Chapter Text
Once they’d finally looped Chewie in on the full details, it took all three of them — Han, Leia, and, critically, Luke — to talk him down from ripping Wedge’s arms out of their sockets in the aftermath of what would then forever be known as The Incident.
It'd been an hours-long affair, one which started with enraged roaring and ended with Luke nearly suffocating in the thick fur of Chewie's chest, but beyond that, as was the way of things among Han’s self-made little crew these days, most of the grief surrounding The Incident went largely unacknowledged. Han and the Princess still supervised Antilles’ apology to Luke once they arrived on Hoth to ensure there was an appropriate amount of groveling — Leia’s frosty stare from over Wedge’s shoulder thankfully enough to cow Luke from insisting that none of the aforementioned groveling was necessary — after which Her Highness had made them an appointment with one of the Alliance’s Personnel Resource counselors.
Han hadn’t been aware that the Rebel Alliance even had a personnel department before Leia informed him of the meeting. After the session, apparently they’d all decided that there was no need for a change in duty roster. Han figures it has to do more with staffing issues and Luke’s irrationally huge capacity to let bygones be bygones than anything substantially reparative. By his estimation, personnel departments are probably the more or less same everywhere in the galaxy, meaning that they're impotent and mostly useless to resolve any issues that extended beyond petty personal drama, even when they're made up of a bunch of ostensible galactic terrorists.
Once that decision had been made, however, they really didn’t talk about The Incident anymore. Although Luke was obviously still a little down in the mouth about it for a while after the fact — which caused Leia to be a bit more watchful, Chewie a bit more overbearing, and Han a bit more free with his praise and friendly affection — after the misadventure outmaneuvering Boba Fett of all the slimy lowlifes back on Ord Mantell shortly after they’d moved base, they all figured they had much bigger coppergrins to fry than to continue pondering the spectacular transport crash that was Commander Luke Skywalker’s love life. So, the four of them just did their best to lock that crap up and move on, which made throwing themselves into settling into their new Hoth ice palace all the easier.
Han still finds himself a little distracted from even that, though. Because while he’s certainly not wasting time dwelling on The Incident months after the fact, he sure as shavit is dwelling on Boba kriffing Fett. Not on him specifically, because he karking hates that guy, even back when they both used to be on the Hutt’s retainer, but more on what exactly it is he represents:
Jabba’s getting antsy to collect.
Dodging bounty hunters is not a novel activity for Han. In fact, it’s about as common as the Emperor’s shadowed, desiccated visage to adorn the front page of the Primeday edition of the Imperial Galactic Star Tribune. But it’s somehow become even more of a regular pastime ever since he joined up with the Alliance to keep an eye on Luke. The kid’s a magnet for all sorts of trouble, and bounty hunters trying to cash in on the price hanging over his head — especially since Vader’s own personal bounty on Luke almost tripled the reward from merely eye-watering to legitimately coronary-inducing — are even more numerous than the clearly-posed-but-still-passed-off-as-candid shots of Mas Amedda and Sly Moore that are splashed across the IGST political society pages on any given day.
The kraytspit that went down on Ord Mantell hadn’t even been the first time they’d tangled with Fett in recent memory; it was just the first time he’d had it out for Han specifically, apparently out working on Jabba’s commission instead of Vader’s.If the circ*mstances weren’t so dire, Han might’ve actually found it a bit refreshing for a bounty hunter to pop up and go after him for once instead of the kid.
But while he’d much rather have rogue Mandalorians aiming their blasters at him than at Luke every single karking time, the fact that sithspawn had all but ignored the kid’s presence this time around speaks volumes.Han’s got a target on his back, that much is clear, and it’s grown to a size neither he nor the Alliance can continue to ignore.
Though he still holds no particular affection for the political smash shavit and break stuff club he’s spent the past three years bouncing around the galaxy with (no matter how hard the kid and her Worship try to convince Han that his actions say otherwise), more eyes on him courtesy of the Hutts means there are now active threats to Alliance operations coming from two fronts. And more threats to the Alliance equates to more threats against its two poster children, especially since they seem infuriatingly committed to being rebels with a supremely unfortunate cause until the days they die.
(Han would simply like for those days to be a long, long time from now. Forever, if possible, but he’ll settle for sometime a while after he kicks the camtono himself, preferably while he’s in his bunk on the Millennium Falcon and withered from old age.)
He knows better than anyone when it’s time to cut and run. It’s how he survived so long after his self-imposed expiration date. And if breaking it off with the Rebellion to appease Jabba keeps two of the three whole people in the galaxy Han cares about even moderately safer, well… it’s a no-brainer.
The day Han dreaded all those years ago while pressed up against Luke on those crates back on Yavin IV has finally come to bear. He just has to figure out a way to convince Luke and Leia of that.
A few weeks after Luke’s latest near-death experience on the recently 100% operational Echo Base (waking up a kriffing extinct species of ice worm, seriously, what is with that kid; and if it’s not a neon, Coruscanti-bright sign of the madness Han’s life has become that he barely even blinks at news like that, shrugging while thinking, Well, that’s Luke for ya, he’ll eat Chewie’s entire bandolier), Han’s still working on a way to break the news that he and Chewie are leaving when Leia eyes him shrewdly through the steam rising from her lukewarm morning caf one random Zhellday before their duty shift.
Her gaze fixed on Han with acklay-like levels of predatory calculation, she stirs yet another heaping spoonful of sweetener into her drink without looking at it. You’d’ve thought with how much of a little hardass she is, Her Worship would’ve taken her caf black like her shriveled little soul; but no, she slops in so much sugar-substitute that she basically turns it to syrup, and the sight always makes Han’s stomach churn. The manicured nail of her slim index finger taps a staccato rhythm on the side of her mug as she takes a testing sip, humming slightly when she finds it to her satisfaction.
Han doesn’t say anything — about the staring nor about the tooth-rotting caf — and calmly continues to stuff his face with his ration of reconstituted tuber hash and powdered bulabird eggs. It’s best to simply wait her out when she gets like this. Han knows he’ll hear all about whatever it is that’s ruffled her royal feathers sooner rather than later.
“Han,” she finally says, after nearly three solid minutes of thoughtful glaring. A new record, probably. “Have you ever met a SpecForce operative named Reyé Hollis?"
Han sets his fork down and measuredly wipes his mouth of any remnants of the Kedalbe pepper sauce that’s needed to make their rations even a little bit edible these days. He even belches for good measure, because it’s always a hoot to see Leia’s reaction to his purposefully lax table manners.
She doesn’t disappoint: Her nose wrinkles at him while her painted lips sneer in disgust, looking for all the galaxy like she wants to dump her mug of rapidly cooling artificial sugar syrup straight into his lap.
Yeah. She wants him. Han’s never been more sure of anything in his life.
He leans back on his rickety mess chair, balancing on its hind legs as he sorts through the blur of Alliance personnel he’s met since he landed the Falcon at Echo. He doesn’t interact with the Special Forces guys very often. They’re fun to drink with, but there’s always some tension there since pilots and groundpounders don’t tend to mix very easily. And while Han had technically been demoted to infantry on the back end of his time as a recruit in the Imperial Military, he’s still got the stink of spacer on him through and through, enough for the jarheads to give him a wide berth purely out of instinct.
He hums a negative. “Nope. Can’t say that I have.”
The minute he says so, Han fully expects Leia to go off on a malicious rant about what this random could’ve possibly done to wrong her.
However, instead of telling him all about this Reyé Hollis and his ability to piss her off, she placidly sets her mug down before pushing out her own chair.
“Ask Luke about him,” she says, before narrowing her eyes at the precarious position Han’s put himself in. “Don’t do that. The floor’s slippery. You’ll crack your skull open.”
Han smirks, leaning back even further as he crosses his arms over his chest. He raises a brow. “That an order, Princess?”
“Han,” she warns.
Han scoffs, “Fine. Yes, mom." He sets all four legs of his seat back onto the snowy deck. "Y’know, you should just give it up and admit that you care about me, just a teeny bit. This whole ice princess thing is getting a little old.” He gestures toward the generally frozen state of their surroundings. “Not to mention obvious.”
Leia huffs, but she nods almost imperceptibly at him — a decisive victory — before turning to leave the Officer’s Mess.
(Han’s not an officer. He’s not technically anything as far as the Alliance is concerned, other than perhaps some sort of jumped-up contractor. But everybody and their rebel grandmother knows that he’s the Princess and the Commander’s pet smuggler, so they basically let him roam wherever he pleases. Han’s not above using his nebulous status to take advantage where he can. While there’s not much of a difference in the quality of the rations that’s served to the officers versus the grunts, the Officer’s Lounge definitely serves better liquor, and sometimes on a busy night he can get away with double dipping on dessert if he hits each of the messes at just the right time. It’s the little things like that that make Han's life bearable.)
