"I'm gonna fucking kill him!"

"Han, you are going to wake up the children, and then I am going to kill you." Leia growls in a low, dead-serious voice. "I do not want the boys to know anything's wrong, do you hear me? And Mylia cried for two hours before I got her to go down, so if you wake her up, I'm throwing you off the balcony." She brushes past me in a breeze of white silk, and I hook my thumbs in my belt, thinking real hard, my heart still pounding from the shock.

"I don't think that place is helping him any," I say softly as I follow her. She peeks into the baby's room, and I hoover behind her. "He's real depressed in there-"

"He's always depressed!" She whispers vehemently, turning, closing the door to My's room. "When we met him, he was depressed about Kenobi and his aunt and uncle. When he and I were first together, he was depressed about being responsible for the Death Star and…about how I got pregnant with Ben. Later he was depressed about you. He always finds something, Han. All we can do is take care of him and hope it's enough."

"It ain't enough! Leia-"

"Luke is a drug addict, Han," she says firmly. "He's going to do things like this because he doesn't know how to stop himself. We're doing all we can."

"We are not doing all we can! You're just saying that 'cause you don't know how to fucking deal with this, so you're acting like it's out of your hands." I find my boots on the floor near the door and pull them on. "If he still thinks the only way out is to overdose, and if he can fucking get drugs to try to do that with in that clinic, then he don't belong there."

"Where are you going?"

"To get him out."

"He's not ready to leave! He'll relapse if he's out, and he needs to be monitored while he recovers from the overdose-!"

"I'll fucking take care of him. He'll be better off with me than there."

"They're not going to release him in the shape he's in!"

"We'll see about that!"

I don't tell the clinic people why I'm here except to visit Luke, and they lead me to his new private room. "Private room?" I ask, suspicious. He used to have two roommates. Supposed to be good for them to not be alone.

"He's not allowed to interact with the other patients until we're sure he's more emotionally stable," a medical droid informs me. I hope that was a decision that was made by a real medic and not a fucking machine.

"Whatd'ya mean?"

"Mister Skywalker was offered the medication he consumed by another patient."

"Then it's that guy's fault! Not Luke's! Luke's hurting for spice so bad, you can't expect him to turn it down!"

"The other patient is similarly not allowed to communicate with his peers, nor is he to be given any more medication except under close observation."

"What the hell'd he take?"

"Mister Skywalker? Five doses of antipsychotics."

"What's that even do to someone who don't need it?"

"I fear no one needs a quintuple dose of anything, General. But in the case of someone with Skywalker's brain chemistry, it did little more than cause him to lose consciousness. There is still some in his system, and it is causing him anxiety and restlessness."

I think again, I'm gonna kill him.

I open the door to Luke's room, and find him pacing.

I sigh in relief, so fucking glad he isn't in bed, so sick from the overdose that he can't move. Like last time. Now I'm really gonna kill him, since he's in good enough shape to take it. He pauses to look at me, and all he says is, "Han, I really need a stick but they won't give me one."

"What, you want them to be on me? You already have yours for today?"

"No, they won't give me any. They're trying to punish me."

"Yeah, well, you fucking deserve it."

He glares at me for a moment, then resumes pacing.

"What the fuck were you thinking, Luke?" I say, sitting in the only chair in the room. "You took five antipsychotics?"

He laughs. He laughs. "Well, you know…if Chrol wants to hear music that isn't there, and he wants to give his pills to me instead…."

"Luke, you're not even fucking trying!" I stand up and push my chair over, hard, making as much noise as I can. He starts, stares at me with wide eyes. I grab his shoulders and make him look at me. "Do you want to get out of here?"

"Of…of course…."

"Do you realize that to get out of here, you have to get clean and stop doing stupid shit like this?"

He blinks. "Yeah, Han…."

"Then what gives?"

He shrugs helplessly. His voice is weak and childlike. "I…."

"This ain't cute. It ain't funny. And I ain't happy."

