A/N: Hello again! So, I've been playing around with this Old West AU on Tumblr (I know, I know, hellsite) for a few months now. It's much looser and less rooted in the OT than NHI. I promise very little involved plotting; Whiskey Knot is an excuse to indulge myself with UST. If that's your thing, read on!
xo
Cic
CLOTH
She'd only gone into town for muslin. A length of curtain-cloth for the house her stepmother had left her, the hated house she'd come back to claim. In her second-best dress, second-best hat pinned to her braids, Leia Organa had set forth, closing the white gate neatly behind her.
Leia had forgotten just how punishing summer got in Whiskey Knot. As she walked Leia tried not to sweat, tried to ignore the heavy drag of skirts in the wagon ruts of the dirt road. Tried not to think of the scrubbing her trip represented, the time at washboard and tub and clothesline. Her velvet hat was unseasonably warm, and Leia yearned for the shield of the old floral bonnet she threw on in the garden, the one that provided shade but also air circulation. In the sunset, it cast a wonderful multicolored glow over her vision, light diffused through calico. This reminded Leia of the Tiffany lamps in the library at Bradford. But it would not do to think of her first home now. It would serve her well, Leia told herself as though slipping blinders on a horse, to think of today's goal, and nothing else.
Cloth. In late July heat Leia could feel every layer of it from the inside out, in the order she'd donned it: lace-edged short bloomers and chemise, stockings, then the canvas of her summer boots; her stature did not allow Leia to bend to button her footwear once corseted. She knew it was considered indecent to dress in this order, but who was around to see her? The big frame house was empty, and the meadow beyond that fell to swollen bend of river was deserted but for Aldera. The mild mare too old now to ride.
Rather brashly Leia looked at herself in the mercury-glass. Her hair yet unbraided, damp from her bath. The combination of high, tight boots and the shape and tint of her natural figure blatant in her thin, unstructured undergarments looked positively brazen, Leia felt an odd thrill to note. Like a picture postcard she'd found her first year away at school, tucked into an anatomy text like some ironic jest, though probably just hastily secreted from a professor. A daguerreotype of a woman in her frilled underthings, kneeling on a tufted velour stool– a dancing girl, Leia imagined, or a Parisian muse. Leia shook her own wavy head, regarding herself as through a pinhole lens (was this what he– but no, no). Perhaps the posing woman was the artist herself, a self-portrait bulb concealed in her hidden fist.
As she turned away from her reflection Leia blushed not with shyness but with the faintest transgressive pleasure. But then, the despised corset. The device Leia had blessedly ignored for days at a time here alone, the entire week she'd been back…home? Was this home, or simply where she'd found herself? Yet she no longer felt that home was Massachusetts, either, though some part of Leia would forever be eleven and removed from that lovely, leafy campus. Doomed to return, then be removed again– ah, she bitterly thought as she laced her stays, the fates had a corset's hateful symmetry.
After Leia was fit and cinched there was her corset overlay, and the elasticized lace thigh-bands pulled high over her stockings to keep them in place. Petticoats. Only then the dress, that second-best, a violet lawn check discreetly mended at cuffs and high neck. Leia's meticulous stitches further hidden with a length of gray satin ribbon she'd found at the treadle sewing machine upstairs. Not the right shade of gray for the violet, and satin was more garish than Leia liked but it would have to do. At least the shine would deflect the eye from the darns that had looked right in the evening lamplight, but glared like sutures of the flesh in the prairie day.
Bearing all this cloth, Leia walked. And corset or not, she held herself so rigorously upright that it was easy to misjudge her diminutive height. She passed men in the fields, farmers, hired hands, then carpenters framing new houses and storefronts on the outskirts of town. Men at work: how Leia envied them their shirts and overalls and trousers. Their rugged fabric that seemed to repel filth. Or to so absorb it as to render it invisible to the eye, the critical eye of the deacon, schoolteacher, the banker's wife. The Eye of Town, searching out weaknesses, little grounds for excommunication. Twill and denim hid what silk and lace displayed. Men were allowed perspiration, permitted proof of their exertions, the evidence of living. The disparity had maddened Leia since she arrived– well-educated as a child of Bradford faculty, her studies and her play co-ed– in Whiskey Knot and had her hand strapped raw and red by the schoolteacher first thing for the way her skirts flew up on the board swing. The swing was for boys. Something in Leia had ignited, then; her cheeks, her palm had ceased their heat but her heart had not quit its burning. Even when she left town last year, at eighteen, Leia had still dreamed of slinging herself freely astride a bareback, half-broke horse and tearing off with a haahwhoop! the way she'd seen–
Cloth. Leia would get muslin, yes, and perhaps a length of whichever durable poplin was cheapest—now this dress was feeling slightly ventilated at the points of her elbows, though Leia knew no fraying was visible yet. She'd checked this, double-checked in the cloudy glass of Meredith's vanity set. Yes: a durable poplin, perhaps a new dress pattern, that heavy muslin. Curtains seemed a silly notion for a woman without immediate neighbors but the upstairs bedroom was impossibly hot with no blinding on the windows. Hot enough that Leia did not sleep so much as lie down to drift from one surrealistic wish or grief to the next until morning was marked by the grandfather clock.
