FANTOD

(n.) a state of extreme nervous tension; a sudden outpouring of intense emotion

It had been an eventful several hours since she'd run out of the circuitry bay. Leia had been frightened by a mynock, discovered they were inside — then fled — a giant space slug, and realized the hyperdrive was still broken, apparently beyond anything they could fix. Still, Han had, yet again, saved the day by brilliantly hiding the ship atop a Star Destroyer, allowing them to escape undetected. They'd even managed to agree upon what to do next, deciding to head to Bespin for temporary refuge and repairs.

The first thing they'd done once clear of the fleet was begin to establish a plan for how to proceed with what would be an unplanned, lengthy journey. They would finish what repairs they could along the way, taking turns on watch shifts to look out for Imperial complications while they were essentially sitting ducks, unable to jump to lightspeed and with no place to hide out in open space.

Further thwarting them, the Falcon's long-distance communications system was out, leaving them unable to contact High Command. Even if they could, with the ship's encryption fried as well, it would be too dangerous to risk interception and reveal their location. There was no alternative; their best hope was floating slowly through space toward an obscure mining colony owned and operated by Han's gambler, Empire-hating 'friend', who they maybe could trust, while totally cut off from the Rebellion or anyone else besides the beings on their immediate ship.

In other circumstances, it could have been a rather cozy interlude. Had it happened on the way to Ord Mantell, Leia might have even found it romantic. Under their current conditions what it was, in a word, was awkward. She didn't know how she was going to survive the coming weeks cooped up with Han, with literally no escape.

And they had yet to address their kiss: the fact that it had happened, why it had happened, and if it would happen again.

It was going to come up; there was no way around that. Leia didn't know what she was going to say when it did. She still hadn't worked out for herself how she wanted to handle it. She'd had only a little bit of time to think it over while brooding alone in the darkened cockpit, in a cave that wasn't a cave. After that, sheer survival once again became the priority and she'd never come to any satisfactory conclusion.

Well, that wasn't entirely true. The conclusion was obvious.

Nothing had changed since Hoth, since he'd told her he was going on the way back from Ord Mantell. If anything, the situation was worse now — Han was absolutely making good on his longstanding threat of leaving. As soon as they could reach a friendly port, get the hyperdrive fixed and get her back to the Alliance, he was out of her life. Gone.

Moreover, in the weeks between that doomed mission and the Empire storming Echo Base, Han had been frequently impossible, culminating in him insisting she was crazy about him and even announcing to Luke in his sickbed just how much she wanted him. It didn't matter that Han had been right; he had hit too close to the mark, and that was what upset her. It was still a scoundrel thing to do.

How was she to know that Han would like it when she called him that to his face, consider it a flirtatious barb — maybe it had been — and then use it to his advantage?

But that was the thing when it came to Han: it wasn't that difficult for him to play upon her weakened defenses when, now more than ever, her heart was fighting a battle with her head in the war of wanting him.

Because there were all those things, all the reasons why she shouldn't want him….yet, on the other hand, he'd shown real bravery and skill navigating the asteroid field, and his quick thinking to float away with the Star Destroyer's garbage had been ingenious. Han had many laudable qualities; the truth was, he really was a good man underneath it all.

And he'd come back for her on Hoth. That was a big one. He was still looking out for her, always looking out for her, even after everything. Without a second thought, he'd put off his departure, risked his own life to fetch her from the Command Center. She'd either be dead from a blast or a cave-in, or in the hands of the Empire right now had it not been for Han.

And that kiss….

That kiss had been everything.

Between falling into his lap earlier and then the way he'd come up behind her in the circuitry bay, surrounding her with his heat and his scent and his essence, so distinctly Han, she'd been jumpy and on edge. She couldn't handle having his arms around her — or rather, she didn't trust herself to withstand them. And that fight between 'withstand' and 'surrender' left her flustered and discombobulated.

In the weeks since Ord Mantell, Leia had discovered that it was awfully difficult to put the rancor back in its cage once it had been set free. Luckily, on Hoth, she'd largely been able to avoid Han, certainly avoid being alone with him. She knew that would not be the case while stranded together for a month on a relatively small ship. In a way, this was like their post-crash shelter on Ord Mantell all over again — only, this time, played out in space with an audience of a droid and a Wookiee.

