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1.
The first time Leia and Han spent the night together, they were pretending to be space junk.
Evacuating the base on Yavin did not go as smoothly as they might have hoped. By which Leia meant that the Falcon was trapped in between two Imperial cruisers, drifting among the remnants of a Rebel cargo hauler. They’d had to power down everything except the O2 recyclers, and it was getting cold. Very cold.
“We should get in the smuggling compartments,” Leia said.
Chewie howled forlornly. Luke looked less than pleased.
“She’s right,” Han said. “They won’t be able to pick up our lifesigns. And hey, at least it’ll be warm.”
“No it won’t,” Luke said.
“Well, warmer,” Han amended.
She’d intended to climb into a compartment with Luke, who was neither hairy nor a smartass. Somehow she ended up crouching in a dank, closet sized space next to Han.
One hour in, she was shivering to her very core.
Two hours in, Han gave her his jacket.
Three hours in, he put his arm around her. Ten seconds after that, she squeezed herself as close to him as she could. She didn’t care who he was. She was cold.
And she couldn’t stop seeing Alderaan explode in front of her eyes.
That had to stop. It really did. But it was dark, and there was nothing to think about, nothing to do -- well, except one thing. It was a terrible idea.
She was going to do it anyway.
Han was rubbing a hand up and down her arm, trying to make her stop shivering. He felt big and warm and solid next to her, and he smelled like sweat and engine grease and a lot of other things that hadn’t been part of her life before the rebellion.
She tilted her head up. Their noses bumped against each other. It was possibly not her finest attempt at seduction. Still, when Han figured out what she was doing, he didn’t hesitate to kiss her back. So she kissed him again, and then another time after that.
He pulled back and looked at her skeptically -- or at least, she imagined he was looking at her skeptically. In the dark, it was hard to tell.
“You’re not gonna get all mushy on me tomorrow, right, Princess?” he asked.
“Certainly not. Are you?” she asked.
Han snorted, and she fisted her hand in his hair and yanked him closer to her. She could think of worse ways to stay warm.
2.
The second time Leia and Han spent the night together, he taught her how to shoot.
She knocked on his door later than was strictly appropriate, and brandished the blaster so he didn’t get the wrong idea about what she wanted.
“I need you to teach me how to use this,” she said.
Han slipped it out of her hand with a practiced flick of his wrist. “To start, how about you keep your finger out of the trigger guard unless you’re planning to shoot something?”
Leia felt her face turn red. She didn’t have a witty comeback for that one.
“Come on,” she said, trying to cover her embarrassment. “The firing range is empty right now.”
“Because it’s midnight,” Han said. Of course he couldn’t make it easy for her to ask for a favor. “If you’re interested in something else, just say the word. Most women don’t want weapons training when they come knocking on my door at this hour.”
“There’s a first time for everything, I suppose.” She jerked her head toward the empty corridor. “You coming?”
She took off without waiting for Han, but he caught up with her quickly, shrugging a heavy jacket over his head.
“Is there a reason we’re doing this at midnight?” he asked.
“I told you, the firing range is empty.”
Leia hoped he wouldn’t make her spell it out. She didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of the rest of the Rebellion, and she saw Alderaan explode every time she tried to fall asleep. Midnight was the only time she wanted to practice shooting.
“Whatever you want, Your Worship,” Han said, just like she’d known he would.
Leia opened the door to the firing range and congratulated herself on selecting the one person on base who would not even dream of asking her if she was okay. Then she stood uncertainly in front of a holographic target of a stormtrooper.
“Have you ever done this before?” Han asked.
Leia shook her head. “A few times, on the Death Star.”
She decided not to mention how often she’d closed her eyes when she pulled the trigger.
“Well, you’re not dead, so you did alright,” he said.
“I’ve been setting my standards too high then,” she said. “Is that really how it works?”
“Pretty much. It’s easier not to die if you can actually hit a target though. Which you’re not going to do if you stand like that.”
Leia sighed. “Are you going to tell me what I should do, or just stand there and criticize?”
Of course, Han couldn’t tell her; he had to show her. Standing behind her, he wrapped his hands around hers, adjusting her fingers so they wrapped securely around the base of the blaster. She gritted her teeth and did her very best not to think about what had happened on the Falcon. Still, a small, sharp exhalation escaped as soon as he touched her -- which he heard of course.
