Chapter 7: In which Madam Author tears her hair out and hides her face from embarrassment.
Leia awoke facing the east wall of a hotel room she couldn't remember entering.
She shifted to her side quickly and felt the burning tear of an open blaster wound on the shoulder she was currently pressing into the bed. She cursed and moved to her other shoulder, hiking up the covers to her chin as she did so. From this angle, she could see Han at a holonet port in the next room and the painful details of her last conscious moments swam into focus.
Ugh, she thought, leaning away from her shoulder and trying to look at the damage. It wasn't terribly deep and had obviously been cared for - she could smell the bacta solution - but she was completely unwilling to write it off.
Blaster shots hurt, damn it.
She flexed her hand, and tried to stretch all the way through her toes, sitting up and taking stock. The hotel room looked hospitable enough, and it was tucked in an alcove where the windows looked straight out towards the walls of the building next door, which stood less than twenty feet away. It meant that, although they had no visibility, they were safe from snipers or other friends ... through the window, at least.
She exhaled through her teeth, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and taking a moment to steady herself. With a quiet huff, she stood and padded towards Han, his back to her. He was completely focused on the screen in front of him and didn't notice her approach.
"So," she said, and was proud of herself for startling him. "I'm not flying point for you in speeder chases anymore."
He turned completely around in his seat, then stood up and crossed over to where she was leaning against the wall. He murmured under his breath as he checked her shoulder, lifting the bandaging and pressing down along the edges. "Well, I don't want to get shot."
"Better you than me," she said, shrugging him off and using his arm to stable herself as she moved towards the kitchenette. "What day is it?"
"Same day, just a little later. Here," he said, as he reached up past her head and grabbed the bowl she was trying to reach. "You were out of it for about, oh, five hours." He slid the bowl over and began filling it with things she wasn't sure she recognized out of a cabinet that looked hardly sturdy enough to hold a loaf of bread. She watched him finish with a flourish, and she moved to sit at the rickity table, Han sitting right beside her.
"What I don't understand," she began, "was who was shooting at us."
Han leaned back in his chair, his hands resting lazily on the table in front of him. "Yeah. That's my question, too."
And what you were working on when I woke up, too, I take it. "What do you know?"
"Absolutely nothing."
"Well, that's helpful." She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Chewie's okay?"
"Chewie's fine. Nobody's around over there." He ran a hand over his face. "The goal is to keep it that way."
So that when we need to leave, we can, she thought. Sometimes she frightened herself; she could practically read the man's mind. It's only scary when I guess the things that even he wouldn't say out loud. He kept looking at her with one eyebrow raised, leaning back against the cusion of his chair. She was eating and he was staring at her like he thought she would get up and try to escape at any moment; it was one of his personal quirks. She knew he paid more attention to her than he should, and sometimes he put her on edge. "What?"
"What what?"
She took a mouthful out of the bowl, chewed, and looked back at him. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
He stood up, offered her a tentative smile. "You're eating," he said.
And that was it. No further explanation, no elaboration. It was this quality, this vague sense of possessiveness, that charmed and confused her. He would periodically do - or say - things like this, and it always threw her off: this nonchalant ownership of her, and she never knew whether to be offended to be someone else's or to feel protected and safe.
She'd once confronted him about it, years ago, back when she hadn't known everything there was to know about him, when she started discussions kindly and with reserve. She'd asked him why he insisted on taking her elbow when they walked together in a crowd. He'd looked at her like she was insane. She'd insisted; it had never made sense to her. Like clockwork, his hand would latch on her elbow, pulling her closer to his chest.
He hadn't answered her then, but she'd figured it out. Slightly. She understood that it wasn't a Corellian custom, it was him, and so she usually just offered it up as one more thing she'd have to learn to deal with.
"So. Our plan?"
He turned back to her. "We need the Chiss."
"Right," she said. "Or, rather, we need evidence that he's here. We may not be able to actually get him."
