Chapter Text
Han Solo couldn’t give less of a womp rat’s ass about the Princess’s crazy little rebellion.
A planet-destroying battle station and countless TIEs versus a few more than two dozen snub fighters trying to make an impossible shot before their no-longer-secret base’s imminent destruction?
Yeah, no thanks. Han's good. As far as he and anybody else is concerned, there’s exactly three things in the entire galaxy he cares about: The Millennium Falcon, his first mate, and the integrity of his own neck. No more, no less.
At least, that’s what he tells himself as he tries to ignore the way his frontal lobe keeps replaying Luke’s parting words — Well, take care of yourself Han. I guess that’s what you’re best at, isn’t it? — over and over like a bargain-bin holodisc on skip. It's only latest entry in his own personal highlight reel chronicling the past few insanity-inducing days, though it's the only one that succeeds in making Han vaguely queasy. Which is honestly saying a lot, considering all that's happened. And it doesn’t even include the way the kid had only given Han a terse, disappointed nod when he'd (absolutely not in a fit of desperation, thank you very much) tried to part with him on good terms.
Hey, Luke. May the Force be with you.
He sets down the crate onto the hovercart with far more force than what’s strictly necessary. It's filled with roughly twice more the amount of Imperial credits than Han'd ever seen at once in his over three decades of lifetime, and it jangles damningly loudly with them, audible even over the fevered din that's being raised by a pack of suicidal freedom fighters and their various lackeys, all preparing them to get ready and fly their snubs straight into some Imperial turbolaser.
Chewie doesn’t even bother to growl out a comment, long run out of dissatisfied words for Han. He opts instead to just give him another one of his patented disappointed looks, but joke’s on him though. Han’s wasted more than enough years of his life with Chewie by now that he’s developed a total immunity to sad Wookiee eyes. If he hadn’t, there’d never be any blue macarons left in the Falcon’s snack cupboard for Han, and that's no sort of life worth living.
May the Force be with you.
Aggrieved, Han heaves another credit-filled crate onto the cart, causing the repulsors to shudder midair. Maker, why the kriff had he said that, of all things? The Jedi are dead, and their hokey superstitious mysticism with them, if they'd even ever really existed in the first place. Han was thirteen when the Confederacy surrendered to the Republic-turned-Empire. He vividly remembers the newsreels that played on all the public holoprojectors — which’d no doubt been broadcasted to every other world in the Core as well — when the Emperor rose to power in the wake of a supposed attempted coup. Even back then though, Han never believed in metaphysical mumbo jumbo. He only believes in what he can see, in what he can touch and taste and feel. And what he feels is that this whole operation is tantamount to suicide.
But Luke…
Luke does believe in that banthacrap, though. And the fact that he’s probably going to be dead within the hour, martyred for a doomed cause that’ll likely be kaput not long after he is, is making Han think and say things he normally wouldn’t.
Kark, but why won’t the kid just come with him? Han honestly can’t think of a bigger waste. Luke's good, so much better than Han initially gave him credit for when he first spotted him in Chalmun’s Cantina; beneath his wide blue eyes and that blonde fringe and those soft edges, there’s a core of durasteel there, ready and waiting to be put through every sort of stress test imaginable and come out the other side with nary a scratch, and all the stronger for it to boot. He's quick on his feet and more than decent in a fight, and his aim in the Falcon’s gunnery pods was fit to rival Han’s own; in time, Han’s sure, the kid might even prove to be better — might.
That durasteel spine was on full display when he confronted Han, dressed in his orange flight suit with his shoulders set back, standing straighter and taller than Han’d ever seen him. Even as he walked away without a second glance in Han’s direction, those nonsense parting words floating dead in space, he’d looked—
Well, he’d looked good.
Han’s only known Luke for a little over two days now, but he can’t help but think that he might've accidentally gotten somewhat attached. In his defense though, the kid has potential, and, as much as he hates to admit it, he's succeeded in making Han feel things he hasn’t experienced in a long, long time.
The thought of him dying up there, not necessarily alone but without Han to watch his back, burst into a quintillion itty bitty pieces because some scughole TIE jockey managed to pop off a lucky shot, is unconscionable.
Han won’t stand for it. He can’t. The Rebel Alliance has their cause, and now Han Solo has his: Keep Luke Skywalker breathing until he realizes what a karking naïve idiot he is and unquestioningly follows all of Han's advice, like every sane being should do.
He has to try again. He has to try and convince the kid to go with him and Chewie, where he’ll be safe and sound on the Falcon. At full speed, they can be almost three parsecs away from the fighting by the time the Imps even figure out what the Rebels are doing give the order to scramble their fighters. Hells, Han has half a mind to take Luke with even if he can’t convince him — he's scrawny enough that Han imagines he could probably sling him over his shoulder pretty easy, even if the kid tried to fight him.
Mind made up, he ignores Chewie’s questioning bark as he marches across the flight deck and plunges headfirst into the surrounding chaos, his gaze on constant scan for the berth that’s marked Red Five.
When he finds it, Han’s breath clogs and stutters in his throat, stopping him dead in his tracks.
Because in the shadow of his brand new X-Wing, he finds Luke wrapped tight in the arms of another man.
