A New Galaxy
"Why are they hailing us?"
Salla blinked and turned annoyed eyes to her companion. Dressed in the garb of a guard for Jabba the Hutt, Calrissian looked out of place in the copilot's chair of the Intruder's cockpit: dusty, dirty, and supremely uncomfortable. His spare clothes were packed in the crew cabin just behind her main hold, but he had sat himself at her side and not left since they had left a carbonite-encased Solo hovering over the Falcon's medbunk.
Focusing more on her squadron, she had left the actual unfreezing process logistics to the twins. They were better informed and she didn't want to be around until Han was in good shape again. The medic had warned them all pre-mission that Solo's eyes were probably going to have the hardest time healing from the trauma of the freezing process, and while she admired her ex, she had no desire to be near him when he would be swinging punches left and right after realizing he was blind.
Temporarily, she reminded herself.
Sobering stuff, thinking of an ace pilot going blind, even temporarily. Han Solo without his eyes—Solo, whose entire personality centered on his insufferable pride—the idea made her skin crawl.
Hell, no. Let the princess handle that.
"I don't know why they're hailing us, idiot," she said with an exaggerated patience she did not feel. "Why don't you do something useful for once and open the channel?"
He scowled but complied, and it was a few seconds of static before Leia's voice filtered through the speakers mounted on either side of the cockpit control boards. "Salla, are you two alright?"
"Depends who you ask," Salla replied. "I'm fine. Calrissian here is ready to jump out of his skin. What's the update?"
Mild sounds of too many voices speaking in a small space at once, and she rolled her eyes at the interminable chaos of the Millennium Falcon, regardless of who was at the helm. She opened her mouth to urge the princess to stop wasting her time…
And then a familiar, insufferably proud voice said into the mic, "Hey Sal. Fuck you, Lando."
Laughing with delight, Salla clapped the poor man on the shoulder and said, "Straight out of carbonite and flinging insults, what do you know?"
But inside a tremendous relief tore through her stomach like a podracer through the last curve of the Boonta Eve Classic.
"You're going to have to forgive him someday," Leia told him as she slid a half-full cup of caf in his direction and sat down beside him in the booth. "We would never have gotten you back without him."
"He was incredibly brave," Luke added to Han's left.
Cub has another week before he needs to grant forgiveness.
Han sipped the caf—hot enough to burn his tongue, the way he liked it—and tried to figure out where exactly he stood on the matter of Lando's culpability. On one hand, he understood the extenuating circumstances in play at Cloud City. On the other hand, Lando had been instrumental in springing Vader's trap.
And on yet another hand—like a Verpine's spindly insectoid frame—Lando had helped Chewie escape Bespin and had helped with his rescue attempt, too. Would Luke and Leia have escaped without him? No one could quite tell.
"Maybe a couple more days," he mused, knowing already that he would eventually let Lando off the hook.
The caf was delicious, its taste magnified by a thousand. The hit of caffeine, though, was so strong that it felt like his heart tripped a few times in its steady gait, and the heart monitor across the way beeped in alarm.
Aaya, leaning against the nav console in the far corner, turned to look concernedly his way, her lekku twitching.
"No," he forestalled her question, knowing exactly what she would be after. He was more than ready to be done with the science experiments. If he heard the phrase ideal case study one more time, he was gonna start shooting things, and he estimated his aim was about ninety percent his usual.
Not great odds for her.
The Twi'lek sighed and closed her mouth, waving a hand around. "When you inevitably keel over from arrhythmia, I'll be sure to show you the same respect you've shown me."
"Deal," he said, ignoring Leia's squeeze of his knee in rebuke. "So. The drives aren't running. What's the plan?"
We are waiting for the rest of the squardron to join us just outside the Tatoo system, his copilot rumbled. They should arrive within the next thirty or forty hours.
"Salla is coordinating the return of twenty-six formerly enslaved people to their homewords," Leia added. "It took some time to evacuate them all from the palace. We thought it best to unfreeze you immediately while that happened and we awaited their return."
Get him out now, he remembered from those last moments inside carbonite, and hid the shudder that threatened to run down his spine. He didn't want to give Leia or Aaya any reason to restrain him in the medbunk. "I appreciate that. Then what?"
Luke smiled. "Then we all hit the Alliance rendezvous and try not to get arrested on sight."
His sluggish brain took a second to realize what the Jedi had just said. "Unsanctioned rescue mission, huh?"