He nodded. "I have Chewie watching the local newsreports, though he hasn't heard a word about a Chiss military commander parading around here."
She sighed. Things are never that easy. "He won't find anything. Not if it's the missing grand admiral."
"Yeah," Han said, moving past her and kissing the top of her head as she ate from the bowl. "What do you think counts as evidence? Besides him strapped to a gurney?"
"You mean, what will the Senate accept as proof?" She waited for his nod, then set the bowl on the table. "We'd need at the very least a holo, a voiceprint, and possibly something attaching him to a known Imperial ship or captain."
"What would be ideal?"
She thought about it. "Him, strapped to a gurney."
He sighed. "Paperwork-wise ..."
"A communique between him and someone else should be enough paperwork," she said. "Voiceprint verifies identity, holo verifies where he is."
"A voiceprint verifies identity if the identity is known," Han said, rolling his eyes. "We don't even really know the guy's real name. And we just got shot at for no good reason, so it's an easy bet he's aware he's got someone watching for him."
If the shooters were from him in the first place. "Right."
They became quiet. Leia was thinking about politicians, the web-like net that connected everyone to everyone else somehow - even if that connection was one transaction tucked safely away where no one else would find it.
"What about Teradoc?"
Han looked at her and tilted his head. "We have no proof they're connected."
"They may not be, really. But the timing is not coincidental. Teradoc is Imperial; his agenda would be on their network, on their committees."
"Not necessarily," Han said. "Zsinj's operations were need-to-know; we never got anything out of Shadowcast or anywhere else. We tried it, at the Gravan system, and look where that got us. If they're black ops - "
" - nothing is going to connect them. Not where we could see it." She sighed. "This isn't making me feel any better about being here."
"We've both seen him."
"We both saw a Chiss male. There is nothing in what I saw, at least, that proves he's an Imperial grand admiral. In fact, the only true Imperial connection we have here, at Sluis Van, was the officer I talked to in the bar. And he didn't give much away." She pushed the bowl away from her and went to stand up. "I'm done and I'm going to get in the shower because I'm not ready to be brilliant yet."
"Wait." He sat down across from her, heavily. "Wait."
She continued to stand up, paying him absolutely no attention. "What?"
"Our objective is not to prove that our Chiss Grand Admiral is back and ready to go. Our objective is to prove that he exists." She nodded and he continued, his eyes narrowing, but the excitement in them growing. "There's nothing we have, no resource, that gives us any real information on the Council of Twelve. The only people who know are the people who were in the Council to begin with."
"And they're all dead."
"Except Grant."
'Except Grant' was right, Leia thought. Grand Admiral Grant was the kind of man the Emperor had been dying to promote when he joined the Imperial Navy. Grant had been rash but intelligent, abrasive and gloating, but not overly ambitious and entirely self-serving. He hadn't left the Battle of Endor with much, so he found a nice little hole to hide in until the other grand admirals had been killed. Then he came out with striking evidence for the existence of an Imperial database and network scheme within the Rebellion and bargained with it for a peaceful retirement somewhere on the luxurious world of Rathalay. "Grant's already given us everything he knows in exchange for immunity. If there was a thirteenth grand admiral, he would've told us."
"Unless he's the specious prick we know him to be. Would he even consider a Chiss grand admiral a grand admiral?"
It was a good question. "Probably not."
"There you go."
Leia sighed. There you go was Han Solo's way of choosing the most dangerous and illogical course of action possible, full of death threats and plasma explosives and big giant blasters aiming for the brainstem. While she wasn't sure how contacting a retired Imperial grand admiral could result in any of those things, she was certain that if anyone could manage it, it was the man sitting right in front of her, waggling his eyebrows.
"You're going to get yourself killed," she said.
"Well," he stood up and walked around his chair, slamming it into the table harder than needed and smiling handsomely, "It's my turn for daring heroics."
"Grant," she opened, smiling placidly like the kind gentlewoman she was supposed to be. "My name is Leia Organa."
