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Some people leave all at once, in an hour of blood and smoke that changes everything.
Han Solo took months to leave; so slow there was no moment she could point to and say, then, that was the day he left. Thirty years of lives orbiting each other can be undone in an instant, but to reach escape velocity, change course and set another path might need another thirty years.
At their age, the galaxy the way it was, they probably didn’t have thirty more years.
But he tried anyway: a run to the Dagobah system that detoured via Mareedin for less than a rumour. Then the Teryen system. Days became weeks, a whole month.
It’s easy to speak of first things, first meetings, beginnings. Something has never happened before and then it does. But last things, endings: sometimes you don’t know them for what they are until many years have past. Until you die, how can you know it’s the last time you will see somebody, hold them in your arms, make love to them? There could always be another time, you tell yourself. This isn’t the end. This isn’t the end. I’ll see him again, he’ll come back.
The first time she went to bed with Han was a long time coming, and it didn’t solve anything. They had been sniping at each other for months, on Hoth, the cold and the enforced proximity not helping anybody’s temper. She was effectively leading the military rebellion at 20 years old – not alone, not the only leader, but the most emblematic one. The one who had lost most, and who had very little left to lose.
The kind of easy exploration with her peers that she’d barely had time to enjoy (one girl, three boys) was over: with her planet gone, Leia had no easy left in her, and precious few peers. She had Luke, sweet, intense, growing into himself almost before her eyes and filled with a power you could practically see; and Han. Han who slouched long-legged all over the base and pretended he didn’t care but never left.
Later, she was quite frank with Han: she’d considered both of them. Even briefly decided that Luke was the more promising candidate, but that was logic and friendship speaking. Ultimately Leia’s decisions of the heart were made at a much baser level, and later of course she was glad of it. She was never able to feel scandalised at what might have happened, though, what they had almost done: a brother you don’t know about until you’re 20 is still a brother, but she could still never summon up that sense of taboo. Other people might have been scandalised if they’d gone through with it and word got out, but a tiny guilty part of her wished they had, before they knew who they were to each other.
For Han it was quite the opposite. Once he knew Luke was her brother, that he was off-limits, he was even friendlier. Something about Luke’s big blue eyes and moral rectitude brought out the flirt in Han: he felt safe, or exciting, or he wanted to provoke. She was never sure. Luke would just smile at him indulgently with that look in his eye like he was a thousand years old and had seen it all before. Which he hadn’t, but maybe when you have the power to move oceans and control men’s minds everyday concerns like your twin’s suitor flirting with you just don’t phase you. Leia certainly never minded. She always thought that if anything happened to one of them, at least the other two would have each other.
It was Luke’s absence after they lost Hoth that pushed her into bed with Han. Perhaps if he’d been there to keep the peace they would have dragged it out until after Endor, even. But he wasn’t there, the rebellion had no base and the Millennium Falcon limped towards Cloud City at sub-light speed when Leia needed to be regrouping the fleet, counting survivors, be somewhere that people could see her.
None of it was Han’s fault, but she wasn’t kind to him. She was astonished, later, at her own blindness: how had she not seen his every-man-for-himself posturing for what it was? Every day he didn’t leave was a declaration of love that she didn’t know how to read. The man who only took orders from himself had quietly joined her rebellion and accepted her leadership, and now he was waiting for a sign from her. A quick tumble in a bunkroom was never going to be enough for him, but he certainly did his damndest to hide it from her.
She was angry with herself for finding him so distracting. It felt like a battle with primaeval forces, with her prehistoric lizard brain, resisting Han Solo. She was never sure later why she felt so certain that resisting him was the right thing to do: was he insufficiently committed to the rebellion? Did she always know that it was going to be more than just sex, with her and Han?
On the Falcon, they fought. About everything and nothing: the ship, the rebellion, the stew, the cabin temperature, the route, the noise of his heel jiggling on the floor, who last used the lever wrench and didn’t put it back. It was her first real taste of domestic intimacy (and possibly his too), and she wasn’t at all sure she liked it.