Shrugging my hands off his shoulders, he says, "You know what, Han? A couple weeks ago, when you told me that there are 'a lot of different ways to be crazy?' Well, you were right. And maybe I'm a kind of crazy where I'll take any drugs I can get and I don't even know why. Maybe I don't want to get better. Maybe I want to hurt myself more than I want even wake up in the morning, and maybe there's nothing anyone can do about it."

"What about Ben and Anakin?" I ask.

He stops pacing again, pausing to take some uneasy breaths. "They're better off without me," he growls at last, turning to the dark window.

"You don't mean that."

I step up beside him, and offer him a stick. He sighs loudly and accepts it. "Thank you," he breathes, lighting it, taking a long drag.

I lay a palm on his back, and he looks up at me. "You need to get better for the boys," I remind him. "Now stop acting like a jerk and taking stupid drugs."

He nods. "Yeah. I know…."

He knows I love him. Gods, how I fucking love him. No matter how mad he makes me. I dunno how many chances I'm gonna give him, but probably way more than he deserves. Ever since I met him, I ain't been the same. I rub my hand over the tense muscles in his back, and he closes his eyes. I can't believe for a minute that he's responding well to touch-he usually only does that when he's feeling really sick, like right after he got to the hospital-and I say, "Like that?"

He turns a little pink. "Yeah," he admits, trying to sound like he doesn't really care.

"Your muscles are like duracrete-"

"Kinda hard for me to relax, Han."

"Yeah…." I move and stand behind him, kneading his shoulders with both hands, gentle enough to not worry about hurting his fragile body. He sighs and seems to relax a bit.

This could be good. "Put that thing out and sit down on the bed."

He stiffens again. "Will you give me another one?"

"Sure. But I promise you'll feel better if you let me work on your back a minute."

He listens. He never does that. "Do you want me to lie down?"

That seems too intimate. "Nah, just sit at the edge." I kick off my boots and sit behind him with my legs up under me, and he tries to sit straight and give me a good angle.

"I don't know where you learn to do this stuff."

"What stuff?"

"You know, all the random stuff you can do. This, and cooking, and the tattoo thing."

"Anyone with half a brain can cook."

He snorts. He can't cook worth a damn.

I smile. "And tattoos are easy. You just need ink and a pin." I pull down the back of the neck of his tunic a bit and look at his tattoo for the first time in over eight years. It's really small, on his right shoulder blade just below his neck, about three centimeters across. It's a little Alliance Starbird in black ink. We'd known each other about a month when he found out I could do them and asked me. I remember putting the ink on the pin and saying, "You're sure, right? This don't come off."

"I'm sure," he'd insisted, looking up at me through too much gold hair, lying flat on his stomach with his shirt off, his head nestled in the triangle of his folded arms.

"Maybe you should go to a real artist."

"I want you to do it."

It'd turned out real clean, and it still has the good, think, precise lines I'd managed to give it. I rub my thumb over it. "Still looks good. You realize it's over ten years old now?"

He laughs. Genuinely. "Gods, Han, don't say that!"

"Ever get any others?"

"Never wanted any others." He says it like it really means something.

I smile to myself and rub his shoulders some more, and his muscles start to melt under my fingers.

"Are you still mad at me?" he asks softly. I'm surprised he cares.

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry."

An apology. For his self-destructive behavior. That sure never happens. "Don't do it again."

"Okay."

"Really?"

"Yeah."

I wrap my arms around his shoulders from behind and squeeze. "You ever feel like you're gonna do something like that, call me instead."

"Okay," he breathes, and I believe him. Sighing, he wraps his arms around mine, and we hold each other. "I don't like it here, Han."

"I know. I don't either. It's fucking creepy."

"Yeah. And I just keep extending my sentence by…screwing up."

"You gotta stay here until you're well enough to leave," I say, surprised I'm not dragging him out like I'd come here to do. "But believe me, kid: as soon as you're done with detox, I'm getting you outta here."

"Detox isn't the only part of rehab."

"You can do the rest outpatient. And I'll keep an eye on you. Promise."

He nods, squeezing my arms. "I know."

"You gotta get better for me, though."

"I will."

And I believe him. Again, like all the other times, I believe him.