Together Again, Huh?

The first thing he noticed were his fingertips. Gentle tingling, then sudden stabbing, like that of hot vibroknives. Seconds or years passed, then the knives were gone and he felt a biting, ruthless cold—so cold, space cold—until even that yielded to simple sensation.

His fingers, then his hands, wrists, the tip of his nose. His fucking eyelashes. All of him, every part, jolted through awakening with pain and sensation until …

Him. Feeling. A sentient being. A living, thinking human.

And his thoughts were disorganized, little sparks of awareness without a focal point. He couldn't grasp how he felt because he didn't know what had happened, didn't really know who he was. It was terrifying; he hadn't existed minutes before but now, suddenly, he did indeed exist.

The first duracrete Han Solo thoughts that zipped through his brain were those of self-preservation. He swung a hand wildly to test the space around him and managed to hit a big something with a metallic clang and a fierce note of pain that spread over his palm like heat over a desert.

"Han!" he heard, but it wasn't a word he recognized at first. Just something his animal brain interpreted to mean possible danger. He struggled again, found his body uncooperative, and opened his eyes to take in his situation.

Darkness.

Panic shot through him, even as his slow-as-shit synapses began to fire. Han was his name. And something had happened to his eyes; he couldn't fucking see.

Vulnerable, his animal brain said, and that was enough. Instinct took over—instinct born from subconscious memory, the kind of memory that lived in muscle fibers—and his survival skills kicked into high gear. He had four other senses to warn him of danger. Best run through those real fast, get a handle on the situation, before he got himself into deeper shit than he already was.

"Heart rate and blood pressure are dangerously elevated," a second woman said. He flinched away from the direction from where her voice had come.

Then a third onlooker: male this time. "He's there. You can feel him too, right?"

"Only through you," the first female voice—deeper, richer—replied. "I can't hear him at all."

Hear me? he thought, but couldn't say, because he didn't quite remember how to ask that out loud. Again, he reached out his hand and found something alive, latching onto it as if it were a liferaft on Kamino.

"Commander—oh," the second female voice said as he grabbed what felt like her wrist. "Please, sir, don't—"

He squeezed the wrist and bared his teeth, but still couldn't make his voice work. He opened and closed his mouth several times, willing lazy muscles into movement. Who are you? he wanted to ask. Where am I? What's going on?

Cub. Let her go.

But all he knew was that someone was with him: at least four someones, from what he could tell. Sensation first, then interpretation: that was how he had survived his entire damned life. The air was cold, smelling slightly of disinfectant. His mouth tasted like metal but he couldn't figure out if that was the coppery taste of blood or something else related to his captivity. Below him was plastex—a medbunk?—and a voice repeating his name over and over again.

"Han. Listen to me. Listen."

Feminine, but that didn't mean anything. They were just as capable of murder as anyone else, and he had pissed off so many women.

Deep, but voices could be altered.

Concerned, and that sounded genuine.

He paused.

"Han," she said again, closer now. "You're safe. Stop."

Safe.

He let go, and the wrist was gone in a heartbeat.

That voice. Her voice. There was something…

Did he trust her? She was familiar, but he couldn't … couldn't gather his wits about him. Every neuron in his brain felt foggy, disconnected, like he had short-circuited his electrical system and was now trying to flood it with power to jumpstart the whole shebang in one go.

Never worked on engines. Why did his brain think it would work on itself?

"You said he was listening," the second female voice said—the one belonging to the wrist he had grabbed—and it was pure accusation. "You told me to get him out before he was ready!"

"He was listening. He was ready," the other woman answered.

"Then there's a bigger problem, here. He's too volatile. We need to sedate him—"

"No."

That came from the first woman and the man, and Han was grateful. He blinked, trying to will his broken eyes to work. Sedation was not going to help matters at all. He needed his brain to start working, and he needed it to happen a good thirty seconds ago.

Where am I?

"If we sedate him, we can get his vitals stabilized, then bring him gently back. It will be less of a shock to his system."

The man overlapped her last word with his first. "If we sedate him, he will be worse when we bring him out of it again. Trust us on this."

And then the first voice again, the one he trusted: full of confidence. "You're safe, Han. Breathe. Relax."

But one overwhelming fact remained, and he couldn't have bitten it back if he tried. His vocal cords were rusty, unused, but finally they worked and he nearly vomited the words to her. "I can't see."

"Temporary," she said, still close, and he stopped struggling, mostly because he had the feeling that if she had wanted him dead, he would already be so.

