Clay and Pearl Bridge Passage: Telling Luke
Languorous blue light brushed against skin, darkness like a sheet above their heads. Leia Organa and Han Solo recovered: sweat drying, breath calming: dimming, sated pleasure humming through their veins. The galaxy's colossal ramshod spinning of the past few minutes stuttered into a gentler rhythm. A beautiful silence permeated the quarters, like silk against fingers and lips against lips.
Blissful quiet. Descending drowsiness. The most ethereal taste of oneness on their tongues, the heat that cooled in a mechanized, environmentally-controlled cabin on a star cruiser built for war. Somewhere outside the cabin was a corridor where revolutionaries stormed to fight, where the galaxy's last hope for peace brokered war. Where violent conflict was planned, waged, won and lost.
And yet Leia felt so calm, so wonderfully relaxed, that she hardly noticed when Han folded her into his chest. His skin was warm, always so warm, and she nestled into him with all the contented pleasure she felt. Exhaustion trickled like rainwater, soothing and relieving as she settled, as her heart slowed and her eyes closed.
She'd slept better this past week than she had since…. when? Since the destruction of Alderaan? Since her election to the Imperial Senate? Since her life had become less about her own ambition and more about fighting a near-unwinnable war. The galaxy's future weighed on her shoulders like duracrete, pounding like her heartbeat in her ears.
But not here. Not with Han. Not consumed by his heat, his skin. She was safe and free to be normal, infatuated: a passionate woman in love with the man in her bed. Everything else could go hang for a few hours outside the walls of her cabin. She could rest and that in itself was so extraordinary that it sometimes made tears prickle the edges of her eyes. Relief, utter and complete, in being able to trust the universe to still be in order as she fell asleep with Han, as he held her, as she whispered I love you into the blood-hot skin of his chest.
She was so proud of him, of them, of the steps they'd taken to create this haven for themselves in mere days. All the pain—all the pride and fear—pushed aside to experience what they could be together.
Leia's thoughts slowed, blurred into hazy color. Wandering sparks of insight fizzled, and she breathed into well-loved skin and hair, feeling warm. Safe. Cherished.
"We gotta tell Luke."
She blinked, startled by the low rumble of Han's voice. She felt rather than heard him, ear pressed to his chest, interrupted from the lullaby of his slowing heartbeat. His voice had come out of nowhere, had blown through her satisfied haze like an ion cannon through vacuum.
Luke who? she thought, facetious but only just.
"Not now," she whispered into his skin, pressed her lips to his throat as if to soothe it into silence.
It was late. So late. The chronometer on the hull was blurry, but she thought it said 0134. It wasn't an unusual hour for her to be awake, although the novelty of seeing it because of this with Han was still fresh. She had a full schedule tomorrow morning and needed to be able to command attention with grace and intelligence. She should be asleep.
The problem had been her own desire, the hollow wanting in her chest with Han Solo scrawled on it in vibrant red ink. She'd wanted him badly the day before, had acutely felt his absence from her side the minute she'd left him. The day had been a mess of meetings and briefings and hours spent in front of her holo-terminal in her office, challenging and hard. And her meals had been lonely affairs with High Command staff; the rations had been wholly unsatisfying and so had been the company. Hours and hours of tedium when all she wanted was to see him smile, to see him walk by and growl her name in private, teasing tones.
When Han had stopped by her quarters later this evening she'd nearly attacked him in her desperation. She'd pulled him to her like she couldn't breathe without him, like she had been slowly suffocating all day. Sometimes it felt that way, like he took the oxygen with him when they parted in the mornings, like her nerves didn't settle until they felt the warmth of his smile. It had been a vicious cycle of pleasure and pain. She generally didn't want to leave him but also relished the reunion, the snap-crackle of his breathless kiss, the way he couldn't get enough of her, either. She desperately needed sleep, but she felt like maybe she desperately needed him, too.
"He should know," he said.
She closed her eyes, rubbed her nose along the hair on his chest, pressed a gentle kiss to his skin.
"He should," she agreed.
Out of their small assemblage of friends only Luke was unaware of the monumental shifts between Han and Leia that had occurred on Nar Shaddaa. Chewie had been present, of course, and no one else seemed … qualified? Trustworthy enough to know. And Luke was their friend. Leia hesitated to admit they owed Luke the conversation, but they did. It had been Han and Luke and Chewie and Leia for so long; now that the parameters had changed, Luke deserved to know that two of his closest friends were, to put it delicately, seeing each other.
