The sandy-haired desert child, the human from Tatooine, stretched out his arms and made a display of his boredom. He still smelt of sand and blood, and below that, the pungent reek of ozone and burnt human flesh. He'd taken a bit of a beating—his first beating, perhaps—and had come through a blaster-fueled massacre just before, or passed very close to one. Perhaps he'd never been to space before, and the wonder of it all was a distraction. But Chewbacca smelled all manner of trauma about him. To bear the weight of it all, and to affect the appearance of boredom at the first few moments of leisure—there was a courage in that. Perhaps he was not as weak as he looked.
Loyal Han Solo, the human of incalculable courage, was in rare spirits. It pleased the old Wookiee to see him so. He was out of danger, now—that was always how he seemed to feel in the freedom after the jump. To Chewbacca, hyperspace was the loneliest place in the galaxy—the loneliest place outside of it, maybe—but it brought Han Solo to such a place of serenity that he knew they would never have roots again, if he could help it.
Chewbacca could live with that. Every time they came out of hyperspace, Han Solo's own species tried to murder him. Again, and again, and again, one pink-skinned monster after another came after him. Han Solo had killed so many of his own kin in self-defence it had become second-nature to him. It was the most heartbreaking thing Chewbacca had ever seen. And yet, one murderous human after another, he courageously made advances on human mates, for as long as they would let him. There'd been a dozen like the female in the Mos Eisley cantina—a dozen who seemed attractive, as far as he could judge such things. And always in a haze of panic and blaster fire, they were driven away to other worlds, other lives.
Han Solo was happy here, and that brought the Wookiee comfort. Han's never-ending war against his own species was the most heartbreaking thing in the world. But it was the nature of humans, he thought, to have broken families—to be broken families. It was best not to think about it too much.
"How long 'til we get there?" the farm boy asked.
"About six standard hours," Chewbacca said, on the off-chance it mattered.
The boy walked past him as if he were a dumb animal.
"Han, how long?" he asked.
"About six hours, kid," said Han Solo. He darted his eyes to the Wookie. His face was stern, but he thought it was hilarious.
"Funny," Chewbacca snorted, and went to check the damage to the power converters.
As usual, the converters hadn't responded well to the abuses of pulling against tractor beams, of having power rerouted again and again from one ramshackle system to another as courageous Han Solo changed his mind again and again what sort of power he wanted: put everything to this, full power to that. He looked with eager anticipation to the magnificent silver canisters he'd stacked by the alluvial damper. They were Freedom Relics, as the Wookiees referred to all vintage technology produced before the Fall, and it had been immensely kind of Han Solo to cough up the last of their emergency fund for them. The specifications of these converters were off the charts, making them a once-in-a-lifetime steal for a patchwork ship of the Falcon's capabilities and demands—but more than that, the converters were a symbol. Freedom Relics were reminders of a time before the enslavement, and it touched him that Han Solo respected that, even if he didn't understand.
"You okay, pal?" said Han Solo.
"I'm fine," Chewbacca snorted.
"Don't take it person—" Han Solo started, but stopped. Nobody this far out from the Wookiee's home sector ever understood him, and he never took offence. "It's something else bothering you, isn't it?"
YOU ARE READING
A Certain Point of View
Fanfiction"OBI-WAN NEVER TOLD YOU..." With those words, Darth Vader shook our faith in Obi-Wan as a reliable narrator, and told us there was more to his story than we ever knew. It's very rare that I write fanfiction, but this AU story (...or IS it?) takes p...
