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The persistent blip of a data pad's message alert cuts through the room's quiet, startling Leia from the dossier she was half-reading, half-skimming, and not really absorbing at all. Digging through her travel-case yields nothing but her clothes and more of her work files, which just confuses her more before she remembers that she had tucked the pad she used for personal messages under the lining of the case. Any repressed concerns she has of being so bored by her official duties, to the point where she considers a text message an interesting diversion all but vanish as she reads the words.
The message by itself isn't much - just an address and a room number, followed by a few words.
"Reserved a room for a couple nights. Welcome to join us anytime - Han"
It's the 'us' that makes a tiny electrical thrill race up her nerves, one that she's been craving to feel for a while without even really knowing it. In a few minutes, all her sensitive files and data are locked up in her password-locked safe and pushed to the back of the closet; and Leia herself is but one drop in the sea of passer-by's in the streets below, following the signs to the nearest transit hub.
As the huge, ancient speeder-bus lurches into the station, AXXILAN PUBLIC TRANSIT CONSORTIUM all but hidden under a multicoloured coat of rust and graffiti, she hesitates for a split second. Leia reminds herself that none of the private speeders lined up in ranks outside the governor's palace will dare go where she needs to, and a shiny surface-city speeder would only draw unwanted attention to herself. Even with her hair let out from any kind of formal style and dressed in the plainest, most practical clothes she could find in her wardrobe case she knows there's a chance she could be recognized, and not just by admirers. The pistol strapped to her leg, hidden for the moment by her long coat, puts her more at ease for the moment as she hands the driver the fare in mostly-untraceable hard credits.
She takes a spot by a back window, doing her best to seem casually disinterested in everything the way most of the other riders are, to not act like she cares as the chipped plastoid seat, carved with the initials of what must be generations of vandals, creaks alarmingly under her and the soles of her boots make unpleasantly sticky noises against the floor. Sighing, she turns her attention to the world outside the window for distraction. Back-lit by the planet's massive moon, the perpetually-cloudy Axxilan sky shimmers pale, turning the sea of spires and towers beneath it silver. The upper city's air seems less choked by speeders and starships, nor crowded by ludicrously tall buildings as the likes of Coruscant or Denon. It stirs a dim memory in her mind of another long-lost skyline, a view that was never captured by official cameras; only by the mind of one young woman when she chanced to look out a window while boarding a blockade runner for Scarif.
Leia could almost call it beautiful - at least until the moment it all vanishes into darkness, as the transport descends into one of of the huge lower-level access shafts in the surface. Here there are no more silver spires, only huge megastructures that rise like black mountains, dotted with windows like countless fires lit against the permanent night. The speeders and shuttlecraft that were absent on the surface all seem to be down here now, darting all around them like shoals of tiny fish as the transport descends, plunging into the depths of the planet like some vast sea monster.
Going by the address she was given, she still has a long way down to go in the belly of this beast. Leia does her best to get comfortable in her seat and not draw attention to herself. Which might still be difficult, even on a world as far-flung from the Core as Axxila is.
A tinny voice announces an upcoming stop, and a Pantoran man sitting across the aisle from her gets up. A narglatch, bloodied storm-trooper helmet clamped in its jaws, snarls at her from the back of his battered Alliance fatigue jacket, and she suppresses a shudder at the sight of the campaign patches studded across the shoulders and down the arms - Onderon, Quilura, Umbara, Hoth - all the worst in living memory. Leia also sees that the backs of his pale blue hands are tattooed; one with the Alliance starbird, the other with the Black Sun. He catches her watching him, and for a brief moment he stares right back at her with huge, piercing golden eyes. Leia freezes. But the Pantoran just grins, winking at her. Then he all but jumps out the half-opened door before they've even fully stopped, jogging straight towards a door at the mouth of an alleyway, unassuming save for the two obviously-armed Weequay standing beside it. She just manages to see him slip something into the waiting hand of one the guards and disappear inside the building, before the transport slowly lurches away from the stop.
Leia sighs in relief as the speeder-bus continues on its way. If the man had recognized her, he at least had the decency to keep it to himself.
The public so rarely allows for heroes who are less than faultless and perfect, and the real danger to her down here isn't so much to her safety, but to her reputation. The public who so adore the official version of Leia Organa, Hero of the New Republic, would not be so admiring of the one who skulks around the lower depths of outer-rim city-worlds and rides in the same transports as Black Sun gangsters.
Really, she's mostly fine with that. The official version of her isn't really all lies, yet it's not really the truth, either.
