Leia watched as the youngest cub marched to the dais where the Matriarch of the Fifteen Dens embraced and welcomed her home in the name of her ancient ancestors. Hundreds of Shistavanen filled the great pavilion, the ceiling of which was framed with bloodwood that had been soaked and twined into pointed twisting skeletal sculptures and jagged spikes. Sections of bloodwood had been wrapped in a very thin material that had subsequently been treated so that it clung tightly to the wood and gave the appearance of skin. It was translucent enough that natural sunlight poured down from overhead although the material gave the airy quarters a rosy tint. Leia felt as though she was standing in the bowels of something alive – or something that had once been alive.
Off in the distance, the city of Topwaau was visible, built in the hills of the same dark bloodwood that was tougher than titanium. Since the ceremony had begun, the sun had rapidly burned away the thin web of morning fog, revealing the strategically desirable view of the deciduous forests and wind-ravaged lowlands. They stretched as far as she could see in any one direction and reminded her of Alderaan's southernmost continent. Leia would have said so to Han, except that the ritual embraces (which also involved a great deal of sniffing) were completed and the Matriarch of Fifteen Dens gestured for him to step forward.
It was quiet enough to hear the whuffling breathing of the wolfmen nearest her. Looking mildly embarrassed, the tall Corellian complied. The Matriarch sniffed him soundly and growled at length.
"Han Solo," translated Thalus, who was standing to her right. "If ever you are in need of a friend, of aid, of a safe haven, you are always welcome here. If the Alliance is ever in need of aid, we are here."
Normally, Leia knew Han would have broken the seriousness by cracking a joke, but he only said, "Good luck to you, and Mooz."
"Thank you my friend. We will remember you."
"You're turning out to be quite the diplomat," Leia whispered under her breath when he returned to her side.
"Don't get too excited. I'm not making any career changes."
Silently, all of the wolfmen began filing out of the pavilion, heading quickly for the city. Taroor was the only one to turn around and offer a very human-style wave with her massive paws.
As goodbyes went, the exchange was less than satisfying, but the Millennium Falcon had arrived at an inauspicious moment in Shistavanen history. Over the last two weeks there had been several skirmishes with the Hriiki, an avian species that dwelled in the thickest part of the woods. Recently, the ferocious flyers had attacked two cubs, both of whom had escaped with serious injuries. (Leia wondered if the jagged spikes of the great hall were a form of protection should the Hriiki fly inside the pavilion, but there was no one around to ask, except for the fierce-looking she-wolfs waiting to escort them to the Falcon escorts who were both wearing silvery feathers in their wide belts.) In retaliation for the recent attacks, a hunting party was being sent out tomorrow and as a matter of cultural tradition, the Shistavanen believed goodbyes before a battle courted back luck. Naturally, Thalus and Mooz had already signed on.
Twenty minutes later, Uvena Prime was a dream in hyperspace.
None of the wolfmen had been permitted to cross the threshold to the captain's quarters. It was a firm rule of Han's and one Leia had agreed with at the start of the flight, despite worrying that it was somewhat selfish when there was so little space to be had. Now, too exhausted to contemplate sani-cleaning the ship from bow to stern, she was relieved to have a haven onboard unpolluted by canine odours and musky fur. Soon, she was cleaner than she'd been in over a week, muscles soft and relaxed, wrapped securely in an ancient oversized red towel.
Han caught up with her just as she finished. He climbed out of his rumpled clothing and ducked beneath the spray.
Leia sat on the tiny counter-space and worked at towel drying her hair. Han hadn't been wearing his safety straps during the air taxi crash on Bonadan and there were several splotchy bruises sprawled idly across his left side. Other, nasty looking marks decorated his throat. They had to be from the Yaka within Tion's Embassy, not the Shistavanen who had helped him. For a minute, he stood with his head bowed so that the water ran a river down the center of his back, rolling his neck from left to right.
"Why didn't you tell me about what happened at Star's End with Doc?" she asked. Only en route to Uvena Prime had she learned the story behind that.