Han freezes like a kybuck in the speederlights as he tries to make sense of what he sees. Like Luke, the other guy’s also dressed in an orange flight suit, so clearly he’s yet another fool fighter pilot about to ship out on this stars-damned suicide run. As far as Han knows, Luke never set foot off Tatooine before he boarded the Millennium Falcon. But the way he and the other pilot are clinging to each other, almost like they’re trying to crawl into those stupid, ugly flight suits and then even further into one another’s skin, tells Han immediately this isn’t the first time they’ve met, or even the first time that they’ve held each other like this.
Han doesn’t know how long they’ve been clutching each other before he stumbled upon them, but it’s pretty soon after that they separate, albeit only by about twenty centimeters. However, the effort with which it takes them to put even the tiniest bit of distance between their bodies reminds Han of the strain of trying to lift a magnetized boot off the side of the Falcon’s hull those rare times he’s forced to make exterior repairs mid-flight, which is very hard and very sweaty work.
They’re so wrapped up in their own little galaxy, one that seems comprise only the both of them and nothing else, that they don’t even notice Han gaping at them like an idiot only a handful of meters away. Luckily, it gives Han a good view. The man is handsome: Dark-haired and dark-eyed, with chiseled features and a shiny, well combed mustache. For all his admittedly roguish good looks (not as roguish as Han's though), he appears to be only a bit older than Luke, maybe four or five years at the very most. The expression he makes when he looks down into Luke’s face and brings his hands up to tenderly cup the kid’s jaw only serves to make him seem even younger, because it reminds Han of a wet-behind-the-ears starpilot who’d just broken atmo for the first time.
“Luke,” he says, his voice so hushed with reverence that Han can hardly hear him. “I can’t believe you’re here. I thought I heard your voice in the briefing room, but I couldn’t — I didn’t want—”
Luke curls his hands around the man’s wrists. His huge, stupidly blue eyes shine with an internal light that’s so much brighter than the hangar’s overhead glowpanels.
“I’m here, Biggs. This is it — we’re finally going to fly together,” he says. He sounds so genuinely happy, Han could gag on it.
Luckily, the man, Biggs, apparently as a bit more sense to him than the kid, because he only barks a cynical laugh. “What a mission to be our first, huh?”
“Sure beats anything we’d be doing back home,” Luke snorts, his round cheeks dimpling in a wide, toothy grin. “You know I don’t do anything by halves.”
Biggs softens, and he shoots Luke a sincere smile of his own. “No, you sure don’t, sunshine.”
Han barely has any time to wonder over the warmth with which Biggs imbues that last word, that little pet name sunshine, when suddenly it appears that neither Biggs nor Luke can resist the mutual tractor beam oscillating between them for even a second longer. Before he can politely look away, they’ve closed the miniscule gap between their bodies, their faces meeting in the middle.
Except, as he stands there spying on them like a Bothan on the most mortifying operation of their career, Han’s not exactly sure what their faces are actually meant to be doing.
Technically, it could be called kissing, he supposes. Though, engaging in ill-advised attempts to sloppily eat each other’s faces off is probably a more accurate description. Even if kissing is somehow among their supposed end goals for their current activity, there’s no finesse to either of their techniques; all Han can see from them is raw hunger and clumsy, desperate passion as tongues slide into mouths and lips try and fail to find some semblance of a rhythm.
In a way, it's almost sort of weirdly cute, provided you were a space freak who was into that sort of thing. Neither of them have much by way of carnal experience, that much is made abundantly obvious by the way they’ve bumblingly tried to attach their lips together like a couple of spark-drunk mynocks. But the affection between them is laid heart-wrenchingly bare when they finally part, and the two moon-jockeys spend a good thirty seconds simply making gooey doe-eyes at each other before Luke brings up a thumb to smooth down the wet muss he'd made of Biggs’s mustache.
Biggs presses a soft kiss to the pad of it as it passes over his lips, and that, even more than their inept attempt at snogging, makes Han feel like a grade-A creep for watching them.
A warning klaxon rings somewhere overhead, signaling that it’s time for all glory-seeking pilots to do their final checks before takeoff, and Han spits a curse because that’s his signal too. Only, for him and Chewie, it’s a warning that the minutes are running thin, and it's time to take their reward and get the hells outta dodge.
“I’ll see you on the other side, sunshine,” Biggs says as they reluctantly begin to part.
Luke beams as he swings himself up onto the ladder. “You better! If they’ve got blue milk, the Tatooine Sunsets are on me!”
Biggs laughs, and Han does his best to block it out as he turns back to finish loading the credits onto the Falcon.
***
Miraculously, the Death Star is destroyed. However, only three Alliance starfighters, plus the Millennium Falcon, make it back to Yavin IV. Red Five, Luke Skywalker, is among them.
Red Three, whom Han learns during a short moment of remembrance was called Biggs Darklighter, is not. He was shot down by Vader in his TIE/ad before the Falcon could get there.
Han pointedly does not think about that. He doesn't think about a lot of things.
In spite of the grievous losses (or maybe, Han hazards a guess, it might even be because of them) the ensuing celebration turns out to be one of the wildest ragers he’s ever had the privilege of attending. It's a swinging bacchanal wrapped in a blur stricken revelry and faces nearly gone crazed with desperate relief. What has to be every cask and keg and crate on base had been broken open in service of what turns out to be a party-cum-Alliance-wide affirmation of life, with booze of every single kind and genre and flavor flowing free and in quantities that makes Han wonder for a hot second if he hadn't actually died in the giant red shadow of Yavin and ascended straight into Corellian heaven, the suspicious lack of wine-dark seas and fleets of garnet-and-ivory sailing ships be damned.
