With Chewie on watch, Han and Leia spent the afternoon — or what passed for it; after several days in space they were totally reliant on the ship's artificial day and night cycles — working on repairs, along with Threepio, who they wisely had occupied in a different part of the ship.
The Falcon had taken hard hits from the Star Destroyer, leaving numerous spots around the ship needing patch-ups and overhauls above and beyond the broken hyperdrive. They'd already spent several hours hoping to get the rear deflector shield up and running again, just in case they met with more hostile company.
The last forty minutes or so had seen them both in the Main Hold, Han working beneath the floor while Leia sat at the station nearby, checking the corresponding diagnostics while occasionally passing him tools through the open maintenance access hatch.
"Any change in the numbers?" he called up to her, swinging his torso back upright from where he'd been dangling over a pipe deep into the bowels of the ship — Leia secretly loved it when he did that; it was an amazing view.
She shook her head, though he was still hard at work and presently couldn't see. "It's too soon to tell. The system has to reset before giving a proper readout."
Climbing back up enough so that his body was visible from nearly the waist up, Han set the hydrospanner he'd been using down into its tool box and looked over at her. "Feel like we're makin' progress. You've been a big help today." More than just assisting him, Leia had become a proficient mechanic in her own right in the years since Yavin. "Sure glad I taught you basic ship repairs."
She pursed her lips in private enjoyment of his ever-present bravado. "Oh, you taught me, hmm?" she glibly replied, getting up and crossing the short distance to kneel before him.
Han nodded. "Taught you the Falcon, anyway. She's a very particular kind of ship."
"And by 'particular' you mean held together by spit and a prayer?"
"Aw, don't listen to her, baby," he cooed, patting the beam beside his arm consolingly.
Leia laughed and slide the toolbox aside so she could lean forward on her elbows, shifting down onto her stomach to be closer to his level. "You're a very particular kind of man," she murmured to him, her voice dropping low and his blood along with it as she reached for his neck and drew him the rest of the way across the maintenance pit to her waiting mouth.
Up until then, Han had always been the one pulling Leia into a kiss. She came willingly every single time but was never the instigator, so her new assertiveness took him by surprise, took him a second to react. But when he did he returned her kiss eagerly, and soon even that wasn't enough. Continuing to move his lips over hers — now that he'd been allowed to, kissing her forever seemed like an agreeable prospect — he ran his hands from her neck down the length of her arms until his open palms reached durasteel, and then he hoisted himself up out of the pit and onto the deck where he could better touch her.
Caught by surprise herself, Leia scooted back to make room for him. The gesture inadvertently separated their lips, but Han was unfazed and simply took ahold of her, hauling her half onto his lap in his exuberance to be near her. "Princess, did you just kiss me?"
"Mm-hmm," she answered dreamily, still lost in the spell of his mouth against hers and his hands now on her hips.
"You initiated a kiss? All on your own? 'Cos you just….wanted to kiss me?" he asked, sounding somewhat baffled.
Grinning, she retorted, "Is that so hard to believe?"
"Yeah," Han answered in awe.
Her smile fell and she nodded. "Because I'm so cold. The Ice Princess."
She began to pull away from him, but he caught her arm. "No, not even close. Because you're so kriffing far out of my league. Hells, Leia — you're a princess, a senator, a commander, a fuckin' force of nature. You're incredible. So, yeah, it's damn near impossible to believe you could ever want a guy like me. Has been from the start."
She had to smile at that. "And yet, for the past three years, you've been insisting quite the contrary to anyone who would listen."
"Yeah, but…" Han shook his head. For all of his bluster over Leia being crazy about him, it still seemed too good to be true that she actually was; the thought left him a bit gobsmacked. "...that was just talk."
"Oh, I think you believed it, Captain," she said cheekily, curling her fingers into the edges of his jacket and using it to pull him to her.
"Attraction and lust, sure."
"Was I that obvious, then?" she mocked herself, but he ignored it, still on his train of thought.
"People told me — Chewie, the Rogues, even Rieekan — that there was more between us, that you felt it, too. Didn't seem like they could be right. But, logically, their arguments made sense. And after Ord Mantell, I—"
"Yes, Ord Mantell…." Leia sighed at the beautiful memory of the first part of their trip, at the opportunities lost before it all ended in disaster. And a darker, restless sigh at the aftermath that led to Han's leaving.