Very much so, Chewie growled.
Letting that sink in, he thought through what that meant of the past six months. It didn't surprise him in the least that Chewie, Luke and Leia had gone off on their own to rescue him. He was grateful—and humbled—by their commitment and drive to save him from a mess of his own making, but it made sense to him. He would have done the same for any of them.
Lando and Salla made less sense, but it wasn't beyond him entirely. Lando was a piece of shit for what he had done at Bespin, but even Han could recognize that Vader typically left no room for argument when he wanted something done. It wasn't like Lando had had much of a choice. And Salla was just as much a friend as an executive officer. They had dealt with the awkwardness of being former lovers and had become a team all their own, trying to make a bunch of independent contractors into a squadron. Trial by fire, forged into leadership by the nature of the work they did. Leia had at one time compared it to her relationship with Carlist—ask Leia about him, later, he reminded himself—and despite the age and massive power dynamic differences between the two partnerships, it wasn't that far off the mark.
But it was the rest of the squadron that made him the most conscious of the enormity of the sacrifice all of them had made on his behalf.
"How bad is it gonna be?" he asked.
Bad enough, Chewie growled.
"Gial knows where we are," Luke protested. "Technically speaking, he sanctioned the activity."
But Leia spoke as if this was an old discussion between them. "Technically speaking, Carlist did not sanction this mission, and the Mercs are under his command. And Aaya—"
"I knew what I was doing," she interrupted.
That makes your sacrifice even more admirable, not less, Chewie countered.
Stabbing guilt reverberated through Han's gut, and he resolved again to cooperate with Aaya. It was only fair to reward someone who went against Alliance brass, after all, even if the reward meant some unpleasantness in his near future.
And as for the Mercs—
"Why didn't you sanction the mission?" he asked Leia.
He understood that it probably would have been an uphill battle for her to fight for funds for the rescue, but it wasn't as if she hadn't managed bigger ones than this. The Alliance wasn't above allocating a certain credit amount to recover valuable personnel, especially when the operatives of the rescue mission volunteered for it. Leia had done a lot of negotiating with her peers in High Command on behalf of stranded Alderaanina refugees. Her pull was significant, even if said pull was being used to rescue her boyfriend.
Trying hard not to make a face at the title he had just given himself, he waited for her answer for a few seconds, before realizing that the hold had just become very, very quiet.
Leia cleared her throat. "Because I had to resign from High Command once I disclosed our parentage."
Han watched her eyes fall to her lap and then turned to Luke for confirmation. At the young Jedi's solemn nod, he turned back to Leia.
"You told them?"
Stupid thing to say. She wouldn't have said it if she hadn't, and since she was openly referring to the Vader situation with Aaya within earshot, he had to assume it was common knowledge within the ranks by now.
Which meant it had happened soon after Bespin.
That was … horrifying. Sure, he didn't care that Luke and Leia were the children of the greatest force for evil the galaxy had ever known, but he was a special case, a close friend for years, a part of their family unit for all intents and purposes. He personally knew them, understood who they were after so many life-and-death situations that it was a wonder all of them had survived their friendship. His acceptance of their bloodline was nonnegotiable, a foregone conclusion.
But the Alliance was full of people who had already subscribed to the xenophobia of Imperial propaganda against the Jedi. He had seen it himself, in his own flight. And Dodders already had shown himself to be a real asshole after the whole brigg situation before Hoth.
Why should it surprise him that the HC had forced her out? Now that he thought about it, there was probably no way for her to remain on the body at all, regardless of her own power and influence.
"I told them," she confirmed. "Mon was right, we had to do it sooner rather than later."
Luke—probably sensing the downturn in his sister's auras or colors or whatever—chimed in. "It was bad at first, but it's gotten better."
Zend has had much to do with that, Chewie added. She is a formidable executive officer and has worked hard to create an atmospher of collaboration within the ranks.
"You mean she bullied everyone into shape," Han said.
"More or less," Luke said with a smile.
Damn right, he thought. Count on Sal to do the heavy lifting for him when he couldn't do it himself. He owed her a whole lot of good whiskey when they found themselves face-to-face again.
"So you two report to Ackbar, now," Han said after a moment of reflection. "Which division?"
Leia's smile reappeared, and he was glad for it. "None."
"We're more like our own thing," Luke added. "A semi-independent strike force."
