The Turn
The struts settle onto the platform with a jerk. The outer hatch opens for the first time in three weeks, and the air smells of sour citrus, the mark of a new planet. Brilliant sunlight illuminates the world outside of the Falcon's shadow. Leia had missed true starlight on her skin. Between the trip here and the incessant cloud-cover of Hoth, Bespin appears heavenly. A planet with a yellow dwarf star and sustainable temperatures. A virtual paradise by comparison.
The world outside of the ramp appears hospitable. A small mining colony, floating among the clouds in pristine natural splendor. A favor owed from a (maybe) friend. So simple a thought when it had first been proposed.
Nothing is amiss.
Except she knows the soul of this world. She had been here before, in her dreams. Falling through the stormy sky, heavy with pressure and pregnant with rain. She had searched these platforms dozens of times. She had hunted for her loved ones, her family, with incomprehensible terror in these halls, in the very air she now breathes, while a dark voice she didn't recognize boomed from all around her.
I have them. I have all of them.
This beautiful sky had cracked with thunder, been torn to shreds by lightning. It was clear and peaceful here now, but it has the same spirit. The same tenacity, the same industriousness.
The same terror.
She breathes in the air and squares her shoulders, knowing the end of the story about to unfurl before her.
It began as an itch between her shoulder blades, innocent and harmless. An annoying sensation, it intruded on her time but was not anything that persisted too long or drew her attention too far from what she was focusing on.
Since what she was focusing on was largely the incredible lines of Han's body, an annoying itch was of no consequence to her. Better things to do, after all. Long conversations in the bunk, followed by long companionable meals and then even more companionable sex that reaffirmed everything she had believed about the man she loved… all of it was more interesting, more enjoyable, than worrying about the small, niggling feeling that something wasn't right.
Most physical sensations were simply in the mind, after all. She could make it disappear easily enough.
But the itch persisted. It caught her wayward attention in quiet moments, during meditation, during the brief seconds she had alone. And she would consider it and then let it go, as she did most disagreeable things of late: the bruise at her hip, the chill on her arms. Her mind was larger than that, than all of that, than the physical world, even.
And then the itch spread down her hands, manifesting into a shake and an unsettling rattling in her chest that reminded her too much of Eloquin percussion instruments. Hollow. Timid. Ominous.
Placing her hand to her chest, she breathed in and out, feeling for any physical sign of injury. But there was no pain, and the rattling wasn't exactly … real. Not in the same sense that a broken rib or a concussion was real. It was more complicated, more nuanced, than that.
Meditation didn't bring her any elucidation. She could sense Luke, lightyears away and still brimming with tight action, wherever he was. But beside that, there was no sense at all in the Force that something was wrong. Just a sense of unease. Shifting. Movement.
"Maybe it's anxiety," Han offered when she brought it up to him. "It can do all sorts of weird shit if you don't catch it early enough."
He wasn't wrong, and these symptoms did have a tinge of worry to them.
But … "Why would I be anxious?"
She was happier than she had been in awhile. At peace with her decisions. Certain in her relationships with others. Her growth in the Force had been steady, and while frustratingly slow, she had indeed seen progress. Carlist was alive, Luke was alive. Han was here and opening up to her. And the Alliance wasn't in immediate danger of extinction, from what she knew.
Han shrugged. "Don't ask me. I'm just the sounding board."
Shirtless and arms stretched along the back edge of the holochess booth, his chest was warm where she leaned beside him. His fingers pulled her braid apart. His nonchalance underwrote his words, the lack of danger so obvious in his relaxed pose that it made her feel a little ridiculous to have mentioned it.
"I've never felt it before," she said. "The Force always feels so emergent to me, like it's trying to grab my attention. But this is subtler. Softer."
"You're stronger now than you were. Maybe that's why."
"I wish I could ask Yoda."
She didn't miss his quick expression of disgust and tried to hide her smile behind a minor adjustment to the knot he was creating in her hair. Han had made no secret of his disdain for the master, and she could hardly fault him for it; their time on Dagobah had been fraught and boring for him, never mind the insults hurled his way at every opportunity.
"And it doesn't feel like him?" he asked.
Not Yoda. Him. The only entity who didn't get a name, only the pronoun. The walking monstrosity that haunted her nightmares. The stalking shadow. The provocateur of her power.
"The first time he came for us, I felt nothing until he was in the system," she answered him, trying to regulate her breathing. In and out, she thought. In and out. "And the second time, I didn't know until he let me know."
"So if it's him…?"
"Then he's far away, or I'm stronger, or it has nothing to do with him and I'm overthinking again."