Thirty years of marriage and a child would hone and sharpen the words they flung at each other, and those weeks on the Falcon were nothing in comparison to what they found to wound each other later. But no one can see into the future, and when Leia screamed at him:
“Then you can drop me on the next rock we find! Nobody’s forcing you to be here, if it’s all so intolerable you know what you can do, don’t you?”
“No, what can I do, Princess?” he snarled back.
“You can go back to the backwater you crawled out of and eke out a meaningless living until the Empire hunts you down, and I’ll find someone who actually gives a damn to help me!”
And she turned on her heel and stalked off.
There wasn’t far to stalk, and her remorse caught up with her before she’d got all the way round the ship. A leader couldn’t afford to lose her temper like that: she had to apologise to him, this was just the way he was, he showed affection by needling her, she just had to let it roll off her and hold a steady course.
When she went looking for him he wasn’t in the cockpit and he wasn’t in the main cabin or in the hold. Chewie howled mournfully at her and shrugged. It wasn’t supposed to be a reproach – Chewie took her side more often than not – but he was sensitive to Han’s feelings.
She found him in the sleeping cabin, elbows on his knees and shoulders slumped. He straightened but didn’t get up when she came in.
“I came to apologise,” she said, her voice as gentle as she could make it. “I know how much you’ve given up to help us, and I appreciate everything you’re doing, Han. Really I do.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, and I – I’m sorry I spoke to you like that. It was inexcusable.”
“I can think of worse things,” he dredged up a smile, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
The smile she gave him back was a damp, ill-formed thing.
“You’re right, you know,” he added, gaze somewhere at ground level. “I’m not the guy you need around here. You need some bright young hope, someone who’s never had a second thought about why they’re here.”
She stepped towards him before she could think better of it.
“No, I don’t, I need you, Han -”
He looked up at her and his face gave a funny twist.
“Yeah. Me and my ship that can outrun anything in the galaxy, right?”
“No, you.”
He didn’t say anything, just sat there looking up at her, and she couldn’t think of any other way to convince him.
She leaned down and kissed him.
It was meant to be a brief press of her lips to his, symbolic: a token to be redeemed some other time. But he made a low desperate sound and opened up to her, his arms coming round her waist, and her own damn body betrayed her. She was in his lap without consciously deciding to be there, and there was no putting this one on him. He hadn’t pulled her. It was nobody’s choice but hers to gasp into his mouth and kiss him deep and wet, grind against him as he held her close. She was overwhelmed with wanting him, wanting to fuck him, desire making her fierce as she pushed him down onto the bunk.
Then they were tearing at each other’s clothes, getting tangled up in sleeves and holsters in their haste to reach skin. She had to stand up to get her pants off and when she kicked them away he groaned, “Leia…” and pulled her back into his arms, naked. His eyes were closed as he sucked at her nipples, making her arch her back, and then he was kissing down her belly. And when he opened his eyes and looked up at her, it hit her all at once that this was the big time. He wasn’t just the infuriating smuggler who hung around while she was trying to run a rebellion: the safety of that was over a long time ago. He was someone she couldn’t afford to lose, and she couldn’t carry on pretending otherwise for much longer.
He groaned when she spread her legs for him, and he bent his head to kiss the insides of her thighs, faint scratch of stubble making her shiver. Then he was gently parting her folds and the shocking heat of his mouth was on her, licking and kissing as she panted and tried to hold on, to slow the build of pleasure. She stopped him with a hand fisted in his hair, thinking to slow down, show some damn restraint, but when he looked up at her again every hope of restraint was shattered.
She pulled him back down with a moan, and seconds later she was coming, wave after wave of it washing bright over her, giving herself up to it completely. He didn’t stop until she pushed him away with a trembling arm, and then he was kissing back up her body, wringing aftershocks everywhere he touched her.
