Uncover


Leia looked spectacular in the harsh lights of the open galley space, all playfully-ferocious eyes and tightly-braided hair. Her body coiled into the stance she preferred against larger combatants. Serious and prepared, she looked more like a predator than his small, timid prey.

Han, on the other hand, might as well have been drawn with little hearts floating all around his head. He knew this, and he didn't fucking care. It was serious business, this reconciling thing. Last year, when they had first admitted how they felt, they had been stuck in a Mon Cal cruiser in the core of the Rebel fleet. And he had been newly-commissioned, with responsibilities and people who called him sir as he tried not to pull a face.

It had all been very respectable, honestly. And it had felt great, he had to admit. But Han and Leia hadn't had the opportunity of full days together back then. It just hadn't happened; there had been too much to do. There had been work, always work: late shifts and early meetings. And then later he had been working with Prisht and The Distributary and had been gone for days and then weeks on end.

Reunions were great and all, but sometimes he just wanted … to live with her. Is that what it was? Not domesticity: that was a pipe dream he didn't dare acknowledge. But the inimitable sense of having time, time to relax, time to talk. To explore, in painstaking detail, the freckles on her thighs.

That was new, and that was good. And it might also be the reason he was shit at doing work lately.

"Han."

Jerked from fantasy, he refocused on his tiny opponent, all hair and eyes and disappointed expression. "Yeah?"

Back to the galley, where they were both (unfortunately) dressed and acting like responsible adults with goals to accomplish. Again.

"You were a million klicks away," she said. "Please tell me you were thinking of something useful."

"Nope," he said cheerfully, popping the P.

She rolled her eyes. "I need you here right now, not there."

Indicating their bunk with the tilt of her head, the point was made abundantly clear. Stop thinking with your cock, he translated for her, because she would never say something quite that explicit, no matter how hard he tried to goad her into it.

And he definitely tried. Often.

"Fine," he agreed. "Terms?"

"Let's keep to the normal rules. I'm going to be working on levitation at the same time as we drill. You just do what you do."

"I'm gonna win," he offered in the spirit of the game, but without any true anticipation.

Her smile came so slow and so confident that he felt a thrill flare down his spine, despite his reticence. "If you say so," she challenged.

He brought his hands up and sank back into his right hip. His style of hand-to-hand wasn't anything like hers. It wasn't anything like the ones they taught in the Alliance to the rookies and fresh-faced children that flocked to the recruitment camps, either. Nah, he was quicker, dirtier, and more ruthless, his skills honed in the fire of bar brawls, spice dens, and the streets of Coronet City.

Leia was too smart to engage first, and so he played the aggressor. Stepping into her space, he shot a fist wide, somewhere near her shoulder, and she easily dodged it. He pivoted, and in his peripheral vision caught a glance at a plastisteel-cut bowl rising from the galley counter.

"The remote not working?" he asked.

"I wanted to try something that didn't move on its own first."

He lunged again with wide swings, almost comically large compared to her neat sidestep. One more foray in, and he overshot her ribs by at least twenty centims.

"You can't be serious with this," she said. "Han. Fight."

"This isn't my idea of a fun time, Princess."

Definitely not. Hitting women ranked lower on the list than running spice for Hutts, and that had been him at his lowest. A twinge, somewhere in his chest, something that reminded him of the moment he had seen that Imperial asshole prod a lone Wookiee in the side with an electrowand. Protect, it said, and that was all there was to it.

But Leia knew more than she ever let on, and said, "I'm not defenseless. I won't get hurt."

Was that it? His panic over her safety spilling over into hand-to-hand combat drills now?

Running a palm over his face, he sighed and spit out a defeated and slightly pissed-off fine. He put his hands up, gauged where her weight was planted, shifted forward and opened with an undercut toward her solar plexus. It didn't connect, of course; she nimbly moved to her right. And because he knew she would do that, he snuck into her left, where an opening had suddenly appeared. She pivoted again, but he followed and reached for her upraised right arm, over her head, trying to bully her with sheer force.

A second too late, he realized he had neglected her feet entirely, just before she stomped on his left foot with the heel of her snow boot.

He hissed in pain as he secured her right arm behind her back, but she wrenched out from under him, twisting her arm from his grip and freeing herself. Normally, he thought, she would have stepped away and re-engaged with some distance. A new bout, more or less. But her focus was on the bowl, safely hovering to his left.