Seeing an awful lot of each other, as it turned out. She hadn't been alone in her bunk in a week.
"He'll feel a lot worse if we wait much longer," Han warned, running a hand down the skin of her bare back.
She knew that, too. They had been careful about displays of affection, but there was always a chance Luke might stroll onto the Falcon and see them. Or notice that neither of them seemed to be present at many of Rogue Squadron's lackluster parties of late, that while the four of them usually ate meals together when on duty at the same time, Han and Leia had been conspicuously absent.
"You want to stake your claim?" she asked, teasing.
He jerked to look at her, green eyes flashing. "No."
Han looked affronted, offended, like what she'd teasingly offered as motivation for him was anathema to his moral code. The thought would be funny if it wasn't somehow a stumblingly accurate interpretation of his insulted expression. She knew Han well by now, but she didn't know him well enough yet to anticipate his reactions. And whatever else he was, Han was unpredictably ethical in his own crosseyed way.
She pressed her lips together and waited for him to explain himself.
"I just know I would've wanted to be told if it'd gone the other way."
She bit her tongue, surprised at the heat in his voice. She'd known that there had been a friendly competition for her affection in the early days of Luke and Han's involvement in the Alliance. But she'd thought they'd struck a kind of agreement, an understanding that she was the lone bestower of her favor. The adolescent vying had disappeared and morphed into friendship as far as she knew.
"The other way," she murmured.
His hand stopped at her hip, wrapped around her side and pressed her body closer to his. "Yeah."
"There was no possibility of that happening."
Not in a million years. Not in this lifetime or any other. She wouldn't go so far as to say that Han and she were an inevitability; that dripped of sentimentality and any such notions she had had died with Alderaan. But she could not imagine having this conversation with Luke, discussing how to tell Han that they were together. The idea was all wrong; the whole scene would've been a farce. Maybe as a joke; no, but she would have never agreed to that. The last thing she had ever expected to find in the Alliance was someone to love.
Leia pressed her lips together and scrunched her nose as Han tugged her to lie on top of him. She folded her legs to either side of his hips and leaned her chin on her steepled fingers on his chest, looking at him so closely that she could see the flecks of gold in his eyes.
He looked good in the night-cycle light of her quarters. Not in a sexual way, although her desire for Han was now a constant whisper in her ears. No, he looked good to her in a deeper way. He looked vulnerable: bare-chested, lethargic and satisfied. His skin didn't flush the way hers did—that beautiful tan of his hid that from her—but there were marks nonetheless. A shadow on his shoulder in the shape of her teeth, one he could easily hide beneath a shirt but still, there it was. His hair was a mess on the pillow, sticking up with the rampages of her fingertips as he'd nipped at her inner thighs, as he'd pressed tiny kisses along the edges of her standard-issue Alliance underthings.
He looked properly adored. A smile snuck onto her lips that had nothing to do with their current topic of conversation.
"Sweetheart," he began. "You might have warned both of us if that had been the case."
"Luke …. Luke's not ….He's always been just a friend."
Han's hand swept lower, to the very lowest part of her back, comforting in his forthrightness, the way his physicality shined bright in the darkness of her quarters. Something she'd learned this past week; something she'd suspected since he'd run screaming after a group of stormtroopers in the corridors of the Death Star. Han exuded kinetic chaos the way she exuded self-possession. She imagined in another life, with a better childhood, he would have been a smashball player or maybe a martial artist. He understood the physical world in a way she didn't, a totally unique perspective. Not unlike a dancer the way his spatial reasoning informed him of the galaxy, of the traps and trappings of physics and mass and the way her lower back desperately needed his fingertips to soothe old nerves.
"No spark," he murmured.
She lifted her chin to kiss his lips, full and warm and tasting vaguely of her soap. "No spark," she agreed. "But you're right. We should tell him."
"He's probably already figured it out. Seemed awful suspicious at dinner last night."
Leia rolled her eyes. "Might have had something to do with your hand on my leg."
Unbothered, he shrugged and offered no defense.
Tactile, that was the missing word for Han. Physical and tactile. Touch-starved, in a way: some long-suppressed trauma hidden in his past. She had waded into his depths but there was still so much ground to cover. A tempting kind of unfathomable, the way his fingers needed her skin.
The quiet blanketed them again but the dreamlike stillness had faded. They were awake, wide awake, eyes on each other. Way to ruin the mood, Han, she thought, but the thought had no teeth. She couldn't fault him for wanting to do right by their friend.
