This is my first ever Star Wars fic – I've been a fan of the movies for years, but have just started venturing into the EU, so please do point out any errors or omissions. Hope you enjoy this!

A Rainbow Shell, or Three Times Wedge Antilles Said 'I Love You' (And Many Times He Didn't)

My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me

Christina Rossetti

*

They don't throw their emotions about, Corellians. They bluster and mock, and hide their hurt in casual sarcasm and languid smiles. Sometimes, Wedge wishes he were an earnest Alderaanian, cursed and sombre, heavy with shadow, compelled to share every final thought, to sit friends down and explain one's feelings with cringing honesty. Other times, Wedge is glad he lives with the uncertainty, trusting that his friends and lovers and the meagre remains of his family realise what he cannot say.

He is old too fast, hardened too soon, as they strafe the surface of the Death Star. He sees Porkins evaporate in a blizzard of white sparks, and feels the deadly pulse behind him as a Y-wing explodes. His fingers work coldly, skating across the controls, his eyes unblinking, these ardent, glorious deaths registering vaguely behind his one great mantra, the trench.

The impact, when the TIE's laser grazes his right wing, shakes him from his automatic, unfeeling focus. He pulls from the trench with electric flames streaming across his power converters and shaky apologies spilling from his heart, and the speckled night swallows him. It seems oddly peaceful, Yavin, gigantic, marbled, dwarfing this mechanical monster. He is trembling, his hair plastered to his brow, his helmet chafing his jaw, and the silence around him is frightening. Dodonna calls Luke frantically, but the comms are dead. Static would be better. The sky is littered with fragments, shadows of explosions, and Wedge watches Biggs vanish, and realises that Red Squadron is dead.

From the monotony and insignificance of life on the station, bickering with his sister, sulking through his teenage years, he's transformed into some cynical veteran, and he can barely remember home. The lush forests of Yavin IV, and the stony caves and hidden seas of previous, dangerous bases – they've been home for him too long, with their basic rations and the smell of fuel tinging the air. And everywhere, through risky evacuations and flashing dogfights and the onset of dread and hopelessness, home has been Jek, and Biggs, Dreis. Rue. Late night sabacc games and shared secrets, and eroded privacies. Names and empty bays and debris floating across space. He wants to shout his love into the silence, break down with childish thanks and mournful farewells. He's loved them all, their ways and crackled voices, and as the new kid pulls up and the Falcon beams blue across his vision, and the Death Star collapses, he realises there is no one left to hear his confessions of love.

Years later, greying and wise, the pips on his shoulders crowding each other, he still cannot bring himself to tell his pilots, steeling themselves for death with earnest, youthful faces, climbing their ladders into their graves, that he loves them. He's still Corellian, after all these years. He still fears the word.

*

But there are those who coax it from him. TIEs come screeching from nothing, with green lasers pulsing, and Hoth is dead and imposing below, as the Rogues swarm through the pack, the anxiety of the ground assault still quaking in their bones.

'You've got two on your tail, Hobbie,' Wes barks over the comms, and spirals through space, his lasers blistering the darkness. They scamper and flit, flashing green and red, and two TIEs collide in a scorching apocalypse.

'Nice one, Rogue Four.'

'My pleasure,' Ten Numb crackles. Wedge searches for the gap they need to jump to hyperspace, but the sky is choked with Imps.

'No heroics, boys,' he says shortly. 'Evasive action. Let's get the hell outta here.'

He dips, his stomach jumping, after an Interceptor chasing Dix Rivan, his R2 squealing indignantly. It's only when Dix shakes him off, swooping beneath and aiming a fatal blast at the underside, that Wedge realises he's uncovered, two TIEs weaving behind him, green lights streaming past him.

'Watch out, Wedge,' Hobbie shouts, ducking laser blasts in the distant sky.

'I know, Hobbie,' Wedge snaps, boosting his rear deflectors and diving back towards Hoth. 'Little help, guys?'

'I'm clear to make the jump,' Santage says, and Wedge, tension in his voice, and the TIEs looming behind him, clears three Rogues to enter hyperspace.

'I'm on them, Wedge,' Wes says, his voice familiar and assured, and his T-65 screams past Wedge, cannons blazing. The explosions, when they come, one, two, are spectacular, and reverberate in Wedge's eyeballs as he and Wes peel away from the cataclysm.

'I bloody love you, Janson,' Wedge says shakily, and Wes laughs nastily. As the stars stretch and his heart lurches with the stress of lightspeed, he knows he's going to regret that last comment.

Sure enough, when they rendezvous on Home One, they sit around in the cantina with forced cheer, trying not to miss the icy panoramas of Echo Base, the fog of tauntaun breath and careful steps down slippery, snowy corridors.

Wes clutches a flask of Eyeblaster protectively, and stands up, swaying slightly.