And then, too, there was the fact that he seemed to implicitly trust that voice.

He couldn't get his brain to follow that path, and it was just as well, because he had serious questions and they were far more important than memory at the moment. Survival trumped feelings any day of the week.

"Where am I?"

"The Falcon," she answered. "On the medbunk."

Blinking, he let that sink in. The Falcon. Home. Safety. His pride-and-joy, and she had been in danger the last time he had been alive.

Hadn't she?

Why had he woken up with such an innate sense of panic?

"His color is settling down," the man said.

"Heart rate is still elevated," the scond woman warned. "I really must recommend—"

"No," they answered in tandem again.

But Han was still assessing, and only marginally understood the words they spoke.

Medbunk was bad, but the woman was right: the Falcon was safe. If he could just remember how he wound up here—and what the fuck had happened to his eyes—he could maybe piece it all together into a coherent picture.

"Who are you?" he asked.

Silence greeted his question, and he felt another wave of panic cresting on the horizon. Deafened by the sudden lack of stimuli, he turned his head. Though it didn't help him see any better, he could feel somebody next to him, hunching over the medbunk. He could smell her, just to his right: a soft, clean citrus that combated the antiseptic sterility of the medbunk.

Wake up, he urged his brain. Wake UP. Remember.

"This is what I warned you about," the second woman said. Her voice sounded far away, and he realized that she probably wouldn't come near him again unless it was to sedate him. "His memory should have returned by now."

The woman closest to him spoke, but her head was turned away from him. "You warned me he might not survive at all, Aaya."

"Just give him a moment to adjust," the man said,, and, again, Han was grateful to those two voices: the reasonable ones, the ones who were giving him time and space to get his bearings.

Rumbling, then yet another voice. Cub.

Emotions cascaded through him like a waterfall. That voice was instantly soothing. That voice spoke with wisdom and care and years of friendship. He hadn't noticed before, but that was Shyriiwook.

A bigger piece. Another bit of information. A Wookiee.

"You," Han said. "I know you."

"Heart rate has slowed," the second female voice said. "Vitals are more stable. I'm concerned about his amnesia, though."

That makes two of us, he thought.

Then the man and the first woman began to talk over one another, and he struggled to hold onto the thread of the conversation. Their voices were hushed and urgent, and they only seemed to say half of their words out loud.

"I think you need to—

"—I can't hear him, Luke. He's as quiet to me as he's always—"

"It doesn't matter. You can help him."

"This is your deal, not mine. I'm better with the shooting and the stabbing—"

I'm sorry? Han thought, his hackles raising again. What the fuck did you just say?

A low chuckle, then: "Seems like it's your deal, now, too. Help him."

Someone sighed, and suddenly a cold hand grasped his wrist. Jerking, he tried to disengage, but the hold was strong and his muscles were still half-asleep. After a few moments of limited struggle, he let his elbow sag to the table beneath him and allowed her to bring his hand to what felt like her collarbones. Soft skin greeted his fingertips, and it went a long way to calming down his instinct to move away.

"You're safe," she murmured. "Everything is fine."

How? he wanted to ask her. How is everything fine when I can't see and I can't fucking remember anything?

"Please don't fight me."

He put up a frail resistance, and they both knew it. "Fight?"

"Breathe," she urged, and squeezed the hand she had pressed to her skin. "Let me help."

With that last word, he felt himself pulled into vision for the first time since his very rude awakening. He knew instantly that this was not real. The image was wavy and blurry and darkness creeped along the edges like a very old holo, but he was so relieved to see anything at all that he relaxed into whatever spice delusion she had triggered in him.

A white bedroom. Windows open, the sound of crashing waves against rock, a slight warm breeze filtering through. Sea-salt on his tongue. A big white bed with rumpled, expensive-looking sheets.

And two people lying amongst it all. A salt-and-pepper-haired man and a small brunette woman faced each other: eyes open, smiles soft. The man brought one hand to the woman's face, running a finger down her cheek and to her lips. She said something—he couldn't hear the words—and the man grinned as she pulled him to her and kissed him softly around their smiles.

It took him a moment to recognize himself, and another moment to realize that this scene was one he remembered. This was familiar, this had all the ambience from not just the torture at Bespin—Bespin, fuck, that's right—and then his captivity in …

Carbonite. Yes. He had been frozen in carbonite.

"Focus, Han," he heard.

The smell of salt. The crashing of the waves.

He had been here, asleep, for a long, long time.

"You stayed here for me," she said. "I asked you to stay, and you did."

