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Han hasn’t had an honest-to-god water shower in years, and never one this warm. Lady Proxima often complained that human children stank and required regular hosings to be bearable, but no one was wasting energy heating up the bath water for dozens of orphans. The Empire, even stricter about the hygiene of their soldiers, provided nothing more luxurious than two minute daily sonics.
Han eyes the cascade of water falling from the ceiling. He sticks out a suspicious hand to test it. He’s so shocked by the heat that he stands stock-still for a long second, dumbfounded. Then he clambers straight in. He should have made the connection earlier. This is a Y-45 hauler Beckett has made off with, and if there’s one thing he knows about Y-45s, aside from their spotty relationship with the laws of hyperspace physics, it's that their antiquated cooling system requires actual water to circulate through the engine. A side-effect he hadn’t considered was the potential for diverting that coolant into the greatest invention the galaxy has ever known: the hot shower.
He stands under the water, unmoving, eyes closed, for much too long. He can’t bring himself to move, to scrub at the layers of mud and sweat and blood that have accumulated on him over the past week. Not even Imperial soldiers have access to sonics in the middle of an entrenched land campaign. He shivers, not with cold but with nerves. His platoon had been run ragged on the ground for days; the troopers who got blown up right at the start were the lucky ones. He’s pretty sure he tore something dodging a pulse grenade yesterday. Plus, that fall into the wookiee’s cage, not to mention the thrashing afterwards, didn't do him any favours. Now that the adrenaline of escape is wearing off, he’s fairly certain he’s got a broken rib, a lot of damn bruises, and probably a concussion.
He cracks an eye when he hears the ‘fresher door open. He turns to see the wookiee ducking in under the doorframe. His fur hangs so thick with caked mud Han can hardly tell where his face begins. He shoulders his way under the water next to Han, the breadth of him filling the cubicle. He smells horrendous.
“We couldn’t have done this maybe one at a time?” Han complains, but he knows it’s unfair. He’s been hogging.
The wookiee tells him as much.
“Yeah, yeah,” Han grumbles. He turns his back, close-quarters barracks protocol, and squeezes a palmful of soap from the dispenser on the wall. It takes him a couple minutes to scrub clean, his hair the worst of it. He turns back around, ready to provide a good-natured grumble about the inconvenience of it all, but stops dead when he sees the shape the wookiee’s still in. “Damn. You’ve got a lot of fur, huh.”
The wookiee looks at him miserably, both hands curled in the tangled pelt of his chest. The water around their feet is sludge, and although Han can finally see a suggestion of russet hair on the wookiee’s head and shoulders, the rest of him is still matted black with mud.
“Uhhh,” says Han. “Do you… want a hand?”
The wookiee glowers at him, hesitating, then agrees with a duck of his shaggy head.
“Okay, just-- Hold on.” Han reaches for the soap dispenser’s little lever, then stops. It’s just not realistic.
He pulls the whole unit off the wall.
~*~
Chewbacca, Han learns a few hours later, has been in captivity for at least two months, although he’s fuzzy on exact dates. Or maybe Han just isn’t understanding him correctly through the enormous mouthfuls of food the wookiee’s shovelling into his face.
“That’s strange,” Han says, making an uncharacteristic point of chewing and swallowing before speaking.
Another perk of stealing an active transport ship right off the battlefield is the entire cache of supplies they found in the cramped mess, which Beckett suggested they help themselves to. The table is small, particularly for someone of Chewbacca’s height, but he hasn’t seemed to mind much of anything since Han dug into the little cold-stasis unit and emerged with a neatly butchered haunch of some kind. Han had opened his mouth to say, “I’m not sure if that's cooked yet…” but the wookiee grabbed the meat straight out his hand and put it directly into his own mouth and that was that.
