Chapter Text
She had been on worse missions than this one, she told herself.
The mission to Galgurga, where she had been separated from Luke and had to find her way through the swamp by herself, half blind in the dark. The mission to Rakrenzi, where Milla and Reg decided to blow off some steam in the bunk next to hers.
Her examples were light, so what? Bad missions — the truly bad kind — were better left forgotten.
Hurtling away from Home One even as Chewbacca flew the Falcon the opposite way to help set up the new base on Hoth, Leia looked across the cockpit to the captain. He wasn’t watching her, focused on his calculations, the tendons of his neck shifting in high relief as he rolled his head, a quirk of his.
A twisting feeling in her gut directed her eyes away. Perhaps she had better start thinking of reasons this mission was awful, after all.
“Hey, Your Regalness!”
Leia rolled herself out from underneath the speeder and glared at him. He was leaning against it, grinning in that way that never boded well.
Covered in engine grease, she felt anything but regal.
“Can I help you, Captain?”
“I’m sure you could, sweetheart, but I’ve got a question for you instead,” he said.
He clearly wasn’t going to go on without a response, just grinning at her like that. She groaned, sitting up.
“I’m listening.”
“Is it true you bathe in milk?”
Leia’s hand went to her face in exasperation. At the moment, she would give secret plans just to bathe in anything.
For good measure, she gestured at herself.
“Where did you get that delusion, grav head?”
“I didn’t mean now,” he said. “But say, before. I thought that’s what all the fancy people do on planets like Alderaan and Coruscant.”
For some reason, he was the only one she could bare to hear talk about Alderaan. Possibly because he was the only one who didn’t treat the subject like glass, like doom. Like the end of her world.
“I have never bathed in milk, Captain,” Leia said. “Nor have I known anyone who claims to.”
“That’s a lie, though,” Han said. “I saw some once. In a bottle. In one of those water showers at some place on Trikkinci.”
Leia blinked.
“That’s called soap.”
He didn’t fire back, only looked at her funny. Something dawned on her.
“Was that your first water shower, Captain?”
“I didn’t use it,” Han said. There was a bravado there she knew, nearly three years after meeting him. He wanted her to think there was some glory in his masculinity, in the idea that he hadn’t showered, but there beneath…
“You didn’t know how, did you?”
She smiled. There, around his ears, was a sort of red. He might have been smiling a little bit, too.
“Pretty wasteful, fancy stuff, just soaking yourself in water,” he mumbled.
Leia stood up.
“It isn’t wasteful in places like Alderaan. The water made up most of the planet. After we used it, we cleaned it and returned it, almost better than it was before.”
“Water makes up most of Corellia, too, exalted one,” Han said. “And nobody’s getting in that water.”
“No,” Leia said. She nodded. “Corellia is too industrialized. It’s contaminated.”
She was about to go back to her work, the speeder was up for inspection in two time parts anyway, when suddenly she realized something.
“Ha— Captain,” she asked, spinning around. She knew from the look in his eyes that her smile was fatal. “You don’t know how to swim, do you?”
Ord Mantell.
Carlist set it up.
It was an important mission, there’s no doubt about that. They needed to speak with the appointed delegate from the Trianatt System. But he was tracked, watched, seen. He could not make his way out to the rim where they were stationed.
Instead, he would go where delegates often go — on a pleasure trip. The boiling mineral pools of Ord Mantell are known galaxy-wide as a cure for many diseases, but most of all work. If in the private areas he so happened to meet a young honeymooning couple, like so many honeymooning couples who go to bathe on the planet, no one would blink.
One room.
One bed.
A chaise, too, for good measure.
Three nights.
She went back and forth between which motive she wanted to believe. She settled on peace. The constant bickering distracted the troops, diffused the orderly appearance of command. The captain’s actions encouraged insubordination.
It would be a tactic she had used often, both in the senate and on behalf of the Alliance: when two cannot settle their differences, lock them up together. They will find a way or the strongest will survive.
Han swiveled his head toward her, a glint in his eye as he caught her own. She could feel him preen at her blush.
She hoped to everything that peace was Carlist’s only motivation.
He was pretty sure he gaped when he saw her walking toward her at the hangar.
Pretty sure. As in, there was a chance he didn’t.
He almost definitely did.
She had been wearing uniforms for the past two years. Flight jackets. Vests. Sturdy pants. Work boots.
She wore white as much as she could, even though it stained. And somehow, for a princess, she was stained a lot. There were plenty of women, and men for that matter, on base who did their operational duties behind computers. Clean.
But she was always covered in whatever the machines were covered in that week, a sonic next to her as she tried to look at least presentable.
“I thought princesses were supposed to be, like, dainty or something,” He said one day as she wheeled her way out from under Luke’s X-Wing. “How come you’re the only one I’ve met and you’re covered in grease all the time?”
“Well, for one, I was adopted,” she muttered. Han nearly choked on the sweet grapple he was eating.
“Adopted.”
“Adopted.” She said.
“I didn’t think royal people did that,” Han said.
“Well, my parents did.”
He studied her.
“So this is all an act,” he said. He was grinning. “The walking all straight and the fancy talk and all that. Really, you’re just an orphan like me and Luke.”
That was the danger of going and pulling princesses out from under spacecraft. It made you want to stay.
Han would have himself entirely convinced it was time to go pay off Jabba. And then he’d wander into a garage, find Leia covered in oil.
