Leia didn't remind him of Qi'ra until Hoth. It had taken her raising up the wrench in her small fist as if she'd beat him with it, the way she bit her lip when she tried to turn the damaged gear, that tiny pause, shorter than a breath, before she shrugged him away to see the resemblance to the girl he'd once loved and the woman she'd become. Qi'ra eyes were grey, the grey of the dirty streets of Corellia and the dirty shadows they'd drawn around them, and Leia's were brown like the wing-feathers of a dunnock, but they shared an expression, an intelligence that would always be beyond him. And they both had long, dark lashes they would drop when they didn't trust him to look. Leia sounded like Qi'ra at night, when she woke from a nightmare with a choking gasp and not a cry and his mind edged away from the questions of what they had both suffered, the answers he knew he didn't want. They were both so finely made, silk always a second skin, the silk he wanted to see in a gleaming puddle beside his scratched-up bunk.
On the trip to Bespin, Leia found the perfumed lazuli oil he'd bought for Qi'ra and never given her; how could he remember how it had never smelled on Qi'ra's throat, how it clung to her wrists and her hips, her slender waist? Leia had bathed with it and he was overcome with the most overwhelming lust- he had never wanted two women at once, never before, and he was ashamed to admit it, even though Lando would have laughed loud enough to bring down every bounty-hunter in the galaxy if he'd known, but Han did then, he wanted the past and the future. He wanted Leia to slap him and Qi'ra to shrug. They would both have understood and he didn't want that from either of them, an understanding that was too close to pity, to a milky-sweet compassion. He couldn't get it anyway.
Qi'ra was gone and Leia heard voices, whispers she said were from the Force, screams that were her memories. He married Leia and he never told her how he feared he'd see Qi'ra in the baby girl who was Ben's twin, who'd drawn only one breath but didn't open her eyes. If she knew, she didn't say, just looked down at the boy at her breast, who'd raised a small fist, and murmured a prayer in a dialect of Istibith Han had never learned, just as he'd never learned the hymns of Bela Vistal that Qi'ra hummed to herself when she couldn't sleep.
Leia curled up on her side when she slept, tucked against him the way Qi'ra had once been, though not because she wanted his body heat to keep from freezing in an alley-way, the way Qi'ra had. The curve of her bare shoulder was the same, fit in his hand the same way, but Qi'ra hadn't ever looked at him so solemnly when she woke and she never wept when she came, his name cried out Han han han, swallowed with the taste of salt and t'iil nectar licked from her lips.