Leia awoke first. She lifted her head to find sudden pain in her neck. Shutting her eyes tightly, she reached back to massage it with her fingers. Her cheek felt swollen and tender where her face had been resting, so she thought she must've hit it on the control panel when they crashed. Without warning, a sudden realization swept over her: Han.
Her eyes snapped open and she glanced beside her to find Han slumped forward on the controls with his face turned away from her. After undoing the crash webbing she walked to the other side of him and gasped at the sight of his blood sprayed over the controls. There was blood running down his face from a cut over his left eye and running down his chin coming from his mouth. Wrapping her small hands around his strong shoulders, she shook him gently.
"Han?" She spoke his name softly, questioningly. She wasn't sure if he would wake up. Looking at him again she was reminded of the apparent lifelessness of his body when she'd first freed him from Carbonite, and the intense fear she'd felt at the thought that he wasn't coming back to her. She shook him harder this time "Han, wake up… please?" Her vision began to blur as the tears formed in front of her eyes.
She was about ready to lose it completely when she finally felt him stir under her touch and let out a low moan. Relief surged through her, and she shook him again. "Han, come on, wake up."
He moaned again and spit some of the blood from his mouth before wiping the excess with the back of his hand. Leia pushed his hair back from the cut on his forehead, wet with perspiration. He slowly opened his eyes and looked at her. "Leia?"
She smiled down at him. "Hey there, how are you feeling?"
He took a second to consider his answer. "I've had better days." He started to lift his head from the panel and Leia placed a hand on his shoulder to slow him.
"Easy. You've got a nasty cut here."
Han reached up to touch the spot above his eye where the cut was. It was warm and sticky, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped, and he hardly even winced when he touched it. "It's not bad, really. I'll be ok." He looked back at her he seemed to have forgotten about his own injuries. "Are you okay?"
It seemed ridiculous of him to be so worried about her considering the stream of blood running down his face. "Me? Oh, I'll be fine. Just a little sore in the neck and a swollen cheek. Nothing to worry about. Let's get you to the med kit and clean you up a little though, okay?" Han nodded and Leia offered her arm to help him up before she guided him out of the cockpit.
Once Han's wounds had been cleaned, she finished up by placing a soft kiss to his forehead after she sealed his cut with a bandage. "You were a little messy, but I think you'll be all right."
"I think it's just because of the doctor I've got," he said smiling at her.
Leia smiled back, but then her expression became sullen. "Han, what happened up there?"
She didn't want to ask that question. Han had always had complete faith in his flying skills, and so had she. She knew it must've hurt him not to be able to do anything to keep the Falcon from crashing, especially when it had nearly cost them their lives. But she just didn't understand what had happened.
Han looked at the floor, obviously not knowing how to answer the question. "I can't explain it. It was like one second I was flying her in for another perfect landing, and the next, nothing worked. I tried every lever, every thruster, everything on my ship, I just couldn't control her anymore." He finally lifted his head and gave her a sincerely apologetic look. "I'm so sorry."
Leia reached up and put her hands on either side of his face. "Han, there was nothing you could've done. I married the best pilot in the galaxy, and I believe that if you couldn't do anything, nobody could. It wasn't your piloting, it was the fact that you couldn't pilot."
"I'm just glad you're all right." He reached over and brushed his thumb over the red, swollen part of her cheek before leaning over and giving it a tender kiss.
"Well, now that we're stuck, maybe we should get in touch with someone who can get us out of here."
"Um, that's going to be a little tricky right now."
"Oh, no." She didn't like the sound of that.
"Yeah, well, when we lost the controls, we sort of lost our communications, too."
Leia couldn't believe what she was hearing. "What are we going to do? I don't even know where we are!"
"Well, there's not really any civilization here, just a lot of beautiful beaches and forests. That's why it was going to be perfect for our vacation. It's about as far away from anything as you can get. Smugglers knew about it because it's the perfect place to go if you need to hide out for a little while. Anyway, the Smuggler's Alliance set up a comm station here in case of emergencies. So I guess that's really our only option."
"How far is it?"
"Oh… about, 30… 40 kilometers tops."
"Great."
"I know. It's not exactly how I envisioned us spending our vacation either."
"I guess we should get some supplies then, huh?" There was no use arguing, because they obviously had no choice.
They gathered their belongings and shoved them into their packs. "We'd better go out the top hatch considering the ramp is under water. Luckily it's pretty shallow here, so it doesn't look like she'll sink. We may even be able to save her."
"I hope so. I can't imagine flying around the galaxy in some other hunk of junk." She pulled his arm along as they went over and opened the Falcon's top hatch and revealed the blazing sun overhead. Leia shut her eyes and felt the warmth absorb into her skin. The air was hot and sticky, but she hadn't felt that warm in a long time after spending most of her time in climate-controlled buildings back on Coruscant. She would've been more excited about the heat had it not been for the fact that she and Han had to hike through it to get to the comm station.
"Yeah, I forgot to tell you," Han said. "It gets pretty warm here. It would've been perfect if we had spent the whole time lying on the beach like I meant for us to."
"That's ok, Han. I'm sure I'll survive. Looks like the Falcon is pretty secure on the bottom here. She should be here when we get back."
Han looked around the edges of his ship. "Yeah, she should be okay. Well, I guess it's time to get wet."
"What?" Leia asked just before she realized what Han meant. He had jumped feet first into the ocean, and when he resurfaced in the clear, blue sea, he spit some water up at her playfully.
"Come on in, the water's beautiful!" Leia smiled and jumped in after him. The warm salt water enveloped her, and she couldn't remember the last time she had swum in an ocean. She had to admit, the planet was beautiful. There were enormous, green trees reaching up to the sky along the shore. Han sure knew how to pick their vacation destinations, and she made a mental note that someday they would have to come back. She only wished that right now they could relax and enjoy it.
After swimming to shore and drying off, they began their hike through the dense forest.