Urdur
By Knighted Rogue
see You Could Use Another Good Kiss home page
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He was well-toned and interested, she knew, because he kept giving her a sheepish grin and staring down at her shoes when she asked him questions.
On a cold planet like hers, one didn’t often find attractive, tanned men worth the time to ogle, and the exoticness of the man’s look was enough to draw attention from even the homeliest women beside her. Pictures of models on Urdur always made them look serene, like ice or maybe glass, circumspect and polished and arcane. Mottled blue eyes, flat-lined blond hair, hard angular features and a pronounced brow—that was the local aesthetic. With a flurry of brown hair and sometimes-captivating hazel eyes, it stood to reason that their hyperdrive mechanic was an outsider. Tanned muscle notwithstanding, his nose was crooked, he smiled out of one side of his mouth, and he was beyond the scope of normal Urdur male beauty.
Maybe a failed pilot, then. Someone who’d seen some of the galaxy.
The quiet submissiveness was a ruse, though the girls beside her obviously didn’t see through it if the tell-tale giggle meant anything. Cora herself had this overwhelming impression that he was dangerous, one knife-fight away from abandoning the ho-hum hyperspace mechanic existence and blowing exhaust tails into the Corporate Sector. She pictured the man as a freighter bum, a hired hand, and dismissed it. In charge, she thought. Man of his own destiny.
“Well, Ms. Lybeth, I think we may have figured out what to do with your ship.” He stood ramrod straight, dusting his hands off on his trousers. “It’s the motivators, not the hyperdrive itself. Good thing, too, because our parts stock hasn’t been updated in a few weeks.”
“How long, then?” She’d need a week at least to get him to the house. She couldn’t look too desperate. “And, please. It’s Cora.”
“Cora.” She had the impression his natural voice was deeper, more filling, and had an unbidden impression that maybe, just maybe, he was more dangerous that she had initially thought. Oh, okay. You’ve got a past, then. “Two weeks. Maybe more. Want me to notify you when something looks decent?”
“No. I’ll come in.” She smiled. “I’d like to check on it myself.”
Cora Lybeth turned her back on the mechanic, faced the girls and pushed through them, bee-lining for her lady-in-waiting. “Cap, escort my dear ladies to their vehicle.”
Cap nodded, her eyes flicking down, then turned and led the group down the ramp to the lot where their speeders were all parked. Cora thought, for just a second, that if the short brown hair of her newest servant was grown out, maybe the poor woman could find her own plaything. Then she turned and whisked away, mentally preparing herself for the week ahead.
What was supposed to have happened didn’t happen because he was an overprotective bastard and he thought it was too dangerous a role for her to play.
That’s what she thought.
Han knew differently. What was supposed to have happened didn’t happen because he was overprotective, yes, but it had more to do with him being tired of losing her. Every time she had to play a woman that she wasn’t, she shrugged it off and called it part of the job. It was hard on her, though, when she made herself into sacrificial-Leia, and he hated it when it happened. He needed just one mission to end without her apologizing to him.
So he’d altered the plan a little. Instead of going after the husband, they were going after the wife. Hopefully, him seducing someone would work just as well as Leia seducing someone, and, if everything went alright, he would make an ass out of himself and they would laugh about it all later.
That’s what was supposed to happen.
Leia had suggested that his only real marketable skills were piloting and fixing his damn ship, and, to tell the truth, she was right. It made sense for Han to be inserted as a ship-techie. On Urdur, the need for reliable hyperdrive specialists was always dire, so he’d grabbed a few oil-stained shirts and got to work. He’d expected to be caught by now, though Leia’s philosophy of “hidden in plain sight” seemed to apply here particularly well. His real identity—or hers—hadn’t come to light. His paranoia made him forget that they’d both been out of the public sight for years now.
The irony of working on Urdur—home to Jessa and Klaus Vandengande’s interstellar repair base, and a big place filled to the core with his past life as a lowlife—was not lost on him. It was a good thing Leia was content to leave his past in the past, because there were a million things here that were a little too memory-lane-scary-as-hell for him to be truly comfortable with their assignment.