Leia glances back over her shoulder. “Reyé Hollis, Han. Remember that."
Han offers her a lazy salute. “Will do, General.”
***
Han does not, in fact, remember that. Not for another four days, and not until it's the middle of the night in the tauntaun stables of all places.
In his defense, he’d been busy. Not in the least because the day after his breakfast with Leia, he'd finally screwed up enough wherewithal to tell his two short stacks that theFalcon's gotta skedaddle in order to face the music.
It went about as well as he could’ve expected.
Which is to say, not at all.
Leia had gone nuclear. Han'd never seen her get that mad before. He’s fairly certain nobody has. The previous few times she’d actually gotten truly angry with him, it was like all her emotions shut down, locking them down tight behind a wall of pure Mandalorian beskar before hissing some cutting insult and stomping away. This time though, she went full rage-mode on Han, screaming and cursing bloody murder at him, calling him all sorts of names like coward and sithspit and sleemo and even a couple of insults in old Alderaani Han’s pretty sure hadn’t actually been uttered aloud in probably a thousand years.
By the end, it was like the very air had begun to vibrate with force of her wrath, nearly smothering Han under its oppressive psychic weight. Only after she’d exhausted herself did she go quiet like he was used to, and then she’d left the room before he could even get a remark in edgewise.
Luke didn’t utter a single word during the entire ordeal. He’d merely turned the full power of his teary, betrayed tooka eyes on him before following the Princess out, after which it seemed they made the joint decision to subject him to the silent treatment for as long as they could hold out.
It’d taken nearly two rotations for them to finally acknowledge his existence again, after Leia’s subzero shoulder had been forced to crack when she’d needed to ask Han where he’d moved the Falcon’s secret emergency package of blue macarons. It was one he kept secret from Chewie but couldn’t find in himself to hide from the Princess, because supply lines were a shavit-show on a good day and it’s better for everyone’s health and sanity to keep her in her daily fix of sugar. He’s almost tempted to track down whoever’s in charge of the Special Committee for the Occupational Safety and Health of the Alliance (or SpOSHA, as everyone else on base calls it) and make it a rule in one of their hefty guidebooks.
It was probably some of the worst forty-eight hours of Han’s life, and that's including the time he’d spent in that muddy prison pit on Mimban, wondering if Chewie was eventually gonna cave and eat him while they’d waited to enact their great escape.
Without the two of them to justify his continued existence among the Rebellion, he’d felt a little like a ghost wandering around Echo Base. He had duties and chores, of course, just like everybody else (he wasn’t a total freeloader, he earned his measly stipend just like all of the other contractors), but it had really hit him then, perhaps for the first time since that fateful life-affirming party, that his initial fears from after the Battle of Yavin had come true: He’d gotten used to having people that hang around him all the time, and now that they were gone, he was kriffing miserable without them.
Yeah, he’s man enough to admit that. Sue him. It’s not as if he’ll have a single credit to his name left when Jabba gets done with him, anyway.
If he was even alive to pay at all.
He supposed he’d still had Chewie to talk to during those two hell rotations, at least in theory. But his first mate's also been a little irked at him ever since Han made the executive decision to pay up to Jabba, so it's not like he's exactly been at his most soft-and-cuddly recently either. Not that Chewie’d really even been around to give Han the time of day anyway, since it seemed like whenever he wasn’t managing one of the Falcon’s perpetual repairs or looking after Luke like a mother popahen, he was rubbing elbows with Alliance brass in some kind of advisory capacity. Because — and Han still couldn’t quite believe this — he was apparently some kind of war hero who’d served with the Jedi on Kashyyyk during the Clone Wars.
In his more bitter moments, Han can’t help but wonder what else there all is that Chewie doesn’t bother to tell him. Though, he really doubts he can be surprised by literally anything anymore, his life since he met Luke has gotten so karking weird.
The entire situation had made Han so despondent that by the time Leia finally caved, he didn’t even bother to lord the location of his secret cookie stash over her. He just told her where it was (in the refresher beside his cabin, inside the compartment where Han kept his shaving supplies), and was pleased when she and Luke grudgingly allowed him back into their orbit.
After that, he decided he'd better not complain about their treatment of him and just be content to spend whatever short amount of time he has left on base with them, even if Hoth itself is a scughole.
And man, does Han hate Hoth. He’s pretty sure it’s the sixth or seventh Corellian hell that’s the ice one, and he’d bet good creds that this frozen rock is a pretty damned accurate approximation of it. He hates the constant frigid, howling wind. He hates how damp he always feels from the snow melting into his clothes. He hates how the generally sh*tty conditions make the Falcon creak and groan and sigh like she’s liable to fall apart at any moment. And most of all, he hates the f*cking—
Huttspitting—
Starsdamned—
Tauntauns.
Han is now far more acquainted with this planet’s humble native reptomammal than he’d ever wanted to be in his entire karking life. They’re smelly, they shed, and, as much as Luke tries to claim otherwise, they’re kriffing mean. The mount the Alliance stablemaster assigned him for patrols always spits at him every time he tries to enter its stall to saddle it up, so he’s resorted to paying off one of the husbandry officers to do it instead.
This has not endeared him to the stablemaster, an older Cathar woman with graying brown fur and a grizzled notch in one of her pointed ears, who seems to love every single one of those wretched beasts like it’s her own nasty, stinking, expectorant child.
She and Han have been in something of a cold war (pun absolutely not intended) for months now. Even with her enhanced tookalike reflexes, she hasn’t actually caught Han bribing her staff to do his job for him yet. But she knows he does it. And he knows that she knows he does it. And she knows that he knows that she knows, and so on. So, while Han simply tries to live his best life and have as little contact with the foul creatures as possible outside the bare minimum of what’s needed to do his actual job, she in turn tries to make his life a living (sixth-or-seventh-circle-of-Corellian) hell.
Avoiding that whiskered witch is the only reason why he’s crept back into the stables this late in the first place. He's trying to locate his favorite scarf, which had gone mysteriously missing in the hours between now and when he’d come back from patrol earlier that day.
Han’s pretty certain he left it in the administrative office at the far end of the stables, where he remembers bickering with his catty feline nemesis after his shift. At least, he sure hopes it’s there. With his luck, the stablemaster might’ve snatched his scarf and thrown it into a stall with one of her precious tauntauns in an act of petty revenge, leaving it to be covered it in spit and piss and dung and hells knows what else, and thereby ruining the buttery, ultrasoft, rebel-orange synfleece yarn Chewie had painstakingly knitted it with forever. Han certainly wouldn’t put it past that hissing, half-eared wench.
Don’t get him wrong. Han knows it’s not that serious. It’s a kriffing scarf. He can requisition a new one from supply the minute the office opens down in D-wing the next morning. But Chewie’s sore with him already, and Han doesn’t want him noticing that the scarf he’d made had suddenly disappeared from Han’s cold weather kit. There’s truly very little in the galaxy more pathetic than a mopey, disappointed Wookiee, except perhaps a Wookiee that is mopey and disappointed with Han specifically. He may be immune to sad Wookiee eyes, but kark, even he’s got limits.
So here he is, in the middle of the night cycle, hours before the stablemaster or any of the on-duty hands would be back at work, tiptoeing down the stables’ main corridor like a Bothan on the second-most mortifying operation of their career. Second, since the spot for first place is still firmly held by that time Han'd accidentally spied on Luke and his now-deceased ex-fiancé trying and failing to make out right before the Death Star run.
Even though most of the base is asleep, including the stablemaster and her lackeys, for Han, stealth is still of the utmost importance on this mission. The administrative area that Han needs to poke through is actually just a cleaned-out tauntaun stall that’d been repurposed as an office cubicle, since apparently the Alliance had overestimated the number of beasts they’d be able to actually capture and tame well enough to ride — much to the (kriff, he’s running out of quips… mew-licious? No, that’s nothing) stablemaster’s chagrin, Han guesses. It sits at the far end of a row of stalls that are actually being used by their intended occupants, who, right now, seem to all be asleep. While it’s their ideal state of being in Han’s opinion, it also precipitates his need to stay quiet.
