Disclaimer: All of it is George's.
A/N: Han was harder to write than I thought he would be, but since I always kinda planned on writing a companion piece to Fact I felt I had to do this. Anyway, Han POV, stream of thought, trip to Bespin. Read, enjoy, let me know what you think.
He has learned to how avoid attachments.
If there is one thing Han Solo prides himself on (and there's more, of course, but even he can be hypothetical) it is that, the ability to completely avoid commitment, a skill he has perfected in his many years. He sticks to what he knows: Chewie, the Falcon, money. Yet somehow she has slipped into this, his routine, his space, and she refuses to leave no matter how terrible he behaves, how many crude jokes he makes, how much he wills her to go away. She sleeps besides him for the sixth night in a row (she's stopped leaving in the pre-waking hours. Not that he cares whether she stays or not. Because he doesn't.), and for the fourth night in a row he lies awake, listening to her breathing, stealing glances at her in the dark.
He has spent the better part of his life avoiding, destroying, escaping, attachments. Which is why he lies there staring, listening, wondering why exactly he went back for her.
He does not love her.
She is after all the bossiest, most stuck up, righteous woman he has ever had the misfortune of meeting. 'Not my type either' he tells himself as he watches her from the entrance of the cargo hold, which she has taken to cleaning for no real reason. She's petite, so tiny he thinks she could be lost easily if she didn't insist on constantly wearing white, making her stand out amongst the crowd she has chosen to surround herself with. Her hair is ridiculously long, bothersome; never lose except when he pulls it down. Her face is set with strong features, impossibly dark eyes that never smile. She is plain compared to the other women who have passed through Han's life.
Leia is an ideal, something intangible even he grabs hold of her and she says his name. Loving an ideal is a daunting task, even for him.
It's not his fault.
For all his suggestions he was not the one who initiated this turn in their 'relationship'. He remembers her standing in his cabin, removing his shirt. He didn't stop her, but was he supposed to? Had she been waiting for him to pull away and ask whether or not this was going to have any major ramifications? Somehow Han doubts this is up to him. He doesn't think it would be right to tell her to leave after everything that's happened.
It might ('does' a little voice inside his head say, the same little voice that still holds something that resembles a conscious) mean something.
It has been nine nights since he last slept.
Leia, he has come to learn through observation, is intimidating even in sleep.
She makes no noise except for the constant whoosh of her breathing. Her hands rest on her stomach, fingers flexing, always grasping for something she can't seem to get a hold of. If she rolls on her side, as she has tonight, and push her hair away from her neck, Han can vaguely make out the puncture marks left over from the Empire's interrogation droid. If the blankets slip off her back he can trace the five-digit code tattooed onto the small of her back. Both of these, like the blaster burn on her left side, and the bruise on her elbow, remind him that she is more than a stuck up princess, an untouchable ideal, she is a solider, always ready to go for her cause.
This frightens him more than he cares to admit.
Sometimes she looks at him with this look that says 'there's something I'm not saying'.
She wears this look a lot, has since he first met her, nothing out of the ordinary. She was, is, a politician after all. But she wears this look more often now and it begins to bug him, annoying him to the point where he wants to just grab her and demand she spill it. But that's not really an option since they're in the middle of nowhere, with only a limited amount of room and an even more limited list of activities to engage in and if she were to get up and stomp off he doesn't know if he could handle it (because, Han tells himself, he might die from the boredom that would ensue since he's not sure they've come far enough in their whatever it is to go after her and mumble sorry before asking again). So he simply doesn't ask, telling himself he has no real desire to know.
'Let her keep her secrets' he thinks when he catches Leia staring during dinner. Secret sharing after all is a form of trust. Trust leads to complications. 'And we don't need any more of those.'
He has always enjoyed the chase.
The rush of adrenaline, the surge of satisfaction that comes with each little victory, the triumph of conquering. It would be a lie to say this was not the case with her. But something went wrong, Han thinks as he finds himself thinking about this much more than he's use to. Somewhere down the line of small victories and tiny conquest she seeped into him, began to make room for herself among the things he understood without allowing him to understand her at all. And he hates her for this without hating her (it seems to be a trend with Leia), wondering when it became this thing it is now, with him staring at her sleep, watching her do the most mundane and idiotic of task, becoming use to her presence, her habits. Becoming used to her.
The chase is over and Han finds himself wanting more.
Do you think a princess and a guy like me could ever…?
'Wouldn't the kid be green now,' Han can't help but thinking at night. To know his prim and proper (though in all truth she was never really that prim or that proper) Leia curls around him each night, talking in her sleep from time to time. He wonders if Luke (or anyone before him) knows she wakes practically in tears every now and again, screaming. He wonders how she acts around those people (if there are any others), wonders if she bites her lip and takes deep breathes, refusing to speak until the next morning when she apologizes as though it were nothing. Han wonders how often princesses and guys like him find themselves stranded in the middle of space, running from the Galactic Empire with a broken hyper drive and a thing between them that isn't quite respect, isn't quite desire (he doesn't think love though the word comes to his mind more often now than it ever has before, especially when she's looking at him with those eyes he suddenly wants to make smile).
No. There's no amusement in the answer now.
End
Every time you review, a Hobbit finds a ring