It was supposed to be a quick mission, in and out with two data chips in his pocket and the Falcon rocketing out of Coruscant with the Empire none the wiser than he'd been in their capital for an afternoon. He wasn't recognizable to them, common smuggler ship not on their radar. If anyone raised questions, he could play it like a rich kid's private spice delivery. Gods knew he'd pocketed enough credits for that in the past. The Rebels were now happy enough to capitalize on those skills, and he'd been happy to pocket their credits for runs like this. Even happier than running spice, if he was honest with himself.
He was supposed to meet the contact at the Green Garto. He'd picked up data chips on a few supply runs in the past, and it had always been a quick and easy transaction, a chip under a napkin left on the table, or pressed into a palm during an effusive greeting.
This time it was different. He'd gotten to the cantina and met the contact, who gave him not the chips he'd expected but coordinates farther into the city proper. Much farther than he'd planned to venture. It was banthashit, and he could feel his chain being jerked, his time being wasted, the Alliance credits being wasted on desperately needed intel that wouldn't materialize.
When he returned to the Falcon to wait for the new rendezvous time, he did a little information gathering on the new location. It wasn't another dive joint or club, but the address of the Alderaanian embassy offices. Or, former Alderaanian embassy offices. Official information indicated that all assets of the planet and House Organa had reverted to possession of the Empire-official line still being that Leia had perished over Tatooine-and that included the embassy property. It was apparently now condemned, which piqued Han's curiosity.
As night fell, he tossed a dark jacket over his usual spacer's vest and headed to the Embassy District, blending in with the shadows. It seemed an odd place for a vacant, condemned property, between all those fancy mansions taking up entire blocks. But in this too Alderaan had been made an example of, formerly elegant entry gates broken and barely dangling on their hinges, notice of official condemnation barely discernible under scorch and blaster pockmarks.
Cautiously, he slipped through the mangled gates and through the grimy, litter-strewn passageway into a huge open space. What had once been an enormous courtyard conservatory garden had now gone wild and menacing jungle, no longer a tea party garden, humid and fragrant with decomposition and riotous blossoms. In the rustling vegetation was not the screeching vornskr but very humanoid giggles and moans-he understood immediately what this place had become.
He slid into the leafy shadows, inhaling deeply the nearly overpowering and sharp scent of delicate red flowers next to his head, like the spicebread he'd loved as a boy. Impulsively he plucked a short sprig of them and tucked it into a pocket of the jacket, before taking up vigil on the entrance.
When the figure in the midnight blue Humbarine headscarf and long cape slipped into the conservatory, hips swaying unsubtly, he emerged from the shadows. He wasn't very subtle himself; this was no longer the site of gentle politics.
"You're late," he growled. "I better still get my money's worth."
"Oh you'll get it all right."
Acknowledgement, acceptance. Mission nearly complete.
Han let himself be dragged deeper into the plants that had swiftly overtaken what had once surely been a highly manicured space. Now the fountain in the center was empty, the statue in it -a goddess? a princess?- toppled and twisted, outstretched arm broken. He felt almost guilty for looking, as if staring at a victim of disfigurement. Eyes locked on the lithe dark figure leading him, until they abruptly stopped at an alcove, filled with vines and moss, almost cavelike, small flowers sprouting through the cracks in the floor.
He spun around, was pushed deep into the vines, crackling around him, as the contact knelt in front of him. Hands glided up the sides of his pants, where blood stripes would have been any other day. This shouldn't have felt so strange to him, wasn't unlike something he'd paid for in a city like this in the past. But all artifice, as this whole endeavour was, as nimble fingers slipped into his pocket for a split second, the barely perceptible weight of the data chips sliding inside.
Less than a minute.
Then pulling away, straightening. Only then did they speak, whispering. "The royal family used to live on the fourth floor."
Disappearing into the leaves then, silent as they'd appeared. He lingered, pondering the additional bit of information. It wasn't what he came for, and he wasn't sure what he'd find in this ruin of a building. In the space of a heartbeat he decided, though, tracing the trail deeper into the foliage, finding a slimy stairwell in the corner leading up into the building itself. Open to the courtyard's humid air all the way up, vines had crept through the balustrade and along the handrail.
His worn boots were silent as he made his way up, drawn inexplicably, against his better judgment. He didn't want to see what had become of what was once, presumably, her gorgeous rooms, knew she wouldn't want to see it either.
But what if there were something-anything-left?
So up he climbed, to the treetops, bounded by cloudy plasteel, to a corridor with worn dirty carpet, prior color indistinguishable in the murk. The entrance doors there, heavy wood, were defaced of carvings but still hanging, locked. A big, old-fashioned metal lock, perplexing and undisturbed.