"And you?" he asked of his first mate.
Chewie shrugged. On loan from the Old General to Giad Ackbar. Officially, we are still on the roster for the Mercs.
"And you," Han addressed Aaya on the other side of the hold. "You just up and left Medical to rescue me?"
The Twi'lek shifted uncomfortably, but seemed rather proud to have been recognized for her effort. "Yes, sir."
Swallowing, he looked around the conspiracy of people in his hold, recovering from his dangerous rescue. Face by face, he noted them, and felt an enormous sense of gratitude for all of their sacrifices. He didn't really believe he was worth all this trouble, but if they did … well.
That was sure something.
"Thanks," he said. "Thanks for coming after me."
He nodded off as they all talked about the rescue, debriefing each other on the finer points of their victories. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, listening with satisfaction as Leia recounted Boba Fett's end and slapping Luke's back when the kid mentioned how very dead Jabba the Hutt now was, but the call of uninterrupted rest was irresistible, his body fighting an uphill battle toward homeostasis.
"Come on," Leia said against his ear, and led him back to their bunk with a hand that brokered no argument.
When he next cracked open his eyes, he was again coccooned in the blue lighting of the night-cycle lights and he was naked, though he couldn't remember when that had happened. He took a deep breath bereft of the burning of the wounds on his chest and realized the bacta had done its job. The heart monitor still tugged a bit, but otherwise, he felt pretty damn good.
Considering.
Enjoying the feeling of simple, unrestrained breathing for the first time in so long, he allowed his mind to wander. Thinking of sacrifice. Thinking of home. Thinking of how different this debt felt to the one that had been his downfall. The debt he owed to his rescuers was without expectation of repayment, and that was a kind of grace he had never known.
Part of him, the kid from the streets of Coronet City, wanted to lash out at such a huge overbalance. It was dangerous to be so connected to so many people. If any of them wanted to lord the action over him, he would be unable to dispute it. The sheer power of that realization startled him, the vulnerability inherent to the debt he owed them.
But it was the larger scope of his person that accepted the sacrifices made on his behalf for what they were: the inevitable result of planting roots in a fertile field with good people by his side.
No one was supposed to be alone. Not forever.
With that thought, and the related suspicion that she wouldn't be far, he rolled onto his back and turned his head to look at the woman who had been the harbinger of his revelation.
Cross-legged, closed eyes, steady breathing. Her lips were slightly pursed and her eyelashes fluttered.
He swallowed, watched her for minutes or hours, as she recovered from what he now knew had been months and months of pain.
The next time he awoke, she was lying so close to him that all he would have had to do is crane his neck a little to kiss her. But she was asleep, and he was happy to see it. Out of the two of them, he suspected maybe she was the one who needed rest the most.
Finally, after yet another sleep of unknown length, he opened his eyes into the same blue lighting and saw a pair of shrewd brown eyes staring at him. She reached her hand out toward him and brushed her fingers down his unshaven jaw, over his lips, across the heart monitor haphazardly taped to his chest.
"I love you," she whispered.
It was the first time either of them had said it since his rescue, between revelations and camaraderie and telling Lando to fuck off and teasing Aaya for trying to make sure he survived his unfreezing. And all of those things were important, and all of those things had needed to happen, and all those people deserved his time and attention because the debt he owed all of them loomed large.
But suddenly he realized with anger and shame that he had neglected the person to whom he owed the most in the entire galaxy.
"You have no idea …" he said, and it didn't make sense to her, but it made sense to him. She couldn't possibly know how much he loved her, how thankful he was for her love in turn, how unbelievable he found it that she had, singlehandedly, kept him connected to the world of the living when he should have been a lost cause long ago.
He had been a lost cause, before her.
Swallowing, she closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her lips had turned up on one side, a facsimile of his own crooked grin.
"You think you know everything," she answered him with an amused dryness that he found particularly alluring.
He frowned. "I know enough to know you can't know what I was about to say."
"You didn't even finish your thought."
"I was building up to it."
"Was it even Basic?" she teased. "Do I need to go get—?"
He kissed her. Hard.
In the pantheon of ways he had kissed her, or dreamt of kissing her when he had been away on those stupid trips to Nar Shaddaa, he had never been able to adequately show her the depth of his love for her. How she wrecked him. How the smallest action, the most innocent expression, could rip his heart to shreds at the weirdest times. How sometimes he thought that she had been constructed to confound and confuse him for the rest of time as some kind of galactic prank.