"Pleased to make your acquiantance, Your Highness." The former grand admiral's gray eyes sweeped the whole of the screen, and Leia wondered if Han was sufficiently out of view. "How may I help you?"
"Information."
He squinted. "I thought that was assumed."
"I'm interested in the Council of Twelve."
"I've already done a fairly large debriefing on the Council, Princess. If it's not in the report you have lying in front of you, I'm not sure I'll be able to help."
His voice was smooth, cultured; he was the very essence of a Tapani nobleman, and she was considering whether or not to put him on her current list of 'People Leia Organa Will Never Ever Trust'. "Was there, or wasn't there, a thirteenth grand admiral?" She glanced down, as if she were reading from something below her. "A non-human grand admiral?"
His eyes narrowed, the only indication that she'd flustered him. "The Council of Twelve was not inaccurately named. There were twelve grand admirals."
"And a Chiss."
He puckered his lips, looking for all the galaxy as if he were preparing to kiss the screen in front of him. "The Chiss was never a part of the Council."
She sucked in her breath. "What was his name?"
"Thrawn," he said. "That wasn't his given name. The full thing was too long to pronounce."
She was tempted to roll her eyes. "Was he appointed publicly?"
Grant looked slightly shocked, like she'd slapped him across the face. "Publicly?" He snorted. "Thrawn was never 'publicly' anything. He was inevitably the Emperor's dirty secret. Useful, oh, yes. Very useful. But a secret nonetheless."
"How useful?"
"Thrawn was good enough at strategy to win the Emperor's favor. He conducted himself well on a few tours and wound up with a command equal to that of a grand admiral."
"Was he or wasn't he a grand admiral?" She was tired of repeating herself.
Grant looked to the side lazily, as if he wanted a distraction. "He was a useful strategist. A secret. The kind of weapon that the Emperor collected to assure no one else could have him." He returned his gaze to Leia's, smirking. "You may think all you like about the Emperor's evilness, his dark soul and his unprovoked attacks and all that, but he's not really fading away, is he?"
Leia switched tactics. "After the Battle of Endor, where did Thrawn go?"
"He was already assigned a mission none of us were privy to."
"From the Emperor."
"Yes."
"Does anyone else know what that mission entailed?"
He rolled his eyes. "No, Princess, I don't know what he was doing."
"Was?"
"Oh," he said, interest finally creeping into his voice. "Oh, I see. You think Thrawn is alive."
She didn't take the bait. "Do you have any information on his whereabouts at the time of the Battle of Endor?"
"No."
"Do you know the name of his flagship?"
"No."
"Do you know of any living officer that flew under his command?"
His eyes drooped lazily. "All I can tell you is that you would know if Thrawn was still around. He was the kind of commander that you'd remember, if you saw him. Remarkable mind, fantastic strategy, terrible execution."
She cocked an eyebrow.
"Thrawn was sloppy. He misjudged things. He was insufficiently prepared for the level of command he received."
Leia considered this. Sloppy was not the typical adjective for a Chiss. From what she'd always read and heard, the Chiss were infinitely logical, almost to a fault; they bred warriors and pilots like their spacial talents and mathematical skills grew from the ground. The Corellians had produced some of the best pilots in the galaxy - Han and Soontir Fel and Wedge Antilles - but the Chiss were in a class of their own.
Describing a Chiss military commander as sloppy - one whom the Emperor considered enough to grant assignments worthy of a grand admiral - told her much more about Grant than it did Thrawn.
"Thank you. If I have any more questions, I'll contact you," she said, sure she would have to at some point.
Grant gave a funny squint, his eyes narrowing. "If you've got something for me, let me know. If Thrawn's alive, and if you find him, and if you decide to go after him, let the New Republic know I'm all for the fight." He smiled, his narrowed eyes making the look unsettling. "I'd pay for a chance to eliminate whatever fleet he might have cobbled up."
She stopped, her hand extended toward the comm termination switch. "Why do you say that?"
