thisavrou_log | openish | to describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane

openish | to describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane

Who: Leia Organa

straightouttacarbonite, and YOU. If you want. ♥
When: May 18
Where: The open prompt is at the bar. The closed ones are in navigation and at the Falcon.
What: Fallout from the holo Leia received in the mail today. Two closed prompts and an open one.
Warnings: Spoilers for The Force Awakens.

for Kylo Benben
She knows what's going on before the little boy in the holo says more than Hi, mom, it's Ben. Perhaps she's always known. His interest in her, in her ability to use the Force, and his disdain for Han have never seemed in proportion. There's something personal in both of them, the strange, coy way he approached conversation as much as the biting frost of his anger.

This might be someone else's, she tells herself nonetheless as she watches. She wants that feeling of recognition to be wrong--she hopes it is--but the details only keep stacking up. An uncle called Luke. Jedi training. The meditation tricks Leia's brother employs for himself. And those dark eyes that seem to come straight from her face. The nose, unquestionably Han's.

(She has no explanation for the ears, but she can't help but feel an affection for them that seems borrowed from a stranger.)

If this isn't their son, she'll eat her blaster, piece by piece. And that leaves her shaken, staring at the space the holographic image was long after it flicked off. Her apparent adversary, the unhinged bane of Han Solo's existence, is their child. Whatever it is that's brought him to this point, they must have had a hand in it.

To lie to her, though--a lie of omission counts, in her book--and to speak to her as a stranger when she's his mother...to call it anger is to miss the empty ache, the insult, the amorphous sense of betrayal. She's a panoply of hurt.

She finds him in navigation, and they're both fortunate there's no one there to hear her snap, "Ben!"

for Han Solo

"Meet me at the Falcon." Leia spits the words into the MID, insistent and clipped. "It's important."

In a better mood, she might not order him around quite so remorselessly--but in a better mood, she wouldn't have to. She stalks through the corridors of the Moira until she comes to the cargo bay. The speed of her footsteps picks up as she nears the Falcon. That bucket of bolts is a more welcome sight than just about any she can think of just then.

OPEN - ambiguously set throughout the weekend as needed

Leia hasn't needed a drink so badly in a long, long time. The bar on the Moira isn't exactly ideal--it's public, for one thing--but she's not convinced she wants to use her small store of Alderaanian wine on family problems. (And, if she's completely honest with herself, she's also not convinced she wants to be alone right now, anyway.)

If someone should happen to sit down beside her, she'll give them a humorless nod of acknowledgment. No real smile, but there's no animosity to the way she asks, "What're you drinking?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

He whirls to look at her, the chart in front of him already forgotten. The chair he lurches from wobbling back and forth like an officer with bad news to deliver. His lightsaber clipped to his side. He strides to her, his features clenching and then snarling.

He grabs her by the arm, yanks her to him.

“Who told you that name?” Kylo Ren demands, his face next to hers. Almost touching. He'll kill them.

Leia knows going into this confrontation that that's exactly what it will be--but though she digs in her heels, she's a wisp of white linen and sinew compared to him. He has his father's height.

It's an unsettling thought to consider when his fingers press roughly into her arm. For a moment, her eyes are wide as she stares up at that wild-eyed face, but she's not going to be intimidated by her own son. Stamping down that brief stab of fear, she glares up at him, her voice hard and brittle.

"You did." The holo is in her pocket, but she's not about to draw it out and show him. He'll destroy it, surely, if this is his response simply to hearing his name. "Ben Solo, isn't it? Is that why you've been after him?"

He twitches at the name, or his face does, his mouth crumpling. “No,” he says, the word turning to deadweight on his tongue. His hand clamps down on her arm and his eyes lock onto hers. She's not lying—he's tormented with a thought, an image of her emerging from the ingress to a boy whose most ardent wish has been granted.

Had she liked him?

“No.” He discards her arm, steps back. He has some faint, foolish hope of explaining it to her, of going on as he has been. “My name is Kylo Ren.”