It was all a very stressful position to be put in. As a result, she hadn't always behaved becomingly. In both earlier instances, in Han's lap in the cockpit and when he'd tried to help her in the circuitry bay, she'd lashed out at him undeservingly. It was a defense mechanism. What was she going to say? Please don't touch me; I can't trust myself if you do?

It had been a mistake then, asking him to call her by her name; she'd known that right away as her eyes fell closed in frustration — at him, herself, the whole situation. Her assertion that he made it so difficult sometimes was certainly accurate, though much more far-reaching than a few nicknames and smart remarks. Han made it difficult not to find him attractive. He made it difficult not to be drawn to him. He made it difficult not to be distracted from the Rebellion and her drive to bring down Vader and the Empire. He made it damn near impossible not to break her vow to herself never to love and lose again.

His request that she admit she sometimes thought him "all right" was a laughable understatement, soon verified when he took her injured hand in his. It had been such a superficial injury — she'd only pinched the side of her finger a little — but Han had been concerned, as he always was with her injuries, no matter how small. And at first that's all she thought it would be; Han tending to her wound as they had with each other so many times in the field.

But then he'd enjoyed her 'scoundrel' moniker for him — and with the way he looked at her, smiled at her when he told her as much, she knew she was in trouble. That, and the way he'd begun tracing her fingers with his, rubbing the inside of her palm….

Such a simple touch shouldn't have felt so good, but it did.

But it couldn't. And self-preservation had kicked in.

Yet, she was running out of options for internal resistance. All she'd had left was inventing feeble excuses for why he had to stop touching her that very instant, before she combusted. Leave it to Han to see through her, zero in on the truth, feel the tremble he could so easily induce.

You like me because I'm a scoundrel; there aren't enough scoundrels in your life.

She'd weakly tried to deny it with a slight shake of her head, but if he'd been close to the mark before, he'd annihilated it then.

And when he spoke to her in that tone…..

She suspected he knew well what it did to her and that's why he used it. Han was nothing if not precise when piloting a risky course, and he'd handled her as expertly as he ever did the Falcon, making her stomach swoop and her blood drop low before his mouth even touched hers.

They'd both known that any protest on her part, any demurring of liking "nice men", was only for show; if she'd really wanted to get away she could have — he'd seen her take down a Kintan strider unarmed –– but she hadn't moved an inch as his mouth drew inexorably closer to hers.

Leia had imagined their first kiss hundreds of ways over the years, but nothing could have prepared her for the charge of that initial touch of his mouth to hers. He'd caught her mid-sentence, but her eyes had immediately fluttered closed, concentrating on the sensations he engendered, the way he nestled her lower lip between his just so, sucking it gently with just the right amount of pressure. She'd long been warned by her aunts that kissing was a "gateway", but she'd never found that to be true herself. Until then. Until the tug of Han's lips on hers set off a heat she could feel all the way through to her groin.

The kiss had been short but sweet, ending with an audible pop. It had taken them both a second for their eyes to even open to reality, and when they did neither was in any hurry to break contact. Though they were technically no longer kissing, their noses still brushed, their lips mere breaths apart, still lingering in the sweetness of what they'd just experienced. Then Han had leaned back enough to look at her, to give her a moment to react, a chance to object.

Truth be told, he'd looked a little awed, which was exactly how she'd felt — and not even the whisper of an objection had been anywhere close to forming on her lips.

Just the opposite; she'd breathlessly invited more. Okay, Hotshot.

That was all the encouragement Han had needed, diving back to her mouth as she wound her arm about his neck. The way he'd held her, with his fingers curling into her shoulder blade, left the inside of his forearm brushing across the side of her breast, igniting currents of longing there, and she'd pushed her fingers up into that irresistibly scruffy hair of his, cradling the back of his head as if to keep his mouth pressed to hers eternally.

All right, she hadn't exactly been subtle, but neither was his tongue — and if there had ever been a gateway to sex, his tongue was certainly it. Kissing Han was like her first taste of flying, that first sip of Alderaanian wine, heady and intoxicating and easy to get lost in. Even now, she honestly couldn't say how long it would have gone on had Threepio not interrupted.