Officially she's on Axxila in the first place, as part of a delegation from the Core to foster cooperation between the New Republic government and the local administration. Officially, she and Han have long separated and lived apart for years. Officially, her son is living at Luke's temple permanently for the benefit of his education in the Jedi path. Officially, Bail and Breha Organa adopted her orphaned from biological parents who had died in the final clashes of the Clone wars. Officially, Boba Fett has been as good as dead for over a decade.
The official version isn't really all lies. Yet it's not really the truth, either. The truth, of course, is more complicated.
Truthfully, she's on Axxila with New Republic intelligence agents under the guise of cooperation, to try and pry information out of the notoriously corrupt local government about a number of Imperial war criminals that were last seen in this sector, before they somehow managed to vanish into thin air.
Truthfullly, she and Han aren't really separated, not in the legal sense at least. Han was simply never meant to play the role of New Republic war hero, or that of a war hero's husband. They love each other too much to deny the other any of their happiness and freedom, and so she lets Han come and go as he pleases. Somehow, that explanation was too confusing even for her closest friends or what passes for her family these days.
Truthfully, Ben hasn't visited home for years, and rarely ever sends messages. The ones he does send are short, terse, oddly evasive; even for a boy whose own father calls him quiet and moody on his best days. Truthfully, she wishes she'd never known of her biological parentage. She could have lived her whole life without the spectre of it shadowing her every step, to say nothing of what it means for her son and even the entire galaxy.
Truthfully, Boba Fett is still as good as dead to the galaxy at large, but not to at least two of the sentients that live in it.
The speeder takes a turn somewhat sharply, rounding a building the size of a respectable asteroid; and starts on a steep into yet another ventilation shaft, sharp enough that Leia has to pop her ears to stop their sudden ringing.
Every detail of that day has remained burned into her mind's eye, the image as clear as if she were still standing there.
The room with the threshold board that creaked under her shoes, the window's view of the industrial shoreline of Tinnel, with the Falcon just visible in its faraway dock. The scent of the salt sea that permeated everything on that planet. The heavy wood furniture. The half-open 'fresher door. The clothes thrown haphazardly around the room. The data pad on the floor that she droppped, the one with the hastily-composed message from her absentee husband claiming that they needed to talk, now, about something incredibly serious for the both of them.
At the centre of it all; Han, pale skin flushed pink, thick silver-and-brown hair mussed beyond hope, stripped down to his shorts and pinned flat on his back by Boba Fett, apparently very much alive despite evidence to the contrary.
The sounds were as unforgettable as the image. The short, harsh breaths and the barely stifled whines Han let out with each scrape of Fett's teeth on his bruised, bitten neck and jaw. The sounds of pulling fabric as Han's fingers desperately clutched at Fett's shirt, nearly tearing it with sheer force. The words that poured out of Fett's mouth into Han's ear, purred low in some language she couldn't understand. The bedsprings that all but squealed under their weight as they rocked their hips together. The gasp when Fett brusquely shoved his hand down the front of Han's shorts.
Leia shifts a little in her seat, feeling a bit warm. A twi'lek woman seated a few spaces ahead of her sniffs the air, sighing with annoyance as she looks over her shoulder. Leia pretends to be fascinated by something on the ceiling of the transport until the twilek turns back around, lekku twitching and flushing a darker pink as she mutters something rude about other species and their annoying, unruly pheromones.
Wether it was anger, or desire, or some strange combination of all of those things that made her do what she did next, Leia still isn't' certain. But something had possessed her to stay in that room, rather than turn around, never come back, and forget Han Solo had ever entered her life. Something had possessed her to walk right up to a man who had collaborated with the Empire, who had captured them for the sick amusement of a cruel gangster, who was supposed to have unceremoniously and embarrassingly plunged to his death before her eyes and now who dared to lay a hand on her husband.
Something had possessed her to grab Fett by the hair, haul him up to his feet, and to kiss him breathless.
Licking her dry lips, she remembers how Fett's mouth had felt against her own, sudden and hot and demanding. She remembers how his hands felt curled around her sides, how they sank into her hair. She remembers how Fett felt under her own hands; solidly built like her husband, but broader, heavier, and marked by far too many old faded scars that made her want to ask questions she knew even then that she'd never get a straight answer for.
She remembers how it had felt to be pinned beneath Fett's weight and heat, remembers Han's moans in one ear and Fett's harsh, panting breaths in the other, remembers the heat and pleasure between their bodies that built to a flashpoint that engulfed them and whited out her mind.
