Lo opens his eyes to a scene in too much focus. Too much information, and he can't prioritize it. It's almost a second — .89 seconds, actually — before he sorts it into meaningful shapes enough to even understand that Lando is there.
Lando's standing behind some young human guy that Lo's never seen before. It looks like they're in a well-kept, spacious droid repair room that no one else is using. Over the stranger's other shoulder, watching Lobot, are an old-looking astromech droid, a shiny humanoid-shaped translator droid, and a huge Imperial security droid, just hanging out, which nobody seems concerned about.
Not that this is the weirdest place he's ever woken up. At least Lando's here.
"Lobot?" says the human stranger. "Hi. My name's Luke Skywalker. How are you feeling?"
He tries to work out the answer to that question, and that's when the context of what just happened to them starts to come back in. The ship — the Emperor's ship — the injuries, the choice to push his cybernetics past the limit again so they'd have a chance to get out alive. "Damn," he says. "I really thought I was gonna lose it there. I—" He looks at Lando, who's staring at him with a kind of relief he's never seen on his friend's face before.
He really looks at Lando.
"How — how long was I out? What happened?"
"What's the last thing you remember, buddy?" Hearing Lando's voice again is — strange. Is it?
"Hacking the ship," Lo says. "Then…" He tries to query the implants to fill in the missing time for him, and the immediate response is a crashing, splitting pain across his head. "OW. Fuck." He aborts the process instantly, doubling over and clutching at his temples.
"It's okay," Lando says. "It's okay, we're all safe."
Lobot sits back up, taking a deep breath. "Damn. Usually when I blink out, I can just access what the implants recorded and patch up my memory. But when I tried to do it just now—"
The astromech droid pipes up in Binary. JUST ONE OF SEVERAL THOUSAND REASONS THESE THINGS NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN APPROVED FOR HUMANOIDS. IT'S IMPOSSIBLE FOR ORGANICS TO HANDLE THE INPUT FROM PERFECT RECORDING.
"Have we met, short stack?" he says to the droid. "And where are we?"
"Bespin," Lando says. (Bespin?) "That's R2-D2, C-3PO, K-2SO, and you've already met Luke Skywalker. …He's a Jedi Knight."
"Hello," says Luke Skywalker.
"A Jed—" Lo rubs his forehead. The pain, or whatever he can label his brain's response to the input he tried to access, stopped as soon as he stopped the attempt. But now there's just a blank. "How long since we got out of that ship?"
Lando, troublingly, doesn't answer right away, but looks at the Jedi like he's asking for advice about whether it's safe to tell him.
"Would you prefer standard time units or Bespin years?" C-3PO, the shiny one, asks brightly in the meantime.
Kriffing— stars. He looks from 3PO to Lando. "Standard."
"Four and a half years," Lando says.
"…Four and a half." So that's why he can't assemble the data from the implants.
"Lando never stopped looking for a way to help you," says Skywalker, the Jedi. Lando seems uncomfortable to be talked up like that, which is new.
"And you found a Jedi?" Lo asks him.
"Uhh. Well, I wasn't exactly looking for one of those, no," Lando says. "He sorta dropped out of the sky." Skywalker rolls his eyes, like he can't really believe Lando just said that. So he guesses there's a story. A history, even, which he's slept through.
Carefully, Lo queries his implants for just a few seconds of recording, a sample of the most recent memories before he… woke up, to see if he can manage it. What they return is still, as R2 said, too much data for him to immediately make sense of, but it doesn't overwhelm the human part of his mind. And with a little work, he can integrate it well enough to understand it, a three-second memory of this room minutes ago, Luke looking at Lobot but addressing Lando, saying, "considering what you've told me about him, I think it's gonna—"
"You okay?" says Lando, in the present.
"Yeah, just trying something." It took him a second and a half to do that. At that rate he would need 2.25 standard years to assimilate his missing memories, if he were to do that and nothing else. But this is just his first try. Maybe it'll get better with practice.
There's a functional little apartment waiting for him in the federal district of Cloud City. Apparently, he was living in it before, when Lando was the Baron Administrator (Baron Administrator? Lando?) and he — or his central processing unit — was Lando's aide-de-camp. And now he has it back, now that they've chased out the Imperials who took over the planet later on. The Imperials, whose Empire has now fallen. Apparently.
After the Jedi had woken him up and he'd had a little while to orient himself, Lando hugged him for a long time, more carefully than he expected from his old friend. Then there was a lot to catch up on, and although K-2SO suggested that since they were both Imperial hardware he could directly interface with him and upload a brief summary of all major news events, nobody else thought that was a good idea, and Lo got started on filling in the blanks as best he could the old-fashioned way, listening and reading. It was a lot. It is a lot.
The flat is plain but it has a little terrace — it's Cloud City, after all. Lo steps out, the door recognizing his handprint like all the locks in here. He takes in the sky, like nowhere else. Bespin. Home.