Even as Han had pulled away to stop the metallic poking at his shoulder, she'd continued to cup the back of his neck, lingered at his lower lip, desperate to draw it out just a little more. Her hand too had remained in midair where it had once been touching him, still aching to be touching him, inadvertently grazing over his chest and shoulder as he'd turned to the droid.

That woke her up.

It was a lot easier to think once contact was broken, to ask herself what the hell she was doing standing there eagerly kissing Han, still reaching out in hunger for him. Gods, you need to pull yourself together! She remembered that chastisement floating through her mind. At just the thought, her hand had flown up to her hair, patting it back into place though her braids had remained immaculately pinned; it was reflex — save face, present a pristine, regal front.

Watching Han a second longer as he listened to Threepio, her thoughts had been an endless chain of what were you thinking, Leia; what were you doing; can't we do it again?. She'd felt driven to both keep looking after him in dazed longing, and to run as fast and far as she could. While Han was yet distracted, she'd hurried to do the latter.

And for the past two hours, Leia had been doing pretty much that: running. Or in this case, more like hiding, but the principle was the same. She'd holed up in the galley under the pretext of cataloging consumables for their journey.

Almost as much as she'd needed to get away from Han, she'd needed the work. Luke and Han forever got after her for "working yourself to death", but work was distracting. Work was calming, and she'd needed something to do with her hands and body, an outlet for her agitation while she tried to sort this all out.

She had to come to some decision, find some way to get through this unscathed and with her dignity intact; after all, this was only the very first night of a long journey. But Han, unexplained kisses, and nighttime — even the artificial one of space — were a treacherous combination when she was still so unsettled, when Threepio was assigned to permanent overnight watch, and when Chewie was already asleep in his hammock. That meant her and Han, alone all night, left to their own devices, with only a small door easily palmed open between them, and three bunks readily available nearby.

So, yes, Leia was hiding in the galley, thankful that he hadn't yet found her — but certain he would come looking. And Force knew there were only so many places to hide on this ship. It was only a matter of time before her luck ran out.

"Thought I might find you here," Han's voice came from behind her.

Speak of the devil. Still, he'd surprised her, and Leia jumped while returning a carton of bantha cream to the chiller. "I've been doing an inventory of provisions."

"Don't need to. We got lucky; the Falcon was stocked with consumables when the Empire decided to attack. Me and Chewie always load up the full two months' worth whenever we're headin' off-planet."

Mention of him "heading off-planet" — that is, abandoning her — left Leia feeling prickly, and her subsequent answer was delivered in a snappish tone. "Yes, well, it never hurts to be thorough."

"Maybe." Han shrugged. "Not much we can do about it out here, though, if we did have a couple less cans of nerf steak stew than the logs say, or were off by a few ration bars."

She seized on this. "But there is something we can do: develop a system of rations. Do you think that's likely? That the logs are off? Because if they are, then we need to—"

"The logs are fine, Sweetheart; got plenty of food to make it to Bespin." He shook his head, dismissing her evasive attempt. "What I think is this ain't about the logs at all. This is about you avoidin' me."

Leia's consequent huff of air, bordering on a scoff, dismissed the very suggestion as absurd. "And why would I be doing that?" she countered, but used the excuse of putting back a jar of tok nut butter to turn away from him.

"Right." His face clouded over, some of that exasperation from the halls of Echo Base back in his voice. "That's how you're gonna play this."

If he was going to use his Hoth tone, then so was she. Ice Princess demeanor it is. As she swiveled to face him, Leia straightened her shoulders and lengthened her spine, taking on her full regal bearing once reserved for Senate debates. "I'm not 'playing' at anything."

That holier-than-thou tone chafed less than the fact that she was still trying this with him. "Please," Han mocked bitterly, "you're the master of the game."

"I don't know what you mean. I'm simply seeing to our supplies," Leia continued to insist. She turned her back to him again, moving aside a canister of dried jogan fruit to make room in the cupboard for a jar of Ansionian tea.

A silent dismissal. A congenial one, but a dismissal all the same, and it rankled Han. "So that's really how it's gonna be for the next four weeks? You're gonna act like it never happened? Act like you don't know what I'm talkin' about, just like back on Hoth?"