He studied it, hefted it in his palm, weighed it against past locks picked, tools waiting in his pockets. Amazed that he remained undisturbed, he made quick work of the lock, wondering why no one else had. Or did they already know it wasn't worth breaking? This whole place seemed thoroughly abandoned except for illicit affairs, devoid of opportunistic inhabitants. Did the swanky address and neighbors keep that at bay?
The doors themselves were locked, too, proving a bit tricker, and had probably been the true defensive line. He looked around at the darkened corridor, back to the silent stairwell, before slipping inside and shutting the door behind him. Locking it, appreciating the weight of the mechanism.
Han wasn't sure what he'd expected. He'd been in expensive apartments and homes and hotels before, but usually those of drug lords and arms dealers and the insanely nouveau riche. These were clearly the apartments of another type of wealth, or the remnants of them; overturned and broken furniture, stuffing ripped out but real splintered wood and a room's worth of flimsi documents and books and even antique paper volumes scattered across the floor. It would have been a beautiful room, once.
But it was marred not merely with the mundane Imperial ransacking and pillaging, but also the smells of burnt textiles and plastics, and human excrement. It had all been defiled. Suppressing the urge to vomit, he scanned the room, noted a few things still scattered on the shelves, disregarded. One small parchment volume, worn, but careworn, worthless and thus not defiled like the rest. A children's book. He tucked it deep into his pockets, into one of the vest pockets that zipped shut, and headed deeper.
It was more of the same in the dining area, stains from a few broken wine bottles and glass everywhere. Not an intact bottle left and cabinets open and emptied of anything edible. There were a scattering of rodent-gnawed napkins on the counter, scattered condiment bottles, a few utensils, and several packets of tea. She loved tea; he tucked a couple of them into a lesser pocket.
There was an office, in even worse disarray than the welcoming library room, more flimsis and styluses and broken datapads, and an overturned wood desk. Trailing fingers down the smooth face, his rough fingers caught what at first he thought was splinter damage, in evidence around the axed-open drawers. But this was something else, too subtle for stormtrooper gloves to discern. He slid his fingers across the spot again and again, applied more pressure, tapped, pressed. Gently something gave, subtle again, almost invisible but for the catch under his fingers, to attuned to delicate mechanics.
A few holo cubes, a single data chip.
Was this what the entire place had been torn apart for, or was that merely spite?
He tucked them carefully into different pockets, all that secured, some in his vest, taking no chance that he wouldn't get something back to her. They felt heavy in his pockets, the weight of someone else's stolen life. Carefully, he pressed the desk closed again, stepped back into the hallway, and let his eyes readjust to the darker space.
Two rooms, opening left and right, that must have been bedrooms, mattresses tossed and ripped open and mirrors broken, a window missing two glassine panes. But impersonal, no clothing or jewelry or dead flowers. He moved on, to what must have been her room.
It was not what one would normally expect for a teenage girl's room, but knowing her, it wasn't unexpected. Shredded remains of a green duvet, feathers still swirling in the wind through the broken window, half ajar onto a balcony of untended plants that had either died or gone wild, growing into the room. Scattered, torn clothing tangled with his boots as he crossed the room to a dressing table, bottles in disarray and jewelry boxes opened and emptied.
A scarf still tangled at the corner of the cracked mirror. He untangled it, a bright clear blue with a print he couldn't discern in the dark, balled it up and into a pocket, too. He wished he had more room to carry everything back, ripped curtains and bent spoons and hundreds of flimsi pages. He surveyed the room, tried to spot anything else that might be of value to her.
A broken stained-glassine lamp was beside the bed, broken frames that must have once held art hung crookedly, pillows ripped and shredded on the flipped mattress. But a drawer in the bedside table yielded another printed book-he'd seen more here tonight than he had his entire life previously-along with a lone earring and a hair brush. He tucked them all away, realizing that his pockets were now full.
He was cautiously making his way back down the hall when there was a loud thunk from the wooden door, then a few hammering notes. He froze.
Were they trying to break in, or find the person they realized had broken in?
Retracing his steps back to Leia's former room, he hastily made his way to the balcony. It overlooked the lush greenery of the former conservatory. Leaves tickled through the balustrade. It was hard to judge the distances in the shadowy darkness, but he assessed his choices with practice in fleeing blown situations, and jumped.
There was a debrief with the Intel officers, and handover of the data chips he'd been sent for. He'd only told them what they needed to know of the mission; when Leia's face had blanched at the mention of the second rendezvous location at the former embassy, he knew he'd made the right decision when he'd planned to give an abridged version to the committee.
