Work Text:
They have more time than Leia knows what to do with on the way to Cloud City. Admittedly, she has something new and distracting to occupy her. She had suspected at first that she and Han would kill each other if confined together in a small ship for a long period of time, but whatever it is they're doing right now, killing each other doesn't seem to be it.
Han and Chewbacca work on the ship, and she helps as much as she can; Han's started teaching her to fly the Falcon, a more complicated ship than the shuttles she's piloted before; she and Han spend a lot of time together; and she's sleeping better than she has in a long time, curled up in a warm bed where no one, at the moment, can find them.
But there still seem to be a lot of extra hours in each day. Leia has never had days that weren't packed with responsibilities, except for holidays that involved carefully planned recreational activities. She's not actually sure what to do with herself without a schedule.
This morning, Chewbacca is still asleep, and Han is taking apart the environmental controls system in an attempt to rid the air of a persistent annoying chill, and the ship is on autopilot through an uneventful stretch of space, and no one needs Leia to do anything. It's as good an opportunity as any to explore the ship and its contents more thoroughly.
She feels a little ashamed of snooping, even though she's been invited to make herself at home, but only a little. She harbors some idea that the beginning of even a wartime fling – her best guess at what they're having, although she really doesn't know – ought to involve getting to know each other better. There are ways in which she feels she knows Han completely by now, and ways in which she is learning more about him every day. That talking to him feels like talking to a friend, when they're not trying to take each other apart. That he can be surprisingly affectionate, his arm going easily around her waist, his hand finding hers to hold as if that's a thing people do casually all the time.
What she still feels she's missing is basic biographical fact. She has extracted from him, with some difficulty, such monumental secrets as what may be his actual age, the fact that he's been running the Falcon with Chewbacca for about ten years, and the reluctant acknowledgment that he did a brief stint in the Imperial Navy, years ago. Since the Alliance wouldn't have a fleet without a steady stream of defecting Academy-trained pilots, she's not sure why this required tactful probing.
She has an entire list of other questions she'd like answers to, things like, so, do you have any children? or, so, exactly how many people want to kill you, and why? or, so, what was your family like, and is there anyone who still worries about you? It's just that she knows that asking all those questions, especially in rapid succession, will lead to Han complaining, "What is this, an interrogation?" and finding something in the noisiest parts of the ship that it's critical for him to take apart.
Which leaves her playing anthropologist, trying to extract meaning from material objects, since her only possible local informant is Chewbacca, who seems to have decided that he approves of whatever it is that she and Han are doing, which is good, but also doesn't seem inclined to try to explain Han to her.
She starts in Han's cabin, although she's seen everything there already. The bed is surprisingly comfortable, not standard issue, and made up with covers that are thicker and softer than Alliance-issue survival blankets. There's a huge closet that would probably have an extra person sleeping in it, on an Alliance base.
"Why do you have a walk-in closet?" she'd asked early on, bemused.
He snorted. "That's Lando's fault."
"The friend we're going to see?"
"He had this ship before I did. He cared a lot about clothes." Han shrugged as if there was no accounting for peculiar tastes.
Han's clothes don't even fill half the closet. She's seen all of them on him, a few pairs of dark trousers, a number of white shirts, an even smaller number of shirts in sober colors, a couple of jackets. It's obviously not the closet of someone who cares about clothes. Leia could fit her entire wardrobe in the empty space, if her entire wardrobe weren't on a transport at the rendezvous point. She tries not to miss the clothes she had on Alderaan, because she knows that's petty, although most things that she misses about Alderaan that aren't petty are unbearable to think about. It's possible to stand wishing that she had her old favorite sweater and a pair of warm slippers. She gets tired of always wearing boots, and the deck is cold under her bare feet.
The fresher is even less informative. The current towels are worn and mismatched, and one is covered in advertising slogans in a language she doesn't read, but they're still softer than Alliance issue. The floor is perpetually damp and could use a bathmat. The soap in the shower has a crisp, spicy scent that she is coming to like, although it isn't really adequate for dealing with her hair.
She leaves the cabin behind and prowls through the rest of the ship. The cockpit is empty, the Falcon still on autopilot, and she knows better than to take the controls without permission on someone else's ship. Han is a more patient teacher than she expected, although when she thinks about it, she's seen him be patient with the young Alliance pilots in simulations, pushing them to try the same maneuver over and over until they get it right. She thinks he must have had a good teacher himself, once. At the Academy? Training to be a fighter pilot, until suddenly that door closed?