An hour, it took. An hour from the house to Silver Street where Leia stepped, in her neatly buttoned, heeled, torturous boots, up to the creaking wooden sidewalk. The waxed canvas squeaked and pinched at her lisle stockings, but she would not limp. She would not think of the blissfully flexible oxfords she'd bought in Boston. They were for boys but they perfectly fit Leia's tiny feet; she knew they would not do on the social parade-ground of the wooden boardwalk. Not if she meant to stay locally tolerated long enough to sell her house.
Damned boots. Still, Leia would not move like Betsy Armstrong, just ahead, mincing into the milliner's. No, Leia would not move in slow state like that, like the river barges, paused long enough to draw admiration from the young men lounging outside the livery. She did not look to note the spot where one young man had used to lounge on the bench, long legs crossed at the ankle on the railing. Untangling harness, or oiling tack. No, Leia did not slow, and she did not look back. In fact, at the very shadow of the urge to ache at his absence Leia redoubled the firmness of her step, as though to impress her slight weight into the pine slats. She didn't want to be back in Whiskey Knot. If she had to be, Leia would leave a mark.
XXXXXXXXXXXX
All that forgetting. Yet Leia knew him at once.
She knew his voice, that baritone. Her skin registered its unique vibration before her ears, before her hearing; yes, it was her skin, tightening. A voice she'd heard mostly raised in laughter, in quick banter, in boastful intent: a voice carried back to Leia on breezes– he was always going somewhere, and at speed. Forever setting up a race, declaring that the latest horse he'd broke c'n go like blazes. But now his tone was not challenging, impatient, daring. It was quiet, yes– but completely without the soft caress it had got when– no. Not the day of her foot, she would not think of that.
Leia moved down the aisle. Evil, evil boots, carrying her silently, not squeaking for once, marching on against her will. Perhaps her wretched traitor foot recognized its rescuer, taking her closer. Closer, until– Oh. Rather boldly she'd once mentally chosen delicious to describe his scent when Leia was seated behind him in church, though the preacher would surely scold that this word trod perilously close to lust. She remembered the jostle of long legs in his family pew, next to his older brothers who were tall, too, but dour or mild enough for stillness. But Han's attention wandered out the stained-glass window sponsored by his father, inclining his profile to her, bathed in blue. And the look on his face: his forehead creased with boredom so weary it was almost plaintive. It was almost…lonely, it was–
It was just the same, his warm scent, sun-dried cotton and leather and salt. Hint of his mother's famous cedar-oil soap that took the blue ribbon every year at the county fair. Leia passed the paper sleeves of pins, the spools of thread and stacked bobbins. The thin bone needles for fine stitchwork, the thicker steel for knitting, the crochet hooks and hat hooks, the lacework hooks and buttonhooks, everything a hook drawing her closer. Leia's grip constricted on the hank of coarse upholstery floss. Tight as Leia's corset stays, the bands at her thighs, the lace at her throat.
At the rear of Miller's Dry Goods, near the table where Mary snipped with flawless economy into bridal peau de soie, he stood. He stood next to the fine, tall Eileen Howard, regal and pleased with herself in her elaborate layers of silk and frothy prim collar, ivory cameo as finished and correct and unnecessary as the wax seal on one of Mayor Howard's letters. Leia saw him from behind: lanky as ever, in dark blue serge trousers. His coarse broadcloth shirt should have been white but was tinged permanently dun with the fine, airborne earth of his father's farm. Suspenders that emphasized the width of his shoulders. Appealing, unashamed patch of sweat between the broad blades of his back. The skin exposed by his rolled-up sleeves was deeply tanned, and the back of his neck, curved to allow the bend of his head, had a paler strip just under his defiantly open collar-band. As Leia watched, he hitched a hand in his leather holster. The long fingers of the other moved restlessly through his sandy hair, as though feeling his exposure to Leia's eyes.
Lips pursed, Eileen Howard tidied her gloved hand through those overgrown strands. Retreating into the aisle of notions, Leia closed her own hand against the sting of thread. Closed her eyes against memories, stillborn and precious, now utterly vicious. Her heart squeezed in her chest like a bulb in a daguerreian's fist– insisting on a rapid chain of images, one after the next. And in all of them the same lopsided grin, the mutable eyes, the jagged line on the chin that she'd heard called the bite of Beelzebub. But Leia had always thought of his scar as a feature akin to a stripe on a horse's muzzle, or a directional marker slashed into bark. Or something burned into the skin by iron, a fiery stamp.
Blazes. Brands. Words of speed, of heat, of possession, of freedom.
Han.