Torn and Mended
If anybody had asked Lando to describe the most miserable world he could possibly crash on, he wouldn't have described this one. His vivid imagination would have come up with bubbling rivers of molten lava or gigantic krayt dragons or maybe a planet peppered with sarlacc pits.
He would have been wrong.
Turns out there is nothing more miserable than a desert which is just a desert.
As far as the eye can see there is nothing but sand and rocks. No people to shoot at you, no sounds but the howling wind, no nothing that could break the monotony or convince you that you aren't alone on this miserable sunbaked sithhole.
He's doing fine on water, his official cargo had included moisture farm equipment. His food reserves won't make for fancy dinners but they will last a while, too; he knows to pack extras just in case.
If he needs parts he can't fix or build himself…
Well, he will just have to hope the pirates hadn't managed to jam his call for help or someone will be able to puzzle together the chosen-to-be-untraceable route he had taken. Bounty hunters, at the very least. The pirates had taken him for the regular smuggler ship he was posing as, but someone is bound to be looking for General Calrissian. At this point, he would welcome bounty hunters.
Two weeks later, neither rescuers nor bounty hunters have come and repairs are taking forever when he needs to first build half the parts he needs. He carefully chooses not to think about the possibility of parts being broken beyond repair.
Everything he owns is starting to look as drab and sandy as the desert around him.
He ends up taking the speeder bike he had jury-rigged for a spin, even though he isn't fleeing from the locals such as he had intended it for.
There had been suspicious activity on his more-dead-than-alive scanners, so he tells himself he needs to check out the possible threat, that he isn't just desperate to see something different than sand and would take getting shot at over silence and howling wind.
He gets his wish, in a roundabout way.
Turns out this just isn't Lando's day, or week, or month – what a surprise.
"You know, I'd told myself I should be fully prepared for the locals to be as unfriendly as the locale, but this is just plain rude," Lando remarks as he ducks and evades to stay out of range of his guest and the metal pipe he is swinging at him. He's pretty good with the pipe, too.
This after he had stripped the man of several projectile weapons he had carried and believed himself safe enough. He hadn't expected him to start tearing Lando's quarters apart to create his own makeshift weapons, at least not till his situation turned actually dire enough for that.
"Don't guests have… not that! I've only just repaired it!"
Getting chased through his own crashed ship by a man whose life he had just saved. Figures. It's just how things would go for him on this planet.
The blond man with the grim jawline and love for bludgeon weapons smashes his elbow into a nest of jury-rigged cables and there's an ominous shower of spark.
Nothing blows up, the lights flicker but don't die.
Jawline is distracted long enough for Lando to grab his hidden blaster.
He aims it at the man and gives him a sunny smile.
"Now let's try this again, shall we?"
The man's eyes are still wild and trapped, he puts Lando in mind of a cornered animal that has been driven too far. That's no surprise at all, considering what he had seen on the man's body when he cut away his torn, bloodied clothes to tend to his wounds. He lowers the pipe but holds onto it. Under the circumstances, that's good enough for Lando.
"I'm Lando Calrissian. I found you and brought you onto my ship." The man's eyes narrow at him. "You understand me, don't you? That's a relief. I wasn't sure if they speak Galactic Basic here."
"Why?" The man's voice is hoarse and weak, not in the way of someone whose throat has been hurt, but more like… like someone who just isn't used to speaking.
Lando has begun to understand that over the course of the past weeks. He has spent these weeks talking to himself just so he wouldn't go days without a word.
"I noticed activity on the scanners and found you in the middle of a pile-up." It had been more like a car-strewn battlefield, really. Besides, vehicles didn't just happen to crash with nothing but wide open desert around them. No need to point that out. "You're the only one alive, though you were closer to dead. I brought you to my ship and patched you up."
The stranger looks at the bacta patches on his chest and left leg, where he had been most gravely injured.
"Why?"
It is Lando's turn to feel puzzled, a little lost even by how lost the nameless man looks.
