Shoot Your Shot

0 BBY

Tatooine

All right, maybe it wasn't the best way to start off a conversation.

If I was being honest with myself, marching up to a wanted criminal with a loaded pistol in hand rarely ever was. Not when I didn't know how to use said pistol. Not when I was still panickedly trying to figure out how to turn the safety off beneath the bar table, quietly praying that the king of bluffs wouldn't call me out on my own.

You ever wish you had a reset button? That you could just give your target a smile, a pat on the back, and each walk away with the common understanding that the last five minutes most definitely did not happen.

Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, Han Solo didn't deal in reset buttons. He dealt in smuggling spice and double-crossing Hutt crime lords. That made him worthy of jabbing my pistol at, firm in the knowledge that had I not cut him off approximately three seconds beforehand with the pleasantry, "Going somewhere, Solo?" he'd probably already be somewhere far offworld doubling some more crosses.

As it stands, he hardly wavers at the implication of my threat. Trapped at not-gunpoint like this he has to backpedal himself into the cantina alcove him and his snuggle buddy of a co-pilot have been inhabiting for the better part of an hour.

"Yes, Greedo. As a matter of fact, I was just going to see your boss. Tell Jabba that I've got the money."

Taking a seat myself I can only shake my head in annoyance at Solo's insistence. Jabba had already warned me that he was going to try and talk his way out of this one. The smuggler was supposed to be very good at that sort of thing. One of the best.

Words didn't come quite so easily for me. Only violence did. It was what I had built my reputation on, after all. I'll still tell any freighter pilot that cares to listen that I was the one soul brave enough to actually bully Anakin Skywalker as a kid. Yeah, that Skywalker. Made him cry for his mama enough times to earn me my rep on the desert playgrounds back in the day.

If only to reaffirm that reputation I steel my gaze at the wily smuggler, wave my non-functional blaster pistol around like I own the place. "It's too late, Solo. You should have paid him when you had the chance. Jabba's put a price on your head so large that every bounty hunter in the galaxy will be looking for you... I'm lucky I found you first."

"Yeah, but this time I've got the money," Solo persists, hardly flinching beneath the blaster muzzle staring him point blank in the face. That really made me wish I knew how to pull the trigger. He wasn't supposed to be this cool under pressure, fosh dang it. I was supposed to be the one with the power here. The guy holding the gun.

"If you give it to me, I might forget I found you."

Reasoning with the unreasonable, that was what the vaunted Greedo, bully of Skywalkers had stooped himself to. For a moment it looks like it might have even worked, that I had gotten through to Solo. He traces his finger along the back wall of the alcove, contemplating the alternative. "I don't have it with me... Tell Jabba—"

"Jabba's through with you! He doesn't have anymore time for smugglers who drop their shipments at the first sign of an Imperial cruiser."

I was the guy with the gun, remember? The guy who was supposed to be in control here. Navigating through Solo's cluster of bantha poodoo was starting to grate on the nerves. At this rate he was just buying himself enough time for his Wookiee co-pilot to come back from the bathroom so they could both take turns ripping me limb from limb. There were plenty of rumors about those two. Enough spaceport gossip saying he was in intimate relations with the walking carpet that I wouldn't put it past them to enjoy the primal experience of scalping me. When you consider the fact Solo unironically called his buddy 'Chewie' and that they spent all their time holed up next to each other in that ship of theirs, well... those with more creative imaginations than I have weaved taller tales out of less.

True to form Solo decides to keep his innocent act up awhile longer, tries to make an emotional plea. "Even I get boarded sometimes, Greedo. Do you think I had a choice?"

"You can tell that to Jabba. He may only take your ship."

I didn't even have to finish that statement for both of us to know it wasn't true. Jabba wasn't the kind of slug that went for half measures, one look at his gut was all you needed to tell you that. You didn't even have to acknowledge Solo to know that taking his ship implied a fate worse than death.

"Over my dead body!"

I couldn't help but loosen a smile at that one. Finally, he was starting to get it. "That's the idea, Solo. I've been looking forward to this for a very long time."

"Yes, I'll bet you have."

PEW!

