AN: Hello! We're back with another Earth AU that no one asked for. This story is ultimately about love and triumph, but it deals with some dark parts of humanity: namely the Holocaust. Consider this your content warning: there's some dark things ahead. I hope, if you choose to read, that you think I've treated these characters and history with the respect they deserve.

1939

Germany invaded Poland in September. It took nearly a month for the tendrils of the military to spread throughout the surrounding countryside, and Han Alleine watched with his neighbors as they marched into the village on a rainy morning.

Nothing was changing, they insisted. It was to improve things. What things there were that needed improvement, no one ever said.

So they tried to exist as if everything was normal. Han was a bricklayer, and he continued stacking chimneys and building paths.

One day he was approached by a man in a dark blue coat with pins and patches all across the chest. The man insisted that Han come to the edge of town the next morning. The Fatherland needed his skills for a special project for which he'd be rewarded handsomely, if he agreed.

At the appointed time, he arrived. Several other men, all bricklayers or skilled builders, were gathered there as well. A truck came by and they climbed inside.

A short drive through the forest led them to wall of barbed wire. More uniformed men let the truck through the gates. Another layer of barbed wire. Guards with guns and vicious dogs on short chains roved the area between the fences. Finally, the truck jolted to a stop and the men jumped down, being led across the camp by the same man that had gathered them up the day before.

Their eyes all fell on the skeletal figures in the distance, all clad in striped uniforms, carrying shovels and other digging implements toward a massive pit near the fenceline.

Han's stomach roiled.

It wasn't his problem, though. Nothing he could do to stop it.

The builders were led to a wide, empty area.

"We're building a gas chamber. We've got the plans and the materials, we just need your labor."

No one had to ask what it was for. They knew the rumors. He couldn't ignore the knot in his stomach anymore. He hadn't vomited since childhood, but he was determined to remain calm.

Han didn't hear anything else that was said. He followed at the back of the group, taking slow breaths and trying to ignore the smell. At the end of their little tour, they were walked back through one of the buildings at the first layer of fencing. A secretary took their information one by one.

Through an open doorway, he saw a room full of women with shaven heads sitting at desks, carefully writing. A guard roved between the rows, and he watched as the guard's hand wandered over a few of the women, who could do nothing but allow it.

After giving his name to the secretary, they loaded into the truck for the ride back to town.

As they were pulling away, he saw a group of ghost-like children playing in the dirt near the edge of the fence.

Bile rose before he could hope to control it; he vomited over the back of the truck.

There was nothing he could do to stop them, but he'd be damned before he helped those bastards. Han did not appear for work the next morning, nor any morning after.

00

He met her the day of his first resistance operation. It had been mysterious: instructions passed in code, a munitions drop in an abandoned barn on the outskirts of town, meeting up with an unnamed operative just after dusk to place the dynamite on the tracks and hide in the bushes to see that it went undisturbed until the 11:35 troop train passed on its way to one of the camps.

He'd almost not believed that she was an operative—a tiny whip of a thing, gaunt, almost skeletal in appearance. There was a gray shadow around her face that he wasn't completely sure was simply from the cover of nightfall. They'd hardly spoken beyond the passphrases that identified themselves to the other. She'd seemed physically weak—he'd carried the dynamite during the 1.5 mile hike to the tracks because she already appeared to be collapsing under the weight of her own slight form. Still, her mental strength had vastly accommodated for it; when they'd pressed the detonator, she'd watched the sky light up from their hiding place.

Nazis, he reminded himself. Nazis on their way to torture and kill. The idea of taking so many lives still didn't sit well with him, but she looked…. Not pleased. Vindicated, perhaps.

"Your next instructions will come in a few days," she murmured to him before slipping into the darkness of the forest. Truth be told, he wasn't sure she wasn't a ghost.

It had gone on like that for a few weeks, receiving instructions tucked into his loaf of bread from the baker. Sometimes it was another sabotage mission, other times it was as a guide, moving refugees from one place to another in the cover of complete darkness and eerie silence. Sometimes she was there. Other times it was someone else or he acted alone.