"After that, it was hard not to have some hope that you might have deeper feelings." Han wrapped himself tightly around her, bending to nuzzle his nose beneath her ear. "But kest, Sweetheart. What are you doin' slummin' with a guy like me?"
Moving her fingers into his hair, she gently brought his face back up to look at her. "You mean a guy who has saved my life more times than I can count? A man who's held me when I was hysterical with fear after yet another nightmare? A man who insinuatingly charmed his way into my life, determined I would still have one, that I wouldn't spend my days and nights starving and sleepless, cold and alone and in misery for all I'd lost? A man who made it a point every single day — even when I yelled terrible things at him — to make me smile, or laugh, or even just yell at him some more because at least then I was feeling something other than pain?"
Leia moved her hands down to cup his face, her thumbs tenderly sliding along his jaw. "It's not slumming, Han. What in this galaxy would I be doing not with a guy like that?"
She smiled at him, her heart in those large caf brown eyes, and in the very next second her breath was taken away as he swooped in and kissed her for all he was worth.
The following day found the Falcon's entire crew working to fix her hyperdrive. They were all fairly certain it was an exercise in futility — Threepio had already informed them of the astronomical odds — but they had nothing but time to kill, so what did it hurt to try?
Han would have preferred to banish Goldenrod to the cockpit on watch or shut him down entirely, never a fan of his overly loquacious style, a sentiment that had only grown since Threepio had developed a knack for interrupting him and the princess. But he needed the droid's help talking with the ship, and so Han had Threepio plugged in at the back engineering station — at least a little removed from where he was — to translate Falcon-ese while simultaneously keeping an eye on the scopes.
Chewbacca was busy at the actual hyperdrive unit, which left Leia and Han working together in the rear circuity bay.
Or they'd meant to be working….
She was just too irresistible to Han, wearing one of his shirts belted with a spare piece of fibra-rope over an old pair of his bloodstripes rolled up at least half a dozen times. And dammit if she didn't look adorable in welding goggles — how she could make even them look good was as mystical as Luke's Force mumbo-jumbo, but she did.
Welding soon fell by the wayside as Han laid aside her goggles and torch and, unable to help himself, bent to kiss the freckles across Leia's cheeks and over the bridge of her nose.
Chewie, who happened to be walking by on his way to the ceiling hatch, spied them that way and made an amused comment in passing on how clearly besotted they both were.
Before meeting Han and Chewie, Leia hadn't known as much about Wookiees as perhaps she should have. Once in their acquaintance, she quickly came to learn that Shyriiwook was a complicated language — so much more than the 'barks and growls' beings frequently reduced it to — and it had taken her longer than she was proud of to fully grasp it. Things finally began to click into place for her when Han had offered this helpful advice: You gotta relax about it. Give that brain of yours a rest and just feel the meaning. Luckily, she'd long been fluent in Solo speak, and therefore knew he meant that translating Shyriiwook was less about the actual words and more about deciphering the tone, pitch, resonance, and tenuto. Even then, meaning was often situational, making Shyriiwook one of the most complex dialects she had ever studied.
While striving to master the language, she'd come to discover for herself why verbatim translation was ineffective, if not impossible. The vocal makeup of Wookiees meant oral limitations where they were literally unable to convey Shryiiwook representations of certain Basic words. One of those difficult-to-adapt terms was non-Shryiiwook given names. There was no Wookiee sound to express 'Leia' or 'Han', so Chewbacca had his own unique monikers for every being he was on a first name basis with. Han he called Cub, an affectionate mark of the human he loved as a little brother, possibly even as a son; Luke was Young Jedi, for obvious reasons; she was Little Princess; Artoo belonged to Luke now and was often busy with him and the Rogues, but when Chewbacca did having dealings with the astromech he called him Jedi Droid; and Threepio had Leia's very favorite sobriquet of them all: Aureate. It was especially fitting for the protocol droid, as its duel meanings — literally 'of a golden color', and figuratively 'of golden, grandiose speech' — were both exceedingly apropos.
That was just one of many fascinating things Leia had learned about the Wookiee tongue, and by now she considered herself fluent in the language, second only to Han amongst the Rebels at her translating skills. But she still wasn't an expert Shryiiwook linguist and had to look to Han in question at this unfamiliar sound. Perhaps it was a new nickname? "I don't know that word. Or is it a phrase? What did he say?"