"Did it dip?" he asked, as he pressed in again.

This was the question, and the reason he had agreed to any drills in the first place. Leia firmly believed her skills with the Force (the levitating, the moving shit around) was barely in her control at the best of times, and only with corresponding movements of her fingers. His aim, then, was to pull that control from her however he saw fit, to prevent her from using that movement as a crutch.

I have a better idea, he had offered when she first asked for his help.

She had looked at him skeptically at that, and rightfully so. Lounging around in bed that morning, they had been naked and comfortably occupied with things that had nothing to do with the Alliance or the Jedi. He had balked at the insinuation of work, his focus on the deft slide of his fingers as they flitted around the gorgeous periphery of her breasts, but there had been no true guile in his words. His idea was far better than hers.

And what is that? she had said, turning on her side to face him, knowing very well the nature of what he was about to suggest.

You try to float shit in the air while I'm inside you. It's a better test, and we'd both enjoy it a hell of a lot more.

It was a much better plan to his mind, but Leia hadn't agreed, rolling her pretty eyes and threatening to go take a fresher alone if he kept it up. And so here he was, trying to overpower her in the galley like some drunk goon on Nar Shaddaa.

Stupid.

"Yes," she answered his earlier question, about the bowl. "But this is good. Try again."

Different aim this time, but the same end. He quickly eyed the hull to his side, weighed the pros and cons, then made a simple plan of attack in his head. The bowl forgotten, he pressed to her side with a fruitless jab to her ribs. She pivoted as anticipated, and he reached for her again, narrowing the space between them. Pivot. One slim arm came up to block the hand that attempted to grab her shoulder, and there was that twisting motion again to free herself.

But his intention hadn't actually been to capture her then and there. When she broke his hold, she stepped back closer to the hull. It wasn't a perfect trap, because she could easily roll to get out of the twin walls of his body and the durasteel at her back. He was next to useless in the lower plane in this position, and she was faster and nimbler than he was by a hell of a margin.

She wouldn't try it, though. The whole point of the drill was to see how she did in situations of capture. He couldn't defend her against Vader, not really, but he sure as hell could help her practice managing multiple attacks at the same time.

The bowl hovered to his right. He could see it out of the corner of his eye, placidly hanging a meter and a half above the deck with no support lines or hoverjets.

Without a word, he ducked a shoulder and bodily maneuvered her into the hull, pinning her outstretched arm and crooking a knee around hers to shift her weight onto his side. And he had her as well as he probably could because she had let him, and he wasn't blind to that. But this was her world, and he was just some warm-bodied droid in her service right now, so whatever.

This wasn't a position anyone would be able to use to hold anyone for long, and so he turned her around, pinning her hands behind her back and releasing her feet. Then, because he didn't like the idea of immobilizing her facing a wall, he shifted until her back was to his front, with his back to the hull.

The bowl was on their left now, clearly in their view, still hovering. And here was the moment of truth. He had to do something more than immobilize her, because surely she would be able to manipulate the bowl toward his head or something? She had moved the blast doors on Hoth. This could hardly be any different.

But nothing happened for a full minute, and he got antsy.

He leaned down to her right ear, keeping the bowl in his sight-line, and whispered, "Shouldn't you be trying to…?"

Trailing off, he caught the expression on her face, her tight lips and angry eyes, and realized that she was trying.

"It won't move," she bit out through clenched teeth. "It's … I'm … stuck."

He remembered that word from their first night together here on the Falcon. Stuck. She had properly identified his inability to move for what it had been: an emotional response to a memory. And he didn't know if that was what this was for her now, or if something else was happening, a forced helplessness or a mental block.

The one thing he knew was that she was capable. And of that he had no doubt.

"Do you want me to loosen your hands?" he asked in a tone that was awfully condescending and felt disgusting coming from his throat.

She huffed in indignation so hard he could feel it against his chest, and it made him smile. "Absolutely not."

"It's okay if you can't do it," he said. "We can try again later."

"No."

He squeezed her wrists, and, like an asshole, goaded her further.

"I'm sure we can ask Luke how he does it when we get back to the Fleet."

The growl that came from her threatened to make him laugh, but he stuck to his guns.

"Maybe not all Jedi can do all the things?"

"I can do it," she said. A twitch of her fingers against his hands, and he adjusted his hold until she couldn't cheat. "I can."

"You sure about that?"

