Sometimes Han Solo forgot to despise Leia Organa.

Not that she was despicable. The opposite, actually. She was righteous, but that level of personal accountability was utterly exhausting to Han. She was capable, which he admired, but it came at the price of an infernal guilt that she threw around like dust in a storm. She was smart, so smart, but she wielded her intelligence like a weapon.

Even if she wasn't despicable, the way he felt after each interaction with her certainly was. Guilt and lust, in equal measure. Guilt because she made him self-reflect and he avoided self-reflection at all cost. He was fine, just fine, with who he was and what he was doing. There was absolutely no need to muddy it all up with morality. The fact that she didn't seem to do it on purpose only made it worse.

And lust because … well. Apparently his type was righteous, capable and smart.

So sometimes he forgot to despise her. When this forgetfulness happened, it happened slowly. Like an undertow: an invisible force tugging him out to sea. Life would be fine, things made sense. The galaxy ran on its usual mix of chaos and anarchy. He'd fly supply runs, they'd relocate to yet another awful base, she'd mouth off to him - and only him - every chance she got. And the shape of the reality around him was familiar. Chaos and anarchy. Fight or die. This was the life he knew.

But every once in awhile she'd chip off a big chunk of his defenses and he'd find himself wondering how the hell he was going to keep from falling hard for her. And it was happening a lot more lately; they'd gone on three intel meet-and-drops this month alone. She didn't just chip off pieces while risking her neck for the Rebellion. It was like a goddamn avalanche.

His most recent assignment was supposed to be easy enough. Low risk, high payout - well, as high as the payout ever got with the Rebels. Han figured he was safe. Get in, grab the medical supplies, get out.

And then Leia had been assigned to the mission. He'd had a moment - just one - when he'd considered backing out. But that was the problem with this slow process: as much as he didn't want to give her ample opportunity to impress him, he also couldn't seem to stop it. And it pissed him off. What kind of a mercenary backs away from a paying job because he was terrified to find himself alone with a woman?

He sucked it up. He wasn't afraid of anything.

It seemed Leia's father had been good friends with the manager of the facility where they were picking up these supplies. She'd been to the facility twice with her father and had personally arranged the mission itself. Bail Organa's friend offered key codes to the building and storage units with explicit instructions to stage the mission as a typical black-market robbery. The manager could claim plausible deniability and the Rebellion could get their supplies.

But the mission hadn't gone as planned. Han and Leia got into the facility without much trouble. The security code the manager had provided was accurate. The outer security door opened and they rushed in under the cover of darkness. They easily found the supplies tucked cleanly away in a back warehouse: a good thirty thousand vials of an antiviral medication. Leia had told him the supplies would help the Rebels prep for their newest hellscape of a base.

She hadn't used the word hellscape. He tried hard not to focus on the sure grip Leia had on her blaster.

He quickly found the system computer and used the second set of security codes to open the refrigeration units. He moved to the units, leaving Leia to plant evidence of the "robbery", packed up the vials into a travel cooling unit and lugged it back into the room within two minutes.

"Alright, that's it," he said. His boots made a dull click as he re-entered the manager's office.

But she didn't respond. She was staring wide-eyed at an image projected in front of her with a crease in her forehead and her shoulders hunched high. He watched her, thinking she must read faster than anyone he'd ever met because her eyes tracked the line of code too quickly for a normal human to process. He opened his mouth to ask what was going on but she beat him to the punch. "This is wrong," she said. She pursed her lips and turned those quick eyes on him. "This is not what we thought it was."

He dropped the cooling unit and came up behind her, trying to look at the projection. A series of columns and a long list of locations scrolled in front of him. "What's got you spooked?"

"I'm not spooked," she bit out. "Look."

"I am looking," he said. "It's a lot of places and times."

"It's a shipping manifest. Honestly, Captain, you'd think you've never freighted cargo before."

A tick of annoyance in his head and a longer, hotter adoration in his chest: this was the effect he'd been trying to avoid. He ignored it. "I know it's a manifest. Why do we care where it's supposed to go if we're stealing it?"