Leia didn't say anything to that. What could she say now? She couldn't very well go on claiming that any thought of her wanting him to stay for her — to be with her — was only in his imagination. Not after what happened in the circuitry bay, after she'd not only returned his kiss but gone back in for more.

At her loaded silence, Han heaved a sigh of frustration. "I'm too tired for this, Leia. Aren't you tired?"

There was something bordering on desperation in his tone that made her stop what she was doing and turn back around, made her feel compelled to answer honestly, to at least give him that much, but fear continued to hold her back. "I…We don't have to go through consumables now. We can even take a break from repairs for a bit. It's not as if we don't have the time."

"Princess, you were a teenage senator, the youngest ever, and runnin' a rebellion not long after. That brain of yours is whip-smart. I've seen it in action for years on missions with you. Working closely. Sometimes very closely," he added with a suggestively lifted brow that called to mind their last mission together. "So I know you know that's not what I mean."

"If you think this is some ploy to get you to join the Alliance…."

"Aw, c'mon." He tsked his tongue in disappointment. "You can do better. We both know that's not what I meant, either."

Now Leia was the one to get frustrated. Frustrated that he wouldn't just let things be; frustrated that he had to keep pushing her; frustrated that he seemed compelled to make her admit things, things that she was freely ready to divulge before, but now everything had changed and it wasn't fair of him not to concede the difference. "What — what do you expect me to — What do you want from me, Han? You're leaving. You're always leaving." Her indignance grew at this issue, a long-standing bone of contention she could really sink her teeth into. "You've been threatening that from the moment I met you. You've always had one foot out of the door."

"Have I?" Han countered just as indignantly, not giving an inch, either figuratively or literally as they stood nearly toe-to-toe in the galley. "Then why am I here, years later? If I'm always leavin', if I'm only in it for the money—"

"You said that, not me!"

"—if that's what I'm after," he continued around her interruption, "and I'm still hanging around, more than three years later? That'd make me a damn poor mercenary, wouldn't it?"

"You're the one who — every chance you got," Leia fumed, stomping her little boot in a way Han tried not to find attractive, "you're the one who claimed to be leaving! So you don't get to be outraged if I made that assumption. Not even 'assumption', because you outright said it!"

Okay, so she had a point. But he had one, too — something like, if she really wanted to see the pretense for what it was, she could have; hells, all of Hoth had. "And I'm supposed to believe you could survive the Galactic Senate but you couldn't see through that bluff? No one sticks around that long, Sweetheart, who actually plans on leaving. And when's the last time you heard me say it before last month?" Before Ord Mantell forced him to change his mind. "...Been a while, huh? I'm. still. here!" he emphasized; to him, that meant everything, and he couldn't understand why she refused to see it.

"You're here because the Empire attacked Hoth," she refuted. "That's the only reason you're here now. By total chance and circumstances beyond your control. The Empire and a broken hyperdrive are why you're here. If it were up to you, you would have already dropped me off with the Alliance and been on your way."

"Yeah, I would have," Han frankly granted. "But only because of that bounty hunter. Only because I had no other choice." As he went on, defensiveness, even a touch of guilt, crept into his usually unflappable demeanor. "What did you want me to do? Stick around and wait for another bounty hunter to capture you? Do you think I'm gonna let that happen? You think I'm that heartless? Kest, if I was heartless that's exactly what I would do."

That accusation deflated some of her anger, taking the bite out of Leia's words. "I never said you were heartless. I don't think you're heartless, Han." Her eyes softened as she brought them up to meet his. "So you really would have stayed and officially joined the Alliance?"

He wasn't sure if it was the righteously hopeful tone of her voice, or just the fact that, predictably, that was the one and only thing she'd honed in on of everything he'd said — like a broken holorecorder that keeps playing back the same thing over and over again — but Han had just had enough.

"Kriff, Leia, this ain't about the Alliance! Not everything is about the Alliance! It's not about the Rebellion, the war, High Command, any of it. This is about you and me," he said, moving still closer to her in a way that left Leia feeling flustered again, only without the excuse of dirty hands to fall back on. "This is about what's happening between us, and you pretendin' it's not. What do I want from you?" he asked incredulously. "I want you to talk about that. I want you to deal with that."