"Why not?" he asks back. Even scoundrels… Well, alright, some of them would leave a man to die, but he's never been that kind of scoundrel, and while others are it's no reason to look at him with such utter incomprehension.
The man lifts the pipe higher. His eyes are flickering wildly, searching for an exit. He looks like he's about ready to make his own by sheer brute force and desperation. "I won't be your blood bag."
Before his inner eye, Lando sees O-PLUS HI-OCTANE UNIVERSAL DONOR tattooed onto the man's back.
He takes a deep breath. Okay. They are having very different conversations here.
This planet.
Lando doesn't know what exactly makes him drop his blaster. The loneliness, maybe, or the sun, or that he remembers Vader and how trapped he had felt, forced to send his best friend to his death so many others could live. He knows a thing or two about feeling cornered, and what people are capable of when they are desperate.
"I'm unarmed now. See? If I were trying to capture or hurt you I wouldn't have dropped my blaster."
Slowly, the pipe goes down again.
There are a lot of questions Lando could be asking. A lot of things he wants to know about this place, about possible trading posts, enemies, or even about the man himself and the multitude of old and new wounds he bears or the tattoo on his back.
He goes for another smile, the charming one that convinces people they want to keep playing sabacc against him even after they have figured out that he cheats. "Are you hungry?"
Turns out his new guest isn't the chatty sort.
Of course he isn't. That would be far too easy for this planet.
He doesn't talk, remains tense and silent even when Lando just asks for his name, but he devours ration bars as if they were the finest Coruscanti cuisine and looks at the tank of purified drinking water with something akin to reverence.
He sleeps, courtesy of the medicine that is still making his body and mind sluggish. Lando doesn't. He gave the man his bed, but most of all, he may be kind, but he is no fool.
The man wakes up screaming five times that night. Lando squashes his natural desire to check on him. In the morning he acts like he'd heard nothing. Even broken men have the right to hold on to their dignity.
"Would you like to help me?" Lando asks over breakfast, mostly so he can keep an eye on his guest while he keeps working on the repairs.
Turns out his guest is good with machines. Really good. He doesn't know what the parts of a spaceship are called and he has a long way to go till he understands what they do, but he's got a talent for improvisation.
"You learn to build things from scrap, or you die," is all he's got to say about that.
Lando looks mournfully at the comm he is yet again trying to repair. He keeps returning to it every couple of days even though he knows it to be a lost cause. "I'm better with words than with machines."
His guest looks up from where he is patiently soldering tiny wires. "Words can't save anyone."
"In my world they're the most powerful weapon of all."
His guest doesn't respond.
They live in different worlds.
They develop a routine.
Lando talks and his still-nameless guest listens.
So maybe it isn't much of a routine, but the best scams are the simplest ones. Lando can't say for sure yet if there's a scam involved in this, but he doesn't worry anymore about falling asleep with the no-longer-a-stranger on his ship. He'd even put the pipe back into place when he insisted on returning Lando's quarters to him.
Lando talks enough for both of them; he tells him of Han and Chewbacca, of winning Cloud City and the clever schemes that had gained him his reputation.
He doesn't speak of the choices that haunt him, not even of the choice to throw his lot in with the Rebel Alliance, even though this is a choice that doesn't haunt him. Fair enough, his guest still hasn't told him anything at all.
If Lando is good at reading between the lines, well, that's a different story.
One of the things he reads between the lines? His guest likes it when he talks.
"You need to work faster."
Or not.
Lando gives him a look, half tempted to play at being wounded for having been interrupted in the middle of his third-best Jabba tale. "Why? Are you eager to wash your hands of me?"
He feels a strange tightness in his throat at the thought that he'll soon lose his taciturn shadow. He's grown used to him. Maybe a little more than that, even. Or a lot more than that, even. Han's newfound love for hopeless causes must have rubbed off on him.
What he gets in return is a glare. "It's only a matter of time till others find your ship." He swallows hard. "You don't want them to find you."
He thinks of the tattoo on the man's back, of the marks on his body and his screams. "No. I don't think I want them to find us."
