I Became the Ghost in His Cockpit to Save Him From His Son

The official archives of the New Republic called him a hero. A general. A veteran of two galactic wars. But Elara knew better. She scrolled through the declassified files on her datapad, the cool light illuminating her small office deep within the Coruscant library stacks. To her, he was just Han.

The man, not the myth, was the subject of her life’s work. Her obsession. She had memorized every holovid, every mission report, every personal log that mentioned his name. She knew the crooked way he smiled when he was bluffing, the deep lines of grief that settled around his eyes after he lost his son to the darkness, and the precise cadence of his voice from the few audio recordings that had survived.

It was his death that held her captive. It wasn't a glorious end in the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, a ship she knew as well as her own apartment. It wasn't in a firefight, blaster in hand, going down fighting for the cause he’d reluctantly come to champion. It was on a cold, sterile bridge, reaching for a son who no longer existed. A son who answered his father’s love with the crimson blade of a lightsaber.

Every time she reviewed the Starkiller Base security footage—a grainy, silent recording that felt like a violation to watch—a cold fury settled in her stomach. It was all wrong. The positioning, the timing, his plea. It was a preventable tragedy, a wound in the fabric of history that had never healed correctly. It sent ripples of pain forward, shaping the galaxy she lived in, a peaceful but haunted place.

This conviction, this deep, unshakable certainty that it shouldn't have happened, had driven her beyond the official records. For months, she had been cross-referencing energy expenditure logs from the final days of the Old Jedi Order with astronomical charts, chasing a rumor, a ghost story whispered among fringe historians. A temporal anomaly. An echo chamber.

She found it cataloged under a forgotten designation: Jedi Communications Array 7, located in the derelict upper spires of the old Temple. It was officially listed as dismantled, but the energy logs told a different story. A faint, cyclical power signature pulsed from its location, a pattern that matched no known technology. It was weak, almost undetectable, but it was there. A heartbeat in a tomb. The historians called it a ghost. Elara, holding the schematics and the impossible energy readings on her datapad, felt a tremor of something else entirely. Hope.

Getting into the restricted spire was the easy part; a lifetime spent navigating bureaucratic archives had taught her how to slice security codes and forge access permits. The array itself was a hulking, skeletal ruin in a cavernous chamber coated with centuries of dust. It looked dead. But Elara could feel it—a low thrum that vibrated through the soles of her boots, a faint hum in the silent air. It felt like a sleeping giant.

Her hands trembled slightly as she connected her portable power core to the primary console. The schematics had been complex, but she’d traced every circuit, every energy conduit, until she knew them by heart. This wasn't about understanding the tragedy anymore. This was about defiance. It was an act of rebellion against a history she refused to accept.

She bypassed the final safety protocols and diverted all power.

The world dissolved. There was no sound, no light, just a violent, wrenching sensation, as if every atom of her being was being pulled apart and threaded through the eye of a needle. It wasn't painful, but it was absolute—a total negation of self. She was nothing but raw consciousness adrift in a screaming void of pure energy. Flashes of images, sounds, feelings—not her own—tore through her. A desert sun on a young boy’s face, the roar of a Wookiee, the sting of carbonite, the soft touch of a princess’s hand. The echoes. They were the echoes of his life.

Then, silence. And form.

She wasn't in the dusty chamber on Coruscant. She wasn't in her body at all. She was… present. A point of awareness floating in a familiar space. The smell of worn leather, hydraulic fluid, and something uniquely metallic filled her senses, though she had no nose to smell with. She saw the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon. Every detail was exactly as the archives described: the mismatched plating, the scuffs on the control yoke, the golden dice hanging from the console.

And there he was.

Han Solo sat in the pilot’s seat, his back to her. He was older than in the heroic holos, his shoulders slumped with a weariness that seemed to sink into his very bones. He ran a hand through his graying hair, muttering curses under his breath as he jabbed a sparking control panel with a hydrospanner.

“Come on, you bucket of bolts,” he grumbled, his voice thick with frustration. “Of all the times to short out…”

He was real. He was alive. The sight of him, solid and breathing and so terribly close to his end, sent a wave of desperate urgency through her. She didn't know how this was possible, or how long it would last. She only knew she had to speak. She focused all of her will, all of her impossible presence, into a single point.

“Han.”

Her voice was a clear, feminine tone that cut through the low hum of the ship’s engines. It didn't come from the comms. It came from the air itself.

Han froze, the hydrospanner clattering to the floor. He slowly turned in his seat, his eyes wide with alarm, scanning the empty cockpit.

“Who’s there?” he demanded, his voice a low growl that echoed slightly in the confined space. He grabbed a blaster from a holster slung over the co-pilot’s chair, the weight of it familiar and reassuring in his palm. He swept the weapon through the cockpit, then the small galley behind him, his eyes darting into every shadow. The ship was empty. Silent, except for the thrum of the sublight engines and the frantic pounding of his own heart against his ribs.

He lowered the blaster slowly, a scowl deepening the lines around his mouth. “Faulty comms,” he muttered, trying to convince himself. He’d been pushing the ship, and himself, too hard. Running on fumes and stale caf for weeks, always looking over his shoulder. It was starting to get to him. He was hearing things. That had to be it.

He slumped back into the pilot’s seat, placing the blaster on the console next to him. He ran a shaky hand over his face, the rough stubble scratching against his palm. He felt old. Older than his years. Every bad decision, every debt, every loss felt like a physical weight pressing down on him.

“I’m not a faulty comm,” her voice said again, closer this time, seeming to emanate from the very air around his head. It was soft, but firm, laced with an unnerving sincerity. “Please, Han. Don’t ignore me.”

He shot to his feet, the chair scraping loudly against the deck plating. “Alright, that’s enough!” he yelled, his voice raw with a sudden surge of anger. “Who is this? What do you want? If this is one of Kanjiklub’s tricks, it’s not funny!”

There was a pause, and for a moment he thought he’d finally scared the phantom signal away. He stood rigid, his chest heaving, listening to the silence.

“I’m not with Kanjiklub,” she replied, her tone softening with what sounded like sympathy, and that was somehow worse than the anger. “Or the Guavians. I know you’re in trouble with both of them. That’s not why I’m here.”

A cold knot formed in his stomach. No one should know he was being hunted by two separate criminal syndicates at the same time. That was a detail he had kept quiet, a fatal miscalculation he was trying desperately to outrun. The voice wasn't just in his ship; it was in his business.

“I don’t know who you are or what kind of mind game this is,” he said, his voice dangerously low as he began checking panels, looking for a hidden transmitter, a bug, anything. “But the game’s over. Stop talking.”

He expected another reply, another piece of intimate knowledge thrown at him to unnerve him further. Instead, there was only silence. He finished his sweep of the cockpit and found nothing. Not a single device that wasn't his own. The silence was more unsettling than the voice had been. He sank back into his seat, the anger draining away and leaving a hollow, anxious feeling in its place. He was alone. He had to be. It was just stress. The pressure was making him crack. He picked up his hydrospanner, his knuckles white around the handle, and forced his attention back to the sparking panel, determined to fix the problem and pretend the last five minutes had never happened.