She's not hungry yet, but she wanders into the galley anyway. They're well-stocked with provisions, mostly Alliance rations, but some commercial packages purchased on Han's supply runs.
"We'd run out of fuel before we ran out of food," Han said when she first raised the question. He considered that for a minute. "At which point, granted, we'd eventually run out of food. But we're not going to run out of fuel. Don't worry about it."
She's not worrying about it, although her list of things she's not worrying about has gotten long. The Alliance rations are Alliance rations, revealing nothing but the shortcomings of ordering military supplies for their durability rather than their taste. The commercial packages reveal a taste for grease, salt, and strong flavors of all kinds, but if there's anything here that’s comfort food from Corellia, she can't identify it. This is the street food of a dozen different planets. Most of it isn't bad, although at this point she'd kill for a salad.
There are a few bottles of ale, and she knows there's a bottle of whiskey stored away in the lounge, but as far as she can tell, Han doesn't drink when he's working. She's seen him with a drink in his hand at Alliance celebrations, but she's never seen him drunk, and although she knows for a fact that he brought back multiple cases of liquor on his last supply run and sold it all under the table in a matter of hours, he doesn't seem to have kept back much for himself.
The lounge is quiet, Threepio recharging rather than racketing around, and Han still not in sight. There's a game board here, and they've played a few games, but mostly Han and Chewie leave the board set up for long games against each other, exchanging moves as they pass through the lounge over the course of the day, and she doesn't like to interfere.
There's a holoprojector, and she rifles through the holodiscs in Han's collection, although they're labeled in mismatched writing, and she suspects he's been trading in these on the base as well. There are a number of travel programs, fantasy trips to exotic places with beautiful scenery or historic landmarks. She's surprised that's interesting to him, although she supposes he can't have been everywhere. There are fewer space adventures than she expected, although that might be too much like real life.
She watches a few minutes of a broad comedy in which nothing more alarming happens than a case of mistaken identity and romantic confusion. It's the kind of thing she might have watched with her friends when she was younger, in the moments when she wasn't trying to spend her leisure time on classic literature or culturally important works for self-improvement. She isn't in the mood for self-improvement at the moment.
There's also a datapad loaded with books, which surprised her when he first offered it to her, and then made her feel bad for having been surprised. Even on normal transits, he must have a lot of time to kill in hyperspace. The selection is broad and varied, but she can identify a few patterns. More travel stories, and adventures set on exotic planets. A few older books that look like Corellian classics, which he is probably not reading for self-improvement. More modern books that are decidedly not romances, because the hero spends a lot of time blowing things up before getting the girl, but in which he does, eventually, get the girl.
There's an entire series of boys' adventure books titled things like Val Raiden and the Golden Asteroid and Val Raiden and the Planet of Doom. The publication dates match up with Han's childhood years, and she finds herself charmed. She tries to imagine Han as a Corellian schoolboy smuggling cheap novels into school and getting in trouble for not paying attention in class.
She has no idea whether anything about that picture is correct. Han doesn't volunteer information about his early life, how he decided to attend the Academy, what Corellia was like when he was growing up, or anything that would contradict the idea that he sprang to life fully-formed at the age of twenty. It's hard to ration her questions. It would help if he asked more questions about her own past, but although he listens when she talks about people she used to know, he doesn't probe, probably feeling that the fact that all those people are dead is likely to be a sore subject.
He's being tactful. She appreciates it that he knows how to be tactful. It's refreshing after Rebel pilots who are brash and honest and blundering and never seem to know when to stop talking. And Han does know when to stop talking, although he's by no means taciturn. They've been talking a lot in the last few days. It's just that she's not sure how much she's learned, beyond establishing the fact that they both want to be doing whatever it is that they're doing.
Probably he would tell her that's the important part right now. Probably she worries too much. Probably she should put worrying too much on her list of things to try to worry about less.
"Hey," Han says from behind her, and waits until she tilts her head back to look up at him to put his hands on her shoulders. He's always been good about that, about not taking her by surprise. It's not that they don't understand each other, in some ways.
She leans back into the touch, and he rubs her shoulders. "How's the environmental control system looking?"
"I think it's getting warmer in here," he says. "Want some food, or have you died of boredom waiting for me to finish?"
"I'm not quite that bored yet," she says, and reaches up to twine her fingers through his, as if that were a thing that people did all the time.