He smiled demurely. "Princess, if there's one thing I despise, it's unneccessary people." He flicked a piece of dust from his shoulder. "Thrawn was ... a frivilous being. An Imperial joke. I'd consider it a matter of honor to remove him from the galaxy." He reached for his own termination switch, then paused and grinned at her. "If he's alive, of course."
The screen went blank and Leia blew out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding.
"Well," Han spoke up from across the room. "Grant just confirmed it."
"He didn't confirm it in a way that will hold up in front of Cracken." She put her head in her hands, the pulse behind her eyes pounding. "We know that Palpatine had a Chiss around named Thrawn, that he was a good tactician."
She left the rest unsaid, because she knew he knew what she'd say. They had no proof that Thrawn was ever appointed as an Imperial grand admiral, and also no solid base to say that the Chiss both of them had seen was the same Chiss that Grant wanted to destroy.
"So we're back to visual confirmation and voiceprints," Han said. "If we can find any. If Grant was against Thrawn's appointment - if he was indeed appointed - chances are the Emperor never added his information to the general Imperial records."
"Which means we have nothing to compare them with."
He nodded. She sighed and stood up, feeling her body's natural instinct to tense up, to protect her wounded shoulder, and struggling to keep it from her face. There are things Leia Organa hoped she'd never have to deal with ever again - blaster wounds to non-critical areas of her torso was near the top of the list. She'd handled the Endor wound poorly, wincing and talking in her sleep and such. In this day and age - four years after that wound had closed - she couldn't afford to do anything to get Han's protective instinct up. She had to bear this like the seasoned soldier she had been, with all the grace of the politican she was now.
She walked over to the pantry-shelf, a lower one than the one in which Han had found her breakfast, and hunted around for a muscle relaxant that wouldn't put her to sleep or impair her physically. "Our best bet," she reached into the shelf, found something she thought could work, "is to establish that there is an Imperial presence here. After that, we need to prove that our friendly local Chiss is a part of it." Or leading it, she thought.
"Chewie's checked the port logs."
"If Imperials are here and if they're keeping a low profile - and we know they are because we haven't caught them here at all - they wouldn't be in the port logs." She tilted her head back and swallowed the relaxant, taking a proffered glass of water from Han. She walked back over the table, rested her hands on the back of the seat she'd been sitting on and handed Han the glass.
"Where do you want to look, then?" He asked, standing, too.
She moved towards him, put her hands on his neck, standing on her tip toes. Even then she wasn't as tall as him; it was increasingly inconvenient that the man she'd fallen in love with had to duck his head to even kiss her forehead. "I'm going to suggest something, and I want you to try to keep an open mind."
He pulled a face, but didn't say anything, probably anticipating that he would lose the argument anyway.
She smiled and tugged on his neck so she could kiss him quickly, sweeping against his lower lip and reveling in the comfortable feeling of his arms tightening around her waist.
When she stepped back, he looked mollified against his better judgment, his eyes still wary but the corners of his mouth turned up. "Fine. But I want to be the one getting shot this time." He sighed and turned away, towards the bedroom. "You got a lot more sleep than I did."
A library.
A goddamn fucking library.
Han tried not to look furious at Leia as she slinked through the door. It was hard to do, because she was currently fulfilling one of his personal fantasies without focusing on him in the slightest. This had something to do with their grand admiral, he knew, but the rest of it was a blur because she had tried to explain her plan to him while she was dressing.
Han Solo had enough experience with sex and women to know that you don't show when you're turned on, unless you know for sure that the feeling is reciprocated. If you say something - or do something or touch something - you're more likely to be turned down and be called a typical male. If you stay quiet and try to pay attention, you have a chance.
With Leia ... well. Leia was a perceptive woman. If he insinuated something, she picked it up. He wasn't sure if this was because she was Leia or because they'd been together for too long. It all meant that she could read him like a pro. The thing with Leia, though, was that she was also responsive, meaning when she picked up what he was thinking, it wouldn't be long before she wound up there, too.