"It wasn't worth mentioning until a few days ago," Han answered. "Believe it or not, there are a few planets in the Corporate Sector where the welcome mat would fly out."
"Just not the ones that happen to have CSA headquarters on them," Leia added under her breath. "You're quite the hero then."
"Who? Me? Nah. I'm just always in the wrong place at the wrong time." He reached for the soap. "But I have this funny habit of staying alive no matter what the odds."
"You're going to give Threepio a circuit meltdown one of these days." Leia nudged her toes against the containment field that kept the water from spraying outside the cubicle. "Personally, I like that about you."
"Good." Han winked at her. "So was it just my imagination or was Jarratt treating me like a long-lost Alderaanian war veteran or something?"
"It wasn't your imagination."
He held a hand up in mock-surrender against the spray. "I give up. What'd I do?"
"For starters, you rescued me from the Death Star."
"Ah. So because of that…"
Leia cleared her throat. "Rescuing a member of the World Family ensures that you'll always have the welcome mat put out for you wherever an enclave of survivors exists."
"Huh." Han rinsed pale green lather from his hair. "Well, one thing's for certain."
"What's that?"
"The Force sure seems to have a vested interest in keeping you alive."
"What do you mean?"
"Well…" Han wiped soap from his eyes. "You may not know how to use it or control it, but whenever you need it, it shows up."
From a certain point of view, Leia amended silently. It hadn't exactly helped her to avoid Tion's trap on Bonadan in the first place, had it? She waited for him to finish, then kissed the yellowed bruises at the base of his throat until she was newly damp. Since the ordeal had ended, they'd embraced and touched each other many times, but not in private, not with that feeling of almost-loss present so that she could banish it.
"I would have told you about the vision if I'd understood it at the time," she explained, eagerly running her palms over his chest. She was planning to talk to Luke about it as soon as she got back.
Han discarded any pretence of an interest in talking. He muttered one unintelligible word, leaned down and kissed her bottom lip. The kiss started out small, and then his tongue moved its way into her mouth.
When they came up for air, Leia shifted her hand between Han's legs, examining the organ that had an almost velvety soft quality about it, softer than the skin of a newborn. As it hardened in her palm, she slid two fingers in tandem over the underside of the tip where he was most sensitive and listened to his breathing quicken. "I missed you," she said.
One hand slid beneath the towel and cupped her breast. "I know."
Suddenly she had a desperate need to touch all of him, to feel all of him. She sucked at his throat, her body rising and tightening increments. His caresses slipped to her stomach, and then to the inside of her leg, almost carelessly. She said, "I need to come," not knowing she'd been about to say anything at all, and then felt almost taken aback.
To her surprise, Han broke the kiss and scooted down so that he was on his knees.
"I meant," she managed, gasping, "We should go to the bed."
"But that's not what you said." He unwrapped her towel and then his hands were hot against the inside of her thighs and his mouth was even hotter.
Flushed and startled, she attempted to recall if they'd fallen to their passions over the past few weeks ever in such a fashion but she couldn't think beyond the present. It was only six steps or so to the bunk from the fresher, but she liked precisely what his tongue was doing too much to stop it. It took all of her concentration to lock her elbows and brace her hands on his shoulders.
Soon, her legs were trembling and she teetered on the cusp of succumbing to a particularly exquisite pleasure at the hands of the dark-haired Corellian. Moaning, she arched her feet and buckled at the waist over his shoulder. It would have been an awkward fall, broken by the edge of the shower cubicle, but Han caught her easily and spread the discarded towel across the fresher floor before tumbling her back.
She covered herself with her hands, wanting a minute to recover while shivers of an unfinished orgasm continued rippling between her legs, but Han had none of it, prying her legs apart and covering her with his body. The slick sensation of penetration was intense, as though a thousand nerves endings were raw and over-stimulated.
"Wait, wait, wait…" she begged.
Buried deep inside her, Han propped himself up on his elbows and kissed her squarely on the tip of her nose. Half-heartedly, he said, "All right."