Early in the night, shortly after their triumphant return and while he's still running high on adrenaline and the novel sensation of a whole base’s-worth of strangers looking at him like he’s some kind of hero, like he somehow deserves to be seen as something other than the smuggler and the scoundrel he still very much is, Han drinks and dances and laughs with the best of them. He joins in even as he senses the people around him are engaging in drinking that's a little too heavy, dancing a little too frenetic, laughter a little too manic, for what’s essentially supposed to be a victory lap for the Rebellion. The feeling still doesn’t quite fade even after he imbibes about a cask’s worth of Dathomiri dark ale and several shots of some twitchy-lekku’d engineer’s podracer fuel-adjacent starshine still special, but it’s certainly made easier to ignore, especially after he's spent what feels like hours swinging the Princess around the makeshift dance floor in the middle of the flight hangar — the space made largely empty for reasons nobody has the strength of will to acknowledge, not tonight at least — to a full throwback set of old Max Rebo hits.
They're dancing face-to-face, or rather face-to-chest, with one of Leia's hands settled low on his waist, the other held tight in his grip as they attempt a slightly dirty version of the Boxnov-three step, when she yells at him in the midst of a five minute-long organ solo, “I think you should drink some water!”
“Wow, Princess, I didn’t think you cared!” he calls back over the pounding jizz. “Relax! I’m Corellian, we’re bred to be hard drinkers!” To demonstrate the resilience of his liver and his beskar-clad control over his faculties, he dips her low and then twirls her around his arm in a perfect mockery of an Alderaanian waltz sequence. The way he stumbled as he did so was all part of the act.
Even in the hangar’s juryrigged nightclub-dimness, Han can see her tiny, shrewy face scrunch in disbelief as he (purposefully) recovers and reels her back in, her back thumping against his lower torso.
“Well, I don’t want to be hungover for the award ceremony tomorrow!" she huffs haughtily, and Han immediately hopes with all his heart that she has the worst hangover of her life tomorrow. "Go get us some water, laserbrain.”
“C’mon, just one more song!” he says, dropping his hands to sit at the swell of her hips. He idly fingers the silver belt that drapes tantalizingly low across her stomach as they begin to sway in tandem to the beat. “They haven’t even played that one where Sy Snootles—”
He wheezes and drops his hands when her very bony, very sharp elbow makes contact with his solar-plexus.
“Now, Han. Water! Chop, chop!”
“On it,” he gasps, passing her off to the closest nearby body on the dance floor.
Coincidentally, that body just so happens to belong to one of the three surviving snub pilots. Her name is Evaan… something, he thinks. Her glazed eyes widen comically as she belatedly registers exactly who’s been unceremoniously shoved into her arms, giving her that sort of moons-struck zonked look that signals to Han that she’s high both on life and most likely a little something extra.
Still, he thinks Her Worshipfulness will probably be safe enough with her for the time being. Probably.
After escaping the crush of the dance floor and waving off several weepy thank-yous and a whole lotta pats on the back in the process, he’s rolling up to the bar and trying to flag down the mess officer on duty, a harried-looking Besalisk who was no doubt conscripted because theoretically he could mix two drinks at once, when some idiot finally decides to cut Max Rebo off mid-riff. The whole hangar erupts into a vicious chorus of hissing boos and howling jeers, only for them all to raise up a jubilant cheer once that same idiot replaces Rebo’s greatest hits with a record by the Modal Nodes.
It’s not the same song they’d been playing in the spaceport cantina. Chalmun has Figrin D'an under some form of extortion to only play the Modal Nodes' true blue classics, and the song blasting from the PA system is from their ill-received newest album, which had bombed so badly on the galactic charts that Han was pretty sure it was at least partially responsible for leaving them stranded and indebted to the otherwise no-name Outer Rim cantina proprietor. All the same, and perhaps it’s because the song is experimental and a little out there, it makes Han immediately think of Luke.
Luke, who he can admit is the real man of the hour, for all Han has been enjoying the time spent basking in his own adulation. Luke, who destroyed the Death Star by making the one-in-a-million shot. Luke, who's saved everybody's skins at this point, including Han's.
Luke, who… isn’t here.
Completely forgetting about both the water and the fact that he’d left Leia stranded on the dance floor in the care of a spice-tripped fighter jock, Han sweeps his eyes over the hangar. It’s pitch dark and packed to the gills with rebels of every size and gender and species, and it’s while he's desperately scanning that pulsing crowd for a slight figure with shaggy blonde hair and eyes bigger than the small moon-sized battle station he just blew up, that Han realizes that he actually hasn’t seen Luke for like, a while.
He turns to the guy next to him, whom he vaguely recognizes as the only other X-Wing pilot who made it back — Red Two, Wedge Antilles — and asks, “Hey, have you seen the kid?”
Antilles startles a bit, broken from whatever daze he’d been in whilst staring blankly into the bottom of his disposable cup. He squints at Han blearily through the gloom, and Han nearly groans. Just his luck, another Death Star pilot who isn't all there.
“Who?”
“The kid,” Han repeats, a bit exasperated and stressing the word for emphasis, because who else other than Luke would he be talking about? He’s got nobody else on this maker-forsaken base he cares about other than Chewie, or the Princess, and — whoa, okay, he maybe he is a tiny bit tipsy. “Luke. You know, Skywalker? Blonde hair, blue eyes the size of gas giants, about yea tall? Mister winner of the star wars himself?”