With his usual sense of timing, he managed to catch her elbow as everyone else was filing out of the room.
"I brought back something else for you, if you wanna stop by the Falcon sometime."
Her face was still pale, but the careful blankness she'd managed to school it into during the debrief cracked, eyes softening and only managing a few sharp nods before hurrying down the hall.
Hours later, he was sitting at the comm console installing a few system updates, when he heard steps on the ramp, too light and tentative to be anyone else. He kept his head down and focused on the monitor in front of him, took a sip of the whiskey he'd poured earlier, waiting.
"Han?" Her voice carried, preceding her around the corridor.
"Hey, Princess." He still didn't move from the workstation, merely swiveled his chair around to greet her. "Want a drink?"
She stopped a meter away from him, shaking her head, hands twisting together. "You said you had something else for me? From Coruscant?"
He took another sip of the whiskey, nodded. "Yeah. From the embassy."
"I thought that it might be."
He rose from the chair with a shrug. "It's not much. I wasn't planning it, didn't know-I could only take what fit in my pockets. And I had to jump off your balcony to get out, so. Nothing big."
"Jump off-but that's four floors up!"
He shrugged again, walked past her back the ring corridor towards the cabins. "Those trees are tall. I dunno what it was like before, but it's like an indoor forest now. Just grabbed a branch and climbed down. Done that plenty visiting Kashyyyk with Chewie."
They'd reached his cabin door, and she froze in the doorway as he entered. He rummaged in the wardrobe, pulled out the box he'd put the things from the embassy into. Wordlessly, he held it out in her direction, towards where she still stood in the doorway.
In glacial steps, she crossed the small room, took the bin in one hand. He watched her look down, at the meagre contents, frozen again.
"There were more books, more'n I've ever seen before, but I couldn't carry…." He wasn't sure where this urge to apologize to her was coming from; he didn't usually apologize to anyone for anything.
It was her turn to shake her head, eyes never leaving the contents of the box. "This is….Thank you." She looked up at him then, pulled the box close, hugging it.
"You're welcome." He rested one hand on her shoulder, pointed down at the bin with the other. "The desk in the office was knocked around pretty badly, like they were looking for something in it. I found a panel, opened a drawer, those holos and the data chip came outta there. Thought those might be important."
"They are," she said slowly, "to me. Probably not to the Empire." Leia pulled one of the holocubes out, studied it, picked up another. Pressing the button, nothing happened. "Do you have a charger?"
"Sure, c'mon." He gave her shoulder a little tug as he passed, urging her to follow him back into the lounge. There, minimal rummaging turned up a handful of different power cables, and he offered them to her.
She took one, plugged it in at the comm station where he'd been working earlier. Before plugging in the holocube, she picked up his abandoned whiskey and drank the rest of it in one swallow. Then, without hesitation, she plugged it in and pressed the play button.
Pixels and static burst forth for a second, then coalesced into the flickering image of Leia, looking so much younger, and her parents, toasting with fluted glasses of fizzy drinks, an elaborate pastry in front of them. It only played for a few seconds, then looped back around, infinite cheers from a long ago celebration.
"Birthday?" he asked softly.
"Sixteen," she said softly. There was a hint of tears in her eyes, but the corners of her mouth tipped up a bit, not quite a smile. "There was an official party, but this was after, just us."
He didn't know how to respond to that, just studied the image. Five years ago, looking so young and so happy. Carefree.
After a minute, she pressed the power button again, and the image disappeared. Unplugging it, then carefully placing it back in the bin before turning to him. "I don't know how to thank you for these. I don't-didn't have anything left. Anything that wasn't an official image. This is just…."
"You're welcome." He put a hand on her shoulder, looking warily at her, unsure of this emotional Leia. He was used to stoicism or cracking wit. "D'you want-need to take the power cable for those? I got plenty."
"Please." She suddenly sounded almost as young as she'd looked in that holo.
He put it the box with the things he'd brought back for her, studied the contents for a moment himself. "Can I ask you somethin'?"
She nodded cautiously, tears still lurking in her eyes.
"Those red flowers smell nice. They got a name?"
"Gingerbells. They were always a favorite of mine." Reaching down, she picked up the fading sprig of them and brought them to her nose, then lifted them to his. Then smiled, really smiled. "Thank you."
She tipped up on her toes and kissed him lightly on the cheek, before dropping the flowers back into the box and stepping away. Without looking up, she turned, and made her way off the ship.
The faint scent of gingerbells lingered at the comm station as he poured himself another whiskey.