“Come on,” she whispered in his ear. No more words would come to her.
She came again with him inside her, clenching desperately against the thick length of him, so intense she couldn’t catch her breath.
Han followed her seconds later with a cry that he muffled in her shoulder as she wrapped her arms around him, held him tight.
They fucked like that, fast and intense and overwhelming, a dozen more times before they reached Cloud City, and it didn’t resolve anything. Each time they got dressed awkwardly, and avoided each other for hours, only to fall into bed again like history repeating itself.
It would take another 30 years before the full weight of all the things that repeated themselves really hit them, but she couldn’t say the warning signs hadn’t been there. Maybe if she’d known the truth about the family she was born into, she would even have been able to read them.
According to Alderanian custom, a princess would give birth in her chambers, attended by her women. But there were hardly any Alderanian women left by the time Leia went into labour, and certainly none she would call friends. It had crossed her mind that she might call on Shara Bey, but by then Shara had a child of her own – a life of her own beyond the Rebellion or the New Republic. Shara was a friend, but she was no handmaiden. It was the same for all the other names she thought of. They would fight at her side, but times had changed: the women Leia knew and trusted were warriors, not birth attendants. Not that they couldn’t be both, but a warrior was still a warrior when she lived on another planet light years away, while a birth attendant had to be right there for the title to mean anything. And none of them were.
So the last princess of Alderaan gave birth in her chambers, attended by Dr Kalonia, a midwife from the Hosnian system and confirmed scoundrel Han Solo, because all of this was his fault. He had wanted a baby, so he could damn well stay here and see what bringing a baby into the world involved.
Mostly it involved a lot of waiting, and a lot of swearing. Dr Kalonia came and went; the midwife encouraged her to keep upright and moving, so that simple gravity would help the process. Leia paced her rooms in between contractions and hung onto furniture when they struck, knuckles white on the back of some core world antique that had been here since the days of the old Republic. And Han Solo followed her.
When she stopped by the wall of windows, all smooth duraglass and white marble and nothing to hold onto as pain ripped through her, Han was there to support her. She pushed him away once she could stand again, started walking again as if she could outrun the contractions, and he followed at arm’s length, hands in his pockets like he was trying to be inconspicuous.
He was wise enough to mostly keep his mouth shut and look chastened by her suffering. Leia couldn’t eat, but he brought food for the midwife, and asked her in a low mutter he probably thought Leia couldn’t hear:
“This is normal, right? It always takes this long?”
“For a first baby this is perfectly normal, yes,” the woman told him, wiping her fingers.
“And is it supposed to hurt this much? She’s really in pain, isn’t there something you can do?”
“If she asks for it, of course. But the princess’s wish was to follow the Alderanian ways, and have a faster birth by not using it.”
Han frowned at this, clearly unconvinced.
Not that she could blame him: Leia was starting to doubt the wisdom of the Alderanian ways now, too. Each individual contraction was bearable; 10 contractions were bearable. Two, three, four hours of contractions would have been bearable. It was pain with a purpose that left no trace. What was becoming harder to bear was the uncertainty of it – how many more hours, how many more times would she double over, hear her own breath coming high and fast, her own voice groaning like that? A hundred times? A thousand times? A whole day? Two? How did anybody bear it? How had the human race survived so long, if this was what every woman had to go through to bring life from her body?
In the end it was a day and a night, and Ben was born in the morning light of the next day.
He didn’t breathe at first, and time distorted itself as the thirty seconds while Kalonia and the midwife pressed oxygen to his mouth stretched out for a millennium. Then he spluttered and cried, and Han held him with a look of terrified wonder while they turned to Leia. Who was still bleeding, bleeding dangerously if not treated at once, they told her later.
But this was the Hosnian system, and the doctor had everything she needed to stop the haemorrhage in moments. Perhaps in the backwaters where they had hidden during the rebellion she would have died, but here in the old palace looking down on the heart of the city, speeders flitting past the windows and light catching the polished stone and durasteel of the senate building, the danger was past almost before she had time to register it was there.
