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The art of losing
The words of the Alderaanian poet came back to Leia as she collapsed on her cot, the phrase ringing over and over through her head: The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
She was supposed to be in a briefing, but she’d called out sick at the last minute. Actually, she hadn’t even called; she’d sent Carlist a text, then turned off her comm. And she wasn’t sick, she just…wasn’t well.
She didn’t know how to do this.
The first standard day had been easier; she’d just kept moving, just like after Alderaan, after any other past mission that had gone utterly to shit. No time for our sorrows, Commander. Luke was badly injured and deeply troubled; Lando and Chewie were just barely managing to fly the Falcon together without coming to blows; Threepio was keeping up a stream of constant chatter to Artoo, which was oddly comforting and maddening at the same time.
Leia got supplies. She focused her attention on the ship’s systems and on cleaning up the nasty cauterized wound where Luke’s hand used to be. She devised a plan C, should the Alliance not be at the primary or secondary rendezvous points, got them clearance with the fleet, kept Chewie away from Lando until after they were safely in the hangar.
The structure of landing protocols and medical examinations and debriefings—even that one hellish session that had made Leia feel like somehow she was on trial—had made things feel more manageable at first, too; she could run on procedure, on process. There were still cracks. Carlist’s expression when he registered that the injured human aboard the Falcon was Luke, not Han. Saying the words to explain where Han had gone: Vader. Bounty hunter. Carbonite. Jabba. The kindness of the Rogues, who via Wedge had returned an envelope full of credits to her yesterday, proceeds from all those bets she wasn’t supposed to know about on Echo Base. For the rescue.
But she’d been holding it together. She had. And then not even three standard days back on the duty roster and it was clear that she—was not. Could not.
Fuck you, fuck all of you, she wanted to say, though it was none of their faults.
It was Han’s fault, really. If she’d died on Hoth, she wouldn’t have to learn how to live like this. She could have been one with the ice forever, given over to it, let it seep into her bones. Six weeks in sublight with him, and she’d unlearned everything she knew about how to press forward when your heart was broken. When your love was shattered into a million pieces while Vader made you watch.
So shattered that something like a t-shirt—that stupid t-shirt, that soft, glorious, worn smashball t-shirt that still smelled like Han, even though she’d been the one wearing it the last few weeks—made you call in sick to a briefing and flop down on your cot to stare into the dark. Made you remember what it felt like for his hands to slip that shirt off your body, his lips to glide over your skin, his arms to hold you afterward.
Leia couldn’t afford to remember, but she didn’t want to forget.
She’d seen a holofilm, ages ago, back on Alderaan. A historical drama, where a noblewoman had a secret affair with a commoner from another world. The woman was a poet, a calligrapher, but she lived in a time and place where her writings were as forbidden as her love for the commoner. During their stolen nights together, at his invitation, she took to writing her verses along his body, making his skin the canvas where she came to life. The holofilm story had ended in tragedy, with the lover’s death and the noblewoman’s despair. But it had been something beautiful while it lasted.
She’d seen that holo with Mama, both of them weeping into their bowl of bang-corn by the end, moved by the beauty of what could not be. The poetry of loss.
Mama had been a poet of sorts herself, before tragedy had taken her, too, her advice from years before now joining with the poem in Leia’s head: We won’t always have time to dance with the ones we love. So dance now.
Dance now
“How about—the Corellian Cheek-Step?” Han asked.
Leia laughed from her spot at the dejarik table. “You know, if that hadn’t been the most popular dance on the holonet six years ago, I might think you were making things up again.”
“I told you, the Margengai Glide is a real thing!” he protested. He pointed at her in mock accusation. “And you didn’t answer the question, Princess.”
Leia could feel a fleet of giggles threatening to carry her away again, but she’d be damned if he would get the best of her on this. “I wasn’t talking about the Margengai Glide,” she said. “The ‘Space Pirate Boogie’? Come on, even you can do better than that.”
Han gave her a silent look, his eyebrow raised.
“And yes, I do know how to do the Corellian Cheek-Step,” Leia answered.
“Might ask you to prove that,” he said.
“Bring it on,” she said, imitating the confident tone he used when he indulged in this kind of trash-talk. “I can shake my ass with the best of them.”