She remembers the morning after, waking up in her husband's arms, Fett nowhere to be seen, as if the whole thing had been nothing but a particularly vivid dream.
Han had confirmed that it was not in fact a dream, after an almost embarrassing amount of apologies, about half of which she'd been too tired to register. After insisting on making his point with some of the better before-breakfast orgasms she'd experienced in her life, he'd admitted that he still harboured some feelings for the hunter, something that went far back to their days working for the Hutts, when Han had found himself more attractive as a companion than as a payday for Fett.
She'd asked why he hadn't just asked Fett to stay with him. Then he'd told her with a look of such sadness that the hunter wasn't like him.
Men like Fett are shooting stars, he'd explained. They're brilliant while they last in your life, but they never stay, and never return.
Except Fett had returned.
The transport continues its descent, the droid voice calling out stops and levels as they travel deeper and deeper into Axxila's lower city, while Leia sinks deeper into her thoughts and memories.
Leia remembers the night Fett had come back, almost as vividly as their first encounter. She can't remember the name of the humid moon, or the planet it orbited. She now really only recalls three of them in the tiny room with the barely-functioning air conditioner, the sweat and the stickiness nothing compared to the ecstasy that two sets of hands and mouths working in concert could bring. She also remembers the time after that, on the floor of the Falcon's tiny cabin, the sounds of their pleasure muffled under the thick furs that kept them warm while the northern snows of Lothal battered the ship's hull. Then the fourth visit, a fifth, a sixth. She remembers whispering to Han, on a night long after she'd lost count, while they held hands over the hunter's sleeping form. Fett was like a comet that only *seemed* to go where it pleases, she said, and that maybe, just maybe they were like the planet that kept him circling back into their orbit.
Leia still isn't sure what keeps Fett coming back to her, to Han. Perhaps it's just something as simple as lust, a way to blow off steam without anything so binding as a formal relationships. Perhaps he likes to have two people willing to continue the fiction of his death as a convenient cover for whatever he does when he's not with them, and the sex is his way of keeping them quiet. Perhaps he loves them both in his own baffling, mysterious way; but then again, she isn't sure if Fett can even understand something like love.
Perhaps it's none of these things, and the three of them have barely scratched the surface of what they all really mean to each other.
The droid voice calls out another stop, the last before the line ends. She leaves by the rearmost door, feeling a bit lightheaded. Her slightly shaky steps go thankfully unnoticed by the stream of people too busy going on their own way. Counting the building numbers lit in flickery red neon, she jogs up a few steps, up to a blocky, squat tower with a familiar four digits. That, and a sign reading "Hotel - Vacancy" written in Basic, Huttese and Mando'a are the only things that mark the it out from the rest of the buildings that crowd the street. Inside the lobby it's even less distinct, the same kind of interior that every mid-to-low-price-range, no-questions asked hotel in the galaxy has - nondescript, bland, and impersonal.
There's no-one else there, thankfully, besides a bored-looking Togrutan girl parked behind the check-in desk by the lift. She barely registers Leia's presence, and only looks up from the holo-novella in her lap until she's standing right in front of her.
"I have a room reserved here. 203," she says, managing to keep her voice steady.
The Tog doesn't say anything, but looks her up and down with vague interest, wide blue eyes lingering a bit on the small blaster strapped at her thigh. Whether it's because she also recognizes Leia or is just vaguely suspicious of an armed stranger wanting in on a room that, according to the booking computer, already has two occupants, it doesn't matter. Either way, a fifty-credit chip gets her the key card and a half-hearted "enjoy your stay" that gets cut off as the lift's door shuts.
Riding upwards in the dull, steel-lined car with a carpet best left ignored, Leia is once more alone with her thoughts.
There was a time when Leia would have stopped for a moment, to really think what she was doing here, what she'd gotten herself into. What she was about to do, again, without even thinking. Leia Organa, Hero of the New Republic, definitely would have. She would have felt embarrassed at letting her desire get the better of her. She would have worried about what the consequences of this being known by the public would be. She would have stood there and thought herself into a standstill, if not simply turned on her heels and made tracks right back to the city's surface.
The lift judders to a halt, and the doors rumble open. At the end of the hallway the numbers 2, 0, and 3 flicker in the dim night-time lighting like the lure of a deep-sea hunter, and it's all Leia can do not to dash towards it knowing what waits for her behind it. Instead, she takes a deep breath before she steps out of the lift, and the doors roll shut behind her.
Officially, she and Han are separated. Officially, Boba Fett is dead. Officially, Leia Organa would never, ever do anything like this.
The truth, of course; is always more complicated.