Chapter Text
Fires on Hoth
Entirely Too Trusting
The trouble with Han was that he was so kriffing expressive.
And Leia was not. She could be sharp as a blade, direct, staggering—all of these things were necessary voices for her. She was a senator, a rebellion leader, and most of all, the princess of a scattered world. If she did not speak firmly and loudly, she would be lost in a galaxy of larger sound. She was used to drawing her face and her tone like a weapon, like a cloaking device.
Han tossed his around gormlessly.
He gawked. He sneered. He scoffed at generals and let incredulity splash across his face at the worst moments. He was not awful at diplomacy; he’d just dismissed the pressure to perform it.
How lovely for him.
Leia, then, was left to witness his displays in meeting after meeting. Equally horrified and fascinated as he blundered his way through and left the offended to clean up the mess of their own reaction.
This was one such a meeting, and Leia couldn’t bring her gaze from her datapad, but she knew what she’d find if she did. Han’s sarcastic lilt dripped with that half-sneer, half-smile, and she wouldn’t be shocked if he’d tossed his arm over the back of his chair like this was an outer rim smuggling den and not a supply line coordination forum for the Hoth base.
Tolbin Farr, squadron leader for the team carrying out the shipments, sighed to her left, and Rieekan cut in, smoothly as ever.
They let Han get away with it.
Because he was a smuggler, and they expected no better of him.
It made her want to climb the walls, like she was so angry that she might grip the smooth, icy surfaces hard enough to defy gravity.
Instead, she shifted her chair closer to the table and stretched out a booted foot, seeking the sprawling legs she knew would be nearby.
When she found him, she gave his ankle a swift kick.
Han started. Their eyes locked, his warm brown ones almost grey in the blue light. His hands rose and fell on his arm rests, and he dragged his slouch into a lean over the table. “Alright there, Princess?” he said in a low, bitter drawl.
Leia tipped her chin down and pretended to re-examine the shipping route. “I believe so, Captain.” Her chilly tone couldn’t quite pass for polite. Mon Mothma frowned.
Be nice to the scoundrel, Leia. Be patient, Leia. He doesn’t know any better, Leia.
Boggling, how they could accept his help and dismiss his merit at once.
“She kicked me under the table,” Han shared, smiling woodenly at her.
Haja Estree, assistant head of Hoth base’s supplies acquisition, choked on a laugh beside him.
“I was stretching.” Leia tried to spear Han into silence with her gaze, but it didn’t work. It never did.
“I know we’re all on edge,” Rieekan said, tentative and appeasing. “But we’re nearly through.”
“Apologies, Captain,” Leia said through her teeth.
Han squinted at her and tilted his head.
“The second ration shipment will arrive from the Daedalus System,” Mon Mothma continued.
“—think she’s just grumpy from that knee,” Han said, as if one of the highest-ranking leaders of the free galaxy hadn’t started speaking again. He waved a hand, pointer finger extended at Haja. “She’s been walking around on that thing all day, you know.”
Haja frowned at her, all wind-chapped wrinkles and black hair wired through with white, these days. Yet another person searching for an excuse to coddle her out of her work.
“All. Day.” Han flexed his hand, repeating the point as if that was necessary.
So now he was mild and conversational.
Leia could’ve spit, but the table was made of ice, and her blood felt so near to boiling that the liquid might’ve burnt right through it.
Han looked back at her, seeking—
—seeking—
Something.
Leia worked her jaw. “Stop,” she mouthed.
Han lifted his brows, nudged that stupid, wavy finger towards his heart. “Me?” he mouthed back.
Leia relocated his mucky, nerfherder boot and exerted a slow, firm pressure onto it with her own. Han’s eyes flashed. His leg shifted.
Suddenly, two boots caged her own. Han’s gaze didn’t flinch as he nudged his foot against hers—almost—almost like a slight cuddling motion.
A mortifying, hot flush swarmed up her throat.
Instincts throttled through her. The urge to—to grab and shake him, or to—to hurtle over the table and plaster his smug, trying smirk to the ground.
She heard none of the rest of the meeting.
Her anger was at such a steam that when the rest of them exited, Leia was last on her feet. The doors cut closed, and she had no thoughts in her mind as she charged around the table. Han half-turned, brow cocked, and then Leia’s hands slammed the wall on either side of him.
He exhaled in a staggered whoosh, his breath heating the air between them, and then he began to laugh. “Got you pretty riled up, didn’t I, Princess?”
“Your behavior,” she seethed. “It’s—it’s absolutely inappropriate.”
Han leaned back into the wall and folded his arms, as though he’d chosen this spot himself. “By whose metric?” He was smiling. Why in the soaring synthstones was he smiling?
She jolted against the wall. “I mean it, Han. Enough.”
His smile faltered. “You started it,” he said.
“I was trying to get you to stop,” she snapped.
Han’s arms fell. “I wasn’t doing anything, your worshipfulness.”
Leia drew a long, tight breath into her chest, but it didn’t loosen anything inside her. She hated that stupid nickname. And he knew it. Oh, he knew it.
“You made me look weak in front of—”
Han’s eyes rolled back, a loud scoff tumbling from his lips. “Weak.” He waved at her, put out. “You took a bad fall, hyperextended your knee, and you’re pretending it’s—”
“It’s none of your business,” she said at the same time.