She wasn’t afraid for a second: she’d come of age on blood and battlefield medicine. There was no more pain, just the elation of what felt almost like victory.
It was only when Dr Kalonia left them alone at nightfall, confirming mother and infant both to be well, that the enormity of what they had done finally chased away the adrenaline.
What were they doing, she and Han, alone with this tiny scrap of life they were almost afraid to touch? They could take out a death star and overthrow an empire, but they had no idea at all what to do with a baby.
A baby with a shock of black hair and a squashed red face, who lay swaddled and sleeping in a crib like an explosion waiting to happen.
As the double doors slid closed behind the doctor, Han turned to her with his hands on his hips and for just a second she thought he was about to run out on her. The great General Solo, who could outfly anybody and talk his way out of anything was about to run away from his own son.
But he didn’t, of course.
He looked at her with that expression of bravado in the face of terrible odds that she knew so well, and said, “Okay, kiddo. We can do this. We can do this,” and her heart swelled with love for him.
Years later, she found a holo of that night. Of herself with her hair in a simple braid down her back in the early stages of labour, clearly taken by Han while she was too busy being in agony to notice.
“Why do we have this?” she asked him as he helped Ben assemble a model X wing.
He deflected it, of course.
“Hey, look Ben, that’s you in mama’s belly, right before you were born,” he said to the child. Who with the typical self-centredness of a five year old, was at first fascinated then quickly bored by this glimpse at a world before he existed.
When he ran off to a better game, Leia pressed, “Did you take it?”
Clearing away Ben’s toys from the table, Han muttered over his shoulder, “Thought you might die. Just wanted to make sure I had something to remember you.”
She wrapped her arms around him from behind, rested her chin on the top of his head.
“People don’t die in childbirth any more, Han.”
“Yeah? Well, they do where I’m from,” he said, kissing her hand.
And in the end he was right, really. She wasn’t the one who died, but he was right.
When Ben left, there were warning signs. At least, after the fact they seemed like warning signs.
The alarm in their quarters that malfunctioned, letting out a shrill beep every few hours, always when they least expected it. In a moment of silence, or when they were on the edge of sleep. It didn’t mean anything: it was just an electronic device with a loose circuit, but the maintenance droid failed to repair it. They lived with it for a week, starting at its shriek of panic until Han lost patience and ripped it out of the wall panel. If there was a fire, other alarms would wake them. There hadn’t been a fire in a generation. They weren’t worried.
Han was sick around then too. A cough that wouldn’t clear up, wheezing in the night as if he couldn’t breathe. Of course he refused the doctor. Leia might have pushed it earlier, if she hadn’t been distracted with an armaments directive that had the senate all at odds. That wasn’t even what troubled her: the senate disagreed over everything, and did it so slowly you might scream. But she was used to knowing her own mind at least, at making a decision and sticking to it if no new information came to light to change it.
On this, she was unsure. Arming the planets on the Outer Rim was being debated on Hosnia Prime, but what did they all know, safe on the most core of Core Worlds, about deep space and the people who lived out there? What was provocation here might be prudence there. The distinction between self-defence and aggression was often a matter of opinion at this distance, and she couldn’t make up her mind which one it was.
When she finally bullied him into it, she went with Han to the medical appointment. The debate would carry on for weeks, and she would try to make a virtue of her doubts. Call them open-mindedness, a need for more information. She didn’t need to sit through every single session to maintain that position.
Carbonite on the lungs, the doctor told him. An aftereffect of those months frozen on Jabba’s barge: common, symptoms quite controllable, but not curable.
Leia was relieved – it was nothing serious, the medication tried and tested - but Han took it hard. They rarely spoke of that time, some shared sense of discomfort they preferred not to examine falling over both if it ever came up. Han snapped at Lando, once, for an entirely harmless remark about the Hutt. He’d stalked off, leaving Leia and Lando blinking at each other, at a loss for words. When he came back an hour later he was prickly and his shoulders hunched, and none of them brought it up.