Leia swallows hard at the way his grip tightens to something painful, her determination not to be browbeaten into submission by her own child wavering. A thought occurs to her, for the first time: There is no reason to believe he won't hurt her. Only her own stubborn assumption that he wouldn't brought her this far, and with his hand on her, she can't keep hold of that easy belief.

The idea that she could raise a boy who grows up into this strange, violent man spreads a chill through her gut. Without the proof before her, she wouldn't believe it.

She's on the verge of slamming her free hand down on his thumb in hopes of breaking his grip when he lets her go. She takes a step back as well, resisting the desire to rub at her arm, and pulls together every scrap of defiance within her.

"You call yourself Kylo Ren." It's a small distinction, but one she thinks is worth making. "But that's not what we called you, is it?"

He feels it, the way he used to. The familiar overlap in the Force, her heart in his chest, quickening with fear. He's hurting her.

When she steps back, he regrets it with an intensity that borders on fatigue. His shoulders go slack. Maybe that's what this will be, a slow backing-away. The distance between them growing ever wider. “It's my name,” he says, so insistently it rings false. Kylo Ren is the name he made for himself, a name he deserves to take pride in, a name steeped in blood. It has brought troops into formation and Jedi to their knees. If she could see its effect, she wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

“There's no”—his mouth works uselessly, soundlessly, until he takes a breath—“Ben Solo. Not in your time. Not in mine.” He looks at her, knowing that should be the end of it.

“Don't you understand?” he asks.

If that connection existed for both of them, Leia hasn't yet developed the sensitivity necessary to notice it--or perhaps she'll have to wait until she carries him herself. That he is her son feels purely theoretical; he's still a stranger, one who's maddeningly inscrutable even when she suspects she should be able to read his body language more clearly than she can. He's demonstrative, but the idiosyncrasies of his face mean nothing to her.

"Why don't you explain it?" she asks, her voice sharp. She's well past I'm pretending to be patient with you and deep into I'm not being patient at all because I know it doesn't matter as she stares up at him, crossing her arms. "Since I clearly don't."

“I'm giving you what you wanted,” he practically shouts, his voice loosed like a wave. Hating her for all she's done, all she hasn't, for standing with her arms folded and forcing him to introduce her to her own indifference.

He blinks. His gaze drops to the Moira's scuffed floor, and he swallows. He speaks slowly, stiffly. “You have no son. Go. Leave.”

"Why would I want this?" A man older than her, styling himself Kylo Ren and appearing in visions granted by the Force--visions that offer nothing but the promise of darkness. A man whose reaction to the sight of his own father is inexplicable violence. No one could possibly long for that from their child, least of all Leia.

For a moment, she grits her teeth, wondering what she can possibly say that might--well, what does she want her words to do? Convince Ben of Han's worth, draw him out of this fit of pique and into a conversation, goad him into an explanation that actually explains. (A small part of her doesn't care what her words do, so long as they strike him with enough force to leave a mark. That's the part she ignores--the part she's going to have to start thinking about more in the future. It seems like it must be a form of darkness in itself.)

"I've seen my son." The words come out easily enough, but behind that straightforward tone lies a nest of uncertainty. This might be the one person Leia can't fool with a diplomat's poise. "I've heard him tell me he missed me. If you think I'm going to go without some kind of an explanation--adversaries, Ben? Adversaries?"

This. He hears you. No pain is unbearable, Snoke has taught him. It should be judged not in terms of strength, but novelty.

He's never hurt like this before.

It's as if he's been ground to dust. He shuts his eyes, opens them almost immediately. Later, he'll will himself to be satisfied: he was right.

“I killed him.” It's a confession. How many times has he pictured the violent twist of her features, the surrender of her prized composure, and now he can't face her as he speaks. His voice is thick, clotted. He doesn't clear his throat. “I killed Han Solo.”

If she could see what was going on behind that angular face, maybe she wouldn't have come in here raring for a fight. If she'd thought, if she hadn't given into her rashest, most reckless instincts, she could have approached this differently. But the realization that she had a son, one who'd lied to her for months, had been a slap in the face.

