Chapter Text
1994
“So, you slept with her?” Rey brushes a hand across her brow, staring down at the notepad she was scribbling on, supplementary notes to the recording. Her eyes are wide, confused, maybe, but not shocked – she had prepared herself for the reality that this story was going to be all the things a rock and roll interview brought to mind: sex, drugs, and all. “But you didn’t form the band with her until seventy-two, and this is…what? Sixty-eight?”
Han nods, his first cigarette long extinguished and laid to rest in a silver ashtray on the coffee table. The second was burning down dangerously close to his fingers, the smoke curling in front of his expression. “Well, no, I didn’t sleep with her. Not then.” He seemed to recollect it over again at that, a hint of amusement in the curve of his mouth. “But that’s how I met her.”
It seemed like a mundane way to meet someone, a high school party. Especially someone who would become the frontwoman of the biggest band in the world.
“I think I–” She laughs once, looking up at him again, “I think I thought that part of the story would be a little…grander.”
He shrugs, though his grin is wide, as though they were sharing a joke. “Yeah, you would think so. But me and Leia just met the way any guy and girl would, y’know? We were just kids at a party, but all that stuff – the band, her being so talented – didn’t come until later.”
**
We dated for a while, me and her. Like I said, I wasn’t the dating kind, really – or I’d only do it for a short time before I decided I was bored and moved on to the next. But with Leia, it felt natural, and she always left me wanting more, which I guess is why I felt like I should take her out. For real, I mean.
I took her to drive-ins, walked her to class and carried her books for her, and despite her being three years below, I think she gained some sort of status from it, or maybe I just liked to think that.
I did the “meet the parents” thing with her, too, after we’d been going out for enough time. Bringing her to my house was sort of anticlimactic, because I think she expected something different than what she got, even though I explained the situation to her. I even sat outside my house with her – the two of us parked in the driveway, and I gave her the rundown about my aunt, the guy she was probably going to have over, and how it wasn’t really a big deal to meet her. Leia was a romantic, though, despite the face she put on, and I think she wanted some sort of approval from my aunt, like it made her feel special that she was getting brought into the house.
It wasn’t typical – honestly, my entire family situation wasn’t typical, and instead of sitting down at a dinner table with my nuclear family, I brought her inside and my aunt waved hi at her from where she sat on the couch, wrapped in the arms of her current boyfriend. They were watching reruns of sitcoms, the laugh track punctuating some appropriately goofy occurrence, and Leia sort of stood there expectantly before I put an arm around her shoulder and steered her out of the living room and down the hallway to my room.
That was the extent of my “meet the parents.” The other way around, though, going to her house was much different – and much more pressure.
Her mom was a politician, I knew that, and with that information came a certain amount of expectation, like I had to put my best foot forward, be on my best behavior.
There was no peptalk on that one, either, because I just drove up to her house and parked by the curb, facing it by myself before I stepped in what felt like the lion’s den. I traded out the t-shirt and jeans for something nicer, and I’d freshly showered, ran pomade through my hair, sprayed cologne. I felt like I got pretty to be hanged.
The house didn’t make me feel any better. It was in the nicer part of town, sat back from a lawn that I wasn’t entirely sure wasn’t fake grass, that astroturf stuff, and it was all a gleaming, eggshell white, columns rising from a porch into a high ceiling, windows like eyes between black shutters. If you squinted, you might mistake it for the White House.
The door had one of those fake knockers attached to it, the top lined with a lip of molding, white spirals etched into the painted wood, and I pressed the adjacent doorbell.
When it opened, I was expecting it to be Leia, but the person behind it was taller, forehead covered with a fan of blond hair, beneath which blinked two wide, blue eyes. Her brother, Luke, I assumed from the fact that he was here and was her only sibling – I sort of pictured him as the boy version of Leia, though, dark hair and darker eyes, and it was slightly jarring to find out what I’d been picturing was dead wrong.
“Han– I’m here for Leia,” I said, and it came out sort of like a question at the end, because I was frankly caught off-guard by the fact that she didn’t seem to be here. I looked past him into the foyer – futilely, because there was still no sign of her. Momentarily, I wondered if I’d gotten the wrong house and that this wasn’t actually her brother but a random kid who was going to tell me to turn around and go home.
“Oh, yeah–” he said, and he gave a wide, friendly sort of smile and stepped back from the door, pulling it open wider to let me inside. “She’s upstairs. She said she wasn’t ready yet.”
