Post Afterglow
"Are you serious?" Leia flipped over onto her stomach. The lower half of her hair was tucked underneath her navel, so she had to roll over and tug the never-ending curtain attached to her scalp and toss the brown-auburn mess over her shoulder. And it was a mess; at three twenty-five in the morning, a combination of active coitus plus one hour's worth of sleep made for knots and tangles in her hair. One part of her brain wanted to make a dash to the fresher and attack the twists and turns with a comb. But doing that would ruin the mood. She didn't want to pierce their perfect bubble in this bed with rumpled sheets and a coverlet that the housekeeping droid hadn't changed yesterday...but it didn't matter. Not in the grand design of the little stitches and stars that made up the universe. In the fuzzy glow of the sunrise shimmerlamps tucked in the ceiling, all was cozy and perfect. The afterglow of the afterglow, somehow and sometimes pure and perfect than what preceded the calm.
"Are you serious?" She had to ask the question again, just to come back into the present. Floating away in the middle of her conversation with Han, not a good idea. Even if his suggestion was peculiar, one of those middle-of-the-early, early morning notions that wouldn't make sense later on...still, this was wonderful.
Han stared at her. That dazed look he got whenever something about her caught his attention. It still made no sense that a man could lose track of his thoughts over something trivial like hair. The unbraided mess on top of her head was sticking out at odd angles...after the tumbles they had engaged in when they first spilled onto the bed, surely a few strands were poking up like untamed sheaves of wheat. It looked terrible. Yet Han never cared. If anything, he was more attracted to her in this disheveled state. The times when he tried to pull apart one of her coiffures that took forever to arrange were frustrating, but funny. Funny, and sweet.
He didn't love the princess. The perfect holoimage splashed about on all the news channels...the figurehead who led a rebellion and was the locus of hope and renewal for a displaced people...such a distant ideal. A mythic image no man could ever touch, or desire, or love. But the woman...he'd proven enough times how strong his feelings were for the reality that lay beneath the shallow veneer of the royal ideal she projected to the galaxy.
Leia smiled. It was glorious, and odd. She reached out to his collarbone, brushing her fingers against his skin. Still wonderful, strange, miraculous, divine, all of this time with Han, this adventure of the heart.
Her fingertips, as they traced along his skin, brought Han out of his reverie. He reached up and took her hand away from his neck. "Sorry, got caught up in the view." He kissed her hand, then he smiled. "You're too distracting sometimes."
"Sometimes? Is that all?" Leia held the laugh back, until the circle of their mutual joke was complete.
"Sometimes." He traced his thumb along her chin. "'Cause a guy's head has to be somewhere else besides sex all the time, right?"
He changed the script again. Just a little, but still, he broke the routine. That happened every so often when they played this verbal game. The beginning was always the same, but the ending was forever open to innovation. On certain nights, he would have to finish the circuit, because she was too caught up in the rapture of the moment. Other strange hours in the middle of late night and earliest morn, Han was the one unable to speak. Both of them could become overwhelmed by the strength of their bond. Two disparate souls brought together by the funny little quarks and quirks of the universe...Han brought her out of that empty world that was her existence once, in those days, months, and years between the moment Alderaan was blown asunder, until...when, precisely? On Ord Mantell? That moment when he risked everything to head across the icy plains in the deepest hell of a frigid night to save Luke? Perhaps. But it all became solid when Han returned in the midst of chaos and confusion, when the beams were falling, and the fleet was rising up to the sky, and she was praying to every ancient deity she'd ever read about that they would be granted safe passage to the Alliance safe world. Her fate didn't matter. Death was the inevitable conclusion to her journey, just as it had been destined for her father. In the command center, her service and life were meant to end.
The Force, and all its celestial attendants, had other plans. Han came back, which was impossible to imagine in the maelstrom of battle and invasion. He was there to save her. Extraordinary.
He believed she mattered. That was his reason for coming back, pulling her away from duty and the unbreakable bond to the dead of her childhood. The remote virgin devoted to the highest cause of freedom was meant to lose her altar, so Those Higher obviously decided. It wasn't until later, after she brought him back from the fringes of death, that Leia understood the truth. They were meant to be together.
It was so strange. But she would never give this present, and future, back for whatever used to be her existence before he entered her life.
"I love you," Han whispered.
She reached out her hand and brushed his cheek. "I love you too." Then she smiled. "Now, about that crazy idea¼are you serious?"