The next time Cora went to the maintenance bay, his sleeves were rolled up past his elbows, so she caught glimpses of forearm and skin when he took his hands out of the paneling of her ship.
“How’s she doing, Mr. Terno?”
He looked up, startled, she thought. She hadn’t worn heeled shoes today. “She’s doing great, Mrs. Lybeth. Pulling through nicely, I’d say.”
He smiled and she remembered why she had considered him dangerous in the first place: he knew beyond what he shared. Something about him was an act, though she wasn’t sure what it was, and it felt like he was capable of doing quite a bit of damage if he ever got around to it. The danger was part of the attraction, however: the danger and the anonymity. It was a glorious, freeing feeling and one she was ready to pursue.
“My name is Cora,” she said, stepping towards him and tilting her head up. “And that’s excellent news. I think it’s worth celebrating.”
There was a slip in his mask, but it was covered up quickly. The arrangement they made was less than what she was looking for, but more than enough to cover what she needed, and so she left quietly, her slippered feet gliding across the bay floor, humming to herself and thinking about tanned skin and those sometimes-captivating hazel eyes.
There was no way in hell he was going to bail out of this, though all the incentive in the world was there.
What hurt the most, he thought, was not the idea of meeting Cora Lybeth at her house, because that was private and he could be covert when he wanted to be. She was vicariously adventurous and narcissistic to the extreme, and he wondered about the man that had agreed to marry her. But she was essentially harmless, untrained to use any of the weapons her husband’s company produced, and she wasn’t strong enough to really get him down if it came to a hand-to-hand fight.
The hardest part was acting like a complete idiot and endlessly dealing with a woman that was as ego-centric and delusional as Lando Calrissian had ever pretended to be. He was used to women wanting him; he wasn’t used to swallowing all the things they said at face value.
Nevertheless, he now had a dinner date with his mark, and he couldn’t back out of it. Iif it were Leia in the pilot’s seat, she wouldn’t think of ejecting. If he did, she wouldn’t ever let him hear the end of it. And he didn’t think he’d survive the rest of his natural life if she were to be proven right about this mission and his abilities as an actor.
So he sighed, went back to his quarters, and fought off the desire to drink the anticipatory bottle of wine he had stashed under his bed for when they finished this damn mission. He really didn’t want it, but he needed all the fortitude he could get.
Cora was pleased when he arrived just before the time she had told him, dressed in a nicer version of the white work shirt and casual trousers. He’d smiled at her as he entered her home, and she guided him through the hallways until they reached the dining area, telling him basic histories of the sculptures that lined the walkway. When they reached the table where the food lay, she got distracted by the crease in the skin between his eyes. She watched him carefully as he took in the decor, the wine, the place settings.
Something was off, she could tell. He wasn’t looking at her, not really. His eyes took too long to scout the room, and she noticed how they flicked to the back door and her mother’s silk frame, as if he were evaluating something she couldn’t see.
“Is something wrong?”
He looked at her, and she had the distinct impression that he desperately wanted to say something, but wouldn’t. “I’m just warm, is all.” He fingered the collar of his shirt. “The wrong shirt to wear tonight, I guess.”
He laughed softly after he said it, and she eyed him carefully. She couldn’t put her finger on it. The mechanic looked completely normal, and he hadn’t said anything to make her think otherwise. She settled for being slightly ill-at-ease and refocused on her plan, sitting down and gesturing for him to do the same.
“The food looks great.”
She nodded. “My cook is absolutely incredible.” She uncovered two plates. “This is an Urdurian favorite; I’m assuming you haven’t been here long enough to have tried the local delicacies?”
He nodded and began eating, easing into his chair and leaning back slightly. The man was a mystery to her; she was relaxing as he was, but the twinge of danger she felt was still a very insistent itch in the back of her throat. They shared the dinner and an interesting conversation, in which he confessed he wasn’t used to fine dining and she confessed that she found his skin fascinating. The dinner loosened his tongue, she could tell, and he would laugh and tease her at the same time that she spoke in innuendo and batted her eyelashes.