Han laughed. "Nothing new there."
She let him have that one, true as it was. She knew it drove him crazy. But her brain was hypervigilant, and it always had been. Some kind of training or maybe a natural consequence of her childhood in the palace: either way, she was cursed with a constant stream of thoughts and worries and puzzles to solve.
Part of what had been so wonderful about the past weeks had been her utter lack of responsibility. There was no way for her to engineer a working hyperdrive for the Falcon; it was ludicriously out of her depth. She couldn't set plans or execute orders; they were without safe comms. It had been, quite simply, days upon days of quiet with Han, blessedly combat- and worry-free. No politics. No war. Just them and Chewie and Threepio, trying to stay sane.
"You say you know this Lando person."
His hand fell to her shoulder, and he squeezed her arm reassuringly. "Yeah."
She looked at his profile, at his unruly hair, the long, crooked slope of his nose, the fullness of his lips, and then narrowed her eyes, suspicious. "And?"
"And what?"
"What can you tell me about him?"
Sighing, he looked up to the hull and seemed to organize his thoughts, a hilarious attempt to curate what was probably the disreputable circumstances of their friendship. "He's a card-player. Gambler. Scoundrel. You'd like him."
"Mmm," she skeptically agreed. "And he just so happens to own a mining colony?"
"Probably conned someone out of it. He was at Nar Shaddaa with me and Salla for the battle. We go way back."
Interesting. Another holder of that sacred badge.
"Can you trust him?"
"No. But he has no love for the Empire, I can tell you that."
Yet another associate of the underworld that had tried to stay out of the Emperor's clutches without pledging allegiance. She wondered if…
"I know that look," Han said. "He's not gonna join, I promise you. He's not the joining type."
"Neither were you."
He arched an eyebrow at her. "I don't think you can wrangle him the way you wrangled me, Sweetheart."
Wrangled. As if she had stuncuffed him to the Alliance. "If he has no love for the Empire…"
"Lando's no idealist. His feet are planted in credits and nothing else."
She tried to hide her mirth from him, the way he said planted in credits, as if he himself had not tried to convince her of his mercenary attitude early on in their acquaintance. It was probably a losing battle. He knew what she was going to say before she even had a chance to form the words.
"Different story than mine. Different reason to need the credits. Lando's good people, just a little more brutal in getting ahead."
"Brutal?"
He tilted his head side-to-side, as if weighing his next words. "Smarter, maybe. Not in everything, mind you, I'm quicker on the draw, better in the pilot's seat."
"Of course."
"But with credits and investments, though? Yeah. He's got an eye for it."
Wondering how much more brutal Lando could be than trying to abandon a fledgling cause at their most desperate hour, Leia decided to let the matter drop. Nothing good could come from forcing the information from Han, and they still had two days to prepare for Bespin.
She looks to her right and there is Han: intent and murderous in the shadow of the boarding ramp, eyes cut straight ahead with a viciousness that unsettles her.
"Last chance, Flyboy," she murmurs as she turns back to the unopened doors at the end of the landing platform. It is quiet and empty here, not a soul in sight.
"No."
He takes her hand and squeezes and she is grateful and mournful all at once. His last chance to save himself, and he casually throws it away.
But she had not expected him to take the offer, anyway.
We are fine right here, thank you, Chewie growls from her left.
She doesn't look at them, her stalwart companions, but she knows how they would appear to any outsider. Intimindating. Confident. A line of fury and protectiveness, passion and resolution.
Taking a deep breath, she watches as the hydrolift doors open for a well-dressed man and five others in crisp uniforms. The man opens his hands wide and Leia steels herself for battle.
To get her mind off the mysterious Lando, the crew of the Falcon taught her the Transkian version of sabaac, which inevitably led to a heated argument.
"But there's no Queen in your hand. You've already put it into the randomizer twice," she accused.
Han eyed said hand, which of course didn't have the high-born Queen of Air and Darkness anywhere near it. "Says who?"
"Says me," she responded. "It is a statistical improbability that you have the Queen, based on the past three hands."
You cannot count cards, Little Princess, Chewie said.
"Surely that's not counting cards," she protested. "Card-counting is very difficult, from what you've both implied."
Han felt stubbornly hellbent on this point, and knew that they were heading into serious argument territory. "Haven't implied nothing."
We've been very explicit about it.
"Stop counting the damn cards, Leia," Han finished.
Opening her hands wide, she stared at them in shock, and it was enough to almost make him grin. Almost. Except for the part where she was cheating.
"It's a logical assumption to make, considering," she insisted. "Card-counting is mathematical. Not intuitive."