In theory, it’d be no big deal if some of them woke up to find him tiptoeing down the hall. However, Han’s gut’s been acting up again, which means that he’s got a bad feeling about this. He simply knows these devil animals can sense how much he despises them, and he’s pretty certain that if one of them wakes up, his presence’ll cause enough of a stink that it’d wake the whole damn stable, alerting whoever it is that’s on call to come down and do a wellness check. Which tonight, knowing Han’s woeful lot in life, might even be the Whiskered Witch herself.
So, Han keeps his steps light as he hurries down the dimly lit corridor, eyes and ears on high alert for any disturbance in the… kriff, not the Force, but the stables’ overall sleepy quiescence.However, to his pleasant surprise, he makes it to the far end of the hall without incident.
In hindsight, it should have made him even more suspicious. But hubris can get the best of everybody, even Han Solo.
He’s about to turn the corner of the partition and waltz right into the cubicle when, finally, he hears a noise that isn’t his.
He freezes. It’s a stupid reaction, because despite his own personal reasons to be sneaky, for once he’s not actually doing anything wrong. The tauntaun stable is not a restricted area; he’s authorized to be here, just like everyone else on base is, no matter the hour. But at this point it’s hard to unlearn reflexes that’ve been carefully cultivated over the course of an illustrious twenty-plus-year career working on the wrong side of the law, so it's more than understandable for him to be a little jumpy.
However, his instincts seem to have really done him a solid this time, because after the noise — a small, punched out breathy sound, followed by a wet smack, which in no karking way sounds like a tauntaun — comes the voice.
“Oh, kriff, baby. You’re so tight,” somebody in the office breathes.
They’re obviously trying their best to be quiet. But while none of the tauntauns seem to have heard the words, Han certainly has. He can’t help the aggrieved groan that escapes his throat, which thankfully is nearly inaudible over the damningly wet noises that are starting to pick up steam inside the cubicle.
“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” he whispers to nobody in particular, and certainly not to the two beings currently going at it in the stall. “Not again.”
After spending three years on two frigates and three different Alliance bases, Han’s gotten depressingly used to accidentally catching people in the middle of having sex. Walking in and being walked in on is practically considered a rite of passage by most Alliance vets, though Han has thankfully managed to avoid the latter thus far in his career as the galaxy’s most half-assed rebel. He maintains a strict policy of only dropping trou and whipping his dick out while he’s safely aboard the Falcon, and it hasn’t failed him even once in this regard.
Of course, the rest of the rebellion’s officers and enlisted beings aren’t afforded even nearly the same opportunities for privacy, so with both tensions and hormones constantly running at an all-time high, accidental exhibitionism isn’t exactly a rarity among the troops. There’s a certain etiquette to it, one that everyone’s forced to learn sooner or later after spending so much time living in one another’s pockets.
It’s a fact that remains true even on a base as big as Echo, which is the largest Alliance complex to date. Unfortunately, it also happens to be made of about ninety percent snow and ice, which means that despite its size, hidden nooks hospitable enough to be conducive to stripping down and doing the horizontal calenada are still in fairly short supply.
Han does have to admit that staging a quickie in the stables at night is something of a stroke (heh, stroke) of genius. This particular section of the base is kept at a balmy seventeen degrees above freezing — about five degrees warmer than even the barracks — which makes it one of the few places on all of Hoth that you weren’t in danger of literally freezing your balls off. And when it comes to wanting to spend time around the stables’ main occupants, it’s Han’s opinion that actually ranks among the majority, rather than that of the Whiskered Witch. While she, Luke, and the majority of the husbandry officers are softhearted space freaks who could probably look at a rancor and unironically call it cute, most beings in the Alliance tend to be just as put off by the tauntauns as Han is, and thus generally avoid the stables like the plague if they don’t have to be there, especially during off hours.
When Han looked at it that way, he could sort of see how the stables might actually be a perfect date spot, provided you could ignore the smell and didn’t mind potentially putting on a show for an ornery alien ungulate.
Of course Han be the one to ruin it for someone. Dragging his gloved hands down his face, he stands in the middle of the hall and rubs his chin, carefully considering his options.
By all means, he really should’ve just up and turned around the minute he realized the cubicle was occupied. But then that meant there was the prospect of potentially facing an even more ornery Chewie, and, well, he does really, really like that stupid scarf. It’s warm and smells mainly of synthleather, ozone, and Wookiee — meaning it smells exactly like the Millennium Falcon. To Han’s hindbrain, that’s probably the most relaxing form of aromatherapy the galaxy has to offer. Letting something like that fall into the she-cat’s clutches practically feels like a war crime worthy of Vader at this point.
It occurs to him that he could simply take a seat and try to wait them out. His datapad’s in the large interior pocket of his parka, and there’s some expense reports he still needs to send off to accounts payable before Command can reimburse him. He’s done the whole sit and wait thing before, and more than once. Two of the flight deck mechanics back on Resolute Base'd had a favorite supply closet they liked to get down and dirty in, and they’d always seemed to time their trysts to right when Han in particular needed something out of it.
Thankfully, the soundtrack to Han’s pondering after that initial snippet of dirty talk is little more than wordless panting and soft whimpers, making it relatively easy to think. He assumes it’s from the voice’s partner, who is presumably the kriff-ee rather than the kriff-er.
This theory is confirmed when ostensible kriff-er starts back up again: “Yeah, you like that? You like it when daddy f*cks you like that?” There’s a small squeak from the kriff-ee that sort of sounds like uh-huh, before the kriff-er growls, “Goddess, you’re divine. Take it, baby boy, take it. Clench that pretty hole around daddy’s big co*ck.”
Their voice is soft and more than a little husky, ringing with some sort of regional twang that would’ve made something in the back of Han’s skull vibrate pleasantly had he heard it in literally any other situation. However, now he merely bites his lip at it, smothering a laugh. Hells, even he doesn’t run his mouth in bed that badly, and Han was fairly infamous among his exes for spewing some pretty stupid shavit when his dick was hard.
“Ooooh, f*ck. Yeah. Shiraya’s kriffing haloes, you’re the most beautiful godsdamn thing on this entire karking rock, aren’t you? Aren’t you? Yeah. Tell daddy how much you love taking his co*ck.”
The stereotypical bad p*rno dialogue forces Han to clap a hand over his mouth, shoving the giggle that threatens to tumble out right back into his throat where it belongs. He can’t help the aborted snort that escapes his nose, though he no longer worries at all about waking any of the tauntauns. There are far more scandalous things afoot that night in the stables than little ol’ Han Solo deciding to go for a midnight stroll.
Yeah. Nope. Kriff the scarf. He won’t be able to listen to this without accidentally busting a rib trying not to laugh. That’s just bad manners.
He’s about to turn around and leave them to their privacy, when suddenly, he hears a high-pitched and, to his utter devastation, extremely familiar wail.
“Oh stars! Yes, daddy, I love your co*ck! I love your big co*ck. sh*t, sh*t, sh*t — daddy!”
He freezes again, hardly daring to breathe as this new voice, heedless of volume, breaks out into a series of wordless cries. They’re sharp and staccato, like they’ve been punched out of the person making them.
Han closes his eyes, feeling his face contort into an expression caught halfway between hysteria and despair
He’d know that little series of pathetic “ah, ah, ah—” moans anywhere.
He has to check. He can’t not. It’ll haunt him until Jabba throws him to the rancor if he doesn’t.
Slowly, so slowly he practically oozes across the short distance, Han sneaks up to the doorless edge of the partition. He pokes his head around, and—
Ah.
Yep.
That sure is Luke.
“f*ck yeah, baby,” his partner growls in the glistening space where Luke’s neck meets his shoulder. Each measured thrust of his hips punctuates a dirty syllable huffing out of his mouth. “Take it, take this dick. Daddy got it special just to kriff pretty boys exactly. Like. You.”
Head thrown back in ecstasy, Luke practically mewls at the praise. His hands scrabble blindly at his partner’s broad back as the man roughly bounces him on his co*ck.
“Oh, Force, daddy!”
Immediately, Han closes his eyes and flings himself back behind the partition. He even covers his ears for good measure, because for as much as he and Luke have remained almost disconcertingly comfortable with discussions of sex after they’d ended things over a year and a half ago, there’s still gotta be at least some semblance of boundaries between them.
It’s too little, too late.
Even with just his brief glimpse, the image of them has seared itself onto his retinas, where it’ll probably remain until the day the universe finally decides that it’s had enough of Han Solo and sends him out onto the celestial seas.
Or, more likely, casts him into the pit — the icy one — provided he doesn’t at least try to forget what he just witnessed, right then immediately. But, kark. Han’s not sure that the threat of damnation to the sixth or seventh circle of Corellian hell would be a good enough incentive to even want to unsee what he just saw, because… well.
