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“Huh,” said Han. “No welcome mat. You think maybe he wasn’t a people person?”
Luke interrupted his contemplation to bestow one half of the famous Skywalker-Organa Twin-Barrel Death Glare on him. Fortunately it wasn’t the really lethal half.
“What?” Han said, all innocence.
Behind him, Chewie gruffed. <<This is why humans are not supposed to consume spice during adolescence.>>
“What he said,” said Luke, who did not understand a word of Shyriiiwook but had a less-surprising-than-it-used-to-be talent for knowing exactly what Chewie meant anyway. “Also, could you please not. ”
“Just thought a laugh might make it easier, kid.”
Luke sighed. “I know you did. I just...want to get this over with.”
“Right,” said Han. “Which is why you’ve been standing there staring at it for five minutes doin’ nothing. Tell me you’re not waiting for Leia.”
“No, Lando. I said he could have any spare capes we find.”
“See? Sense of humor, always helps.”
The kid’s smile still looked like it might fall over in a light breeze, but from what Han had heard about the year or so he’d been on literal ice, it said a lot that Luke was smiling at all. “Just wish I could figure out how I’m supposed to get this open.”
“That’s the trick, isn’t it.” Han cleared his throat and stuck his thumbs in his belt. “Probably kinda late to be asking this, but the spooks are one hundred percent sure you’re authorized for this thing?”
“Yes, it is,” said Luke dryly. “And yes, they are.”
Han shrugged, ran a hand over the back of his neck thoughtfully. “Well, he was a bastard, but he wasn’t a stupid bastard. Maybe he said something and you missed it.”
“Or it could just be one of the five bajillion things we didn’t have time to talk about. You know, in the ten whole minutes of our lives when we weren’t trying to kill each other.”
“Huh,” said Han. He stuck his hands in his pockets awkwardly, glancing at Chewie who gave a low whine of concern. “You got a point there.” He cleared his throat. “I got a laser shear on the Falcon I could grab.”
“Be my guest, but Engineering says the hull is fifty times as dense as durasteel.”
Chewie gruffed and gesticulated. <<Or about half as dense as Han.>>
Luke cracked a real grin at that. Han drew himself up in exaggerated indignation, figuring he should keep a good thing going. “Laugh it up, Fuzzball, I don’t see you coming up with any bright ideas.” A real idea struck him. “Why dontcha try that thing?”
He pointed at Luke’s lightsaber, but the kid was already shaking his head. “Might damage the systems. General Cracken would blow a fuse.”
Who gave a damn about Cracken’s fuses, was what Han wanted to know; but on second thought Luke probably couldn’t afford to antagonize any of the Alliance brass just now. Even if the big reveal had gone down way, way better than Han had ever dreamed possible.
Course--he grinned, he just couldn’t help it lately--a lot of things had happened this week that were way better than he’d dreamed possible. The Emperor was dead. The Death Star was toast. His main competition for the woman of his dreams had turned out to be her brother. Said woman now kissed him senseless at least twice every day. Said woman’s old man was never, ever going to give him grief about that, on account of Darth Asthma having wheezed his last.
With a slight cough he got rid of the loopy grin, because he was Han Solo and he’d be damned if he was going to swan around looking like some twitterpated nerf-brain. Especially since that was exactly what he was. “Ole Firecracker’s gonna blow a fuse anyway if we can’t get this thing open.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees, squinting at the almost invisible jagged seam running around the circumference. “I could try hotwiring it--”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Luke, “but hell no.”
<<That’s Jedi wisdom for you,>> wumfed Chewie.
“Ha, ha,” Han groused. “Least I’m trying to actually help and not just standing around shedding on things.”
<<At least I am only shedding fur. You humans shed dead flesh. It’s disgusting.>>
“ I’m disgusting? Do you even smell yourself after you take a shower--”
“Quiet down a sec,” said Luke suddenly. “I’m going to try something else.”
“What?” said Han.
“The Force.” Luke raised an eyebrow at him. “Try not to freak out.”
“I don’t freak, kid.”
Luke gave him a weird little smile and then turned back to the problem at hand. He spread his hand over the surface, like he was feeling for a heartbeat, took a deep breath, and screwed his eyes shut while he exhaled.
