Fracture

by Kat Roland

After a lifetime of rough starts, poor choices, critical misjudgments, and even worse luck, Han Solo was ready to declare victory over the gods of fate. He and Leia Organa, she of the imperious manner, the frequent demands, the pointed declarations, not to mention the luminous eyes, luminous hair — luminous everything, it turned out — had been lovers for a little over a month. And it had been going pretty damn well if he said so himself.

Granted, he felt like he was notoriously easy when it came to her. After the battle of Yavin he had been intent on getting back to Tatooine and bluffing his way into Jabba's good graces again. But he had stuck around the Alliance day after day, month after month, until he had to admit to himself it was almost solely because of the princess. And as much he grumbled at the increased number of favors — could he squeeze in an extra stop on his next run? ferry a team of diplomats halfway across the galaxy? use his mechanical skills to stand out in the frozen tundra for hours fixing a busted speeder? — he had enough self-knowledge to recognize that he folded quicker than a rookie sabacc player when she fixed her dark eyes on him and insisted on the urgency of her request.

He didn't want to think of those favors, or whatever they might be called, as paying off since his intention had never been transactional; he just wanted be near her for extended periods of time, maybe even witness the genuine smiles with which she favored Luke and a few others directed toward him for once. But it hadn't happened like that. Instead, their interactions rose and fell like the tides, transitioning from prickly combativeness to a peaceful lull and then rising back up again; regardless of the phase, their submerged attraction never waned, and Han couldn't decide if consummation of their relationship was inevitable or as unlikely as ever.

The tension finally came to a head during their trip to Caldira, the assignment undertaken by just the two of them. And although he had certainly helped her along the way, her blunt initiative in that small house in a nameless village took him by surprise. Maybe he had misjudged her; after all, she wasn't tentative in any other area of her life, so why would he expect her to be when it came to sex? Perhaps he assumed that her experience as a captive on the Death Star influenced how she carried herself, made her cautious in certain ways, but she rarely shared anything from that time with him and it wasn't in his nature to pry.

Once they returned from Caldira and settled back into the routine on Echo Base, most of their free time was spent in his cabin. In the beginning they had made a token effort to socialize with Chewie but Han was grateful that his friend wasn't fooled by it and just waved them toward the cabin hatch with a sarcastic growl. Leia had been his sole fantasy for so long now that he still felt a residual shock every time they made love. He couldn't get enough of her, and although their first few times in bed had been more or less frantic, both of them consumed with long-suppressed need, he was soon able control his most desperate urges and take his time, delighting in the ardent caresses and whispered pleas that convinced him that she was as just as desperate for him. When he was inside her, her slick tightness hugging his cock, overcome with delirious pleasure, he would have gladly forsaken all the credits in the galaxy to stay there forever.

Once the question of whether he loved her popped into his mind unbidden, he couldn't shake it. He was pretty sure that he had felt love, or perhaps something close to it, with one or two women from his past. And yet despite the fact that Leia outdid those other women in every way imaginable, something prevented him from admitting to himself that he loved her. So he turned the question around: did he not love her? If asked whether he denied loving Leia Organa, no power in the galaxy would compel him to say yes. So was it the same? Was not not loving someone the equivalent of loving them? Han thought that someone smarter than him — someone like Leia — would be able to figure that out. But they had only been lovers for a month and everything was going too well for him to even think about jeopardizing it.

What he did know was that being with her was easily the peak experience of his life. His sordid past receded; no longer was he just a runaway, a smuggler, a casual lay for portside women, a pilot dangerously in over his head with a gangster. When he was with Leia he was able to forget himself while simultaneously feeling that he was more like himself, his true self, than ever before. In spite of the fact that they were in the middle of a war and trapped on an ice cube of a planet, Han was happier than he had ever been.

So in retrospect it was only inevitable that he would be the one to fuck things up.


Han's run to the Lycarus station hadn't been one of his more successful ones. Less than half of the agreed-upon shipment was waiting for him and when he challenged the slimy supplier about the broken contract, he received only excuses and curses in return. And the chatter he picked up along the way didn't encourage him to start a fight. There was a tension at the hub and Han wasn't sure if it was due to the higher-than-average casualties in recent battles or something else. Whatever the explanation, he saw no reason to hang around and wait for something else to go wrong, so he and Chewie high-tailed it out of there with a reduced load.