It was probably one of the hottest things Han has ever seen.
He presses a hand to his chest in a useless effort to calm his suddenly racing pulse, warm blood pooling in his cheeks like he’s some sort of virgin discovering still-image holop*rn for the first time all over again.Except, what he’d just witnessed was so much better than any two-cred piece of staged holosmut, Han can only describe it as almost cosmically unfair.
There’d been Luke, of course, pinned to the wall of the Whiskered Witch’s office cubicle by, if not the tallest, then certainly one of the broadest standard human men Han’d ever had the pleasure of laying eyes on. And while he was of the very well-informed opinion that Luke was an absolute smoke show when he was in the middle of getting kriffed, no matter the angle or position, the way the kid’s unknown partner had manhandled him so well that he was practically bent in half, knees up by his chin and bare toes curling in the air from the way his calves were flung over the man’s beefy arms, was something else entirely. He’d been bare from the waist down, completely speared on a heretofore unknown co*ck and with what looked like to be very little leverage. By Han’s reckoning, the only way Luke could’ve possibly been holding himself aloft against the wall was either through judicial use of the other man’s clearly prodigious upper body strength, the sheer will of the Force — which was almost enough to convince Han to maybe start believing in it — or both.
Luke’s mystery guy hadn’t been half bad either. Although he hadn’t undressed all that much, only having rucked the trousers of his snow fatigues and his supply-issue smalls halfway down his meaty thighs, he was still all strong shoulders and tapered hips, and in possession of what Han was confident was a contender for the most well-toned ass known to humankind. Kriff, he probably could’ve bounced a half-credit off those muscular, dark-skinned glutes, which had been flexing deliciously as he brutally pounded his — let’s be real here — fairly average-sized, plasti-covered dick into Luke’s sopping front hole.
A hysterical part of Han almost wants to thank them, since they’d just made him the warmest he’s felt in weeks. Who needs a clumsily-knitted scarf with more Wookiee fur in it than actual yarn to ward off the chill, when Han can just think about Luke being railed by his hunky kriffbuddy until he spontaneously combusts?
As he tries and fails to catch his breath against the cubicle wall, Han realizes he simply cannot deal with this.
So he does what he does every time he can’t deal: He bolts.
It’s only after he’d all but sprinted back to his cabin aboard the Falcon, shoved his pants down around his knees, and furiously stripped his dick that he remembers the conversation he and Leia had four days prior.
Ask Luke about Reyé Hollis, she had said.
Reyé. Now that’s a Naboo name if Han ever heard one. On a hunch, he mentally replays for himself all of the dirty talk he’d accidentally overheard, which really doesn’t seem all that silly to him anymore.
He pauses at the point where he remembers that bit about Shir… something, and their associated wings or haloes or whatever. He’s pretty certain he might’ve heard something somewhere about a name like that being associated with one of the Naboo’s favored moon goddesses.
Right. Kriff. Okay.
As he comes to terms with the realization, it’s only then that he notices the hint of orange yarn peeking out from beneath a pile of the thermal underlayers he’d hastily stripped off earlier that day. Sitting on the edge of his bunk, he stares at it for a long, disbelieving moment, before burying his face in his palms.
Vowing to never, ever enter the tauntaun stables at night again, Han gazes at his spent, wet co*ck and screams into his hands.
Yeah. He definitely needs to talk to Luke.
***
Han’s gotta hand it to him: Freshly soniced and bundled up, with his shiny, fluffy hair flipping out from beneath the muunyak wool cap the Princess had wrestled onto his head the exact moment she realized he didn’t own one, Luke is the very picture of all-Almakian apple pie innocence the next morning in the Rogues’ ready room, looking for all the galaxy like he hadn’t spent the previous evening in a glorified animal pen getting dicked down six ways to Centaxday by a SpecForce operative nearly twice his size. Kark, he even kriffing hums as he stirs his powdered hot chocolate into his favorite mug, which is the slightly wonky one Chewie made him while slogging through the muddy depths of his ceramics phase a few weeks back.
It’s amazing, really.But Han knows better than to be fooled by simple appearances, especially when it comes to Luke Skywalker.
He’s determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of this so-called Reyé Hollis.
“So,” Han starts, leaning nonchalantly against the break table, his smirk vibroblade-sharp. “Anything you wanna share with the class, Junior?”
Luke glances up from his Wookiee-sized mug, which even in the kid’s biggish mitts looks more like a small bowl than a cup. Confused, his gaze darts around Han as he reaches for the spray canister of whipped cream. “Um. No?”
“No?” Han’s smirk stretches into a shavit-eating leer. “No? Is that your final answer?”
“Uh, yes?”
“Oh, well my mistake then!” Han remarks grandly. “So I guess that guy whose ass I got an eyeful of in the tauntaun pit last night while he was railing you wasn’t your boyfriend.”
He wishes the sh*tty burner commlink the Alliance outfitted him with had a holocamera function, if only to memorialize the way Luke does a literal spit-take. He dribbles lukewarm hot chocolate all over himself, spluttering as he nearly chokes to death on one of those little freeze-dried marshmallows.
It’s glorious.
“Boy — boyfriend?” Luke screeches once he’s retained the capacity for speech, his face now approximately the same color as Admiral Ackbar. “I — what?! How dare — oh, my Force… You… you saw?!”
The volume of Luke’s voice eventually reaches a pitch that causes both Zev and Hobbie to actually spare them half a concerned glance from the other side of the room. However, they only shrug and turn back to their card game the minute they register Han is there. Han doesn’t blame them. After three years, all the Rogues are pretty kriffing used to his and Luke’s near-inscrutable levels of banthacrap by now.
His mug totally forgotten on the table, Luke clutches at the front of Han’s thermal pullover like he can’t decide whether he wants to shake him or to simply forgo the Jedi way altogether and punish Han with a bit of sithly strangling.
Han, for his part, is way too busy cackling his lungs out like a Peridean howler to be overly worried about it.
“Han!” Luke wails, and it’s so close to the unmasked tone he’d used while skewered on Hollis’s dick that Han nearly chokes on his own saliva. “How could you?”
Laughter abruptly transformed into a hacking cough, Han wheezes as he grips Luke’s hands with his own and gingerly extracts them from the fabric of his top. He doesn’t let them go, holding them in a grip that's just tight enough that Luke’ll have a hard time tearing them away without using his voodoo. It’s necessary precaution, in case he decides he suddenly wants to pull a Leia and attempt to claw Han’s eyes out.
“Pipe — pipe down, Junior. It was an accident,” Han sputters out in an attempt to soothe him, genuinely baffled by the intensity of Luke’s reaction.
Just like when he tries with the tauntauns both Luke and the Whiskered Witch are so enamored with, it doesn’t work. In fact, it somehow only makes Luke even more mortified. Han’s brow creases with concern as all the color drains from Luke’s face, his pallor turning as ashen as the icy walls around them.
“How much did you see?” he breathes, sounding haunted. “Oh, stars, how much of it did you hear?”
He looks like he’s about to be sick, which of course makes Han feel like the galaxy’s biggest jerk. He's actually sort of used to that by now. It’s not the first time Luke’s made Han feel that way, and it certainly won’t be the last. He tends to have that effect on people. Han swears it’s one of his Jedi superpowers.
“C’mon, kid,” he sighs, buzz suitably killed. “This seems like it should be a sit-down conversation.”
Han leads Luke to the dejarik table in the corner, picking it both for its familiarity and the fact that it’s far enough away from the main area of the briefing room that they'll have a modicum of seclusion away from Zev and Hobbie. Not that Han’s overly worried about them; they’re both decent guys who have a good sense for knowing when things are meant to be private. It's one of those living-on-top-of-each-other etiquette things.
Once Luke is settled at the holotable, albeit fairly miserably, Han steps away and refills the kid’s crooked mug with fresh hot chocolate, complete with even more of the little marshmallows that nearly killed him. He tops it with a generous dollop of the spray cream before setting it right beneath Luke’s nose, the steam wafting up straight into the kid’s mopey, tightlipped face. The rich chocolate aroma does nothing to change his expression. Han's frown deepens.
“Alright, before I apologize for accidental — and I repeat, accidental — voyeuring,” he starts as he settles in the seat adjacent to Luke, “you mind telling me what all that yelling was about?”
He places a hand on Luke’s knee, squeezing it once he doesn’t move to brush it away. But despite his apparent acceptance of Han’s, yeah, rather paltry attempts at tactile comfort (because, hey, even if they are politely looking away, Senesca and Klivian are still right there), the kid staunchly refuses to look at him. Instead, he just shrugs and looks down at his lap, picking at the skin beside his thumbnail on his right hand.
