Happily Ever After, Part III
Once upon a time, there had lived a princess. The princess was beautiful and intelligent, strategically strong and pronouncedly proud. But she was cursed from birth with one terrible secret, a secret so humiliating, so terrifying and utterly abominable that she never told anyone other than one man. It was a debilitating and dangerous secret, that one man knew, one that could frighten away her allies and make her vulnerable to her enemies' attacks. No one could know the secret, with the outstanding exception of the one man, and he was given the responsibility of guarding her secret to the grave.
And as Han Solo watched the funeral service for Leia Organa, he wanted to scream the secret out loud, to force everyone in the room to understand what she had so carefully hid from them, what had made her make them believe she was invincible, what he finally could scream because they had kept it to her grave.
She was human.
It was a concept most of these people did not understand when it came to her. He had watched speaker after speaker pour over notes of anecdotes as the humanitarian tear fell and the sympathetic voice cracked, shattering the somberness of the service with pointless posthumous defamations of her character. Not that they understood their actions; they performed the service that was traditional, fitting. The kind that is given to every cold, lifeless corpse they drag through the doors. They dressed it up with words like "special," "gentle," "good," and called it a funeral, a slapped job that no one wishes to undertake and everyone wishes to finish.
But it was revoltingly ill-conceived for her.
The speakers used words like "special" when discussing her compassion for each soldier of the Rebellion, and yet they failed to include such necessary information as the tears she shed privately because she felt she had been "special" enough to destroy her own homeworld with her commitment to her people. They christened her "gentle" in her soft manner, her royal sweetness, but forgot that even in the most frenzied of moments, in the most bloody of circumstances and dire of straits, she could be insured to carry her blaster, load it with a carbine and her own pacificity, and shoot the enemy in the head upon command. They discussed her as the redeeming goodness of the Rebellion, the light of morality that would forever guide them in their pursuit of freedom and equality. But did they truly know the extent of her goodness? That she gave and gave and gave and gave until she had nothing left to give to them, and then contributed a little more besides? That she was the most amazingly moral person anyone there had ever met?
That you could see the goodness in her eyes as they took in the worst and accepted it without hesitation or qualm?
"Special," and "gentle," and "good" sometimes covered her person, her life, but never always. Human was the word they were looking for. The faulty character trait that they wished to overlook in such a wonderful martyr as her. Humanity meant she hadn't been perfectly content to live her life in a state of voluntary imprisonment within the Senate or Mon Calamari mess halls. Humanity meant emotion, sin, awkwardness, and lies. Humanity meant imperfection.
Palpatine help them if their martyrs have a dark spot on their records.
Leia Organa's dark spot, or at least the dark spot that knew all the rest of her minor dark spots, was seated in the back, away from the speakers and the communal falsity. He fiddled with his DL-44 as he slouched in a temporary chair with his unkempt hair in his face and a set of haunted green eyes that never concentrated on any one figure for too long. The figures baited him, attempted to draw his gaze toward theirs so they could, for the first time, say they were sorry, they knew how he felt, that he had their support.
It was all Han could do to force the scream on his lips to a restless tapping of his right foot.
It unnerved him endlessly that Leia would be subject to such an awful funeral. He wasn't exactly sure what kind of funerals princesses had: he had never before realized that princesses died, that princesses died because of stupid mistakes, that princesses died because of stupid mistakes caused by the men whom they said they love and who say they love them back. It was a twisted, morbid, rancid trail that led him here, to a painful close of the best thing he had ever had in his forsaken life.
The best thing he had ever had in his forsaken life had been foolish and heartwrenchingly naïve to think that he deserved her. He didn't. Not by anyone's galactic stretch of the imagination. And that mistake had cost her her life. The stupidity of it made his heart squeeze, his breath falter, his eyes close. She had died because she had trusted him with more than her life. She had given him her future, her heart.
Her secret.
The princess' deep, dark secret, the secret of her clean heart, the secret of her unblemished soul. The secret that never did come out until the story was over, the last page flipped and forgotten in a pile of such romantic idiocy. Until after the happily ever after.
Han had never believed in happily ever afters, he had never been told the true meaning of the phrase. For a struggling pickpocket on the streets, happily ever after could just as well mean a full meal as marriage and contentment, and Han, as the product of human cruelty in the worst case, never understood that concept. And through the years, it had never really occurred to him to philosophize over it. It was an abstraction, useless to everyday endeavors and life in general. What did happily ever after have to do with smuggling, income, ship maintenance?
And he still hadn't fully comprehended the meaning of it as he raced full-faced into it. He was loved by a princess, had become a general. Was, without realizing it, becoming the modern ideal of the happily ever after. Without a cognizant understanding of what was happening, fate, the Force, the gods, whatever had picked him up by the dirty neckline of his spacer's shirt and thrown him, hard, towards that elusive, unintelligible paradise, the beautiful love-of-his-life in his arms.
But, somewhere along the line, he screwed up.
Because happily ever after most certainly wasn't sitting in a hard, cold, metallically-incriminating chair in the back of a sickeningly sterile room as semi-friends, acquaintances, even enemies stood to pelt the audience with another virtue of the princess. Instinctually, intuitively, without the proper childhood bedtime tellings of the fairy tale, Han knew that this sure as hell was not happily ever after. It couldn't be.
Maybe this was his happily ever after, separate from Leia's.
