Chapter 4

Princess Leia Organa hadn't cried when Darth Vader had tortured her aboard the Death Star. She hadn't cried she'd been forced to watch as Alderaan, the only home she'd ever known, had been obliterated, taking most of her family and friends with it. She hadn't cried for Ben Kenobi, and she hadn't cried for any of the pilots who'd gone down fighting for her helpless cause. She hadn't cried for Han when Vader had encased him in carbonite, and she hadn't cried for herself when she'd been left alone. She hadn't cried, in all of the weeks she'd been waiting with Luke aboard the Redemption, waiting for something – anything – to shine a little hope into what was left of her battered little world.

She had cried when her mother died. She had cried, and her father had pulled her aside and told her that she had to be strong. She was the princess, he had said, and the rest of the planet would be looking to her. If she was sad, they would be sad, but if she was brave and strong and hopeful, her people would be too. She had sniffled, and wiped her nose on her sleeve, and nodded. Even then, she had understood. And she had walked back into the throne room with her back straight and her head held high and a proud, determined smile on her face.

She had held back her tears then, and every day since then. Tears of grief, tears of pain, tears of frustration. Tears of relief, and tears of joy – she'd swallowed them all, added them to the quiet burden of responsibility that had been with her for as long as she could remember. Like administrative duties or political ties, emotions were a part of her job: something to be relegated, delegated, and handled with care.

Leia was very good at what she did. She sat in the cockpit of the Alliance shuttle all the way to Tatooine, her hair perfectly coiffed and her face set in a mask of perfect composure. She spoke when she was spoken to, and her answers were well-informed and interested. Even when all she could see was the glow of hyperspace, she kept her eyes forward, and none of the crew could have guessed that what she was seeing at the end of that tunnel was a moment when she could finally crumble, let everything she was carrying fall, and be a woman for a moment instead of a princess.

"Your Highness?"

It was a line she knew well. "Yes, Captain?"

"We're about to switch over to the sublight engines. You might want to strap yourself in."

Leia did as she was told. Her palms were sweating and her neck and shoulders ached, but her ceremonial smile never wavered. She kept her eyes on the stars as they materialized and spun into focus, then faded into the background as the planet swept into view.

"This is Captain Roarke of the Cluan's Folly, requesting permission to land."

The communicator spit back a flurry of static in reply, and Roarke glanced expectantly at Leia. It was a false designation, but neither of them had expected any trouble from an out-of-the-way spaceport like Mos Eisley. Roarke cleared his throat and pushed the transmit button again.

"Mos Eisley command, you're breaking up. This is the Cluan's Folly, requesting landing permission."

Another burst of static, and then a voice, heavily accented and most likely non-human. "Docking Bay 157."

"One-fifty-seven. Thank you." The captain smiled reassuringly at Leia, and she leaned forward in her seat, showing nothing more than polite appreciation as the hope she had been waiting for swelled bright and white and barren on the forward screen.

Mos Eisley was by no means a metropolis, but it wasn't exactly the sleepy little town that Luke's stories of his homeworld had led Leia to imagine, either. From above, it appeared that nearly every one of the city's numerous docking bays was occupied, and at ground level the streets were filled with a hodgepodge of people, creatures, and beings that seemed to fall somewhere between. Everyone here was in a hurry, and within minutes of disembarking the shuttle, Leia was nearly run over by an angry-looking man riding a creature she had been fairly sure was extinct.

We're ready. Rendezvous at Mos Eisley.

That had been Lando's last message to her, and Leia had hoped – had assumed – that he and Han would be waiting for her. Instead, she found herself alone in a strange city, with silence on her comlink and an almost palpable sense of urgency in the air.

A woman hurried past, dragging a small child impatiently by one hand. They were both dressed the way Luke had been when she'd first met him, in dirty tunics and leg wraps that had probably been white when they were new. Leia followed them for a moment with her eyes, trying to imagine what Luke's childhood must have been like here, in this harsh, unfriendly place. The mother glanced over her shoulder at Leia, furrowing her brow in distaste before pulling the child through a doorway and out of sight.

Leia slipped into an alcove on the other side of the street, hoping that here, at least, she would be out of the way. The comlink was a dead weight in her hand. There was nothing from Lando, nothing from her own shuttle. The excitement she'd felt on her approach to the planet was being rapidly replaced by a creeping fear. "Lando?" She called into the comlink again, not really expecting a reply. "Are you there? Chewie?" She didn't dare to ask for Han.

