where he sat. Her strong and deft fingers, honed after years of replacing console and computer modules, gripped his hand nearly just as tightly. He turned his head and looked at her. Though her black hair had greyed slightly around her ears and small lines of crows feet surrounded her brown eyes, she was still just as beautiful now as she was when the holo had been taken, he thought.

"Are you ready?" he said, his voice a mere squeak in the silence. She exhaled deeply and slowly nodded her head. He turned off the holoemitter and activated his comlink. "Send him in."

The door to the office opened and another human male walked into the room. He was wearing the orange flight suit that all Alliance starfighter pilots wore. His dark brown hair was in disarray from the helmet that must have been left behind on his ship after his flight from the New Hope dreadnaught nearby. He was young, barely into his mid-twenties but the look of his brown eyes seemed to make him look older than he was. He saluted. "Admiral Wentlas," he said. The pilot turned to Galen's wife. "Captain Wentlas." The tone of his rural Agamarian accent was polite and well disciplined. How many times had he made this exact same speech before?

"Commander Farlander," Galen said with a quick nod. The gesture was almost all he could will himself to do.

"I was your daughter's commanding officer during the battle," he said. He took the seat that was offered to him. He moved his attention equally between the both of them, Galen noticed. "She had volunteered to take a snowspeeder for Blue Squadron while we covered the evacuation from the base. I paired her with Lieutenant Tav Nay'yka, one of my best shots.

"We were tasked with protecting a small pass in the mountains off of the main plain," the pilot added. "Command was worried that the Empire would send walkers, probe droids or hover tanks to the this pass and try to flank Echo Base's prepared defenses." Anya squeezed her husband's hand again, halfway to reassure him and the other half to help herself. Galen knew what was coming up. He had given this speech before to family members of deceased crew members, but he had never imagined that one day he would be hearing it for himself.

"Lieutenant Wentlas fought bravely," Farlander said. "Her snowspeeder scored kills on three probe droids and a scout walker. She was making another pass on another scout walker when a concussion missile exploded near her speeder." His disciplined tone was betrayed only slightly by a pause. "Your daughter tried to pull out of her dive, but she was unable to. Her speeder landed intact in the snow, but there were no comm transmissions from either her or Nay'yka for the rest of the battle. I flew by the crash site several times and there was no movement at all, even on my final fly-by about an hour later when my squadron was evacuating the planet."

"Nothing?" Anya said. Her voice strained with emotion. She sobbed silently, finally letting out all of the emotion that she had been holding back. Galen wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close to him. Decades before, after the loss of his ship's partial namesake and the deaths of his and Anya's bunkmates, he was an emotional wreck. Now he only felt a cold and empty numbness in his chest. He just sat behind his desk, holding his wife with his mouth slightly agape.

Galen watched Farlander struggle with something and knew that the young pilot had taken responsibility for all that had happened within his own mind. "No," he finally said. "I didn't hear anything. I didn't see anything." The pilot paused again. "I didn't feel anything." Galen wondered what that sense had to do with it. "Your daughter and her gunner died in the crash and I'm sorry. If there's anything that I can do, just let me know. If you can't reach me, comm Lynia Delline on the New Hope, she's one of Mon Mothma's aides and she knows how to reach me."

"Thank you, Commander," Galen said. His voice was nearly monotone. The pilot nodded his understanding and saluted once more before heading out the door, leaving Galen and Anya alone in the office.

Galen closed his eyes, holding them tightly shut. In his mind he could see the ice-covered tundra of Hoth, a wrecked speeder half-buried under the snow. His daughter was slumped over the control yoke with her dark hair matted with frozen blood. She was alone and unmourned, her only monument the vehicle that she had died in. He opened his eyes again, protesting the scene.

***

Anya Wentlas sat in their quarters. clad in a light green sleeping gown, her head in her hands. The possibility of death in the Rebellion was never a stranger to her: she had lost friends, family and homeworld to the Empire and knew of many more that had somehow lost even more than that. That she may one day lose her daughter, though, had barely even crossed her mind with a semblance of seriousness. Yet war never cared for anyone's hopes, she thought bitterly.