Jesus – wasn’t ready? This was hardly a date by any qualification – it was a dinner at her house with her family. Who was she trying to impress?
I gave a hum of acknowledgement as I stepped into the foyer, disguising my relief at the fact that I’d gotten the address right, and I shoved my hands into my pockets, uncomfortably out of place somewhere I didn’t belong without the safety net of Leia.
The foyer was nice, like the rest of the parts of the house that I could see. A rug ran the length of the door to the edge of the stairs, just before the living room. It was dark blue, looked evidently expensive, and was bordered by little swirls and spirals that danced the perimeter. In front of me was a table, one that looked antique, topped with a tasseled lamp, also dark blue, and a twin pair of framed photos, both black and white and difficult to make out, though I was sure one was Leia and one was Luke, both much smaller and younger.
In the living room, from the brightness of tall windows, across which expensive curtains draped, a figure stood from one of the chairs, arranged neatly in front of a massive fireplace, and made its way over to the foyer, coming into focus.
“Mrs. Skywalker,” I said, as if she had surprised me. Maybe I felt like now I had to act proper, make myself fit in here.
Former Senator Padmé Skywalker was as intimidating as I expected her to be. She was dressed nicely, a boat-necked black dress, and her hair, the same color as Leia’s, was pulled back into a complicated-looking bun at the nape of her neck. As imposing as she was, she was also strangely comforting: wide brown eyes from which the faintest of wrinkles fanned and a wide, friendly smile. If I cared more about politics, I might’ve recognized it.
“Han, yes? Pleased to meet you.” Her hands were folded neatly in front of her, but there was nothing cold or off-putting about her stance.
From behind me, Luke moved towards his mother, blond head coming not much above her own, and he flashed the same sort of smile, a twin to Padmé's, though his was much smaller, shier, maybe.
“Nice to meet you,” I said, managing to look back towards Mrs. Skywalker.
Her shoulders turned, a hand motioning for me to follow her. “Leia will be down in a minute – here, come sit down. It’s nice of you to come have dinner with us. I wasn’t sure what you eat – Leia didn’t say if you were vegetarian, so I hope what we have is all right.”
“Oh, no,” I said quickly, walking behind her into the living room. “Anything’s fine.”
Everything about this – this house, the way Padmé spoke, stood, made me feel as though I had been cut and pasted here, sticking out like a sore thumb. It was everything I didn’t like – dinners with families, rich people with too much manners, and I’d made a point up until now to avoid it at all costs. Maybe if my life had been different, if I’d been raised in an actual house with actual parents, ones who made real salaries and kept us away from that side of the tracks, I’d be in my element. Hell, I might even like this, but that wasn’t the case, and the only thing that was keeping me slightly sane was the fact that this family, on the outside at the very least, wasn’t stuck-up and rude.
At my answer, Padmé turned to give me an approving smile as we made our way through the living room and into the adjoining dining room, Luke trailing behind me in a manner that was vaguely bashful, a small gait like a nervous puppy.
“We won’t start without Leia, of course,” Padmé said, rounding the table to the head, and she said it as though she had to reassure me of her manners, as if the implication that we might sit and eat without her daughter was appalling. “I’m sorry she’s taking so long, really–”
She was almost exasperated in that polite way, apologizing on Leia's behalf, putting on an amused and apologetic smile as if to say girls will be girls, and it was about then that the three of us all turned, Padmé setting her hands on the back of her seat, Luke moving to take his, and me standing there, unsure, that Leia appeared at the entry.
“Sorry,” she said first to me, flashing a smile, and nothing was sheepish about it, because there was one thing I had learned about her the past months, and that was that she was never really apologetic about anything, didn’t feel that she needed to be. She took as long as she took, she said what she said, and she was always right, at least in her mind. She was entirely unapologetic, and despite the fact that this was coupled with unparalleled stubbornness, I found this refreshing – endearing, even, when it wasn’t directed towards me, because in a world of fake people always giving excuses, she was real.
She knew I knew this, and that’s why her eyes flashed at me when I smiled back at her, a private joke shared between us. She rounded the corner of the table, the heels of her boots clicking on the hardwood, and she pulled out her chair, taking her seat.