A minute ticked by. Then another. Luke’s other hand wandered in midair like he was playing with the molecules. A couple of tools that the techs had left on the floor floated up off it, drifting and bobbing around the room. One bumped into Han’s ankle.
<<Are you freaked out yet?>>
“No,” Han said obstinately.
<<Yes you are. I can smell it.>>
“Fine. A little. Not that though.” He kicked the hovering tool away and glanced at the doorway again, playing with the grip of his blaster. “Just keep feeling like a bunch of white armor’s gonna show up any second, know what I mean?”
Chewie growled agreement. <<All this peace and quiet has a wrong odor.>>
“Still can’t believe Ackbar pulled this little bonus off.”
<<It is an impressive kill. Green Squadron showed great prowess in their hunting. They should receive belts.>>
“No shavit.” Han checked on Luke only to find mumbo jumbo still underway. The tools were doing a sort of slow dance on the deck now. He gave it sixty-forty the kid was doing it on purpose to mess with him. “Said her complement was, what? Three hundred thousand?”
<<Something like that. Almost as many as our entire surviving navy.>> Chewie cast a considering glance around the compartment. <<If there had not been so many officers on the bridges…>>
“You got that right.” Han shook his head in continued amazement. If it weren’t for the not-so-minor miracle Green Squadron had pulled when they managed to take out both the command and auxiliary bridges within less than a minute of each other--and pretty much the whole top half of the chain of command with them--he didn’t see any way in the nine hells the Alliance could have captured the Executor .
Course, he couldn’t see what they were going to do with it, either. Even if they’d had the kind of surplus personnel it’d take to man her in combat, she’d gotten a hell of a goodbye-kiss from the Death Star’s EMP blast. Everything on her aft port with a wire in it was fried, including Sublight Drives One and Two–either of which you could’ve docked Home One inside, and Han knew for a fact it’d bust a couple Alliance budgets just to get her polished back up. One big-ass white rancor, that was what this thing boiled down to.
Still, Intel was drooling all over her. Premier flagship of the whole damn Imperial Navy, after all. They’d figured she had to have whole troves of intel gold stowed away in her computers...and she probably had right up until one of the junior Imperial captains in Systems Central pushed a button and slagged said computers just before the boarding parties reached him. Airen Cracken could’ve chewed his way through a bulkhead when he got the news. He’d pressganged every computer tech in the quadrant to try and Frankenstein the melted files back to life, and he had scanning crews and extraction specialists crawling between the decks like maggots on a dead reek hunting for any independent data nodes that might have escaped the slag command, preferably ones with Black-level access hardwired in. Everyone from Mon Mothma to mouse droid POWs had suggested he might be asking a bit much…but come day three, the extraction guys had turned up a flimsiplast schematic of the destroyer’s entire computing network, and damned if a certain tall dark and nasty crewmember hadn’t built himself exactly that.
Unfortunately, Darth Paranoid had also had what you might call A Thing about security arrangements.
Han wasn’t surprised. You didn’t get to be Chief Imperial Goon by handing out flowers and chocolates. Hell, the way he’d gone through staff officers, there’d probably been hundreds of people right here on this ship who’d’ve jumped at a chance to cut his cast-iron throat in his sleep. According to her construction schematics, Vader’s private section was structurally separate from the rest of the ship; there was actually a whole second hull hidden under the plating, a big battle-steel bubble containing about half of Cresh deck in the command tower. It had independent reactors, life support systems, electronics, the works, and of course that data node Cracken wanted so badly…
…which, unfortunately, was sitting inside The Egg From Hell.
What The Egg was, nobody knew, on account of nobody could crack the damn thing open. It had no handles. It had no on/off switches. It had no push/pull signs. It didn’t even have an external power source to unplug. It just sat there between the main corridor entrance and a blast door leading to the rest of Vader’s suite, a gigantic black metal ball made of what Engineering figured was an exotic alloy and Han figured was 100% pure weapons grade fuckoffitude. Its electrified surface had sent two techs to sickbay, its anti-intruder programming had slagged ten slicing computers, and the biggest salvage droid that Ackbar’s construction crews could wiggle through the Destroyer’s corridors had failed to scuff its finish, much less crack the seam. Engineering said it had its own microplant sealed inside and was so perfectly airtight it could probably function as an escape pod. It was, in short, Darth Furniture. Cracken had started making noises about cutting their way in from space to get at the thing with shipyard-grade armor drills--whereupon his salvage guys, motivated by an overwhelming desire not to spend the next several months of their lives on that project, had thrown themselves back into the search and finally dug up an intact copy of the secure-access logs. No actual passcodes, but it did have a record of access times and standing authorizations for most of the Destroyer’s high-security areas, including The Egg From Hell.
