ONE
They'd been on Echo Base for about two weeks, and Han Solo was still not sure whether he wanted to kill the Princess or whether he was starting to like her.
She was, he had to admit, a hard worker. While he was sceptical of royalty both by nature and by profession, the little Alderaani Princess had surprised him with her nerve, her sense, and her particular brand of blithely cutting efficiency. Hell, if she'd been born somewhere else, as someone else – perhaps as a particularly hot-tempered scavenger's daughter in a muddy hut on some godforsaken planet on the other side of the galaxy – he'd have gladly invited her aboard the Falcon for a spin, maybe more. But that was neither here nor there.
Nonetheless, Han thought as he, hands in pockets, surveyed the mess area, the Falcon could've been fixed days ago, and by this point he was just stalling.
She wasn't there, again.
And he went on with his day, again, until late at night, again, he made his final stroll around the base before bed. This time he decided, on a whim, to drop by the observation platform – the Hothian skies were vast and dark after the setting of the frigid sun, and to Han, slightly claustrophobic after weeks on land, they were a comfort.
For once, he saw her before he heard her, a small, white-clad and white-faced figure sitting at a metal table with three pilots, their heads close together. Their voices were low, and he could not quite understand their murmurings – it was all, he thought, very interesting, and not an opportunity to waste.
He hung back quietly, unnoticed, until finally, the three young men said their goodbyes and left her alone. Leia, too, rose, but Han was quicker.
He strolled toward her, and she looked perplexed as he fell down into one of the vacant chairs and propped his feet up on the table.
"Your worship," he drawled. "Fancy catchin' you at last. I've been trying for the past week."
She sat down again, which surprised him, and crossed her arms.
"And why would you try to 'catch' me, Captain Solo? You know where I normally perform my work."
He was sure nobody else in the galaxy talked as properly as she did, and it drove him crazy in a number of different ways.
"Yeah, yeah. You don't normally eat with the commoners, though, do you, sweetheart?"
He grinned when she didn't respond. He enjoyed winding her up – felt, vaguely and instinctively, that she perhaps liked it too.
"'Cept your three new boyfriends. I guess one flyboy isn't quite like the other, after all. Where'd you pick those up, anyway? Pretty puny, aren't they? You could do better- "
"Alderaan."
She said it so rapidly, so uncharacteristically quietly, that he couldn't understand at first.
"Huh?"
"I picked them up on Alderaan."
If he'd expected anything, that was not it. His chair rocked forward rather too violently, and he lowered his legs to regain his balance. Finding himself face-to-face with her, his bravura melted somewhat. Han coughed.
"Right. Yeah. I guess you're their Princess, huh?"
"Queen."
He had to lean forward to hear her properly, but that word, he caught.
"Queen. My mother was Queen before me."
"She died when -?"
"Yes, she died when."
Her intense, brown eyes rested on his face, insistently and restlessly, as her fingers peeled off one white glove. The hand they revealed was pale and smooth and, he noticed with some interest, it trembled.
"We're trying to find out how many of us there are. Alderaanis. Where were you born?"
"Corellia." he found himself responding. It was the first time, he thought, that she'd taken him entirely seriously – and it was unsettling.
She nodded. "I've been there. Leafy. Green. Lots and lots of trees."
He smiled at her and – wonder of wonders – she smiled back. He might not be sure he liked her, he thought, but he sure liked that smile.
"Yeah. That's what it's like."
"There were about two billion of us. That's what my mother said, and she would have had reason to know. My estimate currently, based on what I know and what these three men know, is that a few thousand of us survived. Perhaps more. We are compiling a list of those we know worked on different planets, or who, like me, might have been travelling at the time of the disaster."
Her pale, small fingers fumbled in her back pocket, and she fished out a couple of grimy, folded pages. Smoothing them with her wrist, she pushed them toward him.
"This is what I have so far."
Han leaned in. His eyesight was better than perfect, usually, but he had to strain to make out the names, scribbled in a neat but tiny handwriting, that crowded the pages. Some had question marks. Some were struck out.
He whistled between his teeth.
"Those three you saw, they came to me, and they're not the only ones. Our planet is gone – our cities, our history, our food, our clothes, our families. We're all that's left."
She was a girl of white steel, like twice-frozen snow, but Gods, she was young, as well, to bear a burden like this. It certainly put his own debt to Jabba the Hutt into some perspective – and somewould say he bore that relatively minor burden pretty lightly, anyway.
"And thus - "
She was probably the only person alive who used the word "thus".
"- I've been trying to collect information during my off-hours, so, when the war is won, the galaxy shan't forget there was once a place called Alderaan."
That was the first moment Han Solo believed the war could be won and would be won, and he glimpsed, for just an instant, the reason why men old enough to be her grandfather listened to her. She was a royal, true, but it wasn't enough; barely-grown princesses of destroyed planets did not usually wield a great deal of influence. Leia was listened to because she was Leia Organa, Princess-maybe-Queen of Alderaan, specifically that princess, that barely-grown girl, with stone in her eyes and steel in her heart.
"Sweetheart," he said, and for once, it was not meant to irritate her – not really.
"Nobody could forget there was a place called Alderaan once."
She searched his face for mockery and found none.
"I hope I never forget." Leia responded quietly.
Her precious sheets of paper were still in front of him and, for lack of an inspirational response of some sort, Han scanned the list of unknown names. Halfway the page, two Organa names were neatly written down. Both were struck out.
His chest felt heavy all of a sudden, and she noticed where he was looking.
"I never had any real hope, of course," she said in her low, clear voice.
"I knew they'd go down with her. But I had to know for sure."
Han nodded, and when she rose to her feet and beckoned him to the window, he joined her without thinking.
"Where's Corellia? Can you see it from here?"
As a matter of fact, he could and, narrowing his eyes, he pointed his finger at a blurry but familiar speck in the sky.
"There. There she is. Haven't been there in years, but there she is."
And suddenly it meant something that she was there. He'd never cared all that much for the rock that had given him life, even if it was green and fresh and rather, he guessed, beautiful, but at this singular moment in time, it meant something that she was there, like he could reach out and touch her.
She, too, pointed.
"That's where Alderaan was, but you'd know that. She was snow white and surprisingly bright from afar, but green and blue as you came closer. There was one particular lake - "
Her voice stalled, and Han rested a heavy hand on her shoulder.
"Yeah. I bet there was, kid."
They stood for a moment, and the moment passed. Leia smiled, blinked twice, then turned toward him.
"I guess all I'm saying, flyboy, is that she was mine."