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When Han mentions he’s technically sort of one of Jabba’s goons, that one’s the worst. Luke has a lot of admirable qualities, but ‘easygoing’ is not one of them, and Han’s never seen the kid go so fast from joking to white-knuckled, furious, the air around them suddenly choked with rage.
Han’s never spared much thought for what Jabba does when not telling his lieutenants to menace Han. Luke tells him, in vicious detail. The Princess watches them both from where she’s leaned against the inside of the hull, her gaze darting between them.
At one point, Luke is literally shaking, talking about some old man whose jaw was broken in three places because he couldn’t pay for Jabba’s ‘protection’—she leans in, easy and graceful as some natural thing, sunsrise or moonset or the opening of leaves, and tucks her head against his shoulder.
They’ve only known one another about three hours, by that point. (Han shivers, all over, and hopes they mistake it for horror.)
It takes the Princess almost the whole trip to Yavin to talk the kid around, and Han’s pretty sure that bitterness is still there, judging by the way Luke spits out, you got your money, as though that’s such a bad thing.
Later: “Yeah, gotta settle up my debt with Jabba the Hutt, get out from under that—” Han tells Antilles one morning, yawning into his cup of caf. When Luke beams at him, open and adoring, he damn near chokes.
“It’s not about you, or your backwater planet,” Han grumbles. “Oh, I know,” Luke says, a sight to happily for Han’s taste.
Han’s delighted when he realizes that the Princess (though she’s become ‘Leia’ by then, his thoughts having slipped into the familiar, too-intimate, and dangerous) prefers an argument to genuine conversation. Luke, the moofmilking country boy, wouldn’t know how to shout back at someone if you paid him for the privilege; when Han gets snarly, he just retreats into a sulk. But her Worshipfulness is a blaster with a hair trigger, and it’s fun, with someone who enjoys a furious give and take.
That said, they do have a handful of genuine fights, where it veers badly at some comment—
She calls him a bastard once, and he calls her one right back; she goes white and screams at him, screams bloody murder and worse, and that’s how Han discovers Her Highness was adopted.
“I—ah. Didn’t know my parents either,” Han offers, after she’s angrily dashed the tears from her eyes. She’s still sniffling.
“I knew mine,” she says, with a quiet sureness, a fierceness. “My mother was Queen Breha Organa, of House Antilles, and my father was Bail Organa, Viceroy of Alderaan.”
“Would have liked to meet them,” Han says carefully, and then, “Though I think they would have been less than thrilled about meeting me.” She laughs, and they’re good.
Arguing distracts her, calms her down, and once Han figures that out it’s like having a key to her soft bits, the vulnerability she doesn’t let anyone but Luke see. She’s pacing the corridor, waiting for news of the latest mission, when he picks a fight with her.
(In hindsight, he can’t even remember what it was about.)
She’s still red in the face from shouting, breathing hard, when she cautiously steps into his personal space, leans her forehead against his chest, breathes out. He imagines he can feel it, even through the thick coats they all wear on Hoth. “Thank you,” she says, after several long heartbeats.
“Yeah,” Han says, his hands stubbornly at his sides. “Anytime.”
Han and Chewie have all their arguments before this, in the rocky, awkward first years when they were trying to get accustomed to one another. (Han, young and immature and hurting, dragging the baggage of Lando behind him with every step, Chewie hating that immense gratitude a grant of freedom inspires, being so indebted to a human who only drinks, whines, and enters into deals with shady underworld hutts.)
Still, there’s a moment when they’re on their way to Bespin when Chewie plants himself in front of Han.
They fight about it until Chewie grabs him in a headlock the way only a wookiee can. “You sure you’re going to be okay?” he growls, and Han sighs, sags against him. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. It’s been almost ten years, right? If I can’t handle it now, I won’t ever be able to…”
“All right,” Chewie huffs, and lets him go, and that’s the end of that.
(Well, sort of. “Told you so,” Chewie growls affectionately, after Han is free of the carbonite. “I think the takeaway here is that emotionally, I was fine with seeing my ex,” Han says, sticking a finger in the fuzzball’s face, and then almost fainting with the sudden, awful, rush of blood to stiff and unused muscles.)
(and then…)
The funeral pyre of Darth Vader is almost burnt down to embers when Leia comes to stand beside her brother. He takes her hand, after a moment of figuring out how their fingers are meant to lace together around the hilt of a lightsaber.
“I don’t think…I won’t ever forgive him.”
“I know,” Luke says, quickly. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, like a mourning veil. It smells of Han’s hands, and sweat, and blood, the remnants of a battle recently fought. Luke’s shirt pulls at his shoulders, the small of his back, stiff with sweat—his hands smell of bacta, artificial flesh, from where their father’s hands clutched at him. “I know. It’s okay.”
Leia squeezes his hand. “Someday, when this isn’t—you should tell me about him. When I’m ready to hear it.”
“I would like that,” Luke says.
Silently, they watch the fire burn itself out.
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