'Well, my friends,' he announces slyly. 'I have good news.'

Wedge has a horrible feeling he knows exactly what's coming, and takes a defensive slug of retsa, his eyes watering.

'Today, in the heat of battle, in the midst of our gallant retreat…our esteemed commander proclaimed his love for me.'

There is raucous laughter, and hooting, to cover up the sting of defeat and the memory of Dack and the others frozen in their mangled T-47s. Wedge blushes.

'Never knew you had it in you,' Hobbie giggles into his flask. Wedge shakes his head mutely, mouthing angrily at Wes.

'Do you deny it, fair sir?' Wes mimes distress, clutching at his heart. 'You wound me, Antilles.'

'Course I don't deny it,' Wedge says boldly, and before he starts thinking of death and blasted snow, he pulls Wes down to him and kisses him soundly on the lips, a humdinger of a kiss, lips smacking and Wes' eyebrows raised in shock.

He releases the black-haired boy, winks at the rest of the squadron, sitting there with their mouths open, and departs composedly, murmuring 'excuse me, gentlemen', as he stalks out briskly into white corridors, his teeth still aching from their clash with his wingman's.

He's alive, after all, and too many goodbyes come too late these days, and if his men laugh a minute longer before remembering their comrades back at Echo Base, he's glad. And if Wes feels the friendship and safety in his embrace, and realises this, this is loyalty, he's glad, too.

*

The straggling few regroup on the Home One, their scorched little ships pulled gently into the belly of the cruiser. There are crowds gathering around the bay, mobbing the pilots leaping from their cockpits, patting their backs and pouring the relief of years into their embraces. Lando and Nien emerge from the Falcon's hatch, into a sea of joy.

Wedge pauses in the cockpit of his X-Wing, his visor fogging. The sounds come as though underwater – laughter and abandon and the echo of that final fireball. He knows this cocoon so well, and his fingers hesitate on the dash, caressing the shield generator, the S-foil actuator, the power displays. The astromech port is black now, his R2 dragged from its cradle by the grateful techs. Every inch of this titanium coffin is embedded in his skin, the deep, charred gash across the snub nose, the nicks and scratches in the top left cannon. They are scarred, he and she, this faithful vessel, and this ordinary man, sweating and aching in his faded orange jumpsuit.

He wraps his right hand slowly around the trigger, the handle familiar in his grasp. Lando's face – so perfect for this jubilant audience, all pleasing smiles and heroic words and charm and bravado – appears to his left, and the General motions to the crowd, and Wedge feels suddenly cramped and trapped inside the T-65.

He releases the trigger, and whispers into the muffled dark of the cockpit, 'I love you', and feels only slightly stupid for talking to his ship. He pops the hatch, and the air and the sounds of victory flood his sanctuary, and anxious hands reach for him. As he descends the ladder, eye-to-eye with blast marks from years back, popped rivets and faded paint, he realises the wonder of it: a fragile, tiny compound of flawed flesh and aging metal, facing down the wrath of centuries with only thoughts of revenge and liberty, and a few measly proton torpedoes, to fuel it.

*

It spills so easily from his lips, with her caught in his arms, wide-eyed and beautiful, and for the first time with her, he feels in control.

'I love you. I'm not going to meekly walk away.'

In the heartbeat before he kisses her, he feels fear – nothing like the sweat and adrenalin of Endor, the pain and loneliness of imprisonment on Eiattu – it's a creeping, cold fear, as though he's frightened of being without her. Of being unloved. He's naked, without his helmet and his insignia and his trigger primed beneath his thumb, and this woman, this goddess, has the power to destroy worlds with her lips, and with those eyes.

And when she kisses him back, when her fingers tangle in the hair at the back of his head and her nose brushes his, he feels breathless, like that empty, hollow moment, shooting from the chasing flames and collapsing innards of the Death Star into airy nothingness.

He drinks her in, the invention of wild futures, and dares to dream as he lifts her tunic over her head, kissing her collarbone.

'I love you,' he whispers again, as she presses her body against his, swallowing the weight of years, of deaths mourned and remembered, of girls forgotten and regretted. This time, she echoes him in quiet gasps, and he barely thinks of Wes, hidden outside, or of the spectres trooping across his nightmares.

By nature, he's practical, uncomplicated, carefully assessing the problem at hand and responding in the most efficient manner. It's what's kept him alive, and burdened him with guilt, but with Iella's head nestled on his chest, and her hair tickling his chin, he begins to reach beyond the moment, to plan the years, and knows he'll never regret this rash, impulsive declaration of love. It's never been truer. Ships and friends, planets and ghosts: his love finds a home here, in Iella's cramped quarters, on a shabby sofa, a shy smile dancing in her eyes and a beacon in his future.