JaySteph March 2020 Prompt - "Stay: In Another Universe"
Dick2D2 began whirring and beeping excitedly.
"What's going on?" Tim Skywalker asked CPNYWRTH. "What's wrong?"
"I'm afraid I don't quite know what's gotten into him," the golden droid replied. "He keeps repeating 'I've found her' and 'She's here.'"
"Who's here?" the Tatooine youth replied. "Who's he found?" The squat blue and white droid was stamping its platform feet in its excitement.
"He's found Princess Stephanie," CPNYWRTH replied.
"The princess? She's here?" Tim said, alert with surprise and barely contained action. "Where? What level is she on?"
"Princess?" said Jason Solo, raising an eyebrow. "Princess? What's going on?" he said suspiciously, not at all liking how this crazy desert kid was revving himself up like rain clouds were gathering on Tatooine.
Jason's buddy Chewbizarro growled in backup support.
Dick2D2 gave a sad whistle and hum as he scanned for further information in the computer databases.
"Oh, my," CPNYWRTH said. "I'm afraid she's been scheduled to be terminated."
"Oh, no," said Tim Skywalker in horror. "We've gotta rescue her. What level is she on?"
"Now hold it right there," Jason Solo said sharply. "Somebody better tell me what the hell is going on. What princess? What is this?"
"She's the one in the message! The one we came to help! We've got to rescue her," Tim blurted out all at once with zero clarity.
"No. Uh uh," Jason said firmly. Forget needing to understand the situation. He didn't need to know what in hell the kid was talking about to know that rescuing somebody from the Death Star cellblocks was a bad idea. Scratch that. A terrible, horrible idea.
"You heard the old man. He wants us to wait right here," Jason said authoritatively.
"A second ago you were saying you couldn't wait to get out of here and now you want to stay?" Tim whined at him in frustration.
"Marching into a detention level is not my idea of a good time," Jason snarked back. "That's more like suicide."
"But they're gonna kill her!" Tim huffed desperately.
"Better her than me!" Jason shot back and Chewbizarro growled affirmatively.
Tim fell back, temporarily defeated as Dick2D2 continued to search for the princess's cellblock. Suddenly, an idea occurred to him.
"She's rich…" Tim said to Jason enticingly. Chewbizarro growled in warning at his friend.
"How rich?" said Jason suspiciously.
"So rich," said Tim. "Rich, powerful… if you were to rescue her the reward would be -"
"What?" grunted Jason, wanting an actual answer.
"Well, more wealth than you could ever imagine!" Tim said expansively.
"I dunno, kid. I can imagine pretty big," Jason said, leveling him with a look.
"You'll get it!" Tim squeaked.
"I'd better," Jason said threateningly.
"You will," Tim said, dropping his voice lower into an octave that he hoped conveyed assurance.
The escape plan was going to shit, of course. If you could even call it a plan. Yeah, well, maybe it was more of a desperate attempt to get crimelord Oswald the Hutt off of his back for the debts that he owed him, but can you blame a guy for trying, Jason Solo thought to himself as he frantically shot his blaster down the cell block corridor towards the battalion of Death Star troops that had them pinned.
"This is some rescue," a feisty blonde with cinnamon buns on her ears said sarcastically as she emerged from her cell. "Looks like you've managed to cut off our only escape route."
Holy shit, was that the princess? Jason felt his heart drop out of his chest. She was beautiful, sassy, ferocious, funny, the woman of his dreams - so of course he decided that sneering at her was his best move.
"Maybe you'd prefer it back in your cell… your Highness," he scorched her. She rolled her eyes. Well, that was something, Jason thought with glee. He'd gotten a reaction out of her.
"Give me your blaster," she shouted at Tim, grabbing it from his surprised hands. She turned and shot open a vent in the wall. "Into the garbage chute, everybody!" she ordered.
"What an incredible smell you've discovered!" Jason snarked to Steph as soon as he landed head first in the pile of stinky, wet, crap. "Bizarro, get away from the door," he ordered his pal, lifting his blaster up.
"No, wait!" Tim said but Jason had already shot. The energy blast bounced around the chamber off the walls, narrowly missing them until it finally hit a pile of garbage.
"We've already tried it, it's magnetically sealed," Tim moaned at him as Princess Steph got up in his face.
