Cause and Effect


If Han had had any expectations for the situation looking better in the morning than it had last night, they had been soundly dashed by sunrise. Dark feelings surrounded him with the light of Y'Toub's rising: he hadn't slept well and what sleep he had gotten was pitched with anger and self-recrimination. The unsettling realization that he had truly hurt Salla when he'd left still hung over him like a cloud, grasping at the edge of his thoughts like those old ghost stories Shrike had told him when he was a kid.

The problem wasn't that he'd hurt her. Life was pain. You were born, you suffered, you died. That was it. Pretending there was anything more to life was useless in the end. He'd seen kids die in the streets; he'd seen good people lose everything. Hope was an ugly word when there was nothing good to hope for. Bottle that shit up quick because if you don't, you were dead that much sooner.

No, the problem wasn't that he'd hurt Salla. The problem was that he hadn't cared that he'd hurt her. He hadn't thought twice about it. He'd never considered the ramifications of his midnight escape: he'd left. She'd never contacted him. They'd moved on.

But now … well. Now he'd seen it. He'd been confronted with the evidence of Salla's eyes, the old, tired pain surrounded by scar tissue. The depth of her decency. She'd risked her life to help them, to save them from certain death at the hands of Grouka.

Salla was all sorts of rough when it came to her business but she wasn't cruel. And it was starting to occur to him that he might deserve her cruelty for what he'd done to her. He couldn't ignore her kindness in the face of his betrayal: the consequences of his actions. Something had changed.

And he knew exactly who had done it.

That was a truth that Han was not ready to comprehend. He had space to regret the way he'd treated Salla but there was no room for questions of morality. He definitely didn't have space to contemplate changing his ways. Because here, now, was Leia in the picture: the very definition of hope. Someone he respected despite—and secretly because of—her unfailing goodness; someone he considered a friend. And the thought of treating Leia the way he'd treated Salla made him sick.

You complete shit, he thought to himself. It should have made you sick to do that to Salla, too.

He knew his heart wasn't truly a living thing, hadn't been for a long time. What sat in his chest was a repressed, cold thing that he was only now realizing had the capacity to hurt someone else. The phantom beats he'd felt when Leia smiled at him were not proof of his ability to take responsibility for his actions: that was … a different thing entirely.

And even if he did take responsibility, if he apologized to Salla for treating her like her feelings meant nothing? Even if he did all that, what then? Nothing he could do or say would make her feel any better.

People get hurt, he reminded himself. People who open their hearts to other people are bound for heartbreak. Nuthin' for it.

"Do you see anything from the cams on the landing pad, Chewie?" he heard, and his brain snapped back into reality, shoving all introspection into the wild abyss of his subconscious where it couldn't hurt him.

A hotel room: dusty, dirty and tiny, full to the brim with three adult humans and a Wookiee. A mission that had gone completely off the rails. A coder in possession of a guild badge that was encoded with coordinates for Leia's payload. A clusterfuck, well and true.

Han blinked at the ceiling, hearing his own thoughts, and winced. People who open their hearts are bound for heartbreak. He pictured Leia crouched near a little slave girl, heart ripped wide open and pouring into the street in front of her. Pictured the countless times he'd witnessed the same brash goodness in Luke, in Chewie.

Was that why his conscience suddenly had a voice? Because of Leia?

He blew out his breath and tried to focus, pushing against his deeper thoughts with every ounce of strength he had.

Their prey was ensconced in a one-bedroom flat directly across the hoverlane from their hotel room. Salla had managed a decent vantage point into the coder's flat, thanks in no small part to a loan from the Treasury of Rebel Fools and Idealists. Perched high above the littered street, the flat had one window, curtained and shut tight. They couldn't see the flat's door; Han supposed it opened into a central hallway that fed into many such identical flats. The building, like the rest of Nar Shaddaa, was covered in dust and grime.

He turned his head to regard the rest of the team.

