While I was fighting Jabba's guards to save my friends on Tatooine one image kept me centered. Just one mental picture to focus my thoughts and allow me to do what I needed to. A dark haired man standing in the middle of our quarters, wearing blue boxer-briefs and the orange sweater I'd made him. Orange like the flight-suit he was wearing the very first time I saw him. Wedge Antilles, Red Leader, and my lover since Yavin 4.

I said good-bye to those same friends before I flew to Dagodah to complete what Master Yoda and I had started. As I put on my own flight-suit I asked Leia to tell Wedge I'd be back. She smiled and nodded, then gave Han a look that told me she understood. In the quiet of space I could see him above me, still wearing that orange sweater. In my mind I was there on my knees, pouring all my love and longing into pleasuring him. In a flash of remembrance I could taste him on my tongue, hear my name whispered sweetly and feel his hand stroking my hair. And later lying in his arms lost in my own ecstasy, brought there by his hands, his touch. These are the memories that made it easier to face Yoda and Ben and what they told me. Things I knew already but couldn’t accept until then.

Leia was the first to embrace me when I walked unannounced into the briefing. Han joined her and clasped my hand warmly. But it was his dark eyes watching me from across the room that I was thinking about. Wedge, serious and handsome in his orange flight-suit, with his thin lips drawn tight as he contemplated the battle ahead of him. I caught his eye and our only exchange then was a smile.

After going over the mission plans with Han, after standing alone on the observation deck watching the stars go by the ship, and after working up the courage to ask some X-Wing pilot where his room was, I went to him. No one answered my knock so I opened the door with a nudge of the Force. He was lying in his bunk, drifting just on the edge of sleep with a datapad falling out of his hand, and he was wearing that orange sweater and blue boxer-briefs. Everything that I was shattered and reformed in the second it took to cross the room and bury myself in him. He woke with a start and wrapped himself around me. I told him everything. About Yoda, about Ben, about Leia, about having to face Vader. It all poured out and he just kissed it away. Why him? How is it I could tell Wedge everything I couldn't tell Leia or Han or even Ben's ghost. For all that Wedge is an important part of the Alliance, one of he best and brightest parts in fact, he is still removed from my problems. He’s not my sister, or my sister's lover, he never knew Ben, and the only contact he's had with Vader was nearly being killed by him when we flew against the first Death Star. He is separate from all this, but he loves me anyway.

And that night, our fates looming before us, we made love like dying men. Hard, urgent, cleansing love. He laid me on top of that sweater and fucked me until I stopped thinking about Vader or Leia or Ben or Yoda or anything outside of that room, that moment. None of it mattered while Wedge plunged inside me; nothing existed but the scent of him and a fire in those beautiful dark eyes. I nearly died when he pulled out to turn me over and dived in again with increased need. The sweater below me was soft like a lover on my face and like a lover it held me while the man on top of me poured all of his fears and needs into me. The sweater and Wedge both holding me. And as Wedge whispered "I love you"s over and over in my ear and came inside me I came into the bed and cried out his name into the sweater. The sweater I'd made him while sitting in the swamp of Dagodah wondering if I'd ever become a Jedi. The sweater I had dyed the same exact color as a flight-suit. Because Wedge looks so damn good in orange.

Now I'm standing with shackles on my wrists waiting to confront my father. Waiting to find out if I'm right. And there is only one image that is making this cold detachment, this calm I'm showing the Imperials, at all possible. And that image is Wedge getting ready for the day telling me he loves me, telling me to be careful, making me promise not to do anything crazy, a promise I'm breaking right now. But most of all, the image that holds me is that of my beloved Wedge trying to get his flight-suit on while wearing that orange sweater.

Finis

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