When she sees the strain in his face, his eyes shutting against her demands--adversaries, Ben--she realizes that all she's done here is swing back. And at her son. At a man who once so longed for her presence that he sent messages asking her to come to him. How far apart we are.

It shouldn't be a surprise that he answers with a blow of his own, nor that it should hit her squarely in the chest. He knows her far better than she knows him, must realize the breath will die in her chest when he tells her this.

Her mouth opens, but the words are tangled at the top of her throat, cut through with a mix of pain and disbelief. (He isn't lying--she's sure of that, somehow--but accepting his truth is a step further than she can bear.) She stares up at him; whatever grotesque world he lives in, it's her doing. I raised you. When her voice does come, it's rough. "Why?"

He doesn't need to remember. It's in his thoughts, the way power is in his blood—ineradicable, undeniable. Alive. The last moment he felt his father in the Force, the terrible calm to follow.

I thought it would make me stronger. Kylo chokes back the answer. Information is all he has to offer her, all he has to deny her.

“You want to prevent it,” he says. Speaking cleanly, deliberately, as though translating her anguish. It's the only reason she'd ask such a question. “You can't.”

(If, for an instant, he joins her in her futile yearning, if he too knows the turns and walls of that labyrinth of ruined possibility, it doesn't reach his voice.)

"Of course I want to prevent it." The weight of this conversation is finally coming down on her shoulders. Her voice is no longer arching full of indignation; she's solemn, a little weary, and the fire in her voice is banked to embers. "And I want to understand you."

He's an aberration from everything she might have imagined of a child, and yet she can see so much of his father in him. And so much of myself. It's easier to look for what's Han, especially knowing that the fury required to murder his father might have (no, must have, she thinks) come from her.

"Am I next?" she asks, and there's a bitter humor to the question despite the humorless tone she asks it in. He could cut her down right here if he wanted to, though it wouldn't do him much good in the long run.

His face contorts with that ugliness exclusive to pain, disbelief slamming up against anger. His lip trembling. “Understand me?” He takes a gasping breath. The worst of it is—he remembers a time they understood each other perfectly. “You won't even use my name.”

He glares at her, not trusting his features, giving them no alternative. The question threatens to break him open. No, would spill out. Never.

In the long silence, he strips, feeling by feeling, the emotion from his voice. “I'd prefer it not come to that,” he says in a humiliating whisper. Kylo lifts his chin and holds her gaze, regarding her as if from behind a mask. She doesn't know him. She doesn't care.

“But if it does, I'll save you for last.”

"Fine. Kylo Ren, if it makes such a difference." And it does. It's a rejection of the family that created him and raised him, a particular insult to Han Solo in the rejection of his surname. How Ben can hate his father so insistently, she doesn't understand.

(He's Ben to her now, even if he insists on being called Kylo. She's seen him giddy and laughing, his features pulling easily into a familiar grin, and she couldn't forget it if she wanted to. He's her son, and she called him Ben; it's Ben he'll be to her.)

(But if she really must call him Kylo, she will. To his face.)

He's not only Han's son, though, not with the ability to hold others' attention as he does. What he says is part of it--Leia's mouth turns dry at the thought of dying at her son's hand--but there's an intensity in him that could be turned to charisma with only a little effort.

(She'll wonder later if she tried.)

"It doesn't have to be this way." Her own voice has grown soft, in answer to his. She takes a step forward, tentative. Whatever happens next, he's not going to kill her at this moment--not if he's telling the truth. Of course, he might be willing to see just how close he can come to that line (and for that reason, she regrets leaving her blaster behind), but that's a risk she'll have to take. "If you tell me what happened, we can make this right."

He's on the brink of something, the Force awhirl like the wind around a spire. She moves toward him and he's seized with competing impulses: to shrink back, to meet her. He's bewildered by her, her gentle tone. Where's her anger? Evaporated, erased, refined into a dangerous subtlety?

She's telling him what he wants to hear. That's her genius.

But he so desperately longs to hear it.

“You got rid of me,” he says. His voice cracks, and he jerks away.