But, damn it, he certainly tried. He pulled her bottom lip between his and stole her words from her with all the grace of her hand when she touched him in the white room. Running his fingers up her spine, he pulled her closer, feeling her soft skin collide with his, as she opened her mouth and invited him to sweep his tongue over hers.
Her lips withdrew and then came back to his, and he changed his angle, pressing into her more fully, breaking away only to run the tip of his nose against hers, before kissing her again like the lovesick fool he was. A faint beeping could be heard in the next room as his heartrate picked up, and he pushed away to glare down at the heart monitor.
"Can you—?" he began, but she was already brushing her index finger against the metal on his chest and pulling it from his skin with a faint buzzing.
"Is she gonna scream at us for that?" he wondered, as Leia threw the offending monitor into the crate at his bedside that served as a table.
"She's asleep," she said and turned back to him with such heat in her eyes that it startled him for the briefest of seconds.
He didn't think to wonder how she knew that.
Like a drowning man, he lunged for her as if she were dry land, pulling her small body beneath his with all the subtlety the moment didn't require and kissing her senseless. He didn't remember missing her the past six months, but he damn well remembered the terror of the last time they had been like this, and he wanted it gone. He wanted to erase the desperation of her lips. He wanted to make sure she really did understand how fully he loved her, how much more she deserved than he could ever offer her but how he would try, he would try every fucking day, to live up to the man she said he was.
He left the fullness of her lips and kissed the corner of her mouth, her cheek, until he could lick the curl of her ear and whisper, "You are everything to me."
She stilled, her breath caressing his cheek.
He congratulated himself on rendering her mute—her, the woman who always had something to say—and then softly pulled the lobe of her ear between his teeth. She gasped, and immediately slid her arm out from under her and raked her nails over the edge of his hairline and down his neck.
"You had to one-up me," she murmured. "You couldn't help it."
Ah, but he was busy at her throat, pressing open-mouthed kisses along pulse points like it was his goddamned job, and he couldn't be bothered to answer her in words.
She exhaled a harsh breath, then pressed against his shoulders to get him to stop. He complied, a little annoyed at the sudden interruption, but relented when he took in the incredible image she presented. Breathless, rosy pink, with hair that easily cascaded from its loose braid and bloomed like a flower on the pillow beneath her, she was the picture of careless sensuality.
His heart squeezed in his chest and he was thankful the monitor was currently residing in the crate.
"Unless we want a very traumatized twin brother on our hands … "
She trailed off as he sat back on his heels, confused and turned on, and watched her close her eyes in concentration. After a good ten seconds of deep, even breathing, she suddenly looked at him with a grin he could only call sinful.
"Alright," she said. "Come here."
But he was still clueless about the problem, much less the solution, so he said, "What the hell was that?"
"He's asleep, too, don't worry," she said, sitting up to match his position. "I just had to make sure."
"Make sure of what, Leia?"
She grimaced, wrinkled her nose at his tone. "We … can talk to each other now. Silently."
He froze, unsure if this was a joke or not.
"It really hasn't been an issue until now. I just had to make sure the channel was closed so he didn't … hear."
"Hear."
"Yes, hear."
It wasn't a question. He truly wasn't capable of that much coherence.
"Hear?"
She pressed her lips together to hide what looked like a grin at his expense and, after a beat, nodded.
His brain stuttered to a full stop by the sudden whiplash conversational turn. They had been on their way to their first real reunion since Bespin, he had thought, but this was a situation that he couldn't just … leave alone.
Hear?
"Has he heard us before?"
Shaking her head, she quickly said, "It's a recent development."
"Have you heard him?"
"Oh, god. No."
He waited for her to say more, but further explanation never came and he briefly wondered if he really had lost his mind, because here she was, the woman of his dreams fully ready to fuck him to death, and he couldn't get his brain past the words talk to each other silently.
"Han."
He cleared his throat. "He hears what you're thinking?"
Obviously hoping that proximity would help matters, she draped herself over his chest like a blanket and set her chin on the back of her hand. "When I want him to, yes."
"Which is most of the time?"
He just couldn't comprehend how monumental of a shift that must have been. Luke and Leia were vastly different people, with whole worlds of interests and characteristics that separated them, even if they also had a lot in common. But to invite someone into your head on a semi-permanent basis? That was … that was …
"Recently? Yes." She seemed to clue into something that was eluding him, and her expression turned playful. "You're not … is this jealousy?"
