Outta Here
Chewbacca studied the metropolitan jungle of West Nar Shaddaa like he had studied the vines of an overgrown Blampalla patch on his homeworld of Kashyyyk: wary and quick and mindful of danger at every turn. He brought all focus to his task, mindful and intense, eyes and ears perked, ready to hover in a millisecond and tractor beam his humans to safety if that is what it took.
The city zipped beneath him, small and bleak: buildings and hoverlanes and the barely visible shapes of pedestrians as they startled at the boom of the Millennium Falcon's sublight thrusters. He used his hunter's eyes to articulate the minutiae of the skyline, trying to differentiate between his own engines and the distinct whine of Imperial TIE fighters. He hadn't seen them yet but he knew they were there.
The comm traffic had been clear: Vader was on Nar Shaddaa.
Chewbacca whuffed softly to himself, mocking his captain for being unsure of having a comm-scanner onboard the Falcon. Cub had argued that weapons and shielding were more important to their careers of crime; Chewbacca had vouched for nuanced defensive hardware, like cloaking devices, medical equipment and the comm-scanner.
It will be most enjoyable to tell Cub I found him due to the scanner.
If he found Cub, that was. Chewbacca gritted his teeth and resumed his mad scramble.
The Falcon's underbelly scraped the bright blue overhang of a veranda; he was flying so low that, had Han been at the helm, Chewbacca would have called him crazy. As it was, Chewbacca only grimaced and continued flying, a low groan in his throat.
"Chewbacca!" See-Threepio yelled from the pilot's chair. "Chewbacca, you are flying too low!"
The Wookiee growled, annoyed. As if the protocol droid could say anything more obvious than that he was flying too low. Chewbacca was well aware. The altitude monitor was accusing him of the same charge. A loud whine had been echoing through the Falcon's cockpit for the last twenty-odd seconds. The transparasteel was full of color and movement as Nar Shaddan residents dove for cover.
Of course I am flying too low! he thought and didn't say.
But the warehouse where Cub and Little Princess were supposed to be located was empty. And that did not bode well for his humans.
Stop telling me how I should fly and open a channel to Zend, he roared instead.
"I don't know why I should do as you say, Chewbacca. You have been nothing but rude all morning!"
Chewbacca bared his teeth in a snarl and Droid hurried to switch chairs and follow the Wookiee's directive.
I have not been rude, Chewbacca thought. I have been … insistent.
Perhaps insistent was too mild a word. From their first interaction of the day in the spaceport berth, Droid and Chewbacca had been at odds. The first moment had been hard enough: Chewbacca and Zend ducked for cover outside the Falcon's security panel as Droid loudly promised injury and pain if they did not miraculously produce Cub to counteract the droid's primary objective. They were all fortunate that Chewbacca knew the Falcon's systems as well as he did: he remembered at the important moment that See-Threepio was not able to trigger said security systems, a safeguard for which Chewbacca was thankful. Droid had done all he could to convince any and all intruders of his ability to engage the belly gun and electro-sensors over the past few days.
Droid can lie, Chewbacca had thought with pleasure.
But then they'd lifted off and Droid and Chewbacca found themselves on Khlowian terms again. They had flown Zend to her own ship, the Starlight Intruder, hidden in a secret berth close to the spaceport owned by Prisht the Chev against the protests of Droid. And then he'd pushed to the edge of the sound barrier to reach Cub and Little Princess in time, only to find an empty warehouse full of environmental stabilizers, the Starlight Intruder quick on his heels.
Droid had been mercilessly annoying after that.
Chewbacca would have assumed Cub and Little Princess had simply not yet arrived to help load the heaters but for the corpse of the guard outside of the cargo door. Once he'd spotted the body, Chewbacca had hauled jets and began the mad dash to find his humans. He'd switched on the comm-scanner with a rough flick of his paw and navigated straight toward a skirmish taking place a klick away.
It is them, Chewbacca mumbled to himself. It has to be them.
"Chewbacca, I have the Starlight Intruder for you," Droid said from behind him.
Zend! The Wookiee roared. We need to split up. You load the heaters. I must find Cub and his mate.