*****
They've finally sprung Han from the medical bay, so he is, officially, fine. That's what he's been trying to tell them since the previous day. He's spent some time walking around and talking to people who seem genuinely happy to see him back, although a number of them also seem to feel guilty.
He's not particularly invested in making them feel better about not having mounted an Alliance rescue, even if he's not sure that the Alliance would have done a better job than his friends did on their own. He's heard the official line repeated by people who sound like they're trying to persuade themselves – taking on Jabba was too dangerous, they don't take risks like that for one man, he wasn't captured in the line of duty, etc. He's also heard that Leia told them where to get off, in terms not commonly used by princesses, and that she was going after him herself, with or without anybody else's help.
He really didn't expect that. He figured he'd hit the end of the road. He knew Chewie would feel like he had to try for a rescue, and hoped that he wouldn't get himself killed in the process. But Leia was more sensible than that. She'd be sad about it, but she'd go on. He'd be one of her regrets.
He's getting tired now even though he's done essentially nothing since he left the medical bay, which is irritating, but which he blames on having been on one planet, and then in hibernation, and then on another planet, and then on ship's time, all in rapid succession. It's a relief to step aboard the Falcon, and to see – now that he trusts his vision a hundred percent – that his ship seems to be fine, too.
He heads back to his cabin and figures he'll crash for a while and then find Leia and tell her – he's not sure what he wants to tell her, except, thanks, which he's probably said already, but which he could probably stand to say at least one more time.
They slept in his cabin on the way back to the fleet from Tatooine, but he doesn't remember much of that except falling asleep the moment he hit the bed, with Leia tucked warm under his arm and the hum of the Falcon's hyperdrive in his ears. Now he's aware of things he missed before. One of Leia's jackets is draped over a chair. Leia's winter boots are neatly lined up in a corner, and a pair of light slippers is by the bed.
He's pretty sure she didn't have the slippers when they arrived on Bespin. Either a few days ago or several months ago, depending on how you look at it, and he's trying not to look at it, because he doesn't want to remember being in carbon freeze, and the events of the day before that weren't too hot either, and this is a bad line of thought that he cuts off by investigating the state of his cabin.
A lot of her clothes have appeared in his closet, Alliance-issue uniforms and some pieces he brought back for her one time or another by special request, because the Alliance uniforms aren't made to fit someone her size. A couple of white dresses he's seen her wear for ceremonies or parties. A couple of outfits he's never seen that look like they're intended for less stuffy parties, making him wonder exactly what kind of trouble Lando got her into while they were looking for him.
In the fresher, her hairbrush is on the sink, and there's something striped and fluffy on the floor in front of the shower. There are some Alliance-issue towels, although his towels are also here. There's a hair dryer. He's pretty sure he didn't own a hair dryer.
He crawls into bed and thinks about her sleeping here, while he's been gone. He'll go see her, in just a little while.
He wakes up because someone else is in the room, and then realizes that Leia is lying beside him, once again tucked under his arm, having managed to come in without waking him, which he wouldn't have thought anybody could do.
"Hey," he says, and she twines her fingers through his.
"You seem better," she says, squeezing his hand.
"I'm fine, don't worry about me." She's warm against his shoulder. "I'm just glad to see the Falcon's in one piece."
"Chewie took good care of her. And I've been staying in your cabin while you were gone, not Lando. Chewie didn't want him getting ideas."
"About the Falcon, or about you?"
"I'm not interested in Lando, Han."
"Well, good."
"I'm afraid a lot of my stuff is still in here," she says, as if there's a question she's not quite asking.
"That's not a problem," he says, and tightens his arm around her.
"I mean, I haven't had a lot of time to move it."
"You're busy," he says. "There's no hurry."
"Well, if there's no hurry," she says, and relaxes against his shoulder.
His hand is fisted in the fabric of her shirt. He's not in a hurry for her to go anywhere.
"Thanks," he says, after a while. "For the rescue."
"You knew I'd come for you."
"Sure," he says.
There's a pause. "You didn't know I would, did you?"
"It didn't look good," he says.
"I would never leave you," she says, as if that were a thing that he always should have known.
And it isn't, but maybe he's learning. He strokes her hair.
"I bought a bathmat," she says after he's half certain that she's asleep.
"A what?"
"A bathmat," she says, as if this is a thing that people generally have. "For my feet."
He probably ought to object on general principle, but right now he doesn't feel like he minds at all.