A part of her was gone. She felt that deep void within her and knew that it could never be filled again even if she would have another child some day. She had carried Alexis for nine of the most hellish months of her life: the aftermath of the Resurgence's destruction and the six long months of laying low in the Alderaanian palace or her parent's home, holing up in her and Galen's state room while some Imperial dignitary visited, when Galen had to leave her behind when Organa's spies found the Sarlacc Project that had led to it all, sitting beside his bedside as he recovered from the wounds he had suffered. And now Alexis was dead.

The words of an old superstition came to her mind. Anya was never one to believe in superstitions, but she still remembered her grandmother telling her this after a cousin had given birth in the aftermath of Grievous' horrific attack on Alderaan. "Children born around death are destined to be followed by it." It had seemed quaint and old fashioned by that time, and the entire family had laughed about it. If true, though, how cursed were children conceived around death?

She looked over, through the open door, to the bed where Galen was sleeping and thought him lucky as she rubbed her tired eyes. She walked over to the small kitchenette and poured herself a cup of caf before returning to the table. He had gone numb inside like she had when she learned of Alderaan's destruction. She wished that she could be as detached from the reality of the situation as she had been back then instead of having her bare and raw emotions dragged through coals.

The cup of caf was empty now and Anya quietly changed out of her sleeping gown and into an Alliance uniform. The door opened with a soft hiss as she left their quarters and roamed semi-aimlessly throughout the durasteel hallways of the cobbled together ship. She soon found herself in the long and thin spar that connected the dreadnaught prow to the two large solar fins in the stern. Docking tube three was beneath her feet and she kneeled to the ground and input the passcode. Galen had mentioned something about leaving the ship tomorrow, so she might as well make sure that their ship was ready. She had to do something other than just sit and mourn.

She felt her gut flip as she left the gravity plates of the assault frigate and into the field generated by the Rendili-made star cruiser. The cruiser's airlock was in the back of its round, two-deck rear, forcing the craft to dock with the frigate "upside-down." She exited the airlock and stepped into the circular room beyond. Two large doors flanked an open lift to her left. Anya's eyes paused on the door directly to her right, her heart sinking lower than it already was: Alexis' room, she thought painfully. She turned to her left and entered one of the several storage rooms and emerged with a tool kit.

The lift took her up to the modified cockpit, two pilot's stations in front of a rectangular window that overlooked the ship's flat front section. To her left, towards the rear of the ship, a row of seats for passengers lined the back wall. Anya walked over to the sensor suite near the ship's flight yoke. The last time that they had flown the ship, she remembered, they had been a bit on the slow side. She killed the power supply to it and went to work.

The panel slid open easily, revealing neatly organized wires connecting the display panel to the floor, into the crawlspace where it would eventually connect to the sensors themselves. With her multitool she loosened the wire's connection to the panel's motherboard and then tested the board itself. That was the problem, she thought as she pried at it. The motherboard had sometime through out the years had loosened itself in its moorings. She loosened the screws and then reset the board, reconnecting it to the console and putting the wires back into their proper slots.

Done, she thought as she lay on the ground. There were still other things to do, diagnostics to run and other connections to check. Her eyes felt heavy under the weight of far too many hours without sleep. She blinked hard to clear them and then again.

Her eyes opened to unfamiliar sights. She was on a soft bed in a dark room, her head and aching neck muscles resting on a pillow while a soft thermal blanket covered her body. She sat up and looked around, recognizing the room as Galen and hers small quarters aboard the courier. Anya stepped out of the bed, wondering how she had gotten there.

"...Land, I have complete faith in you," she could hear Galen say as she opened the door into the main cabin. "I've seen you command the Dawn before and I know you can do it."

The young Captain Hol Land stood at the entrance of the airlock, the Duros male pleading with her husband. "I'm just saying that so soon after Hoth, we have to be vigilant. I can't command..."