"I can get you parts." He stands up and approaches Lando. He's still holding a pair of tongs. "We have no ships, but they crash here sometimes. I can get you what you need."
There's an urgency in his eyes which Lando has never seen before, not even on that first day when he woke up on the ship and thought he was Lando's captive. He's close now, too, closer than he has ever come without a good reason.
Lando could reach out and cup his cheek, and brush his thumb over cracked lips. If it were anyone else he would amp up the charm; with some luck, he wouldn't be going to his bunk alone tonight.
With this man, he'd be more likely to get the tongs jammed into his gut. He's often wondered what kind of world brings forth people like him, but at the same time he's not so keen to get an answer.
"I think that's the most I've heard you speak at once," he says, his voice pitched lower, and stands up so they are face to face and a little bit closer yet, "keep that up and I'll think you're starting to care."
He looks pained for a moment before covering it up with his usual grim mask. "I'll go."
"Go where? Back to the people who did that?" Lando points his chin at him, meaning his back, the old injuries, all the things they have never spoken of.
The pained look is back, but he shakes his head. "He's dead." He looks torn for a moment. "And I'm not going back to the Citadel."
He doesn't explain where he's going. Lando doesn't demand answers. He just hates letting him go alone into danger on his behalf.
It won't even be till he's left that Lando realizes he should have been more concerned about him taking off with everything Lando gives him to trade, certainly a small fortune by the standards of this world.
First there's an awkward goodbye by his mended car.
They look at each other in silence for a while till Lando's chuckles break it. "I can think of a dozen clever things to say, but I don't think any of them would impress you."
He could have sworn there's a hint of a smile on the man's lips, but that's probably just a trick of the light. He looks at Lando for long moments like he's trying to solve a frustrating puzzle. "My name is Max," he says curtly and gets into the car.
Lando is smiling for sure as he walks back into his ship. It doesn't feel so lonely anymore.
Later, he thinks of the possibility that Max might take off with the trading goods, but he can't bring himself to doubt him.
Max returns four days later with new bruises, new wounds and a renewed hunted look in his eyes.
He has what they need.
They still can't fix the comm and call for help, which would be the easiest solution, but repairing the ship is no longer a desperate hope, it's just a matter of time now.
Lando brings out a bottle of Old Trusty he had been saving for a special occasion.
"What happened?" he asks once they sit on the floor of his quarters, the remains of their portion bread dinner still on the floor.
"Nothing." But it doesn't sound like a dismissal. Instead, Max looks stricken by it. "Everything was as it should be." He looks down at his fingers holding the bottle. He has only taken a sip. "I had forgotten what it's like now."
Lando takes the bottle from him. "Tell me what it's like."
He wishes he had been out there. He wants to be out there, exploring a new world, meeting people, not cooped up here on this ship for months on end. But if he loses the ship he will die on this backwater world. It's not a risk worth taking just because he's feeling caged.
Max finds and holds his gaze for the longest time. He plucks the bottle from Lando's hands and puts it down safely out of the way. Then it's suddenly his hands framing Lando's face, his lips on Lando's, his tongue exploring his mouth.
Lando's brain grinds to a halt, his heart constricts with the joy of suddenly having something he had yearned for but never thought possible. Something he'd not even permitted himself to think about in flights of fancy.
He kisses back, hesitantly at first since he's still not sure how much closeness Max can handle, or if there are any places he doesn't want to be touched. But he gains confidence with every second their kiss lasts and then Max's hands are everywhere at once, and Lando loses himself in sensation.
He learns that Max isn't shy about his scars, but hates for Lando to look at his back. That's fine, he peppers his chest with kisses and whispers into his belly button and makes him grit his teeth with the effort to stifle his moans when Lando's lips wrap around his cock.
He doesn't even try to stifle his own moans when Max slides into him. He undoes him with tenderness Lando had never thought him capable of.
When it is over neither of them makes a motion to leave.
A shrill beeping jerks them out of sleep.