There had been two names authorized for access to The Egg. One was Darth Vader. The other--and this had caused a certain amount of comment in Alliance circles--was Luke Skywalker.
Han personally thought Cracken’s forehead was looking more muscular these days, owing to all the scowling he’d had to do ever since that little piece of information saw the light of day. Luke on the other hand had been looking pretty wrung out. He and Leia had given Han and Chewie the low-down on Vader that victory night on Endor, but the plan had been to keep it just the four of them for a little while, to give Leia some time to come to terms with things. The Egg had shot that plan out the airlock. Luke being Luke, he’d gone straight to High Command, and Leia being Leia, she wouldn’t let him go alone, and Han being Han, he’d come along to break the nose of anybody who even looked like giving her lip about the whole mess.
She’d been a nervous wreck. Hells, Han had been a nervous wreck, and he didn’t have to explain a damn thing.
But Luke had walked in, totally calm, and just...told the story. The whole thing, from growing up on Tatooine all the way to Vader’s last words on the Death Star. By the end there hadn’t been a dry eye in the room. Not even Cracken’s, though he might just have been thinking of the lost leverage opportunities. Mon Mothma had actually gotten out of her seat and embraced Luke and Leia both, almost like she was their mom, and somehow that settled everything as far as High Command was concerned. If Han had still had any faint doubts about whether he’d been right to throw his lot in with the Alliance, that day had laid them to rest.
Anyway, Luke had agreed to try to crack The Egg From Hell, and High Command had even agreed to let him have the first look-over if he could get it unscrewed. Cracken hadn’t liked that bit much (or at all), but Mothma had insisted, saying that there might be files of deeply personal interest to the family.
Family, here, meaning Luke, cause Leia wasn’t gonna touch this thing with a ten-lightyear pole--
A huge whoosh and a surge of movement made Han jump half a meter off the deck and whip his blaster out. Chewie guffawed. Luke stepped back as The Egg split in a jagged line around the middle and the top half soared up on what sounded like a regular old hydraulic piston.
Han shoved his blaster back in its holster and clapped Luke on the back. “Good going, kid. How’d you do that?”
“It’s not a passcode at all, it’s engineering!” Luke turned, eyes all bright and shiny like a kid who’d figured out a puzzle. He grabbed Han by the elbow and dragged him up to The Egg, pointing at the teeth and sockets along the edges. “See? Electromagnetic plates. Once they touch it closes a circuit and activates the magnetic seal. But there isn’t any other breaker in the circuit, they built it completely without power controls.”
Han stared at it. Fur tickled his ear as Chewie leaned over both of them to get a gander of his own. “So how the hells d’you--”
“You have to retract one of the mag plates out of contact position. This one here moves, see?” Luke pressed a plate on one of the teeth, and Han saw it sink maybe a millimeter into the shell. He and Chewie leaned in to inspect more closely.
<<That is brilliant,>> Chewie wrowled.
Luke beamed. “Isn’t it?”
“ What ’s brilliant?” snapped Han. “There isn’t a damn button for this either?”
“Nope,” said Luke. “Only one way to move it.”
“What do you mean there’s only…oh you gotta be kriffing me.”
“Jedi’s honor I’m not.”
“A telekinetic lock?”
“Yep. Sure is.” Luke took a step back and grinned at the stupid wizard lock like it was the greatest thing since hyperdrives. “How perfect is that?”
“Sith psycho,” Han muttered under his breath. Luke glared. “Him, kid. You’re the Sith spawn psycho.” Luke glared harder. “It was a joke!”
“That’s not as funny as you think it is.”
“It’s kinda funny.”
They looked up from the stupid wizard lock at the inside of The Egg. They all stared. Chewie whumphed.
“How should we know why it’s white on the inside?” Han huffed. “Hell of a place to call home though.”