“Don’ think we’ve actually won the war yet,” Antilles slurs. Han’s a little surprised to hear he’s got a Corellian accent. Not exactly slum Coroneti, like his, but close to it. Definitely in the same hemisphere.
“Don’t exactly care about that, buckaroo,” he replies, because he really, really doesn’t, even despite everything that’s happened. Right now, all he does care about regarding the jumped-up political action committee he’s inadvertently hitched the Falcon to is figuring out what sort of trouble Luke could've possibly gotten himself into now. “Just tell me if you’ve seen him or not.”
Antilles screws his face a bit, both like he’s thinking hard and like Han's left him with a particularly bad taste in his mouth. Han doesn’t exactly blame him; he knows he’s not for everyone, even if those people are wrong.
“Think I saw him go outside a little while ago,” Antilles answers, finally. “Maybe he jus’ needed to get some air?” He wavers a bit on his feet. “Whoa, hey, is it hot in here?”
“Thinkin’ you might need to get some air yourself, chief,” Han says, as he turns toward the hangar doors without so much as a thank you.
“It’s Lieutenant!” Wedge barks after him.
Han waves at him from over his shoulder. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever!”
The air once he exits the relatively cool, climate-controlled hangar hits Han like a kriffing wall. The humidity on Yavin IV is certainly nothing to joke about; even in the dead of night, each inhale makes Han feel like he’s breathing in liquid permacrete. Sweat forms on his brow the very instant he steps outside, even while he’s simply standing still and looking around the exterior assembly area for any clue as to where Luke could be.
The yard itself is pretty barren, little more than a sparse square of hardpacked dirt strewn with industrial debris and the occasional snarl of limp power cables, hastily torn from whatever equipment or infrastructure they’d once been plugged into. It’s all evidence of frantic preparations for a doomed evacuation if Han’d ever seen any, but it also means there aren’t many places Luke could've squirreled himself away hiding.
His gaze eventually falls on a low stone wall in the yard’s far corner, partitioning off a tiny little courtyard area. It’s covered and moss and slowly disintegrating, marking it as a part of the original ruin complex rather than any new Alliance construction, which is probably the only reason why it’s still standing when the rest of the area’s been completely torn apart. However, that means it’s also the sole spot in the entire immediate vicinity that offers even a little bit of privacy, thereby making it the most obvious place for a person to chill out in if they, for whatever reason, wanted to escape from their own damn party.
Han immediately sets out toward the walled-in nook, and he quickly figures out that the yard’s acoustics certainly don’t do it any favors as a would-be hiding spot either; since the closer he gets, the clearer he can hear the hushed voices echoing out from inside it.
“I’m sorry, I just… I think I need to hang out here for a while. The party, it’s — it’s a little overwhelming, you know? So many people. I’m not used to it,” one voice says, which Han immediately clocks it as Luke. He’s got a sort of warbly tenor with a slight rasp to it, though right now it’s pitched higher and softer than Han normally hears it. One of the first things Han discovered about Luke is that he generally tries speak in a lower voice than his natural register, though if he gets startled — say, by a cosmetic surgeon with the death sentence in a dozen systems and his Aqualish sidekick, or a creepy tentacle monster hiding in a trash compactor — he's prone to let it slip a bit. But he otherwise tries his hardest not to, which, considering what Han’s gleaned of what Luke’s whole deal is, he mostly gets. Still, by the sound of it, it seems like he’s sort of given up on it for now, which makes Han wonder who he could be talking to.
However, thinking about pig-faced Evazan and Ponda Baba makes Han abruptly remember just how out of his depth Luke had been in the bar back on Tatooine, and he kicks himself for not thinking of the possibility of Luke being overwhelmed by the party soon sooner. Han's been too distracted by, well, everything: The booze, the party, dancing with Leia, shooting at Darth kriffing Vader and coming out of it alive. Luke coming out of it alive.
The fact that he’d been so wrapped in the joy of it all, especially since so much of that happiness stems from his relief that Luke is still alive and kicking, makes him feels weirdly guilty for not keeping a better eye on the kid. For not making sure he was in there having fun with the rest of them, even though a part of Han’s fairly certain that isn’t really his responsibility.
“Of course, Luke. Take your time. I’ll be back in a bit to check on you again with some water,” the other voice says, their tone impossibly gentle.
Han's steps falter for a second. Huh. That’s gotta be Leia. It has to be. She must’ve ditched Eva-whatever when she’d no doubt had the same realization Han did, and somehow managed to get to Luke merely moments before him.
But… he must be drunker than he thought, because for a second, after hearing Luke’s pitched-up voice without the rasp, he almost thought it’d been him who’d spoken again, talking to nobody and referring to himself in the third person. Han’s never noticed how Luke and Leia’s voices are almost eerily similar.
Spooky.
“Thanks, Lee.”
“Pfft. Don’t tell anyone I let you call me that.”
Luke chuffs a soft laugh. “Roger roger.”
Han’s only about three meters away when Leia turns the corner of the partition. In the red-and-silver light of Yavin and its various other moons, he can see now how her makeup is smudged and half sweated off, and how the braided nest of her hair's pretty much completely fallen off her head from being taken on a trip around the dance floor by Han and practically every other member of the Alliance for the past several hours. Her eyes, the color of dark Garqui caf, are luminous in the half-darkness, and beyond fatigued — and sad. They're very tired, and very sad.
