This piece is a follow-up to Questions Not Yet Asked in terms of events, but it's much more serious tonally. I'm going to give a Rape/Non-con TW for oblique references to past events only (my work always operates with that Death Star headcanon).

And Their Answers

"But you've only been with one person, and you're young––"

"I'm twenty-seven!"

"You're young, and I sort of get the sense that no one's asked you."

Leia crossed her arms and frowned at him. "Asked me what?"

Han looked at her languidly, eyebrows raised a touch, and asked, his voice friendly and kind, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to say, "D'you like women, Leia?"

…

D'you like women, Leia?

Leia rolled her shoulders back automatically, slipping into the defensive pose she knew well – the pose of nerf-herders and foul stenches and, apparently, questions like this. I don't – I know – I think – I never –… "I... what?"

Han gave her a weird look and a smile and adjusted the half-sleeping toddler in his arms. "I said, do you like women, princess. In addition to men, of course."

"Of course," she murmured, distractedly. "Sorry, I––" She frowned, so frustrated at being caught speechless so many times in one night – do you like women, princess? In addition to – do you like women, do you like men? Princess, you do like men, don't you? Yes, she knew the answer to that one, a brilliant rush of radiant yesyesyes so maybe she could begin to consider answering the other part – maybe, eventually, but certainly not – "I just can't talk about this right now."

They slipped into the back of a cab, and he gave her the same confused grin, the one that said I had no idea this was a whole thing and I'm realizing that now and I didn't mean to put you through a whole thing I swear I swear. "Sweetheart, I didn't mean to––"

Leia shook her head, as if to clear it, still lost in thought. "No, no, I – just not right now – I'm sorry, I… I'm sorry." She smiled at him and kissed his cheek, sighing.

"Mama…" Ben, then, reaching to wrap his arms around her neck and scooting from Han's lap onto her much smaller one.

"Oof, 'loved, hi there." She wrapped her arms around Ben tightly and kissed his hair as he pressed his hot cheek to her neck. "Shh, baby, go back to sleep." It suddenly felt very important to hold him tight, this baby she'd improbably had at twenty-four, born on a military base two months after her wedding. The smell of his soft hair, the warmth of his sweet breath against her neck. They'd have to do something about this mommy phase eventually, sometime before he started school, but for now…

Sometime before he started school – three years – sometime before she turned thirty, was it possible that she hadn't yet turned thirty? With Han's fortieth just around the corner?

She grunted a bit to scoop the baby (not the baby, the toddler!) onto her hip when they arrived at their new, temporary place, and he whimpered a bit into her neck. "Shh, darling…" He'd grow used to this place too, sweet thing, and the next place too. "Han, my––"

He held up the battered taupe clutch she wore with every formal outfit. "Got it." She always left her purse in cabs and he always retrieved it.

Do you like women, Leia? As she guided the baby through the familiar routine in the unfamiliar space – "teeth, honey" "Mama no––" "Yes, 'loved––" "Mama no…I'sleep…" "If you're asleep then how are you talking to me?" – she couldn't stop thinking about it. If she was being – if she was being brutally honest with herself it was a question she'd asked herself before but – before was – what, a decade ago – the Leia who asked herself this question did not whisper-sing Alderaanian nursery rhymes to time out how long her toddler should brush for, did not say prayers with him while she combed out his braids – "and we say thank you for family and every kind thing" "tank you fo' fam'wy 'n e'ry kye ting" – and when that Leia went to wash up while her husband did bedtime stories she did not see webbing of having had a baby speckled across her abdomen, did not have breasts like these, did not have burns down her spine that she could still feel the ridges of, that meant she couldn't wear drop-back dresses, dresses she wouldn't want now anyway but back then, back when she thought wearing white was patriarchal and modesty a ploy she wanted to wear dresses like that – would have liked to wear dresses like that in front of – other women? She splashed water on her face – oh gods…

"Hey – 'Mommy'?" Han's teasing voice, low and content, in the doorway. "Ready for you in there…"

Leia dried her face on the skirt of the navy dress unabashedly. She followed Han back to Ben's tiny bedroom down the long hallway, the one she was grateful for because of havoc the noise of her night terrors wreaked on Ben's sleeping habits, and Han loped his arm around her waist as they hovered in Ben's doorway. "Goodnight, darling," she murmured, yawning.

Han squeezed her shoulder. "'Night Ben, we love you."

Leia ten years ago who asked herself big questions about desire and want did not hear the tiniest voice, just barely peeking out from above his sheets – "'Night, Mama-Daddy." Did not end up somehow with a husband, did not lean against his tall frame – "Love you…"

But she was a teenager then – she – that's – why was her head spinning? Because it wasn't like it was – women or married, women or baby, it was––

"You wanna talk now, or…?"