For some beings it is very intuitive, Chewie warbled, pressing the tiny remote randomizer they had picked up sometime during their trips to The Distributary. The Fallisonians, for one.
And the Jedi, Han thought but didn't say. Instead he brightened, struck by a memory. "What's his face. At The Ringer."
The Ranger, on Corsynth, Chewie corrected, turning to Leia with a look of apology. Cub had him executed.
"No, wait. That's not how it happened."
Leia, for her part, didn't look at all as surprised as she probably should have. Han realized that either she trusted him enough to know there was more to the tale than Chewie was telling, or the crime somehow ranked lower than something else she knew of his history. She fit her chin in her palm and waited for his explanation.
"He was a slaver. Complete piece of shit. And I turned him in to the Hutts for stealing spice from them, not for counting cards."
That was the first time he had seen the rancor in action. He remembered with a pang the sound of the slaver's bones cracking against the ugly beast's jaws, the cheers and jeers from the crowd, his sense of disgust and faint nausea at the brutality of what his actions had wrought.
Even a slaver didn't deserve that kind of death. Death, yes. Torture, no.
Chewie growled. I am certain Koppe was comforted in the end to know you turned him in for the right reasons.
"Fuck off."
"Did the Hutts do that often?"
The semi-playful atmosphere soured with Leia's words, and Han turned to her, sitting small in the middle of the booth, surrounded by Chewie's bulk and his own. "Do what?"
"Execute their own?"
Han opened his mouth to remind her of a very similar incident not even a year past, but she was too quick.
"No, I know what we saw in the spice den on Nar Shaddaa," she answered herself. "And I read the Senate hearings on Jabba's crime syndicate a few years ago. But cold-blooded execution… that's a different thing entirely."
Was it? Han didn't think so. "The Emperor executes people."
"Of course," she said, but he couldn't stop himself from cutting her off. He so rarely won an argument against her, and he knew he would win this one.
"He was gonna execute you."
Chewie huffed a laugh for whatever reason, and Han's lips turned up on the sides as Leia opened her hands in defeat.
"Fine," she said. "But still. Capital punishment for theft of spice?"
"Because treason is a better reason?"
"No, of course not…"
Trailing off, Leia's voice sounded like it had been stolen from her, one word at a time. Han didn't think anything of it until she had been silent for nearly thirty seconds. With a jerk, he looked at her and his chest clenched into sheer, visceral panic.
"Leia?"
Wide, vacant eyes. Open, trembling lips. Too-shallow breaths and a paleness to skin that should be a blushing, rosy pink.
He called her name again, grasped her shoulder and shook her. He snapped his fingers in front of her eyes. Called for her over and over again, louder each time.
What is happening? Chewie roared, his own fear evident in his tone.
Han didn't answer him. He cupped Leia's jaw in his hands, turned her toward him, and hunched down to be at eye level with her, centims away. The vacancy in her eyes terrified him.
This was Jedi shit. This was the kind of thing he couldn't understand, couldn't protect her from. This was out of his control, and he hated that, hated how vulnerable he was to the whims of a Force he didn't understand.
"Come back," he whispered.
This is like Home One, Chewie said. When Little Jedi came to me on the ramp.
Han nodded but didn't take his eyes from Leia's face.
Chewie contined. They came out of it eventually, Cub. All will be well.
But that wasn't enough for him at the moment. "Come back," he repeated a little louder, unable to reply to his first mate, unable to do much more than make demands and try to manage his own panic.
He knew it would swallow him whole if he let it. It had happened before, and would happen again, and helplessness seemed to be its source. A small part of his brain flickered on, like a candle in a dark room, and he was taking mindful, deep breaths against the tidal wave. He focused on her face, her trembling eyelashes, the shallow inhales she took, the microcosm of the universe that she was: stars and black holes and life and death.
In for five, out for eight. Try not to exist. Pull yourself out of the cycle of anxiety and overreaction.
Glimpses of success, but his hands shook on her face. He was caught between two realities, and he fought the temptation to give in to either of them.
In for five, out for eight.
She blinked and there she was again, life and warmth in her eyes. Sagging in relief, Han's head bowing for a split second before he came right back to her. Taking stock. Inspecting. Holding her face so tightly in his hands that he dropped them to her shoulders because he feared he was hurting her.
"What was it?" he croaked.
He knew what it had been, he hadn't needed to ask. This was how she had looked on Home One before Vader's attack. This was Force-visions and paralyzing fear. He knew this, but he needed her voice. He needed the low, strong tones of confidence to help him back away from the edge. He acknowledged that he had done some of the work himself, kept himself sane during what would have usually dropped him into insensibility, but what he really needed right now was assurance that she was okay.