He didn't remember that. He remembered the room, but he didn't remember her here. There had been a voice …

Like the picture had suddenly liquified, everything fell away and the room morphed into a dark chamber, lit with blue and red lights. A platform under his feet. A circle of people staring at him with different degrees of animosity and brute amusement on their faces. The smell of chemical processing wafted through the air, and his chest burned where he had been tortured by a sadist.

Bespin. The word rose from his memory again. This is where I died.

He recognized it, now: the last, fleeting moments of his short, awful life. His bad decisions had led him here, to an unsatisfying ending, and there was unfinished business, but what did he care? He was dead. He didn't believe in an afterlife, or gods, or any celestial purpose to his life.

So where was he now, then? If not dead and not in some afterlife, then where?

It was worth it, he heard.

The same brunette woman as in the seaside room, but so much younger: shackled and tiny. The words came from her lips like a royal decree. He looked at her—really looked at her, not just a glance, but a whole, unabashed moment in time—and saw her history written on her face like it was a dossier in Aurabesh. He saw her pain, and her conviction, and her power. He saw her unmitigated strength, beautiful vulnerability, and the way she was going to survive this, because she … had to. There was no other option.

He saw mistakes, his and hers.

And he loved her. He could feel it in his bones. He loved her so much that he could barely take the injustice of being ripped away from her. He loved her so much that his ribs hurt to see her in such pain, and he loved her so much that he understood that nothing he said would ever make this any easier for her.

He was about to die.

Better me than you, he thought, and part of him marveled at the ferocity in that statement. But it was true. He would suffer this fate over and over again to spare her, to give her a chance to make it out of there alive.

What had she just said? That loving him had been worth the pain of losing him?

It always was, he said, because he had once claimed it hadn't been, and she was the one who would carry this reassurance with her after he was dead. That at no point had he truly thought her love wasn't worth the galaxy itself. That his words had been a terrible lie—one coming from stupid self-delusion—and that this thing with her was real enough to commit to, real enough to die for.

I would die for you in a heartbeat, without a second thought.

His words on the Falcon, just before he had completely ripped her apart.

And he had. He'd willingly gone to his death for her. And then, when she'd asked him to stay … he had done that for her, too.

Stay here, she had begged. Stay here.

The room, the man and woman on the bed, the two people speaking in low tones to each other over a platform of heartache … that was him and—

"Leia," he said out loud, like a guttural cry, like her name had been lodged somewhere in his chest and he was coughing it up.

And the connections came at him too fast, even as the carbonite platform faded into darkness and he came back to himself with all the speed of the Falcon at peak performance.

Leia. Chewie. The Falcon.

"I'm here," she said next to him, and it was the most perfect sound in the world, relief flooding the sharp command. "I'm right here."

Thank the ancestors, a Wookiee voice breathed, and a similarly ebulient exhale sounded from the man on the far side of the cabin.

Leia. He thought she might be crying, by the sound of it, and so he swept his thumb under her eye, navigating by feel alone.

"You're okay?" he asked, desperate to see her: frustrated that he couldn't. "Vader. We were caught on Bespin. He was gonna kill you—"

"I'm okay," she whispered, and he felt her hands on either side of his face, holding him together. "We survived. We're all okay."

"How—?"

But she didn't let him finish the question. Lips pressed to his, and he was overstimulated and desperate for answers, but kissing Leia was never something to take for granted, because the last time …

The last time he had kissed her, he had been about to die.

The salt of her tears hit his tongue, and he pulled away, knowing that this wasn't the time or place to revel in his near-constant need to hold onto her so tightly that he might suffocate her.

"Chewie?" he whispered against her lips.

I am here, Cub, the Wookiee rumbled.

His relief was shortlived. Bespin. Vader. A sprung trap, and they had been the bait for—

"Luke?"

"Me, too," the male voice he had heard said, and that was somehow Luke Skywalker, who—last Han had known—had been about to be captured by evil incarnate. "We're all okay, Han."

"Fuck," he whispered, sagging into the medbunk.

It was more than just a body that was unused to being alive. Beneath the weight of realizing how unbelievable it was that the most important people in his life had somehow, miraculously, survived the catastrophe at Bespin, there was a deep uncertainty about what exactly had happened. It had been their worst moment; no way out and Luke hurrying into a trap. Vader had been there, had tortured him, had forced Leia to observe said torture, and no one could have managed to escape that. It was an elegant, terrible strategy, and it had worked spectacularly.

Hadn't it?

"Commander Solo, how do you feel?"