She nods as they make eye contact, coolly brushing past him as she walks back to the hangar.
He doesn’t know exactly why he does it. Whether it’s something about the bags under her eyes, or the slight tremble of her chin even as she walks by with her shoulders erect and her head held high, but something about the way the Princess looks in that moment makes Han reach out and pull her into a one armed hug as she passes him by.
He moves before he can even really think about it, and she goes almost preternaturally still the instant she realizes what’s happening. She immediately ices up under his touch as he reels her in, in clear opposition to the way they’d been rubbing all up on each other not ten minutes beforehand. However, it’s that very fact that motivates Han to remain stubborn in holding onto her until she does something to acknowledge him, even if that acknowledgement comes in the form of her scratching his eyes out with her manicured claws for his presumption, or merely coldly biting his head off like the snooty frost princess she is.
Miraculously, and thankfully for the integrity of his vision, she actually seems to thaw after a minute, relaxing into his hold. She even returns the hug silently, her tiny body surprisingly soft and warm against his side beneath her thin white robes. They stay like that for only a brief moment, before she slips out from under his arm to rejoin the festivities, no words exchanged between them.
Han watches her retreating back for only a second before turning his attention back toward his goal. Mission: Luke Skywalker.
He enters the nook and stops short. Though the circumstances are totally different, it’s still a weird echo of his reaction to how he’d found Luke with Biggs beneath his X-Wing, only this time Luke is fully of aware of him. Blinking, he takes in the pile of storage crates Luke has perched himself on, the party-sized case of beer set beside him, and the veritable mountain of crushed and empty cans that sits just below his dangling feet.
“Whoa, what happened here?” Han asks, planting his hands on his hips as he surveys the scene. “Aren’t you a little young to be partying this hard, Junior?”
Luke snorts, ducking his head away from Han’s scrutinizing gaze. He takes a long swig from his latest drink, and Han's apparently come just in time to watch him kill the can. He crushes it in his fist with startling ease as he pulls it away from his mouth, throwing it onto the pile with the others. It lands with a jarring metallic rattle.
“No, and I’m from Tatooine, remember? Beer is literally cheaper than water,” he scoffs, wiping his mouth with the back of his fist. Fringe still shading his eyes, he grabs another beer from the half-empty case beside him, effortlessly popping the tab one-handed. “Not that this imported Lothal shavit is much stronger. My aunt’s fermented mati had a higher alcohol content than this stuff.”
He sounds shockingly lucid despite all the drink he appears to have guzzled, his still too-high voice rock steady with only the slightest hint of a slur. Han’s Corellian sensibilities are undeniably impressed; just another thing he didn’t think Luke had in him, though Han supposes that he of all people shouldn't be surprised when others demonstrate hidden depths.
Luke's still in his flight suit — which, in his defense, Han’s pretty sure the kid hasn’t had a single free moment since he popped the cockpit to Red Five — but in deference to the swampy heat he’s unzipped and stripped it down to his waist, tying the sleeves at the dip of his hips to keep it secure. It leaves him in just a stained sleeveless undershirt, one that’s a little big on him but still obviously cut for the human female recruits. Han wonders if somehow there weren't any extras in men's, or if they were all just too big for his skinny little body.
Luke still cuts an admittedly pretty figure in it, anyway. The freckle-dotted skin of his lean arms, which are subtly muscled in a way Han can’t help but appreciate, glistens with sweat. His shoulders are the same, narrow but strong, beautiful and golden. Though, Han’s still not overly fond of the way Luke’s goes around with them all hunched up, like he wants to minimize any chance of someone even glancing at his torso, despite the fact that he’s almost always wearing a compression band under his top to flatten his chest.
Han wonders if there’s something the Alliance can do to help him with that.
He tears his eyes and musings away to jerk his chin toward the can midden. “I seem to remember you ordering a glass of milk at the bar.”
“Again, cheaper than water," Luke says with a shrug. "And I like blue milk better than beer, but they don’t have any of that here."
His poor attempt at languid, Han-like nonchalance is completely ruined when he finally lifts his head to actually look Han in the face. He’s flushed, and so painfully young, and his voice cracks when he asks, “Have you ever had a Tatooine Sunset, Han?”
Something in Han’s chest begins to ache, cracking just the way the kid's voice did.
“No, but I’ve seen ‘em. Both the cocktail and the real thing,” he replies, tone gentler than he’d thought himself capable of. “What’s going on, Luke? Ain’t you supposed to be the man of the hour or something? Y’know, it’s a little pathetic to be out here drinking alone, especially when you’re supposed to be some kinda hero.”
Luke smiles tightly at him. “I’m fine. And I’m not drinking alone, not anymore.”
Han sighs and scrubs a hand down his face.
“No, I guess not,” he concedes. “Scooch over.”
Luke does, thankfully shoving the case of beer out of reach the process, and Han plops himself down next to him. Then it’s exactly like it’d been with Leia only moments before. He doesn’t think; he simply wraps an arm around Luke and drags him to his side.
While Luke’s got about ten centimeters on Leia (and probably even more than that, if his shoulder’s weren’t so perpetually hunched), he feels just as small and fragile as the Princess to Han — even more so, in some ways. His body warm and a little sticky where it’s pressed against him, Luke doesn’t freeze at Han’s touch like Leia did, but he still shudders like he’s been blasted by a sudden chill. He doesn’t stop trembling even as he burrows as far as he can into Han’s side, leaning his head against his shoulder.