When he returned to Echo Base, touching down just minutes before the bay doors closed for the night, Leia comm'd him that she was stuck in a late meeting. He used that time to unload the shipment, telling himself that the floor jockeys hoisting the crates onto the droids were surely ignorant that so much of it was missing. He wanted Leia to hear it from him, not some anonymous ensign who was eager to impress the princess with his attention to detail.

The evening dragged on with no sign of Leia and Chewie had already turned in, so eventually Han gave up and collapsed onto his bunk. He felt like he had only been asleep for a moment when the sounds of her moving carefully around the dark cabin forced his eyes open. She was dressed in her normal sleeping attire of nothing but an oversized shirt, an arrangement that she could only get away with on the heated Falcon.

"Hey." He rubbed his face blearily as he struggled to sit up. "You wanna hot shower?" One thing that had managed to go right on his trip was a refill of the Falcon's water tanks.

Leia sat on the bed and cupped his face, her fingers drifting lightly over his cheek. "I just took one, silly."

"Oh. Yeah." Now he was aware of the steam wafting into his cabin and the dampness of her braid. "Shoulda known you weren't going to wait for me," he yawned. "You must be tired."

"You're the one who should be tired," she returned. "Rushing back here tonight." Laying down against him, she slipped her hand under his shirt and ran her fingers over his chest. "How many jumps did you have to do?"

He wrapped his arms around her and inhaled the lingering scent of her shampoo. "Not that many." Seven.

She shook her head. "There was no reason to hurry. We have a few days until your next run."

"Well, I wanted to check on my favorite girl," he murmured, smoothing his hand up and down her back. "So. How's Sally doing?"

Leia tilted her head and gave him a look of amused tolerance that he knew all too well. "She's fine. She's getting a little stronger every day." The tauntaun born soon after they returned from Caldira had had a rough start to life. As the first calf born at Echo Base, she had been quickly adopted as fleet mascot complete with naming ceremony and heated debates over her parentage. Normally Han didn't get swept up in that kind of nonsense, but apparently a month of sex and related interactions with the woman he didn't not love had turned him into someone who took an interest in those sorts of things.

"We think that a couple of other tauntauns might be expecting," Leia was saying. "But you know how hard it is to examine those creatures."

"More babies? You're gonna have to swipe some birth control injections from the medcenter."

"You joke, but Mon Mothma has already proposed that," Leia said drily. "We can't afford to have half of our tauntaun fleet sidelined from their normal duties. Those things are randier than a couple of teenage Twi'leks."

Han yawned again. "It's gonna be tough on morale if you cut off the supply of tauntaun calves."

"Yeah," she said softly. "And less reason for you to hurry back from your runs." She rested her chin on his chest and he spotted a glint in her eye. "If I'm not reason enough."

He pulled her tighter against him and kissed the top of her head. The bad news about his trip could wait until the morning. "That's all right. You're pretty cute too."


Some hours later, though not as many as he would have liked, Han was pouring kaffe in the tiny galley when Leia appeared dressed and coiffed in the hatchway. "Is that for me?"

"'Course it is." He held out a mug and followed her over to the table balancing his own cup with a platter of warmed-over nerf sausages. "You got a busy morning today?"

"Not too bad." She speared one of the sausages and chewed it thoughtfully. "We have a meeting to reconfigure the air patrol schedule since so many of the pilots are in and out these days on assignments."

"You can always book me an' Chewie if you need to fill a few slots," he offered.

She smiled. "We'll see. I don't mind having the Falcon stay at the base when you're here."

He put on his best lecherous grin. "So you want me all to yourself, is that it?"

"Look at me like that again and you'll be orbiting Hoth indefinitely before you know it." She rose from the table. "Oh. You never said how your run went. Did the crates get unloaded last night?"

He grimaced to himself and took a fortifying sip of kaf. "Yeah, but we didn't get everything that was agreed on. The run didn't go so great. The guy waiting for us insisted that he was ignorant of the rest of the inventory and that this was all he had."

Leia looked confused. "Did you try to get the rest of it?"

"Yeah, of course I tried. But the conversation wasn't going anywhere and I can tell when someone's not gonna budge." He huffed a breath. "There's a lot of grumbling out there, especially after that last offensive when a bunch of civilians died."

"We did a thorough review of the available intelligence and there was no indication of civilians on that Imperial base," Leia protested. "And what does that have to do with the contract we had?"

"Anyone who's upset because non-militants just died isn't gonna care if you knew they were there. They're just going to end up less likely to help the Alliance. And less eager to hand over all of the supplies, contract or not."

"So you're saying that they would rather side with the Empire and their extensive history of killing civilians outright?" she shot back.

