Twilight settles over the forest, elegant and cool, calming after the raucous celebrations that had occupied much of the day—and the days prior. There has, Lando must admit, been a lot of partying—and not a lot of thinking about the future. To the point where even he’s ready to pack it in, the weight of all that exuberance leaving him buzzy with exhaustion and an uncharacteristic urge for quiet. A lot is going to be happening in the galaxy here soon. They’ve all got to be ready. Not that he’d ever be the one to say it’s time to move on to more serious business when there’s enjoyment to be had. He might think it, mind, but…
His thoughts bend toward where he’s headed, he can’t deny that. What he’ll do now. Where he’ll go. He can’t help it. And has never been able to. It’s the planner in him. Needless to say, that trait makes it hard to concentrate on the festivities when you’re not sure what your place is going forward.
The Ewoks have been generous, if not exactly kind, offering their homes for the duration of the Rebellion’s stay on Endor. And despite the diminuative nature of their homes, they are cozy—the homes, not the Ewoks. And the view is something else all together. He inhales the crisp air, pleased with the unrecycled cleanliness of it, the fine greenery a nice change of pace from Bespin’s metallic modernity. It’s almost enough to get his bearings just leaning against the thick wooden railing on the platform outside his hut. But almost doesn’t cut it and nervous energy continues to skitter beneath his skin, pushing for something he can’t articulate despite his slick, omnipresent facility with words. Inconvenient, considering he’d rather settle down and rest if he could. No words necessary. No articulation necessary.
Footsteps thud, light and hesitant, delicate, on the wood bridging his landing to a landing nearby. Under the darkening canopy and without much more than a candle to illuminate his immediate surroundings, he can’t tell who it is. Not until she steps out of the shadows and speaks anyway.
“Lando Calrissian,” Leia says. “Will wonders never cease?”
He slides further down the platform, a polite invitation for her to join him. Smiling in welcome, he scrutinizes her—or tries to—for signs of her reaction. Is she pleased? Or chagrined? Without daylight to go by, the figuring of it is difficult. And so he gives up for the time being, leaving it to fate as to whether he learns what she thinks or not. Because by the time he can tell, her face is placid. “What wonders would those be?”
“There’s a party going on and you’re not right there in the center of it.” She steps toward him and takes the proffered space with a minimum of fuss. “I didn’t realize that was possible.”
“Before me stands a woman who sees it as her duty to attend every party thrown in her vicinity because it’s good for morale. And yet here she is,” he replies, tsking mournfully. “I might say the same to you.”
“I guess you caught me,” she says, her voice deep with warm sarcasm aimed at herself.
“I guess I did.” Tipping his head in greeting, he catches her eye. “What can I do for you, Princess?”
Her elbows thud against the railing as she leans forward, all of her weight on them, legs stretched, her full attention focused on the indistinctly darkening forest floor. As he waits for her answer, he admires the line of her back. She’s forgone the brown dress she’d worn the first day or two in favor of leggings and boots; a thick, buckled belt of leather winds cinches the pale tunic she wears. Her hair is braided and looped against the crown of her head. Baby-fine wisps stage their escape around her neck and temples. His hand itches to smooth them back into place. She looks beautiful. She is beautiful.
She sighs, rocking forward on her toes. “You can start by calling me just about anything else.”
Lando fails to be anything other than pleased. “Leia, then.”
Candlelight catches on her lips, bronzing them as she smirks in wry acknowledgment.
When she doesn’t answer, he offers a prompt, his curiosity getting the better of him. “So?”
“So what?” she asks, prim.
“So what might I do for you?”
“Nothing actually.” Pushing a few stray hairs behind her ear, she turns her head. “I didn’t realize you were up here. I was—hoping to get a few minutes to myself.”
“On my landing?”
Sighing, defensive, she pinches her nose. “No, I was just planning on passing through.”
“Oh, I see,” Lando says, delighted for no good reason. He leans toward her, bumping his shoulder against hers. “Well, you don’t have to let me stop you.”