Somewhere behind her, she heard the sounds of a ship taking off. A cloud of sand billowed into the street and the ground shook, causing the building she was standing against to quiver. Another ship rose from the other side of the spaceport; Leia could see this one silhouetted against the light from the twin suns. It was a late-model freighter with parts from what looked like completely unrelated ships tacked on in a configuration that was decidedly unpleasing to the eye. Leia reached for the comlink again, and a third ship took to the sky over her heads, this one followed by the sound of blaster fire.

"Lando?" She couldn't keep the rising fear from her voice anymore. The streets were full of people – rushing, she now realized, away from the center of the city and into whatever safe havens they could find. "Lando! Chewie! Where are you?"

The comlink buzzed and crackled, and Leia had to hold it to her ear to hear the tinny voice that made its way through the interference at last. "Mistress Leia! Mistress Leia! Thank goodness you've arrived!"

"Threepio?" Another ship took off, and Leia had to shout to hear her own voice over the roar. "Threepio, is that you? Where are you?"

She heard a blast – two blasts, really, one on the comlink and the other in the distance, somewhere off to the left. She started running in the direction of the sound. "Oh, my!" Threepio cried into the comlink. "The city is under attack!"

"Threepio! Where's the ship? Where are you?"

"Docking Bay 72. And do hurry! Oh, my!" The ground shook again, and the connection dissolved into static.

Leia moved against the crowd, following the signs toward the lower-numbered docking bays at the center of the spaceport. Every ship in the city seemed to be taking off at once, and the sky was dark with freighters, cruisers, starfighters – every kind of ship she'd ever seen, and some that she strongly suspected were one-of-a-kind hybrids, waiting to make the jump into hyperspace.

By the time she reached seventy-two, the streets were nearly deserted. The people who hadn't taken cover had vacated the city center, and those that were left were huddled into alleys or hiding as well as they could among the junk that seemed to overflow from every crevice of the port city. Only See-Threepio, his golden body gleaming in the light of the twin suns, stood prominently in the middle of the street, waving his arms and shouting her name into the sky.

"Mistress Leia! Mistress Leia! Over here! It's terrible," he moaned. "They've left me all alone."

"What do you mean?" Leia followed him to the Falcon's boarding ramp, but stopped at the bottom. She wasn't sure she wanted to be back on the Falcon yet, not without Han anyway. "Where's Lando?"

Threepio stopped, his head cocked to one side as though he was struggling to comprehend the question. "Didn't he tell you? He and Chewbacca have infiltrated the palace of Jabba the Hutt. Oh, wait, Your Highness! Don't leave me alone out here!"

Leia barely heard him. The palace of Jabba the Hutt. The name didn't mean much to her. She wasn't exactly knowledgeable about the galactic underworld, much less out here in the Outer Rim. But she knew Han. She knew that he'd flown against the Death Star, spent the night on the snowfields of Hoth, driven his ship right into an asteroid field and stared into the mask of Darth Vader without so much as a quiver. Han was fearless, or at least closer to it than anyone else she knew. And she knew that he was scared of Jabba the Hutt. Suddenly, she needed to sit down.

"How – how long have they been gone?"

"Several days, I think. To tell the truth, I expected them back much sooner. From what I've heard about this Jabba the Hutt –"

Leia gave him a sharp look. "Thanks, Threepio."

"Oh!" The droid took a step back, apparently offended at having been interrupted. "You're welcome, I think."

"Didn't they take the comlink with them?" She already knew the answer to that, though, didn't she?

"I beg your pardon, your Highness. The ship's computer is trying to communicate with me." Threepio inclined his head in the direction of one of the Falcon's control panels, nodding now and again in response to an electronic conversation that Leia couldn't even hear. "Oh!" He raised his head, his shoulders thrown back in pride. "They're here."

Leia had half-expected Han to walk through the door and straight to the pilot's seat. It was only the part of her that remembered Bespin, that could still see Luke the way he had been when Lando had pulled him through the top hatch, delirious and defeated, that warned her not to set her hopes too high. He was alive. That was enough.

Lando was up the ramp first, his face set in a grim expression that only hardened further as he nodded to her, taking his seat behind the controls. "Get up here, Chewie!" he yelled. He was hoarse and filthy and bleeding from a cut above his eye.

