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Millennium Falcon: Day 2 After Han’s Rescue from Jabba
Han awoke with a startled gasp, alone. He squinted and blinked - although his vision was better - it was not quite restored. The warmth of Leia tucked along the length of him last night, holding him tight while he shook and retched, fever raging, had felt like good medicine to his battered body. To hear he had been frozen a year and unable to see the changes that year had wrought on his friends had been horribly disorienting.
Leia had excused herself an hour ago, with a departing kiss on his forehead and a caress of his cheek, to join a Rebel Alliance command call. He was consumed by restless energy, and yet too weak to leave his cabin or exercise it.
Even after being frozen in stasis an entire year, he was unaccustomed to stillness and afraid of being alone with his disjointed thoughts. An entire year. While he couldn’t see Leia’s face clearly yesterday, he saw enough to know the time had taken a great toll on her. The kid, too. They had changed and grown, grown closer together, suffered, and he hadn’t been there. Leia had sparingly told him some details of how time had passed and the difficulty in locating him and then executing his rescue. But they hadn’t talked about them. That helplessness of not being there had begun to gnaw at him. He had so many questions. About Leia. About them. Did she still love him? He thought she did. She had told him at his rescue. Did she want him to stay? What was next?
They used to be so comfortable leaving things unsaid. His lack of vision and the confusion over having lost the entire year she had suffered through were causing his thoughts to race manically. What he needed was to really talk to her, which couldn't happen at the moment. She hadn't said what, but the Alliance was planning something big and very secret. He needed a distraction before he spun out and lost his shit entirely.
He reached up blindly to fumble his hand around the storage locker near the bunk in search of something to distract him from his thoughts and the accompanying doubts. With a huff of frustration at the exhausting effort of just raising his arm, he roughly shoved aside some of Leia's trinkets (had she been spending a lot of time in their cabin when he was wall art?). After clumsily knocking over several items, his hand brushed against his old datapad. He hazily recalled the audial book on the history of feminism on Corellia that he and Leia had listened to on that weeks-long flight to Bespin…when they weren’t naked in the bunk. It wasn't a thriller by any means, but it was good and would pass some time.
He powered on the scuffed device. The screen opened to what looked like a notebook, if the neat horizontal lines were any indication. He squinted and roughly rubbed his eyes again, hoping they would clear enough for him to see what was on the screen. Fuck! He hated not being able to see. It threw off his entire sensory perception and left him feeling vulnerable and simultaneously over-stimulated and sensory deprived. He angrily jabbed a finger in the direction of the text-to-narrate button. A droid voice began to read a poem.
A Vision
I gaze into the mirror with blindfolds on,
Seeing red but needing answers;
To investigate a truth or notion
To feel and touch before it’s gone.
But I have been so resistant to see,
To look with honesty and open eyes;
That time has rolled by and still,
I question, fearful of the truth I flee.
That I have deceived myself so long,
Instead of leaping in, I ran away;
Pushing and shoving violently,
Always too weak to be strong.
I’m so angry he will fight for me,
But never commit to stay;
He’ll give me glimpses of him,
And stop short of letting us BE.
So exhausted from terror, loss and pain,
The dread of loving and leaving;
Yet, he, we are worth the risk,
I can’t let anger and fear be our last refrain.
I have a vision of both of us whole
Together, a team – and happy;
Holding tight to each other
in a moment and life we stole
Ok, Hotshot, Ok
Han sucked in a breath through his teeth, utterly shamed to find his throat felt tight. He could hardly inhale, choked with emotion as he was. He warred with himself for control, unaccustomed to feeling like his heart had been punched and embraced simultaneously. He found the sensation uncomfortable and alien to the extreme. He flexed his jaw, bunched his fists at his sides, let his eyes flutter closed, and breathed, in, out, in, out until he had himself under some control.
Snatching up the old datapad to his bruised chest like a lifeline, Han's back sank down the wall of his bunk and he curled into himself. Leia had consented to his kiss a year and a month ago. It had been an emancipated moment of pent-up yearning. She had run away after the interruption but sought him out soon after. He had waited so long for her, almost past the point of endurance, and then suddenly she was ready to be a them.