Luke stepped inside slowly, and Han leaned over the outer edge, looking around. There was less room inside than he’d thought. Most of it was filled by a powered circular seat, which looked like it rotated to face the semicircular console at the back. That’d be Cracken’s data node. Overhead, hanging like a sort of grotesque chandelier, was an apparatus with two curved clamps on its arms. Retracting panels, housings, and dark monitors lined most of the inner walls of the shell, containing gods knew what. Underfoot ran a circular air vent embroidered with telltale lights, all of them currently red. There wasn’t a thing in sight that you might call personal, unless you counted a couple patches at the edge of the seat where the leather had gone dull and discolored with heavy wear.
Chewie had seen that too; he gestured and growled at length.
“Huh?” said Luke absentmindedly.
“Says Vader must’ve used this thing a lot to put that kind of wear on the chair. Ship’s only been in commission a couple years.”
Luke was standing by the chair, a hand on the backrest and eyes far away. “Yes, he did. To take the helmet off.”
Han glanced back at the creepy ceiling claw, suddenly realizing what those clamps had been for. He ran his tongue over his teeth and swallowed; mouth felt kinda dry. “Makes sense. Looks like it might be some kind of pressure chamber, with those vents.”
Luke shook himself back out of whatever wizard trance he’d been about to have, and leaned over the arm of the chair trying to look at the console behind. Finally, with a sound of exasperation, he sat down gingerly in the chair and spun it around. “I don’t even know if it’ll let me access anything...”
Han clenched his jaw for a second, then joined Luke inside The Egg and leaned over his shoulder as he tried a variety of controls, trying to find the ones to activate the systems. Nothing seemed to be working. Finally Luke gave a grunt. “I think we might have to close the chamber. Maybe it’s tied into the same power circuit.”
Han made a face. “Oh, that’s nice.”
“Worth a try.”
“You can get it open again, right?”
Luke gave him a very Leia look, all unimpressed eyebrows. “If you’re worried about it you can wait outside.”
“And miss my chance to poke around your old man’s underwear drawer?”
Luke, still doing his best Princess of Alderaan impression, declined to take the bait. “Chewie, I’m sorry but I don’t think we can get three in this thing. Mind waiting outside?”
Chewie said something to the effect that he was perfectly happy to go the rest of his life without a single glimpse of Lord Vader’s underthings. Which, Han felt, showed an appallingly underdeveloped sense of vengeance.
“You and me both,” said Luke, and Han shook his head in despair. “Alright, here goes.”
<<Watch your thick skull.>>
Han pointed a warning finger. “Keep it up and I’m gonna switch out your shampoo with--”
He had to stop mid-threat and duck over the chair as the top shell of The Egg twisted swiftly down. Harsh blue-white lights blazed overhead, and indicators blinked awake all over the interior walls--mostly small and white, some green, a rash of red.
“With what, exactly?” said Luke.
“That hair-remover cream stuff Leia’s got. You know, for her--”
“Han!”
Han donned his most injured look. “ Legs, I was going to say legs.”
Luke shuddered and cleared his throat, tapping at the console. “Yeah, uh. Right. Good. Uh, looks like this thing’s still dead. So.”
Han hooked his thumbs in his pockets, smirking. Good to know that under that shiny new cool-calm-and-collected Jedi Luke Skywalker, there was still some good old fashioned easy-to-embarrass Kid Luke Skywalker. He’d been missing the Kid a bit since coming out of the ice. “Just don’t tell me it’s another of those damn wizard locks.”
“Doubt it,” said Luke. “I mean, he’d have to concentrate on keeping it on the whole time he was using it, that’d be ridiculous.”
Ham rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah, that would be ridiculous.”
“There’s got to be a control for it. One of these buttons.”
They both leaned back and looked around at the umpteen billion unlabeled buttons on the inner shell.
“So...we just start pushing Darth Vader’s buttons, huh?”
Luke crooked a smile. “Well, if anybody knows how...” He flicked his comlink on. “Chewie? We found the data node but we’re still trying to power it on, might take us some time.”
A tinny wrowl agreed. Han contorted himself around to face the shell, surveying his immediate options, then shrugged and started thumbing a column of tiny round keys next to the monitor that happened to be at eye-level. The display activated. Han squinted at the text menu. En-ter-al nutrition, whatever that meant...gastro pv connection engage...pump flush sequence...NG tube engage...nutrient selection...medication selection...well, whatever the hell that was, it wasn’t a computer control system. Spotting a big red button a little to the left, he pushed that instead.