Luke called them often, from the academy on Yavin. More often than he had in years, and not only the holo calls. He was there in the back of her mind with the Force, like someone tugging on her braids to get her attention. Only when she turned, he wasn’t really there at all.
She couldn’t send him a clear message back, and when she asked him in the next holo call he frowned and said he hadn’t meant to do it.
It was the same with Ben, only Ben didn’t call. Leia could sense him in flashes, stronger than any time since his early childhood, and quite different in tone. Every couple of days, too fleeting to really tell anything from, but that nonetheless left her unsettled afterwards. If Luke felt like a tug on her hair, Ben was like someone throwing a stone and running away. But she never said that out loud, not even to Han: Ben wouldn’t throw stones at her.
Leia felt it happen.
From her office with its high arched windows she thought she saw clouds roll in, but when she raised her head the skies were clear. The twin suns shone; air traffic glinted in the light. There were no clouds.
But there was darkness coming from somewhere. She got to her feet, slow, as if afraid to disturb something though she couldn’t have said what, crossed to the transparisteel. She even reached out to touch it: perhaps the darkness was a flaw in the building, in the refraction qualities of the material.
Then she felt heat, and the taste of deep green at the back of her throat, and knew it was Yavin she was seeing in the dark. But it wasn’t dark there, not where Ben and Luke were – their planetary day matched hers. A storm? There were short, wild storms on Yavin all the time. Rain fell, wind blew, and the sun came out again leaving everything dripping, colours so deeply saturated they glowed. The darkness she saw wasn’t a storm on Yavin.
She found herself running without a clear idea where she was going. Her administrative team in the outer chamber looked up and fell silent as she appeared, and there was X’ia, who had worked for her for years, coming towards her, hands held out as if she needed help.
“Leia, what is it, what’s happened?” and Leia could only shake her head, let the girl support her.
“I – I don’t know – I can feel-” the darkness was growing, and then that feeling like a stone being thrown. She flinched, but it wasn’t at her this time. And it was more than a stone. It was something red, anger without a source, hatred without direction, only it did have direction: a tendril coming her way, but most of it lashing out, slashing, burning – oh no, oh no, Ben no no no, killing –
She sank to her knees and X’ia followed her down, hands on her elbows, calling to the others, “We need a doctor! The senator is ill!”
Leia pressed a hand to her mouth, shook her head and spoke through her fingers. “I’m not, I’m not ill, it’s not me, it’s – you need to get me through to my brother, to Luke – X’ia, get him -”
These people, her staff, they were all such good people: X’ia was giving the instruction, helping her up, waving the boy at the com station aside to finish the connection herself one handed, her other arm still around Leia.
But there was no answer. The Academy on Yavin didn’t answer. The call signal echoed and echoed, the tone rising and falling, rising and falling, but nobody answered.
X’ia adjusted the channel, double-checking the signal, the device, before looking up at Leia.
“Keep trying,” Leia told her. The darkness was still there, thicker, choking her, with something swirling in it that felt like grease, like something unwholesome, something that hated her and hated everyone it saw.
She closed her eyes and tried to focus on Ben, but all she got was red, like a broken screen or a burning building. What have you done, she asked him, but he didn’t answer. Those stones had been built up into a wall: the darkness seeped through, but he wouldn’t hear her on the other side of it.
Many hours later, a holo call came in from Luke. She hadn’t left her office – her team had gone home, all except X’ia who shook her head when Han shooed the others away. He’d shrugged at her then put a hand on her shoulder for a second.
The signal was bad, but X’ia could work with bad signals.
“…so many of them, Leia. I don’t understand how -” Luke was drowned in static, the image flickering away and then back as X’ia adapted the code, fingers flying.
“Luke, what the hell happened?” Han was yelling at Luke’s holo. “Where’s Ben, Leia thinks he did something, we don’t know shit back here!”