“I don't know, why don’t you tell me how it’d feel if I’d walked in on you having sex,” he bites out petulantly, right as he tears at a hangnail hard enough to make it bleed.
Han unsubtly nudges the hot cocoa a little bit closer to Luke. The kid rolls his eyes, but he stops mangling his cuticles in favor of wrapping his hands around it all the same.
Pleased, Han opts to reward him with sincerity as he huffs, “Well, now, I gotta admit, I probably would be a little embarrassed if you strolled in on me doing the do. Almost nothing worse than being caught with your pants down if you didn’t plan for it ahead of time.” He pins Luke with a thoughtful gaze. “But considering the shavit you and me got up to back in the day, I’m not sure it’d be that big a deal if it was you. More funny than anything, really.”
Luke hunches into himself, curling over his drink like one of those segmented isopods he'd had so much fun playing with on that beach on Glee Anselm before the whole drowning incident. He glares furiously at the perfect spiral of cream on top, as if trying to make it melt into the hot liquid below even faster by sheer force of will.
Which, now that Han considers it, is something the kid could probably do.
“Is that what you thought when you saw, then?” Luke rasps into his hot chocolate. “Is that what you thought when you heard? That it was funny?”
Each and every single one of Han’s internal Luke-related klaxons suddenly blares to horrified life.
“Maker, kid. No,” he gasps out, immediately gripping one of Luke’s bloodless hands away from where it’s wrapped tight around his comically oversized cup. They’re still a bit puppyish, ill-proportioned to the rest of his slender little body, and it takes everything Han has not to kiss his scarred knuckles. He just might do it anyway, even with Klivian and Senesca there to spy on them. Those two have better things to do than gossip about who their Commander’s currently kriffing, especially since in this case it isn’t Han.
“I only mean that the situation is funny,” he rushes to reassure him. “Why in the nine Corellian hells would you think I’d be laughing at you? You remember all the crap I used to spew. I’m probably the last sonuvabitch able to judge anyone for what they say or do in the middle of the act.”
Finally, finally, that seems to crack the defensive shell Luke’s built around himself. He unclenches some, tentatively looking up at Han from beneath the dark gold curtain of his fringe. The relief Han feels at the sight of those too-big, sea-blue peepers is nothing short of dizzying. His guard’s still up, like he’s still a bit wary of Han, but Han can work with that.
“But…” Luke stammers, and Han gives in to the urge to press his lips to the back of his hand. Luke deflates at the tender gesture, sighing, “It’s so… Ugh, it’s just so weird.”
Han lifts his shoulders in an insouciant shrug. “So what? You like what you like, kid. And if I’m gonna be honest here, from what very little I saw, your fella seemed like he might’ve been more into it than you.”
“But you… you don’t think it’s, like… strange? That I’m, eurgh, gross for being into that sort of thing?”
“Hells nah, Junior,” Han says with a vehement shake of his head. “It’s a huge galaxy out there. There’s much weirder stuff people are into. Kriff, I’ve even walked in on some of it right here on Echo. I ever tell you about that mechanic I caught with the chick with the blue montrals who works down in Ops? Now that’s some shavit I cannot unsee. Coupla freaks, the both of them. I swear, it was like—”
“Han!” Luke yelps, breaking out into a startled giggle. “Shush!”
Han grins, so wide he feels his cheeks ache with the strain. “Hey now, I’m just sayin’! And look, I ain’t judging them either! Far be it from me to yuck anybody’s yum so long as both parties are having a good time.”
Though it's still a bit tight, Luke smiles back, squeezing Han’s hand once before releasing it to take a sip of his hot chocolate. Han wipes off the bit of spray cream that’s left behind on the tip of his nose, thoughtlessly licking the remnants of it off his thumb as he leans back into his seat.
“Would…” Luke starts after a moment, voice quiet as he stares back down at the holotable. “Would you have thought it was weird, if I’d… if I’d wanted to call you that, back then?”
Han stills, his thumb still hovering in the air in front of his lips. There’s a familiar heat in his gut as he lowers his hand and fists it on the table, but it’s low-grade and manageable.
“Did you?” he asks, more curious than turned on.
Luke shrugs, still shy but thankfully no longer completely embarrassed. “I don’t think it ever even occurred to me that that was even a thing people did. But if I knew? Then yeah, maybe.”
“Huh,” Han remarks, a little surprised despite himself. “Well… I can’t say it really does anything for me, personally.” That’s a total karking lie; he’d never thought of Luke ever calling him anything but his name in bed before this point, but now he finds the notion of the kid calling him daddy between the sheets makes something in his brain whistle so loud he feels like a horny teakettle. “But if you’d wanted to? Sure, I’d’ve been game to try it.”
Luke perks up. “Really?”
He sounds so genuinely relieved that Han's arousal immediately wanes. The feeling is replaced with overwhelming fondness, which bubbles warmly in the base of his chest.
“‘Course, Junior,” he replies, stretching an arm over Luke's shoulder. “So long as you were having fun, I always had fun. And it looks like you were having a blast last night.”
“Oh, Force,” Luke groans. “Stop.”
Equal parts smug and relieved that he’d navigated their reefy conversation so successfully (Maker, maybe he’s actually getting kinda good at this whole heart-to-heart thing; who woulda believed?), Han smirks and props his chin on his free hand. “So. When am I going to meet him?”
Luke’s expression shutters. “You’re not.”
“Uh, it’s not exactly up for debate, kid.”
“It’s my life, Han,” he grumbles around the rim of his dented mug.
Han squeezes Luke to his side, ducking forward so he can forcibly catch the kid's gaze and look him in the eyes with a serious expression. “Sure it is, Luke. But humor me for a minute. We — Chewie, the Princess, and me — we just don’t want this to be another Wedge.”
Instead of subjecting Han to more of his grousing, Luke shocks him by throwing his head back and laughing. Hard.
Han’s pleased to hear it, even if he is a little baffled. Across the room, Zev and Hobbie hardly even blink at them, too engrossed in their game of Dead Man’s Binspo to pay attention to either of the two chucklef*cks in the corner.
“Oh, believe me,” Luke wheezes after a moment once his giggling’s subsided, reaching up to wipe a tear from his eye. “It won’t. Definitely not.”
Despite the kid’s apparent rock-solid faith in the situation, Han can’t stop his mouth from twisting doubtfully. He drums his fingers on the table, anxiety churning as he thinks of all the things that could go wrong just because of Luke’s nerfbrained insistence on seeing only the very best in people, Han included.
He sighs, “Yeah, you say that, but—”
Luke shakes his head. “It won’t, Han. Trust me on this one.”
“Kid, previous events’ve made it obvious that the Force or whatever isn’t willing to tell you if somebody’s gonna turn out to be a scughole, no matter how nice he treats you at first,” he argues. “None of us have even met this guy. I need you to let me have a drink with him. For Chewie’s peace of mind, at least.”
Luke’s smile turns disgustingly indulgent. Han shudders, icked at how fuzzy it makes his insides.
“Only for Chewie’s peace of mind?” Luke asks. “Not your own?”
Han scoffs and looks away. “Well, yeah. That too. And Her Worship’s.”
“I’m touched you’re so worried about me, Han, truly,” Luke says, still looking grossly fond. “But… look, it’s fine, okay? I’m gonna tell you something that’s not really my place to reveal, so don’t go spreading it around, but… Reyé, Sergeant Hollis… he’s… he’s like me, alright? I wouldn’t have gotten involved with him if he wasn’t.”
Han doesn’t get it.
“Hollis is like you… how?”
“Han,” Luke groans.
Oh. Oh.He’s so kriffing stupid.
“Huh,” he says again. Blinking, he thinks back to the image that’s now permanently engraved into his spank-bank, specifically recalling the equipment Hollis had been sporting. Huh. “I wouldn’t’ve guessed.”
Luke barks, “Han!”
“What! It was supposed to be a compliment!” he exclaims, throwing up his hands. He pauses for a beat, before adding, “I think.”
Luke rubs a hand over his eyes, glaring at Han from between his fingers. “Believe me, it’s not.”
“Okay, noted,” Han huffs, before he thoughtfully strokes his chin. “But still. Those docs on Naboo — at least, I’m assuming he’s Naboo, what with a name like Reyé — I mean, they must be something special.”
Luke rolls his eyes. “I mean, yeah, the implant is amazing, but he also works out a lot. And I think he’s always been pretty well built.”
“I wasn’t talking about that.”
Color floods back into Luke’s cheeks.