“Shavit!”
“Han!”
Han frantically pressed all the closest buttons trying to turn off the dozens of spray nozzles that had suddenly activated overhead. Finally they stopped, either because he’d found the right key or they’d run on an automatic timing cycle. The air smelled sharply antiseptic. Luke wiped his face dry on the inside of his sleeve.
“So,” said Han, combing droplets out of his hair, “not that one.”
“You think?” Luke hit a button on the left arm of the chair, whereupon there was a hoosh of rushing air and a desiccated mechanical voice.
“Atmospheric seal engaged. Oxygen saturation to 98.54 percent commencing.”
“Not that one either,” said Luke, and went to work figuring out how to reset to a standard atmo mix. It only took him a couple of minutes, but Han was feeling pretty lightheaded by the time the oxygen level started dropping. He shook his head to clear it a bit.
“Kriffing Sith Lords.” Han turned back to the next set of controls on the bulkhead. “What the hell was wrong with him anyway?”
“More like what wasn’t wrong,” Luke muttered. “Look at this.”
Han leaned over the panel Luke had pulled up on the chair arm below the atmo controls. “System status,” he read aloud. “For the suit, you think?”
“Must be. Respiratory, cybernetic main, gastro, power, electronics, sensory, cardio, hermetics, coms, neurofeedback, dermal necrosis…stars, it just keeps going .”
Han whistled low. “And you said Kenobi was the one who…”
“I don’t know,” said Luke. “A lot of it, anyway.”
“Thought I had it bad with the carbon freeze,” Han muttered. He stared around him at the various apparatuses and controls. With a status readout like that, practically all of this stuff had to be medical systems and diagnostics. And when your med systems had names that sounded like ship parts… “This is a whole other level of kriffed right here.”
Luke nodded, silent. Han’s eyes fell on the system status readout again, and his jaw hardened in a twinge of not at all expected but very genuine anger.
He tried to kill it. Tried hard. This was Vader; if anybody deserved to be kriffed to the nine hells it was him. But then he found a panel labeled blood chemistry analysis with a built-in collection probe that was sixteen centimeters long and half a centimeter in diameter and stained rust-red up to the middle, and after that he found one for “neural interface programming” with a map of over a thousand neurofeedback needles built into the mask and armor, and then he found another one for “necrosis management” with automated debridement routines for literally scraping the dude’s skin off cause it kept rotting away. There was a setting for anesthetic…which was at kriffing zero and which, when Han tried to adjust it, asked for a master override code. None of the other settings did.
Call him a crazy space wizard, but he was getting a real strong feeling that staying alive after whatever old Kenobi had done to him had not been Vader’s idea.
Probably not Kenobi’s idea either, to be fair. No, if you asked Han, this stunk of His Royal Wretchedness, bow to stern. He’d grown up on the streets of Coronet, where moral standards were just one more thing nobody had enough of; but even the streets knew if you found a dog run over you did the decent thing and shot it. Even Jabba wouldn’t’ve dragged out the misery this long. Feed you to the rancor, yes; stake you out naked on the Great Schott Flat at high noons, yes; chuck you in a pit full of starved womp rats, yes--but at least you could pretty well count on croaking inside a week or two, not twenty years. That thousand-year-digestion spiel about the Sarlacc had just been for dramatic effect, he was pretty sure, you’d die of dehydration way before–-
Behind him, Luke made a triumphant noise. “Got it!”
Han twisted around in time to see a huge holoscreen fire up. He was about to clap Luke on the back in congratulations when the kid suddenly inhaled sharply and slumped to one arm of the chair, face in his hand. “Luke? What’s wrong?”
“It’s no–”
But his voice cracked treacherously and he stopped talking, just shook his head to say nothing. Han looked back at the holoscreen, wondering what kind of Darth Data Node they had on their hands. But it was just a plain old workstation interface, same basic layout as every other secure node Han had ever seen on an Imperial anything. Classified data portal on the right, a holo viewer on the left…
…and then he realized what Luke had seen. The holo viewer’s default image wasn’t the usual Imperial logo or design of any kind. It was a grainy two-dimensional shot of a kid. Maybe eight or nine, all skinny limbs and mussed blond hair, monkeyed around the top of a moisture vaporator and grinning like a complete scamp.