Leia caught her breath and smiled demurely at him. Water dripped onto her cheek and forehead, trickling into her hair. She ran her nails lightly over his hips and felt his stomach muscles bunch up against her ribcage. He was aching for this as much as she was. "Just go slow to start," she said. "I want you."
"Like this," he said, sliding in and out.
"Yes."
After a few moments of gentle rocking, Han clamped his forcefully mouth over hers and pretended to forget the request.
The rising tension between her legs soon had her entire body screaming for a new release. Leia felt drawn out to the point of breaking like a feral creature, squealing and twisting beneath him. She grasped his upper arms and ran the pads of her feet over his calves, murmuring Alderaanian words that were never uttered in polite company, words that a daughter of the World Family would never use, should never have known.
Han responded by driving into her in a circular motion, sliding a hand under her bottom and breathing ardently into her ear and against the nape of her neck. He said, "Tell me when."
It wasn't long before she exhaled, "Now."
Han thrust himself into her over and over, grunting and shuddering from head to toe. She moaned at length, pleasure drifting outward in concentric circles almost in time with the throbs against her womb.
They lay together panting quietly.
"Maybe from now on we should avoid stepping off my ship altogether," Han suggested wryly.
Leia considered that for a moment. "It might not be such a bad idea. Those events are usually over-rated anyway." She pressed her teeth against his shoulder. "This is definitely not over-rated."
Han squirmed over onto his back, drawing the back of her head in and kissing her. In doing so he accidentally gouged his opposite hand's fingers into the base of her ribs. Leia promptly seized up with an "Ouch!"
He traced the small lump that had been the boneknitter's injection site. "You should see a medic when we get back to Endor," he said.
"It's fine," she reassured him, although, now that he mentioned it, it was feeling sorer than it had been two days ago. There was no telling if Tion's Em-Dee droid had been programmed to sterilize its equipment. "Do you have any antibiotic patches on board?" she asked, glancing sympathetically at his right eye. It was still bloodshot, although it looked a thousand times better than when she'd first seem him over the hypertransceiver on Bonadan.
"I think so."
"I'll put one on for now and get checked out… if you let them have a look at your eye."
To her amazement, or perhaps still in the throes of post-coital bliss, Han agreed without even thinking about it. She set her head on his chest and sighed, saving his warmth and her own sensual contentment to a part of her mind where she could hold on to it, relive it. He felt so good beneath her that she hated to get up, even if they were laying partway across the fresher hatchway and her feet were buried in a pile of damp towels.
Finally, he said, "If I don't get up I'm going to fall asleep like this."
"Uh-oh." Laughing, she used the edge of the counter to climb to her feet and searched for a cloth with which to wash.
Han yawned and tucked his arms behind his head, watching her with a pleased expression. "So what did all that mean?"
"What mean?" she countered, although she knew perfectly well what he meant.
"Don't make me guess," he threatened. "I'll start making my way down the list of things we haven't tried yet."
"Weren't you getting up." She scooted over his head and nabbed a clean-smelling shirt from the floor by the foot of the bunk. "Have you seen my robe?"
"Try the closet."
Leia peered into the closet. "No."
"The shelf over the bunk?"
Eventually, Leia found her robe crammed into the crack between the bunk and wall. She wandered into the med-bay, scrounged up a credit-sized antibiotic patch and slapped it onto her right thigh. Then, feeling thirsty and vaguely shaky-legged, she headed back into the main hold and poured herself a glass of water. Ration bar wrappers, tufts of hair, and disassembled hardware culled from the storage compartments and used for impromptu games to keep the youngest cubs occupied littered the decks, remnants of their three-day sleep over. She took a seat at the holo-table, which was blessedly free of the mess and covered only with a glossy travelogue.
"How many hours of vacuuming will it take to rid the ship of all this fur?" she wondered aloud when Han made his way aft.
"Usually I make Chewie do it and call it his punishment for shedding and saying the enviro-regulator messes with the seasonal hormones that would stop him from shedding." Han paused to tuck in his shirt. "I know he makes that crap up."