And every time he decided he could take on one more supply run or set of training exercises.
“No,” she said. She stood up and smiled back at him. “Unlike you, I was taught some manners growing up.”
But this, on the hangar… this wasn’t an act. This was everything he could have imagined she was when she was somewhere else. Somewhere where she wasn’t around somebody like him.
The big green gown rustled as she walked, and had little gold… things… all over it. It kept going several feet behind her. As she walked, he realized it changed color in the light. As she walked, he realized how she kind of looked like she was floating when she wanted to.
And then there was her hair.
Half of it was caught up in two little pouches over her ears. The rest of it bounced around her, loose, as though it were floating, too.
Her face looked pretty, too.
“Captain,” she said. There was something there between a smile and a question.
“Princess,” Han choked. Leia’s eyebrow quirked.
“You aren’t dressed, Captain.”
Startled, he looked down. He was dressed. But, right, not the way he was supposed to be. He thought of the emerald green pantaloons crushed into his knapsack and shuddered.
“I really have to wear that stuff?” He whined. “Ah c’mon, I thought it was a joke.”
Leia’s eyebrows stitched up farther. There was a smirk.
“Our cover is to be Naboo gentry, Captain,” she said. “We can hardly pass into Ord Mantell if you look like a scarecrock come to life.”
He bristled, but sighed. He wasn’t going to wear that ridiculous outfit on base, he wasn’t going to give her that much satisfaction.
“I’ll change on the ship,” he muttered.
It was lurid. A pale purple shuttle hardly larger than a speeder, hardly better equipped than a pleasure cruiser. Like the ridiculous outfits, it, too, came from Naboo.
“So I don’t know much about this planet we’re supposedly from,” Han said. “That’s probably something that should have been in my briefing packet.”
“Oh,” Leia said.
He waited, shifting his eyes over to her.
“I grew up learning about Naboo, I assumed everyone did,” Leia said. She was frowning. “I don’t know why. It was very important to my father that I learned about the planet.”
“Not me, Princess,” he said. “Blank slate.”
The title came out of him so easily today. Not like pulling teeth like it usually did. By the way her eyebrow crooked up at him, he knew she noticed.
“We should probably start using our cover names, Captain,” Leia said.
“Alright, Melila,” Han said. It was pretty. Leia smiled. “What?”
“It sounds like a name my father used to call me,” Leia said. “I think that’s why Carlist chose it.”
She barely ever broke through that facade, the one where people were humans. It wasn’t Carlist or Mon, it was the General or the Supreme Leader.
Captain.
“So, Gavec,” she said. “What do you need to know about Naboo?”
Melila and Gavec Penderen. Room 816 of the Watercress. A great limestone resort that looked more like a fortress.
“If this is the sort of mission they send you on but no one else, I might just sign on as your personal pilot,” Han muttered.
“The only missions where you haven’t been my personal pilot have ended up in a swamp or a desert,” Leia muttered back. Han’s eyes slid over to meet hers, and he grinned.
Once in the room, Leia surveyed their accommodations. Their baggage was unpacked, as she expected. Han seemed perturbed that anyone had touched his belongings, but Leia had made sure he had nothing sensitive on him. She continued to circle the room until she found it: a small black dot attached to a wall, no larger than an insect.
“What’s that?” Han asked, noticing her reaching up and poking it with the end of the thin-barreled pistol blaster she had concealed in her pocket. “And I thought you said not to come armed?”
“A peep spy,” Leia said. “Give me your knife, I need something to scrape it.”
Han handed her the knife she knew he kept in the instep of his left boot. She cut the device off the wall and held it in her hand.
“It’s Triani,” Leia said, satisfied.
She walked out onto the balcony and dropped the little bead over the side. Han started to speak, but she held a finger to her lips until she finished her circuit. With his right foot he stepped up onto a small table, his hand on his boot where Leia knew he had a blaster.
“Should we be concerned that our liaison bugged our room?” Han drawled, as Leia dropped her hand and gave him a small nod of approval.
“It’s pretty standard,” Leia said. “If anything, they want to make sure that we’re not an easy target for others.”
“So you just enter into these negotiations with these groups you don’t know if you can trust, and just deal with the fact that they’re openly trying to spy on you?”
“You didn’t think it was easy, did you?” Leia asked. She laughed. “Be careful, Solo. Someone might mistake your for naive.”
She grinned as she turned away, back over to the dresser. She could feel his eyes on her profile, sizing her up. It wasn’t the first time.
“Gods help whoever crossed you in the senate,” he said. “Hell, how’d you even hide that blaster in there?”
“There’s a bigger one strapped to my leg,” she said. She reached back into the large pockets built into the framing of the dress and pulled out a pair of data pads. She handed one to Han.
“There’s a code box up here that we’ll stash these in while we’re out at the baths. Milla gave me a code to override the default settings, so the staff won’t be able to break in."
“You aren’t serious about this thing about the baths,” Han said. Leia frowned at him.
“It’s our cover,” she said. “We’re hardly convincing as honeymooners if we don’t at least visit the baths.”
“We’re honeymooners, we don’t have to leave the room,” Han said. He wiggled his eyebrows futilely and Leia rolled her eyes.
“We’re going,” she said. “They’re shallow. You won’t even have to learn to swim.”
“I can swim,” Han said, shifting his weight. Leia rolled her eyes again and reached into the wardrobe, taking out a light blue nightgown.
“Sure you can, hotshot. I’m going to go change.”