That made much more sense. She most certainly deserved something better than he did. She'd spent her life working towards the destruction of a tyrannical political dictator, had accomplished it, had fallen in love and then been quickly killed in a wave of laser and superheat. Other than the rather tragic lack of length to her fairy tale, it seemed a somewhat happily ever after to Han. Her story didn't end in tears, screams, regret, emptiness. It just ended.
Maybe this was his happily ever after, an existence dedicated to the knowledge that his best was behind him, that his true happiness had been taken violently and irreversibly away from him. That he'd waited too long, that he'd been afraid of the future he should have embraced with both shaking arms. And even as he sat here in this heartless hell of a reminder, he could only think of one thing that could possibly make him feel any better, make him feel as if his continued torture would amount to anything.
Han would make sure that the man who had forcibly given Leia her happily ever after would meet his own.
That man had been difficult to track down.
Six weeks of almost madman obsession had given Han little to work with. He'd searched through endless rows of records and files, worked the trail over and over again, kept to his work with a devotion that seemed unhealthy, inhuman.
Han knew precisely the incongruity of his actions. He watched the empathetic stares he received, witnessed the small expressions of surprise that were given him when he left the Falcon. They assumed he would fall apart in front of their eyes, perhaps even hoped for it. They imagined a haggard Solo – one bereft of purpose, of life, or inclination to do or say anything to anyone.
They were wrong.
He awoke in the morning, each morning, every morning to the senseless unreal reality that consumed his existence now. But he forced himself to get up, to take a fresher, to shave, to eat. It wasn't some form of self-concern; Solo didn't really give a damn what happened to him with the exception that he live long enough to kill his princess's murderer.
It was punishment.
Punishment for a man that could not even protect the woman he loved.
The injustice of it all had led Han to this sector of the Mid-Rim, on this date, at this time. He had spent his last forever for this moment, the closure to his own grief, to his own failure. He had come here, had awaited the capture of that murderer, waiting for the galaxy to give him some sort of justice for the brutal horror of what it had dealt him. Solo had watched the ship descend from hyperspace, get caught in the tractor beam. Had searched the ship out. Had found his prey.
He now stood, blaster pressed to the murderer's temple, completely ready to pull the trigger and make his own grief felt.
But he needed some answers first.
"What did it pay?"
The man cowered back, on his knees with hands behind his head and a rough bruise forming under his left eye where Han's fist had already connected of its own volition. Up close and in reality, separate from the nightmares that attacked him night after night, the man looked small, timid, afraid. Cowardly.
"What do you mean?"
Han laughed darkly. The noise sounded cruel and deep, even to Han's ears. "How many princesses you killed lately?"
The murderer paled as he finally looked up and recognized the face of his capturer. "Solo – "
"How much did you get for it?" When the man simpered further towards the floor, Han bent down and grabbed a fistful of stringy hair. The man slumped and screeched, fought to free himself from Han's grip. "A few thousand? Huh? A million?" Solo continued to shake him by his hair as the man closed his eyes and sobbed at the back of his throat. "How much did it take for you to kill her?"
"It was just a job!"
"A job? A job?" Solo lifted him up and threw him up against the bulkhead, making a cold metallic ring sound through the corridor. "You know how much your job cost?" He punched the man in the jaw. "You know who she was?" A punch towards the stomach, resounding in a sharp moan. "You have any idea who it was you killed?" Punch to the stomach again. "Do you know how long it took for her to die?" I should – I should kill him. I should – "How long she suffered? How long she just – " Han didn't complete the sentence, elbowed the man in the nose, sending his head whiplashing back. "Bastard. Did'ja laugh at the holonews? Gloat to your lowlife – friends?" He took the man's head and beat in back against the bulkhead again. "So how much did it cost? Cause it still cost me a hell of a lot more." He lifted his blaster once more against the man's head and switched the setting visibly to 'kill'.
Punishment. It was all punishment. All of it. For all of them. For her.
For her.
Han stopped.
For her.
The pacifist. The gentle woman in the white caftan shift, sitting on the bed with the ivory covers, brushing her hair. For the woman who'd teased him that night, the one that spoke for the multitudes so loudly, but so quiet for herself. The one with the remorseful eyes, the one with the lost innocence, the one with the dreams of her destroyed homeworld.
The child that grew up too quickly because of violence she hadn't earned.
Han's blaster arm was shaking, his eyes were stinging. It would be so easy. One shot. That's all it'd take. He could end it, end all of it. This man deserved it for what he'd done. What he's taken. From me.
From me.
He lowered the blaster. He could see her, just out of his line of sight, a blur of white and brown, out of reach, so far away. She wouldn't want this. He sighed and swiped a hand across his eyes. This isn't about her anymore. It's about me.
She'd hate me for doing this.
Han reholstered the blaster as he looked pointedly at the bloodied and beaten man cringing on the ground. "You better thank her. She just saved your life."
And, after securing a Republic homing beacon onto the outside of the man's ship, Han threw himself down in his pilot's chair, breathed a sigh at the quiet of the Falcon as the man's ship leapt into hyperspace.
That was for you, sweetheart. That was for everything I never did for you. He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the chair and watched the stars glisten and gleam in the vacuum of space. It was a long, dark road ahead, he knew. One he wasn't sure he could handle.But he would. He would try to live in her memory, live how he knew he should. He couldn't go back – he'd changed too dramatically for that – and he couldn't continue the way he had been. He wasn't sure what he would do, where he would go. Coruscant or Corellia – it didn't really matter.
It does matter.
It would matter to her. And it was all for her. It was all for her now.
I love you sweetheart. He refocused his gaze outside the cockpit. I always will. You knew that. You know it now.
I know you know.
KR