Zend's voice was strained, steady but stressed, and Chewbacca shared her anxiety. "I called in some friends. We'll get the cargo loaded. Go."
Copy that, Chewbacca growled. Thank you.
"Just go save Han from himself," Zalla said before the channel was closed.
Chewbacca followed the the line of destruction and the flashes of stun bolts, still flying too low, eyes desperate for Cub and Little Princess.
A marketplace. Imperial vermin in a circle around two humans, a black, masked entity—not human, never human: even humans couldn't be as despicable as the Dark Lord. Cub struggling to stand behind his mate, injured in the leg? Chewbacca wasn't sure.
He disengaged the latch for the tractor beam and pressed lock just as a bright light shot from the circle below him. Chewbacca watched in shock, stunned, as his instruments detected a massive expulsion of energy on the surface.
From where? he thought, but sealed the airlock behind the humans.
He had no idea where the beam had come from or where it went once it disappeared. All he knew was that he needed to leave Nar Shaddaan airspace now.
The world snapped back into focus with a blinding light and searing pain behind Leia's eyes. She blinked, watched the blur coalesce into shape and tone and dimension, heard an engine roar in the distance. She could feel the heavy vibrations of a ship in atmosphere beneath her hands and when her eyes refocused, she could see the upper hull of the Falcon's airlock.
The Falcon!
Leia gasped and sat up, immediately regretted it as a wave of dizziness threatened to take her under again. She tried to put the pieces of the last few moments together, tried to arrange her memories into cohesive order, but struggled. She remembered Mattias' lifeless body on the ground with a sinking feeling in her chest, remembered their flight from the warehouse to the marketplace. Remembered the stormtroopers, remembered Han's injury ...
She turned, looking for Han, spotted him leaning next to the airlock's inner iris, poking the panel like he was trying to stab it to death.
"C'mon, baby," he mumbled. "You gotta open. It's me."
Leia blew out a concerned breath and tried to get her feet under her. Han needed medical attention and Chewie needed help at the controls. If there were stormtroopers on Nar Shaddaa then they had to have reinforcements in the system. At the very least a few transport vehicles, perhaps even a Star Destroyer.
They were still in very real danger.
"Han," she said, standing on wobbly legs. "How long were we out?"
He whirled on his good leg, eyes blazing on hers. Leia almost recoiled: Han looked terrified, eyes wide and mouth agape, an arm stretched out toward her like he could bring her in to him by sheer will alone, like a personal tractor beam.
"You." he said too loudly, the word echoing through the airlock. "Are you okay?"
She nodded. "I'm fine. You?"
Han's mouth twisted. He tried to take a step toward her but stumbled, his injured foot twisting too quickly. He grimaced, uttered a curse, braced a hand on the hull to steady himself and then used his free hand to beckon her toward him.
"Will you just come over here?" he asked. "Easier for you than for me right now."
She took careful steps to him. Clearly the Falcon was still in atmosphere; the artificial gravity hadn't come on and her feet were stable on the deck. Chewie would have come and brought them into the main hold if he'd made it to lightspeed. That meant they were still on Nar Shaddaa and Chewie was busy getting them off the hateful moon, full of such horrors...
She put it out of her mind, stepping into the circle of Han's arms with a low breath. "Your foot needs to be scanned," she murmured.
He stiffened but didn't let her go. "Don't worry about it. I'm more worried about you."
"Me?"
He pushed her back by the shoulders, grabbed her hands. "Do you… how do you feel? Your hands? Any burning or, I don't know… what the fuck, Leia?"
She furrowed her brow, watched as he ripped off the glove still on her right hand, examined her fingers like they were a navigational chart, like ship manifests for which he had to sign. He flipped her hand over, pushed up her sleeve to expose her forearm and elbow before she finally shook him away.
"You can stop that now," she said. "I'm fine."
"Then tell me what the hell you just did."
She shook her head. "I have no idea what you're talking about. Chewie must've found us in the marketplace, used the tractor beam to bring us here."
"After that. With Vader."
Leia's heart froze, beats forgotten, her whole body still. "Vader?"