"Put that thing away before you get us all killed!" she screamed at him menacingly.
"Oh, absolutely, Your Worshipfulness," Jason bitched at her, secretly loving her attention. "Look, I had everything under control until you led us all down here," he said, glaring down into her adorable face. God, she looked like an angry chipmunk when she was mad and he wanted to pinch her cheeks and stuff his tongue in her mouth until she was squeaking with a different kind of noise.
"It could be worse," Steph sulked, unaware of his lurid thoughts.
A strange sound echoed through the chamber.
"It's worse," Jason said definitively.
"There's something alive in here," Tim said nervously.
"It's your imagination, kid," Jason muttered.
"No," Tim said. "Something just moved past my leg. There! You see that?" he said as a slithering coil floated past for an instant.
Suddenly, he was dragged under the water.
"Kid!" Jason yelled in a panic. "Tim! Tim," he shouted, fishing through the water. Dammit, he hadn't meant to lose the kid. Sure, he was a pain in the ass, like the little brother he'd never had, but… where the fuck had that thing taken him?
Steph was freaking out, too, and she and Chewbizarro were scooping through trash when suddenly Tim's head shot up, with the coils of the garbage monster wrapped around his neck, choking him out.
"Shoot it! Shoot it," he gasped.
"Where?" Jason said frantically.
"Anywhere," Tim gasped as Jason and Steph tried to blast the monster off of him. He disappeared for a few more terrifying seconds under the water until he suddenly emerged, coughing and gagging.
"What happened?" Steph demanded.
"It disappeared," Tim coughed out. A loud mechanical grating sound made its way throughout the chamber.
"I have a bad feeling about this," Jason said nervously right before the walls started closing in on them.
"Don't just stand there!" Steph shrieked. "Try to brace them with something!" she yelled, grabbing a long, sturdy looking pole and trying to turn it sideways.
Fuck, she was smart, too? Didn't lose her head in danger? Yeah…. Jason knew he was in deep trouble. If he survived the garbage compression cycle, that was. He grabbed the end of the pole and tried to help Steph brace it, but the walls kept coming and no matter what they did, they couldn't stop them.
"Get on top of it!" he yelled at Steph, boosting her up to climb as high as she could. Maybe there was a little space on top of the compression walls where she could lay flat and be safe. Maybe.
"I'm trying!" she yelled back at him. Their eyes met for a second, and the knowledge of everything that they might have been to each other flashed between them as time slowed down.
You were my soulmate, Jason realized in that moment and he swore that he saw Steph thinking the same thought right back at him. She blinked away some tears and gave him a sad smile and the moment passed and the walls were still closing and Jason cleared his throat and tried again to help her get on top of the garbage even though they both knew it wouldn't work, and the thought came to him that if it was finally his time to go, it wasn't a bad death for a street rat who came from nothing to die next to the love of his life, even if all they'd had together was a few moments to bicker like an old married couple before being snuffed out as if it had never happened.
But it had happened. They'd met. They'd recognized each other. They weren't going to die alone. Hell, it was more than most people got. He was grateful. And when she finally gave up trying to climb and turned her head to look back at him, she smiled and he knew that she felt it, too, and it was all right.
Jason forced his way up on top of some of the rapidly consolidating garbage to stand next to her. If they were going to die, at least she could do it in his arms. Steph clearly had the same thought; she was coming down to meet him and as she put her hands on his chest he bent his head and he was going to kiss her and suddenly the kid was screaming and yelling and that was the only sound in the room because the gears had stopped grinding and the walls had stopped moving and they were alive and - Steph was hugging him, happiness overflowing out of her features and he held her so close and she smelled like absolute shit but he guessed that he did, too, and he knew that he wanted to spend the rest of his life in her arms.
Striding through the halls of the Death Star, tracking wet puddles along the floor, he and Steph started bickering again. God, it felt good. She felt like home and she was turning him on and did she just call Bizarro a human Taun-Taun? Well, that wasn't nice but it was kind of funny so he made an even more sarcastic quip back at her Worshipfulness and he loved her, God, how he loved her and oh shit, those were Stormtroopers.
Well, nothing like showing off for his lady.
"Aaaaaaagggghhhhh!" he yelled, turning to chase the squadron as he yelled like a banshee and shot his blasters after them.
"He certainly is brave," Steph said admiringly to Tim.