The wine was good stock, too, perfectly charming in it’s simplicity but high in alcoholic content, and she was secretly pleased with her choice when he complimented it. In fact, she was not-so-secretly pleased with the entire evening thus far. He’d proven to be as awkwardly attentive and amusing as she had imagined, and a great find for her intents and purposes.
“Mr. Terno,” she said, as she finished her meal and decided that he should be done with his as well, “what exactly did you think of this invitation when I made it?”
He blinked. “I thought we were having dinner.”
His words were completely at odds with his eyes. “No you didn’t.” She stood up and crossed the room to manually lower the light setting. “I think you know more than you let on.”
He gave a funny-looking smile and looked off to the side. “I think you’re imagining things.” But he stood up as he said it, and that gruff grace was back, replacing the awkward, boyish charm. She was quietly surprised that he didn’t move towards her, but chalked it up to a desire to draw out the suspense as much as possible.
“Imagining things?” He nodded, and she moved back towards him. “Mr. Terno, I don’t know what you—”
She didn’t get the rest of her sentence out, because she was turning, slowly, to see what he had drawn his attention away from her. His eyes had snapped up, and a full measure of anger showed on his face. This is the man, she thought and then forgot what she’d been doing as he grabbed her arm, pulled her up against his chest, and kissed her.
He had no fucking idea what he was doing.
He was furious, angry at Leia because she was there, because she stood on the landing, the last step from upstairs and because she was making him feel guilty for seducing the mark that he was supposed to be seducing.
All he could picture in his mind were the other men, the ones he’d fought and killed time and time again in every dark nightmare he’d had for the past three years, and the whole scene was wiped down with a darker shade of reality than his dreams. It took him a second to realize that it was, in fact, something other than an angry, all-consuming, fire-pitted dream, that his anger burned deep in the part of his head that knew better, that he had no way to stop the bruising sensation of complete betrayal and disbelief.
The cloud started to dissipate. It was irrational to react like this. But it also felt incredibly good to know that this time, just this once, she had to watch him doing something wrong, something ugly and just damn stupid because of a job, because of a mark, because the brass had said ‘jump’ and he hadn’t even bothered to ask ‘how high?’
The word punishment came to mind and stopped him cold as he looked at her on the archaic stairwell, dressed in a ridiculous servant outfit, hand on the banister and supremely dead expression on her face. He had an odd feeling, his mind detaching from his body as he kissed the mark and watched his wife, and all he could think of was punishment.
The moment stretched abysmally, and he felt the mark’s hand in his hair. He wasn’t lucid enough to taste her, to feel the pressure of her mouth, to hear her sighs. The back of his head was the only part of his body he was aware of, the hand sliding around his hair and pulling and then he was yanked out of the kiss, out of the spell, as his mark released him.
She was talking. He wasn’t even looking at her.
A million thoughts went through his head as he heard a deep voice growling behind him, before he felt his jaw snap under the momentum of a meaty fist, before he tumbled down and hit his head, automatically throwing his palms up to protect himself. The word punishment rang around in his head as he pressed a hand to his temple and stood up. He took a second to orient himself, then joined the fray, drawing the mark’s husband away from Leia, leaving her to set up a roundhouse kick on the Cora Lybeth, dropping the older woman to the ground.
The man wasn’t much of a fight against Han, but he focused on him anyway, trying to block out the unsatisfying weight of recognition, of knowing what he actually felt, and being almost entirely unable to. He settled for a punch in the stomach and the brief thought that he hoped his jaw wasn’t broken.
They’d broken into the safe in almost complete silence; the flight back to the Remnant - their home-base at the moment - was a mess of heavy breathing and the awkward feeling that there was too much to say to actually be said.
To Han it felt like a silent fight, like they were hurling incriminations at each other without opening their mouths at all. It was probably for the best, because his jaw felt unhitched and bruised and tender, and he was hit by the sudden understanding that he’d have to take this to a medical center, and soon. He tried to say so, but the wave of pain he felt when he tried to speak made him think twice about it.
Instead, he spent the ride back trying to figure out what the hell he had been doing.
