That's no moon... Wait, no, it's a moon.

[scruffier]

In which Our Heroes (?) stop for blaster practice, assuming the kids can stop bothering each other for two minutes, so help me, I will turn this light freighter around and we will not get ice cream.

Comments

[passingthrough]

"Yeah, that list isn't exactly short. Be nice if people assigned a little more value to people than slips of paper or credits or coins or whatever gets used."

[scruffier]

"At least credits are easy to understand."

Obviously sarcastic, but there's a truth to it. Both sides of a war fight for their principles. Love, hate, freedom, order, those aren't so easy to quantify.

[passingthrough]

"Are you calling us people complicated?" She smiles. Yeah, she's a little complicated and so are most people she's known.

[scruffier]

"I'm just saying, sometimes mercenaries have it easier." If credits are all that matter to you, there are a lot less difficult questions. It's all risk and reward. You can fight for principles and still value life; it's always a question of which is a bigger loss, then. You get used to making the choice, enough that sometimes it's too easy.

He tries to shake off that line of thought.

"Not that I'm on their side. I've had enough bounty hunters for one life."

[passingthrough]

"That's good. I thought maybe you were trying to get me to change careers." Didn't they have a discussion like that once before? "And I don't think it would really suit you." Because she sees him caring about things even when he won't admit it.

[scruffier]

"Trust me, I've had more than enough experience with them."

One bout of hibernation sickness is plenty.

[passingthrough]

"Let me guess, a story you don't want to tell me?"

[scruffier]

"I thought I already did."

Bits and pieces, at any rate. He forgets, sometimes, when she doesn't have all the context to put those together.

[passingthrough]

"Maybe some shades of it. I guess I'll need another sabacc game if I want stories." Is it weird that the twenty year old wants to hear stories from not!dad?

[scruffier]

Is it weird? His frame of reference useless. His parents were gone by then, his son was gone by then.

He shakes his head.

"That's not one of the nice stories."

[passingthrough]

"If I only told the nice stories you wouldn't know anything about me." That's not really fair or true. There were good parts. Even if they all end with 'and now I'll never see them again.' It doesn't make the memories any less precious for having happened.

[scruffier]

For a long moment he's quiet, looking away and ruminating. It almost seems like he's forgotten the question, but really he's just trying to recall what she knows.

"I told you I took on Luke and the old man so I could cover a debt."

Right?

[passingthrough]

"Right." She looks over, a little surprised that he seems to be starting something.

[scruffier]

"I owed money to a Hutt on Tatooine, so a job that'd get me off that ball of sand and pay enough to get out from under his tail seemed like a gift."

It hadn't gone exactly as planned, but she knows about that. Most of it. Enough of it.

"After Alderaan--" She knows that. "I didn't get paid until much later. After the Death Star, after everything. So what did I do?"

[passingthrough]

It is a little hard putting the tidbits she's heard back together to form a more fully developed, complete story that makes sense from beginning to end, but she does what she can. "Tried to avoid him and hope he forgot about it?"

[scruffier]

It doesn't help that he tends to hold back a lot, to downplay some of the action. It's been a long time since he felt like he could call himself a hero.

"Hutts don't forget. Not about that kind of money." But not far off base. "I stuck around with the Rebellion a couple of years."

[passingthrough]

"But Pizza the Hutt caught up with you?" Sorry. It's hard to resist sometimes. "And wanted payment with interest by way of bounty hunter?"

[scruffier]

"The Empire and the bounty hunters caught up with us at the same time." He doesn't get the joke, doesn't have the stomach to stop and ask her to explain at the moment. "They convinced an old friend of mine to take us in and turn us over. Mostly we were just bait."

[passingthrough]

"Who's the old friend?" She should probably know the name of someone who betrayed him like that. Seems like an important one.

[scruffier]

"You already got that part. It's why Ben kept kicking you when we were playing cards.."

Yeah, he noticed.

[passingthrough]

They weren't exactly subtle, were they? "That makes sense. Sweet of him to worry about you."

[scruffier]

That's one way to look at it. It's probably not the wrong way, exactly. But it's more complicated, because it always is. Han shrugs.

"He's not ready to talk about his grandfather, I think. Vader didn't give Lando much of a choice."

[passingthrough]

You know what would help? If you could just condense all of this into a trilogy of movies she could watch to catch up. Get on that, Han.

"His grandfather..." So much she still doesn't know about all of them. Even when she gets the highlights she's missing the depths and the connections. But she doesn't know if that's the same story or just an adjacent one. "So what happened after Lando betrayed you?"

[scruffier]

One great downside of the Empire was that, in the course of wresting and keeping control, a great deal of history was buried and lost. People are easier to subjugate if they don't know there's anything else. They've been trying to rebuild, to keep more than the barest sense of oral history, but with the galaxy so scattered it's difficult.

Han would hate to have a holofilm about his life.

"Vader wanted Luke, planned to have him frozen. Once the trap was set they didn't need me, so." He strives not to look uncomfortable, and the best he can manage is to look detached. "They tested the carbon freeze and the bounty hunter took me back to Jabba."

[passingthrough]

"The tested it on you? I guess it worked" Is he missing any toes? "And Vader is Luke's father?" She doubts he's Han's, but she'd like to close the information up a little tighter just to make sure she isn't missing things.