So how the hell she had missed the fact that he was sore and wanted her was beyond him. She'd come back from a quick look at the clothing store beside the hotel - something he'd been adamantly opposed to her doing, imagining the shooting and the running and he was kind of tired of both at this point - with a wrap around skirt that went past her knee and a deep blue shirt that did nothing to dissuade him from his current condition. She'd been worried about being recognized so she'd added a pair of old glasses that she'd found stashed at the bottom of the closet in their room, which he didn't get until he saw the final product, with her hair pulled back and the barest sheen of something on her lips. She'd had trouble with shoes, she said, until she'd seen a pair she'd liked on the woman staying down the hall from them. Leia'd offered her enough credits to glaze over the woman's eyes, then strapped them to her feet and worked on telling him what to do.
She'd looked buttoned up and private and ... hell.
His part of the plan involved a lot of watching, because both of them knew her shoulder hurt more than she'd let on and that her shooting arm was next to useless for the next few days. So he'd been ordered to sit at a wide-rimmed table near the archivist's office, datapads surrounding him on the table and his head in his hands as he tried to think of something other than the taste of her neck.
He hated it when she did this to him.
He searched around for things to occupy him, settling on his awkwardly-positioned chair with the cushion on the bottom that felt like rock. It was amazing, he thought, that government-funded agencies - like the Hall of Records they were in - would spend so little time or money in making the place comfortable to patrons. Perhaps they assumed so few people traveled through that it didn't really matter.
That thought was very true; Han had taken a quick walk around the main floor and had found three people and an archive droid among the desks and tables scattered around the building. One of the Bothans seated in the far corner was asleep, his arms crossed above his head to block out light, three datapads on the desk in front of him and one on the floor near his feet.
Maybe they didn't need soft chairs, then.
He sighed and tried again to focus. The datapads in front of him were scrolling and searching through information about military rankage and promotional opportunities in various military corps. He was trying to locate critical information about the Council of Twelve without directly typing in keywords that would trip a search-alarm, if they'd bothered to set one up here.
Then again, if the Chiss was Thrawn, and if he was still with the Imperial Navy, and if he was the one Cracken had said was reuniting the fleet, Thrawn himself would've erased the records. Or alarm-tripped them. Or whatever it was Imps did to hide knowledge about themselves; Han was fine with waving a blaster at their foreheads to get info ... the sneaky stuff was a little beyond what he'd been doing the past few years.
He heard a rustling and raised his head slightly, then heard Leia's click over towards the archivist. Han was in a direct line of sight, though he was also looking through a plant and an in-wall search monitor, and he could just see her shape bustle towards the little white-haired human male, who was completely oblivious to her approach.
Leia reached the edge of the man's desk and said, "Excuse me? Sir?"
The sound of her voice wasn't helping things out, either.
Since when have I ever been like this? He rolled his eyes, staring down at the nearest datapad. I'm not a kid; I can wait.
The archivist's voice was deeper than Han had expected. "Yes?"
"I was wondering if you could do me a favor?" Han heard the vague hint of a smile in her voice.
Han glanced at a datapad at the far corner of his table, eyeing Leia and the man out of the corner of his peripheral vision. The little man looked up and was doing a terrific impression of a Mon Calamari, his eyes enormous and his mouth opening and closing in an effort to get a noise out. "If I can ..."
"Excellent." Leia leaned over his desk and stood on one foot, bending the other behind her just a bit so it was parallel to the floor. "I'm doing a systems analysis for the portmaster. Or - " she sighed, " - that's what I've been told I'm doing. He originally specified that I was to catalogue freight lanes and cargo manifests without using the official records. Which is a bit ridiculous, if you ask me."
The archivist was valiantly trying to look at her face. Han had to give him credit.
"But," and here she dropped her voice and inched her face closer to him, "I think it's some sort of unfair test." She nodded. "That's what I think. I can't say anything, because if it is a test, I'll be in trouble for cheating, even though it's impossible to draw up specs when he's not letting me see the official records."