“No, I—I think I’ll just head back. I don’t know why I picked this direction to go in…”
“Hey,” he says, reaching for her, fingers tightening around her wrist. Her skin is mostly smooth and soft and chilled and he’d like nothing more than to map the whole of her hand while he has the chance. Find out if she’s got a callous on her trigger finger in addition to the one at the base of her palm. But since he has her attention, he lets her go. She won’t leave before he’s said his piece and that’s all he wants here. “My landing is your landing. You’ve got free run of the place if you want it as far as I’m concerned.”
“I appreciate that.” Maybe she means it despite the deadpan delivery. And maybe she doesn’t. At the very least, she stays. That’s something. He’s not entirely sure why he cares whether she does or not—that’s a lie—but the fact of it is good enough for him.
He could press her for more information—she might even give it to him—but for once in his life, he holds his tongue and keeps his curiosity in check this time. The smartness of his mouth doesn’t get the better of him. Clearly she needs something. That’s good enough for him. And if she’s getting it here… he can’t say he minds it.
Not at all.
Still, he’d like to help if he can. He watches her as her attention shifts to the canopy overhead, and turns so he can lean back on his elbows against the railing. It’s easy that way to follow her line of sight that way. But it doesn’t make figuring out what up there’s got her so interested any easier. His mind turns and turns an invasive, callous question until it’s a smoother, less prying version of itself. One he might safely ask her. As he opens his mouth—
“Back home, we had a festival,” she says, tipping him off-balance with little effort. Then again, she speaks like she’s talking through duracrete. Perhaps just saying that much takes more effort than a hard, physical shove would. “Took place right around now, I think.”
Lando’s a betting man. He’d put credits on the fact that this festival she’s talking about does—did, his mind supplies—take place right now. No thinking necessary. But if she needs the circumspection, who is he to take it from her? Casual, so painfully casual that he’s almost certain she’d see through it if she paid too much attention, he asks, “What do you celebrate?”
Her head turns his way, her gaze sharpening on his face enough that he’s not sure if he’s done or said something wrong. Quite possibly he has. Regardless, she replies, a little curt, compensating for the tremor in her voice as she answers, “Dancing.”
“What kind of dancing?”
“All kinds,” she says, losing herself in remembrance. Her voice goes soft in a way Lando’s never heard before. “Every kind.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of people in the galaxy celebrating. And I bet a lot of them are dancing right this minute. Seems like as fine a tribute as any of us are likely to get.”
“I suppose that’s true,” she says, begrudging. And Lando cannot find it in himself to blame her. What cold comfort this must be to her, that others can celebrate when nearly every person from her planet is dead.
Still, Lando holds out his hand, heart thumping against his sternum. It’s a fool’s notion, the idea that comes into his head, but he can think of no better way to honor the ache he hears in Leia’s voice, the hunch of her shoulders. She’d shared with him the gift of trust. The least he can do is offer her something in return. Something more than words anyway.
Whether she’ll want it is another matter entirely.
Whether this is just a moment of his ego going unchecked… he supposes he’ll find out soon.
“What are you doing?” she asks, leaning away, suspicion wrinkling her features.
“Asking you to dance.” He smiles, confident, and wiggles his fingers in invitation, bows forward as gallantly as he knows how. “If you want to, that is.”
She laughs, disbelieving, and shrugs, looking around. “It’s dark. There’s no—”
Straightening, he folds his hands behind his back. You were dreaming, Calrissian.
He’s not disappointed though. He’d never go that far.
Then, Leia scoffs and, impatient, returns his original gesture, finger waggle and all. “You’re ridiculous.”
The grin on Lando’s face? He can’t control that, much as he’d maybe like to. He certainly feels ridiculous. All he knows is, when he takes her hand, it’s exactly as calloused as he’d thought it would be. Leia allows so few people behind her defenses. He’s lucky to know this much about her. Lando refuses to take this fact for granted.
She immediately, instinctively takes up the form Lando had hoped she would. Before she can relax her stance, he mirrors it back to her, placing his free hand high under her arm to cup her shoulder blade. She looks up at him, mouth parted in surprise. Still, she’s quick to understand and easily starts in on the steps of a dance she likely knows as well as she knows herself. Unlike Lando, who hasn’t danced like this in years and could’ve used with a reminder or two before trying it.
