7. Day 11 – Part II

Twelve Hells. They used Twelve Hells on me.

Leia's words echoed once and again inside his head. His mind recognized them but his soul refused to find any meaning to those words. "How long?" Han heard himself asking.

"Five days."

Five days! Sweet Corellian stars! She endured that for five days! The worst nightmare of the Kessel Mine prisoners! Nobody in his knowledge had survived more than three.

The wicked invention consisted of an arrangement of twelve needles or probes controlled by a droid. Once attached to the subject, electric current started to flow through them, at random intervals and increasing intensity. Drugs enhanced the experience, and nobody was known to be capable of resisting interrogation under these circumstances.

Nobody, but her, it seemed.

Finally, everything stopped spinning and he chanced a side-glance at her. Leia was still looking down, her hair almost covering her face. He wanted to hold her so badly that it hurt, but he did not. She had showed very clearly that she did not want to be touched and he intended to respect her wish. Long time ago, he had heard that the pain produced by this particular kind of torture stuck to the skin, even long after it was healed. Sadly, he reflected that if the Imperials had gone so far with her as to use Twelve Hells, they probably had given her as well the rest of the usual treatment.

Han Solo felt a new tenderness and admiration for the Princess grow inside of him. Kriff, even after going through all that, she had managed to save the day back there in the Death Star! He had known before that she was strong-willed, almost ruthless in her determination to carry away whatever it was necessary to defeat the Empire, but it was not until now he had a full notion of the depth of her strength. He felt dwarfed, inadequate. He had had all the signs before him to read for years and he had chosen to ignore them, to catalog her as a pushy but sultry nuisance.

Feeling completely powerless, he offered the only thing she would maybe accept from him at this point.

"D'ya want to talk about it?"
Talk? Talk? How could she talk about this to him? To anybody, for that matter. Her debriefing had not had many more words. Fortunately, the events where self-explanatory: if she had betrayed the Alliance, the Death Star would have arrived at Yavin much earlier. They had doubted her recollection about the amount of time Vader worked on her, though. They said she must have lost track of the time at some point, because nobody could stand five days of Twelve Hells.

Most of the people thought that her nightmares were about Alderaan, and they were, but not only about that. How could she explain to Han or anybody else the three hours shower she took after delivering Artoo to the technical crew, that day on Yavin? That she spent another doing the same thing after hugging him and Luke after the battle? Explain the nightmare that had been no nightmare where she lay naked and cold and dirty and in pain, and the stormtroopers made fun of her? And the worst of all, the nightmare inside a nightmare where she felt Darth Vader inside her mind and feared she was going crazy.

She still did, sometimes.

She had improved a lot since those first days, though, and the bad dreams and bad memories came less often, but speaking about it was something she still could not do, and she did not know if she would ever be ready for that.

"No," she simply answered.

For a long while, neither of them spoke nor moved. Han, who usually could not remain still for his life, was for once quiet. Strangely enough, the tension slowly spent itself and this moment of serene companionship was what Leia would remember later as the turning point in their lives.

She was the one to break the silence, at last.

"What about that soup you offered?"

Han looked at her with big astonished eyes, as if she were asking him to jump out of an airlock. "Of course," he answered and as soon as the request sunk into him and he sprang to the freezer to get it.

Good, she thought, watching him emerge triumphal with a frozen container. She had noticed long ago that putting him to do something useful when things got tricky was good for him. They were so much alike in that

Han Solo pulled the soup out of the reheater a few seconds before the program finished. She did not like her meals that hot. He poured the aromatic cream in his best bowl and presented it to Princess Leia.

She motioned to grab the spoon but halted midway, staring at her gloved hand. With an annoyed look, she peeled the gloves off and tossed them angrily aside. After that, she carried spoonful after spoonful methodically to her mouth. Pausing between two of them, she praised the concoction. "It's good," she said, breaking a pale smile.

"It's my favorite," he gleefully replied.

"I want to watch it again," she announced when she finished eating.

"You sure?"

"Yes."

She took her jacket off while he summoned the file. The vid was a boring love story, but the last half-hour had been recorded on location in Alderaan. More precisely, in the Royal Gardens. Han did not bother to conceal that he knew by heart the exact point were the sequence started.

The holo-camera first followed the leading lady through the ornated gates. In the background, Aldera's Palace emerged in all its glory. There was some kind of festivity going on. Between bushes with pink and yellow flowers, a scene was mounted where a group of girls performed a traditional dance. The girls wore loose trapezoidal dresses of translucent shimmersilk the same colors as the flowers. The camera lingered for a minute on them, till the dance ended. As the music died suffocated by the applause and the little dancers bowed, one of the girls was given a big bunch of the same pink and yellow flowers. She carefully stepped down the scene and ceremonially walked to the front row of seats, in the middle of which a grey-haired man clad all in white was sitting. The man stood and he was very tall, and the girl presented the flowers to him. After that, she made a perfect curtsy in front of him, but when she lifted her face again, she winked at him. The man laughed warmly and hugged her and the crowd cheered, throwing petals in the air.

In the next scene, the camera followed another man along a path through the garden and towards the lake. The trees grew graciously along the slope and an ancient statue of the Goddess carved in grey-greenish stone could be seen emerging of the sea of leaves. Along the shore of the lake, there was a shining white sand beach and a myriad of gulls fished in the sparkling water. The man found the woman from the beginning there and for a while the camera only showed their faces engaged in a completely uninteresting conversation, at least for Han and Leia. The Corellian fast-forwarded that part and slowed down it to normal speed when the couple kissed and the camera started to widen its focus like if it was gaining height. Slowly the image incorporated the whole lake, the castle, the city and the mountains. Fade to black.

Han Solo paid really little attention to what the holo-vid displayed. His focus was centered in the woman by him, whose only sign of emotion was a certain tightening of her jaw when the man in white appeared. When it ended, she spoke exactly four words.

"Play it again, Han."

"Again."

"Again."

By the sixth rerun, he protested. "You can't keep going like this, Leia."

"One more time, please, Han. I'll be alright." Her deep brown eyes begged him and he couldn't resist. As if to reassure him, she took his hand and pulled him to sit by her. The vid played again and Solo gained some courage as he noticed that she had kept her hand in his. "That's your father, right?" he asked. She nodded, squeezing his hand harder. "It was the first time he allowed me to dance in public," she said, absentmindedly.

"What?"

"I'm the one with the flowers." If she had looked at him, she would have seen his eyes bulging.

"That's you?" The Corellian froze the holo and enlarged the scene, until the girl winking and the man in white filled the frame. At the sight of the almost natural size image of Bail Organa smiling to the little girl she had once been, something broke inside the Princess.

"I... miss him so much," she said with strangled voice.

A tear fell down her cheek and then another.

All of a sudden, she collapsed in Han arms, weeping uncontrollably.