He raised an eyebrow. “Alright, princess?”
“Verbal instructions would have sufficed,” she said evenly, which only made him smirk. Of course, as soon as he took his hands off hers, she started to shake. She clenched her fingers around the grip as tightly as she could, but it didn’t help.
Han’s smirk vanished. “You sure you’re alright?” he asked.
“I could kill people with this,” she said weakly. With the tiniest motion of her index finger, she could take a life. The thought made her queasy.
“That’s the idea,” he drawled. “If you can’t pull the trigger, you shouldn’t have the gun.”
“I’m not giving up,” Leia said through gritted teeth. She thought of her father and her mother, her aunts and her cousins, the old man who worked behind the counter of her favorite sweet shop, and the barmaid at the cantina that she wasn’t supposed to visit. They were gone, scattered among the stars with a billion other souls, no last words, no bodies to bury.
She stopped shaking and pulled the trigger.
In a holovid, she would have hit the target dead-on in a moment of triumph. Since her life was not a movie, her shot went wide, leaving a black scorch mark on the wall somewhere above the target’s shoulder. Her second and third shots weren’t much better. She lowered her blaster and let loose a stream of obscenities that would have made her terribly proper aunts blush -- had they been alive to hear them.
“You’re leaving slack in the trigger,” Han said, and Leia looked at him questioningly.
Suddenly, he was behind her again, but this time he wasn’t flirting. She wrapped her fingers around the trigger again, and he laid his hands over hers and raised the blaster to firing position.
“Keep squeezing the trigger till you feel resistance,” he said, and then he squeezed off three quick shots. Everyone of them landed in the target’s heart. “You feel the difference?”
Leia nodded, and Han let go. She told herself that she didn’t miss the solid warmth of his presence behind her.
Her next shot landed on the target’s shoulder -- close, but still not where she wanted it.
“Are you focusing on the target or the sight?” Han asked, and Leia shot him an annoyed look.
“The target, obviously,” she snapped. Then she remembered that she didn’t actually know what she was doing. Han did. “Is that wrong?” she forced herself to ask.
“Won’t work that way. The target’s too far away,” Han said. Surprisingly, there was no trace of superiority in his tone. “Most of the time, either the target or the sight’s gonna be blurry. You’re better off focusing on the sight.”
This time, Leia thought before she fired. She straightened her elbows, made sure her fingers were positioned properly, and tried not to worry about how blurry her target looked through the sight. Taking a long, slow breath, she squeezed the trigger and kept squeezing even after she’d heard the blaster discharge. When she looked up, there was a bright red dot in her target’s heart.
“Not bad,” Han said, looking slightly impressed. “Do that five hundred times and you might survive a real firefight.”
Leia didn’t answer; she just brought the sight back to her eye and fired. Five hundred sounded like a good goal, but she lost track somewhere around fifty. Then she gave up counting the shots and started counting the dead on Alderaan - one name for every time she pulled the trigger. She kept firing until her eyes were sandy and her hand cramped up.
By then, Han was slumped against the corner of the wall. His eyes had drifted shut, and he was snoring softly.
“Hey,” Leia said, tapping him gently on the shoulder.
He woke up with a start. “What time is it?” he muttered.
“0400,” she said, feeling slightly guilty. “You have patrol in two hours.”
“Did you memorize all the duty rosters, or just mine?” he asked. Apparently exhaustion wasn’t enough to dull his monstrous ego.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Leia said. “I made the duty roster.”
“Isn’t that beneath your station, princess?” he said. His usual smirk looked softer now that he was half-asleep, and Leia would have found it charming if she didn’t know better.
“I had to do something besides becoming the tragic poster girl of the Rebellion,” she said, locking the safety on her blaster like he’d taught her.
Han looked back at her target. It was peppered with red dots where her shots had hit -- mostly not in the right place, but there was a small cluster just over the heart, right where she’d wanted them.
“You’re not tragic,” he said, just a touch too quickly, and Leia swallowed.
“Thank you for tonight. I wouldn’t have asked anyone else,” she said.
Han looked awkward for a moment, and Leia realized they were perilously close to a sincere conversation. Maybe she looked just as alarmed as he did, because his old swagger returned quickly.