Like a spear of ice had torn through her chest, her heart stumbled into bradycardia. Slow. Like death.
"You stopped stun bolts with your hand. Do you remember?" he asked.
She blinked, dropped her eyes. Vader. On Nar Shaddaa? Her chest felt like it had shrunk, trapping her lungs in unbending bone until she couldn't breathe. A sudden flurry of nervous dread ran through her stomach. Her fingers twitched and her mouth opened in shock.
"I—I remember needing to protect you—"
She remembered visceral, painful fear. Terror at the uselessness of the situation. She remembered blood-curdling, heartstopping anger, she remembered a moment of quick duracrete confidence, of total and complete faith in herself.
Like when she had lied to Grouka.
Leia took a step back from Han as he reached for her again. "Stopped stun bolts?"
His eyes were wide and he was breathing too fast. He watched her like she was a scared pet, like she was about to disappear on him, his mouth open and his hand reaching for her.
But words made even less sense to him than they did to her and he just pressed his lips together and nodded.
"Vader," she whispered. "It was a trick. He did something to us, you didn't see what you think you saw—"
"I know what I saw," Han said. He turned to the security paneling again, breathed out a very harsh open the fucking hatch, you big furball. When he turned back to her, he reached his hand out again, fingertips splayed so wide he looked like was holding a bowl. "Leia, come here. It's okay. It's okay."
But Leia hardly heard him. She was locked in a tight circle of three words: stopped stun bolts. And there was Vader, too, the most cursed of her nightmares. And at the very least Han didn't seem to want to dump her out of the airlock, so he must think Vader had been tricking him. If she actually had done something like that, Han Solo wouldn't come within sixty meters of her.
It was the power of suggestion. Luke had told both of them about how Obi-Wan Kenobi had convinced a stormtrooper in Mos Eisley before any of them had met…
Obi-Wan?
Her eyes met Han's; certainty broke through her shock. She remembered Vader, his mask so close to her face, his harsh breathing in the raucousness they had created in the marketplace. She remembered Han grabbing her hand, she remembered Vader leaning forward, the faint dust on his helmet the odd detail she couldn't seem to get past.
She remembered her utter hopelessness. She remembered feeling energy in her torso that didn't belong to her. She remembered the lock of her limbs, the way her throat had closed and choked the breath from her lungs. She remembered her heart beating wildly out of control, the desperate failing of her body as it held too much energy in her cells for her body to take.
Until it overfilled, until it exploded out of her like blood from a wound.
"What did I do?" she croaked, horrified. "Han, what did I do?"
He opened his mouth to respond, closed it, tried again, but was interrupted by the hatch opening with a quick hiss.
She turned to look at the newcomer, hands splayed by her sides, hair in her eyes. See-Threepio appeared in the hatchway, gold plating dirty and the whir in his servo-motors noticeably louder than they had been three days ago when she'd last saw him.
"Mistress Leia, Captain Solo, it is so good to see you alive! When Chewbacca told me that you were in danger I feared the worst. And I couldn't even let him in because your instructions were very clear, Captain Solo. No one but you was allowed—"
"Shut up, Goldenrod," Han said, reaching an unsteady arm around the droid's shoulders. "Help me get to the cockpit."
"Why, yes, of course. I don't see why you have to be so demanding all the time. I was only doing—"
"Shut up."
But Leia wasn't listening. Her body had reverted to autopilot, a shell in an ocean. She was being lobbed about like she was thrown into a hurricane. She followed Threepio and Han to the cockpit, sat in the navigator's chair behind Chewbacca. The Wookiee gave her a strange look as she sat but otherwise no one addressed her.
And for Leia that was fine. Because if she was—if she had—
In her young life, Leia Organa had become quite the master compartmentalizer. She could neatly arrange her focus into a given task while enormous, horrendous crimes against her were committed. She learned that on the Death Star; nothing would ever surpass the pain of that day, and what else could they do to her?
She used that focus now, blandly forgetting the unknowable.
"Let's get the fuck outta here, what do you say, pal?" Han asked as he plopped into the pilot's chair.