The image flickered back into life.
“He – it was. It was Ben -” then nothing. For a second it looked like the signal was gone again, but then she understood. The signal was fine, it was Luke who couldn’t make the words come out. Leia already knew, and she couldn’t say it either. She saw it happen, she felt it happen, but how do you find words for this? The only words she could offer would be darkness, stone, red. Anger.
She didn’t need her brother to tell her anything.
“He killed them. Ben did. It’s a massacre here, I was too late and I don’t know where he is, I can’t sense him, he’s just – gone, he’s gone, Han - ”
Han flew them out in the Falcon that same night, and both of them knew there was no coming back to the lives they’d had before. Until they reached Yavin they were still waiting for the full force of the blow to hit them, but it had already fallen. This was just suspended animation.
They barely spoke.
Some time near what would have been dawn, Han scrubbed his hand through the beard coming up on his chin.
“Kid’s got bad blood, huh?” he said. He didn’t even look at her.
It was like a mortal blow. Something squeezed and clenched around her heart, the source of all that bad blood. She reached out to steady herself on the console as if something had really hit her. Like throwing stones. She hadn’t thought there were any words in the galaxy that could make this worse, what their child had done, but now she knew there were. Maybe he’d thought it – all the hours and days and years he had spent with her and Luke, maybe every day he was thinking it, that they were Vader’s children, would always be Vader’s children – but he’d never ever said it before.
For a few breaths she was so stricken she couldn’t even speak. She squeezed her eyes closed, clenched her fists, wished she could just wash away with this, dissolve, never know it and never look at it.
But when she turned to Han his shoulders were hunched over the instrument panel like an old man. A tiny light flashed on and off, on and off, and he was watching it. He didn’t move, he just watched the light, and she knew he meant himself, his blood.
“No,” she began.
He turned to her then, that half-smile that meant so many things quirking the corner of his mouth.
“You explain it then, princess,” he said, so low he sounded like the hum of the engines, the starlight pouring past them.
But she couldn’t.
She didn’t know the last time was the last time. Neither of them did – how could they?
If they’d known, they might have done it differently. Been slower. Been kinder.
Maybe not.
They ran into him on the way back from Hosnia Prime. Leia was with Poe Dameron, so fresh out of the Republican Fleet he still wore its uniform even though he was her man now. And couldn’t Han see it.
It was awkward as hell. Poe had admitted to nerves around the legend of Leia Organa, and just when they were starting to get past that, now here was Han, charging in like a ganjuko and doing everything he could to make the kid uncomfortable. Which wasn’t easy: Leia hadn’t known Poe long, but she knew he had a cool head on his shoulders and a smart answer on the tip of his tongue. He knew when to smile and play nice, and when to square his shoulders and push back, and Han was making him practice both at once.
It was terrible timing: she needed this stopover to brief her new star recruit. She hadn’t – quite – told him he was a star recruit, but she had sat beside him as he flew the shuttle and now she had invited him to have dinner with her. He got the message, she thought.
Perhaps it was her fault. Perhaps she should never have let Han interrupt. But it had been months without a word from Han, and she couldn’t help that damn leap her heart gave when he appeared at their table as if out of nowhere. Of course she smiled, of course she was pleased to see him.
These days that just wasn’t enough any more.
She watched him look Poe up and down, and the curl of his lip told her everything she needed to know about the conclusion he’d come to. Too young, too keen, too good-looking, too close to her, Han was thinking. It was written all over his face.
“Han, this is Commander Poe Dameron, he’s just joined us – you knew his father, Kes,” she said at once. Give him some context, hope an old comrade’s name would keep him civil.
Poe was already on his feet, waiting for a sign to tell him whether he should salute or shake hands. He’d find out soon enough that there was precious little saluting in the Resistance, and even less where Han Solo was concerned.