“I didn’t realise the legion had taken…” He hesitates, then figures why not call a spanner a spanner. “...slaves on Mimban. Seems like a waste of time, especially since they didn’t even put you to work”
Why do assholes need an excuse to be assholes, Chewbacca replies. Or something like that anyway, it’s hard to tell around the meat in his teeth.
Han nods. “True enough.” He eats another tangy spoonful of what he’s fairly certain is pudding. “I’m sorry that happened to you, it’s--” He chews his bottom lip. There’s no getting around the fact that, even if for reasons infinitely more practical than ideological, he’d been wearing the same uniform as the people who captured Chewbacca and starved him in a pit for months. “It’s not right.”
Yeah, no shit, Chewbacca tells him. But ruder. The epithet is culturally untranslatable.
Han sighs. He scratches his neck. He’s starting to feel warm. “I guess it’s not worth much, but I’m not-- I wasn’t--” He trails off.
Chewbacca chews, silently watching him. When Han continues to flounder, he offers an observation on the nature of necessity and misfortune.
“Yes,” says Han, relieved. “Exactly. I’m-- I needed the job, it wasn’t because I really thought that the Empire… I don’t believe in any of that stuff, manifest destiny or imperial obligation or, I guess, ‘order’ at all.” He looks down at the pink swirl of the pudding in his bowl. “I just roll with the punches, you know?”
Chewbacca chortles. He describes, colourfully, just how good Han is at getting punched.
“Stuff it.” Han braces his elbow on the table and points at Chewbacca with his spoon. “I was at a staggering physiological disadvantage and I still managed to survive a raging wookiee attack, I think I did pretty good.”
Chewbacca reminds him about the two months of intermittent starvation.
“Ah, don’t sell yourself short,” Han mutters. He’s getting very warm. He hasn’t felt like this in… a while. He looks away from Chewbacca’s face, the grey and ginger curls that have exploded all over him since their shower, the smirk showing, carnivorously, in a peek of fangs. Han takes a deep breath. He stares down at his pudding. “You know what?” he says, thick-tongued. “I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to whatever this is.”
Chewbacca eyes the red splotches sprouting up Han’s wrists and forearms. He grumbles, calls Han an idiot decorative plant, and hauls him upstairs to find an antihistamine hypo.
~*~
Once Han can breathe and see again, he wants nothing more than to sleep for a week.
Rio, perched next to him on the hallway bench Han’s been draped over for the past fifteen minutes, squints at the blood pressure readout on his flimsy. He’s looking at it upside-down. “I think you’re good to go. I’m not sure what human baseline is, to be entirely honest, but these numbers have gotten smaller in the last few minutes, so…”
“Good enough for me.” Han’s exhausted beyond the ability to care about anything so paltry as organ failure. “Where are the bunks?”
One of Rio’s arms point down the hallway. Chewbacca, leaning against the wall opposite Han’s bench and looking almost as deflated as Han feels, provides a grim prediction.
Han makes a face. “Is it one room the size of an iso chip?”
“Oh, no!” Rio grins. “Beckett and Val and I are in the room the size of an iso chip. You and Chewbacca get the broom closet next door.”
Han and Chewbacca groan in unison.
Two of Rio’s hands pat Han’s shoulders. “Suffering is character building, soldier.”
Han pushes himself upright. His limbs feel about as sturdy as overripe bantha cheese. “Well, then, I’ve got enough character for a whole franchise.”
“That’s the spirit!”
Chewbacca steps forward as Han gets to his feet, but stops just short of reaching out. Han steadies himself on the wall. He gestures. “After you.”
Chewbacca mutters that regardless of who gets there first, he won’t be the one on the bottom.
Han trips over his own feet, but quickly rights himself before Chewbacca can grab for him. He grimaces a pained smile. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”
The room isn’t quite as bad as Han pictured. There are no actual brooms, for one, and there's a pile of blankets stacked just outside the door. With a little creative rearranging of what looks to be nearly a decade’s worth of accumulated junk, it could be downright cozy.