Han had glowered after Chewbacca as he'd lumbered away, but Leia hadn't caught on and seemed to be asking now not out of the same insult Han had felt but simply the curiosity of her always hungry mind. "Closest translation is somethin' like —" Han grimaced, but knew she wouldn't let it go until he told her. "— 'lovey-dovey'."
His explication was met with Leia's tinkling, near musical laughter. Unrestrained levity was still too much of a rarity for her — a criminal one; she deserved to be lighthearted, joyful, and carefree all of the time. So though he'd tried to pull a face at her for finding it comical that the overgrown fuzzball thought such a blasphemous thing of them, Han was far too delighted by her giggling happiness not to smile himself.
"What?" she teased, running a finger over his recently pouting lower lip. "Of all the things I'm sure you've been called in your lifetime, you find that offensive?"
"Not offensive, I guess. But you gotta admit, it's a little cutesy. And cutesy we ain't," he insisted, even as he bit playfully at her finger.
Leia yelped in surprise, pulling her hand back from his mouth. "Aren't we? Chewie thinks we are," she grinned. "I'm afraid you're simply going to have to face facts: you, Han Solo, are terribly cute." She went up on tiptoes to nip at his chin before turning to retrieve her welding goggles from the lever he'd slung them across.
"'Cute' ain't the same as 'cutesy'. Cute, I'll take." He snatched the goggles back away from her, determined there would be no more work right now. They had plenty of time and were currently in no danger. He could neglect his first love a little to enjoy himself with his greatest one, especially when she was so warm, exuberant, and suddenly willing. "Hot is even better," he said with a wink and that roguishly tilted smirk she'd forever had trouble resisting, even back when she'd claimed to hate him.
Leia stepped in closer, and Han expected to be kissed — he knew it; that smirk got her every time. Instead, she made a swoop for the goggles. Only at the very last second was he able to dodge her, using his height to hold them tantalizingly out of her reach.
They stood in a face-off, neither party giving. Locked in a stubborn staredown, the playfulness of the moment gave over to something charged and electric in the way it so often had in many of their past shouting matches that had less to do with where she wanted him to fly off to next and everything to do with the frustratingly unresolved sexual tension crackling between them.
That electric tension was just fine with Han now, when they had time, opportunity, and inclination to do some resolving. He was about to reach for her, forget the goggles — what even were goggles? What was a hyperdrive? What was a starship? There was nothing but this — when she took a step back, put her fists to her hips and hmph-ed in feigned frustration.
"You may like 'hot', but that's not what Chewie witnessed. You were kissing my nose. How very cutesy of you!" she taunted him impishly.
"Hey, you liked it," Han smugly contended. But some of that cocky self-assurance faded a bit as he asserted, "And I was being a gentleman. Doesn't make me 'lovey-dovey'."
Given his reputation as a self-interested — though that part had certainly suffered over the years — badass smuggler, with the cunning charm and swagger of a galaxy-wide cross-species ladies' man, her first impulse was to mock the idea of Han as any kind of a 'gentleman'. But he had, in fact, been a gentleman to her on countless occasions of shared beds and wounds tended to in varying degrees of nudity with nary an inappropriate pass made.
Few would likely believe how much of a gentleman Han actually was, so Leia left that assertion alone, opting to tease him with, "Ah, but lovey-dovey has such a nice ring to it! I'm Lovey-Dovey Solo," she said, dropping her voice and transforming her mannerisms to emulate him; she even took a few swaggering steps that way. "Captain of the Millennium Falcon. See," Leia asserted, back to her real voice, "it's sweet."
He crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back against the wall and regarding her with an enamored half-smile. "Oh, is that me, Sweetheart?" The deep-toned, provocative challenge in his words unmistakably promised something very good coming her way.
Leia didn't let up, wanting every bit of what his eyes suggested. "You've never heard of the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs?" she continued in her hilarious apt imitation of him. "How can that be? I only mention it to everyone I meet."
With that, Han succumbed. "Get over 'ere, Worship. I'll show you lovey-dovey," he said, his voice a low growl she could feel all the way to her toes. And he pulled her into his arms, the goggles falling ignored to the floor.