He jerked in surprise. He had forgotten about that other female voice, the one who had threatened to sedate him. "Fine," he lied. "Who are you?"

"My name is Aaya. I'm a medic with the Alliance. Please, might I take some blood samples?"

A medic? He had trouble conceptualizing how in blazes a sentient medic had wound up on his ship, when he knew—he knew—none were allowed onboard without his express permission.

"No," he bit out, and tried to sit up. "Go away."

But his limbs weren't supporting his weight quite yet, so it took Chewie's muscle to prop him up against the bulkhead. Once he was upright, he scowled and pressed a hand to his stomach, feeling the deep burns of the scan grid blister against the grainy fabric of his shirt. He was tempted to ask them to take it off, but he hadn't heard the medic leave the cabin yet, and he knew she wouldn't leave them alone if he brought up the fact that his chest was an oozing mess of burns.

"You need to relax," Leia said from his left shoulder, and he reached out a hand to touch her, because just about any space away from her was too much for him.

Stay here, she had said. He knew she had told him to stay, and he had stayed, for her, in the room with the crashing waves and salty air.

When had that happened? One moment, he had been staring at Leia as the platform had descended and then, the next, he was here.

There had been no such conversation.

"I need to know what happened," he answered.

Jittery and wide awake, he didn't feel particularly keen to lie down and rest anytime soon. His body was still singing from the effects of the sheer amount of adrenaline currently coursing through his system, and he felt wildly watched, like someone was about to jump out and try to capture him.

Again.

"I'll tell you whatever you want to know," she said. "Just please, take it easy."

"Where's Vader?" he asked, because that was his biggest concern.

The bastard had tortured him. He remembered the scan grid. He remembered the pain and the infinity of waiting between sessions. He remembered not being asked any questions and feeling like his courage—stupidity?—in running around with Jedi had finally caught up to him.

Who do you think you are to defy Darth Vader?

Leia and Chewie seemed to hesitate to answer the question, but Luke was less concerned. "Far away from here," he said. "You're in no danger. I promise."

"Yeah, I don't believe that for a second," he muttered.

We're just outside the Tatoo system, Chewie added. We are not in Imperial space.

"Fett?"

Leia's soft fingers against his burns made him flinch, but he allowed the contact because his fingers were just as hungry on her skin as hers were on his.

"Dead," she said, and it took him several seconds to comprehend what her answer had been.

"Dead?" he repeated. "Who …?"

He knew. He knew who would get her revenge on the soulless bastard, and he turned, reached blindly for her, and kissed the side of her head in gratitude without anyone having to answer his question.

"These burns," Leia murmured, returning to brush her fingers under his shirt. "They haven't healed at all. They're barely a day old. Aaya?"

"I'll go get the bacta," the medic offered, too quickly.

As they collectively listened to her retreating footsteps, Han tested out his legs, feeling the blood course through muscles that hadn't moved in … how long?

He put off asking that question. It was more than he could handle learning at the moment. As long as Leia, Chewie and Luke were okay, he would deal with his lost time whenever they deemed him stable enough to tell him. He was reeling enough as it was.

"Are you okay?" he asked Leia quietly, as if they didn't have her brother and his best friend clearly staring at them.

But the question needed to be asked. The last time he had been alive to know it, she had been openly suffering. And he had bits of memory in his head, conversations they had never had, but that he remembered having with her. Conversations in which she had been crying, screaming for him, desperate to save him from an unknown fate. He would remember those pleas forever; they had been haunting and horrible and useless then, but now they burned bright in his mind.

How do I know that? he wondered. When did I experience it?

It was probably just good conjecture, he supposed. He knew Leia, knew her better than anyone, and he had been lost to her. Of course she had cried for him. Of course she had felt unmitigated pain and grief and loss. There were probably some old memories in his head, too, of what she had looked like just after Alderaan's destruction. He had been there, but also hadn't been there in the same capacity he was now.

Time was weird. Maybe he was conflating her pain then with her pain now?

She leaned into his side, running careful fingers up his spine and brushing over sensitive skin that hadn't felt her touch in … how long? It didn't matter. The answer was too long, no matter the number of days.

Leia, he thought. Leia.

"I can't believe you're here," she whispered, and, yes, she was crying.

His heart jumped into his throat, and he crushed her into his side, feeling grateful and responsible all at once. How had she done it? How had she saved him? How had she killed Fett? How had she escaped Vader?

How, how, how?

It didn't matter.

"Sweetheart," he breathed into her hair. "I'm here."