"I'm not asking you to command my fleet, Captain, the New Hopeis already doing that. All you need to do is command your frigate. Meanwhile," he motioned towards her, "my wife and I are going to go get our daughter." Anya watched as several petty officers emerged from the air lock, pushing just as many repulsor-driven stasis coffins past the three of them and into the cargo bay.

"I'm sorry for you loss, Admiral," Land said. He turned to Anya, noseless face crinkled in the Duros expression for compassion, "Captain." The Duros bowed to both of them and left the crowded ship along with the techs.

"I was beginning to wonder when you'd wake up," Galen said, his voice soft as he closed the airlock behind them. "I'm surprised you didn't when I was moving you."

"I had trouble sleeping," she said. He nodded and motioned towards the lift back up to the cockpit. He wrapped a comforting arm around her.

"So you worked yourself to exhaustion," he said. He sat down in the pilot's chair and she followed up to the co-pilot's station. She watched as he stared out into the space beyond the viewport, his hands moved up to his face and twisted into his greying brown hair.

Anya gently rubbed his back. "Can we do this?" she said.

"We have to," Galen said. "I don't want her to just be sitting there."

Anya looked out the viewport, past the mating of a Nebulon-B frigate and a dreadnaught cruiser that was the Resurgent Dawn and into the cluster of stars that was the Anoat sector. The stars raced towards their ship, soon to be replaced by the blue ribbons of hyperspace.

***

The trip through hyperspace to the Hoth system took nearly two days. Anya stared at the ice-covered world through the viewport. It was the graveyard of so many, she thought, Imperial and Rebel alike now called that frozen hell their final resting place. Not her daughter, she thought with resolve. Her daughter would be found and taken to the Graveyard of Alderaan. Alexis had always loved Alderaan.

"Not seeing any Imperial activity," Galen said as he scanned the sensors. He turned to look at her and flashed her a sad smile that Anya returned. Over the past day, he had begun to come out of his protective shell somewhat and they had spent the last night just holding each other tightly as they wept for their fallen daughter.

"They know this planet has nothing else to give them," Anya said, still staring unblinking at the planet.

"Pull up the map," Galen said as entered the planet's atmosphere minutes later. With a quick series of keystrokes, she had a small facsimile of the area within five kilometers of Echo Base.

"I think that this is the pass that Commander Farlander was talking about," Anya said as she pointed to a small valley near the base. She felt the wind buffet the craft as it dipped lower and lower through the atmosphere. A large mountain range loomed in the distance "We should be coming up on the base soon."

Anya gasped as they passed the mountains and entered the plains just past Echo Base. Groundworks and trenches that had spiderwebbed throughout the ice were pockmarked with craters of black ash. She watched as they passed crashed snowspeeders in various stages of disrepair. Destroyed scout walkers stood with their two long legs standing, supporting nothing but what little remained of its command compartment. One lay on its "back" it's left leg pointed upwards in the sky in mid kick. The larger AT-AT walkers lay lopsided upon the ground, front legs buckled forward and the rear ones pointing into the air. Snowspeeder debris lay around several of them.

The courier slowed as it banked into the canyon and Anya's heart leapt into her throat even as her stomach sank deeply into her as it did. A hundred meters away from a wrecked scout walker was a crashed snowspeeder. It's left wing was buried deeply into the snow, it's canopy gone. She couldn't make the interior and some part of her thanked her for it.

"It's the only one..." Galen said as he sat the craft down upon the soft ground several meters away from the crash. His voice was haggard from grief and stress. "Get your gear on," he said, undoing his crash restraints. "I have to get the stasis chambers ready, then I'll get dressed, too." He placed his hand upon her shoulder and gave a weak but reassuring squeeze.

She undid her own restraints and took the lift down with him to the first deck of the courier. He walked past the door to their cabin and towards the cargo hold in the front of the ship. In the small closet next to the bed were their winter gear: a thick brown coat with an interior of white fur, a tan wrap to guard their faces against the freezing winds, thick insulated pants, and long boots. She dressed silently in the cabin. Galen said nothing either when he entered the room, just dressing in silence with her.