“Poe – Han Solo.” Han Solo needed no rank or further explanation. Poe probably knew who he was the second he set eyes on him.
With no clues from Han to work with, Poe settled for inclining his head in the merest suggestion of a bow. Respectful but not obsequious. “It’s an honour to meet you, sir.”
Anybody else would have been charmed, but Han had already made up his mind.
“You sure know how to pick ‘em, I’ll give you that,” he said to Leia. “I suppose he can fly, too?”
Poe’s eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t say anything. It wasn’t anything to do with him and maybe he knew it.
“How have you been, Han?” she asked, determined to keep this civil.
Han shrugged, expansive, taking up space.
“Oh, you know. Surviving.”
“And Chewie?”
“Yeah, he’ll be sorry he missed you. Hey kid,” he turned to Poe. “If you’re going to the bar, mine’s Coruscant brandy.”
There was tiny pause while Poe looked at Leia, still deciding how to react. Of course Han was being deliberately offensive, any fool could see that, and Poe Dameron was no fool.
“That would be very kind of you,” she told him. “I’ll have the same.”
He nodded and turned, and then turned back, biting his lip.
“The only problem with that is the Republic locked my credit account when I defected, so…”
Han laughed, and it wasn’t a kind laugh. “Can’t even buy the lady a drink, huh? Here - ” he dug into his pocket and held out a fistful of credits. “Get something for yourself too.”
Poe met his eye steadily, refusing to be intimidated, and made him wait just a second before he reached out to take the money.
Leia started to have a very bad feeling about this.
Poe was a long time at the bar. In his place, Leia might have sent a droid with the drinks and not come back - Poe must have seen Han fling himself down into the seat he’d vacated across from her, and decided to let the dust settle first. Which was a shame, because she really did need a drink to navigate through the minefield that conversation with Han had become.
It wasn’t always like this. Last time she’d seen him, he’d stayed a week, slept in her quarters, got up with her in the morning and eaten dinner with her every night. Come to bed with her every night, too.
They never could keep that up for long. Not any more. Not since -
“So what do you got the kid doing?” Han asked.
“What kid?” Leia gave him a long level stare, but he was decades past flinching at that.
“That one,” he said with a jerk of his head. Maybe he didn’t bother to look or point at Poe, but he knew where he was standing all right. “Why, how many you got?”
“Not enough. We could use your help recruiting, if you come across any good pilots who need a job.”
“Yeah well, the pilots I come across don’t exactly have the best references. But if you’re just choosing them for their youthful good looks, I can keep an eye out.”
She almost lost her temper at that. Trust Han to put that kind of sordid spin on this, like he’d never fought beside her, like he didn’t care where Luke was, and all she was doing now was filling a harem.
“If that’s how you spot a good pilot, Han, then that’s your business and I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” she told him. That prim note he always seemed to bring out was back in her voice, and even after all these years she didn’t know which of them it infuriated more.
“What, you didn’t pick me for my youthful good looks?” again, he spread his arms. Here I am. Look at me now.
So Leia looked at him. Dead in the eye and up and down, like a piece of meat. Looked at the droop in his eyelids, the grey in his hair, the stoop in his shoulders, and then he flinched alright. That’s the father of your child, Leia Organa. Show a little mercy.
“Yes I did,” she told him, ruthless. “But that was nearly 40 years ago. We’re both long past that now, aren’t we?”
“Hey, you know what they say,” Han leant back, arms over the back of the seat. “You’re only as old as the person you feel -” and his gaze cut over to the bar again, to the back of Poe Dameron’s head. Not that Leia turned to look.
She held very still, drummed her fingers once on the tabletop, and hated him.
None of it stopped her wanting to fuck him though. It never had. Their bodies knew each other, and maybe that edge of anger was what they both came back for, time after time.
First she had to sit through a dinner of barbed remarks and naked condescension. Poe eventually brought them drinks and pulled up another chair as if he hadn’t noticed Han taking his place. Maybe he really hadn’t. He had nothing to prove here.