"I got rid of...B-Kylo." As a rule, Princess Leia Organa does not stutter. Even at the worst of Han's teasing, even with Tarkin staring her down, Alderaan's continued existence hanging in the balance before her, her words kept their crisp edges and their pointed meanings. But here, before the broken man she'll bring into the world, she stumbles.

She'll be angry again later, no doubt. At him, and at herself, at a self she doesn't yet know and--from his dark references to her--doesn't recognize. Right now, she knows the truth of what he says in his wounded-bird stance and the sudden creak in his voice, and she can't feel anything but regret for a time she hasn't even seen.

How could she possibly abandon her own child? Whether she intended to do so or not--surely she couldn't--got rid of is the truth as he sees it, and that's caused damage enough. He's shot through with it, running along him like the veins under his skin.

I did this to him. Somehow, I'm going to do this.

"Help me understand," she says, holding out a hand as though he might take it. She doubts he will at this point, but the offer is one she has to make regardless. If happy, homesick Ben Solo lives inside him still, she has to reach out. "You're my son. I want to know you."

Her hand is so small. He's unable to break out of the thought. He could hurt her a thousand ways, witnesses them in his mind's eye.

Then: his father's parting touch, his hand shaping the face Kylo Ren turned away from the universe and enclosed in a mask.

His tenderness.

His body is numb, a spill of pins and needles. His voice vapor. He gathers his hands into fists, squeezes lightly, as if about to relinquish something. “You'll hate me.”

It's wrong, all wrong. A plea, rather than a promise.

"No," Leia tells him. "I might be angry at times, but I could never hate my son."

She reminds herself not to think of the meaning behind all this right now, the possibility that, in the future, she might hate her own child. If she doesn't, she's still managed to give the impression of hatred. Isn't that equally bad? Ben still looks upon her with anger and pain.

Her hand drops. The desire to touch his arm, or possibly his hair, does not.

"If you are my son, I love you. No matter what you do." Even if he murders his own father. Even if he stands against everything she believes in. She must love him yet, however painfully. If she doesn't, she's not sure she wants to become that woman.

It should come as no surprise that Lando is a somewhat regular visitor to the bar on board the Moira. Drinking and flirting happen at bars, after all. You don't really have to pay close attention to him to know that he's rather a fan of such pursuits.

Tonight, though, his plan changes rather swiftly when he spots a small, familiar figure at the bar. He doesn't sit immediately, but he does walk over and stop next to her, a minor inclination of his head in greeting.

"Princess.' There's nearly a touch of surprise in his tone as he addresses her, for reasons he swiftly illuminates. "I don't believe I've run into you here before."

"Lando." She still has her cocktail, a colourful but not entirely accurate attempt at a cometduster, in her hand as she looks his way. The look on his face is surprised, but there's a lightness there that's hard to settle next to her own dark thoughts. "I don't believe you have, either."

A large part of her would like to send him on his way, to whatever good-humoured debauchery he's looking to experience, but the longing for someone to sit with wins out. She pats the seat beside her, a silent invitation.

As much appeal as good-humoured debauchery holds for him, Lando's not one to turn his back on such an invitation. He's perfectly aware that he's fairly far from being her favorite person, and he'd certainly prefer for them to be on better terms - it felt as if he'd made some progress there, even, just to wind up here and have it forgotten.

Besides, it really does seem like she could use the company. So, quietly, he offers a moderately earnest, soft smile and takes the seat, pausing a moment to order his own drink - a deep golden liquor from some system he's never heard of, but which has rapidly earned his favor on this basis alone - before turning to her. "What brings you here this evening?"

"It's a long story." Probably not one she ought to be telling in public, either. (Does it matter if she tells Lando? It seems like something for Han to do--Lando's his friend, when they're on friendly terms.)

Leia sets her drink down on the bar, doing her best to straighten up from the slight slump her figure has taken on. This isn't her first ersatz cometduster, and she's weary with the events of the day anyway. "What about you?"

A long story that, evidently, she is not currently inclined to begin telling. His curiosity with the matter is indicated only by an arch of a brow, one that smooths out after a moment as he reclaims a more neutral smile. Perhaps he'll hear from Han, perhaps not, but whatever it is, pressing directly has never been his style anyway.