“Glad to help out a fellow fugitive,” he said. “You’re the only person I know who’s got a bigger price on their head than I do.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Leia murmured. She had known the Empire would want to recapture her, of course, but she hadn’t imagined her name emblazoned on the galaxy’s most wanted list, or the price the Emperor would pay for her head. She wasn’t sure whether to be thrilled or nauseated, though she supposed she could do both at the same time.
Maybe some of her feelings showed on her face because Han clapped her on the back and said, “You’ll get used to it.” He took one last look at her target and added, “Just out of curiosity, how many more nights are we gonna do this?”
Leia smiled. “Until I believe I can shoot every last stormtrooper in the Empire.”
3.
The third time Leia and Han spent the night together, they were drunk. Very drunk.
Leia was not precisely sure what had happened. There had been alcohol -- a lot of it, judging by her headache. And she’d gone to bed with someone, judging by the snoring in her ear. The question was who.
She dimly remembered a victorious mission, and a party. General Bygar had been there, but he didn’t like women. Dak Ralter had passed out under the table. Wedge Antilles was on patrol with Luke, so that left...
Please no. She turned her head very slowly to look at the man behind her, but she already knew it was Han. And her shirt was missing. So was her bra. Don’t panic, she told herself fiercely. Check if you’re wearing pants. She lifted up the covers slowly. She was wearing pants! Thank the Maker. So was Han. Nothing had happened -- or at least, nothing more than they’d done after the Yavin evacuation -- so now all she had to do was escape.
She eased out of the bed and yanked her shirt over her head without bothering to look for her bra. As a rule, she didn’t pray, but she’d sell her soul to any deity who could promise no one would see her sneaking out of Han Solo’s quarters in the middle of the night.
The corridor was deserted. Almost deserted. The custodial droid was trundling back and forth across the scuffed tiles, never mind that they were never going to be clean. At the end of the hall, there was a flash of orange. X-wing pilot, she thought. It didn’t matter. Whoever they were, they were leaving somebody else’s quarters in the middle of the night.
It was Luke. Of course it was Luke. And he was coming back from patrol, not an illicit hook-up, so she had no leverage.
He saw where she was coming from and stared at her with his mouth agape. Should she tell him that nothing happened? Threaten to kill him if he told anyone else? No, that would only make her look defensive. Desperate even. She drew herself up to her full height and walked past him as regally as she could, considering that she was still half-drunk.
In the morning, before she’d downed enough caf to dull her headache, her door chimed.
Han was standing on the other side, looking smug. Her bra was dangling from his finger by the strap. “I think you forgot something, Princess,” he drawled.
She snatched the bra and threw it into her quarters, hoping that nobody was watching. “You don’t get to act like it’s a trophy unless you actually fuck me,” she snapped.
Han smirked. “Is that an invitation?”
Leia closed the door in his face.
4.
The fourth time Leia and Han spent the night together, it was in the chapel on the Hoth base.
It was a terrible chapel - really just a room with some chairs arranged in rows. The climate control system never worked, so it was as cold as Darth Vader’s balls. Nobody ever came here, especially at night, which was why Leia used it.
A tiny holoprojector glowed in her hands. She’d been watching promo vids from the Alderaan Tourism Bureau on an endless loop. A few of them had cheesy publicity shots of her with her father. As a memorial, it was pathetic -- but since everything she owned was impounded on Coruscant or drifting with the remnants of Alderaan, old commercials were the best she could do.
The door hissed open behind her. “Princess?” a familiar voice called. “You alright in here?”
Leia stiffened instantly. She and Han had been avoiding each other since their not-quite-hookup. Now he wanted to intrude on the one moment she’d given herself to grieve?
“Your assistance is not required right now, Captain Solo,” she said crisply.
Han leaned toward her, his eyes snapping. “Oh yeah? When is it required? When you want to know how to shoot a blaster? When you’ve got tricky questions about astronav? Just let me pencil it into my calendar whenever it’s convenient for you.”
“I’m sure 0800 tomorrow will be fine,” Leia snapped. “Just let me check with my people.”
Han smile was sharp enough to slice through carbonite. “Yeah, great, and while you’re at it, maybe you could have them tell me what I’m doing wrong. Cause you might not realize this, but I am actually trying. So what is it exactly? Did I accent the wrong syllable of your name? Or should I be calling you by your full title, Her Worshipful Ambassador Leia Organa, First Princess of Alderaan? Did I get that right?”
