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“No – no, no no,” Han says, drink waving back and forth in his hand as he speaks. “Lando’s the hero of the hour this time around. I didn’t do nothing except – lay a couple of charges.”
He takes another swig of his syrupy – whatever it is Ewoks drink. Ewok-ale. Ewok-mead, maybe. Whatever. It has a burn to it beneath the sugary taste. The party’s started to go a little hazy around the edges. It’ll be dawn soon. There’s a fire in his chest and he thinks we’re gonna be riding this high for a long time.
Luke says, “He couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Pshaw.” Han waves him away. “Not a lot of pilots could’ve pulled that off. And, anyway, I already got a medal – it’s not like I need two of ‘em.” Luke hums politely. He seems pretty sober, considering how long the party’s been going. “And taking out the emperor and Vader in one shot?” he goes on. “That’s what you call a historic moment, right there.”
He expects maybe a laugh at that – a laugh, or a protest that Han had been just as much of a part of firing the shot as Lando, and okay, maybe he was fishing for that particular compliment. But instead, in weirdly measured tones, Luke says, “They were both dead before it blew.”
“Hm?” Han looks at him over his cup. Luke’s looking out towards the party – towards the fires and the carousing. His gaze is very steady. Han swears the kid’s been drinking. It’s honestly hard to say if he’s been drinking. “Did you –”
He lets the question hang. Luke glances at him, catching his drift. “No.”
Han studies his face, trying, through the haze of Ewok-liquor, to figure out what’s going on here. Luke hasn’t talked about what happened up there, yet. Leia knows something but she’s not talking. It’s only, he figures, been a few hours. “But you’re sure, huh?”
“Yeah,” says Luke. “I’m sure.”
He waits a moment for the kid to go on. He doesn’t go on, which is kind of a relief. He slumps against the tree at their backs. “Well,” he says slowly. “I’m sure glad to hear Vader’s out of the picture. I was kinda worried he’d walk away again. A real spider-roach, huh?”
Luke does another of those polite hums.
“I’ll drink to that.” He raises his cup to the sky – to the rough location where, a few hours ago, the Death Star had exploded into glittering fragments in the heavens. “The monster’s dead. He’s rotting in hell and the galaxy’s a brighter place for it. Bottoms up, huh?”
He drinks to it. Luke says, steadily, “He was my father.”
Han snorts a laugh into his drink. It’s only as he raises his eyes, smirking, to Luke’s face and sees the look on it that his laughter dies away.
The look on Luke’s face is calm. Steady. Stony, almost. He says, slowly, “You’re not kidding.”
“No,” says Luke.
He thinks, I’m too drunk for this.
“Shit,” he says. He looks away, casting about himself, swigging his drink for want of something to do, scrabbling for something else to say. “I – shit.”
Luke is leaning heavily against the tree, his own cup raised to his lips, not drinking from it.
Han puts voice to the only question he can think to ask. “Are you alright, kid?”
It takes Luke a long moment to answer. His gaze drifts off into the shadows beneath the trees. “I think,” he says. “I think I will be.”
In all honesty, even if he was sober he’s not sure he’d know what to say in this situation. Hey, at least the son of a bitch is dead evidently ain’t it. Buck up, kid?
In the morning, he’ll probably wake up with a clear head and think to himself you know, this explains some stuff. Maybe he’ll even think of a couple of things he should’ve said. In the moment, though, all he can come up with are questions.
Leaning back against the tree trunk, he says, “How long’ve you known?”
“Since Bespin.”
He nods. It crosses his mind that at least he’s not that out of the loop – then his sluggish, drunken brain produces a still more burning question and he twists his head around to ask it. “Does Leia know?”
“Since last night,” says Luke.
“Huh,” he says.
There’s more questions he ought to ask, probably. His head swims. He’s really not sober enough for this.
Into the lull in the conversation, Luke says, “I used to be able to feel him.”
“Huh?” says Han.
“This is gonna sound crazy,” Luke sighs. “But part of me misses it.”
Gazing at him over his shoulder, Han frowns as he tries to process that sentence. “You know this is for the best,” he says. “Right, kid?”
“Of course it’s for the best,” says Luke, so bitterly that it stumps him.
People say a lot of stuff about Vader. He’d say he’s heard it all, but it’s a big galaxy. There were a lot of rumours about what was under the mask – if he was human under there – or something else. Just how gruesome the truth might be.
People said he was something made, rather than born – spawned out of some secret lab – built out of pieces of dead men, like something out of an old horror story. People joked that he had bits of animal in there – they put some chimaera in the mix, a spice runner on Selonia had once joked to him. That’s why he’s such a beast. People said he wasn’t alive; they said he was a machine.
Superstitious types said there was nothing mortal under the mask at all. People said he was an empty suit of armour, animated by ghosts. People said he’d crawled out of the depths of hell.
But Han wasn’t the superstitious type. Vader was just a man. Evil, sure, but the human kind of evil. A truly evil son of a bitch. But that was all.
Leia’d never talked about what’d gone down on the Death Star, but he knew Vader figured in those screaming nightmares she’d had for months after the fact. Leia had the strongest constitution of anyone he knew. One of those things it was best not to dwell on.
Suddenly, he’s not so glad Vader’s dead. No, he thinks drunkenly, he thinks he’d like to do the job himself. Ideally with his fists.
Luke says, “Leia took it better than I did.”
At that, Han starts to laugh again. It’s probably the booze. It’s mostly the booze. Whatever it is, he throws his head back to look at the clear, Death Star-free sky, and wheezes. “Ah, shit,” he chokes out. “Shit, kid.”
He tries to compose himself, aware that this really isn’t a laughing matter. He draws in a few deep breaths, and manages it, more or less. “Damn,” he sighs. “Hell of a family to marry into, huh?”
He meets Luke’s eyes – and for the first time in the conversation, the kid’s actually smiling. “Yeah?”
He breathes out. Turning, swaying slightly on his feet, he claps a hand heavily on Luke’s shoulder and says, “Alright. Here’s what we’re gonna do, kid.” He jabbed his cup at the kid’s chest. “We are gonna get you so drunk – you’re gonna forget you ever had a father.”
Luke blinks at him, hard – then, at last, he begins to laugh.