Fairytale Endings
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Summary: They shared in the disaster of best-laid plans, once. HSLO AU.
Disclaimer: I tried pretending to be George Lucas the other day, but I couldn't handle the fanboys.
A/N: A million and a half thanks to Mathematica, my dear friend and fellow angst-o-phile, for her inspiration, her concrit, her happy ending, and her impersonation of Stalin.
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"And I held my tongue as she told me, 'Son, fear is the heart of love,' So I never went back, If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied, Illuminate the No's on their Vacancy signs, If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks, Then I'll follow you into the dark..."
Death Cab for Cutie, "I Will Follow You Into the Dark"
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She is drawing circles on the dirty table with one torn fingernail and the condensation from the glass of her half-empty (half-empty, because she stopped seeing the point of optimism so long ago, about the same time she destroyed that planet) glass of whiskey when he walks in to the smoky cantina. And when she sees him from behind the shadows of her back-corner booth, she shrinks into the darkness and hopes for a half-second that he doesn't see her, wonders why the hell she's here in the first place.
(And he should be proud, after all. He was the one who gave her that first taste of whiskey all those years ago, in a seedy tap just like this, in the far corner with his back against the wall so no one could sneak up behind him and press a blaster into his neck.)
He sees her, anyway, around the shadows and the smoke and the two years of war that have sharpened her cheekbones and hollowed her eyes and sheared her once-flowing locks to messy waves that brush her bony shoulders. Of course he sees her. She looks different now, scarred by betrayal and a fight she has finally learned she'll never win, but her eyes are the same. Have always been the same. Silky-brown and a hundred years too old.
(And he knows those eyes, because he has dreamt of them every night since the last time he saw her. They aren't shining with tears, though, not anymore, not like they had been the day he left.)
She straightens slightly as he starts to walk over to her, shoulders back, chin up, like the princess she had been, once. And she doesn't say anything as he slides into the seat across from her, but she does push a cloudy tumbler of amber whiskey into his hands. He tips the drink towards her in the mockery of a toast and downs the contents of the glass in one swallow, without even a grimace against the burn.
(It's cheap liquor. She learned that from him, too. The pain of the drink is a delicious distraction.)
"You came," he says as he sets the empty tumbler on the edge of the table. A half-dressed Theelin waitress ambles over and takes the glass for a refill with a wink of one black-lined eye and a grin in his direction.
She nods once when the waitress is out of earshot and a lock of her wavy hair falls over her face. He resists the urge to reach out and tuck it back, fights hard against the memory of her perfect, elaborate braids, never a chocolate hair out of place, against the memory of another time and place.
(She looks different now, hardened, but he still thinks she is beautiful. So, so beautiful.)
"I didn't think that you would."
This time, she laughs, a humorless sound that is nothing but an echo of a time when she might have been happy.
"Neither did I."
The words sting, but they are nothing he's not heard before, and really he didn't expect anything else.
"Leia -- " Whatever he wants to ask snares in his throat, and she wonders when they ran out of things to say. He closes his mouth and glances down at the table briefly before catching her gaze again with an intensity that nearly startles her. "How are you?"
She considers lying, saying she's just fine, thank you very much, but instead she tells him the truth even though she doesn't know why.
"Tired. I'm...tired."
"I'm sorry." He knew that she would say it. She's been tired since long before the day they first met.
"Hm," she agrees, finishing the last of her whiskey. The blue-haired waitress returns with his refill and offers Leia another, which she declines.
They sit there in silence for a moment, at the same booth but not really together. He sips his drink this time, and she resumes her watery sketches on the grainy tabletop. There are questions that should be asked, but he won't voice them and neither will she. And really, she knows that the skylanes aren't much comfort to him, that the Falcon is a shell of the ship she was before everything went to hell. And he knows that her years of fighting a war that was over before it even started cut her deeply, that she lost half of herself when Luke died.
They both pick at those scabs daily, pour salt in those wounds that will never heal. Why bring them up now?