"I see," the little man said.
"So I was hoping you could draw up the records for me using your I.D. If I use mine, I'll be in the system, and he could find out what I did."
"Ah," he said. "I see. Well, I'm not sure - "
"Oh, please," Leia said. "Please help me out here. I have to get the report done, but it's inconceivable without these records." Han could tell she was chewing on her lip. "I just need you to access them for me."
"I just don't - "
"Oh, please, sir. Please."
There was a sigh, and a slight pause, but then the man agreed, shuffling his way past his desk and moving towards the monitor near Han. Leia clicked after him, and stopped while the archivist entered his information into the screen, then stepped back for her. He told her to take her time and then walked away, and Leia pulled a chair towards the monitor and began clicking through various records.
Ideally, she would head straight towards the port records. If the Imperials were here - and they were both sure they were, based off the Imp in the bar and the strange parade they'd been chased from - the records wouldn't show it. What she was looking at was a public record, after all; no good Imp would lay out their position like that.
But that was all shit they'd anticipated.
Leia was going to look for any inconsistencies, particularly those related to transactions occuring through the portmaster dealing with the shipyards. One of the benefits in using a world like Sluis Van as your own private hidey-hole was that you had plenty of repair parts on hand. Han and Leia knew that there would be no account with the portmaster with the Imperial logo on it, but finding parts that only a Star Destroyer would need ... it should be relatively simple.
They weren't sure what they were going to do with this information, but since they didn't seem to be able to do any on-site survellience of the area without being shot at, this seemed like the best use of time.
Leia was clicking away, pulling screen after screen after screen, occasionally printing out things in hard copy and stashing them in her bag. He gave her an hour before he started packing his datapads up and logging off the servers he was working with. He banged a couple things on the table as he did so, to make it obvious that it was time to go, though when he turned around, fully packed and a step further towards the door, Leia was still staring at the screen, her finger poised above the 'print' option.
Woman, he growled in his head. Get a move on.
She shook her head slightly, then printed the current page, gathered it all up and walked behind him, far enough away that she wasn't with him, and they left the Hall of Records without any trouble at all. He was surprised. The two of them didn't have much experience with successful plans; usually one of them would have to save the other's neck.
It was kind of a nice change of pace.
The problem was that as they left, separately, he started to feel it again. There was something about Leia working the guy over, leaning and smiling and acting like the woman she wasn't in the slightest. Leia was always confident, and she was always sexual, though she'd never believed that of herself until after they'd gotten together. And it wasn't that he needed her to be different. That wasn't it.
He thought about it to distract himself from acting on the very thing he thought about.
Maybe it was how good she was at the sneaking-around thing. How she could seduce someone like that without really trying. Now, granted, the archivist wasn't exactly a hard mark, but that didn't matter. Leia Organa was so used to being someone in one place and another in another place that these acting gigs she sometimes had to do came as natural to her as breathing.
She'd passed him, clicking away, and he could see her now as he bent his head down and watched her through the gaps in his hair. He admired the slim silleoutte she made, the outfit she'd worn looking more and more like a second skin as she continued down the street. His heartbeat picked up and he shoved his hands in his pockets.
It was like a switch had gone off. Her steps were longer and her hips moved back and forth, the skirt hugging her thighs and her chin tilted high. He knew he'd narrowed his eyes, but he couldn't help it. The heat surged double-time and he kept walking, trying to be nonchalant, trying to ignore her but failing miserably.
She turned a corner, down another street, staying far enough away that he could see her but that he had no hope of catching up to her anytime soon without drawing attention to himself. Inconspicuous, he thought to himself. You are still in somebody's sight.
He forced himself to breathe deeply, exhaling slowly. This was ridiculous.
She turned another corner, and Han was startled to see that she was already entering the lobby of their rundown hotel. Had they been walking that long?
He arrived on their floor after her and watched as she entered their room and left the door open, knowing he was behind her. It was a short walk through their door; he shut it behind him and it fell with a crack. She hadn't even made it to the closet yet, her back to him halfway across the room.