His eyes met hers for a second, half-closed in exhaustion, silently questioning. Can we do this? She nodded a single nod. We have to. They had already come so far and risked so much. They left the room together and into the open airlock door.

Anya felt the cold early-morning air slam into her uncovered eyes and the bridge of her nose. Her booted feet sank to her shins in the drifted snow, making every step more tiring than the last. She leaned against the repulsorsled she was pushing for strength, hoping that she wouldn't fall, wouldn't show weakness right now. Up ahead the canopy-less speeder loomed.

"Galen," she said. She stopped and stared at the speeder in the distance, hours of reading after-action reports and hearing Commander Farlander's account of the battle replaying. "Wasn't her speeder intact?"

"Could have been a mistake," he replied. She could hear the slightest bit of doubt in his voice. "The wind could have..."

She pushed the coffin away from her and broke out running towards the speeder. "Anya, wait!" she could hear Galen call out behind her. She didn't listen. Her lungs and legs burned from the exertion as she sprinted through the snow, the crashed snowspeeder now tantalizingly close.

Exhausted and out of breath, she reached the speeder and climbed onto the half-broken wing. She looked into the cockpit and the blaster-scarred hinges of where the canopy was supposed to be. Anya collapsed onto the wing, her knees aching from the impact. A strange mixture of sobs and laughter escaped her mouth and crystallized into the freezing air.

"Anya..." she heard Galen say behind her. She heard the airframe of wing creak slightly under their combined weight as he climbed next to her. She felt him hold her tightly even through their coats, a reassuring and comforting gesture that was no longer needed. He stood up and moved beside her, looking into the cockpit for himself. "Sithspit..." he cursed under his breath as he saw for himself that it was empty.

 

Intense! I really like these OCs, and it's great to see them again. What a staggering loss. And now, where did the body go? A mystery developing from a tragedy!

I liked this part especially:

The words of an old superstition came to her mind. Anya was never one to believe in superstitions, but she still remembered her grandmother telling her this after a cousin had given birth in the aftermath of Grievous' horrific attack on Alderaan. "Children born around death are destined to be followed by it." It had seemed quaint and old fashioned by that time, and the entire family had laughed about it. If true, though, how cursed were children conceived around death?

 

Fantastic! I like Galen and Anya. Their mutual loving support of one another ... Now they have hopes that beyond all wild imaginings, Alexis has survived.

 

Thank you. I really writing like these OCs, as well, even if I'm doing so 20 years after I generally write them. I wanted to get into their heads when they have some sort of confirmation that their daughter didn't make it. And, in a bit of selfishness and influence after playing X-Wing practically all week, I had the person who delivered the news to be Keyan Farlander from that game. As for where Alexis' body went, I figured that finding the empty speeder would be a good ending point for part 1. Obviously, Galen and Alexis hope it means that their daughter actually survived, but there's still a lot of distance between that crashed speeder and freedom.

The original superstition came from somewhere in the ether, I don't know exactly where. Maybe how the baby boom had to go through their own hell in the late 20th century, or somewhere completely out of left field. I also wanted to show that while Anya and her family generally didn't believe it, confirmation bias is certainly kicking in, especially with how Galen was nearly killed taking out the Sarlacc Project, the destruction of Alderaan, and now Alexis' apparent death. Anya's clearly wondering if all of the death and misery following the destruction of the Resurgence was following Alexis.

I wanted to show that, even though they're each handling the grief in their own ways, they're still there for each other when they need to be.

One of the difficulties of having written and published another story first was that readers of both would know Alexis' fate. So, what I've tried to do for that is to make Galen and Anya's emotions about the whole ordeal take center stage. Obviously, at this point, they're very hopeful but still wary. As I said before, it's a long way back to Echo Base.

Thanks for reading, both of you. I certainly do appreciate it.

 

Part II

***

The cockpit of the snowspeeder was empty. It was the only rational thought that Galen could even attempt to think at the moment. The snowspeeder was empty and his daughter was certainly not in it. She wasn't slumped up to the console like he had envisioned in his nightmares, she wasn't half hanging out of the cockpit with injuries that had taken her before she could escape. She just wasn't there.