Luke’s shoulders trembled once and a shaken, hard breath kicked out of him. Han swallowed and stuck his hands in his pockets, not sure what to say or whether he should say anything. He looked at the holo, just waiting, and a funny feeling twisted his stomach. If it’d been a copy of Luke’s wanted poster, or a snapshot the Empire’s spooks had gotten their hands on, or something like that, he could’ve put it down to twisted obsession...but this was just a picture of his kid. Like any good dad would keep nearby. At least, they did in holovids, Han wouldn’t know personally or anything, but still...
“He must’ve gotten it from Aunt Dama,” Luke said hoarsely.
Han’s eyebrows shot up. “First I’ve heard about you having an Aunt Dama,” he replied, carefully casual.
“I barely know her. She lives in Mos Osnoe, practically the other side of Tatooine. Aunt Beru used to–-”
His voice caught hard and he had to stop for a second.
“Used to send her holos, yeah? That’s you? Scrawny thing, aintcha?”
Luke didn’t rise to the bait, just nodded.
“You want to talk about it?”
Luke straightened up, shaking himself out. “I’m–-no, I’m fine. Just surprised me a little. I’m fine, honest.”
“Bantha shit,” said Han companionably. Luke drew a sharp, irritated breath through his nose, and Han just shrugged off the look that went with it. “Give me some credit, kid. I’m not as dumb as your sister says I am.”
“I never said that-–”
“Yeah,” said Han. “I’m guessing you haven’t said much of anything since Bespin, have you?”
Luke sank back into the chair, palm massaging between his eyebrows, looking more worn out than the Falcon ’s hyperexhaust manifold, which last time Han’d looked at that was saying something. “That’s not fair. I did tell you, Han. And Leia, and Chewie. Hells, I told the whole High Command yesterday.”
“You told us what happened, that’s it.”
“What else do you want?”
“Look,” said Han, pulling up a perch on the arm of the chair, “just going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing that if I got my hand chopped off by this homicidal bastard who then says he’s my dad I spent my whole life hero-worshiping, and then I decided I was gonna give him another chance anyway, and instead he hands me over to his sadistic boss who nearly kills me, but then he goes and gets all goodified and rescues me at the last second and straightaway kicks the bucket, I’d have…I mean, at least one feeling about the whole mess.”
Luke heaved a short hard laugh. “Just the one, huh?”
“At least one,” Han corrected. “There could be two, I don’t know.”
“There could be lots.” Luke peeled his hand off his face, stared at it. Slowly clenched it, so the leather glove creaked ever so slightly in the silence, and finally laid it on the armrest, still staring. When he spoke again his voice sounded small and young enough that it might’ve been the kid in the holo talking. “There could be a lot that other people really don’t want to hear, Han.”
Han made a considering noise. “You mean like people your old man maybe tortured once or twice?”
“Yeah,” Luke said hoarsely. “Like them.”
“And you think they maybe wouldn’t appreciate hearing how you loved him to pieces and he wasn’t such a bad guy after all?”
Luke flinched and grimaced. “Han…it’s not that I…I’m not ignoring what he did to-–”
“Leia ain’t here,” said Han.
Luke did look up at that. “Leia’s not the only one he–-”
“Yeah,” Han cut him off, “I know, I was there. Don’t go assuming you know exactly what I think about your old man, huh?”
Luke stared at him like he’d grown a whole extra Wookiee head. “What are you trying to say? You don’t think he was such a bad guy after all?”
Han crossed his arms and squinted at the clamps overhead. “Look, don’t get me wrong here. Your old man was a bastard. I know it, the Wook knows it, things under rocks on Hoth know it. Doesn’t mean I don’t get it, you know? What you saw him.”
Luke looked like he’d gagged on something. “I’m sorry, you what now?”
“What you saw in him,” Han repeated stubbornly. “I get it, kid. Actually I reckon I get it better than anybody else.”
“You get it better than anybody else,” Luke echoed him, in the kind of flat disbelieving incomprehension you’d see if you tried to explain the idea of anonymous charity to a Hutt. Or even the nonymous kind.
Kriff it. Han sighed and ran a hand over his face. “You think this thing’s soundproof?”
“Why?”
“Cause if your sister ever hears this, I’d be better off jumping in the Sarlacc, kid. Honest to gods.”