“What’s up, kid?” Han asks again, and although he was the one to initiate it, he still feels a bit stiff and awkward in the embrace, even as he lays his cheek on the sweaty crown of Luke’s head. “You should be in there celebrating with all the rest of the galactic terrorism club. I heard you’re like their star member, or something.”
That doesn’t earn him a scoff, or a laugh, or even a roll of his eyes in Han's direction like it normally would, which only serves to make Han’s stomach churn even harder than it already is. Instead, the kid only fiddles with the open can in his lap, seemingly too preoccupied to rise to the bait.
“I just don’t really feel like it." He whispers, like he's admitting a secret, "Biggs… Biggs should be here with me." The can he’s gripping dents under his fingers even with the liquid still fizzing inside. "I’ve never been to a party without him. Not that I was never actually invited to any, but he used to take me with him when he was, because he knew how much I loved to go dancing….”
He trails off as Han fights the urge to cringe.
Right. Shavit. Han’s spent the whole damn evening endeavoring to not to think about Biggs Darklighter — to not think about how he’d called Luke sunshine in that small, lovesick voice of his; to not think about how if Han’d told Chewbacca to pull a U-ie just a few minutes early, there’d’ve been three X-Wings returning to base instead of two; to not think about how fucking relieved he is that it was Biggs who got blown up instead of Luke — that he’d all but forgotten about the guy completely.
Knowing what he does about Luke, and knowing the gist of what went on between those two, he honestly should’ve foreseen it’d be something like this. But — kark. Feelings. Han hates the concept of them, and he hates having them, but most of all, he hates talking about them.
Kriff him to all nine of the Corellian hells. Han supposes he can’t just change the subject now, not given how clearly torn up the kid is about it, and especially not given how Han’s the complete idiot who’d asked what he was moping about in the first place.
So, Han steels himself, because despite what you'd hear, he's a good kriffing person like that. Sometimes.
“So… that Biggs fella. Your wingman,” he starts, cheeks aching with the strain of his grimace as he tries so, so hard not to picture the vomit-inducing levels of adoration with which he’d caught them looking at each other earlier. “I take it you knew him from back home?”
“Yeah,” Luke confirms.
It comes out as a small, choked squeak, his voice teetering on the vibroknife’s-edge of tears. But instead of shoving him away like Han normally would when confronted with a grown man that’s clearly about to bawl right in front of him, for some reason, Han’s instinctual panic reaction at the sound is to only squeeze his arm around Luke tighter.
“And he was… what?” he asks, as Luke sniffles wetly into the collar of his tunic. “Your boyfriend?”
“My fiancé.”
Oh, kriff.
Kriff, shit, shavit, kark, and fuck.
Han's tone is high and reedy when he asks, “Ain’t — aren’t you a little young for that?!” Because, pffassk. Even he feels like he’s still too young to get married, and he’s gotta be older than Luke by at least a decade.
Luke lifts his shoulders in a shrug, though the movement isn’t strong enough to dislodge the arm Han’s got slung over them.
“It’s not really uncommon for people my age to get married on Tatooine. Human moisture farmers aren’t really known for living particularly long lives,” he says, as he turns his face toward the open sky above them. It's speckled with both stars and streaks of the Death Star debris as they continue to burn in atmo. “Something about the suns and hard labor, we end up aging prematurely when compared to the rest of the galaxy. And I’ve known… I knew Biggs for my entire life. And I loved him for most of it, even if he'd only just started loving me back. But he proposed last time I saw him, barely over a week ago, right before I left Tatooine. We were gonna get married and he was gonna take me with him to the Rebellion.”
Han gapes.
“Oh, kid. I... That’s… that’s real rough, I tell ya,” he breathes. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s so utterly, hysterically out of his depth, a fact which couldn’t be made clearer by what he spews next: “But, y’know, he must’ve known what he was getting into, and it seems like you ended up here anyway. I mean, you’re getting a medal out of it. So, in some ways, I guess it worked out." He winces even as he says it. "Er. Right?”
Han knows it’s the wrong thing to say the very second the words float from his garbage hatch of a mouth, like the veritable debris field of Star Destroyer refuse they so obviously are.
A strangled noise escapes Luke’s throat as he tears himself away, knocking his nearly full can to the side in a spray of pale lager. Breathing raggedly, he creates what feels like a lightyear’s worth of space between him and Han, all while he hunches over himself even further.
“Yeah, except Biggs is dead. He’s dead, and Ben is dead, and my aunt and uncle are dead,” he wheezes through hard, hitching pants. His hands grip fistfuls of his damp golden hair, stringing his locks between his bloodless knuckles. “What good is a sandsdamned medal if I’m all alone?”
Han watches helplessly as Luke curls into himself with a keening, painful sob, feeling like the galaxy’s biggest heel. The kid’s whole body wracks with the force of it, and he doesn't know what to do.
Corell karking blast it, if he’d only nutted up and turned the Falcon around just a couple—
“Stop. I can practically feel you blaming yourself,” Luke murmurs through a series of sucking, saw-toothed gasps. “It’s not your fault Vader seems to enjoy murdering all my loved ones in particular.”
“Sorta feels like it is,” Han mutters. He looks down at his stupid, useless hands.