Finally, she looks up. Her cheeks are hollow and her lips are bitten from too many nights spent trying not to cry, and all he sees is --
(her, beneath him, her pale body naked and beautiful -- )
-- three years of insults hurled like thermal detonators that did nothing to hide what they truly felt --
(the pleasurepain as she raked her nails over his back, the way she felt around him as he pushed deeper and deeper, how she would crush her mouth to his to keep from screaming out as she fell over the edge -- )
-- the heartache behind her molten gaze as she told him about her torture, as she told him she loved him for the first time and the truth about her family, about Vader and Luke, heartache that has hardened to a razor-sharp bitterness that he does not recognize --
(her smooth skin and the honeyfloral scent of her hair, the way she fit perfectly into him, that she only ever slept through the night when she was in his arms -- )
-- how she screamed in agony as she felt Luke's death over Endor, how she watched quietly, when they were at last in the relative safety of hyperspace and far away from the betrayal at Bakura and the Alliance's undoing, as he raged at her and Chewie because he needed something, anything, to be angry with, how she sobbed, heartbroken, as she --
No. Don't think of that.
She winces as though she has heard his thoughts, and suddenly her eyes are shimmering with unshed tears and he feels a lump form in his throat.
"Han, I..." She trails off and squeezes her eyes shut. She will not cry.
(But then he puts his familiar hand over hers and squeezes, and her fingers find their way between his, and it doesn't matter anymore.)
"I know." And really, he does know, and he marvels at how those two words have become so important between them.
She sighs heavily, shakily, as though her breath has caught on the vibroblade in her back.
"I never apologized to you for losing him."
The deep crevice splitting his heart in half cracks a little more at her guilt. It was never her fault, unless she could be faulted for her zeal to do what is just. But still, he should have realized that she would shoulder all the blame.
(He didn't. He was too busy pointing the finger back to himself.)
"Leia, you didn't -- It wasn't your fault."
"Of course it was," she argues, because they argue so well. "It was over at Endor. I should have known then. She let it slip, Han, enough of a clue anyway that I should have -- I should have realized. You warned me and Luke warned me and I didn't want to believe you."
(He never really blamed her for that. It couldn't have been easy for her to hear she'd been lied to and manipulated and serving the wrong side her entire life. Not that it ever mattered. One side was no better than the other.)
"If we'd left like you wanted to..."
He wishes she wouldn't play the What if...? game. He plays it every day and loses every time.
"No one could have predicted Bakura, Leia," he lies. "Not even Luke."
She ducks her head and he swallows thickly, remembering the smoke and the smell of burned flesh and blood, the sound of betrayal and death, their shock as they watched the woman they'd all trusted rise from the ashes of the Alliance and the Empire and take everything. He remembers runningrunningrunning and fallingfallingfalling and how they had nowhere to go after they jumped to hyperspace and she doubled over, screaming --
(There had never been, not in the entire history of the galaxy, a time when it wasn't ruled or protected by Force-users, whether Jedi or Sith. Never, until now, and suddenly everything that she didn't even know she'd been born to be was obsolete. Luke had told her that she was the only hope for the Alliance, but she wasn't. She failed. She failed because there wasn't a hope for the Alliance to begin with.)
Her hand starts to tremble beneath his and he knows that he is broadcasting the memory, loud, deafening over the generic band at the front of the bar.
"Do you remember...?" she starts unsteadily, and he wants to say Nononono.
(He remembers that the pain had come on suddenly, how she'd curled into herself on the floor of the Falcon as she realized what was happening. He remembers screaming at Chewie to find them a neutral port and how the closest safe medcenter was four hours away and five hours too late. He remembers how she looked -- tiny, broken, helpless, just like he felt -- and he remembers all the blood.)
"Do you remember Bespin?" She doesn't look up because she knows it's a stupid question. Of course he remembers.
(He remembers the faltering hope in her eyes after Endor, when she realized that there might come good out of all this death after all. He remembers feeling the same hope, and he remembers feeling that hope burn away as he wrapped their son in a towel and placed him in her arms. He remembers the transparent, alien skin and searching desperately for a heartbeat even though he knew, he knew, that no baby, not even a Force-sensitive one, could survive being born at twenty-two weeks.)