And Leia …

Leia breathed for the first time in six long, heartsick months.

Big deep breaths. They filled her lungs to capacity and loosened the persistent knot of worry that had developed somewhere under her diaphragm. A curious softness had replaced it, and she wondered if it was gratitude, or relief, or ephemeral delusion. The physicality of it humbled her; she had not realized how very heavy was the burden she had carried.

If asked, she would be able to fight Darth Vader one-handed and win. There was nothing she couldn't do, now that she had Han back.

She turned to him, noting the pallid appearance of his usually-golden skin, his sunken cheekbones and the cuts and bruises that littered his face, and thought he had never, never, looked as good to her as he did right now.

Sitting next to him at the dejarik table, thigh pressed to thigh and fingers threaded through his, she could barely keep herself together. The rush of emotion was so inescapable that she worried her poor brother might explode. She caught his eye and he smiled at her, clearly trying to assuage her worry.

I'm fine, he told her. I'm enjoying the change.

She laughed quietly to herself, giddy, unphased by Luke's gentle ribbing.

"I deserve that," she whispered out loud.

Luke sent yes, you do, at the same time that Han turned to her and said, "What?"

"Luke is making fun of me," she said to Han, squeezing his hand. "Don't worry about it. How do you feel?"

His forehead furrowed and he blinked but didn't comment on whatever was bothering him. "Better and better. Instead of a big dark blur, I see a big light blur."

"That is remarkable," Aaya said from across the hold. The Twi'lek medic leaned against the comm array, eyes trained on her patient. "Considering I haven't been able to do any of the diagnostics I was promised and that you won't let me provide even the most basic of corneal treatments."

Scowling, Han said, "I let you put bacta on the burns."

"And that is all. Princess, we talked about how important a full physical exam is at this stage of his recovery."

Leia remembered those conversations well. Aaya had impressed upon her the dire straits Han might be in when first unfrozen, based entirely on the ten medical articles the med tech had been able to find on the holonet about humans in carbonite stasis. Much of her treatment plan had been haphazard, a loosely-organized set of protocols that had seemed necessary at the time. Cardiac resuscitation, lung scans, labs to determine kidney and brain function. The Falcon's medbunk was better-supplied than it had ever been, according to Chewie, and it still hadn't felt like enough.

But now Leia knew Han was fine. Luke had watched the unfreezing process and had immediately seen the fiery golden-yellow energy that he knew from experience as Han Solo's natural vivacity. There was no question in his mind, and therefore no question in her mind, that Han could return to her.

Poor Aaya. She had risked dishonorable discharge to help her patient and it looked like she wasn't needed at all.

Remarkable.

"Give me thirty minutes to work on him," Leia assured the tech. "You'll have enough data for your case study, I promise."

"Your what?"

Leia let go of his hand to quickly squeeze his thigh in rebuke and then picked his hand back up. "She's here against orders, Han. She should be compensated somehow."

A health study might benefit others, Chewie helpfully added. Do not be selfish.

"We anticipate Vader to freeze more people?" Han asked with heat in his tone, but he lightened it up immediately afterwards with, "Sounds like a time-consuming tactic. Maybe we'll be able to kill him, yet."

Luke tried to shield her from his flare of annoyance at Han's heavy-handed comment, but was unsuccessful.

He doesn't know, she reminded her brother.

I know. Luke replied with the silent equivalent of a sigh. I don't envy you that conversation.

Swallowing, she let the channel close between them, and then refocused on the man at her side. "What do you remember?"

"Everything," he said. "I remember Bespin and the trap. I remember getting frozen. And …"

He trailed off, and even Aaya leaned in, curiosity getting the better of everyone in the hold. From what they understood, Han was the only human to have been frozen in carbonite in at least a century. Before that, there had been records of mining accidents and industrial calamities related to carbon-freezing, but never one they could find about intentionally putting someone in stasis to transport them unwillingly.

But Leia had an idea of where he was going with this line of thought. Not through the Force, but through experience and observation of this man in times of reflection. After the firefights and insane dogfighting, after his heroism and ingenuity were packed away like the rest of the Falcon's arsenal of weapons: after all of that came a reevaluation of how exactly he had made it through the newest life-or-death crisis in a long line of them.

Chewie knew to keep quiet, but Luke didn't. "And?"

Uncomfortable, Han shifted. "It sounds fucking crazy," he warned, but plowed on regardless. "I … was I by the ocean?"

All eyes turned to Leia, and Leia closed hers as the tears fell openly onto her cheeks in total surrender to her gratitude.