"You do realize where my hands are, right, hotshot?" she bit out.

He looked down, caught her meaning in the vulnerable position he was in, the cock she did not refer to by name pressed unintentionally against her restrained hands, and had to laugh, breaking the spell.

"See, this is why this is a dumb idea," he said. "Neither of us is gonna hurt the other. There's no real danger here."

"Five minutes ago, you were afraid to hurt me."

"Yeah, well, I'm traumatized," he said cheerily.

They were still and silent, watching the bowl hang in the air in perfect stillness, and Han considered how even that should be celebrated as a bold achievement. A few months ago she couldn't have done that, and now she was grinding herself to the ground trying to do more. It was always more with her, and he recognized that fire in her eyes for the same one that burned in him, too. The need to test, to push, to inflame.

It wasn't enough to be good. They needed to be the best.

Sighing heavily, she shook her head. "I can do this. I know I can. I just need…"

She tried to move her fingers again. He held her fast.

"Nuh-uh."

She glared at the bowl, and he knew that look was intended for him. He grinned into the crown of her head and kissed her hair, amused. This woman, he thought fondly, charmed by the stubbornness to now cheat just to prove him wrong. Even though it had been her suggestion. Even though she was changing the game as she went.

Standard rules, my ass.

"You got yourself into this mess," he muttered. "Get yourself out."

She strained. She cursed. She bit her lip and scrunched up her face, and shoved against his hands. All of it was useless. He had her, and she couldn't do a damn thing but the one thing she had to do.

"Let go," she finally said. "It's no use."

He didn't like that tone, the defeatism there, but he also hadn't loved this idea in the first place, so he released her hands and spun her around. Facing him, she turned her head and with the smallest flourish of her hand, let the bowl land soundlessly on the galley counter.

"It's a good thing we didn't use the remote," she murmured.

"We could try it my way?"

She shook her head. "Your way would leave a lot of broken dishes on the deck."

Grinning, he hooked her under his arm and led her to the holochess table to pour her a stiff drink.


Her threat of a fresher alone had been ill-advised, because the thought of a combined fresher had danced enticingly behind both their eyes during the failed combat drill. And the only way to really exorcize such a thought was to go through with it, as Leia tipsily suggested, perhaps with some idea of distracting herself from her disappointment in the galley. The fresher was cold, colder than the rest of the quarters, and their slightly-drunken path was littered with bumps against hulls and shushes whispered against lips that smiled entreatingly.

"Chewie," Leia mumbled, before she slipped her tongue against Han's and prevented him from responding for a full thirty seconds.

"What about him?"

"We have to be quiet."

Han, pleasantly warm from two and a half tumblers of whiskey but nowhere near drunk, waved at the controls to the water fresher impatiently. It turned on with a quick hiss. "I'm quiet."

The curtain of her hair obscured the first indignant look she sent him, so she shook it behind her shoulders and reintroduced the glare. "You are not," she argued. "Leia, Leia, Leia, you say."

He stepped out of his pants and into her arms, impatiently ducking his head into the crook of her neck as he picked her up and settled her legs around his waist. "Who's the one cursing in Alderaanian, then? Because it sure as hell isn't me."

Turning them so that his back took the first hit of the spray, he focused on his footing, on not dropping her as she wrapped her arms around his neck and gave him a superior look.

"I don't know what you're talking about. I am perfectly articulate," she proclaimed in all her confident snobbishness, but with a slight slurring of her words.

"Ha."

"You just don't know what I'm saying. What if it's poetry?"

"Ha. It sure ain't any poetry you learned in school," he said, "unless you went to school on Zeltron."

She tilted her head, considering, and then replied, "Perhaps it was a field trip."

Growling at that, he kissed her hungrily, worked up and insatiable and now completely invested in getting her to do exactly what she claimed she didn't do. Pressing her back against the cool wall of the fresher, he ground his hips into hers, wrangling a soft groan against his mouth. The water was too warm, he thought, and while he would normally trust his reflexes and strength to hold her up while he adjusted the temperature, it wasn't a risk he was willing to take right now. They were at best bordering on drunk, and he suspected she had fully crossed over.

That, and the fact that Leia had broken from his lips and was currently biting the lobe of his right ear, made the temperature wildly unimportant to him.

"Tell me how much you want me," she whispered.

Well, okay now. That was more like it. "Field trip, huh? Sure it wasn't a full term?"