She sighed, a great expulsion of breath, and then the word he hadn't been coherant enough to say out loud, an unsteady, broken thing.
"Vader is on Bespin."
"Why, you slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler," the man Leia assumes is Lando Calrissian says. "You've got a lot of nerve coming here, after what you pulled."
He is debonair, in his walk, in his clothes. Fashionable and respectable, and Leia knows the man is supposed to represent a shiny entreaty to the crew of the Falcon. He is the bait. She can only guess her shielding has worked, that Vader has not picked up on her terror and has instead planned an elaborate trap to bring them further into Cloud City.
They don't answer. They don't move. They let the man come closer with his entourage.
He drops the act. "How you doing, you old pirate?"
But they have been warned, they can see the marks of pressure on this man. The weariness in his eyes, the tightness around his mouth. A man who is not who he seems.
Leia gets the distinct impression that Lando Calrissian is not willingly leading them to slaughter.
But Han's voice is deep and low, unapologetically threatening. "Tell them to go."
Fury is evident in his voice. Leia also hears helplessess. She doesn't have the time to acknowledge it.
Lando's eyes tick from Han to Chewie and then to Leia, and he seems to get the gist of the situation. His ploy spectacularly foiled, he turns and sends the welcome party away. They all watch the men depart, and then Lando turns to them once again.
"I had no choice. They arrived right before you did."
"My friend," Han spits, and Leia knows him too well to let him dive down the path to his own rage.
"How many of them are here?" she asks.
"Three squads of stormtroopers and Vader. They have the whole city on lockdown."
Chewbacca rumbles wordlessly beside her, and Leia spreads her senses wide, trying in vain to pierce the veil of Vader's hidden presence. But Yoda had never taught her how to do that, only to reinforce her own shields, and she returns to the conversation at hand with a helpless kind of foreboding.
"What do they want?"
Han's voice is bitterly cold, and that is somehow worse than the explosive anger she had expected. It reminds her of his lies after Ord Mantell. The threat in the calm is far more dangerous that the heat of his usual reactions.
"They're after somebody named Skywalker." Lando's eye shifts speculatively toward hers. "And you, Your Highness. Han is to be given over to a bounty hunter."
She holds his eyes until he looks away, reaching for her composure with every ounce of self-possession she has.
"Then we have a plan for you, old buddy," Han says. And it's grim, and it's dark, but there it is.
A plan.
"It is the only option that makes any sort of sense," she said, struggling to make them both understand. "It's the only way any of us survives the next twenty-four hours."
Han and Chewie stared at her with twin expressions of stalwart confidence. "There is no fucking way we would just drop you off and leave."
Absolutely not, Chewie agreed.
She fiercely shook her head, her braid swinging side to side in response. "He wants me. Not you. You could get to Luke, tell him what's happened. Call the Fleet."
Chewie pounced first. With which hyperdrive?
"And what comm array?" Han asked. "We're sitting ckuds, here, Princess, even if we wanted to abandon you like that. Fuck."
But she was adamant. "There is an opportunity at least for a distraction. A chance. Since when do you shy away from a challenge?"
"... insane to think I would deliver you right into his hands ..." Han muttered, more to himself than to her.
We do not abandon our own, Little Princess.
"He is going to kill me," Leia said loudly, interrupting them, pleading for understanding. They quietened. "I am going to die, one way or the other."
She swallowed, but finished with her coup de grace.
"But he doesn't have to kill you, too. And you can protect Luke."
The silence in the hold threatened to overwhelm her. This was a desperate attempt to make them understand, to make them see the only silver lining to a situation that had just become completely untenable. Vader was on Bespin. She would be executed, not only as a traitor to the Empire but as a Force-sensitive initiate. Probably quite publicly, too.
But Han and Chewie had a chance.
"Convince Lando to help you, if you think he will," she urged. "Get supplies. Send a distress signal. Whatever you need to do, but you'll need to do it without me."
She looked Han dead in the eye, trying to import her own confidence. She didn't expect it to be anything but a knock-down, drag-out fight. Surely they could see the writing on the wall. Surely they understood how she tipped the scales considerably. If Vader focused on capturing her, perhaps it would lead away from the Falcon, and to their escape.
But Han was not upset. He wasn't yelling or cursing or wiping a hand over his face. His eyes were suddenly very calm, very still, on hers. And he waited until he was sure she was paying attention, until she couldn't look away and misunderstand what he was saying.
"No," he said.
"But…"
"I can't do that," he said, and his voice was certain, unselfconscious. "And you won't ask that of me again."