She reached up to run her fingers over the stubborn lock of hair that snuck in front of his eyes. When the lock fell back a heartbeat later she smiled and leaned up to kiss him. Soft, slow, gentle. Reassuring. Not quite chaste but a marked difference from her efforts of a few minutes before.
When she pulled away, his eyes ran tracks over her face. His hand came up to her throat, to the back of her neck. Warmth flooded her body in the quiet as she looked at him, too, at the way her heart tripped over itself when he marvelled at her like she was the newest star in his sky.
She could tell Luke about Han. She could do that. She agreed that Luke would be hurt if they didn't. And she wanted to tell him, too. She wanted to share her new happiness with the entire galaxy or at the very least the Alliance. But that wasn't how Bail and Breha Organa had taught her to navigate her public persona and she had no desire to answer the follow-up questions. Where is this going? Are you sure this will last? What if this is fleeting and temporary and you wind up hurt because of it?
No. She wasn't worried about that. There was a good chance one or both of them would die before the Emperor did. Life was pain. Avoiding it had done nothing but hurt her further the past eighteen months. Better to live to feel the pain than live without feeling the joy. Han was worth that, to her. Nar Shaddaa had taught her to hold him close, even at the risk of the hurt to come. And what if it didn't come to pain?
The air stilled but a new chill crept in. Han reached to cover their bodies with a rough blanket, pulling it over her shoulders like the gentleman he only was when no one was looking.
She smiled at him but knew her shivers had nothing to do with the cooling air temperature of the cabin. Nar Shaddaa had taught her to hold onto Han, yes, but it had also told her far more about herself than she was comfortable with. Her stomach burst into nervous flutters and she fought to ignore the trembling in her hands as she pulled the blanket tighter around them.
Han was somehow on the same page. "And that's all we're telling him?" he asked. "Just about us?"
A dark shape in front of her. The delicious burn of heat on her palm. The lightning-like energy of stun bolts slipping from her fingers to the stormtroopers about to capture them. Flash by flash, the scene retold itself and she knew what Han was asking.
Obi-Wan? A rasp, a strangled, guttural name in a busy marketplace, from the voicebox of her worst nightmare. Darth Vader, witness to a secret she hadn't known she'd kept locked somewhere in her mind. Darth Vader comparing her to a man he had cut down before her eyes.
Darth Vader, the renowned Jedi killer.
"Yes, that's all we are telling him," she answered.
She was not ready to share anything more.
Han fell silent in what Leia knew was disapproval, but she didn't care. The conversation they needed to have with Luke—this one, about their new relationship—would be hard enough without bringing up mystical potentials and genocidal psychopaths. Better to separate the two topics. This one was urgent; the other could wait.
The room quieted again. Their breathing was the only sound, soft and even. She ran apologetic fingers down his left arm, over the bulge of muscle and the cleft of joint and back again. His other hand resumed its steady sweep across her lower back under the weight of the blanket. Back and forth, soothing. And as she looked at him, at his too-long eyelashes and constantly-broken nose, she noticed the concern in his eyes, the way he floundered adorably in this new reality of theirs. He knew as much as she did how to do them.That knowledge was oddly reassuring.
"How do we tell him?" she asked into the quiet.
Han looked at her, brought his wandering hand up her back to her head, nestled into the half-deconstructed braid that tangled over her shoulder.
"With food," he said.
"Food?"
"Lots of food. No one wants to hear about other people getting laid on an empty stomach."
She quirked an eyebrow as if to say oh, naturally, but didn't say it out loud. "So. Dinner," she said instead.
"Dinner," he agreed. "And drinks."
She nodded, rose onto her hands to reach his lips, kissed him goodnight, gentle and light. When she pulled away he tugged her closer, tucked her forehead into his throat. She could hear his heartbeat and was swallowed by her own sated exhaustion before she could blink at the chronometer's fuzzy 0140. We'll tell him at dinner, she thought. With drinks.
Author's Notes: Part 1 is dedicated to the mind-bogglingly talented Justine Graham, who celebrated a birthday recently. This is days late but still: happy birthday, JG! We could not ask for a better friend or fellow fan. I hope you enjoyed postcoital Han and Leia; I know they have a special place in your heart.
Special thanks to AmongstEmeraldClouds for the quick beta and for catching the tone and grammar mistakes. Thank you!
This is a two-part bridge passage between C&P and C&P2. Part 2 of the bridge passage will be posted next Friday, September 27th. Thank you!
-KR