At that, Han’s laughter broke, and he stood up to reach for the bottle of whiskey. Chewie was on watch, Threepio doing a systems check that was mostly to get him out of everyone’s hair, and the lounge had temporarily become part two-patron cantina and part dance studio. After some discussion of the countless dances Leia had learned from cultures around the galaxy—diplomacy and frequent senatorial balls and receptions requiring it—Han had taken it as a personal challenge to find a new dance he could teach her.
“I’m definitely asking you to prove that, then,” he said. He tipped the bottle towards her. “More?”
“Sure, why not.”
Han splashed a bit more into her glass, and put a similar-sized splash into his own before sitting back down. They were pacing themselves with the whiskey, ostensibly to preserve the limited supply for the full span of their trip. But Leia suspected it was also because something was on the verge of happening, and neither of them wanted their senses to be blunted when it did.
Han looked thoughtful, sipping from his glass. Leia liked watching him when he was like this, seeing his lashes narrow over his green-gold eyes as he turned something over in his head. Were he at a sabacc table, he’d pantomime deep thought, exaggerate his motions for the benefit of the other players. But this thoughtfulness was unguarded, real.
He turned his gaze back to her and set down his glass. “Ah, I got it,” he said. “The Corellian rhumba.”
Well, yes. That was real enough of a dance that Leia had at least heard of it, but—“No,” she admitted. “I don’t know the Corellian rhumba.”
Han looked triumphant. “Didn’t think so. Kind of a dirty-dancing sort of thing. Not for royals and diplomats.”
“You’d be surprised at what royals and diplomats get up to in their free time,” Leia said. “But you’re right, not for official functions.”
His eyebrows rose slightly. “Huh, now I kinda want to know.” He jumped up and extended a hand. “C’mon, I’ll teach you. Put all that ass shakin’ experience you got to good use.”
Leia laughed again, and let him pull her up so he could demonstrate the steps. It wasn’t that far off from a number of other dances she’d done, though Han was right—the Imperial Senate rarely had occasion for undulating one’s hips against one’s partner in quite that way. During official functions, at least.
Han took her through a few full counts with the steps slowed down, then increased their pace. Leia was an accomplished dancer, but the rhythm was just enough off from what was familiar that it occasionally tripped her up.
Han laughed as she tried to anticipate him. “You like to lead,” he noted.
Leia looked up at him with a wry smile. “You have met me, correct?”
He laughed again. “Nothin’ wrong with that.” He turned down the pace, brought them to a slow sway, and grinned. “Actually like it, honestly. But you knew that.”
That thing felt closer now, tension crackling around them.
She looked up at him and arched a brow. “Yes. I have, in fact, met you, too.”
They held each other’s gaze for a few moments, then Han spun her out, and Leia laughed in surprise. He reeled her back in, and Leia thought she might melt at the way he was looking at her.
His voice was lower, suddenly, though his tone could still be mistaken for light. “That laugh. I like that, too.”
Leia felt for a second like she was outside herself, watching herself look into his eyes, watching him look back. Then she came back, and let it happen, let herself feel the joy of dancing in the arms of the man who saw her, the man she loved.
To be seen
There was something more naked than naked, Leia realized, a way in which they were so much more bare than they would have been, had they laid skin against skin long ago. If they’d done this earlier, there would have been the thin layer between them, always, the veneer of you’re leaving and I’m not really here.
There was nowhere to go at the moment, but Leia could have kept running nonetheless. Kept herself at bay, thought her way through all the ways this could never be. She could have given herself over in body while keeping her soul locked up, locked away. Safe.
The noblewoman in the holofilm had done that, at first. It was to be physical only, the beautiful body of the commoner simply a temporary reprieve from a life of repression. But as her poetry spilled onto his skin, as words spilled from his lips, he became more than canvas, more than body, more than pleasure, more than mirror. He became the man who saw her, and she, him. Whole, real. Beloved.
There were so many kinds of real, so many of them cruel. The scars that spanned their bodies, the battle station where they met, the events that that had brought Han to a dirty Mos Eisley cantina and Leia to her capture above Tatooine in the first place were enough proof of that. But this was also real: them, here, together, the veil between them lifted well before Han’s worn t-shirt slipped up over Leia’s head.
Real was the green-grey-gold-blue of Han’s eyes, (“hazel,” he corrected), the way the colors changed sometimes as he looked at her. It was his grin, teasing and infuriatingly cocky, gentle and wry, slow like a sunrise at moments. Real was the tang of Han’s skin, the hollow in his neck that made him shiver almost imperceptibly when Leia kissed it, the size and steadiness of his hands as they held her hips, urging her on.