With the question turned back to him, he lets a shrug gently roll through his shoulders. "Oh, I stop in from time to time, pursue some conversation, forge a few connections. We all have to unwind somewhere."

How can she explain this, anyway? Where does she even begin, to Lando, in public? Well, to start with, there's a man. Not Han--not like that--

Not like that, indeed. Leia nods, taking a sip of her drink. "This is the first time I've tried unwinding here. It's not bad."

She's used to thinking of Lando Calrissian as someone so slick that he can't be trusted with a drink order, let alone the truth. That impression still lingers, but there's something about him here that seems almost honest. Maybe living without the Empire pitting them against each other makes a difference.

"What have you been up to?" she asks. "When you aren't here."

"I've managed to unwind in far more questionable locales." Said with a light touch of knowing humor, since he hardly expects that to come as a major revelation.

He considers the question over a sip of his drink, after which he gently swishes the liquid n the glass with a loose, circular roll of his wrist.

"Why, my transporter work, of course. Just doing my part to keep the ship running." The winning grin there, of course, rather heavily points to the fact that there is clearly something beyond that, and more than just the idle flirting and networking he so fondly pursues.

"I never doubted that." Bad news makes strange bedfellows, so to speak, but Leia's starting to settle into talking to Lando. Not with the polite false front she'd shown him on Bespin--as herself, or something closer to herself, at least.

"That's it, huh?" She's not smiling, exactly, but she's looking over her drink at him with some interest. "You don't seem like the kind of person who does what he's told and goes to bed early."

The are those subtle differences to their conversation, and not just on her side of it. While he's certainly not about to abandon his panache altogether, there is far more of him in his words, more substance and less flash.

"I don't know where you'd get an idea like that," Smirking, he lets out a soft chuckle, "Of course, I do have a few independent projects underway, keeping busy... Han didn't mention our little trip, did he?"

"Your trip," she repeats, raising a brow. "It must have slipped his mind."

And at the moment, she can't really fault him for that. Finding out he has a son who not only hates the sight of him but murdered him is the kind of news that overshadows everything else. Including--maybe especially--plans made with Lando.

She nods her glass in Lando's direction, gesturing for him to go on.

He wouldn't have really expected it to come up, exactly - and he doesn't even know about anything else going on, let alone anything that major. But this sort of thing is probably a decent enough distraction from what seems to be a pretty lousy mood.

"Well, we picked up a couple of things, brought them back with us... a dealer droid, for one. Thought it might come in handy on those longer stretches between stops."

"We could fit a dealer droid in the Falcon," she says, letting herself imagine it. Lando, Luke, Han, and her--they could make the journey, if they could find their way across galaxies. The Falcon is a small ship, but she and Han had found a reasonable amount of privacy when they flew with Chewie and C3PO, and Lando and Luke are a lot more discreet than Threepio. And the thought of nights playing sabacc together, or teaching them Alderaanian piquet, is a lot more fun when they'd be flying toward home.

But then Ben's specter, thin and dark, looms at the edge of her mind, and she shakes her head. He can't be left behind, even if she doubts he'd agree to come willingly. She takes another sip from her glass. "There's just one problem. We don't all come from the same time."

On principle Han would still claim he doesn't take orders from anyone. That's not strictly true when it comes to Leia, but in fairness, usually she gets bossy for good reasons. The way she summons him now, though, it's pretty damn obvious something is wrong. Wrong enough that she doesn't want to talk over the MID, or in one of their rooms. The Falcon Is the only private space they've really got, which must be why she wants him there, right?

It's worrying enough to keep him from arguing, enough that he half runs through the corridors to get to where his freighter is docked, brow creased with concern.

She's standing outside it, her arms wrapped around herself, when she sees him coming. Before he can actually make his way over, she's running to him, catching hold of him in a tight embrace, her cheek pressed up against his cheek. It's a perverse echo of the first time they found each other on the Moira, one she doesn't want to think about in any real detail. What matters is that he's here now, and at least for a moment, she can clutch him in her arms and shut out everything Kylo--Ben--said.