Not for the first time he thought that her youth and close association with the Alliance blinded her to other perceptions. "It doesn't necessarily mean that they're gonna side with the Empire," he explained. "They may just turn away from both sides. Not everyone sees things the way you do."

"And that's exactly why we're fighting this war," she insisted. "So all races can understand that there's a better way of life available than the one we have under this regime. That one day the entire galaxy will finally be able to enjoy freedom and self-determination instead of tyranny."

She still didn't get it. "Look, Leia, I want to see the Empire defeated as much as you do. But you need a large portion of the galaxy on your side. On the Alliance's side," he hastily amended. "And I know it's not fair that standards are higher for the Alliance, but that's the reality of this kind of war."

There was a weighty silence before she responded. "You don't think we hold ourselves to high standards?" she asked slowly.

"Of course you do. I know you do," he said reassuringly. "You're never gonna please everyone, but I just thought if you knew what was being said out there —."

"Do you even know how much planning goes into everything? We are always trying to minimize casualties if not avoid them outright. We've cancelled attacks, even those that required weeks of planning, when we judged too high a probability of killing innocent beings." Her voice was rising steadily. "And you should be very much aware of how the Empire uses civilians as shields and hostages in situations that should be entirely military in nature."

"Leia. I know." He was rapidly losing control of this discussion. "Of course they do — that's why they're evil. I'm not saying it's fair, but —."

"So, what — you think the Alliance is no better than the Empire?"

He couldn't keep from rolling his eyes. "Of course not. The Empire is a million times worse." Kest, that didn't come out the way he intended. "But for ordinary beings out there, who don't follow all the ins and outs of politics, sometimes the devil they know is better than the —." The what? His brain was a jumble of debating points by now. "Better than the opposition, even one fighting for justice with their best interests in mind."

"You know, this is rich coming from you." Her voice was steely. "You smuggled how many deadly shipments — spice and weapons and who knows what else — across the galaxy for years. Innocent beings surely died due to what you carried, just so you and your cronies could turn a profit!"

He blinked, the words stinging more than he would have thought. "I know. And I'm not proud of everything I did." He swallowed. "But if I can help you — the Alliance — from making mistakes, even unintentional ones, then you won't have to feel the regret that I do."

"Well, isn't that convenient," she sneered. "Having reaped the rewards of your illegal activities, you now have the luxury of regretting them while lecturing the rest of us!"

"Leia, that's not what I'm tryin' to do! I'm just —."

She ignored him and stormed over to his cabin, emerging seconds later carrying the small bag of clothing and personal items that she always carried on his ship. Waves of anger radiated off her as she unzipped the bag and dug through it furiously.

"If you think that the Alliance is no better than the Empire, then I don't even know why you're here."

"Leia!" Gods, this was a disaster. "You know why I'm here. Of course I want the Alliance to win! I've been helping you for a long time, after all!"

She gave no indication that she had heard him. "And you know how the Empire is. What I went through when I was captured."

Frustration finally overflowed any rational barriers he had erected. "No, actually I don't know! Because you never told me. You never talk about it." He wanted to look her in the eye, to make sure she fully understood his position in all of this, but she was still bent over the table. What the hell was she searching for in that stupid bag?

Finally she raised her head to him, but the dagger in his chest only twisted more. Anger was apparent in her posture, but she was also wounded, her brown eyes large and quivering. "I shouldn't have to tell you the details. You should know," she whispered furiously. "For Sith's sake, Han, you know what they're like, how they treat prisoners."

He couldn't deny that. What had he been thinking during these last few minutes? Hell, what had he been thinking the entire morning? He studied his mug on the table, the lukewarm kaf pooling sadly at the bottom. "Yeah. I do."

She wrenched her bag over her shoulder. "I can't talk about this anymore. I have to get to a briefing."

"Leia —." He watched her helplessly as she stalked off. "Look, I didn't mean to —." She turned the corner in the corridor and disappeared from view. "We can talk about it later!" he hollered after her.

He was still standing there staring at the empty corridor when Chewbacca emerged from his hammock nook and growled questioningly at the disturbance. Han shook his head and turned back toward his cabin. "You don't want to know, pal."


After Han cooled off, he replayed the argument in his head a few times and began to feel marginally better. It hadn't been that awful after all. Leia was impulsive and prone to mood swings just as he was, so naturally she would need a day to herself. Not even attempting to get a hold of her, he instead spent his time tinkering with the Falcon's circuit breakers and catching up with the Rogue squadrons. That evening he even gallantly offered Luke and a few other pilots a drink from his top-shelf whiskey reserve if only to prove to himself that he didn't miss the only person he wanted to be with.