She gave him an impatient look, and he answered by pressing his hips against hers, pinning her to the wall in a neat encore of their earlier activities in the galley. A soft oh left her lips and he felt like there wasn't a single drop of blood in his head anymore.

But just to be sure she got her answer… "I could fuck you every day for a year and it still wouldn't be enough."

"A year," she marveled, breathless, though how could that possibly be new information to her?

He felt sweat prickle at his hairline on his neck, hands full of Leia-skin and lips parted on the column of her throat.

"A year on which planet?"

Valid question, he had to admit, but it was also completely irrelevant right now, as far as he was concerned. She was so close, and smelled so good, and if he didn't get some kind of indication soon that she wanted him inside her, he just might explode.

"Brhamma?" he said, muffled by the line of her jaw.

She laughed too loudly, throwing her head back and hitting the wall. He shushed her with a hand over her mouth, almost dropping her in the process.

"Don't know what I'm talking about, huh?" he asked. "Quiet."

"Brhamma?" she murmured under his palm.

Her eyes were twinkling and her smile was so big, and Han wanted her so badly in that moment that he thought he might combust. "You gonna cooperate?" he asked, trying to move them along, trying to keep her quiet, trying desperately to just pull it together for her.

He lifted his hand to reveal her radiant smile. "No. And Brhamma has, what, sixteen thousand solar days in a year?"

Her lips were wet, and that observation took up approximately sixty percent of his brain-power."Somethin' like that."

"Ambitious, are we?"

"You asked," he said with a shrug. "Any chance I could get going on it, then, Worship?"

Still smiling too wide, like some royal lunatic, she unwrapped one hand from his neck and quickly found him ready and wanting against her. She shifted and brought him inside her, and every thought left his brain. Every single one, lost in her warmth, her wetness, her sublimity.

Groaning, he fought for focus, finding it in opening his eyes to the fires of Leia's challenging eyes.

"Quiet." she ordered, and then promptly disobeyed her own order with a high that had nothing to do with the whiskey.


Blue light shed onto the bunk from the sleep-function lights, illuminating a tranquil scene: Han and Leia, on their sides facing each other, one awake and the other asleep. Mirrored poses, knees bent, hands loose in front of their chests, their fingers so close that they occasionally brushed when their partner twitched. Sleeping deeply, they existed without all the worries or distractions of the daytime hours.

But Han was awake now, and Leia only realized it when the sense of something staring at her overcame her rest.

He teased her about her eyes, how big they were on her face (like some kind of kid's holo character!, he had exclaimed during their exhausting mission to Fliaron a lifetime ago). But right then, his eyes looked like he had taken too much spice. Wide, striking but also wandering. Pupils dilated, bronzed skin pale, lips apart: he was clearly freed from a nightmare.

She would know that look anywhere.

Trying to break through her sleepiness, she blinked and pushed closer to him, in case he needed some kind of tactile response from her. "Han?" she murmured.

But no. He didn't reply and didn't move, still as a statue and staring at her with unnerving and unfocused intensity.

She sat up. "Are you okay?"

He seemed to awaken out of whatever strange trance he had been in, running a hand down her arm and urging her to lie back down on her side. "Don't get jumpy, I'm fine."

And the humor was there, but it didn't help her nerves, awoken so quickly by what had felt like an emergency only moments before. "Why aren't you asleep?"

Shrugging, he focused on his hand, sweeping up and down her upper arm without saying anything.

"Nightmare?" she guessed, though it wasn't truly a guess. Her nightmares had been relentless the first year after the destruction of Alderaan, and had recently returned in a haunting display of how permanent trauma could really be. Anything could trigger it. She wasn't surprised that his demons might occasionally accompany him to sleep.

"Wasn't anything I couldn't handle," he deflected.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

He didn't. She knew he didn't. It was the same hurdle they kept trying to jump, this sense of vulnerability that he had struggled to eliminate entirely. There were parts of him that she hadn't been able to touch, big blank spots where the real Han Solo existed, where no one could truly hurt him. The situation was ironic, too, in that she was already wedged in there; the only one who could really break me, as he put it.

He had meant commitment. He had meant his long descent into Rebel respectability. But she had also proven to be the one nerve he would not risk exposing.

Ah, but she knew that one already, knew the double trap that existed down the road of self-protection. Pushing her away had hurt him, and, probably the greater sin in Han's mind, it had hurt her, too. It had been the same for her: embracing her love for Han had been an absolute gamble and was bound to end in heartache, one way or another. The difference was that together they had made her see that she could accept his loss, if it came to that. That she was strong enough.