But this isn't the place for that, and after a few clinging moments, she lets go in favour of pulling him by the hand towards the Falcon. They can't talk about this out here.

On the surface, Leia running to throw her arms around him and cling should be a good thing, but the look on her face only confirms the obvious: that something is deeply wrong. It's not even any consolation that she's not mad at him. Rather grimly he hangs on as long as she leans against him, a bit too thrown to make any real reassuring gestures.

"What's going on?"

Once they're aboard, the ramp shutting slowly behind her, he can't out off asking for a moment.

She doesn't want to tell him any of it, once the opportunity arises. As long as he doesn't know, Kylo Ren is just one more ugly stranger, someone with questionable sanity and more strength than he knows what to do with.

But there's no way she can keep this to herself. Even if she wanted to bear it alone--she can bear nearly anything alone if she has to--Han deserves to know the truth.

Leia can't bring herself to return to him, once the Falcon's ramp hisses shut. Now that there's no one observing but Han, there's almost nothing keeping her from burying her face in his shirt and weeping. Only her pride and the need to give him an explanation that isn't cut through with sobs, muffled by his own chest.

"It's Kylo Ren, Han." She swallows hard, forcing the words out. The memory of Ben's furious eyes, so like her own, are sharp in her mind. "He's our son."

Bewildered, he doesn't make a move toward her, either. And when she says that man's name in that tearful tone of voice, there's a moment-- just one-- where he leaps to the wrong conclusion and he's ready to hunt him down, their mismatched abilities be damned, and make him pay for whatever he did.

But then she finishes and it's like the power cutting out, all that rage dissipating in a blink. In truth, he nearly laughs. He doesn't-- doesn't smile, even-- but on the surface it seems like such a ludicrous idea. The man's got to be nearly as old as Han is, and he looks-- acts-- like he wants to be Darth Vader, how could he be any relation of theirs?

(Never mind all the other revelations that takes in stride. That they live to see the end of the war. That she'll marry him. She loves him and he loves her but that's parsecs away from an actual life together, a family.

Never mind the part of him that knows, already, that it's true, the way this missing piece snaps everything into sharp focus; the uncanny, inexplicable sense of familiarity, the shape of his face, the way he strode through the Falcon like it was home.)

"What makes you think that?"

He's not sure if he's looking to be convinced or to disprove it. Of course he doesn't want to believe it could be true-- no matter if it makes a terrible sort of sense-- but he needs more. Han can't take it on faith, can't trust some inexplicable feeling the way she might.

She hasn't even begun to think of the other truths Ben's existence promises. That they're going to live--until one of you doesn't, and she has to grit her teeth--and love and raise a child pales in comparison to the angry, untrusting man that child becomes.

(Besides. If they survive the war, marrying Han is the least of what she wants to do with him. It might have taken her years to accept it, but Leia can't imagine a life without him now. No one else would do. The last year has put that fact in sharp relief.)

"This." Leia pulls the recorded holo out of her pocket as she closes the space between them. Reaching for his hand, she pulls it up and sets the little device on his palm, so she can turn it on with one touch.

There he is, between them now: small, but not so small as he surely once was, first standing on his head and then toppling over. His smile, the crooked grin he must have learned at his father's knee, greets Han this time, but his words are still spoken for her benefit alone: Hi, Mom, it's Ben.

Once Han's got the holo, Leia's hands retreat. She stands in silence, arms crossed before her again, watching her son and his father.

Well, if he's demanding evidence, it hardly suits him to hesitate. Still, there's something more weighty than the little recording device here. If this is proof-- well, if it's proof, then it's true, it's not something he can just laugh off and choose not to deal with.

He turns it on, expression carefully neutral, schooled like a card sharp. The young man-- Ben, his name was (will be?) Ben-- tumbles, and it would be charming, maybe, if it was anyone else. There's no mistaking Kylo Ren's face, though it's unsettling seeing him without that glower, that self-styled air of darkness.

Like this, Han can't miss the resemblance. The way his son smiles, the lines of his face, the height he's just growing into. Mom and uncle Luke and Jedi training-- no mention of Han, but he can't begin to form a protest. If things were different, this is where he'd feel a sense of wonder, a bewildering pride.