Their guards came down and they relented, bodies pressed together in desperate touch. They had talked and laughed, and had been…happy. For a few weeks, even with the stress of limping towards an unknown future, they had come together and redirected the frustration and longing of the past few years into the most fucking amazing time in his life. For years he had settled for her unguarded moments, and she his. For those few happy weeks, the unguarded moments had turned into hours, then days, then weeks. Until it had ended with Leia’s declaration of love on that platform, followed by a cold, unrelenting darkness. And now…the anxiety of not knowing what they were today, after so much had changed, churned his stomach.
Han had long viewed love as a weakness like any other addiction- gambling, spice, sex - something that someone else could exploit. A vulnerability once utterly unacceptable to a man who had learned every life lesson the hardest way. But…that firmly held philosophy had eroded over the past three…no four years, as his friendship with, and then love for Leia had begun to grow so incrementally the enormity and depth of it all snuck up on him.
The whoosh of the door being palmed open startled Han, and his head snapped up at the sound. It seemed his hearing was attempting to make up for his lack of vision. One more thing he’d need time to adjust to.
Han couldn’t see it, but Leia’s face colored when she saw the poem opened on the beat up tablet. She sighed and crossed over to the bunk and nudged him over so she could join him.
“I didn’t mean for you to see that, love.” Leia said softly.
“Are you gonna have to kill me now, Sweetheart?” Han teased, as he reached with an unsteady hand to gently caress her back. He wanted to start a more serious conversation, but that could lead to his destruction, so he decided to wait it out.
Leia sighed at the contact, burying her face in his chest and squeezing her arm possessively around his neck.
“I only just got you back, so maybe in a few more days.” Her intentionally light response was undermined by the desperate way she clung to him.
Han chuckled and shifted to his side so he could better try to read her face.
“How come you didn’t want me to see it?”
“I didn’t want you to see it because it’s objectively terrible poetry. I wrote most of it after we kissed after Hoth. I added the last stanza after you were frozen. Both times I was an emotional wreck.”
“I don’t know much about poetry, but I thought it was pretty damn good.”
“Well you would think that since it’s about you.” She had been stroking his hair to soothe him and ruffled it as she teased.
He smiled and made eye contact – at least he thought he did. He moved in to kiss her lips, but missed and got her nose instead. She chuffed out a breath, attempting not make him feel bad for missing and adjusted their position so Han was on his back and her head rested on his chest. He winced with the force with which she hugged him across his bruised ribs.
"I love you." The moment flashed in his mind, helping to anchor him to the real, the now. He wrapped his arm tightly around her waist and pulled her tighter. It was the first time she had ever said it out loud. He had said it to her many times on that long trip, while she had been unable to verbalize it. Leia’s love had been communicated in myriad other ways on the trip to Cloud City. He knew.
Leia sighed again, less playful this time - more melancholy. She removed her arm from around his neck to trace his scar and mouth before moving up his body to place gentle kisses on his neck, chin, and finally lips.
“Leia,” Han sighed. Overcome again with a lump in his throat. He cleared it uncomfortably. “We..we wasted so much time. Years. And then we had just those weeks together. Do you even still want this?” He gestured between them. “You don’t owe me anything. I get that a lot of time has passed for you while it stopped for me.”
“Listen, the only thing that kept me going after you were frozen…” Leia faltered, a haunted look in eyes brimming with unshed tears. She took another moment to compose herself before continuing.
“The only thing, Han, was the hope we could have this,” She returned the gesture, and then tipped his chin down so he might see her face, however blurry. “That I could hold you and tell you I love you again.”
Han’s face crumpled – he couldn’t say if it was shocked relief or exhaustion and trauma. He let the enormity of what was taken from them, the injustice of it, leak out the sides of his eyes and shake his shoulders while Leia held him. After a long while, when his tears were shed and he dried his eyes with unsteady hands, he looked down at Leia and could finally see more of her beautiful face.
“I love you,” Han returned, kissing her temple tenderly. Such simple words loaded with so much promise. His eyes fluttered shut, exhausted. He fell asleep in Leia's arm, soul lighter and vision more focused.