Han peers up at Chewbacca. “Honestly? Better than most of the places I’ve slept in a while.”
Chewbacca doesn’t need to mention his months in the mud cage again. His pointed look conveys his feelings just fine.
~*~
As it turns out, it really doesn’t matter who got there first; there’s barely enough room for both of them to lie down at the same time, and by necessity of weight and height, Chewbacca mostly does end up on the bottom. Han offers, with barely-concealed reluctance, to sleep in the hall instead, but one look at the narrowness of the corridor and a silent shared consideration of what might happen to a hapless body lying on the floor in the event of someone heading for the ‘fresher in the dark puts an end to that.
“Hey.” Han, kneeling on the mat of blankets they’ve laid out, extends a hand. “I won’t kick if you don’t.”
Chewbacca considers his hand as if he’s unsure whether to shake it or bite it off.
“Oookay.” Han retracts his hand. “We’ll just let nature take its course.”
Without another word, Chewbacca curls up like a hairy pillbug, limbs and head disappearing into the curly mess of himself. There’s just enough space left between him and the wall for Han. Han wedges himself in, squirming to fit, and is asleep nearly before his head touches the blanket.
~*~
Wookiees, Han remembers, are cuddlers.
He remembers this when he wakes up being smothered by what feels like a rug with tentacles. He thrashes, blind and claustrophobic, legs pinned, face buried in hair, before figuring out what’s happening. Chewbacca stirs at his flailing. He mumbles without words, a soft trill at the back of his throat. It’s an absent, comforting sort of sound that brings Han up short. One sleeping kitten in the pile purring at another.
The starbursts of panic begin to fade. The world resolves itself into something reasonable. It’s fine, Han realises. He’s fine. Nothing’s wrong. He’s safe. Safer than he has been in a long time, and warmer. In the dark, he can’t even tell how tiny the closet is, how cramped they are. This is the closest he’s slept to anyone since losing Qi’ra, except a few nights here and there with a fellow cadet who’d managed to fare even worse in the Academy than Han. This is… This is nice? Yeah. It’s nice. He always manages to forget, in the long lonely interims, how much he likes being touched.
He lets out a breath, unclenching his fingers from the handfuls of fur they’d defensively clutched. Everything’s fine. He shuts his eyes and tucks his face back into whatever body part of Chewbacca’s is closest. His pelt only smells a little like mud now. Mostly soap, mostly wookiee. It’s just familiar enough to let Han drift back to sleep.
~*~
In the morning, before Han even opens his eyes, Chewbacca tells him he failed to uphold his end of the no kicking bargain.
“We never shook on it,” Han says, yawning. He untangles his legs from Chewbacca’s and stretches as best he can, hands touching one wall and feet the other. “It was no man’s land in here, no holds barred.”
Chewbacca disagrees, but Han can tell he’s joking. Han replies in some deliberately parochial Shyriiwook that calls down an ancestral curse on Chewbacca’s foot hair.
Chewbacca chortles, his elbow banging Han’s head as he sits up. He apologises quickly by touching Han’s cheek with two fingers.
“S’okay.” Han drags himself up too, twisting to work out the kink in his back. “I’ve got a thick skull.”
Chewbacca asks where he learned the language, and why his accent is so terrible, even for a human epiglottis.
Han wrinkles his nose. “It’s not that bad, is it?”
Chewbacca cocks his head sympathetically.
Han grimaces, shifting so he can lean back against the wall. He faces Chewbacca, his feet tucked under the wookiee’s bent knees. It seems like the sort of thing that would have felt awkward yesterday, but now would be weirder not to do. “There was, uh…” He pauses, unsure how to describe the peculiarities of his adolescent social circles. “A girl I knew. A wookiee girl. She taught me.”