Next thing I know, there's a clap of noise. The kind of noise that makes you want to look up from your table, see which one of these idiots accidentally shattered their glass on the floor. Slowly you begin to realize that you can't actually look up from your table. Slowly you realize that you're the idiot. That there wasn't any shattered glass to begin with, just a plume of smoke slowly reeling from your gut. You can barely acknowledge the grim smile on Solo's face as it happens, not when a sear of plasma is superheating your innards. First it crunches through the stomach lining, then it immolates your intestines. By the time it thuds against the back of the cantina booth behind you there's hardly a laser blast left at all, just a splatter-paint of blood. Where your body once held flesh and bone and things, now there is nothing. Only a smoke chamber for the cradle of tibanna gas still reeling from Solo's pistol.

If you ever wondered what getting shot point blank in the stomach felt like, the specifics go something like that. If you were wanting a more condensed version, take it from the guy lying face down on the table: getting shot doesn't feel good.

I guess you could call everything I'm saying now a postmortem of sorts. Rodians are funny like that. We'd probably crumple under less pain than whatever your species might be able to take, but we tend to take longer to acknowledge it. Call it a delayed reaction. Nerve endings are slower that way, I guess. I definitely know I got shot, I just haven't all the way felt it yet. Not physically at least. Psychologically, I'm a basket case that's already resigned myself to death. Waiting for it to happen now is the part that's killing me.

Heh.

I can vaguely hear Solo raise himself away from the booth. He re-holsters the pistol he had sprung out on me from beneath the table, flicks a coin to the wearily approaching barkeep. "Sorry about the mess."

If I wasn't so busy choking on a rising boil of blood and phlegm I think I might have actually laughed at that. That's all my body has been reduced to now: a mess.

When the inevitability of death is all you have left to look forward to I guess even the small things become funny. You know, this was the kind of situation I could have avoided altogether if I just had that damn reset button. When I open my mouth I tend to have a bad habit of making a situation worse. I've heard some Humans call it 'talking out your ass'. While having my innards explode everywhere has made you slightly more intimate with Rodian anatomy, let's just say that particular expression doesn't necessarily apply for us. The ass part, I mean. The rest of the sentiment's roughly the same. I talk out of my bottom half quite a bit.

I'm not really sure why I'm still telling you all this. It's not like it's going to matter much in a couple minutes time. Maybe less, knowing how fast the barkeep likes to 'clean' things around here. I guess I'm still at the point in my existentialism where I can entertain the thought of miracles. On the off chance one occurs here and I'm not swept outside to become Bantha chow I've decided to make a pact with myself: no more bounty hunting for Jabba, no more bullying little kids... Unless they're Skywalker, anyways. Might have to make an exception there.

. . .

. . .

. . ?

You know, the longer I set face down here in a pool of my own externalized organs the more I begin to think that maybe there's a reason I'm still cognizant and telling you all this.

Maybe I'm here to illustrate the flip side of all these cantina brawls that the holofilms have romanticized for us. The kind that ends with a blaster bolt in your chest or an arm amputation courtesy of the Jedi geezer who managed to sneak a laser sword inside - long story there, I can still hear the barkeep scrubbing down the floordecks as we speak. I guess what I'm trying to say is that for every guy that talked their way out of one of these bar scraps there's plenty more who got talked in.

And here I am, the end result.

So yeah, maybe marching up to Solo with a blaster drawn hadn't been the best way for me to start a conversation. Maybe it would have been better to have known how to fire the blaster the Hutts gave me. Maybe...

. . .

Nope. Still not dead. Still feel like there's something I've got to confirm here before I die. Well, speaking of being in the throes of death I've suddenly got this weird nagging feeling that the exact particulars are going to somehow become the cause of furious debate years down the line. So, for those of you that haven't been keeping score at home let me just clear up any future misunderstandings: Han shot first. Like, he definitely shot first. If one of you saps want to carve the directions on how to switch the safety off on my DT-12 blaster pistol onto my gravestone, that'd be great.

There, that's better. My insides are finally starting to burn now. I can feel the bottoms of my lungs begin to ooze into that cavity where my stomach was supposed to be. That's not all bad. That probably means it's about to be lights out. The pain definitely makes it feel that way. I guess this is really the

End

Author's Note: This oneshot was written as a part of the Writers Anonymous Random Opener Challenge.