No. 20 IT'S BEEN A LONG DAY
Going into Shock | Foetal Position | Prisoner Trade
Here's part 1 of 2 for Days 20 and 21!
Leia paced the confines of her cell, hoping that Han and Chewie's escape attempt was working. She didn't know why Vader had decided that they should be kept in separate cells—he probably didn't trust her and Han in a room together, which pleased her, in a vicious sort of way—but if it was to stop them from escaping together, it had worked. Han and Chewie had taken off as soon as Han got the drop on the trooper escorting him. With any luck, Lando's men wouldn't question a stormtrooper—they all seemed cowardly enough to bow to any measure of Imperial authority anyway, Lando included—escorting the great Wookiee up to Lord Vader's ship, and once they had a ship they'd be able to get out of here…
And maybe, one day, they could come back for her. Just as they'd done on the Death Star.
She wasn't hopeful. But the image of Han, Chewie, and Luke bursting through doors to get her out again made her smile, anyway. What idiots. What friends. It had taken appealing to Chewie's safety to get Han to leave her at all.
When the door swung open, she shot to her feet, those plaits that she'd felt safe enough here to put in her hair swinging against her neck. She wanted to tear off this whole outfit, beautiful though it was; she wanted to tie her hair back in the harshest bun possible. But the person crowding through the doorway was Vader, and she remembered the last time she'd been Vader's prisoner and shrunk back in unconscious terror.
He surveyed her with something close to disgust. "Your smuggler has escaped," he said. "Along with his Wookiee friend."
"Good," she spat at him, her chin held high. "I hope they're far away from you."
He didn't respond. He just looked her up and down.
"You will have to do, then," he decided.
This time, he didn't bother with the IT-O droid. Apparently that was too premeditated. The first thing she knew of what was coming was when his fist shattered her cheekbone.
Air, mucus and blood expelled from her in one gruesome gush. She hit the floor, head ringing from the impact of it, her knees making a horrible thud only rivalled by the crack in her face. As she gasped for breath, she felt her bones grating against each other. Tears bled from her tear ducts without her even noticing. Dull pain thudded into her arms, shoulders, back, seemingly unbidden.
"What?" she gasped out. "Is this your"—just talking, moving her face, hurt so much—"interrogation now?"
A durasteel fist seized her around the neck and flung her against the wall. She got up her hands so she didn't hit it headfirst and dent her skull, but she felt something give in her wrists, her left elbow taking a brunt of the force. She crumpled to the floor, landing in a strained, disorderly pile of flesh and bones.
"I wasn't aware the torture started before the questions," she bit out, trembling.
"I have no questions to ask you," Vader told her, and backhanded her again. Her head flew back to crack against the wall. Both her cheeks screamed as she gasped, her eyes full of the blood spurting from all orifices in her face. She felt like she'd had her face shoved into a fire and melted like wax. Her bones had been rearranged.
"No… questions?" She hated the hitch of fear in her voice. What the hell did he want? Why was he doing this?
She could read body language so easily, even Vader's. But all she could get from him was an intense need, determination, and utter apathy to what he had to do to achieve his goal. He wasn't even angry.
He hated her, certainly. But this wasn't about that. He was as cold and distant as that IT-O had been.
His foot lashed out and smashed into her stomach. Leia rolled over into a foetal position, shielding her head with her hands. It was pathetic, but it was sensible, and she didn't love dignity so much to die for it. His second kick, instead of winding her and pummelling her internal organs, collided with the side of her torso. The force of it was akin to a speeder crash. She felt something in her rib cage give; something was hot inside her, sharp, jagged.
Despite the pain that flashed her vision red, black, white, she rolled over, out of the way of his next kick, panting. Something speared her lungs with every desperate breath. She stumbled to her feet, scrambling back from his last kick—it just caught her arm instead, her humerus ringing.
"Then what the hell is this for?" she snapped. Blood flew out of her mouth, mixed with spittle. Vader stepped forwards, until he was close enough to be drenched in the spray. His mask was flecked with it. "You're not asking any questions! This isn't personal, I can tell! What is this for?"
Vader reached out. She tried to back away more, but the wall of the cell cut off any space left to retreat. He took her right wrist in his grip—squeezed tightly enough that she thought he would destroy the frail bones there, crush them, cut off the circulation to her fingers—then took her shoulder. Leia tried to struggle, but an invisible force held her agonisingly, infuriatingly still. She could do nothing to resist; even her tongue was frozen in her mouth. Vader had not yet used the Force in this one-sided battle, but he did not.
All she could do was scream inside her head, until she thought the bounce-back would deafen her.
Vader made a humming noise; she caught a glimpse of satisfaction in him, and for a moment she gained enough control to use her mouth again. She spat. It dribbled down her chin, but her aim was true, and it spattered on the glove that held her shoulder still.
That just meant that when he snapped her arm, she screamed physically as well as mentally.
It was an ugly, awkward break; the angle was odd, the force uneven, but Vader was strong enough that her bone gave and gave in all the wrong places, all of them sharp, jagged lines of pain in her awareness. She sank back to her knees.
Vader stepped back. "That will be enough," he decided. "You are quite deafening."
"What is this?" she got out through gritted teeth. She couldn't see for the tears.
"I do not need you, Princess Leia. Or your smugglers. I need Skywalker. And if one of you is in immense pain, he will sense it through the bond he has forged with you, and he will come." He hooked his thumbs into his belt and surveyed her, undone with agony, on his floor. "You are mildly Force-sensitive, if you can scream so loudly in the Force. That will be especially useful. You have formed a true lifeline with him."
"Burn," she said. "Go and burn in hell."
"I have already done so, Your Highness," he said. "Your own reckoning is coming for you."
It felt like it had already come. Leia lay there on the floor, staring at the blank ceiling as the dizzying broken pieces of her body formed constellations in her mind that no spacer could navigate by, and eventually unconsciousness had the mercy of saving her from her own body's signals.
"He has agreed," was what she woke up to. It could have been moments or hours later. Distantly, she was aware of a ship humming underneath her; she wasn't in a cell on Cloud City anymore. They were moving.
"What?"
"You are to be exchanged for him. Get up."
Leia did not get up. She was dragged. And she was hardly aware of anything else either, until she was on the Falcon and Han and Chewie were fussing over her, with bacta patches and painkillers and stimshots. It must be their entire stash, judging by Chewie's overflowing arms.
"Luke?" she got out. Her arm was bound in a sling. "Where—"
Chewie howled mournfully. Han got out, his face dark in a way he hadn't seen in a long time, "Vader."
She sat up too fast. "We have to rescue him. We have to—"
"Calm down, Princess. We gotta take stock, first. You've got a broken arm, right? Broken ribs. Broken"—he grimaced at her—"face."
She would have grimaced back if it didn't hurt so much. "I'm sure I look hideous."
"You'll never look hideous to me, sweetheart." That was so pathetically petty of him, bringing up their awkward tension now, but after a moment she realised he was genuine. "But that's not what we're worried about. These are all your injuries, right? Luke didn't have anymore."
"Luke's injured?"
"Yeah," Han said. "In exactly the same places."
Her brow creased. "What— what happened?"
"Absolutely nothing. But before he left he told us to tell you something." Han glanced at Chewie, who roared something. "Yeah… Something like that. Dig… Dug… Yeah!" He turned back to Leia. "Have you ever heard of a planet named Dagobah?"