The next morning he busied himself with yet more electrical upgrades. After letting a few hours pass, he sent her a casual comm: Hey, how's it going? I have nerf steaks just begging to be eaten if you want to stop by for dinner. There was no response and Han tried to convince himself that she was just busy. Surely one little argument wasn't going to torpedo their entire relationship, was it? He restrained himself from comm-ing her again and only growled at Chewie a few times while they were buried in the tangled wires and sparking junctures within the bowels of the Falcon.

On the third day Han was roused out of aching dreams by a deafening Wookie roar directed at the malfunctioning hotplate. His mood only worsened throughout the day when it became clear that there was no emergency on the base, no urgent action necessitating that she stay out of contact with him. He mentally accused her of overreacting to their argument — really, no worse than a tense debate — and accused himself of cowardice for not going directly to the command center to end this interminable standoff between them.

After a silent dinner with Chewbacca, Han headed down to the hangar to see if any of the Rogues were partaking in activities more entertaining than brooding. He strode around the space, apparently emptied by the mess bell, and only encountered a small clump of low-level officers whispering furtively in a corner. When he approached, they abruptly ended their discussion.

Han wasn't in the mood to play nice. "What's going on?"

A lieutenant — Mirko, was it? — turned to him reluctantly. "Our radars picked up what might be debris from a crash site. According to the readings, it seems to be located in some sort of a crevasse, so the Princess and two others went to go investigate. They haven't returned yet."

"Why the hell did they let the Princess go?"

The lieutenant reddened. "Nobody's going to not let her go." He lowered his voice. "She insisted on leading the party. She thought that she would be able to, uh, fit in the crevasse if no one else could."

Great. Just great. "It'll be dark in an hour. Are you just going to stand there or is someone going to go out and look for them?" The lieutenant opened his mouth but Han interrupted before he could respond. "Nevermind. I'll go. Did they take speeders or tauntauns?"

"Tauntauns, sir."

He resisted reminding Lieutenant Helpful that he wasn't a commissioned officer. "What's their location?"

Armed with the coordinates, Han threw on his parka and gloves and gathered up some supplies before hurrying to the tauntaun pens adjacent to the hangar. Saddling up the hardiest-looking one, he rode out into the ice-covered plains playing through various scenarios of what might have overtaken Leia and the others. The wind was picking up as it frequently did this time of day, causing his mount to repeatedly weave drunkenly off the path until Han yanked it back in place.

Fortunately the coordinates weren't far off from the actual location and the light held enough for him to pick out the off-white snow gear against the colorless backdrop. Dismounting from his tauntaun, he grabbed his rope and ice axe and stomped through the snow leaning into the wind. A narrow gouge in the ice yawned before him as he approached the small group. A taut rope secured with several ice screws disappeared into the canyon and someone Han couldn't identify was hauling the line up centim by centim. It looked to be slow going.

He easily recognized the other soldier standing close by clutching the reins of three tauntauns. "Is the Princess down there? Is she okay?" he yelled at Tiny, so nicknamed despite his hulking size.

"She's fine, Captain Solo!" Tiny shouted into the wind. "We're pulling her up now."

"What about the debris?"

Tiny motioned helplessly against the wailing gusts as the soldier sprawled on the ice continued to tug up the rope. A few moments later, a small, harness-encased princess emerged from the ice canyon. Relief surged through Han as he reached down to help haul her the rest of the way. She did a quick double-take when she saw him, but turned back to the crevasse to drag up a hunk of metal dangling from the end of the line.

"Could this be from an Imperial crash landing?" she shouted, fruitlessly brushing snow off of the rusted surface.

The man holding the cable shook his head. Han realized it was Oskar, one of the techs. "We'll have to take it to the lab and run some tests."

Han peered in the direction of the oncoming weather and shifted impatiently. "We need to get back to the base. It'll be dark soon and this wind isn't going anywhere." Tiny pulled his hood tighter and nodded enthusiastically as another gust of snow swept over them.

"Help me strap this to my tauntaun," Leia called over her shoulder as she hoisted herself onto the saddle. Oskar and Han wove the rope around the creature's flank and the twisted metal before climbing onto their own mounts.

Han led them back in a huddle, the riders ducking low as gales whipped around them. By the time they reached the base the surrounding landscape was approaching whiteout conditions.