Luke takes several moments to bring himself back under control, breathing deeply in through his nose and out through his mouth, before he uncurls his back from its distraught stoop. He scrubs hard at his face and eyes.
“"m sorry. Are you okay, Han?” he asks.
It’s such a stupid question, Han can’t help but chitter out an incredulous laugh. “What the kriff are you asking me that for, kid? I ain’t the one who did anything worth something today.”
Luke stares at him, expression unreadable. His eyes are wet and swollen and his face is an unattractive, blotchy red. Han merely stares back, because Luke is so beautiful it’s hard not to sometimes.
Then tentatively, like he somehow thinks Han is at all capable of refusing him, Luke presses himself back into Han’s side.
It feels a little bit like another miracle in a day full of them, but Han doesn’t question it. He immediately wraps his arm back around Luke, squeezing him to his body until the breath huffs from the kid’s chest, all while he steadily rubs his thumb along the slender dip of his waist over the stiff fabric of his undershirt.
“If you hadn’t come when you did and shot Vader off my six, then we’d all be dead,” Luke whispers into the hollow of his neck, as he butts his head beneath Han’s chin like an ornery tooka cat. “I’d be dead, Leia’d be dead — the whole Rebellion gone in a single shot. You’re the real hero, Han. I just pulled a trigger and got lucky enough to murder over a million people. You did all the hard work.”
While it absolutely rankles to hear Luke dismissing himself like that, because knowing him, no way in hells was making that impossible shot anything as simple or probable as luck, warmth bubbles around the edges of Han’s gut at the praise all the same, soothing something raw in him that he hadn’t even known was there. He’s heard over and over that night how he’s a hero, probably approaching something like a gajillion times now. There’d been claps on his shoulder and drinks taken in his honor, and sure, it’d been more than nice every time, but… it’s different when Luke says it. And especially when he says it like that, so soft and so sincere.
It makes him feel… Han doesn’t know. Or maybe he does, and he's staunchly refusing to name it.
Either way, Vader’s horrifically accurate aim can go shove it, because Han suddenly feels really kriffing sore at Biggs Darklighter for telling Luke that he'd see him on the other side and then having the sheer audacity to die.
Because Luke... Luke is probably the best damned person Han has ever met. Who even knows, the kid might just be the best damned person in the entire karking galaxy.
Han can’t be sure, not totally. But he’s got a hunch about it, same as the one he’s got about that Biggs fella — because what use is a guy who doesn't keep his promises and just up and gives up the ghost like that, leaving a man like Luke behind? Leaving them behind when they're a person who is just so improbably good, and leaving him behind when he so obviously needs him, alone and clearly hurting in ways Han wouldn’t wish on even Jabba the kriffing Hutt, and leaving him behind with Han Solo of all people?
It’s madness. Complete kriffing lunacy. It goes so far as to make a grimly irrational part of Han think that maybe it’s just as well that Vader got to him, because Biggs Darklighter certainly didn’t deserve Luke anyway, after going and doing a thing like that.
“Ugh, you didn’t murder anyone Luke,” Leia’s voice rings out. Not quite the level of a scoff, her tone is firm but slightly breathy as she rounds the corner of the stone wall, the looming shadow of Han's two meter-tall first mate dogging the steps behind her.
Chewbacca throws his head back and roars a vehement agreement as they both come to a stop at base of the storage crates, careful to avoid knocking into Luke’s pile of cans. Both their hands are full, with Leia laboring under the weight of a full water canteen nearly twice the size of her head, while Chewie hefts a tray consisting of what looks to be about half the snack table from inside.
The Princess thunks her burden down on the closest crate, setting her hands on her hips to imperiously purse her lips at Luke. She’s taken some sort of wipe to her face since Han saw her last, and this is the first time he's ever seen her without makeup, even after their dip in the Death Star’s garbage chute. He’s a little surprised at how naturally pink her lips are.
They almost rival Luke’s in that regard, and it makes it a little hard not to stare.
“This is war,” those too-pink lips spit out harshly, each word seeming to bow a little in the middle beneath the sheer weight of her conviction. “It’s ruthless calculus. Kill a million enemy combatants now, save potentially trillions of innocents later. You did the right thing in blowing up that battlestation, Luke. Never think otherwise.”
Luke lifts his head from Han’s shoulder, his entire being positively radiating self-aggrandizing gloom.
“It doesn’t really feel like I did the right thing,” he chuckles wetly, scrubbing hard at his eyes with the back of his hand. “I feel like there could’ve been another way, another solution other than killing all those people. If there had been more time — maybe then Biggs—”
“But there wasn’t any more time,” Leia insists, stomping her teeny-tiny foot with all the strength of an angry happabore. Han swears he can feel the ground shake from it, just a little bit. “You said it yourself: You saved us, Luke. You saved us all. And you saved countless planets from becoming—" Her expression shutters, and while she doesn't exactly stutter, because Her Worship would never stoop to something as belittling as that, her voice peters off into something small and a slightly brittle as she finishes with a slightly gimpy, "Well. You know.”
Chewie sets his tray down next to the canteen and rests a comforting paw on her shoulder. She brings her own hand up to squeeze it, almost comically small by comparison.
Luke heaves a sigh, his hands falling limp into his lap. Han rubs his arm, doing his lame best to comfort him as best he can.