Padmé turned to say something to Leia, probably a teasing scold for keeping me waiting so long, and I watched momentarily, waiting for the three of them to take their seats at the places I assumed they always sat at their family dinners, so I could choose the empty place, make myself fit into their perfect world.
We had a fine time. Well, I had a fine time – theirs was probably better than mine. I got asked all the usual questions a mother might ask her daughter’s high school boyfriend, if I had a car, where I planned to go to college. I didn’t have an answer for that one, really, mostly because I didn’t plan on going at all, but I didn’t want to say that. The only thing I was spared from was questions about my family, which Leia probably told her not to ask me.
A couple times, I’d look up from my plate or away from Padmé in the lulls between conversations to see Leia looking at me, a glimmer in her brown eyes. We sort of shared a joke in that, I think, me in her family’s house, completely jarring among the three of them, who were so put together. But I did it for her, because she’d asked me to, and I think I could sort of see something grateful in her glances.
In them, too, I’d catch the feeling of another pair of eyes on us, and I’d look over, see her brother watching us, though he averted his attention back to his plate the second he was caught, as though he thought I wouldn’t notice if he looked away fast enough. I figured it was jealousy, maybe, or discomfort at seeing your sibling have a relationship, like you didn’t want to picture that but now it was right in front of you, confronting you, and it was kind of repulsive. Whatever, kid, keep looking for all I cared.
Afterwards, I helped them carry the plates to the kitchen, placed them in the sink and helped Padmé rinse them while she insisted I didn’t have to. She was still insisting and thanking me as we laid them into the drying rack, Leia leaning on the counter and Luke disappearing upstairs the second we finished cleaning.
Padmé kept me talking at the door for ten minutes after I said I had to be getting back, what was called a Southern goodbye, Leia told me as she stepped off the porch steps beside me, laughing into the evening air. Her mother was from the south, and it apparently hadn’t left her.
“I think I did alright,” I said as we walked down the drive, giving her arm the lightest nudge with my elbow, flashing a cocky, joking kind of smile down at her.
She shook her head, turned it where she thought I couldn’t see the one on her face, and then suppressed it, giving me a shrug. “A couple moments where you could’ve done better. But not too shabby.”
“Right,” I said, an amused sort of disbelief in my voice, playing back. We’d reached the curb, stepped down and landed at the side of my car, and I reached for her wrist, leaning on the driver’s side door. “Hey–”
It wasn’t my smoothest, but I’d found the longer I was into these things, the less it took, and the less I needed to be on the top of my game. Maybe that was why I got bored so easily – there wasn’t a chase anymore, wasn’t a need for the cards to fall just right for a girl to want you. She already wanted you.
Leia did. I could see it on her face the second I took her wrist in my hand, leaned forward, her face expectant and soft, eyes trained up on me, head tilted towards, waiting for me, and I kissed her, my arm sliding around her waist on the street in front of her house, the lights illuminating down in faint fluorescence.
She kissed me again when I got in the car – the window rolled down so she could lean in and press her lips against mine again. “I’ll see you Monday,” she said as she pulled back, the slightest bit of giddiness in her voice, in her smile, the way all high school girls do with their boyfriends.
I always wondered in these moments whether she was going to say that she loved me. And maybe it was a relief when she didn’t.
I nodded, rolled up the window, and started the car, acting like I was going to pull down the street when really, I watched her walk back down the drive, her shoulders pushed back, her fingers moving at her sides in a way that told me she might go up to her room, safe from my sight, and squeal into a pillow, call her friends and tell them how great of a guy I was, how happy she was that we were dating and that I met her family.
Oddly enough, the thought kind of made me feel sick, like I was on a boat rocking too hard, side to side in waves I couldn’t get away from.
I put the car in drive and drove down the street.
1994
“Did you?” Rey says. She’d forgotten the notebook on her lap, the pencil set down abandoned atop the page, hung on every word.
It’s a rare thing to hear this kind of history, not when it was hardly ever discussed back in the older interviews, the ones the band did at their peak. It was mentioned, once or twice in passing, that Han and Leia had dated briefly, but the details were so intimate, so exposing, that the picture of them, as a couple, as people, is beginning to come into sharper focus.
“Did I…” he says, his brows raising, either not following her question or wanting her to finish it before he answers. She’s not sure which it is.
“Love her.” She’s poised on the edge of the couch, her face expectant, searching for any indication of the answer in his face, his expression flickering, indiscernible.