As the tauntauns were taken away, Leia huddled with Oskar and Tiny debating how best to diagnose the origin of the debris. Han stomped the snow off his boots and grew more and more impatient. Only when the bay doors shuddered and began to close did the group break up, and Han moved quickly to maneuver himself in front of Leia before she could escape. Clumps of ice clung to her braids and dripped down onto her cheek. He shoved his hands in his pockets to keep from brushing them away.

"You were cutting it close out there," he said. Even to himself he sounded cranky. "The weather is never great this time of day."

"I'm well aware of that," she answered shortly. "I didn't want to wait until the morning and risk a storm coming in and burying it."

"Then let other people go out to investigate those sorts of things. You're too important!"

Her eyes flashed. "Too important to whom?"

"To —." He stopped, suddenly aware that the others in the hangar had retreated from the two of them. "To the Alliance," he finished lamely.

"The Alliance." Her voice was mocking.

"And —." To me, he pleaded silently. He opened his mouth and closed it and then opened it again. "To all of us. Luke, me, Chewie. All of us."

She glared at him, arms folded, and Han realized that they were now alone. The bay doors were shut and most of the lights were dimmed. She looked smaller than ever standing in the abandoned room and his anger from the past few days started to drain out of him.

He stepped tentatively toward her. "Why don't you come onto the Falcon. You can warm up. You must be freezing. We can — talk — or somethin'."

"No, thank you," she said coolly. "I can manage in my quarters."

Damn it. He lunged to grab her elbow as she turned away. "Leia. Please." She glared at him, her eyes matching his in intensity, but some of the stiffness had left her body. Hope flared in him briefly. "Please," he repeated quietly.

Despite his insistence she held his gaze stubbornly and Han was reminded of all the times they had faced off in this exact posture, both of them silently daring the other to break the stalemate. Well, this time it would have to be him.

"C'mon," he said gruffly. "There's still a lot of water in the tanks. Chewie and I have been saving it for you. You can take a hot shower and I'll make us some tea."

She glanced down at her splotchy snow-covered jacket before meeting his eyes again. "All right."

He kept a careful separation from her as they boarded the Falcon as if she were a wounded animal he was trying to lure out of danger. That was exactly what it was like, he figured; she was nursing a wound delivered by him, although the circumstances of her life were such that there was no escape from injury no matter who she chose to surround herself with. There would always be the tender spots within her that bruised easily. And he supposed that he harbored residual marks from his own life that would flare up in response to an innocent word or gesture. Arguments between the two of them would inevitably recur.

Han brewed a pot of tea and set out two cups while turning these thoughts over in his head. He was sitting hunched at the table warming his hands on his mug when Leia came out of the 'fresher dressed in her damp snowsuit. She looked so weary, the frost-induced pink spots on her nose and cheeks only increasing her forlornness, that he wanted nothing more than to scoop her up and carry her to his bunk and make love to her every way possible until they forgot themselves and were born anew in each other's arms.

Instead he sat up straighter and slid her mug a safe distance from his own. "Here."

"Thank you." Her voice was barely audible.

Neither of them said anything for a while. Han drank his tea and racked his brain trying to plot a course out of the impasse. When it became clear she wasn't going to speak first, he set his mug on the table and took a breath.

"Leia, I'm on your side," he said slowly. "Hell, you are my side."

She didn't look at him but he thought he sensed her soften a bit. "I appreciate you saying that," she replied quietly.

"And I wasn't trying to make you feel guilty or blame you or anything. I just —." He forced himself to shut up; the last thing he wanted to do was to reignite their argument.

There was a thick silence as he waited for her to respond. "I know you weren't," she finally said. "It was just one more thing on top of everything else."

He nodded. "You've got a lot on your shoulders."

"We all do," she said quickly. "And that doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to bring up things like that. It just — rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe because it came from you."

He wasn't sure exactly how to respond. "Yeah."

They were quiet again, each taking small sips of tea in rhythm with the other. Chewie clomped by on his way to the cockpit and rumbled a greeting at the Princess. She waved wanly in return.

"Leia." He turned to her solemnly. "You have to know that —." He stopped and tried again. Why was he so terrible at this? "That I—."

She looked at him carefully, as if seeing him for the first time. Her wide eyes, perhaps more steady now, were finding purchase, working to fit this slipped stitch into the fabric of themselves that they were weaving together. She gave a bare nod and an almost-smile and lowered her head to her mug.

Han settled in the booth, angling himself toward her without quite touching her. The silence stretched between them more comfortably now. He wanted to say more. Gods, he really did. But right now, in a period of tentative thaw, this would have to be enough.