Han couldn't help the severely disgusted expression he pulled. "Fuck. No."
"You're jealous!"
"I'm a lot of things, Worship, but I am definitely not jealous of your brother."
Peals of laughter erupted from her and he was very glad everyone was asleep because it felt loud in the hush of the quarters. Then again, he thought, why did he care if people heard Leia laughing while in bed with him? Sounded great, trusting another person enough to be unguarded and real with them.
Okay, but that was exactly the thing that was bothering him. Wasn't it?
"How bad was it, Leia? Really?"
It had to have been hard. He couldn't imagine the stress and self-loathing that had been going on in her head the past six months while she tried to keep it all together to rescue him. She had just admitted that Luke had been in her head a lot and he wasn't sure if that was only because of how badly she was reacting to the news or if it was just how things were gonna be now?
Weird, but fine. He figured it would be like consent. Make sure everyone's on board, check to make sure her twin brother wasn't listening, then go to town. Wasn't that big of a deal, in the dumpster fire that was the galaxy around them. He would do a lot more for her, if he needed to. The ceiling of sacrifices he was willing to make on her behalf was a whole lot higher than that.
But there was still a big problem here, and it had nothing to do with jealousy. He couldn't imagine independent, empowered Leia Organa had been too excited to be heard in her darkest moments, when she had experienced his torture and freezing, then had found out about her abysmal parentage. The worst things she could have never imagined, all come true.
And Luke had felt it all, too?
Han had had to fight like hell to get her to be that open with him, and she had chosen to love him a year ago—no, it was eighteen months now, get it straight, buddy.
To let Luke in like that? It had to have been horrifying.
And he knew he was right on target when she froze, lips slightly parted, eyes searing on his. He wondered if he had just ruined the moment or proven himself to be the smartest man in the galaxy to know the former Princess of Alderaan so fucking well.
Probably both.
Ah, well. Sex was better when everyone's cards were on the table, anyway.
"I told you I wasn't suicidal," she finally said, and, again, he accepted that without further discussion. If she told him that was the case, he would believe her. There was no evidence to the contrary.
His problem still lay in the fact that as his sight grew better and better, Leia looked thinner and thinner to him. That was a sign of self-neglect, and she was prone to that. He knew from experience how she didn't eat when she was focused on something she considered important.
How many times had he dragged her to a mess hall at the dead of night shift because he had discovered she hadn't eaten since the last time he had dragged her to the mess hall at the dead of night shift?
And she had been alone, mourning his loss, dealing with the implications of the Vader thing, and she had had to leave High Command: the position Bail had held until his death.
"He must have helped you," he mused out loud, seeing the recognition in her eyes, the way her eyebrows furrowed. "I don't think you would like him being that close if you didn't need him to be."
"No," she said softly. "I wouldn't."
"So. How bad was it?"
Sucking in a breath, she closed her eyes for a moment before answering him. "I was all alone and grief-stricken. Losing you was a nightmare, but the torture had been worse. I had prepared myself for you leaving me, and prepared myself for your death, but somehow it had never occurred to me to worry that my power could manifest in sharing your physical pain."
How could it? he thought with some humor, because what the fuck was their life anymore?
"And Luke understood the pain about Vader. He didn't understand the pain from my father's duplicity, not really, and he definitely didn't fully understand how I could be terrified of your reaction to the news—"
"At least Luke gives me some credit."
"—but he had enough empathy that his honest reactions to my feelings were grounding."
Sounded about right. He imagined worst case scenarios had been her very close friends in those horrible months.
"He never invalidated what I was feeling. He never tried to tell me I was overreacting when I could barely function without you. He just accepted it, like you did when I told you about Vader."
Pure trust. The concept was strange to him, too, but if they had figured it out together, and with their individual closest friends—Luke in her case, and Chewie in his—then they were on solid ground. More so than before, at least.
What a galaxy to wake up to.
Suspecting a shift back to playfulness, he slid his hand down her back, down down down, until he could tap his index finger against the highest point of her inner thigh.
"And you're sure he isn't listening in?"
She pulled a face. "I promise you, none of us want him listening in. Ugh."
Grinning, he flipped his hand, running exploratory fingertips along hidden, private skin, and gave one short nod. "Sounds good to me, princess."