Leia stayed by the viewport on board the medical frigate where Luke recovered from his surgery, while Luke turned away to rest. She heard a soft tap, and then another. She turned to see Luke at the table. He was sitting with his eyes shut, lifting his fingers one at a time, pointing them straight out and then resting his fingertips on the table top. He pushed his palm toward the surface, his finger arching and then relaxing as he lifted his hand again. Something in it made her want to smile. She could feel a foolish joke hiding behind the edge of her lips.
"A spider doing push-ups?" She asked.
When Luke opened his eyes, his face remained solemn. He held both hands up in front of him, watching his fingers curl and uncurl. "When I look at them, I can't tell one from the other. But when I shut my eyes, I'm not sure if I can feel the new one."
She came up and put an arm around him. "Hey, you going to be okay?" She couldn't undo the injury he faced. She couldn't offer him his own hand back, and fuse it to his arm like a miracle, like a prosthetic. She could only offer him a space to talk.
"I don't know. Maybe I'm imagining the whole thing. There's reflex. There's pain." His sheepish smile made her wonder if any of his tests involved hurting himself. "But I can't tell how tightly I'm hold on. Am I about to drop something? Or break it?"
"Take my hand." She reached out to him.
When he reached to her in turn, he moved with his shoulder, like he didn't believe his hand could accomplish this simple task. She kept her own hand in a flat line until he closed his fingers around hers, letting him guide how their palms met.
It was only when the tension eased out of her did she realized she'd been braced for it to hurt. As did Luke, she'd expected it to grip too tight. The knowledge that this was the first time she'd clasped his new hand, and the realization of her misgivings, made her hyper-aware of the weight and the pressure holding her hand aloft. It lacked the warmth of human skin. She could feel something hard beneath the surface making tiny adjustments. Leia took her gaze from the prosthetic in her grasp and instead met Luke's eyes, letting his hope and anxiety wash into her. She wouldn't be discomforted by the unnatural sense of holding a machine part. She wouldn't do that, not to Luke, not to anybody.
She set aside her analysis of the prosthetic. It wasn't the refinement of the mechanisms that was important right now, or how convincingly the covering imitated skin. She wouldn't allow anyone to say a mechanical part made him less human, not even herself. She would look at him, and hold him for as long as it took, until this hand was no less him than the hand he was born with, until the hand she was touching was Luke. The artificial flesh had started to pick up a bit of heat. Somehow, it didn't matter that it was her own warmth reflected back to her.
"How does it feel?" He asked.
"It feels like holding your hand."