"The proximity alarm," Lando says, instantly awake.
Max leaps out of bed and out of the room, and by the time Lando has rushed to the cockpit, he can see him driving away with his car's engines howling in agony.
He returns alone.
"I got a lock on the scanners, it was just one vehicle," Lando says when he meets him by the hatch.
"A scout."
Lando nods. "Close enough to have seen the ship." He hesitates. "These guys who had found you before I found you…"
"Remaining loyalists of Immortan Joe. One of their spies must have seen me in town."
Another nod. He doesn't know who Immortan Joe is, but that's a question for when they aren't quite so close to gruesome death. "So they returned. They didn't find your corpse. They kept looking."
"They found your ship."
For a moment, Lando feels frozen. Max is still naked, he hadn't taken the time to dress before dashing off after the scout, just to grab his guns. It's impossible to ignore what had happened between them. Impossible to ignore that Max hasn't returned to shutting himself away.
He offers shirt and pants to Max – shirt first. He doesn't like to have his back exposed, after all.
While he gets dressed Lando has a few moments to mull over the difference a night makes. He'd always intended to make this offer, who wouldn't after having gotten a glimpse at the life people led on this planet. He might even have hoped deep down that they would become more than traveling companions, eventually.
It feels weightier now.
"Max?" Lando waits till he's looking at him. "If you want to leave, you should go now. I don't want you to get caught because you helped me." He swallows hard. "But if you want to stay… I would like it if you stayed."
"I've never been to outer space."
He smiles, a little sadly. "I won't lie to you. The galaxy is full of places that aren't any friendlier than this one. And we're recovering from a war. Took down a tyrant, now half the galaxy is trying to put together the pieces while the other half keeps trying to tear it apart."
"I helped take down a tyrant, too. They asked me to stay… but I couldn't."
Lando's heart races faster.
"Then I ran into you."
"You mean, bled all over my second-best cape."
Max doesn't look amused, not exactly, but at least understanding of Lando's need to lighten the mood. He sure is a tough audience for mood lightening. "That, too."
There's silence between them for a while, Lando makes no move to approach Max. He doesn't want him to think getting off this planet comes at a price.
Max, still standing by the hatch, has his gaze glued on the horizon. The sun is just rising over the desert. It's beautiful, if you like deserts.
He turns his back on the sight. "Let's get to work."
They get to work, working through the day and through the following night without a word needing to be said.
That is not to say that Lando doesn't talk, but he speaks of pleasant things again, of outer space, of bizarre alien worlds, of planets which are covered in oceans even, where nobody has ever heard the word desert.
He begins to speak of them not as places he has seen, but as places he would like to explore with Max. Max starts to ask questions. He's still not speaking about his past or what he's leaving behind, though Lando suspects he has nothing left to leave behind, but it feels just like a matter of time now. In the middle of a mad rush against time is the worst possible time to open up, and Lando can wait. He knows now that they have time.
The next morning, sunrise is announced by the roar of car engines.
Lando's heartbeat is loud in his ears as he looks at Max. "Last chance."
He looks wistful for a moment, pained even, then he nods at the wires Lando has been attaching. "Finish that."
He does.
They race for the cockpit, it's the first time Max has been to the cockpit, and Lando races through the pre-flight procedure as fast as he has done very few times.
Besides him, Max stands stiff, eyes fixed on the cars roaring towards them.
The ship finally hums to life properly under Lando's hands, not this half-life existence it has been living. They're both ready to leave this planet behind.
He turns to Max once more. "Last chance," he repeats and prays he won't lose his nerve. Won't chose familiar horrors over the dangers of the unknown and the still fragile bond between them. Max doesn't seem to be the kind of person who likes surprises.
His car is still parked right next to the ship. He might be able to outrun his pursuers.
Max sits down in the co-pilot chair. His eyes are soft when he looks at Lando. He doesn't reach for him, doesn't say anything, but his gaze feels like a caress.
Lando's heart skips a beat. "Alright. Let's show them what speed is."