He didn't know that yet. He still wasn't sure.

"Come on," she urged quietly. "Tell me."

His hand stilled, then moved to sweep loose hairs from her face. "It's almost worse when it's a memory," he began, "because when it's a memory, I can't let it go."

Nodding, she stayed silent but encouraged him to continue.

"It's always you on the holotable. Always. Sometimes it's a straight up holo in my head, sometimes we're somewhere else, doing something different, but then we're back there, and you just pitch backwards, white as a sheet."

"Does it continue after that?"

He thought about it, then pursed his lips and shook his head. "Mostly I just wake up at that point, feeling..."

She waited, but he didn't go on. Supplying the word for him felt like the most natural thing in the galaxy.

"Empty?"

It was how she felt, too, when she awoke to a reality without her parents, without her people. Empty. She would trade almost anything to go back to those last few seconds of blissful ignorance, before. Empty, because that's how it felt when you realized to your absolute core that you were broken in some fundamental way.

He didn't like that answer, she could tell in the crease in his forehead, but he didn't deny it, either. "Fuckin' ridiculous," he said. "Pathetic."

"Not this again."

"No, I mean… Sweetheart, if I kicked it tomorrow, if Jabba showed up and took me away, you'd be fine."

Pulling her head back, she said, "I absolutely would not be fine."

Her focus shifted from him and to herself, and she wanted to stamp her foot in rage, the utter insult in what he had just said flying through her faster than he could fly the Falcon.

"You'd struggle, no, I know," he backpedaled, sensing her fury at that comment. "I'm not saying you wouldn't, uh, be sad."

"Sad," she repeated, and it was like the word dripped with poison.

He plowed on, hurrying to try to make himself understood. "But compared to a fucking planet, Leia … do you see what I mean? You survived that. You can survive anything."

Swallowing her frustration, she sent him a murderous look but didn't respond, prepared to hear him out. She thought she understood what he was trying to say, even though he was saying it so clumsily that it would be easy to think he was making her the loser in this ridiculous who-loves-who-more game he seemed intent on playing.

"But I'm stuck, like you said. I can't get past it, even though things are better and I feel better and you're here. It's like I run a klick and then I blink and I'm right back to where I started."

He hated admitting all that, his expression indicated it better than the words he spoke, but the truth rang out crystal clear. He was stuck, because that was exactly what trauma did. It ripped you back to that awful moment in time, over and over, the brain trying so hard to resolve the unresolveable.

For one single, life-changing moment, they had lost their power to fix the situation to their benefit. It was as simple as that. Leia on the observation deck of the Death Star; Han leaning over the holochess table. For people who lived stubbornly with the idea that they were capable of almost anything, it was a devastating blow.

And once they had felt that helplessness? There was no going back to the people they were before, because those people were gone. Lost. Leia had forged someone new from the ashes through time and help from Luke, Han and Chewie. Han was trying to rush the process.

But saying that to him right now didn't feel like a good idea, so she moved on.

"The scale of the loss doesn't matter," she reiterated to him. "And there is no pathetic when it comes to things like this, Han. I know you know this."

"Sure, but knowing it and understanding it are two different things."

There was no refuting that point. He was absolutely right. So she nodded and said, "Losing you would devastate me. It did devastate me."

Strong, calloused fingers weaved through hers and brought her hand to his mouth, kissing it in apology, but he didn't say anything.

"And you like to think of me as the only one with a history of trauma, Commander, but I know better. Just because I know the name of mine doesn't make yours any less real for not knowing."

Quietly, they stared at each other. She had the impression that if she had broached this subject anywhere else, at any other time, he would have closed up immediately, slamming the hatch closed faster than she could have exhaled.

But they had defeated the impossible enemy of their own misunderstandings and assumptions, and had come out the other side more aware, more humble, and more comfortable. If now wasn't the time to unearth this demon, then it never would be, and she refused to accept that possibility. They deserved to resolve this.

"Magic tellin' you that?"

"A little," she admitted with a tolerant smile. "But it also makes sense. You know what it is to lose someone important to you, someone before me. Your reactions feel old."

"Nothing about me is old."

She liked the humor, and so she indulged it with a wink before pressing on. "Your parents?"