His eyes narrowed, and his jaw went tight. “You screamed like you’d been shot. I’d never heard you make that noise, your highness.” His teeth gritted at her, and that insolent finger rose, jabbing at the air in front of her. “You know what happens when you don’t maintain a starship?”
“I am not a starship, Han.” They couldn’t stop talking over each other, each sentence ramming into the others, stacking like hot bricks into an impenetrable wall between them.
“It breaks down at the worst—” He darted in at a closer lean. “No look at me,” Han said, furious gaze tracking her like he’d locked her on in the Falcon’s weapons aiming system. “It breaks down at the worst—”
“—possible moment, yes,” she interrupted, exasperated. “I’m not a starship.”
Han’s throat dipped and rose in a slow swallow. “No,” he said roughly. “You’re not.”
“And even if I was,” she said, cooled and sharp. “I—I didn’t ask for your help maintaining me.”
The fire in his eyes didn’t bank.
“There are other, more important things that need your attention,” she tried.
“Are there,” he said, more than asked.
Suddenly, it felt as though she were pinned to the wall, rather than the other way around.
“Captain Solo.” At some point, she’d taken a metaphorical torpedo to the front shields, and the battle turned from certain to shaken with her voice.
“Don’t,” Han said quietly. “Don’t pull that.”
“Han,” she managed.
Inside her mind, red lights were blinking. Crew members surged from the bridge, abandoning the vessel. All tactical, rational thought fled, and it was only fledgling Leia, stripped of armor and plan, alone in the captain’s seat.
His finger brushed beneath her chin.
Oh, oh—
Han waited.
Then, Leia did what she’d promised herself she would never, ever do again.
She leaned in.
Han made a slow ragged breath that built into a low sound in his throat, like a tile on an Alderaanian Daylyt keyboard—a resonance that built as she pressed against him.
Alderaanian music was one of the things she missed most. The tiled keyboard had a range, a strange, simplistic beauty that she didn’t see echoed in any other world. Each pearled square held a sound that was heavy with emotion—grief, joy, worry, contentedness. They couldn’t be slammed upon and bellowed into the air. The sound had to be steadily built. The music required patience to play and enjoy, and notes were often experienced one at a time, rather than layered together.
She kissed Han, and the note she heard was relief. In his breath, in hers. It paced and settled, humming through her.
She had so missed that—the feeling of home.
Leia wrapped herself in it.
The rustle of her scrambling. His heady and coaxing, yet unintelligible Corellian mumbling. Her hands in his hair and his on her face, around her waist. Heat poured from the slice of white shirt between the panels of his black jacket. They rolled and crashed against the kiss like tides on the southern Cobaltia shores.
Leia’s face twisted tight in concentration, slackened in awe—Han drew it out of her without her meaning to.
She could do this. She could. She could be mindless and just let go—
“I love you.”
Han’s voice was throaty, winded, the words in basic slipping from him as he drank the embrace like a man who’d spent a life staggering through wasteland only to find water at last.
Leia froze.
Han kept kissing her. For a moment—only a moment, really. And then what he’d said, the language he’d said it in, and how she’d responded seemed to seep through that impossibly warm heart, and his hands slowed and stilled. His right thumb faltered half-way through its journey over her cheek.
His forehead was pressed to hers as he broke his mouth away a scant few inches. His chest dipped and rose heavily in one, then two breaths.
“Leia,” he said, guarded, like they were about to have something out. Bracing. Like this was yet another stupid thing he might needle and persuade her about.
It was too late, though.
Han was not someone she could be mindless with. That would be heartless. He was a smuggler, a survivor of extreme poverty and violence, and those words would not come easily to him.
But he was wrong. He was starved for affection. Every glance from those eyes screamed for closeness, for tenderness, for being held, and—and... Leia did not do those things. Had not, since Tarkin turned back from Admiral Motti and said, “You are entirely too trusting.”
She had learned young that she might be snatched from her home, but she’d never anticipated her home being snatched from her—not so fully. Not so devastatingly, entirely, completely at once.
A different time, and a different galaxy, and maybe they’d have been a pair. But not in this one. Leia stepped back.
He was clinging to one of the first substantial connections he’d made in ages, but that didn’t make it a good idea.
“I apologize, Captain,” she said.
Han’s face contorted in irritation. “Oh, don’t give me that kriffing—”
Leia turned stiffly and marched for the door.
“Leia—” Han called.
It whooshed open.
“Leia!”
Then it shut.
Leia gathered herself as she strode through the flickering corridor. Energy charts, patrol schedules, intelligence briefings…
She filled her mind with the important things.
She’d have to convince Han this was nothing. A bit more distance, steadfast formality. With luck, someone else would begin to step on his foot under the desk and kiss him senseless when no one was looking.
The thought made her throat burn, made the curves of her ribcage compress in, in, in, to play a steady, aching note. Something lost between desperation, duty, and mourning.
The pain in her knee was nothing compared to this.
She proceeded with the operation anyway. Filed herself back into leadership and command. She did not look back through the window of the meeting chamber’s door to see the impact in her wake.
Leia Organa was strong, not heartless. She knew what a home looked like as it shattered.
She drew her wrist to her mouth to hide the drip from her nose and muffle the shudder in her lungs. This was not her fault, entirely.
He was entirely too trusting.