"No he doesn't. I've read that before. It's a fact."
Han grabbed a star-chart from a pocket of his in-flight chair and made a gesture that bordered on the obscene in Shyriiwook. "He doesn't know that I know that he's telling the truth and I'm gonna keep it that way."
Smiling in spite of herself, she said, "You're terrible."
"I'm Corellian," he replied.
"And it was your humility that attracted me to you first."
Han's measured gaze was amused. "I don't think so," he said.
She sipped her water carefully, shifting her gaze around the main hold. The computer interface component was nowhere insight, nor were the data crystals they'd taken from the Tionese Embassy. There was only Han, leaning against the bulkhead, concentrating on a star-chart and chewing the inside of his cheek pocket.
"Han?"
"Uh huh."
"Was Tyyla on them?"
He stopped reading and looked up. "Yes."
Leia set the water down. She clenched her hands into fists and pressed them hard against her thighs. "How did she die?"
"Does it matter?"
It mattered how someone died. Tyyla deserved to be remembered, to have the truth known about her by the only person who could, didn't she? "If you're going to say she would have died regardless when Ald-"
"No." Han shook his head grimly. "I wasn't going to say that."
"Tion said she hanged herself," Leia explained tiredly. "I only wanted to know if it were true."
"I don't know." Han folded the chart into neat squares, crossed the room and set it on the holo-table. "I couldn't watch that much of it. When we get back to Endor, I'll turn it over to Intelligence. If there's any justice out there, Tion will get what's coming to him."
If, Leia thought bitterly, a familiar cold and nauseating anger rising in her throat. There had to be justice, or she'd wasted her opportunity to mete it out days ago.
"Listen." Han rested his hands on the table-top and leaned forward, staring at her peculiarly. "There's something else I haven't told you."
Brow knit with curiosity, Leia asked, "Who else have you rescued?"
His expression didn't lighten. "Tion had a vidrecording of you in those datafiles."
The life drained out of her chest and cold ripples of shock crept up her spine, as though she was suddenly afraid and locked in her cell again. It simply rendered her insensible her to think of Han watching one second of it. The scan grid was alternately in the distant past and then the not so distant past – knowing that he'd suffered so wrenched at her insides. She couldn't imagine witnessing it firsthand. She managed to murmur, "Oh."
"There's that." He reached into her lap and touched a particularly tender bruise at the base of wrist. "And the fact that I refuse to turn it over with everything else. It's gone. I wiped it."
I refuse…
She digested that mutely, said "thank you," and studied the travelogue again, pretending to marvel at the moving images without reading a single solitary word. The travelogue was merely a resting place for her eyes whilst her brain rattled about in turmoil. In her mind's eye she saw Tion lying on the floor of his stateroom, cowering like the spineless monster that he was. She blinked him away, yearning to see sunshine waning through Endor's trees, as though she was a passenger on a luxury liner, changing the view with the unit controls. Not everyone who traveled first class wanted a view of the stars - many hated space travel and spent the entire trip pretending they were planet side. The image of Tion cowering inside the turbolift returned over and over again.
Han's intake of breath above her was sharp. "Sweetheart, I didn't watch it but-"
Stiffly, she motioned for him to stop.
"I shouldn't have left him alive," Han finished, tipping back and snapping his thumbnails against the lip of the table. "I don't know why I did."
I wanted to kill him, she thought determinedly. I wanted to so badly. Looking away was surprisingly easy to do. "I know this is the first time we've been alone since this all started and a lot has happened but I need for you not to be angry right now. It won't help anything."
"I'm not angry."
"Yes you are."
Han swore under his breath. "You didn't look so good when we first got you out of the Embassy."
Leia released a slow breath, avoiding his look of concern. She didn't want Tion there, invading their first moments alone together. "It would have been worse if you didn't escape when you did, yes. They came to inform him immediately."
"And if I'd been later?"