She didn't feel the need to say anything more. She wasn't sure if she was right, it could have just as likely been anyone. Another lover, even. But she believed him when he said that he had rarely felt anything for anyone else in his past, that relationships had been transactional for the most part.

No, the abandonment in question felt more parental than romantic to her, though she wasn't sure why. She suddenly missed Luke so badly she wanted to cry, her empathetic and emotionally-intelligent brother. Luke, who would know how to guide this conversation along with ease and comfort. Leia felt like an electro-hammer ramming down walls she was barely confident she should be destroying.

Han hadn't gotten up from the bunk and he hadn't pulled away, his hand holding hers in the small space between them, and that felt like a victory in and of itself. She was in deeply personal territory and wildly out of her depth. But she felt led to continue, felt a soft pull. No blue colors, no master hitting her with walking sticks. Something more intuitional, truer.

Han needed to talk. It was as terribly simple as that.

"Not much to say," he said at length. "Grew up without 'em."

"Do you know their names?"

"Maybe hers. Not his. Don't know if she knew his name."

Nodding, she absorbed what she could from that, then asked, "Were you put up for adoption?"

He laughed, harshly, cruelly. So bitter and unhimself that it surprised her. "Adoption? No. First thing I knew were the alleys in winter."

"I thought Shrike kidnapped you?"

He had told her about his childhood with Garris Shrike, how the child-slaver who had manipulated, harassed and beaten the children of his operation. But she remembered Han saying kidnapped, and she had assumed it had been from some kind of orphanage, some social services location in Coronet City.

"She was a girl. Maybe thirteen? It's hard to know now," he reflected. "Old enough, anyway. She kept an eye out for me when I was small. As best as she could, at least. It's cold, you know, when you don't have central enviro-controls."

"Hoth cold?"

"Nothing is Hoth cold," he said with a chuckle. "Stupidest decision you and Rieekan ever made, Leia, I swear."

An old refrain, and she acknowledged it with atypical grace. "So you've said."

"Anyway, it was cold enough. I guess she got desperate, and sold me off."

Her stomach dropped. "Sold?"

"Shrike gave her some credits when I was big enough to go with him."

"How old were you?"

"No idea," he said. "Five, maybe six. Old enough to remember."

Leia kept her face free of any surprise, utilizing the skills she had honed as a senator listening to committee testimonies. But the story he was telling her was horrifying, and she wanted to be sick, thinking of this incredible man in front of her coming from such heartbreakingly awful circumstances.

"I don't know for sure if she was my … if she had me," he corrected himself, the word mother apparently too great an honorific. "But I was worth a hundred credits to her in any case. Shrike gloated about that. Called me a steal."

Leia closed her eyes at that. A hundred credits. Enough for quite a bit of food but not enough for shelter for more than a night. Such a small sum for a child's life, and so indicative of extreme poverty. The story wasn't new to her, but the insult of the small price was like a vibroblade to her side.

"Hers is the name that you know?"

He nodded, but didn't offer it to her.

"Do you remember anything else?"

He curled his lips to the side in a sign of nonchalance she didn't believe for a second. "The rest is Shrike. Picking pockets. Scams. Quotas and beatings and all the rest."

He said all the rest like that was a universal childhood experience. Her stomach heaved.

"See, Leia, I can name it just fine," he muttered, referring to her earlier statement. "It was abandonment. I just don't like to say it out loud."

Bringing his hand to hers, she kissed his knuckles, just as he had done earlier in a display of solidarity. She couldn't answer him, couldn't say she was horrified by his short autobiographical story, or that she was utterly furious, though she was both of those things. She couldn't speak against the might of the weight he had just unloaded for her. Speechlessness was about as solemn and appropriate a reply as she could make, and even that felt totally inadequate.

She felt inadequate.

"Chewie knows," he finished.

Her heart swelled for the man in front of her, and his best friend, and for the trust he had just placed in her. No one was equal to Chewie in Han's mind. No one.

With a decisive movement, she shifted toward him, enfolding him in her arms. She surrounded him, and he dropped his forehead to her shoulder, this larger-than-life man folding into her like a piece of flimsy.

"I love you," she whispered. "More than anything."

He nodded, accepting it as indisputable fact, and that meant more to Leia than anything he could have said.


Author's Note: Happy March! Thank you for your support, friends! The next chapter of Specter will be posted on Friday, April 1st. Have a beautiful month and long live Ukraine. -KR