Swallowing, she closed her eyes, hearing the death knell in the steady sureness of his tone.
"I led him to us," she murmured. "He's been one step ahead of us this entire time, and I was so wrapped up in everything else that I didn't…"
She trailed off, knowing there was nothing else to say. She looked up at them, feeling the tears burn at the edges of her eyes.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered.
Han, predictably, shrugged it off. "Don't be."
We agree on this, Chewie rumbled. Protecting you is a good death.
"And, hey, you never know," Han said, trying to lighten the mood. "Maybe we'll scrape through. We've certainly seen worse."
That sentiment maintained itself through the rest of the day-cycle and into the night. They would arrive on Bespin tomorrow morning, and the air inside the Falcon was heavy. They had a rickity plan held together with a thin veneer of hope, one Han thoroughly endorsed but was pretty certain would ultimately fail. He had made a meal of the leftover rations, done yet another inventory of hyperdrive parts, and then found Leia and led her to the captain's quarters.
She was quiet as he pulled her to sit beside him on the bunk. Dark eyes looked at him with pain and sadness, stark in a face that screamed protracted horror. And he hated that look, the heartbreak so readily available on her lovely features that he almost felt like it was contagious.
"Stop looking at me like that," he said with a half-smile. "It's like I'm already dead."
She answered, and it was a slice across his throat. "You should have left me on Hoth."
He paused, unsure how to respond. On its face, it was a selfish thing to say; she knew he wouldn't have done that, no matter his lies that day. Her life was far more important to him than his own, and she knew it. He would have moved heaven and earth to get her off that damn ice planet, even if it had killed him, and he would have done it happily without a second thought. To say that he made the wrong choice was to say that his fundamental truth was not real.
But that wasn't what she meant, because he knew her better than she knew herself.
"This is Vader's fault, not yours," he answered.
"If I wasn't on board, you wouldn't be in this situation."
"If you weren't on board, I would be dead on Tatooine by now, simple as that," he said. "Why do you give all the credit to everyone else and take all their blame on yourself? That is a stupid fucking way to live your life, Leia."
"It's worked for me so far," she grumbled.
"Not that well, from what I can see."
Wiping a hand over her coronet of braids, she sighed and looked up at him in frustration. "You can just make jokes at at time like this?"
A time like what? When they could all die tomorrow, existence over just as fast as it had begun? And she expected him to mope around all night, wasting time and misplacing blame, like it would solve any of their problems? He didn't see the sense in that at all.
If he was gonna die tomorrow, then he was going to live tonight.
"Hate to break it to you, Sweetheart, but this isn't the first time I've been pretty sure I'm about to die. And if it happens tomorrow, then at least I know it'll be for a good reason."
She was crying, staring right at him, and it occurred to him that Leia probably wasn't afraid to die, either. What he saw there was regret, not fear. And he reprised his pose from earlier, palms on the curve of her jaw, thumbs bisecting the paleness of her cheeks.
This was easy. He'd never had a problem with this part of any of their plans. For him, the hardest part had always been in allowing her to love him like that, so completely that she would risk everything for him. And he had a small measure of peace in that he had finally, at the end, started understanding that she got a say in how she got to love him. If she saw something in him worth dying for, well, then there must be something there. Leia was unimpeachably correct when it came to right and wrong.
"A good reason," she repeated.
"You? Of course."
Swallowing, she slowly raised her head. He tried a small smile, but she didn't return it. She seemed to be thinking through something, and he let her take her time. No sense in rushing it. He'd said his piece. Let her figure out her own shit in her own time.
And then, finally, she lifted her hand and tapped his temple twice. "You are extraordinary," she murmured, and it was with wonder that she moved one of his hands to her lips and kissed his fingers.
What followed was a single moment in time that was a revolution of their own, a refutation of what was to come. A giant fuck you to the time they might not have. An embrace of what it meant to love someone so much that you would accept their choices, even if it meant their destruction.
And that was what mattered to Han, as the worst happened a day later. As the world crashed in on them, as their time ran out, as it became horribly obvious to them both that they were not meant to make it out of Cloud City alive. Out of all the times he'd defied the odds and fought the good fight, he had never had so much to lose and known so viscerally that he'd already lost it.
But that was okay. He'd had a choice, and that was enough.
Author's Note: Bespin's such a bitch, and so was March. So sorry for the lack of an update; I was too sick to write and then it was this particular chapter that needed to sit in the incubator for a bit. I'm sure you can understand. Thanks for your support!
The next chapter of Specter will be posted on Wednesday, June 1st. Hold on, my friends, we're about to get our collective hearts broken. - KR
