I spend an ridiculous amount of time over at HSP nowadays, and since things have been ,,, er, slower around here, I've nearly abandoned the ffn-ers. I truly am sorry.

This, then, is my response to the Dec/Jan challege at HSP. The requirements? Han and Leia had to be separated for over two years and must meet up in the fic. There must be a kiss and the line "It had nothing to do with you" had to be spoken by either character.

Voila! Not-angst! Yay!

He'd heard about her accident in passing through the barkeep, who'd mentioned it while implying that even on Sullust, things were bad. Words like idiot and failure had kept popping out from the venders' cornershops as he rushed back to the Falcon. The ship had responded quickly, bouncing along the preps and tests as he cleared out the hold and waited for the green light from ground control. Once given the all-clear signal, he had streaked out of the atmosphere, gray polluted clouds broken up as he sped through them and, with a brief clunk, pulled the hyperdrive lever as soon as he could have.

He hadn't even paid for his last drink.

It was difficult to imagine why his mind still referred to her as his wife. In everything but name they were strangers, originally torn by a loss so bedrock it still resonated in the very blood that ran through his veins, and kept apart by his simple lack of a plan. If nothing else, being married to her for twenty-odd years had convinced him that even his best plans turned out badly. How much worse it would be for him to have returned after her "we need some space" speech was unknown, but as time had passed, he had known, as clear as anything, that he wasn't brave enough to go back. And had simply not done so.

Now, thirty minutes away from seeing her for the first time in two years, he was convinced that this was as bad of a not-plan as he'd ever had. He knew, as well as he knew anything, that she would resent the fact that he was here. She didn't need him. She'd told him so.

There were a handful of things that were so fundamental to him that he did them unconsciously: drawing a blaster for survival, for one. Three of these things centered on her. And while he would have loved to stay away and leave her to the solitude she wanted so desperately, her pain was one of those things that triggered that unconscious response in him.

He had to see her. It wasn't even a question. It was an instinct.

He thought that maybe if he were better informed as to her condition, his fears might be laid to rest. It was the not-knowing that was killing him. To call Luke right now, however, would be disastrous. The last time they'd spoken, Han had had less than flattering things to say to his brother-in-law and his support for the mission to Myrkr. Quite honestly, nothing could compel him to talk to Luke for an extended period of time. Anakin's death had killed a great many things for Han, including his marriage, but it had also birthed a primeval resentment to the man who had let it happen.

Han sped up his pace, resolving to reach the medic station as quickly as he could. There wasn't anyone to call, he supposed. Better go see for himself what the extent of her injuries was.

Walking through the corridors and brushing past medics and worried mothers, Han's stomach started to turn over. His apprehension had seeped into his chest and abdomen, and he could feel the nervous energy cackle beneath his skin. If he didn't find a way to calm down, he was going to be sick, and, being in a medic ward, that was a sure-fire way to get grounded. And if things didn't go well with Leia, he needed to be up and ready to go the minute she threw him out.

He was closer now to her room, he could tell, because the temporary prefab walls became darker and the lights dimmed. They kept the more recent and serious cases near the back, closest to the burial grounds outside, a testament to how grave the galaxy had become. Even here, on the last true haven for the former Republic, civilization had grounded to a halt. What was essential was kept in order, like spaceports and docking bays and the barter markets. What wasn't was kept on the outskirts of the metropolis outskirts, nearest to the cremation centers.

Funny how those places always seemed the busiest.

He reached the door before he knew that he had. Dark grey and untouchably cold, it was their last physical barrier. He threw away the melodramatic thought, slapped the door control and stepped into the room, thrown for a second by the bright light emanating inside. A gentle rustling of human voices rose to him, and he could catch the silhouettes of half a dozen figures congregating around a bed. He caught snatches of conversation involving words like "release" and "ship" and "healing" but was too overwhelmed by the busyness of his wife's sickroom to really organize the individual words into meaning.

He felt stupid and naïve and unspeakably ridiculous for bursting through the door like a war victor on the march for riches. The voices hushed, and a low hum was suddenly very audible, and half a dozen heads turned his way.

A voice broke through the hum, impatient and overused. "Who is it?"

Knowing that the gig was up and that he had no choice, he stepped up closer to the light and turned the corner, fully exposing himself to the bed and the people gathered around it. His eyes adjusted quickly enough to catch her surprised expression and the slight drop to her mouth. She was sitting on top of the bed, uncovered and fully clothed. She wore military coveralls without insignia and a belt with a blaster attached and a faint cylindrical shape that could have been a lightsaber. He was surprised to see her hair short, cropped evenly to her cheekbones, bangs swept across her forehead, a slight curl to them, presumably because of her sweat. Her right cheek had a bruise across it, yellowing and darkening as he watched, and her arm was cradled against her chest with a sling.

He caught her widening eyes and shoved his hands into his jacket pockets, feeling every bit as exhausted as she looked, but not as attractive or young. Her voice broke through again, startling him, not because it was addressed to him, but because it wasn't. "Would you mind giving us a second?"

Her entourage excused themselves and pushed past him to the door, leaving quicker than he would have liked, because, suddenly, he had to talk to her and he didn't have the faintest idea what he was going to say. He stayed where he was, just barely in her line of sight, and leaning with all his weight against the corner of her room.

He was relieved when she spoke first. "Hi."

His mouth had dried considerably since he entered the room. "Uh, hi." He took a step forward. "How are you?"

The corners of her lips turned up, but it looked like she fought the smile that he was suddenly dying to see. "I've been better." She looked down at her immobilized arm and then looked back at him. "You?"