She sighed in irritation and turned to him. "Look at the coordinates of the deliveries."

He leaned closer and squinted. After thirty seconds of trying to suss out what she was expecting him to find, he shrugged. "This'll go a lot faster if you just tell me what you think you see."

She rolled her eyes. "This is the intended delivery route for the supplies we are diverting tonight."

He noticed she hadn't said stealing. "Okay."

She pointed to one part of the projection. "These coordinates go to Sra-Lan, a ravaged port town just north of here. And these to Ebon, a city on the eastern continent with a serious outbreak," she said, waving her hand. "And these are for the capital. It's under siege. They're barely getting any medical relief and - "

"I get it, I get it," he said. "Where does it say the city names?"

She didn't turn to look at him. "It doesn't. I memorized the coordinates on the flight here."

"Of course you did," he muttered. He hitched his thumbs into his belt. "And you're worried about stealing this haul from the cities."

He didn't ask it as a question, he stated it as a fact. Of course she'd hate that idea.

She turned toward him. Her eyes reminded him of solar glare, like the phantom light you see after you turn away from a star. "I can't in good faith justify taking this. Namdi didn't tell me where these were going. He only said he had an expendable shipment that we could procure."

Another euphemism. Divert. Procure.

She continued. "But these people are not expendable. They shouldn't have to die so that we can survive."

"You're fighting a war, Your Worship," he said with a chill. "You don't get to decide who lives and who dies."

His voice sounded harsh, and it was probably because a nearly-extinguished flare of hope was flickering somewhere in his chest. Her planet had been destroyed in front of her. Han didn't care about anything the way Leia seemed to care about Alderaan, but here she was, carefully choosing who to target for her revenge. Such precision was beyond his capacity to comprehend. Wouldn't it be enough to destroy something, anything, standing between her and what was left of her goal? Would anyone in their right mind blame her for being a little bloodthirsty?

He watched her nod. "But these people are not involved in my war. And I'm not going to take down the Emperor by killing innocent people." She turned to the projector. "I'm going to take him down by surviving."

Oh hell.

An avalanche, clear and overwhelming. In one fell swoop she ripped the rug out from under him and left him dazed on the floor. Any annoyance he may have felt was swiftly becoming a thing of the past, a relic. This woman, this ridiculous woman, with her ferocious, righteous anger, was going to single-handedly dismantle the entire system that oppressed the galaxy. And if he thought for even a moment that he wasn't one-hundred-percent, painfully, horrifically in love with her, he was deluding himself.

This was bad. This was so bad.

"So what're you going to do about it?" Han said. He folded his arms over his chest and tried very hard to appear unaffected.

And then she turned back to him and smiled. A ruthless, challenging, rebellious smile that he could feel deep in his gut as the ice came tumbling down all around him. "No, Captain. The question is: what are we going to do about it?"

It turned out that they did quite a lot.

A week later Han escorted a beaming princess back to base with a full refrigeration unit of antiviral medication. High Command, assuming the mission had gone to plan, didn't schedule a full debrief until three days later when someone finally realized that the shipment IDs didn't match and that the mission had taken them six days longer than they had anticipated.

"Your Highness, could you explain to us, clearly and concisely, why the identification numbers on the shipment we received do not match the identification numbers Dr. Namdi provided for us?"

Leia clasped her hands on the table and spoke into the recording device in front of her. "Dr. Namdi's report was misleading. The intended recipients of the original shipment were innocent civilians."

"I don't understand," Jan Dodonna said.

Han grinned at the look of confusion on the general's face and prepared for Leia's inevitable tirade. She looked Dodonna square in the eye, leaned in and said: "I am not going to win this war by taking medicine from innocent people. Not then. Not ever. We are better than that."

Dodonna paused. "Then what did you do?"

Leia turned her head and looked at Han. He did his best to look bored. "For once, Captain Solo had a rather elegant solution to our problem."

Han rolled his eyes. "No one else was speaking up," he drawled.

Dodonna looked like he was praying for patience. He rubbed a hand over his forehead. "Okay then, Captain. What did you do?"

