Warning: rated for Han's (read:my) tendency to use words starting with "F".

The base at Slor-Elan was hot, humid and miserable. Everywhere he looked, Han Solo saw pools of standing water: on the hanger bay floor, outside in the jungle, along doorways and lining the corridors. The quick pre-fab shelters that served as barracks were infested with netting beetles, small and harmless but not the best of bunkmates. The heat hung motionless in the air all day. Han doubted the Alliance could find a worse location for a military base.

He sighed as he wandered the halls. It was dark, hours before sunrise, and his circadian rhythm was lost to the annals of space travel history. At the very least, he was happy to be able to sleep aboard the Falcon when he was ready to turn in. He'd seen some of the Rogues' quarters and they reminded him a little too much of the slave hovels he'd seen in the Outer Rim. Thank the stars the Falcon had climate control. No one was going to drown in their own sweat aboard his ship.

What the Falcon didn't have was a working refrigerating unit in the galley.

Chewie thought Han had blown it while trying to recalibrate the starboard power supply line. Han thought Chewie was full of shit. There was no way he'd screwed up the schematics that badly.

The sad reality was that refrigeration units were in high demand here and they were expensive to buy off-base. Anything perishable that needed refrigeration in this hellhole had to stay in one of three units the Rebels had in their mess hall. Space was limited and, even among freedom-fighters, people took what wasn't theirs. Until he could scrounge up enough credits to acquire a new one and install it, they only had two real options for food.

Ration bars or the base's mess hall.

Han knew better than to waste his ration bars when the Rebels had food prepared and served three times a day. The food was disgusting, but at the very least he wouldn't be caught hungry on his way out.

He scowled at the corridor wall as he made his way to the mess. His way out. Fat lot of good it did to keep talking about it. He'd been saying he was on his way out for nearly ten months now. Every goddamn base, every goddamn supply run, every goddamn mission he went on, he told them he was leaving. And still here he was. Wandering around their latest disaster of a base in the middle of the night cycle in search of some food because his goddamn refrigeration unit was currently a big scorch mark on the Falcon's galley deck.

He heard his boot splash into one of those fucking standing puddles and just about blew his fuse. This was no military base; this was hell, one hundred percent hell, and whose genius idea was it to put a base in the middle of a fucking swamp anyway?

He tightened his fist and lengthened his stride. He just needed to grab food and then he would hole up for a bit. Make them come to him. If they wanted him to help train new recruits or ferry around their spies, they could come to his ship and ask him like civilized beings. He wasn't going to keep sloshing around here like a nerf to slaughter.

He rounded the corner into the main mess hall and came up short. The hall was probably meant to be a small hanger in the early stages of designing the base. The roof was too high for a simple mess hall, and the sealed lining of what looked like a bay door gave away it's original function. The floor beneath his feet was deck plating, meant to simply dent when a ship landed too heavily. And it was just too big; Han knew that this particular base only housed about five hundred people total, soldiers, pilots, and command staff. There was no need for this gargantuan mess hall.

But the size of the room wasn't what stopped him cold. Sitting at a table lined up against the far wall was a tiny huddle of a brunette woman, staring down at a cup in her hands. Her hair was pulled into a braid, probably the most simple he'd ever seen it. She wore Alliance-issue combat pants about two sizes too big and cinched at her waist with a belt. Her tank-top looked like it was a borrowed men's undershirt: it pulled against her breasts tightly and hung loose around her waist. She had one foot resting on the chair and the cup on her upraised knee. Her boots - like his - were caked in mire and the residue of standing water.

Leia Organa. He sighed, about ready to turn around and just swallow down a ration bar. Food wasn't worth the confrontation. He was irritated and she made him crazy. He was bound to say something he'd regret later on and he didn't have the energy to spare on the tailspin she'd send him into.

But he knew she'd heard him. Just as he turned around, she caught sight of him and sighed. "Not like you to turn from a fight, Captain," she said.

He turned to face her again but didn't move closer. "I'm not one for lost causes," he said.

He expected her anger. Instead she laughed softly and nodded. "I think that's quite obvious. Have a good night."

Normally Han would have retreated while the getting was good. It was late, he was not in the mood, and her attitude to him lately had been downright combative. But the tone of her voice, the wearied kindness, was unexpected. And despite what they'd both said, he had a feeling that he was indeed a sucker for lost causes.

He walked across the long erstwhile hanger bay and sat across the table from her. Up close, he could see the dark circles under her eyes, the pinched look of her hollowed cheeks. "Can't sleep?" he asked, though that was obvious. He still wasn't sure what to expect from her tonight.

She looked up at him and quirked an eyebrow. "It was too cold in my quarters."

He frowned. "Too cold," he repeated. "The rest of the base is dealing with heat stroke and you're whining about your quarters being too cold?"

She rolled her eyes. "It was a joke, Captain." She took a sip from the glass and set it back down on her knee. "I'm just taking a break from work."

A joke. Had he ever heard her make a joke before? "I didn't know you did."

"Take breaks?"

"Tell jokes."

"Ah," she nodded. "It's rare, I admit."

He sat back and considered the woman in front of him. Where was the spitfire princess? Where was her inexhaustible tirade? This was not the Leia Organa he'd known. "Are you a double?"

She tilted her head. "A what?"

"A double," he gestured aimlessly around them. "Did they replace the real royal with a body double?"

She closed her eyes and the softest smile he'd seen from her broke across her lips. "One that takes breaks and tells jokes, you mean."

That smile. Holy fuck, that smile. "Not usually in your character," he said. He sat forward and put his elbows on the table between them. "What's going on?"