It hadn’t been so deliberate as all that, in reality. She’d cursed at him for a week straight while he followed her around Proxima’s underground, fascinated by the novelty of her voice and the vibrant colour of her coat, the first wookiee he’d ever met. By the time he managed to charm her with his persistent presence, and his insistence on copying every sound she yowled at him with a glee that was half genuine curiosity and half flirtatious needling, her hostility had become grudging tolerance and then… Well.
Chewbacca wonders if she had taught him bad grammar on purpose or if Han was just a terrible student.
Han opens his mouth to defend himself, then pauses. “You know,” he says after a moment, “probably a healthy mix.”
Chewbacca rolls his eyes. Then he knocks the wind right out of Han’s sails by asking if he’d had sex with the wookiee girl, and if that’s why he has that stupid look on his face right now.
Whatever the stupid look is, Han guesses, it isn’t improved by turning four shades of red. He stutters, “Well-- I-- Y’know-- I didn’t not…”
He sure hadn’t not. For nearly three months he hadn’t not, until Imperial attention got too heavy for her liking and she’d hitched a ride out of Proxima’s territory with a passing crew of Rodians. He never saw her again, but it had been one hell of an eventful time.
Chewbacca shows Han an alarming majority of his teeth, panting a laugh in the back of his mouth. It’s such a specific sort of sound, teasing, intimate, that it takes Han right back to those thrilling days of huddling in hidden cubbies under a stolen blanket, or behind a heap of broken actuator units at the junkyard, avoiding curfew to spend just a few more minutes furthering interspecies relations, as he’d jokingly called it once (and only once).
It was only to be expected, Chewbacca suggests, because all children are terrible perverts.
That brings Han up short. He frowns, a little cold knot forming suddenly in the base of his stomach. Maybe it’s just hunger, but he’s pretty sure it’s not. “Do you think so?” he asks. “I mean, do you really think it’s perverted?” It’s never really occurred to him, but perhaps the opportunistic philosophy of love he learned at the knee of a backwater planet, where a kid’s next happy moment was as unpredictable as their next meal, isn’t as universal as he thought.
Chewbacca regards him. He waggles his head. He says no.
Han nods. The knot uncurls. “Okay. Good.” He swallows, trying on a sharp flashing smile. “Hey, what do you say we go find some breakfast?”
~*~
It’s just that… He’s usually right about these things. Being right about these things is what’s kept him alive this long, and he’s not often wrong when it comes to matters of survival. The look Chewbacca gave him in the shower that first day, that first hour. The way he crowded into Han’s space and leaned over him under the water. The way he holds Han’s shoulder and blocks him into corners, offers him food, nudges up against him when they lie down to sleep, the softened edge to how he calls Han a moron. The unquestioned, silent agreement that they’re a team now, partners, a package deal. How they work together, easy, intuitive, sure of each other.
It’s comfortable, and neither of them have said a thing about it, and that makes Han uneasy. As far as he knows, these things have a certain ritual to them. A contract, implied or explicit, about who benefits and how. He doesn’t like not knowing the terms of what’s coming.
~*~
That’s what he says, finally, when it comes down to it: “I don’t like not knowing what’s coming at me.” He says it, breath squeezed in his throat, with one hand braced on Chewie’s chest and the other on the wall behind himself. He says, “I don’t like being out of control.”
Chewie, overtop him, laughs. Calls him a shitty liar.
Han curses himself for never having mastered his own blush reflex. It must be bright as a beacon in the dark hallway. New plan. He lets his spine go a little loose, his head dropping back to show his neck. He tightens his fingers in Chewie’s fur. “Well,” he drawls. “That’s just what I want you to think.”
Chewie rolls his eyes. Han tries to find anything in himself that’s intimidated by the heaviness of Chewie’s arm on his shoulder, the height and strength of him this close. He looks deep within himself. He comes up empty-handed.
Chewie’s hand curls around the back of his neck. This time, Han’s spine goes loose without his say-so. He breathes out, shaky.
“I’m not scared of you,” he whispers.
Chewie leans down and tells him, without saying a word, that that’s exactly how it should be.