“I won’t tell her.”
“I’m holding you to that. Here’s the thing. Leia…Leia’s a lot like him.” Luke’s eyebrows shot up and Han shifted uncomfortably. “Not in a bad way, but-–I mean, the temper? The smart mouth? The never-take-no-for-an-answer? That whole Jabba thing? You can’t tell me you don’t see it.”
“You’re right,” said Luke, “you’d be way better off in the Sarlacc.”
“Don’t I know it. Thing is–-that’s exactly the stuff I love about her, kid.”
He saw it click in the kid’s eyes. Luke clamped his lips and looked away at the holo again, hand wrapping over his mouth, trying hard to keep it together.
“I been thinking,” Han went on. “Yeah, yeah, I do it sometimes. Look…I didn’t come out of a good place, you know that. Life beats the hell out of some people. Just…takes the good and balls it up into this hard, angry thing. Doesn’t matter how bright and shiny you start out, it can kriff you up until you don’t know yourself anymore, I’ve seen it. I coulda been it, specially after the Navy busted me. Coulda been Leia real easy after Alderaan, or you after your aunt and uncle. Fact is, you, me, Leia, we got lucky.”
“There’s no such thing as-–”
“The kriff there isn’t. We had help after the shavit hit the turbine. We found people who gave a damn about us, and take it from me, kid, people like that ain’t exactly a decicred a dozen. We got lucky as hell. Your old man-–look, we’re sitting in a straight-up torture chamber, and looks like that getup of his was just the mobile version. There’s the kind of help he had on his side.” He waved a disgusted hand at the interior of the Egg. “But he had the same stuff, just…ruined, y’know? So yeah. I get what you saw in him. Cause I see what he coulda been every day. You and Leia.”
Luke didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then his left hand grabbed hold of Han’s and held on for all he was worth.
“I wish I’d figured it out sooner,” he whispered. “I wish–-Han, there’s so much pain in here, years and years and years…and I could have helped him earlier, I know I could have, but I didn’t know…I didn’t know…”
He just broke down crying right there, still quiet cause that was just how he was about it, still hanging on by the hand, leaning hard into Han’s side where he was half-sat on the arm of the console chair. And sure, it was kinda weird and sure, he was kinda glad they were in a Sith Egg where absolutely nobody else was gonna know about this and sure, he hated to see his friend and maybe someday his brother in this much pain…but somehow it was also one of the best damn moments of Han Solo’s life.
“Thanks,” Luke whispered after a long while. He heaved a huge shaky breath out and ran a hand over his eyes. “For coming with me. For everything, this week. I know it’s a mess.”
“Doesn’t mean you gotta clean it up all on your own, kid. Besides”--Han clapped him on the shoulder–”I owe you one, remember?”
Luke laughed at that, soft at first, then harder, until he laughed himself right backwards and halfway down the chair, which had to be a first for this hellhole. The sound echoed and bounced and made the whole place feel suddenly cleaner, like there’d been a scum over the walls so thick and even and hardened you couldn't notice it was scum. Han found himself grinning like a godsdamned idiot again. Hadn’t been one of his best lines, but it’d been a long time since he’d heard the kid laugh like that.
The laughter finally wound down into a huge sigh. “You know what we need?” said Luke. “A break. Take a breather, come back and tackle this data node with a clear head.”
Han snorted. “Kid, what we need for a job like this is a drink.”
“...that’s definitely a better idea.”
“Course it is, it’s mine.”
“You think there’s anything left on tap in the mess here?”
“Now why would I settle for that when there’s a perfectly good officer’s club one deck down? You know what kind of stuff they stock for admirals?”
“The super expensive kind that High Command is definitely going to classify as an Alliance asset?” Luke raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah? Well lucky you, you’re talkin’ to an Alliance general. C’mon. To your old man. Had the two best kids in the universe and went out in style.”
“And we’ll just skip everything in between?”
Han shrugged. “Nobody’s perfect, kid.” He paused. “Except your sister.”
“Good save.”
“I have my moments.”
“You do. You really do.”
Han let one more dumb grin slide. He ruffled the kid's hair to make up for it, grabbed his hand, and hauled him up out of his father's worn-out chair. "C'mon, kid, less talk, more wizarding. Get us outta here."
finis