It was that the last time she'd had this conversation with herself she'd been almost an entirely different person. How could she even thing about going there now?

She closed Ben's door, careful to leave it open a crack, and tried to give a casual laugh. "Sure – but love, this is so silly, I'm so––"

He shook his head to himself and sat down on their bed, beginning to peel of his formal wear. "You are so shaken up by this, princess."

"Who's shaken up?" For some reason it felt very important to unzip the blue dress herself, and she contorted her back until she could grasp the zipper with her fingertips, wriggle it down her back, fingers against the burn marks, the tender skin different from the other skin, regrown by a different Leia.

"I didn't – mean to bring up something touchy, I––"

"It isn't touchy, I just…" She tried to restore casualness into his features as she pulled on a nightgown and grabbed the delicate ceramic bowl of pins from her bedside table before sitting beside him and beginning to unravel her hair. "I just – haven't thought about that in a very long time."

"Mm – but you have – thought about it?"

"See, this why I – don't – this isn't some weird sex thing, is it?"

"Leia."

"I don't know!" Suddenly she felt twenty-one and virginal and super embarrassed. "I don't know, I know some men – have a sort of…"

He made a face. "Uh, yeah, that's not me."

More virginal still – "But you don't have a problem with––?"

"Not a homophobe and do not have a fetish."

"Well," she murmured, biting her lower lip and tilting her head back and forth contemplatively just slightly. "Biphobe."

His eyes were on her intensely, gaze careful but unrelenting. "Bi…phobe," he repeated slowly, enough to make her look away and flush.

"It really – it doesn't matter either way," she mumbled. "We're married and I certainly have no interest in adjusting the parameters of what that means, so…"

"I dunno, isn't it important to – like, know yourself better?"

"Bit saccharine."

"Know what you like better, then…"

"I really – I can't do this – incredibly fraught and bizarre conversation if it's going to become a sex thing."

"Well, s'sort of a sex thing on some level, right?"

"I don't know… I can hardly even – imagine – with anyone who isn't you," she admitted. And this was true – her sexual self had existed entirely in relation to him, always. Every I like that was I like when you do that, every I want that really I want that from you. Even before they were together – her first real desires after everything that had happened were for him.

"Well," he asked, raising his eyebrows. "How far've you gotten?"

"What, with someone who isn't you?"

"With a woman." He was so calm, she didn't know how he could be so calm – she rarely felt the age difference between them but suddenly she was feeling her relative inexperience viscerally. "I know you at least – there was that one girl, wasn't there?"

"Mm," she conceded suddenly flooded with feeling. "Rebenia…"

"Rebenia, right. And you guys…"

"We – were fairly, mm, intimate with each other," she murmured. "Emotionally, I mean and then – physically, a bit, towards the end…"

"And did you like it?"

Her immediate reaction was to look at him, wordless. Like it? What did that even mean? That same instinct: I like when you, I like with you, and even then sex never felt like something she liked or disliked, she didn't have nearly so much control, there was only flooded with feelings of yes, flooded with fear, and then tired ambivalence – did she like it? Orgasming never felt like something she liked or disliked it was something that happened, happened to her, happened to the corporeal part of her and made her feel – or didn't happen when she didn't let it happen – there was something there to untangle of course, she knew that and Han was always implying that too but that was another thing altogether oh gods she was so out of control right now – "I suppose? I was fifteen, it doesn't really mean anything."

"Fifteen's old enough."

"Old enough for what?"

"To know if you liked it."

"Well, I suppose I liked it very much, then." She pulled her knees up to her chest instinctively, then immediately dropped them, determined not to be shy.

"Yeah?"

"I liked everything about her, Han," she murmured tightly. "She was my best friend." She frowned, corrected herself. "Not really my best friend – more like my role model? She was older than me. Seventeen. Suppose I have a type, then."

"Old for your age."

"She, ah. She was very important to me."

She watched as he nodded slowly, concern crossing his features – like every story of hers from growing up, this one had an inevitable post-script of and then she was incinerated into a million tiny pieces while I watched, and he was remembering this. She felt like her life was a series of essays by a lazy pupil who always copy and pasted the same generic conclusion to the end of every essay, except instead of boasting a rephrasing of the thesis it featured tales as varied as her first period and falling out of a tree at seven that always ended and then everybody died. The tree, the father who'd bandaged her knee. The mother who'd grabbed sanitary napkins and painkillers. The girl with the warm lips and daring eyes. Lazy, repetitive, repulsive.

"She was the daughter of my father's chief of staff, the new one from when I turned fourteen? And she was very – mm, very mature, very perceptive. Quiet in a sophisticated sort of way. But with an enormous smile when you made her laugh… and she was older and sophisticated and terribly brilliant and I desperately wanted her approval. Would um – follow her around the castle after thinking up clever things to say. Trying to find the chance to say them…"

"Sweet," he murmured, and he kissed her cheek. "I'm picturing you drafting little jokes all night."

