Han takes his drink black because he had grown a taste for things that were bitter over the years. Sweets, by comparison, he almost never indulged in. Too much of a luxury when he was very young and these days he usually opted for drinks over nice meals. He could count the number of times he’d had chocolate on one hand.

“I think I’ve found a Princesses’ weakness.” He says, bemused by the sound and her comment. He reaches in with is own fork and goes for a bite for himself. He manages not to make a noise, but she will see him scrutinizing the fork (and putting it back into his mouth) to make sure he got all the cake off.

She might also notice the return of his foot nudging playfully against hers.

“I’ll help.” Han murmurs, reaching in for another bite. “This is obviously dangerous and you shouldn’t face this dessert alone.”

And he takes a second bite. Then a third. After that, he’s feeling ready to see if his coffee has cooled enough for drinking with a shallow sip. He really likes the way that the cake seems to taste sweeter when contrasted with a sip of his caff. It’s starting to dawn on him why people like having this whole other part of the meal, especially when there was good company to enjoy.

“Care to share any other weaknesses, Leia?” He says, while leaning his leg right into her foot for more contact. Han knows he’s unusually taken with this woman, but at the same time, he’s enjoying it too much to question.

“Alright, that seems only fair.”

Han goes in for another bite and tries to think of something notable to tell her about himself. He’s less worried about telling her something that he thinks she might already know, because she seemed to be pleasantly surprised by him mostly.

When he finishes his bite of cake, he says. “Eels.” As if that explained everything. He does elaborate after a moment by adding. “To get from where I lived into Coronet City, you had to travel around a large bay and there was this huge fish market there. So the seafood was cheaper than most of the other meat and we ate it a lot, but I hated Eel no matter how it was cooked. Plus they’re just kind of slippery and ... unpleasant.”

“I can’t, for the life of me, even imagine why the Princess of Alderaan would be in a trash compactor.” He says, utterly baffled by that statement. He knew the point of the statement was supposed to be more about the dianoga and commiserating over slimy dumb creatures, but he couldn’t get passed that first part.

He takes one more bite of the cake and then sets down his fork.

Han finishes his coffee fairly quickly. There wasn’t much point in hanging around the restaurant that he can figure. He hadn’t really considered much about the paying part of this encounter and he wonders how much he has with him, when the server comes up.

“You paid.” He said, eyes narrowing. He looks like he’s going to try to find some reason to object, when opts to just say, “thank you.”

“I could use a trip to the ‘fresher, but I’ll only be a minute.” Because their evening had been filled with liquids of various sorts and heading out to a park afterward. He’d rather go now that make it awkward trying to find one later. So he does excuse himself for a moment and then, he’s ready to go.

He likes that she immediately went arm in arm with him. He had spent a couple of moments wondering how best to accompany her on their walk and he hadn’t been all that sure what to do. This had take all the thinking out of it for him and he was entirely grateful for that.

“What are we gonna do?” Han asked, wondering when it was she had time to plan out a second get together for them.

At first, while they walk, Leia works extra hard to keep stride with him. And for a short period of time, he doesn’t realized that he’s making it difficult to stay in step with him. Though when he feels her falling behind, it dawns on him what happening and he starts to walk slower.

“Well, let me assure you that I’d like to see you again.” He says, shrugging. Han hadn’t really caught on that it was a joke when she said it, but maybe he was too excited to consider the prospect of hanging out again. He really liked Leia. She was interesting and witty in a way that he hadn’t been prepared for — not that he had went into the meeting with a lot of expectations.

“I’ll plan what we do for next time.” He says with a thoughtful smile. “But don’t put me on the spot yet, I want to come up with something good.”

Han was impressed with how warm it was in the nexus. It was nice that the could still walk to the park spontaneously and not have had to back for heavier clothes or anything. In hindsight he wish they had a blanket to spread out on the ground, but there were benches to sit at. He starts guiding them towards one of those so they can talk for a while.

“You know there’s a lot more to being a Princess then I ever would have guessed.” He doesn’t press for an explanation of why she was kidnapped, he has to assume it would have to do with money and it doesn’t seem like a polite thing to make her want to relive. “I’m sure the dianoga was awful, but mostly I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“From what I remember, which I admit is not much, Alderaan is ruled by a Queen. Doesn’t that mean the fancy Princes should be coming out to woo you?”

All things considered, there weren’t that many planets that he could think of that still had royals. Or maybe he just only knew of the really rich and famous ones. They were all gonna have trouble if they didn’t yield to Palpatine, Han supposed. That was the only thing that mattered when it came to hierarchy of power in the galaxy.

Han sat beside her and that will probably remind her of the guy that she knew — because he immediately settled into a posture that was comfortable and not one that seemed overly concerned about impressing anybody. His arm stretched out along the length bench, behind Leia’s back. He hadn’t expected her to lay that kiss on him, even if it was fairly chaste. His eyes had widened slightly and his cheeks seemed to have picked up a bit of flush in the aftermath.