"I do," he says anyway.
(The shirt he'd been wearing is still somewhere, tucked into the cargo hold at the back of his ship. The bloodstains -- her bloodstains -- remind him that it happened, that he didn't dream it, that, for a moment, they'd shared something so beautiful before it was snatched away.)
"When they were leading us to the carbon chamber, I thought..." she balls her free hand into a white-knuckled fist on the tabletop. "I thought that maybe we would both just be shot in the back of the head together. Sometimes, I wish we had been."
(It would be too simple to burn the clothes, too simple to forget. He will not allow himself that peace.)
"Why?"
Her fist unclenches and her eyes slide to his.
"It would have been easier than this."
("Fuck this, Leia. I'm done.")
He moves around the booth to sit next to her and puts an arm around her shoulders, then takes it away again when he realizes what he's doing.
"Can you -- " he starts, but then trips over the question. She knows what he means, anyway.
"Yes. But...I don't know if I want it. I didn't want him in the first place."
"Yeah," he agrees, and they both pretend not to notice her lies. She looks up and signals the waitress, who brings them two fresh glasses of whiskey. This time, it is she who finishes the drink in one swallow. She slams the tumbler on the table and looks at him with determined, exhausted eyes and her voice shakes even though she was sure she'd finished her crying.
"I've been fighting this godsdamned war since I was fifteen. I've lost eleven years. Eleven years and everything that I love."
She falters for a moment, and suddenly, he knows what she is about to say. And he feels himself begin to hope for the first time in a very, very long while.
"I can't fight any longer."
(All those losses, and only one broke her.)
"Then don't." The words spill from his mouth, automatic, surprising them both. Because he doesn't ask, dammit, and she is too fucking noble to ever accept.
(But she is done with being noble. Nobility cost her half her life and aged her soul a thousand years and yet the flames of this hell still lick her skin. She made everything worse, she thinks, and she is done trying to fix things so far beyond repair.)
"All right."
To his credit, he doesn't display his shock, but she can still feel it radiating off of him. But he won't question her decision, no, not ever, because he already knows all the answers. Instead, he puts his arm back around her shoulders and buries his nose into her honeyfloral hair and whispers against her head the words that he's wanted to tell her every moment of every day for the past two years.
"I never stopped loving you. Gods, Leia. Not once. I'm so sorry."
The front of his shirt is wet and he knows she is crying again, but it doesn't really matter, because he is, too. And he doesn't need to tell her why he's apologizing. She knows, and it is too hard for him to say it out loud.
"I know why you left, Han." There is no accusation in her voice, only understanding, and just like that she has absolved two years of his guilt and pain and anguish; two years of restless, whiskey-induced sleep and days spent wrestling against the urge to put his ancient DL-44 to his own temple. "I should have gone with you."
"You had your beliefs," he reasons for her, and she shakes her head against his shirt.
"It didn't make a difference."
This time, he only pulls her closer to him, because there is really nothing else he can do.
"Where?" he asks after another long silence, his voice thick with the weight of ten thousand demons that no man should ever have to face.
"Does it matter?" she retorts ruefully. "Away. The Outer Rim, probably. Further than here. I don't think that Mothma will ever stop looking, but she can't search everywhere."
It is not the fairytale ending that she deserves, he realizes. She is a princess and she is beautiful and good, and she deserves a happily-ever-after in an ostentatious palace with a hundred servants sniveling at her heels and little children with her eyes that carry on the legacy of her pure heart. Instead, she is fortunate to have the escape of hermitage, of a dirty shack in the furthest corner of the galaxy, to live out her days in only the company of the decayed hope of freedom.
"Leia..."
She smiles wearily and shakes her head.
"It's okay, Han. Really. You don't have to."
"Please." It isn't a request as much as it is a demand. He'd come with the hope that she would accept, and he doesn't know what to do if she won't.
But.
She does, she does.
"Thank you." The words are inadequate, small. But they are enough.
He tosses a credit chip on the tabletop and they stand. Walk out of the cantina together, fingers intertwined.
(They begin.)