The gunner's seat told a different story. The rear of the craft was mangled from where the killing shot had hit it, metal peeling away from the impact site. The gunner's seat was a mess of shredded fabric and frozen blood. Whatever injuries that Alexis had incurred, they weren't as bad as her gunner.

He slid down the fuselage and sat on the wing. He looked up at Anya, who met his gazes with eyes glimmering in a way he hadn't seen for nearly a month. He matched her relieved smile and let out a laugh that was half a sigh. "She was alive," he finally said. They smiled, spirits finally unburdened.

The snow crunched against Galen's boots as he climbed off of the broken wing of the snowspeeder. He walked to the side of the speeder and inspected the open storage compartment. Snowspeeders couldn't hold that much cargo, especially if they were going into battle. Usually, the small compartment held only enough room for a survival pack and a few other choice items. As he looked into the already open compartment he saw nothing but the gray durasteel back.

"They were alive," he said as Anya joined him. "They survived and they took the pack."

Anya pointed to the burnt hinges on the back of the cockpit. "The canopy, too."

"Her gunner was wounded, badly it looked like." Galen studied the snow at the crash site. Nearly a month's worth of wind and snowfall obscuring any marks save for their own footsteps. "She may have..."

"Used it as a sled," Anya finished his thought. "Could she have made it to the base?"

Galen paused to think. Alexis wasn't necessarily the strongest, but she what she did have was a determination that rivaled their own. "I know that she thought she could," he said. He tempered the hope he felt within his heart, trying to lower his expectations. Sure she had survived the crash, he thought, but she could still be out there in the snow, her body joining several of the other Rebel and Imperial casualties of the battle. The hope that she was alive was already entrenched, holding out against any of his half-hearted attempts to quash it. "Let's get back to the ship. We'll find her."

The courier crawled through the air as slow as it could, its hull so close to the ground that the tallest snow drifts nearly touched the bottom of it's ailerons. Galen piloted the craft around the curve of the mountain and into the plain where the fighting had been its heaviest. Flying this far had taken a mere minute, he thought. How long had it taken his daughter?

A kilometer away was the closest walker. Like the others it had been toppled during the battle, a victim of a tow cable wrapped around its metal ankles. One of the hatches on the side was opened, revealing racks of speeder bikes inside. "There!" Anya said, pointing out the transparisteel object as it glinted in the afternoon sun.

A memory flashed into his mind of the last time that he had seen one of the giant walkers up close. It had been right before the Resurgence was destroyed, when the strike team that he was a member of was fleeing Imperial Center. One of them had been waiting for them at the hangar. His daughter had been here and she had seen the behemoth for herself. Was she as frightened as he was, even if the one she approached was knocked out?

The canopy was sitting next to an opening in the walker's neck. Galen inspected it, looked over the blaster-shot transparisteel and the tow cable strung between the two holes. In the distance, the engines of his ship idled almost silently against the wind. Anya was next to him, clutching her coat closer to her with her gloved hands. He climbed through the opening and into the AT-AT's interior.

The hole opened into the main hull of the craft. The open cargo hatch illuminated the room, beams of sunlight interrupted by dark shadows cast by the bike racks. To his right was a body covered by a thermal blanket, sitting up against the slanted wall. Closer to him, a powered down thermal generator was propped up against various pieces of debris. The foil package of an emergency ration bar was crumpled up next to the generator.

"Is that..." Anya's voice echoed through the walker's compartment.

Galen walked towards the blanketed corpse, the cold of the walker's wall seeping through his gloves as he balanced himself. His hand hesitated over the blanket even though his fingers easily grasped at the fabric. He could hear Anya breathe in deeply behind him. After seconds of indecision that felt like minutes, he finally pulled the blanket down from the being's face. A wave of relief washed over him as a male canid-equine face was uncovered. Tav Nay'yka's eyes were closed, a thin layer of frost over his furred skin. His orange flightsuit clung tightly to his flesh, dried blood marring the flak jacket on his chest.

