12. Day 29

It was the first time they were doing it. Han had insisted so much, that she had to finally give in and try it. The conversation that had conducted her to the present predicament was something like this:

"I can't believe you never done it!" Han Solo exclaimed.

"Well, yeah," the Princess shyly answered.

"But you should!" he alleged.

"Says who?" she defied.

"Me." the smuggler answered cockily.

"Why?"

"Because it's somethin' like flying, you don't really appreciate it until you do it yourself."

"You like doing that, don't you?"

"You betcha."

"And you wanna teach me, huh?" Her husky answer was.

"It'll be my pleasure," he said with a devilish grin.

"Let's do it, then."

"Hey, hey, stop, you'll ruin your jumpsuit that way. Here, let me do it. Yeah, beautiful."

"Captain Solo, Mistress Leia, may I help you?" See-Threepio interrupted.

"That thing looks dangerous, Han, isn't it too big? Maybe Threepio can really help us..."

"We're doing just perfect by ourselves, Goldenrod, thank you," Han dismissed him.

"I only wanted to help," the droid muttered whilst leaving.

It was like this that the last Princess of Alderaan found herself wrapped in a big apron and getting ready to the first cooking lesson of her life.

First Han brought a huge piece of semi-frozen nerf meat and started to slice it in thin loafs with a big nasty-looking knife. Then he put some freeze-dried egg powder to rehydrate in a bowl and passed a duraplast mallet to Leia.

"Hit 'em." Han instructed.

"What?"

"Like this." He started to pound energetically one slice of meat with the mallet until it was half as thin and twice as large. "That way."

She did it but without much success or enthusiasm.

"A little harder?" Han suggested. "Just imagine it's Vader down there."

The mallet hit hard on the meat and pierced it.

"Alright, alright. Not him," he said depositing a light kiss on the back of her neck. "Janson maybe?" He studied her reflection in a glass jar in front of her, counted the lines between her eyebrows and saw with relief that they diminished from three to one.

They kept working together for a while, Leia's mallet going up and down with an easy rhythm, the front of her apron getting splashed every now and then by little droplets of ejected blood.

"And who do you imagine it is?" she asked without warning.

Han faked looking for something in the cupboard. "Err... I give you three guesses."

The princess smiled sweetly. "Me, me and me?"

He turned laughing eyes to her and his hands now sneaked around her waist, turning her to face him. "Hey, your hands are dirty..." she protested.

"That's what aprons are for, Princess," he answered and leaned down to whisper hotly in her ear. "Sometimes. But not lately..."

His lips trailed back to kiss her but she had placed her hands on his chest and was pushing him away, teasingly. But he was not in the mood to be denied or maybe he couldn't resist the twinkle in her eyes so he caught her forearms and drove her arms gently behind her back. Still holding her wrists together with one hand, the other wrapped her shoulders and pressed her body firmly against his. Again, he leaned down to find her lips.

"No...!"

She twitched violently in his arms and he released her immediately. Jumping back, she lost her equilibrium and had to grab the edge of the counter to steady herself.

"Leia..." Han Solo pleaded, extending his arms to help her. But she stopped him with a sharp gesture of her hand.

"Don't..." She asked, taking one deep breath after the other to calm herself. After a few minutes of silence, she raised her eyes again to him.

"I'm sorry," the Princess said.

"C'mon, I should apologize," he answered drawing her back to him. Rubbing her back with both hands, up and down, he suddenly got an idea. His hands sled down farther than usual and she jerked again, but just over the critical point they diverged, grabbing her firmly by the hipbone.

"Jump," he ordered.

"I beg your pardon?" She asked with her most regal tone.

"Jump... please?"

With a perplexed look still on her face, she complied and he assisted the leap, making her sit on the kitchenette counter, pushing aside everything on it. She was now a good half head above him.

"Now, you take command, your Ticklishness," he invited with a wink, placing her arms around his own neck. "Just beware of those knees. They're lethal weapons, ya know..."

"Shut up, Captain Too-Many-Hands," she ordered just before her lips descended over his.

They were a little late for lunch but they finished their task. The thinned meat loafs were covered in breadcrumbs, then soaked in the egg-mix and back again to the crusts. When a nice pile of them were ready, Han threw the milas, as he called them, in the deep fryer that had just reached the appropriate temperature.

He was currently looking proudly at Leia, who was very focused smashing the tubes for a side-dish. As always, when she decided to do something, she did it well.

Strange woman.

Definitely the most complicated female he had ever known. He had stopped trying to understand her long ago. However, he had learned more about her in the past weeks than in three years.

Her life as a Princess and the duties and responsibilities it implied was something very hard for him to comprehend. He could understand responsibility to a partner, a friend, a lover but not to an abstraction like the People of a whole planet. He even could find some sense in her dedication to the Alliance, given that her father was one of the founders. She was a symbol to them and as that, she fulfilled her duty just for being there. But that didn't justify the fact that she almost killed herself working.

She had told him that she wasn't Bail Organa's biological daughter. That she didn't know who her real parents were or were they came from. And that had hit very close to home for him. He knew well that sensation, to look at his own reflection in the mirror and ask whom did he look like. Who brought him to life and gave him away or died before he could know her. He could relate to that. She had only been exceptionally lucky that some people like the Organas had chosen her to adopt. He hadn't been so fortunate.

As for the rest of her, for the woman behind the Princess, after the horrible experience she had lived in the Death Star, he was surprised she let him touch her at all. Anything else was an unexpected bonus. He, of course, wanted desperately to make love to her, to have her completly abandoned in his arms, to get himself lost in her. But he had wanted that for so long now, that it was really nothing more than a background noise, the baseline of his days. It was only brought to his consciousness when something in her demeanor fueled the already burning fire, like a little while ago. And he could not forget that kiss she had given him the night of her first nightmare. That hint of the passion running under her skin, maybe as wild as his own did.

Anyway, she made him feel needed and that was a weird sensation. It was the first time in his life that someone really needed him. Or so it seemed. There had been women that claimed that and discarded him as soon as he accomplished whatever they wanted from him. After a while, he had been the one to go away first without looking back. Would she too discard him as soon as she stabilized emotionally? That sithspawned holo-vid had broken down the dam that had constricted her feelings for three years apparently, making her at times as unstable as vulnerable. But it had its good side: if not, he would be still stuck with the Ice Princess. But playing improvised therapist wasn't easy and he made so many mistakes at it. She seemed to like it, though. She seemed to like to talk about Alderaan while being cradled in his arms.

Things weren't going bad all in all, at least from a certain point of view. But he wondered how long would it last. Day after day, he realized how wrong he had been in talking her into this without telling her the whole truth. Someday, she would start to ask questions about his past and he did not know how he would answer.

But he really cared for her, damn him. That was all he knew; he cared for her and he didn't want her to go away from him.

"Who taught you how to cook, Han?" the Princess asked when their meal was over, nibbling idly at a cookie she had dipped previously in ice-cream.