It took five steps to wrap his arms around her, another four to drag her back to the wall nearest them, and a rough kind of push to turn her around. Her eyes were glittering but not mischevious; if she'd known how she'd affected him, he saw no proof of it. He put his right hand onto her left shoulder and pushed, wrapping his left around her waist and pressing the length of his body into hers.
The tension was suddenly there; he could feel it. The line of energy that had been running up and down his spine was transferred to hers, and she wrapped her hands around his neck, one sliding into his hair. His skin was electrified, doubly sensitive, and he almost groaned when she pulled him closer to her.
Her lips were at his chin, kissing it softly, then moving down his throat to the line of his shoulders, where she drew his shirt away from his body and tugged her hands underneath the fabric, playing up his spine so that he felt like shivering. He curled his fingers into her waist, pressed her tighter into the wall and kissed her as hard as he could. As the energy passed between both of them, all Han could think was mine and now and he took a second to run his lips over her eyelids before he was back at her mouth.
"All this," she whispered, though there was no one to hear her, "because of the outfit?"
He grunted, pushed her blouse up so he could see the lines of her stomach. Before he knew it, he was on his knees and running his nose from hipbone to hipbone. "All this," he breathed, "because you are you and you don't have to do a thing to do this to me."
She sighed, her knees shaking as his fingertips danced just above the line of her skirt. "I must've done something," she said.
He nodded, fingers moving slowly up the line of her thigh, stopping momentarily to drive her crazy. "You did."
"I ignored you," she said, her head thrown back, her breathing frantic and louder than her words.
He murmured against her skin, his fingers reaching his goal. She sucked in a breath, arched into his hand. His fingers were playing and drawing little moans and very little coherancy from her, which he found absolutely erotic, and he wasn't sure how much longer he wanted to play this game.
Then she said his name and it didn't matter anymore.
He smiled, stood, bit her earlobe and bullied her over to the bed, where she pulled him down over her and hooked her legs around his waist. Mine, he thought. Mine and mine and mine.
Her blouse annoyed him, so he ran a hand from the top of her skirt to between her breasts, his palm flush to her skin and his head clouded by a hazy sort of delirium. He got rid of the damn shirt, and she worked on his, and he was buried in the senseless oblivion of her body. She pushed him, and he rolled to his back, brushing his fingers along the lines of her thighs.
Good, he thought, when she leaned down to kiss him, her tongue brushing his, her lips sweet and controlling all at once. She's going to kill me ran through his mind when he brushed down her neck and sucked as hard as he could, but he really couldn't find it in him to care.
He spent absolutely no time or thought in removing the rest of her clothes, and if he was reading her right, she didn't with his, either. He waited until she was completely undressed above him, all skin and beautiful, to push her back to the bed, hovering above her. Her breathing is too quick. Random thought, shaken away by skin, collarbone, breasts, the feel of her skin, overheated. He could feel himself dissolving into single words, single thoughts, focused entirely on mine, and with his last full thought remembered to be careful of her shoulder, unwrapped as it was.
His mind was lost somewhere between the feel of her as he pushed and her fingers tracing down his back. Sighs and the pressure of her nails on his ribs kept him partially focused, but it was all very distant to him because mine and beautiful and slow were tangled up in push and fuck and her murmurs and breaths as she hyperventilated. She pushed tight against him, live as a wire, warm as embers.
She ran the edge of release quickly, fast, and he began to feel the tightness in his stomach flowing, releasing, his world relegated to an unwrapping coil, blurring at the edges. He pushed faster, harder, and the coil snapped, propelled him into her warmth completely, shaking, a mess of limbs and weight.
Good, he thought. The best.
Leia, as if sensing his thought, laughed, brushed her fingers up his spine, and said that maybe she'd keep the outfit stashed away for another time.
The absolute best, he thought, before he slid his eyes closed and fell asleep.