Chewie roared. Leia had never been able to understand a word he said, but she understood grief when she heard it. It was the same sound she'd heard on Bespin, when she'd thought for the first time that she'd lost Han forever. Now, the same fear exploded through her veins. She was on her feet before she realized what she was doing, running into the corridor just in time to nearly collide with Chewbacca – and Han, who was curled into a near-fetal position against the Wookiee's chest, shivering violently in his arms.

"Han!" she gasped, her voice barely more than a whisper. "What happened to him?" Chewie only moaned. "What did you do to him?"

"What did you do to him?" She directed this last at Lando, who looked up at her and tossed a small, hand-held device across the cockpit in reply.

"You stunned him?"

"I had no choice! He was halfway there anyway." Lando never looked at her, never took his gaze from the controls. "I need you up here, Chewbacca!"

Leia took a deep breath and let the weapon fall to the floor. She would deal with Lando later. Now, she had a role to play. She swallowed her anger, pushed it deep down inside of her with all of the other cracks in her armor. She had to be the princess again, and this time she had to do it for Han.

She found him in the crew quarters, curled stiffly on the bed with a blanket draped haphazardly over his feet and legs. Beside him, Chewbacca stood a silent vigil. Leia stood beside him, close enough that she could feel the tips of his fur against her bare arms, but he didn't move. He didn't even look up.

"We need you up there, Chewie," Leia said in that soft, diplomatic tone that she had wanted so badly to forget. He roared softly, and she rested her hand on his arm. "I'll stay with him." She smiled sadly. "He won't be alone."

The ship rocked and rattled, and Leia could feel the artificial gravity kick in as it started to rise. Han moaned and rolled onto his side.

His clothes were torn and ragged, and when he rolled over she saw that his back was covered with thick red welts. His wrists and ankles were red and raw, and he twisted and turned as though, even stunned, there was no position that didn't pain him. Leia dabbed at his wounds with a wet cloth, and he jerked away from her touch. She bit back the tears. She ran a hand absently through his hair, streaked now with a grey that she didn't remember, and he pulled away as though that, too, hurt him.

She felt rather than heard the roar of the ship's engines as they pulled away from the spaceport, and wondered how many of those other ships were right behind them. A blast rocked the ship from behind, and she dimly heard Threepio exclaim, from the cockpit, "We're doomed!" Chewie roared, and she heard footsteps in the corridor, headed toward the gun wells.

The Falcon fired back – she knew that sound, knew the way it felt to be on this ship in the middle of a battle – and Han looked up, his eyes flickering open at the sound. "Chewie…" he mumbled.

"It's me, Han. It's Leia." She wiped at his brow, but even that made him pull away. "You're back on the Falcon. You're safe." Another blast rocked the ship, and she gripped the side of the bed to keep herself from falling on top of him.

Then the ship jerked forward again, and Chewie's roar from the cockpit was one of triumph. "We did it," Leia whispered.

"Not yet." She jumped at the sound of Lando's voice. How long had he been standing there, watching her? "We need you to contact the shuttle, get the coordinates for the jump."

"Right." She nodded, and a strand of hair fell loose, brushing against her cheek. "Han." She looked over her shoulder at him. Another convulsion shook his body and she bit her lip, hard enough that she tasted blood. "I'll be back."

"We'll rendezvous with the Alliance and get Han to a med center." Lando's tone was all business as he made his way back to the cockpit. Leia nearly had to run to keep up with him. "I'm sorry I had to stun him. He wouldn't have come with me otherwise."

"Jabba?"

"Dead. But half the planet was loyal to the old gangster."

"What about those other ships?"

Lando smiled. "Just a couple of favors I called in.

Leia nodded. Lando watched her for a long moment.

"How are you doing?"

Leia bit her lip. She didn't have an answer to that. "Get the shuttle," she said at last.

"Cluan's Folly? This is the Millennium Falcon. Requesting coordinates for the jump to hyperspace."

Numbers flooded onto the navicomputer screen and beside her, Chewie growled softly in appreciation. "Thank you, Captain." Leia's voice was calm and even. "We'll see you back at base."

A/N: Hello from 2018! I still appreciate feedback on this story! Thank you! :)

Original A/N: A big thanks to beta reader Luke1!

Once again, a big thank you to all of my readers. I hope some of you are enjoying this story as much as I am. This chapter was much more difficult to write than the previous ones. I hope it came out okay.

This chapter was updated on January 26, 2011, to correct a typo. Nothing else has been changed! Thank you to reviewer William Joseph for catching it for me. :)