"It's not her." Galen turned to Anya. "Go get one of the stasis tubes from the ship, I'll get him out here."

"One of the bikes is gone," Anya mentioned. She motioned towards the top of the walker, where one of the many speeder bikes that an AT-AT walker carried was gone.


***

Echo Base's main entrance loomed open before her, the bodies of Rebel soldiers slain while fleeing the base littering the field in front of it. An Imperial speeder bike lay on the ground, the power cell regulating its repulsorlifts dead. "This is it," Anya said. She turned to look at her husband and saw that Galen was already deep into the hangar.

"No Falcon," she said. The hangar was empty save for the discarded speeder bike and several snowspeeders in various stages of disrepair. The Millennium Falcon had been the ship that Princess Leia Organa had attempted to escape the planet on and after a month of not reporting in, the high command had feared the worst. Searching for them was the official reason for the trip to Hoth. At least they had made it off planet, Anya thought.

"Alexis!" Galen cried out. Even outside of the large ice-carved hangar she could hear his scream reverberate off of the wall. He called out for their daughter again and she added her voice to his.

"Lex!" she screamed again, the icy air scratching at her raw throat. If she was alive, Anya thought, she would have to be in the base. The thought was strange and especially cruel to Anya's mind. Alexis would have survived being shot down and crashing into the snow, walking Force knows how many kilometers dragging her dying copilot, spending a harsh Hoth night in the belly of a downed AT-AT walker only for her to possibly be killed so close to home. Only the echoes of their cries answered them.

"Maybe we should check the quarters," Galen suggested. They walked through the hallways of the deserted base, passing each slain Rebel with a look of trepidation. There were no Imperial casualties beside their slain foes, Anya noted. Whether it was a testament to their efficiency in clearing the base or to the fact they the Imperials left none of their dead behind was unknown to her. She passed another Rebel body on the ground, a male human with blonde hair. He had a family that was worried about him, she thought, and here she was relieved that it wasn't her child. She felt almost selfish at the thought.

The two entered the medical bay, a deactivated surgical droid standing next to the wall. Blaster shots scorched and melted the ice walls in front of her. A small pool of frozen blood was on the icy floor. Anya followed the smaller drips on the ground into a room to the left and saw the black blaster rifle laying next to a console. She walked over to the rifle on the floor. It was 3/4 of a meter long and simple in its design: a thin metal cylinder with its energy cell jutting off to the left hand side, a folding shoulder stock outstretched diagonally from the main body. It was Nazren-made and gifted to Galen when he took his part of the Alderaanian fleet to fully liberate the planet almost a decade previously. He had given it to Alexis when she went out on her own shortly after Yavin.

"She was here," Anya said, looking at the second pool of blood next to it. It was smaller and flanked by discarded medical supplies. The Empire had tried to save her life? The thought seemed alien to her. For over 20 years the Empire had been a constant threat, their barbarity the things of nightmares. Now they may have captured her little girl.

"They've got her," Anya said to Galen. She held him as tight as their coats would allow.

"We'll find her," Galen promised. "No matter what it takes."

***

It was two weeks later and Galen was sitting in his office aboard the Resurgent Dawn once again. He had contacted the woman that Commander Farlander had given her comm frequency to, and she had arranged a meeting with the woman sitting in front of him.

"Are you his handler?" he asked her.

"I guess you can say that," she replied in an Alderaanian accent with an Alderan dialect. She was in her mid to late twenties and tan skinned. Her black hair was pulled back behind her and secured in a tail with an orange tie. Her white-clad arms were folded over her tan short-sleeved uniform, her right hand covered by a leather glove the hid a metal prosthesis.

"And the stories I hear are true?" Rumors abounded about their exploits, most of them far too unlikely to be handled by only two Rebels.

"You know those Super Star Destroyers?" she asked.

"I've seen one." His mind flashed back to nearly 20 years in the past, flying his star courier--recently stolen from a dead inquisitor--through the damaged hull of the prototype Super Star Destroyer that was the Sarlacc Project to destroy it.

