Title: Imitation of Life
Author: Syntyche
Contact: PG-13. A little gory violence, a little language, a lot of Corellian angst.
Feedback: will be cherished and adored. Please let me know you're reading the story, even if you hate it. Feedback is definitely an inducement to getting authors to post their work; writing is a labor of love, but who wants to share it with an unenthusiastic audience?
Disclaimer: Star Wars belongs to George Lucas, 21st Century Fox, and anyone else with legal claim to it. I am not making any money from this story.
Synopsis: Post RotJ, Han wakes up in Jabba's palace, but nothing is as he remembers it.
Dedication: to Darth Culf, feedback-sender extraordinaire, who has simply amazed me with unflagging reviews, and who shares my adoration for Han Solo and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Enjoy, Culf – I hope it is worth the wait. I'm sure you'll let me know. gThanks for all your efforts:-D
Imitation of Life
By: Syntyche
'This lightning storm, this tidal wave, this avalanche, I'm not afraid … 'Part One: Tatooine
What had been dark for so long suddenly became light. A bright, harsh light that hurt his eyes and struck at his mind. He remembered that he ought to close his eyelids, but realized belatedly they were already shut, squeezed tightly against the frightening reality that was his world, and now had been his world for a very long time. Longer, certainly, than mere days, but the minutes had ticked by in a slowness so deliberate and agonizing that soon after his encasement in carbonite, he had given up trying to keep track of anything but fighting down the swell of panic that threatened to engulf him in hysterical, futile struggles against his metal coffin when he tried to draw a breath and failed.
Try it. Stop breathing for a moment. Resist, if you can, the urge to breathe. How long can you hold on without taking a breath? He didn't have the option of continuing to breathe; he simply hung, suspended, between one breath and the next, eternally waiting for the life-giving oxygen that was being denied him. He was more dead than alive.
He had been carbonfrozen in the midst of a silent cry of pain, his breath choked off as his body was flash-frozen and immediately immersed in scalding molten metal, which had hardened around him even as he raised his hands in tortured protest.
Panic started to play about the edges of his thought again, and he quickly shut down the memory and returned his concentration to trying not to indulge in the vain, terrifying sensation of attempting to draw his next breath. Han Solo had realized that this inability to breathe would soon bring him near the breaking point of insanity, and sent another silent entreaty to follow the hundreds, perhaps thousands, that had gone before it: Please come get me! Please!
The addition of the final please was new to the last few times he'd uttered the plea; it had been, he was sure, a very long time since his arrival on Tatooine – his mind, still functioning, assumed that was where he was, but as he was no longer in possession of any of his six senses, he had no way of verifying it – and Han, never having much faith in people's ability to remember or care for him, was beginning to doubt his friends were coming for him at all.
But Chewie, Chewie had to come, didn't he? Yeah, Chewie would .… if he could. Had Luke been able to survive Vader's snare on Cloud City? Lando …. ? Han mentally shook his head in disgust. How could he have been duped so easily into believing Lando had forgiven past debts? And what about Leia? She was in his every thought; she was his sanity. How he longed to hear her voice again, to see her girlish smile, and even be on the receiving end of one of her angry diatribes. But …. doubt was beginning to seep into the imprisoned Corellian's mind. Maybe she was free, but hadn't come because she didn't want to. Maybe she remembered as he did, bitterly, that he had failed her that last day in Cloud City.
Han would have dropped his head in shame if his carbonite sarcophagus hadn't held him immobile. He released a mental sigh of despair. Perhaps he'd lied to Chewie. Perhaps there wouldn't be another time.
Grief welled in him, his lungs tightened with the thought of never seeing Leia again, and he was re-emerged in the battle not to draw breath.
He couldn't even cry new tears to replace the ones frozen in the corners of his eyes.
But now … light was searing into his world. He had almost forgotten what it was, and now it was reaching bright fingers against his tightly closed eyelids, hammering into his head, and the world was suddenly frighteningly cold as the metal slicked off his damp body, releasing him from his coffin and delivering him into a freedom he couldn't remember and didn't know what to do with. Han Solo was scared, scared of the way he had no control over his body as it fell to the floor, scared when, for a few moments, his body remembered without him the lesson he had tried to teach it so well, and refused to breathe.
Breathe, Solo! C'mon, breathe, damn it! he begged, please!
Silence answered his plea until a harsh grating filled his ears, and it was a long, terrifying moment before he realized the sound was emanating from him: it was his body slowly trying to breathe. Please! he urged silently. His body began shivering uncontrollably, from fear as much as his system struggling to return to normal function. He began coughing, the harsh hacking of trying to dispel remnants of flaked metal from his lungs.
Hands were on him now, feeling, probing through his sweat-dampened shirt and contacting painfully with bruises that had refused to heal. The last hands he remembered touching him were the fierce gripping paws of Lando's ugnaught helpers and he was afraid of what was happening to him again, but his body resisted his mind's cry to struggle and he could only continue to shiver terribly and wait for the owner of the hands to identify itself in some way. Somewhere in his terror he realized that his eyes were no longer clenched shut, and he still couldn't see. New panic surged over him, and he could hear the questions tumbling from his mouth, barely registering the rasping replies of his "rescuer." The thought that Jabba may have thawed him only to torment him anew flashed across his mind, and he reached for the other being desperately.
The great Han Solo's voice was small and scared, and faltered as he asked, "Who are you?"
His thoughts were so chaotic he wasn't sure if he'd asked the question in Corellian, Tillian, Basic, or any of the dozens of other languages he'd learned over the years, but he was rewarded with a reply that made him question whether or not he had finally gone insane from waiting for a rescue that wasn't really going to come.
"Someone who loves you," the new voice said softly, and Han could hardly believe his ears, could hardly think this wasn't some cruel joke. Leia!
"Leia," he breathed her name as if he'd despaired ever speaking it again. Then, more urgently, "Leia, I can't see."
"Shh," she shushed gently, soothing into place his tousled hair with a reassuring hand. "I've got something for your eyes. How do you feel?"
Better, now that you're here, sounded entirely too cliché. Han laughed shakily, his body still twitching spasmodically from the effects of the carbonite, and he leaned slowly into the gentle confines of Leia's arms. "Terrible, sweetheart," he admitted.
"Here. This should help, and it'll help your eyes." There was a whisper of rustling fabric and then a hypo stabbed his arm where Leia had pushed the sleeve up. Han frowned at the roughness of the injection, but made no complaint. He was content merely to be breathing. "I've got to get you out of here," she continued, moving her hands under his arms and helping him to stand upright. He nearly passed out from the wave of dizziness that rushed over him, but clung grimly to consciousness and reminded himself to breathe – to breathe, he could breathe again, and that was reason enough to keep moving. Jabba certainly hadn't taken any pains to have him released from his private prison – who knew if the big slug had enjoyed his new trophy so much, he wouldn't pay to have him encased again?
Han had no intention of finding out, and would have been perfectly satisfied never to know, but at that moment a curtain was swept aside from the far end of the room, and Han could hear laughing. One particular laugh rose above the others: Jabba.
"I know that laugh," he breathed miserably. The laughter was harsh and mocking, filling him with despair. He reached out to where Leia had been just a minute ago, to protect her if he could ….
Until she began to laugh, too.