It was one thing to date someone, love them and end things amicably enough to later form a band, but it was entirely another to not reciprocate their feelings, to date them as a pastime, and then later somehow convince them to be on good terms with you again. Rey isn’t sure how it ended, but she’s starting to be surprised the two were ever in a band at all, much less one as successful as it was.
“It’s a complicated question,” he answers, and he leans forward almost restlessly, hands beneath his chin. And then, after a few seconds, where she thinks he’s going to answer the question, he stands up, treks across the living room, around into the kitchen, behind where the wall opens into an island, stools lined against the living room side, and it’s when he leans down into a cabinet and pops back up with a glass in hand that she realizes it’s a bar.
“I thought you were sober,” she says, maybe more abruptly than what’s polite, but it is an interview, after all.
“From the hard stuff,” he answers, filling the glass with ice, “but I have a drink every once in a while. Straightened me out in rehab. This sort of thing was never really my vice of choice, anyway. You want anything?”
“No, thank you,” she says, watching him remove the top of a bottle of whiskey and pour a glass. “Back to the question, though…about Leia Skywalker.”
“It depends on your definition of love, really,” he answers, though not really, and he moves back around into the living room, settling back down on the opposite couch, glass in hand, and he takes a sip before continuing, “Did I care about her? Yeah. I wanted Leia to get everything she ever wanted. I just didn’t think that included me, because I wasn’t cut out for that sort of thing – maybe I’m still not. But I wasn’t in love with her, to answer your question.”
She blinks, absorbing the answer. It had been evident to her, really, as he was telling the story, that he didn’t have feelings for Leia Skywalker the way she did for him, but she hadn’t expected that he would be so candid about it.
“Did you know that? At the time?”
A slight laugh comes from him, another sip of whiskey, and he runs a hand over his forehead, through his hair. “Yeah. Yeah, I knew I didn’t. But I thought I liked her enough, y’know? And it wasn’t anything serious, just high school. Jesus – it makes me sound like an asshole.”
She shakes her head, though she can’t disagree with him – but this was raw, this was real. And she finds herself somewhat sympathetic, though it’s evident he should’ve broken it off when he caught wind that she was in love with him, but he was a kid with nothing figured out.
“Is that why it didn’t work out?” she asks, lifting up her pencil again, the eraser between her lips. She’s still half-afraid he’s going to turn her away, tell her the thing’s she’s asking are too personal, that he doesn’t want to answer anything else.
“To an effect, yeah. And I graduated, because by this point we’d gotten into the spring of, uh, sixty-eight. And I didn’t want to be tied down to that sort of thing – a girl still in school, y’know. I didn’t want to be tied down at all, actually.”
He leans back against the couch, stretches an arm along the back, and Rey thinks maybe he’s trying to appear as though he’s comfortable answering these questions, projecting confidence. Or maybe he just doesn’t really care at all. She’s not sure which.
“But you were married,” she points out. “Eventually, I mean. So was it that you didn’t want to be tied down at all, as you put it, or that you just didn’t want to be tied down to Leia Skywalker?"
The end of the pencil is between her lips again as she watches him, wondering if she’s going to press too hard, triggering some kind of tripwire. He looks away briefly, towards the high windows rising above the city, the clouds moving across the blue.
“You ask a lot of questions about this time in my life,” he says, circling around the answer like it’s a minefield. He looks back at her, then leans forward to set the glass down on the coffee table, beside the dish of discarded cigarette butts.
“It’s what I’m here for,” she says, matter-of-fact. He’s invited her to ask this, brought her here for an exclusive interview, and she’s wondering why he seems surprised by her interest when it’s the very thing she was tasked to do.
“It’s not that I don’t think you shouldn’t be asking them,” he says after a second, and she catches something in his expression, something like amusement, but what’s funny is lost on her, especially when she’s nervous shitless as to whether or not he’s going to suddenly rescind his permission to the story. “It’s just that I think you’ll be more interested in what happened after.”
“You mean the band? I said before that I think all the background is important–”
“I do mean the band,” he says, quick and with a nod, and he’s faintly smiling now, still finding a joke somewhere. Rey is starting to become unsettled by it, searching for what she’s missing somewhere in all the information about it, everything she’s learned and everything she knows about the band, about Han's history. He’s still smiling when he says it.
“But I also mean Luke Skywalker.”