“Oh,” he squeaks. “Oh, well… I guess you did see — um. Yeah. He — he paid a lot of money for it.”
Han waggles his eyebrows. “And? Was it worth the creds?”
“Han!”
“It seemed to me like it was,” he remarks lasciviously, grinning like a loth-wolf. “Y’know, if I weren’t so concerned that I’d be stepping on your toes, I might be tempted to ask for a test ride mysel—”
“Oh my suns, stop talking!” Luke cries, lunging forward to cover Han’s mouth with his hands.
Han dodges out of the way, laughing and feeling much better about everything. “Fine, fine, I’ll drop it. Now drink your cocoa before it becomes an ice cube.”
Grumbling, Luke complies. He takes a loud, obnoxious slurp, obviously trying to distract Han into changing the subject. Han doesn’t care. He’s not Leia. That sort of warfare won’t work on him.
“Now,” he says, pointedly turning the conversation back to the business at hand. “Should I ready myself to hear all about the sweet nothings he whispers in your ears? Prepare my formal vest for your upcoming wedding?”
Luke snorts into his drink, sending up a small spray of the remaining cream foam.
“Kriff, no,” he says. “I was actually serious about the whole ‘no relationships’ thing after what happened between me and Wedge. Sergeant Hollis and I are just friends.”
Han shoots him a look.
“With benefits,” Luke concedes grouchily.
Han folds his arms on the table, staring hard at Luke as he tries to parse out all of his little tells. Luke stares right back. After a moment, Han softens.
“The same way you and I were friends with benefits?” he asks, because he has to.
Luke shakes his head firmly. “No. Definitely not.”
He doesn’t break eye contact, and that more than his verbal answer is what leaves Han satisfied.
“Alright,” he says as he leans back. “I believe you.”
Luke quirks a smile, looking more than a little relieved. “Wizard. So—”
“I’m still gonna have to meet him.”
Luke’s forehead makes an audible thunk on the table.
***
Sergeant Reyé Hollis, Han decides, is not right for Luke at all. That much is clear from the very moment Han meets him properly, when the three of them all sit down for drinks a few days later.
Oh, he certainly gets what the kid sees in him on a surface level, because even under the unflattering watery lighting of the dank, icy cavern that passes for the Enlisted Servicebeings’ Lounge, Hollis is almost stupidly handsome. He’s nearly ten centimeters shorter than Han but almost twice as broad, and in possession of a ridiculous pair of dark eyes that even Han’s practically illiterate brain can only describe as soulful. When he smiles, it shines out from beneath the sharply barbered mustache of his full, coily beard in a flash of straight, bright white teeth. His dark brown hands are broad and blunt, with thick fingers that make Han swallow dry to think about where they may have been, and how much Luke must’ve liked it.
But for all that the Sergeant’s looks make Han’s heart go a little pitter-patter, he’s still got an air of aloof, co*cky sleaze that immediately puts him on edge. He almost reminds Han of, well… himself in a weird way,and that’s never a good sign.
It’s enough to make Han worry that, despite all the praise Luke’s heaped upon Reyé Hollis since the loth-cat was forcibly dumped out of the bag, the guy still might just be humoring the kid in order to get his dick wet. Something hot and complicated twists Han’s stomach into knots at the thought, and it makes him stupidly glad that this thing between Luke and Hollis apparently isn’t serious. He doesn’t think he’d be able to handle the situation at all if it’d been otherwise.
In other circ*mstances, Han thinks he may have actually sort of liked Sergeant Hollis. He could easily see himself enjoying a drink with and maybe even flirting with him a bit, the unfortunate fact that he’s a jarhead aside. Not that Han ever bothered with Army – Navy rivalry nerfsh*t all that much, anyway. He is notoriously equal-opportunity, after all.
Still, Han can’t help but be a little grateful for that whole rivalry crap, because it helps him play off some of his wariness of Hollis as they make their stilted introductions.They take seats at a wobbly hightop in the farthest corner of the lounge away from the counter, and after a few minutes of excruciating small talk, Han finds the right moment to shoo the kid off to go fetch them all some drinks.
Specifically, three Tatooine Sunsets.
For all that Han is known to fly by the seat of his pants, for once, he's come into this meeting with a plan — one that hinges on Luke's favorite co*cktail. He's chosen them because A, they’re delicious, and B, while they seem deceptively simple, his gut tells him it’ll take the shivering Mythrol, who looks like it’s their first night tending bar, a good long time to even find the recipe in the bricklike co*cktail bible sitting at their elbow, let alone locate the slightly esoteric ingredients that's needed to make them. It’s not like blue milk is a standard bar ingredient anywhere outside the Arkanis sector, after all. Han’s pretty sure the only reason the Rebellion keeps it in regular stock in the mess is purely to keep Luke happy.
If everything shakes out the way he thinks it will, it’ll give Han just enough time to stage an interrogation out of Luke's earshot.
Suspecting nothing, Luke merely chuffs at the way Han imperiously sends him away with their order, his breath steaming in front of his face in a puffy cloud. He shakes his head as he wanders off to go harry the amateur bartender, leaving Han and Hollis to size each other up from across the table in his absence.
Oh, yeah. It’s all coming together. Hanbarely resists the urge to rub his hands together and cackle at his own deviousness.
Smirking blithely, he sits at the edge of his chair, leaning on his elbows. In turn, Sergeant Hollis rests his hands on the table in front of him, cracking his broad, pitted knuckles in the ensuing silence.
“So,” Hollis remarks eventually, in that softly musical accent Luke’d informed Han is indicative of a life born and bred in Naboo’s isolated Lake Country, “this is a little awkward.”
Han snorts. “You’re the one who said it, buddy. Not me.”
Hollis shrugs his mountainous shoulders, cracking his knuckles one last time before crossing his arms over the enormous width of his chest. His biceps strain at the fabric of his fatigues, pulling at the seams even beneath the countless thermal layers.
It takes everything Han has not to ogle.
“Sorry, I’m just not used to the guy I’m currently kriffing inviting me out for a friendly drink with his ex,” Hollis says, raising an immaculately groomed eyebrow at Han. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost think you were being a little territorial, Captain Solo.”
“Me? Territorial? Not on your life, Sarge,” Han scoffs. “The kid would kick my ass if he heard you thought that.”
The Sergeant chuckles, co*cking his head at him consideringly as he settles back onto his barstool. “Just Hollis is fine. Or Reyé, if you prefer.”
“I’ll stick with Sarge for now, if that’s alright with you. We ain’t exactly friends yet.”
“You ever plannin’ on us becoming friends?” Hollis asks shrewdly.
“That depends,” Han replies.
“Depends on what?”
“On the kid, and how you treat him, for one.”
“I think that might actually be two,” Hollis quips back at him.
Maker, yeah, this guy is an ass. And stars damn it, he’s making it really hard for Han not to like him.
It’s frustrating, but it also makes Han decide to give Hollis the courtesy of not beating around the bush. Laying his hands palms-up on the table in a gesture of goodwill, he studies Hollis’s expression as he asks, “Did Luke ever tell you what happened with the last guy he got involved with?”
Han doesn't really have any expectations for Hollis’s reaction, but he still finds himself surprised as the Sergeant's easygoing expression immediately clouds. A stormy scowl marring his features, the synthetic fabric of the his parka creaks as his grip tightens on his arms. He clenches his jaw, hard enough that the twitching muscle is visible to Han even beneath the thick hair of Hollis's beard.
“You mean that thing with Antilles?” Sarge replies, his tone turning rough and a little dangerous as his accent goes on full display. “Yeah, I heard. Honestly, I was ready to go pound that little snot straight into the ice and feed him to that worm Luke and I accidentally woke up when he told me. But then of course baby blue somehow went an’ managed to convince me that there was no bad blood between them. Doesn’t exactly keep me from wanting to go break that punk’s nose, but I decided if the kid’s okay with bein’ around him for now, I ain’t gonna be the one to go poke a shaak while it’s sleepin’.”
“Probably for the best,” Han says, a little shocked, but nonetheless extremely pleased at the development. Dammit, it’s yet another tick in the guy’s favor. (And, right, the kriffing ice worm — that must’ve been how Hollis and Luke met in the first place.) “That’s the kid for you; all invested in everyone holding hands and getting along more than anything else. Swear, he’s got a heart bigger than a bantha’s.”
Something about Han’s words must’ve been funny, because they shock a laugh out of Hollis.
“Goddess, the way you two speak,” he chuckles. “It’s like you’re both Tatooine moisture boys.”