Perhaps it would have been more prudent to let him make his excuses and leave them alone, but she was too stubborn to let Han win like that. He couldn’t command her time or dictate which of her officers she could have dinner with. If he didn’t like it, he could leave. He was good at that.
It wasn’t a deliberate test of Poe – at least, not on her part. What Han thought he was doing was anybody’s guess. For all that she had heard him called reckless, Poe kept his temper with Han when another man might have lost it. Leia knew something about pilots by now, and the ones who were really reckless didn’t live to be Poe’s age. He answered all the digs about his skill as if they were genuine enquiries; gave credit to his squadron as if he knew things he couldn’t possibly have known about Han Solo and his team of one. It was like watching a felinx trying to provoke a dog, and if Han hadn’t been so entirely to blame for the whole mess she might even have felt sorry for him.
It was Poe who put an end to it. He tossed his drink back in a flash of smooth young throat and firm jaw. Leia looked away, fast, right at Han just as Han looked at her. Was it really forty years? Not quite, but longer than this young man had been alive. So much she would never know about Han, and so much she knew that nobody else ever did or ever would.
Poe got to his feet.
“Thank you, General Organa. I wish I could offer to pay, but…”
“The Resistance does actually pay a salary, Poe. We’ll sort it out as soon as we get to D’Qar,” she told him. “And the Resistance also pays for dinner.”
“Then I’ll say good night,” and with that tilt of the head that Han refused to like, he left them to it.
Han and Leia looked at each other, over forty years of bad blood and good blood, and a son who had done what he had done, and a table with the remains of a meal.
“Come on then,” Leia said, holding out her hand, and Han took it.
His face half hidden by her hair as it came loose, Han muttered, “You’re gonna fuck him when I’m not around, aren’t you?”
Leia moved against him, his fingers perfect, almost inside her.
“Maybe I won’t wait until you’re not around,” she whispered, her breath catching. “I could get him in here right now. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
He surged above her, catching her mouth in a kiss that wanted to eat her alive.
“Yeah,” he panted, “teach him everything I know. About you. What you. Like -”
“You think you know what I like?”
His lips were on her breast now, making her arch her back; his cock pressing next to his fingers, perfect heat and pressure.
“Yeah, princess, I know what you like. You like good-looking pilots, round about thirty, not a credit to their name, look at you like you hang the stars - uh,” and he slid inside her, where she was slick and aching for him. “You like the ones who care, but sometimes you fuck up, and -”
He broke off, breathing hard against her neck, moving so slowly she knew it was for her, not him.
“Shut up, shut up, Han, you – no, you,” but then she couldn’t talk any more, she was too far gone on the way he touched her, on the rasp in his voice as he continued.
“Teach him how to go down on you for hours, how to do it slow - ” but he couldn’t keep it slow and neither could she, it had been too long and she was right there, on the crest of the wave for so long as he pressed up inside her again and again and again, until it swept her away and she was crying out and clutching at him, her hips moving frantically to get him deeper and deeper as she rode it out.
The good feeling didn’t last.
When Han rolled over, the old walls were all back up again. Shields activated, weapons standing ready. She could see it on his face before he even said anything.
“How old is he anyway?” he said, voice lazy with an edge like poison. “Can’t be much older than Ben, huh?”
There was a special kind of intimacy in that, a blow so low that only one man in the galaxy could have delivered it.
She pulled the sheet off him, slid off the bed and wrapped it round herself. Stood there looking down at him. He was propped up on one elbow, blinking at her. Either this was the reaction he’d expected or it wasn’t.
“You should go before one of us says something they’ll regret,” she said, so many other words fighting to get out.
“Way too late to worry about that now, sweetheart,” he said. And, well. He wasn’t wrong, but there’s always more you can say and more you can do and there is always, always, always more you can regret.
It was only later, once she knew it had been the last time, that the full force of everything she had to regret really hit her.
But by then of course it really was too late.