He's still confused about how they wound up back here. How Lando changed his own life. Found his potential to be a leader of more than just a little band of thieves. Lo's got a feeling that that handsome Jedi might have been the one to finally set Lando straight. It would have taken somebody special. Someone turned his smuggler into a politician, whether or not it was Luke Skywalker. Someone spotted how he could be more, and succeeded where Lobot failed at getting Lando to see it too.
He takes another try at scanning his records, querying for little slices of time in periods where it would be likely something significant was happening. It's mostly garbage. Chaos. There's something manageable-looking in the records from 1.02 standard years back, Lando's there and just one other person, a tall humanoid with a jeweled plom bloom in her hair. "—even for a—" she's saying to Lando. He looks at a longer segment of memory, hoping he can integrate it.
"I told Maz," said the woman with the plom bloom. "I don't do these anymore. I can't have it on my conscience."
"I know it's risky," Lando answered.
"'Risky.' I did four of these, General. Two recovered. Two died. Do you like those odds?" She nodded toward Lobot. "Does your friend?"
"Just take a look. Maybe he'll be different."
She sighed and said "Have a seat, babe," to Lobot, who sat. She walked slowly around him to inspect the machinery. "Were they installed voluntarily?"
"Yeah. Well. As voluntary as anything can be with Imperials. He got them — intentionally. Does that make it easier? Harder?"
"Very hard. More predictable, but incredibly dangerous." She met Lando's eyes. "I don't like it. Even for a friend of Maz. But. If you can give me documentation to prove he'd want to risk the procedure, I'll take him to my workshop, do a fuller evaluation, and then we can talk about price."
"Documentation? Like what?"
"Any clear directive from the man himself expressing his wishes, or authorizing you. Written, recorded, whatever. Or a next of kin to consent? Are there parents, kids, a spouse—?"
"I know him," Lando said. "He'd want me to try everything."
"You know that's not enough. What if he dies? And even if it's a success, what if word gets out that the Master Codebreaker will mess around with any human cyborg you bring in?"
He closes it there. That'd be one of the failed attempts, then. Standing here, processing it with no distractions, is no easier or faster than when he tried it before. And he feels like it left him lagging.
Lo has no idea how he'll sift through all the implants' memories and integrate them, if he ever can. He tries to see if he can make them grep just memories containing Lando, but that's much too big, it makes him feel like there's a boulder squishing down on his brain. No dice.
Anyway, his stomach's growling. He realizes he hasn't eaten since he got control of his body back.
He hears a chime, and he checks the panel by the back door — it's Lando out front. Lo presses the button to open it, and waves Lando in to join him. Lando's carrying some wrapped bowls and a bottle with two cups stacked upside-down on its neck; he sets it all down on a side table and comes out to the terrace.
"I know you only just got some time to yourself, but I thought I oughta check that you've got all you need here."
"You brought dinner."
Lando shrugs. "You haven't had to remember about food in four years, didn't know if you'd have trouble."
"Thank you," Lo says.
"I know you still must have a lot of questions. But I can get outta your hair for a while, too. So to speak."
"Lando," Lo says. "I have one question right now. How the hell did you end up here?"
Lando laughs softly. "I listened to you," he says. "For a change. I did a lot of thinking about what you said to me."
"What I said?"
"In the— you know." Lando looks almost embarrassed. "You left a recording for me. It played back after the implants took over."
Lo can't even remember what Lando's talking about for a second, then it comes back. "I did. Hell, I remember that."
"You even knew if it ever happened it would be my fault," Lando says with a rueful almost-smile.
"I never said that." He sure hopes he didn't. "I recorded that ages ago. I remember now. Five or six jobs ago — well, before the Imperialis, you know what I mean. One of the other times I could see a fair chance of critical failure on the horizon." He remembers everything he said in the recording now. His cheeks feel a little hot and it's not the cybernetics. "I really put it all out there, didn't I?"
"Yeah." Lando looks out to the clouds, and opens his hands in a gesture that indicates the whole city, Lobot's city, now Lando's city too. "And here we are."
"If that's your way of making it up to me, I told you, I never held you responsible."
"I wanted to, uh." Lando shakes his head a little. "You know, I wanted to be someone you'd be proud of when you came back."
Lo can't even think of anything to say. He touches Lando's arm, strong and solid. It's like no time has passed since he blinked out on the Imperialis and yet it also feels like forever. Some intuition beneath what he can consciously access tells him his friend's easy touch has been absent in the years since the cybernetics took over.
He touches Lando's face, and Lando looks at him with so much softness, almost seeming like he doesn't expect to be wanted like that, Lando who everyone falls in love with whether or not it'll do them any good. Lo has to lean up to kiss him. Lando holds him tight, like he finally feels sure he won't flicker out.