Han grins easily, fondness for Luke momentarily overcoming his caution. “What can I say? He rubs off on ya.”
The Sergeant leers at him, and it’s so reminiscent of Lando that Han can’t help but find it charming.
“Oh, tell me about it," he says.
Han coughs as he tries to hide his grin, reigning his expression back into some semblance of seriousness. They can joke all they want later; Han’s still on a solo (heh) mission, and there’s only so much time before the Mythrol gets enough of their shavit together to figure out the perfect ratios for a Tatooine Sunset to meet Luke’s exacting co*cktail standards.
“So, now you know why I made Junior invite you for a drink with us,” he says.
Hollis nods sagely. “Yu-p,” he replies, popping the -p, which is such a quintessentially Luke thing Han has to laugh. He’s obviously not the only one the kid’s rubbed off on, in more ways than one.
“Honestly, I was expectin’ something like this to happen sooner or later," he continues. "Between you, the Wookiee, the General, and the rest of the fighter jocks, even us groundpounders know that Commander Skywalker is more well guarded than a Queen surrounded by her full contingent of handmaidens.”
Han thinks that must mean something specific on Naboo, but he’s not curious enough to ask. Instead, he simply remarks, “You know, Luke’s told me he’s not looking for anything serious.”
Hollis looks at him with measured nonchalance, his eyes narrowing just the slightest bit.“So? Neither am I. Civil war ain’t exactly the best time to get yourself all wrapped up in another person, Solo.” He says it so pointedly Han almost winces, feeling the sharpness of the words in his ribs. “He and I are completely on the same page here. He was very clear about how I needed to be upfront with him about things, and how in turn he was gonna be the same. It’s a little refreshing, actually. I’m not exactly interested in game-playing.”
Han stares at him for a beat. He takes in the languid state of Hollis’s posture, the cool set of his jaw. He measures the careful blankness of his deep, deep eyes, which are so dark in the lounge’s dim lighting they’re nearly black.
Han’s got a feeling. He’s not sure that he likes it, but that doesn’t stop him from voicing it aloud.
“You like him,” he states, because it’s so karking obvious. His gut’s practically screaming it’s the truth.
Hollis blinks at him slowly. Then he lifts his shoulders in a long, rolling shrug. “Yeah? He’s an easy guy to like.”
Han shakes his head. Sighing, he runs a ragged hand through his hair, wishing that for once Luke didn’t have to make things so kriffing complicated, even if he never actually meant to.
“No. You like him," Han insists. "I’d know that look from a kriffing parsec away with my eyes closed.”
“Now, you know that doesn’t make any sense, Solo,” Hollis says neutrally.
Squinting even harder, he unfolds his arms and scratches at his beard, before resting his chin on the knuckles of one of his closed fists. The new position makes the small gold hoops in the lobes of each of his ears glint in the dim lights, and highlights the faint lines of an old, faded tattoo creeping up the back of the hand currently propping up his head. For the first time, Han wonders what all Hollis did before he got mixed up with freedom fighting. He doesn’t exactly seem like the type to be a farmer or a humble shaak herder.
“But if you’re insinuating that I care about what happens Luke,” the Sarge continues, “well, shoot. ‘Course I do. We’re friends, albeit ones who also happen to have fun and blow off some steam together. Keeps things amusing to have him around, even if he can be karking obnoxious at times with his wizard stuff. Helps that he’s pretty easy on the eyes in that regard.”
Whatever, it’s fine. Han can work with this. In a twisted way, this revelation might even work in his favor for what he's about to ask. Hollis might not be the perfect guy for Luke, but after having got a sense of him and hearing what he had to say, he figures beggars can’t be choosers.
An interrogation isn’t the only reason he wanted to talk to Luke’s new not-boyfriend alone tonight.
He glances over at the bar, surreptitiously checking on Luke and the bartender’s progress. The kid has his head bent over the drink bible, mumbling to himself with three co*cktail glasses beside him as the Mythrol rummages below the counter.
Grimacing, Han makes a split-second decision.
“Look, Sergeant Hollis,” he says, reverting back to formality so Hollis knows he’s being serious, and hopefully imparting that time is of the essence. “Let’s cut the crap for a second. The kid’s gonna be back with our drinks any minute now, so I’m not gonna waste both our times tiptoeing around this: The Falcon’s eventually gonna be shipping outta here, sooner rather than later once my first mate and I can get her hyperdrive fixed. Might be as soon as tomorrow night after Luke and I come back from patrol, if we can make it out before the storm hits.”
Hollis’s forehead wrinkles slightly as his brows raise from the sudden change in subject. “Okay…? Any particular reason you’re telling me this? Or did you just feel like sharing?”
“I don’t know when or if we’ll be back,” Han tells him bluntly, which causes Hollis’s eyebrows to climb even higher. “I know the Princess and the rest of the Rogues — and yeah, that includes Antilles — will look after him, but I’ll be honest, the more eyes there are on the kid, the better. It’ll set me more at ease knowing you’ll also be willing to keep one out for him as well. Y’know, especially since you’re—”
Hollis's brows instantly halt their rise to whip down toward his eyes into a furrow, his hot gaze turning razor sharp. His arms and shoulders coil tight, as if ready to spring at any moment.
“I’m what?” he snaps.
Han fixes him with a deadpan look, unintimidated. “You’re like him.”
Hollis stiffens, his entire countenance going abruptly cold. Then, he conspicuously forces himself to relax, settling into his stool as he folds his calloused hands on the hightop between them.
“Ah,” he says blankly. He cracks his knuckles. "Luke told you, then.”
“I forced it out of him,” Han replies, completely unabashed. “I wasn’t gonna get off his back until he gave me a concrete reason why he thought you’d be any different from Wedge, and, well. I can’t really think of a better one than that. He did tell me not to go spreading it around.”
Hollis releases a breath, rolling his neck to release the sudden tension gathered there. He lets his head hang slightly as he admits, “It ain’t exactly a secret, but it’s not something I really go out of my way to advertise, either.” He shrugs again, forcing himself back to the epitome of calculated nonchalance. It's a move Han understands intimately, though perhaps not in regards to this particular vulnerability. “He ‘n’ I are a little different in a few ways when it comes to that, but I empathize with most of what he’s gone through. It’s actually not all that uncommon on Naboo. We’re a little bit more enlightened about all that shaak shavit than the rest of the Galaxy. I’d honestly have half a mind to take Luke on a trip back home with me at some point, if bringing him to the Emperor’s homeworld wasn’t an instant kriffing death sentence.”
Han grimaces. “You heard about Vader’s little manhunt, then?”
Now it’s Hollis’s turn to level him with a flat stare. “At this point, I think the whole karking galaxy’s heard about the hard-on ol’ tall, dark and asthmatic’s got for baby blue. Not that I blame him, but—”
Startled, Han sucks a sharp, audible breath through his teeth. “Hollis — you can’t just say sh*t like that,” he splutters. “Holy kriff.”
Hollis blinks at him. “Wow, Solo. I didn’t take you for such a prude. You gettin’ shy on me alluva sudden?”
“When it comes to Vader, yeah, kinda,” Han hisses through the near-painful clench of his jaw. He leans forward and rests his weight on his forearms, uncaring if he’s getting his already dingy parka even more dirty from grime-coated tabletop. “You can’t… Look. If you’re gonna spend any amount of time around Luke, it’s better you learn now what topics are off-limits. Joking about Vader just about tops the list.”
To his credit, Hollis’s half-amused expression immediately sobers. “That bad, huh?”
“The guy killed his father before the kid could even know him, murdered his teacher right in front of him, and then shot down his fiancé while he was flying on his wing during his first combat mission. So, yeah, it’s ‘that bad.’”
Han knows it’s a little dorky to use air-quotes. Luke would certainly bust his chops if he were there to see them, but damn it, he has a point and he needs to make it before Hollis accidentally does or says something to the kid he can’t take back.
They must work, because Hollis suddenly looks stricken.
“I didn’t know he used to be engaged,” he murmurs, his dark complexion gone a bit ashy.
“It’s been a few years,” Han informs him, the words wrung in a sigh. “He’s moved on, mostly. But it’s still a sore subject.”
“But, marriage…” the Sergeant says, sounding like he’s a little stuck on the thought of it. “Isn’t — isn’t he a little young for that?”
“You’re telling me. Apparently, it’s a common enough thing where the kid’s from.” Han begins to humorlessly chuckle, but cuts himself short. He tilts a brow at Hollis. “Actually, that’s a bit surprising coming from you, of all people. Doesn’t your planet have some kinda habit of electing child queens?”