Chewie had created a makeshift security suite in the far corner of the room on a rickety card table with uneven legs. Han could clearly see three cam readouts and a small receptor the big lug must have thrown onto the coder's window when Han hadn't been looking: a soft hum emanated from his corner, tell-tale static from an ill-fixed receptor.

Salla leaned against the wall nearest the holoport, wallpaper peeling around her head like a halo, one long leg crossed over the other and hands shoved into the pockets of her flight suit. Leia sat in the room's only chair next to the window, elbows on the sill and eyes focused on the coder's flat.

And Han was sprawled on the one bed in the room: a beaten, dusty queen-sized mattress with sheets of dubious cleanliness.

No, Chewie growled. There is no suspicious activity on the street or in the skies near us.

Leia sighed but Han sneered, feeling the biting edge of anger lace his smile, his guilt bubbling loudly from its cage.

"Of course you don't," he said. "The guy's a coder. He's not gonna be up for another hour or two."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Leia turn a frustrated look on him, her beautiful eyes expectant. "Why do you say that?"

Han slipped his hands behind his head and crossed his ankles. "Every coder I know is a night-raver. Stays up late; sleeps in late. We're not all working on princess time, Pearl."

He heard her exhale, her frustration readily apparent to him as he wielded her code name like a weapon. Blindly fumbling for the grip to his anger, Han found himself struggling for any sort of rhyme or reason for his rage. And Leia seemed a tight target, the cause of all this chaos. Someone was going to bear the brunt of this self-loathing and it sure as hell wasn't going to be him.

Han wiped a hand over his face. Because it's Leia's fault you're an asshole, Solo?

He suddenly knew he shouldn't be within a hundred meters of this woman in his current state: vengeful and angry with himself as he was. She was dangerous. She was the reason for all this introspection, all the terrible feelings. All the guilt and shame of how he'd treated Salla. All the doubts about himself, the ones he'd never let anyone see.

And he hated—hated—that it all stemmed from her. If it had just been him and Chewie on this mission, he would have tossed a salute to Salla in the cantina and high-tailed it out of there. All this trouble for what? A few hundred heaters? For the Alliance's super-duper secret base that might buy them another year? Two?

Annoyance. Needling, nettling annoyance, flushing his body from head to toe, focused solely on the last princess of Alderaan. Narrowed into a beam, tight and magnified the more he thought about thinking and feeling and hurting and loving. It wasn't her fault that he'd fucked Salla over, but it sure as hell was her fault that he felt badly about it.

"Salla, have you been inside the coder's flat?" Leia asked.

Salla nodded. "Once or twice. Grouka uses him a lot."

Leia turned from the windowsill, beautiful eyes intent on Salla. Uh, oh, Han thought. She's in problem-solving mode.

"How much security does he have?" she asked. "Could we get in and out of the flat without him knowing?"

Salla looked like she was at complete ease, shoulders relaxed and eyes glittering in good humor. Han noted the easy way she lounged against the wall, as if she owned the place.

Han would give his left foot to feel comfort like that right now.

"He's got the normal stuff. He had a disturbance net built into his window and doorway, though, so we're not getting in the easy way."

Well, hell. Breaking and entering had never appealed to Han much. He didn't mind taking from Imperialist assholes when they deserved it, but Han never felt the need to go out of his way to smash a window and take someone's personal property. Cowardly, he thought. Like Shrike.

He'd take a head-on fight over this sneaking around any day.

Leia tapped her index finger on her knee. "Disturbance net?"

Han answered but didn't bother to sit up, his voice wafting up from his position on the bed. "It's a product of some pretty hardcore splicing. You trip the net and the coder's equipment gets deactivated."

"By deactivated, you mean—"

"—every file stored in his databanks goes up in flames, including your precious code. I've seen it happen. You don't wanna trip that net."

He'd watched Lando trip a disturbance net once on Caata Blanca. The ensuing fire had consumed records of a bank transfer that meant Lando was suddenly fifty thousand credits poorer than he had been at the start of their adventure. And while Han and Lando didn't see eye-to-eye on everything, the experience had left Han with a hefty respect for disturbance nets.