Han waited a beat for dramatic effect, then said with total nonchalance: "We delivered the shipments directly to the cities, took their payments and used them to buy another full shipment from Namdi."

"Legally," Leia added. "Dr. Namdi still got his robbery, the civilians still got their medicine, and we still completed our mission."

Han gestured broadly to the room at large. "You're welcome. Next time I'll charge a consulting fee."

Dodonna leaned back and looked from Han to Leia and back to Han. After a moment, he sighed. "I don't suppose you would submit your logs for corroboration?"

Han didn't bother shaking his head. Dodonna knew better than to request something he knew would never happen.

"Well," the general said. "I suppose that will be all, then. For now, at least. Dismissed."

Han saw Leia nod to Dodonna and then he followed her from the room. He admired the way her hips swayed as she walked. Such a small but sure thing, Leia's hips. At the end of the corridor she turned to him, her eyes roving over his face slowly. He had an odd feeling, like she was struggling to read him the way she had so easily read the shipment coordinates back at the facility. "Well," she said. "If you don't mind, Captain."

She turned without another word and walked away in the opposite direction of the hanger where he had a million things to do before these damn fools had him running somewhere else. And he had the sinking feeling that he was being dismissed, as sure as Dodonna had dismissed them moments ago. He hated that shake of her head. He hated that he'd undergone avalanches, and self-reflection and questions of wartime morality for her.

And, worse, he hated that he had an unwanted adoration that was getting harder and harder to suppress. He squelched it by some measure every day but most particularly on missions when he discovered he liked every damn thing about her.

But there she went. Just walking away.

He hated that.

"Hey, You Worship!" he yelled before he really thought about what he was going to say.

She turned to him slowly. She looked visibly angry already. "Yes, Captain Solo?"

He grinned and threw his hands wide. "Next time you want a little one-on-one time with me, you'll have to pay up like everyone else."

Her eyes flashed and she stared at him with her mouth open for a moment. "Don't be absurd," she said. "I wouldn't pay for one minute of your company."

"Sure," he said. He dragged out the one word with obnoxious pride. "Especially not when I save your precious Rebellion."

She scowled. "You had one good idea - "

"A brilliant idea," he nodded. "I'm glad we agree."

She marched back down the corridor, up close to him, so close that he could reach out and curl his hand around the back of her head if he wanted. She stood at chin-level to him but she felt like a giantess. "Do you know what a brilliant idea is, Captain?" she asked.

Han was aware of two women walking past them but Leia didn't seem to notice. They watched Han and Leia with knowing looks on their faces as they passed. Han briefly wondered what it was they thought they knew. "No," he said, and he said it low, in the deepest register he could.

She was close, staring at him with such heat. Molten. Blazing hot. Her eyes were fire. She lifted her chin and stared him down. Han was subsumed in all the reasons he couldn't hate her, no matter how hard he tried, no matter how many warning bells were ringing in his ears. In over his head, drowning, watching her face as she burned brilliantly in front of him.

He could kiss her. It wouldn't take any effort at all. He could lean down, brush her lips, get lost in the passion she kept leashed so tight. She'd burn bright, she'd pull him closer, she'd open those lips and he'd taste the flames. He'd be burnt to ash and he didn't give a damn who saw it.

She had to feel this. Didn't she feel this?

"A brilliant idea is fighting for something larger than yourself," she whispered. She narrowed her eyes and stepped back. "And you know nothing of that."

She turned sharply and he watched as she glided out of view. She didn't turn back.

He clamped his mouth shut, hiding the scorch marks he felt but couldn't see. Shaking his head, he ambled back to the Falcon and tried for the millionth time to pretend that he had it all under control. He breathed in deep, smelling oil and burnt circuitry. He considered a drink, thought better of it, and just sat aimless at the gametable.

Because no matter how hard he tried he just didn't think he could despise Leia Organa.

And the worst part was that he didn't want to anymore.

Written for OtterandTerrier for the HanxLeia Secret Santa exchange on Tumblr. Happy Holidays! - KR