"Yeah, but what good is it going to do him if he gets himself killed," Tim grumbled.
"They're tracking us," Steph said to Jason confidently as she sat up in the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon next to him as they flew away from the Death Star, back to the Rebel homebase. "It's the only explanation for the ease of our escape."
"Easy?" Jason said, offended. "You call that easy?" Dammit, he'd thought he'd impressed her with taking down those tie fighters. Yeah, there weren't that many of them, but he'd thought he was looking pretty good shooting them up. And Steph had come to sit with him afterwards, not the farmboy.
The kid was pretty broken up about losing Obi Bat-Kenobi, too. Why the old geezer had sacrificed himself to Darth Black Mask back on the Death Star, Jason did not know. The Jedi were nothing but kooks, after all. Had to be, the way they'd all gotten themselves killed back before he'd been born. But, at least the old man had gotten the tractor beam out of commission.
And now he was sitting pretty in his cockpit, taking his princess back home. At least, he'd thought he was looking good to her until she tore down his glorious escape battle and that had to be the only reason why he'd opened his big fat mouth and was telling her like an asshole that he was only in it for the money.
"I'm getting paid, sister," he heard himself say. Oh, crap, she didn't like the sound of that. Shit, he hadn't meant to hurt her, but she was hurt, he could see it, and she was biting at him and storming off and fuck it, he'd really messed that one up.
He hadn't meant to tell her like that. He'd wanted to explain that as soon as he'd paid off Oswald, he'd come back for her. To her. Hell, he'd fight whatever stupid battles she wanted him to if only she'd look at him again like she did in the trash compressor and fuck, now the kid was here, moping around and looking all sad and saying something that he wasn't really paying attention to.
"Whaddya think, kid. A princess and a guy like me….?" Jason asked Tim out of the blue, semi-bashfully.
"No," Tim said quickly. Aw shit. The kid was jealous. Well, that sucked. Jason laughed at him, but inside he was seething. Steph was his and she knew it and he knew it and Tim was gonna have to get over it.
But when they were on the rebel base and Tim was giving him those puppy dog eyes Jason heard himself offering to take the kid with him. He was a good fighter and hell, he liked him. He didn't want to see him get killed on his fool's mission against the Death Star. But Tim was full of righteous glory, and so sad that Jason was leaving - for greed, Tim thought. But that wasn't it at all. Jason would have stayed, despite what he'd said to Steph on the Falcon.
If there had been a snowball's chance in hell of defeating the Death Star, he would've stayed for her and fought. But shooting proton torpedoes down an exhaust pipe? Jason had lost too many people in his life. He couldn't stick around and see the kid get killed. And he definitely couldn't stick around and see her get killed.
So he'd let her think he was a greedy asshole and that he didn't care and he told himself it was better this way; let her die angry at him instead of sad and grieving and without him because even if he stayed she'd be down here and he'd be out there and they wouldn't be together and -
He shook his head. Chewbizarro was giving him hell with his accusing looks but Jason knew that deep down, Bizzie understood.
Except that when he took off and tried to leave them behind, leave her behind, and leave the kid behind - he couldn't. Fuck it, he just couldn't. He'd at least stay on death watch and be their witness as they went down. He could do that much for them.
So Jason sat on the edges outside of the battle, watching and reading his scanners and Bizzie was growling low in his throat and the kid was doing all right, better than the rest of them, actually, but then Black Mask was on his tail and Jason saw red.
"Fire up the thrusters," he said to Chewbizarro, and away they went, yahooing to the rescue, saving the kid who reminded Jason too damn much of the other kid, the one who grew up on the streets and had nobody and who nobody had ever come to save, and maybe this time Jason could save the kid.
"I knew there was more to you than money!" Steph exclaimed as she threw herself around his neck and hung off of him and he was kissing her hair and holding her and if he was crying a little bit in relief, well, everyone was and let them think it was about saving the planet and blowing up the Death Star and not because he loved Steph so damn much and was so happy that she wasn't mad at him anymore.
He winked at her during the medal ceremony and she gave him that dazzling smile she had, one that was full of promise and love and their future together and Jason grinned back at her. Because one thing he knew for sure: he was getting laid tonight.
"You'll stay?" she asked him when she was lying over him in his arms.
"Yeah, baby, I'll stay," he mumbled against her lips.