“Uh, you’re welcome.”

“I didn’t ask not to have a lesson in politics, either.” Han said with an amiable shrug and an easy smile. “It was nice to hear you talk about something you’re passionate about. I can imagine if you’re anything like your mom and dad, they’re good at giving speeches.”

“It’s just not a topic I can add much about.”

Han’s arm lowers off the back of that bench now, sliding around Leia’s shoulders. It’s sudden weight was probably not all that surprising to her, given that they both knew he was probably going to try to draw her in like this at some point. With her already leaning closer to trace the scar over his chin? It seemed like a good a time as any to spring that on her.

She had turn toward him, after all. He just wanted to keep her there.

“I’m a very good pilot.” Han murmured. “I always was drawn to anything that I could get behind the controls of. Driving when I was younger, because it was just easier to get access to a speeder, but I always knew someday I’d be flying.”

There was an aspect of this story he wasn’t comfortable telling. The fact that he left Corellia to enlist with the Empire is something he’s not very proud of, in hindsight. He thinks he can tell the gist of the story without offering up that part of himself.

“I started learning how to fly when I left my homeworld. I was never satisfied with taking anything slowly and listening to the people that were trying to teach me, was only acceptable to me if they were telling me something I already agreed with. One day I decided I was done with the training wheels and took a one man starfighter that didn’t belong to me for a little spin.”

Han seems almost bemused by how dumb this story gets, but he goes on. She wanted to know, after all. “I got misidentified as a hostile and one thing led to another. A whole squadron of people were trying to run me down, but I was too stubborn to eject. I didn’t get out of atmosphere fast enough and they were my friends, sort of, so I wasn’t going to shoot back at them. Lost my right wing completely. Spun out of the air. Hit the ground and got lucky that my ship didn’t explode.”

“So the scar came from cutting my chin on the control panel during the crash and not being able to afford bacta to prevent the scar.”

No, he didn’t consider it stealing if you intended to give the vehicle back. In this case, he actually had simply been trying to steal the TIE/LN and get off world, but he had purposely not wanted to cast himself in too much of a negative light. He still wanted to impress her. Still wanted her to like him. It was, also, why he didn’t mention that he had enlisted either. He can’t imagine the Princess from a world that eschewed violence would be all that impressed that he was a Imperial Academy washout and Ex-Stormtrooper.

“Mmm, so you like it, huh?”

The cut on his chin hadn’t worried him so much. Or the bruises that he’d sustained. It was the scratched cornea that had come from the crash that had been really concerning. He had to cover his eye with a bandage for almost a week.

She must have wanted to ask about it. He could kick himself for not noticing sooner. How she had so easily gone from ‘tell me something about yourself’ to an instantaneous suggestion about the scar — it had came off not spontaneous in the least. Leia was not very well versed in the art of lying.

Her doe-like brown eyes were tracing the mostly horizontal mark while she tried to deny that she found it handsome. He couldn’t picture a lot of men in her life who’d been battered as much as he had. Even if those civilized Alderaanian’s had managed to sustain the same kind of injuries he’d gotten over the years, they would have treated the wounds with the best medicine available, regardless of the cost. Not a lot of opportunities for the Princess of Alderaan to meet the kind of guy who spent his teenage years getting into fights and stealing speeders, he realized, even he’d thought of himself as ordinary.

“It’s gray on Corellia.” He murmurs, obviously distracted from giving a good answer between her and his thoughts of her. “We didn’t have a Princess ...”

In contrast to the very chase kiss that she had given him earlier, Han had placed his kiss on her neck. It was what she had turned toward him, when she flinched, but hadn’t tried to flee his grasp around her shoulders.

The words ‘I should’ told him far more, believe it or not, than any of the stories she had told him about what it was like to be a Princess. The constant see-saw of having to weigh every decision of what she was expected to do versus what she might have wanted to do was crystallized in that moment. He got just a whiff of the responsibility that went hand in hand with the fame and the fortune and he felt a little bit bad for Leia. It didn’t seem fair that she had to think about if she should kiss him and not just about whether she wanted to.

In that moment, he’s almost ready to apologize. He’d taken what was a nice evening and made an inadvertent conflict, for her, out of it. The words were on the tip of his tongue when he felt her turn back toward him and plant a very un-princess like kiss on his lips.

His hands fell down to her hips and he kissed her back. Spurred on by her enthusiasm and the realization that Leia is also a woman his age that seemed to enjoy the idea of kissing a scoundrel, he doesn’t try to clean it up any. He kissed her the way that he would anybody he was this infatuated with, complete with an assertive press his jaw and cheeks against her delicate face.