She flipped the travelogue over and eyed the images of frothy violet oceans and spectacular cliffs at sunset. In small print it said, Ataria Island Resorts on Spira. "What is this?"
"Nothing," he said, in a tone of voice that left Leia with the distinct impression it had once been something. He scratched at his damp head and stared at the deckplates, frowning. "You should get some sleep."
"What about you?"
"I need to check a few things out."
"I can wait for you."
"It might take a while."
And just like that, he was vanishing in the direction of the main tech station. He'd completed the pre-flight check before taking off from Uvena Prime, but she didn't doubt that there weren't dozens of system scans that should have been days ago. With twenty-three passengers, not including themselves, he'd had a difficult time accomplishing anything maintenance-related and eventually isolated himself in the cockpit. Still, Leia couldn't let him leave him like that, upset either because of Tion or maybe because a lifetime ago he'd thought maybe they could stop off on a quiet resort world and spend some time alone. She stood up. "Wait, damn it."
Han pivoted one foot, righting himself neatly with a palm against the hatchway. "Damn it what?"
"You're always walking off when I'm trying to talk to you?"
"I'm beat and I'm trying to get into bed with you sooner rather than later."
"Oh." It was true; the previous night on Uvena Prime had been far more eventful and exciting than actually restful. She'd slept in the corner of a crowded common room on a pallet with six Shistavanen jabbering non-stop only a meter away, while Han had spent most of the night pretending to drink glasses of a foul smelling fermented beverage. It was a wonder that he was still on his feet.
Apparently, her sudden speechlessness wasn't what he was expecting. Han crossed his arms and waited, almost apologetically. "So what was it you wanted to say?"
"Um… do you need any help?"
Han raised his brows in question.
"We're both exhausted. Two sets of hands are better than one."
"All right, all right, come with me. You remember how to plug in the diagnostic kit, right? You can run checks on life-support and the ion flux stabilizer. And log the power core levels."
An hour later, as Leia was just copying down final row of power core levels, Han arrived at the tech station with a datapad and hair that had dried sticking up in a dozen different places. He quickly scanned the reports and made a few notes in his datapad. Then he looked up and said, "So was that really what you wanted to talk about?"
"No."
"What then?"
"It's just that we've never spent this much together without a break," she explained, leaning into his body; he was a pillar of strength that would never yield, never break. "I have ways of dealing with things when I'm alone. I'm not used to having you, having anyone... in my personal space like this."
"Sweetheart, if you think all I've done is invade your personal space than I haven't been making enough of an impression on you."
"You have." Leia laughed, suddenly bitterly close to tears. "You know what I mean. It's not even me – it's Tyyla that's tearing me up inside. I didn't know, all these years…"
"And knowing what would have happened to you…" He didn't finish the sentence, but his left cheek muscle flinched and she knew he'd watched more of Tyyla's vid-recording than he was saying.
"Don't think about it." She tugged at his fingers. "Come to bed with me."
When they made their way there, Han undressed and promptly collapsed in a heap on his bunk.
Leia used the fresher and draped her robe across the conform lounge at the end of his bunk. The Force sure seems to have a vested interest in keeping you alive, she repeated quietly.Was it the most obvious and the strangest of all truths? Perhaps her brother had unleashed her Force powers inadvertently on the bridge in the Endor village? Why? She wasn't like Luke. Confronting their father hadn't been part of her destiny.
She picked the possibilities apart in her mind and thought; maybe you're not the only one the Force wants to keep alive.
For the first time in a long while, the last princess of Alderaan felt profoundly clear-headed and filled with an almost irrational sense of relief. Since they'd escaped Jabba on Tatooine, she'd been terrified that every time Han turned a corner he was going to be taken away from her again. He wasn't the type of man who would endure worrying and over-protectiveness for long, or the type who could endure it. If she believed the Force was protecting him, maybe she could begin to relax. If she continued to have faith in her own instincts, they would be just fine.
Smiling to herself, she crawled into the bunk.
Han was so tired he didn't even complain about the shirt.