Leia clenched her jaw and swallowed hard. She was not going to cry. “No, you did not. It is impossible to be the Ambassador or the Princess of a planet that no longer exists.”
“Shit.” Han looked down at the floor and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have --”
Leia’s temper flared. “Oh no, not you too. Everyone else treats me like I’m made of glass. I will not have that from you.”
Han snorted. “The Empire blew up your planet and it didn’t stop you. I don’t know what you’re made of, but it ain’t glass.” He paused and shuffled his feet, looking awkward. “Still, if there’s something you need, I wish you’d tell me.”
Leia squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could. It didn’t matter. Tears still leaked out. In front of Han, of all people.
“I swore I wasn’t going to do this,” she said. Her voice was shaking. She couldn’t stop it.
Han covered the distance between him in two quick strides, and she let her head fall against his chest. He put a stiff arm around her shoulders.
“Just five minutes, I swear,” she said.
She felt his body relax against hers, and he pulled her more tightly against him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Take as long as you need.”
It wasn’t minutes. It was hours. Han didn’t leave.
She didn’t know what time it was when her comm unit started squawking, “Leia Organa, report to briefing room. Leia Organa, report to briefing room.”
“I’ll tell them you’re sick if you want,” he said.
“Not on your life,” she said, pulling herself up straight and wiping her face. “I have a mission.”
5.
The fifth time they spent the night together, it was after Leia had blown eight TIE fighters out of the sky.
They were ambushed on a routine supply run.
Leia had never fired a laser cannon before, but she learned. Fast. She saved her life and Han and Chewie’s, which was just a nicer way of saying she’d killed eight people. Eight people who were husbands or wives or fathers or mothers or brothers --
And she couldn’t think that way, because she was at war, and she wasn’t a princess or an ambassador anymore. She was a soldier.
But that didn’t stop her hands from shaking.
When Han came charging down the corridor, grinning, she kissed him without even thinking about whether it was a good idea. He pushed her back against the bulkhead and kissed her harder than she’d ever been kissed before. Her hands were still shaking when she spread them out across his chest, and of course he noticed. He wrapped his fingers around hers while he ran his teeth along her bottom lip, and Leia thought it was terribly unfair how he could be so nice and so awful all at once.
Now was the time to pull away. If she went back to her bunk now, they could spend the next three days snapping at each other and ignoring each other, and then they’d be back to normal.
She didn’t want normal. She couldn’t have normal anymore.
She pulled back just long enough to say, “Take me to your bunk.”
Han looked at her questioningly, and this time Leia really did let go. “If you’re not interested, just say the word, and I’ll take care of things myself.”
“Can I watch?” Han asked.
“I hate you,” Leia said.
“No you don’t,” he answered.
She meant to walk away. Instead, when he lifted her up, she wrapped her legs around his waist and dug her fingernails into his back and let him kiss her while he carried her down the hall toward his quarters.
***
Afterward, she said, “I’d leave, but I don’t think my legs will work.”
She expected Han to smirk -- and he did -- but he also wrapped a lazy arm around her shoulders.
“No need to hurry,” he said. “Be a shame if you missed round two.”
Leia put her head on his chest, and did not quite manage to suppress a yawn. She’d thought she might tell him about the strange force that had seemed to guide her hand as soon as she touched the laser cannon, but it hardly seemed to matter now. Probably every soldier felt something like that. Probably, if she said something, Han would laugh.
“Don’t get any ideas if I fall asleep here,” she said, trailing her fingers down his chest. His muscles felt warm and solid underneath her hand, and okay, the view was pretty nice. She might as well enjoy it.
“If you left now, we couldn’t have sex in the morning,” Han pointed out. He found the bobby pins securing her braids and began pulling them out one by one. She sighed against his chest when he ran his fingers through the newly loosened strands of hair.
“You’re not going to get all mushy on me in the morning, are you?” she asked.
He snorted. “If you want that, you’re gonna have to sleep with Chewie.”
“You’re disgusting,” she said.
“You like it,” he countered.
“I find you acceptable on occasion,” she said, but she didn’t object when he tugged her closer. Her eyelids drifted shut, and for once, she did not see Alderaan explode.