Written in part for the October anon challenge prompt "Hot and Bothered"
He had spied it from the cockpit on his last watch. Barely imperceptible to most but a seasoned pilot's eye - a tiny but ever brightening flicker they'd been journeying towards for weeks into months.
Bespin. Nothing but a giant ball of billowing gas and those willing to take advantage for their own gain. Like Lando.
Han should have felt better, seeing what should be a safe port for them at last.
But he didn't.
He should be relieved to get the Falcon down on her struts and swap in the parts she badly needed. Although he still had implicit trust in the old girl, functioning hyperdrive or not. She had never let him down (well, rarely).
He should be desperate for non-recycled air and water that wasn't murky and food that looked like food and light and heat from a sun on his face.
But he wasn't.
Because for everything he'd gain once they landed in Cloud City, it would likely be the beginning of the end. The end of a sliver of time and space in which he and Leia had finally found a path to each other. The beginning of losing the one thing he'd never expected to find in his possession, which might also cost him the only thing he had - his life - in order to protect.
Here, in the dark quiet of his cramped bunk, he gazed down at the one of its kind cargo that had fallen into his care. It had become habit now to watch her before she woke, as if somehow this sleeping Leia held the key to the mystery of how they had finally come to be. Although she often drifted to the bunk's edge to escape his heat once their hunger for each other had been sated for the night, Han knew that nearer to waking, she inevitably pressed closer to reclaim the hard pillow of his chest.
It still seemed a small miracle to look down and find her there, her head gently rocked by the pitch and fall of his own breath. With her eyes shuttered in sleep, the fiery being that was Princess Leia Organa was nowhere to be seen. Only a beautiful young woman whose face carried the baggage of a few fading freckles and the foolish idea of loving him.
This was the one fleeting moment in his day when nothing else - not the Empire or the Alliance, a cock-blocking droid, wise-ass Wookiee, her past or his future - intruded on his fantasy sprung to life. And the only thing better than indulging himself in wild impossible thoughts of what could be was watching her stir awake in his arms. To watch as her sleepy eyes alit on his, and then the sunbreak of her smile as she found the sum of his parts - eyes, cock, mind and heart - all waiting at attention for her.
Han never knew what he would find in those eyes. Some days, they would close as quickly as they had opened, as Leia sleepily burrowed her face back down onto his chest, settling in with the faintest of sighs. Other times, he saw the churn there from the specters that plagued her sleep, a common occurrence of late.
But more often than not, he would thrill to feel her soft kisses rifling through the patch of hair across his heart as lustful determination filled her eyes, like the tide rushing onshore to sweep him back into the still-raging sea of her desire. Shocked never by her passion, but that she spent it on him.
And for the now countless times they had tumbled into this bunk to remedy years of stolen glances and frustrating misfires, he knew he would never forget a single nanosecond of any of it -
Her ravenous wide-eyed stare that gave way to a whimper when he stood before her for the first time, naked in his need...
Sweeping aside curtains of unleashed hair to uncover the hidden warmth of her breasts that filled his eager hands so perfectly...
How she cursed like one of the Rogues when his tongue delved into her dizzying wet heat as his nose furrowed and teased above mercilessly...
Those lips, so well-practiced in admonishing him, now learning to taunt his hard length with a maddening relentless slide and the accomplice of her nimble tongue...
The way she repaid the single-minded drive of his hips with the whispered scream of his name, unlike others, before her, who had cried out to deities, or for more, but never Han...
This morning, more than ever, he needed to see those eyes, whatever state they may be in. He needed to make more memories, a lifetime's worth, before Leia and the universe that lived in those dark eyes were lost to him, possibly forever.
"Sweetheart?" he whispered, with a gentle brush of his palm over the tousled head tucked in the crook of his arm.
Her eyes fluttered open. She had barely managed a drowsy "Han, what is it?" before he rolled them, leaving Leia on her back and him poised above. He watched desire flood her eyes, washing away the residues of sleep but not the worry, concern and fear that seemed to lurk there now. A mirror of what was likely apparent in his own eyes.
His answer was his lips beginning their climb up the lush slope of her breast. His trek was quickly endorsed by a husky sigh and then handsomely rewarded by the sight of her nipple, tightened in anticipation of his tongue summiting the pink-trimmed peak.
His attention flared to her other nipple and then scorched over the rest of her, determined as he was not to leave a centim of her unattended, uncaressed, unkissed, unloved.
Finally, he was drawn to the blaze at her center, the spring of slick heat that always made him painfully harder. He wanted to lose himself in that fire. Stoke it into a roaring wildfire. Find mercy there for his incurable ache for her. Be consumed by it, forged anew and tempered finely in the furnace of her.
Han shook with short-lived relief when he was buried within her at last, enveloped in her tight hold that was also familiar now, intimate, safe.
With each frantic thrust, he worked to earn his name flying from her lips, but he heard only the cry wrenched from his own mouth instead.
"Ven, Leia" he gasped to the woman arching beneath him. "Ven fho mei."
But to the woman who lived within him now, his heart begged Ven de mei.
Come with me.