12Note: Written for Scruffy... Happy Birthday my dear dear friend! You are one of a kind; In fact, you're a whole other kind but I think I'll keep you anyway ;-)
And to KR, you are the best beta a girl could ask for! Thanks for lending me that brilliant mind of yours! All the hugs for you, my friend.
You surge to the surface of your awareness unexpectedly, moving through the fuzziness of an almost reality. Your eyes blearily seeking the reason behind your prompted awakening, your mind registering the glittering stars that mark a new day, the warmth of your familiar surroundings, the shape you love like no other.
Your body following the route that your eyes have mapped, you turn on your side, the one forever occupied by its rightful owner, the only one you've ever wanted. Your hands become a cradle, your lips travelling from the softness of her neck to find their resting place behind her delicate ear.
"What can I do?" you whisper, because you see her silent suffering and that glowing thing nestling between your lungs pulsates with her need.
You've been here before, her silent observer, her lighthouse even when she doesn't know that she seeks one. Her sorrow comes in now familiar waves, the same ones that crash upon your tough exterior while your inner softness is lit by the same burden. Haven't you always been the strong one? Haven't you wondered at the resilience of your consistency? You, too, are human after all. You have to remember.
Even then, you can't resist. How could you, when she's closer than she has ever been? When her heart, raw and surging with the absence that is dragging her down, opens just for you in a way you've rarely witnessed. You wonder, again, what was it that brought you here. Was it her stillness that ruptured your dreams or those soft, panting breaths that always follow her tears?
Your defences lower. Your sorrow is cast aside.
"Leia?" you ask, because you won't take what's not willingly given and because you know that some truths are shared harder than others.
You wait for a readiness that might not arrive and so your mind drifts back, through the folds of time, at years long since gone. You remember how you longed for the freedom of her name. How many breaths you held back for fear of things not meant to be. And every time, through all this space, no matter what, you end up here, with her.
"I can't," she tells you, her voice nothing but a shaking rush of air. You search her words as you always do because you know that even though the war is over her wounds are present still and so you find her in the midst of her own unravelling.
Brushing away her stray tears your thumb begins a slow dance right at the apple of her cheek. Such a sweet spot of utter vulnerability and one that only you get to cherish.
"I know," you tell her because you do. Because you see her thoughts like burning stars collapsing behind her eyes and it's all you can do not to fall with her.
And that's all it takes.
She turns to you, folds herself in the warmth of your security, all of her pressed to all of you. Muscles gripped in the strength of her delicate fingertips and small shudders that reveal the urgency of her despair. You want to move. Inaction has never been your strong suit and now more than ever, when there is so much at stake, you want to fall back on all your past activity. And still, you wait. You've learned by now that so many things that look on the verge of their imminent ending have only just begun.
"I can't stop it," is her quiet admission. "Again and again I choose wrong. I choose wrong and then everything falls apart."
Her tears run tracks down your chest and underneath the palm of your hands you feel her shudders consuming her whole, remaking her in sorrow.
How can you make this right? What can you say that won't be heard as something coming from too far away, arriving always so very late?
You found the answer that night all those years ago. The two of you newly alone on a wooden bridge of a wooden village, the future uncertain and your feelings freshly realised, you held her because she asked you to and because there was nothing you wouldn't have given her.
"I'm sorry," you tell her once more. It still feels like less than enough now, same as it did back then, and yet something in those singular syllables finds a home in her dormant gratitude.
Her eyes soften as they traverse the tired lines creasing through age the corners of your mouth. Up they go, touching the now familiar path of your cheekbones, the line of your nose, the warmth of your eyes.
Somewhere within her exhausted heart she finds a soft smile, and she gives it to you, openly, gratefully, so very easily.
"What for?" she wonders. "It's n—"
"Not for that. The past," you explain.
Because this is important and you want her to know. It's what's troubling you, that even though you promised you'll be there for her, despite the weight you've pledged to share, despite your willingness and intention, she goes to places you cannot follow. You are left behind. And within the vastness of this space, how can you help?
"For this," you try again, "Now."
You sigh because admissions like this one have never been easy to make. Your hands rubbing the naked skin of her back both a silent comfort and a soft remembrance of all that is at risk.
"It wasn't your fault, Leia. Nothing you could have done. It wasn't you."
A subdued exhale all the indication that she heard you, and the smallest of nods the proof that your words were delivered to their chosen destination.
"But," she begins, and already you knew that her mind is a wild horse that wouldn't be tamed so easily and so, holding her tighter, your ride it out with her. Because she needs it. Because you need it, too.
"What if I hadn't been there? It would have been someone else's world. It could have. It could have been someone else's family." The battle with her tears now lost she's baptising you with the shreds of her heart, and you wonder, how can you feel such gratitude for her even now, at her most desperate hour?
"I know the variables," you hear her say once your thoughts have aligned with hers, "I do, but what if it wasn't me they had in their cells? Don't say it wouldn't have made a difference, don't—"
She breathes in suddenly.
Her devastation finding its landing.
Her body racked with the sobs of what will never come to pass.
"I didn't even say goodbye," she delivers in anguish, in a barely there whisper, with what strength she has left. "I didn't know, and then it was over and—" brown depth searching the refuge of your eyes, her pupils dilated, her breath erratic, her sadness a gravity you can't escape. "I was alone. I was alone, Han. There was no one."
You recover enough of your steadiness, taking hold of her name, blanketing her from all that has stripped her bare and you beckon her to you. Back within the boundaries of the life you're still building together. Within the love you've nurtured. Within the years you've already shared and those yet to come.
You breath her name onto her temple and you move forward, your arms bracketing her slender shoulders, your legs entwined much like the moments that bind you together, the mattress now carrying the shape of her back, the heaviness of her grief.
"Never again," you promise, landing feather-light kisses in the expanse of her skin, at all the places you can reach in your haste and tenderness, her eyelids, the corners of her lips, the softness of her jaw, the impeccable gentleness of her throat.
"I am with you, always. Always, Leia. You're not alone. Not anymore. Never again," you repeat again and again, an oath newly-forged, the answer you've finally, finally found.
And maybe, just maybe, that's what she was looking for, too.
Her fingers thread through your hair, getting hold of it, her forearms resting on your shoulders, finding purchase, remaking your solidity anew. She is trembling and nodding with a fervour she didn't have before, with understanding and maybe, at last, a lighter heart and you wonder if two people can merge into one, and which one did the saving after all.
"I love you," you hear her say then. "I love you, Han" and every word scorches your reality and becomes a marking in the place where her breath lands on your neck.
And just like that, in the still of an almost departing night, you glimpse the truth you were seeking all along. You marvel at it. That you got there even though it seemed like a place so very out of your reach. You hold her tighter, then. And you tell her that you love her too, for how could you not, when she is everything to you, your wondrous reality, your inescapable destiny.
Utterly spent, exhausted but with your hearts joined and full, you set off for calmer dreams, and your final thought before everything fades is how lucky you've been, to have found someone just like her.