But Kylo Ren is everything they stand against.

His son hates him.

The image fades, and he can't find anything to say.

It's harder to listen to it a second time, knowing everything that's coming without any of the surrounding context. When was the last time he'd seen her? Had seen Han? Was this a normal bout of homesickness or something more insidious? What changed that good-humored little boy, his features still bearing the puppyish softness of childhood, into the man on the Moira?

Ben still misses her by the end of the holo, and Leia still doesn't know how badly. She wants to find that child and ask him everything Kylo Ren won't say.

"I don't--" But her voice is weighted with every feeling she doesn't want to acknowledge, and she has to stop. A breath--a breath, and she tries again. "I don't know what happened to him."

No matter how far her thoughts roam, they always circle back to adversaries.

Even if Han has less experience talking to Kylo-- he can't think of him as anything else, can't reconcile the boy grinning at the recorder with the brooding, threatening man-- there's no mistaking the relationship they have now, in his eyes. It's luck, maybe, that kept him from being hurt worse on the observation deck, and through the other Ingress, it was only the question of what might happen if they were no longer sharing their shared world.

He doesn't for a moment imagine it was mercy.

And though he shakes his head obligingly, doesn't say a word of it, he thinks-- it must be him. Their son sent her a message, he missed her, once; he didn't mention Han at all, and here-- years later, it must be-- he's come after him more than once. It isn't hard to put the pieces together, that whatever it is, it must be his fault, and why wouldn't it be?

And what the hell do they do now?

Without any answers, he closes the distance between them. He wants to hand back the holo-- no, he wants to throw it away, destroy it, forget it-- but more than that, honestly, he wants to wrap his arms around her. It's a selfish reaction, because this is bound to be his fault, but she looks like she could use it.

They can't throw out the holo or destroy it, as far as Leia's concerned; it's the only proof she has that Ben Solo was once an innocuous little boy. As much as watching it hurts now, she suspects she'll play it many more times before this trip is over. And every time, she knows she'll wonder if she visited him when she received it.

She hopes she did.

For now, she leans into Han's embrace and, with no small effort, keeps the tears pressing at her eyes from spilling. Her chest is tight, as though she held a breath too long.

"He looks so much like you," she murmurs, her eyes squeezed shut. "I can't believe I didn't see it before."

What a handsome man he could be, if he wasn't violently unstable. What a different man: proud, perhaps, and undoubtedly smart-mouthed, but nothing like the twitching, cruel creature she confronted a few minutes ago.

Somehow that simple truth makes the bottom drop out of his heart the rest of the way. She isn't wrong-- looking at the holo he couldn't doubt it for a moment. Two words and everything fell into place. (Shouldn't he have recognized the passion and fire in Kylo Ren's eyes? So much like his mother's, but bent to terrible purpose.)

He doesn't know what to say, stuck contemplating their first meeting, the wild look on his face. You should run, he'd said, and even now Han can't tell whether that was some strangled attempt to avoid the conflict that followed, or whether he'd only wanted a chase. There's still too much missing to make sense of it. Some thirty years of history, he'd guess, that might tell him why his son hates him.

For a long moment he just stands like that, hanging onto her.

"Did you talk to him?"

She's got that habit of confronting things. He won't be surprised if she did.

Leia nods, her cheek rubbing against his chest. It's a few moments before she speaks, looking for the words through the strained quiet.

"I shouldn't have." There were few worse things she could have done. Barging in there with a fight on her mind...the further she moves from those first, furious minutes, the worse she feels about them. Her voice turns low, bitter. "It's too bad that Ingress can't take us back an hour or so."

But the words she spat Ben's way are hers to live with, and there's nothing she can do about that. It's hard to bear, harder to admit to Han; the only thing more onerous than living with an error in judgment is admitting it to someone else.

"There's more," she admits, her fingers twisting idly into the fabric of his shirt at the small of his back. Having something to clench is coldly satisfying at a moment like this. "And it's not good. How much do you want to know?"

