Meeting Like This

Chapter 3: Tatooine I

 Time slowed to a crawl, and all of the noise in Jabba's throne room faded into a faint, humming blur. Leia didn't look around to see who was fleeing and who was preparing to fight. If there was noise, she couldn't hear it.

She heard, first and foremost, the shrieking alarm of the thermal detonator in her hand, interspersed with her own pounding heart.

A second passed like an eternity, than another. Under her stifling disguise, a trickle of sweat ran down the back of her neck.

Jabba the Hutt began to laugh.

"This bounty hunter is my kind of scum," the ganglord chortled. "Fearless and inventive."

Her hand was beginning to cramp, but Leia forced herself to hold while C-3P0 translated the Hutt's counter offer. As far as Jabba knew, she was an Ubanese bounty hunter named Boushh who didn't speak or understand Huttese.

"Jabba offers you the sum of thirty-five thousand," the droid squeaked. "And I do suggest you take it."

Her thumb eased back the detonator's pin. This part of the plan had been Lando's idea, and one that Leia hadn't fully understood until this moment. Obviously they needed a way to get Chewie in, but why draw attention to herself? Why not try to blend in?

"Zeebuss," she hissed through her helmet's voice modifier, and as Threepio joyfully translated her agreement, the room erupted into raucous cheers.

Maybe Lando had a point. By doing something compulsively greedy and reckless, this was blending in. She looked around the throne room at the appreciative audience, and then her gaze fell on Boba Fett. His gloved hands were crossed over his rifle, his t-shaped visor aimed directly at her.

"Right behind you," she said under her breath.

His helmet tilted forward in a slow, deliberate nod and Leia's heart stopped beating in a moment of blind paranoia. There was no way he could have heard her across this noisy chamber, and no way he could know who she really was. Fett was cunning and resourceful, but the chase was at an end now.

The nod was a gesture between two hunters, she reasoned. An acknowledgment, maybe even a little "I've got my eye on you, buddy" antagonism. Even if he suspected something, he couldn't really know. She took a deep, steadying breath and turned away. The adrenaline she'd felt while bargaining with Jabba was wearing off, and a shiver ran up her back. Suddenly she had a bad feeling about this.

________

"Get your hands off of me!" Leia struggled fiercely but the Gammorean guards hauled her forward, causing her stumble on the rough stone floor. They caught her roughly as she fell, jerking her back to her feet and grunting as they dragged her down a dark corridor. In the distance, Leia could still hear the throne room's clamor, the celebration of her capture was still going full swing.

She'd known it was a possibility, of course, but she'd expected to be taken to a dungeon cell like Chewbacca and Han. Instead, she was marched to what she could only assume was a harem, populated by young, attractive dancers and slaves. She was stripped of the remainder of her disguise, fitted with a cold metal collar around her throat and forced to put on some humiliating scraps of cloth and metal that barely passed for clothing.

Sometime while they were doing her hair and make up, the red-eyed Twi'lik who served as Jabba's majordomo came in and whispered something to the harem mistress. She looked Leia over with hard, speculative eyes.

"Tonight?" she said in Huttese, and the Twi'lik confirmed it. "He'll have a fight on his hands," she replied, but she seemed more intrigued then displeased. "Send me two guards. I'll have her delivered to his chamber."