He exhaled, trying to release his nervousness before he did something really stupid. "You know. Good."

She nodded, her eyes focused on his neck. "What happened?"

"Ah, well," he glanced up to the ceiling, praying to every god he'd ever heard of to end the awkwardness he couldn't stand feeling, "I got slammed into the Falcon's control yoke." She opened her mouth, but then closed it, and he desperately wanted to know what it was she was going to say. The seconds ticked by, and he spoke up again just to end the quiet. "I thought you'd be a lot worse."

"Just a broken wrist." She nodded to the door. "They made it out to be worse than it was."

"Ah." He shook a bunch of hair out of his eyes, opened his mouth to get to the heart of the matter, but she beat him to it.

"What are you doing here, Han?"

He didn't know how to answer that without sounding pathetic. He was there because he couldn't stand not to be there, because he had wrongly assumed that she could take care of herself. But here … here there was evidence that pointed to the exact opposite. Here she sat with her arm in a sling because she'd been thrown from a tampered transport, and had he been there, maybe it would have just been a sprain, or maybe not, but at least he would have been there. He was there because of that part of himself that reacted unconsciously to her pain, because she was so fundamentally rooted in his head that even two years' absence couldn't remove all the connections.

He had no idea, really, why he was there. He just knew that he had to be.

"I don't know," he said. "When I heard, I came."

She made a point of looking straight at him. "It had nothing to do with you, Han. There was no reason for you to come."

He dropped his head and nodded, painfully aware that she was right. But he hadn't come because she'd been hurt. That was the catalyst. He came because there was something fundamentally wrong with their lives, and her accident had suddenly made it all very clear.

He kept his head down, but stepped up to the bed where she sat against a pillow. He settled next to her, facing her. She straightened her spine and tensed, but didn't make the effort to move away from him, and he wondered if maybe that was because she didn't want to or because she couldn't. "Leia, this is insane."

She looked up at him, but didn't say anything.

"This, this half-assed thing that we have going here, it doesn't make any sense." He breathed loudly through his nose. "If you love someone, you stick with them. If you don't, you leave. It's not a hard thing to decide."

Her eyebrows dropped closer to her eyes. "I agree."

"So what do you want?"

He couldn't believe he had just said it, much less had looked her in the eye when he did so. He was overwhelmingly aware that he had just placed every single ball in her court and that if she said what he thought she would say, he would have no choice but to let it go. He tried to convince himself that it wouldn't be any different from what they'd been doing the past two years, but he couldn't get it out of his head that it would be final. It'd be the end. He wasn't too sure that he was entirely willing to place every last shred of hope he had left in the hands of a woman he wasn't sure he still knew.

But when he looked up again and saw an entirely agonized look on her face, he had a feeling he still knew her better than he thought he did.

"I don't know what I want." She breathed and tossed her hair out of her eyes. "I want things to be back the way they were. I want Chewie back. I want … Anakin – " he didn't move to hug her, though every instinct he had was screaming at him to do so " – we lost it all when we lost him."

"Yeah. We did." He shook his head. When he was a general, he had never considered what a child's death might do to a family. He knew, of course, the strain that was put on the family of a soldier, but his part of the notification process ended with the holocall. He imagined that they were not so very different from every other family in the same situation, except that his family, with the exception of him, felt the death of the child. Maybe that made them a special case.

"What do you want, Han?"

If she wasn't going to say it, he obviously had to. "You." Her eyes widened again, and a tear fell down her face. Her skin was red around her eyes and he could see the muscles in her neck.

"You're kidding." She sniffed and wiped a hand across her face. "You haven't said a word to me in two years."

He felt his anger start to seep up, but pushed it back down. "Neither have you."

She closed her eyes, shook her head, exhaled loudly. When she looked at him again, her eyes were clear and her lips were pressed together, and the bruise forming on her cheek had turned purple near the center. She moved her head closer, and Han had a sudden rush of panic. She was watching him with worried eyes, and stopped moving when his eyebrows shot up. Another wave of panic shot through his system with the realization that he may have just ruined his chances. He gave her a slight smile and reached over, tentatively running a hand down her unbruised cheek. Her eyes closed and then opened again suddenly as she softly took his bottom lip between hers and skimmed her free hand around his neck.

Han was careful to let her set the pace, aware that if he made a mistake, it would be right here when he was overjoyed and liable to do something untoward that scared her off. She added more pressure to his lip, an old sign that told him she wanted more than just passive nonresistance, and so he kissed her back, keeping it soft so as not to scare her away. He wasn't sure how much she wanted from him, where she wanted this to head, and so he kept her body close and concentrated on the addictively joyous feeling her breath on his cheek, the sweet taste of her mouth, the feeling of her fingers curled around his hair.

He disengaged himself from her once he was sure he'd lost all the breath he'd been holding. She pressed her face into the crook of his neck and he could feel her body shaking where it rested against his. He closed his eyes, wrapped his arms closer around her, and thanked every god he'd ever heard of that this, at least, was a first step, and that this, at least, wasn't a 'no.' Given the chance, he was sure, they could work it out, figure it all out. Because this, at least, was the beginning of something, and beginnings were things he could understand. A beginning for them meant something was happening, and as long as something was happening, he felt safe.

If you, like me, are becoming somewhat disillusioned with ffn, let me know in your review, and I can take you to HSP and all it's wonderous Han and Leia-ness. :)

Please review! It doesn't do me any good as a writer if I receive no feedback. Like it? Hate it? Tell me!