He idly wondered what scheme Lando had cooked up while Han and Chewie had been hauling freight for the Alliance.

Leia pursed her lips, looked down at the floor. Han watched her eyes shift side-to-side, as if she was reading the threadbare carpeting for clues. Planning. Calculating. Wading through the endless depths of her incredible mind for a sliver of an idea.

His breath caught and his heart—the cold, dead thing in his chest—thumped against his ribcage like a drum. Deep and thunderous, unavoidable. Stop it! he commanded himself. This is her fault. You wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her.

But his heart thumped again, clear and loud. Exactly, it said. Exactly.

Han scrambled to tighten the lid on his thoughts.

"Can you bring up a holo of him?" he asked, and his voice sounded too loud in the quiet room. "Maybe we could catch him on the street?"

Salla snorted, disparaging humor readily apparent. "If you were the only coder working for Grouka the Hutt, would you let a public holo exist on the holonet?"

"No," Leia murmured, settling back to watch the coder's flat through the window again.

And that was it; they had no other recourse. They needed the badge to get the heaters. Salla had last seen the badge in the coder's flat. They couldn't get into the coder's flat through the door or window. They couldn't use Han, Leia or Chewie to find him on the street because they didn't know what he looked like. And they couldn't send Salla to him because he knew Salla …

"Does he like males or females?" Leia asked quietly.

Han's heart went cold.

"Females, I think," Salla answered. "I mean, he asked me to stay the night with him the last time I was there, so at the very least he isn't against females. Why?"

But Han knew where Leia was going with this. "No."

"I'd just be the first to go in," Leia said, standing and turning toward the bed where Han lay. "I'll go in, stun him and then signal you. We get the badge, the disturbance net isn't triggered, and we're out of here in a few hours."

Han wanted to yell. He wanted to erupt, his anger flying everywhere, venting fire and rage into the air like a volcano on Mustafar. He was worn raw by all this internal conflict, consequences of his actions and his own goddamned moral compass…. And now Leia decided to open the rift further, to expose herself to danger, do her damndest to get herself killed on this planet, whether by slave child or coder or Grouka's men or the Imperial Moff …

"You'd go in there alone?" Salla asked, skeptical.

"I can handle myself," Leia answered, though none of her usual stubbornness was present in her tone. Only chill and certainty. "For ten minutes, yes. I can handle it."

"What would you even …?" he shook his head and huffed a laugh. "Leia. How would you get inside? Debate him on the merits of the tax code? C'mon."

Leia's eyes flashed, but her voice was arctic. The dichotomy was striking. "I know it's difficult for you to imagine, Captain, but I do know how to play a part. I have the anatomy and he doesn't know me. That eliminates the rest of you. I'm your only hope."

Cub, Chewie growled.

"Oh, alright. You have the anatomy," he repeated, jumping to his feet. "What good is the anatomy if you don't know how to use it?"

Cub! Chewie roared, louder. Stop.

But Han was done. He had struggled all night with his own demons and he was exhausted. He was tired of Leia charging into where she didn't belong, stomping her foot and demanding everyone cater to her best impulses. Be honorable. Join the Alliance. Save the galaxy.

Bullshit.

Leia didn't miss a beat. She breached the four steps to him like plasma through atmosphere: quick, decisive and without hesitation. She only came up to his breastbone, but her presence was so much larger than her physical stature. Han had to take a quick breath when she stood toe-to-toe with him, her eyes furious and her lips collapsed into one angry line. No one else existed in the hotel room any longer. It was just him and her. And Han was terrified into silence.

"Just because I am careful about how I use my anatomy doesn't mean I don't know how to use it," she breathed.

He opened his mouth to respond but no words came to mind and in the silence, Leia spun on her heel and lunged to the hotel door, open despite no one standing near it. Before Han could comprehend how the fucking door had opened, Leia was through it, boots loud in the hallway, and the door slammed shut by itself, rumbling on its old hinges.