"Something like that," she admitted, smiling softly. "She also used to run – she was very athletic, long legs – oh gosh, I'm blushing – um, she would run in the forest behind the palace? And I started pretending I loved to run as well and would follow her. And eventually we became friends. I would ask her advice on everything..."

"Such a little sneak. Did you know she was––?"

"I don't think so? I don't think so, it never even occurred to me. In retrospect it was rather obvious, she – carried herself in a certain way that – you might read into. I thought she was just… incredibly confident and handsome."

"Confident and handsome, huh?"

"Oh, stop it. She was, though – very athletic, very tall, very tan. Long dark hair. I think my parents – probably suspected something before even I did? We were… she would go on these foreign trips, with her father, and when she would come back I would wait for her in the hangar and race into her arms and she would spin me around. Like you do, actually," she admitted with a faint blush. "We were that kind of friends."

"Ah, yes. That kind," he said teasingly.

"We had sleepovers, we spent all our time together, we did all of our homework together and talked policy all night, she gave me these books and we had nicknames, the whole thing. Hers was – don't laugh, Bena, I know, I didn't realize until now…"

"What? Nah, that's funny – he shares a name with your best friend, I don't dislike that... What was yours?"

"Lee," she murmured.

"Lee and Bena. Cute. Like – Leebena."

"Shut up…"

"It's sweet."

"She was sweet. And then… I don't know. One night we were having a sleepover and we were sitting on my bed and she was painting my nails, and she said. Ah. She said Oh, you're so pretty, Lee. Not in any particular way – and I – just kissed her. Suddenly. And… she kissed me back."

He was rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand as he held it and she was blushing so, so hard... "And you liked that?"

"I did," she breathed, and she began to rush through her words: "I – yes, very much – and I don't know, it very quickly became – I mean not much happened, no one's hair came down or anything – but, ah, I took off her shirt and her bra and I touched her and she took off my shirt but not my bra and touched me and a bit – between my legs, as well – and then my mother walked right in because why would she knock, it was just us doing homework, right?"

"She walked in."

"Yes, right in and then immediately walked right back out but that was it, and I was shaking and Bena put on her things and raced out and that was it."

He frowned. "What do you mean, that was it? That was – were your parents not––"

"No, um, actually?" Her throat was tightening all of the sudden, making her voice tremble just a bit, and she fidgeted in discomfort. "Actually – they – they sat me down and said they would love me no matter what and that they thought Bena was a wonderful girl but we needed to set some parameters – my mother, um," she was choking up now, why was she choking up, fuck it all, "My mother looked up and sent me these – silly articles about – lesbian safe sex? Because the talk she'd given me hadn't covered it, um…" She was shaking now, all of her, wearing a tight pained smile and staring into her lap.

"So what happened?" he asked gently. "Did she…?"

"No she um – no, I did. I – Bena wanted to talk. She said she really cared about me. She said she was so sorry if she'd gotten me in trouble, that she would apologize to my mother, et cetera. And I said it had all been a mistake and I didn't know what I was doing and I believe I used the words I'm not like you, I'm not that way and we never, ever spoke other than formally again."

"Never ever? Princess, are you serious?"

"Yes I, ah. I don't really know why I – I don't… and, you know, for every formal function thereafter, my parents would – ask if I wanted to invite her. They were so. There was this formal – gathering approaching and I'd never gone with an escort before because I was too young, and they asked if I wanted her to be my escort. Said I was old enough. They would ask if she wanted to come over for dinner…" She squeezed her hands together to calm them. "It's not like Alderaan was some – haven of tolerance or anything, I feel like that's important to this story. They were – it was something very serious and real for them to say those things… anyway, the next year she went to university and I went to the Senate and that was that."

"Sweetheart, I don't – I don't understand. What the hell happened? If your parents were––"

"I just wasn't ready to – make a decision like that? To be brave like that – I, um, I wasn't ready to be the lesbian – bisexual – whatever – princess of Alderaan? I wasn't ready to move to Coruscant as the lesbian princess of Alderaan, to have people think about me differently, to have people think it was okay to talk about me, for people to interpret my actions differently, I wasn't – I didn't want to be that person and I didn't want to dive into something I didn't understand and couldn't control and I don't know, Han, the whole thing was so – complicated, she was my role model and my best friend and I was so young – I kept thinking, what if I want to take it back? What if I'm not sure and I can never take it back?"

"But that's not – and anyway, if you're bi––"

"You don't know that, don't say that," Leia said abruptly, sitting straight up.

"Sorry, what?"

"Sorry, I just – I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She focused on breathing deeply. In through her nose, out through her mouth. "It's like. Um. That time? Do you remember that time, when that panel asked me to speak? And I – was very unhappy? The panel on – sexual violence."