But it was also his voice in the dark, late in the night cycle, in the quiet of their bunk, and hers joining it. Stories of home planets, snippets of childhoods, glimpses of who they’d been, before.
“So what did you think of me, really, at first?” Han’s voice was quiet, but seemed to fill up the cabin.
Leia laughed softly and lifted her head to look at him. The only light was the bit seeping in from the doorway, but her eyes had adjusted enough that she could still find his face. “Thought I made that pretty clear at the time.”
“Mercenary,” he said. “I remember.”
“Also, giant pain in my ass.”
“I saved your ass!” he protested, but Leia could see his grin in the dark.
“Thank you,” she said, as if he’d offered her a sweet rather than saved her life.
“You’re welcome.”
Leia put her head back down. The dark made them both reflective, made it feel safer to share. She at least wanted to offer him a real answer.
“Honestly? I had trouble figuring you out,” she confessed. It was true; Han had confounded her from the start. A tough nut to crack, Mama would have called him.
At first Leia thought it was that she wanted to be Han, to move through the world the way he did. She was jealous, she’d decided, of the way he could saunter through the hangar, casually lean against the back wall during a briefing, make the same sardonic observation that had come to Leia’s mind and then go where he pleased. He could head out in his raggedy ship, fly to whatever ports he might find, and then come back, or not. There was an ease to Han Solo, a way of being that suggested that the only person he was responsible to was himself. That he could choose to care, or not, as much as it suited him in the moment.
“Me? Nah, ‘m not that tough.”
She looked up at him again. “I was a little jealous of you, too.”
Surprisingly, Han seemed to accept that. “Huh.”
She remembered watching his hands as he’d dealt hands of sabacc with the Rogues, deft and competent, but always casual. She’d watched his walk, the sway of his hips, the ass that was the subject of many a whispered conversation. The way he wore his shirt open, like he couldn’t even be bothered to close it.
“Also, you were annoyingly handsome,” she admitted.
He laughed, and rubbed her back affectionately. “Annoying?”
“Very annoying,” she confirmed. Annoying, because he was both leaving and not leaving, and his continued presence not only on base, but in her life, just didn’t track. Han could’ve faded to the background, been a colorful character who had helped the worst day of her life avoid being the last day of her life. But he wouldn’t. He very stubbornly wouldn’t.
“And you wouldn’t leave me alone,” she said. Wouldn’t let me die, wouldn’t let me become a shell of a person.
“Couldn’t,” he said. “Somebody had to save your skin.”
Her hand closed around his again, squeezing lightly, before they drifted off to sleep.
Hands
She told Luke on the second day back with the fleet, after the debriefing from hell. They had a rare moment alone in the medbay, just after the Two Onebee had left from taking the measurements and making the calculations for Luke’s new prosthetic.
It seemed only fair that Luke know; no matter how distant and plain devastated Bespin seemed to have left him, he was still her friend, and Han’s. And for love of the Goddess, Vader knew.
She put her hand in his remaining one, looked him straight in the eye, and began.
“I’m in love with Han,” she said, not sure how she was going to explain how this all had happened, if he asked. It didn’t just happen; they’d both leaped into it fully conscious, fully appreciative of everything it meant, fully choosing it and each other. Leia knew it was more than close proximity, more than a convenience, more than a response to a desperate situation, more than even just friendship and physical attraction. What it was, besides love, what had created it, besides them, were a little hard to explain.
But like Chewie, Luke didn’t need an explanation. As she spoke, a grin dawned across his face, so genuine, so eager, and so Luke that Leia nearly cried to see it again.
“Yeah, you are,” he said, as if it were inevitable, as if the whole galaxy already knew and had just been waiting for her to say the words.
Words
Leia was pleasantly surprised at all the Shryiiwook words she had already picked up over the last three years: the intonations that meant “Cub,” Chewie’s name for Han; the growls he’d long used for her own name, which she knew translated as “Little Princess,” and understood as a title of great affection and tenderness as well as respect.
[To be small yet so powerful and mighty is a great thing indeed], Chewie had once assured her.
She knew there were multiple levels of greetings, and that she and Luke had been the recipients of the most familiar ones. Another great honor. She knew the names for bantha milk, for the Falcon, for kaffe. Hydrospanner. Hyperdrive, sadly. And she usually knew when Chewie was telling Han he was full of shit.