Yeah, he isn't surprised. Usually he's charmed by her headstrong way, but at the moment he just feels deflated.

And of course if there's more, it isn't good. Anything she's got to follow up this news has to be awful, which means he needs a minute to steel himself, too aware of the feeling of her face pressed against him, her knuckles against his back.

"It'd come out sooner or later."

Right? So he'd better get it over with.

Usually her headstrong ways don't end with her snapping furiously at her own son. It's not so charming then.

For several long moments, she listens to his heartbeat, reassuring herself by its presence. Whatever might be true of Ben's time, it hasn't happened yet. They might still fix this--or prepare for it, at least.

Or just take care not to have children.

"He killed you." It's a whisper, one that she hopes is loud enough in the stillness of the Falcon for Han to catch it. She doesn't want to have to repeat herself. "It must have been like seeing a ghost--"

When he saw you here. Her voice breaks off, the inadvertent cruelty of the words too much to say. Instead, she kisses his shoulder, a hand coming around to rest over his heart.

Ben's hatred for Han seems inexplicable to her; she can't imagine Han feeling anything but love for a son. Even if he might not be especially familiar with children, she's certain he'd try his best with Ben. And even if he was a bitter failure as a parent, patricide seems like an awfully irrational response, even for Ben.

The idea of having a child is so new, so foreign, that he can't get a grasp on how he'd feel about it. Impossible, now, to have any reaction that isn't overshadowed by the knowledge of what comes to pass. He's never wanted kids. Never thought of the possibility, really; what's odd is the strange sense of loss it leaves behind, knowing.

Her news shocks him more than it should, is his first wild thought, his jaw clenching. Hating your father is one thing, but to kill--

He takes a slow, steady breath. Sooner or later, all men die. (That's not at all comforting.) At least it makes that strange first encounter fall into place; of course he'd be unsettled, of course he'd be wild-eyed and uncertain. It had been strange enough for Han to see Obi-Wan Kenobi here, a young man, and he'd barely known the Jedi, hadn't had a hand in his death.

(You should run. Why would he say that, unless-- )

And of course in that moment it's clear enough that he's going to have to face his son, his murderer, and ask why. He doesn't want to, not even a little bit.

Wouldn't he love a child enough? It seems impossible to imagine he wouldn't be capable. There are subtler, simpler ways to ruin lives, though, and evidently he managed that, because of course it must have been his fault.

There isn't anything to say to make that better. He imagines Kylo Ren must have used that truth as a weapon, and it's a wound Han hasn't any power to heal. He shuts his eyes and kisses her temple.

It's hard enough to carry the knowledge of Han's death around with her. That he has to hold it, too, is far worse. She thinks she can nearly feel him grasp it, the impenetrable darkness of his end--and after all that meditating with Luke, perhaps she can.

Ben looks like he might be around thirty, doesn't he? He represents three decades, then, three decades they might be together. Thirty good years at minimum, depending just when their son was conceived...and depending on just when Ben slew his father.

But thirty good years isn't enough. Not when they otherwise might have forty or more. The cruelty of it--the inevitable foreknowledge, the act itself, the pain that must have led to their son's desperation--is unspeakable, something she suspects can only truly be expressed in this silent, despondent embrace.

She feels his lips at her temple and sighs. What matters right now is Han. Turning in his grasp, Leia stretches up on tiptoe to kiss him--quick and soft, her hand coming up to cup his cheek.

"Come on," she murmurs, her thumb brushing over his lips. She can feel the warmth of his breath against her skin. "Let's go find somewhere more comfortable." Somewhere they can lie down and take comfort in each other's heartbeats for a while. The bunks will suit her just fine, at this point.

All men die, but generally speaking most don't plan on it. He doesn't know what to do with that knowledge, inevitable and useless as it is. Maybe in time he'll make peace with it, or get properly angry about it. For now it's only a weight, something new to carry around and worry over when he's not putting up a brave face for her sake.

Echoing her sigh with a too-heavy breath, he nods. Curling up and dealing with this by not dealing with it sounds like the best option.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

openish | to describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane

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