Hollis snorts. “I guess, but it doesn’t happen as often as you think. Our age of majority is still twenty-one, same as the rest of the systems in the Mid Rim.” He shrugs. “Unfortunately, the way our education system’s set up sorta makes it primed to churn out a surplus of child prodigies. And then, when our most famous queen in the past four centuries just happens to be one of them child prodigies, suddenly our whole planet’s gone and gotten some kinda reputation.”
Han holds up his hands, palms facing outward. “Hey, I’m not insinuating anything. I’ll take your word for it. I’m just assuming that you weren’t a child prodigy, then?”
Hollis grins, his teeth shining luminously bright beneath his mustache. He co*cks his head and practically purrs, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Han can’t help the way he visibly shivers, and Hollis grins like the tusk-cat who’s gotten the cream.
Hollis looks down as he rolls his knuckles on the table, his full lips pursing thoughtfully. “Y’know, I’ve been hooked up with the Alliance in some form or another for a while now. I was part of a cell back on Naboo ‘til right before Scarif. Who was this fiancé? Maybe I knew him.”
“You ever heard of a kid called Biggs Darklighter?”
The Sergeant’s brows rise again, and he whistles lowly, obviously impressed. “Damn, really? Never actually met the guy in person, but I’ve definitely heard of him. He racked up some record-breaking flight numbers during that Fleet-wide dogfight to get the Death Star plans. I think your boy over there’s been the only one to ever beat him in single-engagement kills since then.” His smirk turns a bit melancholy as his gaze slides toward the bar, where Luke seems to have convinced the Mythrol to completely disregard the co*cktail bible in favor of verbally instructing them in how to make a proper Tatooine Sunset. Hollis mutters, “They woulda been unstoppable together if Vader hadn’t gotten to him.”
Han nods, subdued and steadfastly ignoring the way his heart goes nearly supernova at how easily Hollis refers to Luke as his — as Han’s — boy, for all that the other man is the one currently kriffing him.
Kark.
Okay, fine. Maybe Han does like Reyé Hollis. Just a little bit. But then Han notices the way the drinks are finally just about made thanks to Luke’s direct intervention, and he pushes aside his inappropriately warm and fuzzy feelings.
“For what it’s worth, I never got the chance to meet him properly either,” he bites out in a rush. “But back to my point — will you do me a solid and look out for him? I know you don’t know me from a porthole, but—”
“Shiraya’s haloes, Solo,” Hollis interrupts, looking a little offended. “You don’t even gotta ask. I told you, I care about Luke. I swear to you, he’ll be safe with me. It’s been about fifteen years since my handmaiden days, but protecting a queen ain’t exactly something you forget how to do.”
Han gazes at Sergeant Reyé Hollis — who, despite his veneer of snark and easy licentiousness, in this moment sits across from him so sincere and determined and strong — and feels himself nearly go limp with relief.
“Well, then, that’s that, isn’t it?” he says, shooting Reyé a grin. “Stupid of me to even worry about it, really, since the kid’s so pathetic he can’t help but make people wanna take care of him. He’s like the universe’s most irritating tooka cat that way.”
“Ha! You certainly don’t gotta tell me that,” Hollis replies, matching Han’s grin. A collection of nascent laugh lines crinkle handsomely around his eyes. “Annoyed the kark out of me with his insistence in trying to use magic tricks to get us out while we were trapped in the galaxy’s worst deep freezer together. It worked out, though I still can’t say I exactly get it.”
Han offers him a commiserating salute. “Here, here. Now, explain to me what you mean with all that stuff about queens and handmaidens. Whaddaya mean you—?”
“Sands kriffing hells!” Luke cries, unceremoniously dropping a tray laden with three perfectly proportioned Tatooine Sunsets onto their little bar table. “Sorry for the wait, we had to send a droid to fetch the bottle of the Klantoonian rum from the Officer’s Lounge, and then the recipe the bartender had was all outta wack. It asked for three parts blue milk to one part liqueur, can you believe that?”
“Can’t think of anything worse, kid,” Han deadpans as Luke hops up onto the barstool between him and Hollis. He smirks at the way Hollis gapes at the layered drink, obviously confused at how something so simple apparently took so long. “Word to the wise, Sergeant; don’t try to keep up with Junior here. I swear he’s part Yarkora.”
Luke sticks his tongue out at him while Reyé’s expression only becomes even more bemused.
“Redundant livers,” Han stage-whispers at him as he begins to stir his drink.
Luke rolls his eyes.
“Noted,” Hollis says, amused though clearly still a bit befuddled. Han's not worried. If he sticks around long enough, he'll get used to Luke. Everybody does.
Han notices the exact moment Hollis’s eyes inevitably slide away from Han to rest on Luke. Though the kid’s so zipped and bundled that basically only his face is visible beneath all his layers, the Sergeant still looks a little dazzled by him. Han can’t really blame him. Luke’s magnetic like that, enough so that the kid distracts people from faces even as devastatingly handsome as Han's own.
Humming cheerfully, Luke wastes no time in stirring his drink with the metal swizzle until it’s the perfect shade of purple. He tips it back in a long sip, throat bobbing as he swallows. He licks his lips of the remnants, oblivious to the way Reyé goes a little slackjawed at the sight, before he finally focuses on Hollis and his as of yet untouched glass.
“Here, Reyé, you gotta stir it before you drink,” he explains, like that was the part that was tripping Hollis up about the whole thing. Han smiles into his co*cktail as the kid continues, “Unless, of course, you want a mouthful of the liqueur, but that’s not as pleasant as you’d think.”
Luke immediately scoots his stool closer and reaches out to stir Hollis’s drink for him, and the other man’s gaze is so painfully soppy Han can’t help but feel a little embarrassed for him. Between that and his own sweet co*cktail, his teeth feel like they’re beginning to ache.
“You couldn’t have just told me that?” Reyé grouches at him, though his tone holds a suspicious lack of heat.
His hand drifts from the tabletop to rest on Luke’s thigh; too high to be strictly friendly, though low enough to not be risque. Han feels his ribs tighten as he spies Hollis’s thumb begin to idly rub circles on the stiff khaki fabric of Luke’s fatigues. From the slightly exasperated look on the Sarge’s face, Han’s not sure he even realizes he’s doing it.
Luke scoffs. “Aw, don’t be such a grump all the time. Just sit back and watch me work for this first one. There’s a technique to it.”
“A technique, huh?”
“Ye-p.” Luke pops the -p.
“Well, then. Let’s see it, Flyboy.”
Han sits back and simply observes the way Hollis indulgently watches Luke mess with the stirrer, his thumb never pausing in its soft stroking on the kid’s leg. Luke swirls the drink with obvious exaggeration, but eventually the co*cktail turns the pale lavender of its namesake. He turns the full sparkle of his quasar-bright smile onto Reyé when he finishes, and Han smirks wide at the way the man blinks in the shining glare of it, obviously dazzled again.
“See?” Luke asks, holding up Hollis’s glass triumphantly, just as the last of the components eddy together in a pleasant blend of blurring colors. “It’s pretty, right? And probably the closest thing to a real sunset any of us’ll be able to see while stationed on this iceball.”
“Yeah. It’s real beautiful,” Reyé agrees gruffly, clearly not paying any attention to the drink at all.
Propping his chin on his hand, Han hides his snort by taking another sip of his co*cktail.
Reyé might not be right for Luke, but he supposes he's better than nothing.
***
After that night, Han simply doesn't have the capacity to spare a single thought for Luke's situationship with Sergeant Reyé Hollis, because the next time he and the kid are together outside of a medbay after the blizzard that'd occurred the next day, they’re prisoners in Jabba’s palace.
Han’s weak, he's blind, and he's disoriented — and that’s not even mentioning how he’s trying his kriffing damnedest not to panic as he begins to grapple with the realization that he’s just lost over an entire year of his life.
A year without Luke. A year without Leia.
(And, oh, kriff, where is she? Where is Leia? He heard her, he felt her, she was there when he fell out of the carbonite. She was so soft and she smelled so good; her arms were so strong around his frail body. She kissed him so sweetly, and oh, he loves her, he has to tell her, where the f*ck is she, where is Leia—)
Luke's presence is an indescribable relief. Han can’t see him, but he’d know him anywhere. After three — four, five? — years, he feels almost like a part of Han at this point; as if he were a piece of his heart or some other vital organ that had decided, stupidly, to take its chances trying to survive outside of his body.
However, even if Han can feel him blind, can feel the cool, comfortable presence of him like a bacta patch over a raw, gaping wound, Luke is… well—
Luke is different.