The truth was that he didn’t have a clue. He had a hazy, adrenalin-infused memory of what he assumed was the last few hours, but he found himself unwilling to trust himself. His actions felt more automatic than anything, and more monumental than it would look in the report to the brass; he’d kissed his mark to distract her and it was simply unfortunate that the husband had come home early. The kiss itself hadn’t done any harm – the husband would’ve started the fight regardless - and sex was a demonstrable weapon in the NRI’s arsenal.
Hell, it was a weapon in their arsenal. The promise of sex got a lot more done than talking—or interrogation—did. Took less time, too.
A pair of emotions ran through a loop in his head: remnant anger to confused guilt. The anger he understood well enough to shove aside, but the guilt was completely irrational. He hadn’t done anything wrong; he hadn’t slept with the woman, he hadn’t crossed any lines or boundaries or broken any laws.
He was astute enough to realize that, in this case, ‘crossing lines’ meant more than simple physical action. He’d wanted Leia to see, to watch. He’d wanted her to feel as angry and embarrassed as he did when she did it to him. Jealousy was an easy concept to define, until you dealt with it yourself; then it became much more nebulous. He hadn’t realized how jealous he was, how angry, until he had been trying to make her jealous and angry, too.
Stupid, he thought. Stupid to think that this wouldn’t come up.
They ducked inside the communications alcove, and Han watched the door hiss closed behind him. He assumed Leia would be filing the report, because he suspected he looked beyond injured and was edging closer to hospitalized as the seconds ticked down. The alcove itself was hard and cold and sterile, and he had the fleeting thought that intelligence reports would be filed with more expediency if they put alcohol in the room. Maybe then people who weren’t Leia would bother to submit them on time.
He waited, voiceless, as Leia hooked up the comm equipment and readied the frequencies. It wasn’t a long process, but he was feeling his jaw more and more. If they offered it to him, he’d take whatever drug they had on hand, if only to stop his jaw from killing him and to fast-forward past this whole mission. It needed to be done and over and never spoken about again.
“Corp Center, number 2285. Verbal report to commence shortly.”
Leia turned from the projector and looked at him. She reached out a hand and ran an index finger over his bottom lip, then grabbed his hand and pulled him into the holo interface.
“Go ahead. We’re receiving.”
“Sir, this is Leia Organa Solo reporting a complete success on mission 0430. Objective was attained with minimum property damage.” Her voice was strong, and he wondered why she suddenly sounded like a politician again. “I have no critical injuries, though my husband may have a cracked jaw and a concussion.”
He disagreed with her on the diagnosis.
“Subjects one and two are being detained on-planet and we swept the scene for anything of interest to investigators.”
She deflated. It was enough to make him raise an eyebrow, because her posture cracked only a tiny bit, and her face retained her pride, but her eyes looked bigger than he’d seen them.
“Captain Solo and I have successfully completed eighty-two percent of the missions we have been assigned in the past six years. Never once have we filed formal complaint charges or requested a transfer. On the basis of our merit, our success rate, and our loyalty to the department, I formally request our honorable discharge from New Republic Intelligence, effective immediately.”
He had been waiting two years to hear those words come out of her, or his, mouth. Had he been able to move his jaw, he would have vocalized his happiness so that the pilots in the rooms next door would have been woken up. He settled for a slight sway from one foot to the other, which she misunderstood and shifted as if to hold his weight if his knees gave out.
“Inform us when the discharge paperwork is complete. We will arrive on Coruscant in three days. Out.”
She turned to him, and her eyes were hard again. She lifted a hand to his cheek, was careful as she touched his swelling jaw and he wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Did I ever tell you the story of Trontric Greye?”
He shook his head.
“It’s an old story.” She stopped to button up one more clasp on his shirt. “The moral of it is that if you take things for granted, they leave.”
He absorbed that and was happy she didn’t expect him to say anything, because it wouldn’t have fit the circumstance at all. The possibilities flew through his head, and he settled for thinking I won’t as loudly to her as he could.
“Thank you,” she said, stepping down off the display, pulling on his hand, “but I’m not taking the chance.”
The End