“I may mess up,” Lando says, “and I hope you’ll accept my apology in advance if I do.”
“I’d say you’re doing perfectly well,” Leia replies, far more generous than his capabilities probably deserve. It has been a while. And his muscle memory returns to him with sluggish reluctance. It’s easy enough to follow her lead at least. Still, she’s cordial as she adds, “I just wonder how you know the style at all. The Empire didn’t exactly encourage the spread of Alderaanian culture past its borders.”
Lando leans toward her, welcome to share this confidence with her. “This may come as a surprise to you,” he says, not a little eager to do just that, “but the circles I used to run in often rejoiced in flouting Imperial mores.”
Leia’s hand squeezes at his, her fingers wrapping tight around his knuckles as she shifts her weight, pushes him in a slightly different direction. Perhaps he should feel ridiculous like this, the rhythmic thump of their feet against wood the only sound other than their voices and the accompaniment offered by indigenous wildlife—strange caws and strobing, throaty croaks and whizzing insect wings. But no shame worms through him. The only thing he feels, in fact, is regret that he cannot see Leia’s face in the clarity of day conditions.
“That’s…” Turning her head, she breaks posture to cough into her shoulder. Immediately she regains proper form and for one moment—as they turn just the right way for the candlelight to catch on her face—he thinks he sees gratitude in her eyes. “Well.”
Though Lando would like to stretch the moment to its limit and maybe push it beyond that—he might easily dance with Leia all night—her body tenses beneath his hand and slowly, almost naturally, relaxes after the length of one dance. She steps away, releases his hand, and slips out of his grasp.
Then, taking the chance to surprise him, she steps toward him and plants her hands on his shoulders. Rising onto her toes, she kisses him. Short and chaste, the touch catches him on the corner of his mouth, more romantic than friendly, though neither one nor the other entirely. Or perhaps he’s just imagining things. Though tell that to the fluttering vethli wings beating up a storm in his stomach. She smiles at him and resumes her place on the railing. Patting it, she jerks her head in invitation.
He doesn’t refuse it.
Surely he only imagines the warm line of heat down the side of him closest to her. She’s not a furnace after all, but he can’t deny the way just being near her seems to stave off the night’s chill. When she snakes her arm around his, though, and pulls him close—closer even than the dance they’d shared had—he no longer has to imagine what that warmth feels like. A blurry concoction of emotions swirl around in Lando’s chest, never quite settling: longing, joy, wonder and worry and disbelief. When he tries to focus on one, it skitters out from under him, growing both too big and too small to contemplate.
So he stops trying. Just lets himself enjoy the moment. There’ll never be another like it.
“Hey, Lando?” she says, leaning somehow even closer into him. The scent of the redwood tar soap their Ewok hosts had provided to them. Medicinal and sharp and green all at once, it clings to her hair.
“Yeah,” he replies, careful to speak around the weight lodged in his throat.
“Thank you. For everything. For being here,” she says, sharing with him something greater than the sum of those scant handful of words. Good at reading people, he sees all the things she doesn’t—maybe can’t—say and feels it when she tightens her grip on his arm, leans her head on his shoulder. A large bonfire flares far in the distance, half obscured by the many large tree trunks dotting the forest. In the growing darkness, in the growing stillness, her eyes pick up some of that heat and color. She doesn’t need words to get across her meaning.
So neither does he.
Placing his palm over the hand tucked against his side, he laces his and Leia’s fingers together. Their knuckles press together, leaving behind an ache that mingles with the now cold air, sweet and bracing.
A tiny gesture.
A promise.
An if we want and time enough for all the when we wants that now exist because the Rebellion pulled off the impossible. Because Leia and he and everyone else pulled off the impossible. There’s the real chance of a future now, so wide and open Lando might have gone breathless with all the different possibilities if he hadn’t spent the vast majority of his youth living just that way.
But this moment? It’s more than enough to soothe that twinge of need inside of him for plans and purpose and security. He has a place, he thinks—or can, so long as he takes the chance.
Shifting slightly, he tugs his arm out of Leia’s grasp, wraps it around her shoulder and pulls her snug against his side.
It’s the easiest thing in the world to take a chance.