Finally after a month of proving his usefulness, he'd been allowed to join in a planning meeting. The directions brought him to the back room of one of the shops downtown. After slipping in the backdoor, he found the secret entrance concealed beneath the rug and knocked on the little door at the end of the rickety stairs. Passphrases were exchanged, and he was in.

A room with earth for walls, ceiling and floor, the only light coming from a tiny kerosene lamp. A root cellar beneath the building, repurposed for top secret meetings.

In the flickering light he could hardly make out his own hands in front of his face, much less the faces of those around him. It was better that way: better that he not recognize the others, better that they not recognize him. Plausible deniability on every front.

A female voice with the code name 'Phantom' led the meeting, describing their next several targets in a whisper. Ideas were shared, possible hiding places and new sources of supplies. The number of refugees they hoped to traffic through the area. Many POW's were on the list, he realized, coming from the camp 20 miles north. Heroes.

They left one by one at the end of the meeting so as not to draw suspicion. He caught a glimpse of her face in the light as she held the lamp aloft so others could climb the stairs in relative safety. Her. The skeletal woman from his first mission. The leader of their pod, a woman who looked like death walking.

She'd gained some strength since then, able to stand straight and tall without a hint of wavering in her posture. She'd looked at him with brown eyes that were sunken into their sockets.

"You've proved yourself. Welcome to the resistance," she murmured as she pointed him up the staircase.

The next months carried on like that—meetings, missions, refugees, trying to live in the light like a good citizen of an occupied territory—keeping his head down, accepting his meagre rations without complaint, never catching the eyes of the blue uniforms that patrolled the town, living in the darkness like the rebel he was becoming.

A few more missions passed with the Phantom. He began to recognize her shadow in the starlight, began to notice how it changed from skeletal to simply bony and underfed. Everyone was bony and underfed these days.

Like a ghost, she'd slip out of the shadows at their prescribed meeting time. When the mission was complete, she'd vanish into the fog, a figment of his imagination. She haunted his mind too, visiting his dreams quietly in the night as he slept or in the empty hours of the day as he let his thoughts wander.

He never saw her in town. He assumed she lived in the root cellar, her face too recognizable for it to be safe living out in the open. He'd leave a bit of something—a chunk of bread, a piece of cheese, anything he could spare—on the makeshift table after the meetings. Rations were few and far between, meaning meals were often made of watery soup with a few chunks of potato or cabbage swimming in the tasteless broth. Still, he had only himself to feed. He could spare a mouthful here and there.

Eventually, after feeling certain that another member of the group was snatching it before she could, Han started pressing it into her hand or jacket pocket on his way out. She'd never reply verbally, keeping it a silent thing between only them. But she'd let her hand linger in his or meet his eyes for a long moment to show that it was appreciated, even if she couldn't utter the words.

The topic of food came up during one of their meetings. One of the operatives complained about the lack of food. His home was a stop on the escape route and he always had extra mouths to feed. 'I swear, they feed them better in the camps.'

She grew immediately solemn, yanking her long sleeve up over her elbow, baring her forearm to the lamplight. Five black numbers etched into her ashen skin. She'd been in a camp.

If he hadn't respected her before, he did now. It was beyond respect: awe, compassion, unadulterated admiration.

Her appearance made sense: the hallows around her eyes, her slip of a figure, the days at the beginning when it seemed she couldn't lift even her own legs. The way everyone accepted her word as law, gospel. She knew what it was like in there.

The complaining member mumbled an apology and Han passed him an extra ration card.

He learned her name on their next mission: Leia. He told her his: Han. He did not mention the tattoo.

They were together on every mission from then on, falling into such an easy rhythm that it hardly seemed dangerous anymore. It was just a simple foray in the countryside, as if everyone carried a woman and a few dozen dynamite charges on their bicycle through the woods at midnight. The ease with which Leia faced death… it made sense now. Those camps made one look death square in the eyes, and now that she'd done that and won, Han assumed that there was little she feared anymore.