"He snuck aboard one of them, right under the nose of Darth Vader, and made off with a ship inside. He used that ship to get aboard another Star Destroyer and destroy it and the factories within it."

"Sounds unbelievable."

"I would have thought the same thing if I hadn't seen it myself," she said. "Now that we've established reputation, what's the job?"

"Simple for you two, and a bit of overkill," Galen said. "There's a computer database on Gannis that has a list of all the prisoners taken on Hoth and their current locations."

The agent's eyes narrowed. "How did you find out about this?"

Galen thought of the black-plated protocol droid that he had helped during the hunt for the Sarlacc Project and his initial attempts to find his daughter. It had led him only to this. "I cashed in a favor with twenty years of interest," he said. "Credits are no issue to me here; you and your partner will get your money, no matter what it takes. I want that database and I only need to see one name on it, then Alliance intelligence can have the rest of it."

She nodded and extended her gloved hand. Galen shook it. "Well, you have a deal. Kyle and I will get that database for you."

 

Okay, I may go back and review chapters in more detail at some point but I wanted to leave a note here that this was an excellent story! I really like how we see the development of the Galen and Anya of many years ago as experienced Rebels -- and very worried parents. I'm embarrassed to say that it took me a while to make that last-name connection with Alexis, though I'd figured it out by the time this was posted. Maybe a note in their OC profiles? Anyway, I really love their interactions with each other and how they respond to each bit of news. The last part with them trailing over Alexis's path is doubly effective after reading Survival Instinct. And I like the Easter egg at the end (at least, I believe this is a familiar Alderaanian who hangs out with someone named Kyle? )

 

Terrific uncovering of more clues and enlisting of assistance to find Alexis definitely. Galen and Anya definitely continue to be each other's strength. !!

 

I wanted to show that both of them have really grown into their roles as rebels. They're each leaders in their own way. As for worried parents, when I was writing Survival Instinct, the thought came into my head that she was likely assumed dead since no other rebel came to rescue her. Now, how would her parents react to that?

I've updated the OC index profiles to the beginning of this story. I'll tend to update only after a work is finished for short work such as this.

I wanted each of them to have their own reactions to everything, from the initial grief to each new clue along the way. I also wanted to revisit the locations from SI, as I had left some clues at each stop along the way (Alexis didn't need the canopy sled anymore since her gunner died, the speeder bike was left at the entrance to Echo Base) that ultimately led to where she had been shot and captured.

The one and the same. As you can tell, Galen's very determined to get that database, and I feel sorry for the poor Imperials guarding it.

I wanted to show that they're still there for each other, even twenty years after we first saw them. As for enlisting help to find Alexis, I'm pretty sure that they're doing what any parent would do if they had the means and were in their situation.

I'm going to try and get some author's notes compiled soon.

 

Author's notes are up. If you all like this, please let me know so I can keep doing them for future or even already published works.

Spoiler

* The Resurgent Dawn is a Rebel Assault Frigate Mk. I Rebel Assault Frigate Mk. I. Since Galen was originally created for a Wizards of the Coast RPG adventure, I went with their depiction of the assault frigate rather than Star Wars: Rebellion's. I picked the name for Galen's flagship to be an homage to the Nebulon-B that was destroyed before the events of Recovering Home, as well as using the original Imperial name for it (Imperial Dawn) that I created for an old Diary Challenge.

* Galen's desk being made of Alderaanian oak was a conscious decision to show how attached that Galen became to the planet between now and the last time that we saw him.

* To sort of foreshadow the cameo at the end, I made the opening scene reminiscent of the opening to Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight, with the main characters staring at a holoimage of happier times in the darkness.

* The person that delivers the news of Alexis' supposed death is Keyan Farlander, star of the X-Wing video game. The only information regarding him and the Battle of Hoth merely states that he survived it due to his Force-sensitivity, so I had pretty much free reign with the character.