“It’s just, from what Ben told me about him and my father, it doesn’t feel like—”
“It’s what any Jedi would have done in this situation,” Chewbacca cuts him off.
Luke blinks, clearly not expecting Chewie’s series of chuffing growls to interrupt his little pity party.
He turns his head toward Han. “What did he say?”
Blinking at Chewie himself, Han translates. Luke’s brows shoot toward his hairline, and he does a double take in the Wookiee’s direction.
“Ooookay,” he says a bit dubiously, looking at Chewbacca in surprise. He glances sidelong at Han. “Are you sure that’s what he said?”
“Yeah, unless my Shryiiwook’s suddenly gone down the shitter,” Han says, more than a little perplexed himself. He raises a brow at Chewie, ignoring his chiding huffs over Han’s insistence on being crude. “Since when do you know anything about mythical space wizards, you big lug?”
Chewie takes a seat on Luke’s other side, easily reaching over him to ruffle Han’s hair. “I’ve lived nearly four of your lifetimes, pup. I’ve crossed paths with plenty of Jedi, and not just a few during wartime.”
Grumbling, Han swats Chewie’s paw away. He hates when the old fleabag lords his stupid Wookiee longevity over him.
“Huh. Fine then,” he huffs. “Say for the sake of argument I believe you. You didn’t feel like sharing that with me, why?”
Chewie shrugs, unrepentant. “You don’t ever seem to listen to half the things I have to say, anyway.”
He’s got Han there. That still doesn’t mean he isn’t gonna argue about it, though.
While he and Chewie are busy bickering, Leia takes the opportunity to hitch up her skirt and hop up on the crates as well, wedging herself in the narrow space between Chewbacca and Luke. She drags over the canteen, extending the built-in straw and shoving it right into Luke’s lap. She presses her body against his side, squishing him further into Han as she takes Luke’s right hand and threads their fingers together.
“And you’re not alone, Luke,” she says to him, her voice hushed as Han and Chewie quarrel over both their heads. “Don’t ever say you are. You have me. You have us. As long as we’re here, as long as we’re alive, you are not alone.”
Han and Chewbacca pause arguing in order to let the declaration sink in. Not only for Luke, but also for Leia herself. Because while Han’s known the Princess for an even shorter amount of time than he’s known Luke, it's something akin to self-recognition that sparks low and painful in his ribcage when he hears the quiet desperation of her tone.
Don’t say you're alone, is what she’s really trying to say, because if I don’t have you, then I don’t have anyone, either.
And that reminds him too — holy shavit, how did Han somehow forget that in the middle of all the raving derangement that was the past few days, Leia’d up and lost an entire planet? Her home and everyone she ever loved, destroyed right in front of her?
He tries to imagine some gaunt-eyed, skeletal Imperial gleefully giving the order to go and blow up the Falcon right in front of him, all while Chewie (and Qi’ra, and Lando, and Luke, and L—) was trapped aboard her, vaporizing the only place and person (people) that’d ever truly felt like home.
The imagined pain of it almost makes him gasp for real, feeling like it's rending a hole straight through his chest with the force of a punch-dagger, and it's almost too much to bear. She may be a frigid ice queen, and he may be a scoundrel and a rogue, but even he’s got the morals to believe that nobody deserves to witness a thing as devastating as all that. Han’s not that much of a raging Hutt spit. He might actually just have to try and be nicer to the Princess for the next couple of days.
He looks down at her as Luke shifts away from Han’s shoulder to lay his temple on her head. Han immediately misses the warmth of him even in the sweltering humidity, biting down his scowl as Leia’s beady little harpy eyes slip closed and her nostrils flare with an exhausted, but contented-sounding, sigh.
Well, maybe Han’ll be nicer to her. Maybe.
Curling himself around Leia’s opposite side, Chewbacca stretches one of his arms across all their backs, his limbs long enough so his paw is just able to touch Han’s far shoulder. Maybe it’s just because he’s so stars-damned drunk and tired, but for the first time in his entire life, Han isn’t scared by the intimacy of the moment. Yeah, he’s uncomfortable, but it doesn’t make him want to get up and book it straight for the cockpit of the Falcon and rev up the hyperdrive, which is nothing short of a miracle.
…Huh. Just another one of those to add to the pile, he guesses.
It surprises him, but maybe not as much as it should. Call it trauma bonding or whatever, but when he looks at the three beings cuddled up on the right of him he gets the sense that, for better or for worse, they’re a unit now. That somehow, he’s landed himself with a full crew, not too big and not too small, and coincidentally just right amount of people to comfortably man a Corellian YT-series freighter according to spec.
However, there’s also a reason Han runs the Falcon perpetually understaffed. It’s always easier to get used to dealing with a little discomfort all the time than reckon with a potentially irrecoverable loss when times get lean. Knowing this, the most self-aware parts of Han recognize that it’ll be achingly hard to leave the two squirts snuggled in the middle of him and Chewie when the time comes — because the time always inevitably comes. Han can’t count on any more miracles; he simply can’t afford it.
For now, though, he looks down at Luke, his tanned profile gilded by the moons and planet above them in a way that’s reminiscent of those garnet-and-ivory sailing crafts populating the endless oceans of Corellian heaven, and he makes a promise to himself that until that time comes, he won’t leave Luke alone, and he won't leave him behind. Not like the kid’s father, not like old Ben Kenobi, and definitely not like that Biggs Darklighter guy.
Luke can do so much better than them, anyway.