Very unhappy had been an understatement – she was livid and hysterical and practically hyperventilating until he'd explained to her that it was definitely because of her policy work, not something people had discovered about her.

"I have – had – have a very specific idea of myself and I don't like it to be breached," she said slowly. "And if it has to be breached I at least – don't want it breached for others – I want to control the way I'm seen. I want to… I don't know… I want to control."

"Yeah, princess, I know that." He pulled her into his arms and she mostly let him hold her, thoughts reeling.

"It's funny because – after? Everything that happened, you know, to me, to home – it never occurred to me again? Or it occurred to me but it seemed like something I wasn't allowed anymore. Because it seemed like – like – like…" She forced it out: "Like girls and best friends and kissing other girls was for someone else, not me anymore. Innocents or children or people who were naïve, not so broken and hardened. Like an outgrown, more vulnerable me."

"That's – you would think––"

"Right, you'd think I'd just be turned off men forever or something but I don't know, I think I thought." She swallowed carefully and looked away. "That girls kiss girls and women take cock."

She could feel his entire body grow rigid and tense and he swore into her hair, holding her almost too tight for comfort.

"Like that encounter – on the bed, with that nail-polish, Han? It was so – innocent, so easy. I don't mean to – infantilize women who – are interested in other women, I only say that because I was so young but – it was so easy, Han, there was nothing to negotiate or ask. We didn't even say a word."

So easy – she thought about the first time they'd slept together, all of the communication and build-up and work that went into it because of everything she'd been through. Every touch beginning and ending with confirmation and talk… and even now, though it wasn't like that, it also wasn't sweet in that same way, still – always just a bit dangerous, just a bit reckless, just a bit wild.

"That's what my life used to be like," she breathed. "Nail polish and easy and my bedspread and braids…"

He was silent a long while, his arms still tight around her. "Do you think," he finally said, his voice low and serious, "that if you were with a woman now, after, it would be different? Or the same?"

She shut her eyes with a growing sense of dread at his direction, as if to make this line of questioning go away. "Like do I think it would be triggering, Han?"

"Do you think it would be easier. For you."

"Than being with her then?"

"Than being with – men. Now." Me, now – she heard his implication very clearly and winced.

She didn't know what to say. She pressed her face against his arm and sighed deeply. Oh, Han. "I don't –…" She trailed off. "It doesn't matter, now."

"It matters to me."

"But I want to be with you," she said clearly, sitting up and turning to face him. "I want to be with you, now. Only you. I like being with you – love being with you, love you. How can you even––"

"I'm – yeah, I'm sorry, I don't know what––"

"I like being with you, Han – I like – I like sleeping with you. Sex with you. Love. Sex, sleeping with, I––"

"I know that, Leia, forget I said anything––"

"You can't – that's not a very nice thing to ask me – you know I always choose you – how can you––"

"I didn't mean it like that, I just like want what's best for you––"

"You're what's best for me." She couldn't even believe this was happening and was eager to shut this absurdity down fast. "I love you, you are what's best for me."

"Right. Right. I – sorry, I'm really sorry, Leia, you don't I don't care, whether – if you decide you are, you know that."

"I know." She bit her lip. "And – I don't know – I like having… that part of me… live there, in that place, with other Leia. I like that other Leia will never kiss a girl and feel fear."

He shut his eyes and exhaled deeply. "That part of you can stay with current Leia, too, though. You don't have to leave her behind."

"It just," she continued, "seems like a big responsibility. Calling myself – what I suppose I would technically be considered – I feel like I should then – do… more. For other people, like – me."

"It's not like you have to pick a label and wear it," he said finally.

"I wouldn't want anyone else to – consider it shameful, though. If it were them."

"You don't owe people anything anymore, Leia," he said tiredly. "You've given 'em all so much of yourself. You don't owe them anything else."

"But as someone who works in foreign policy, I can really… I don't know – or what if Ben––?"

"That's a long ways away."

"I don't know. I would never want to make some kind of – I don't know. Announcement – gah, the thought of that – ugh. Or do any – I don't know, that just isn't me…"

He took another deep, full breath. "How about this. If someone asks you, don't lie."

"If someone asks me?"

"If someone says…" He rallied and adopted a cheesy newscaster voice, desperate to see her smile, and she did smile, the small, shy, content one he loved so much. "'Princess Leia Organa, we're polling all the hottest politicians on their thoughts for Cosmology's Sexiest Beings issue—'"

She covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her laugh, the shy smile bursting into a brilliant beaming one. "Are you, now?"

"'Yep, and we need your input. To start off, we'll select the folks for you to evaluate – you'll be considering some delectable human males, including Captain Han––'"

She laughed again but played along, interrupting playfully, "Women too."

"'Excuse me?'"

"I like women, too."

#

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