* Even though he's fought around Jedi several times, Galen seems to miss what Farlander meant when he said that he felt nothing coming from the downed speeder. More than likely, he simply isn't aware that Farlander is Force-sensitive, combined with nearly 20 years of not seeing an actual Jedi.

* Lynia Delline was introduced in the novel-length prose sections of the X-Wing Strategy Guide as a love interest for Farlander. As he's shown to give the Wentlas' her comm frequency in case that they can't reach him, it appears that they've stayed together since the Battle of Yavin.

* The point of view switch between Galen to Anya marks the first time in a non-epistolary work that her viewpoint has been shown. She previously had a single chapter in the Dawn of Defiance Journals that have been truncated and have been overwritten with new works containing the two.

* I had the idea of her wearing a green nightgown due to the end result of hopefulness in the short story. Green has frequently been considered a color for both hope and life, which certainly fit the story's theme.

* We get a very brief look about her feelings about the destruction of the Resurgence that I would like to eventually go deeper into, as well as her initial coping mechanism after the destruction of Alderaan.

* The Duros captain Hol Land is named after Lawrence Holland, one of the creators of the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series.

* The Rendili-made Courier is the same make as Darth Maul's ship from Episode I. It was mentioned in the original Dawn of Defiance adventure modules that main villain Inquisitor Valin Draco had one of the ships. Galen and the strike team must have taken it out of the hangar while escaping.

PART II

* Galen's thought about Alexis hanging half out of her cockpit was taken from an image of a British tank commander whose tank was knocked out during Operation Market Garden, leaving his body in a similar position.

* On a similar note, I took inspiration on the description of the damaged rear of the speeder from WWII planes.

* The idea of Alexis using the canopy of her speeder as a makeshift sled comes from the rural area tradition of taking an old car hood and making it into a sled.

* In the tradition of Star Wars weapons being kitbashed versions of real weapons, I described Alexis' discarded blaster rifle to look like a British STEN submachine gun, the predecessor to the Sterlings that were used to make the E-11 props.

* As Kahara mentioned, woman that Galen contacts and meets with is Jan Ors, from the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight series. Other than being a large fan and wanting to reference yet another favorite game series of mine, I wanted to show that Galen and Anya are indeed willing to do whatever they can to free their daughter.

* The black-plated protocol droid mentioned in the same scene was Switch, a character from early on in the Dawn of Defiance adventures that led me to create Galen and Anya. The favor is owed to all members of the group that helped the droid set up his information brokerage.

 

Wowowow.

It was wonderful to revisit the Hoth scene from Survival Instinct from a different POV, and most importantly it was moving and touching to meet again with Galen and Anya twenty years after Recovering Home. I loved how you made them more poised, more mature, and, well, parents, while keeping the essential traits of their personalities (and Galen's *brown* beard was a nice touch!)

Another tidbit I loved is how you "namedrop" Legends characters in this story. I had this sense that the woman who appears at the end may be someone I know, but I wasn't sure until she named Kyle.

(Oh, and your endnotes are very helpful. I saw that you continued doing them in your recent stories, and it's a great idea.)

 

After writing Survival Instinct, the ending never completely sat right with me. At the end, Alexis is captured and likely presumed dead by the Alliance as a whole. Well, what would her parents think when they heard the news? If they're anything like my mother, they'd drop all that they could to go see for themselves (my mom apparently nearly had to be physically restrained by my stepfather at the time when a tornado warning hit an area where I was at a Boy Scout camp. Otherwise, she'd have driving all the way there.) That's why I decided to write this. As for Galen's hair color, it was only black in Recovering Home due to dyeing it for the Coruscant mission, so of course I'd have it back to its natural pigmentation here. Twenty years can do a lot to change a person, especially when the majority of it has been spent at war. I wanted to show that with them.

I absolutely love continuity nods, and I try to stick them in whenever I logically can. I especially like to drop characters that aren't often seen in fan fiction, or even in the officially licensed stuff, in the case of Keyan Farlander.[/quote]

They are almost needed, especially when I get really reference happy.

Thanks again, for reading and leaving a review!