She looked at him, directly at him, her eyes so shockingly focused on his it sent a jolt down his spine. "The base on Cal-4 was destroyed an hour ago."

He blinked at her.

She continued. "We had over eight hundred people stationed there. Eight hundred and forty-six, to be precise."

"I didn't know you had a base on Cal-4," he said.

"Not anymore," she said.

He wanted to say that he was sorry, but the fact of the matter was that this was war. They were inciting a revolution; they were the underdogs. Destroyed bases weren't particularly novel things. As awful as this news might be, she was a woman whose entire planet had been destroyed less than a year ago. The scale tipped considerably higher on that end than the eight hundred people lost tonight. She more than anyone knew the cost of war, of command.

He eyed her bowed head, her idly tapping fingers. "Why'd you leave the command center, then?"

She shifted, lowering her upraised knee until she was leaning against the table just like he was. She was so small. Her gravity didn't make sense to him. She pulled other bodies to her; her mass wasn't big enough to generate such an effect. And yet, looking at her now, he couldn't deny how she defied the laws of physics. He could fly the galaxy from the Core to the Rim, but this woman here was a complete mystery to him.

"We're losing personnel daily," she said, clasping her hands around her cup. He wondered what she was drinking.

"It's a war," he said.

She nodded. "And we're losing."

He pressed his lips together. No sense in denying it. The very fact that the Alliance High Command had sent her here - to the literal definition of hell - was a sure sign. The people here, the ones who'd gone all in … their days were numbered. His stomach soured. He thought about Luke, the Rogues, the mechanics who hosted Sabaac games once a week. About Leia herself. They were all in. They were traitors. Even if they defected now, there was no asylum from the Empire. He knew that intimately.

"Behind you, above the next table, is a hanging worklamp. Do you see it?"

He turned. The table behind him was non-descript, surrounded by four chairs and illuminated by a lone worklamp tethered to the ceiling by a long cable. He turned back around. "What about it?"

She looked past his shoulder: at the light, he presumed. "It swings. Have you ever noticed that?"

Han turned to look again. At first, he didn't see anything. After a moment, he held his breath and watched the wall behind the lamp. There, yes, he noticed a slight sway in the pool of light. It was small, barely movement at all. But once he saw it, he couldn't help seeing it. Back and forth, steady and sure.

"It moves because the seal on the old bay door isn't tight enough. The air pressure outside is higher than in here, and even the air wants equilibrium." She snorted quietly and he turned back to face her. "So the air pushes through in a current right by the worklamp and it moves the cable."

"Should have sealed the bay door tighter, then," he said, unsure what she wanted from him.

She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling. "Would you understand what I meant if I said I feel like that worklamp?"

He squinted at her and frowned. He wasn't a big fan of metaphor, but this mood of hers still mystified him. "What do you mean?"

She looked back at him. "That lamp can't possibly withstand the amount of pressure it's under. Look at the cable attaching it to the ceiling. It's too thin, too inflexible. It's going to fall. Unless something changes, or we reseal the bay door, or we replace the cable, that lamp is going to crash into the table beneath it."

He sat back. "And you're crashing?"

She sighed. "I've already detached from my cable. I'm in freefall now. It's no secret."

Han let that thought echo around the hall and watched her as she looked down at her hands and the cup they held. Her voice was so calm; it was hard to interpret her meaning when it sounded like she could be ordering drinks from her waitstaff. He'd heard many people talk about suicide, or ruin or giving up, and their detached voices were always so odd to him. People in freefall disassociated from their ambitions, from their wants and desires, and he had no concept of what that felt like.

But looking at her now, he could almost understand. She had no one, nobody. Hell, this whole conversation was a sign of how lonely she was. The princess didn't admit failure often, and she certainly didn't admit it to him. Ever.

"You're not in freefall," he said, eyeing the top of her head. "Not even close."

She looked up at him. "Don't patronize me."

"I'm not. I don't care enough to patronize you," he said.

She blinked at him. For a long moment she watched him. He found it kind of amusing, the two of them sitting there staring at each other while she decided whether or not to be offended. Finally, she lifted her chin. "And how do you know I'm not in freefall?"

He held up a hand, ticked off his fingers. "One: ninety-nine percent of the time, you're a pain in my ass. If you spend that much time yelling at me, you have to spend at least that much time being a pain in the Empire's ass."

Leia narrowed her eyes, but something about the set of her mouth told him she was amused. "Go on," she said.

"Two: people with convictions don't lose them in one bad night."

"Eight hundred people just died," she bristled.

He interrupted her. "You've lost more before." She opened her mouth but he continued. "If you were gonna fall, you would have done when you lost Alderaan."

She shut her mouth. He supposed an outside spectator would find his words cruel. To anyone else they might be. But though he didn't understand Leia Organa, he understood her strength. In the face of monumental loss and catastrophic odds, she stood firm. The best way to get her to respond with fire was to remind her of the tinder she had sitting all around her.

"I'm assuming you have a third point?" she asked after a moment. "Lists come in threes."

"Third," he said, standing up and pushing his chair back in. "Your cable is strong enough. You can sway all you want, but you're not going to drop."

He nodded to her, and ambled back the way he'd come. He didn't like the idea of staying there while she pondered his words. He knew from past experience that sitting in a room with the princess was like putting a flame next to flammable materials: eventually someone would catch fire, and he didn't want to be scorched tonight.

Figuring he'd just eat a ration bar and turn in, he got to the entrance of the hall before he thought to turn around. When he found her again, she was looking thoughtfully at the swaying worklamp with her chin in her hand. He watched her for a moment, then turned away and left her in peace.

It's been FOREVER since I wrote OT stuff. I kind of forgot how fun it is! - KR