But she wanted to understand more, to become fluent, even if she could not train her vocal cords to say the words herself. So every afternoon on their crawl to Bespin, she and Chewie played a game of dejarik, and Chewie told her stories to help her learn.
As skilled an interpreter as Threepio was, he was often needed elsewhere during their lessons, either keeping watch in the cockpit or helping Han talk to the Falcon again. The droid also had an unfortunate tendency to get on Chewie’s nerves during these sessions, particularly when Chewie felt Threepio had inadequately translated the nuances of a Shryiiwook phrase. So Chewie and Leia were often on their own, using written Shryiiwook runes to help convey difficult words.
Leia was thinking a lot about language, these days. She still dreamed in Alderaanian sometimes, though she rarely spoke it outside of events with her people. Too painful. She already knew how to speak Corellian, although before Han she was more fluent in High Corellian and less fluent in Olys Corellisi.
And even in Basic, even with the words aching to leap off her tongue, she could not say the three words that Han had already said, over and over: I love you.
But she could draw them. Like the noblewoman in the holofilm, she painted the words across Han’s chest, his arms, his back, though unlike the holo, she wrote with her fingers, drawing in invisible script. She wrote it in the language of her dreams, a tongue she could barely bear to speak, words that he did not know. After they made love, she wrote it in Corellian, traced the phases he whispered to her: Minmin larel valle. Mia kor.
Every night, Leia wrote their story across Han’s skin, in the language of a dead planet, in Shryiiwook runes, in Corellian endearments, in the words in Basic she could not say out loud. She wrote it across the scars that laced Han’s back, grieving the pain that had put them there and loving the man who had survived despite. She kissed it into the scar on his chin, loving the man who’d pretended to care for nothing but already had loved her like no one else.
And she let him trace her scars, see the history written on her body as well. The place where her chin had burst open as a child, when she’d been playing around in the palace. Where she’d fallen learning to ride her thranta. The bump in her wrist from when she’d broken it, crawling out of her window to hide in the woods. And the most painful, the ones from her captivity. The line of puncture marks down the back of her neck, the bruise at the base of her spine that had yet to fade in three years, the bits on each of her wrists, the mark on her hip. He greeted them with words of love, with tenderness.
“Beautiful,” he said quietly one night.
“My scars?” she asked.
He shook his head slowly. “You.”
Verses
On the long flight to Tatooine, Leia told Chewie the end of the story from the holofilm. How a powerful, bitter man had discovered the noblewoman’s poetry on the commoner’s flesh, had taken him away. The man did not speak the language of the lovers, but he understood enough to know that the words were precious, valuable. He wanted them for himself.
The man forced the noblewoman to translate while his scribes recorded, forced her to read the words from her lover’s body as he was executed. After the commoner’s heart beat no more, the noblewoman watched in anguish as the bitter man bound the verses in a book and displayed the stolen poetry as his own.
Chewie nodded sagely as Leia finished.
“I’m not sure why I told you all that,” she admitted. The Falcon was especially quiet this trip, just the two of them. She’d started talking about that holo, and more and more of the story had just fallen out of her mouth.
[Stories are how we know ourselves, and others], Chewie observed. [This is similar to an old Shryiiwook legend. Although it ends differently. ]
Then Chewie told another story, of love, of honor, of a Wookiee raised outside the trees, an artist of exquisite runes, who fell in love with a tree dweller. Who, when her mate was taken, gave up the tool with which she carved her runes and took up a crossbow.
Leia thought of their trip to Maz’s castle to secure her disguise, the plans hatched over the last three months, the coaching she’d received from Lando and Chewie about Jabba’s palace. Her studies on hibernation sickness, on how to give Han a fighting chance to make it once they’d freed him.
“How does the story end?” Leia asked.
[The rune-carver comes in disguise, and her mate does not know his rescuer, until she carves the love rune into the trunk of the Wroshyr tree.]
The Rune-Carver
“Who are you?”
She’d already said the words, once, and he’d heard. He knew.
She’d prepared for this in so many different ways; studying her Ubese, imitating Boushh’s stance, packing the thermal detonator, memorizing the controls on the carbonite platform. She was prepared for him to be shivering and sweaty, to be blind, to be disoriented.
She wasn’t prepared for how it would feel to be known.
“Someone who loves you,” she said, after removing the hood and voice box from her disguise.
“Leia,” Han gasped. To hear her name in his voice again, to know that after six long months, he was alive, to have him reach out to kiss her—
No story, no poetry could compare.