| Author |
Topic:
Blood and Ashes; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Tied for Best Underrated, Winter Awards
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GrandAdmiralV
Registered:
May '05
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Date Posted:
7/23/05 10:00pm
Subject:
Blood and Ashes; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Tied for Best Underrated, Winter Awards
- Date Edited:
4/15/06 10:50am (16 edits total)
Edited By:
GrandAdmiralV
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NOTE: I moved this from the Beyond the Saga forum, because, as spiritgurl pointed out, it begins right before the end of ROTJ and should really be here instead.
Title: Blood and Ashes
Author: GrandAdmrlV
Characters: Boba Fett, Miele (OC)
Timeframe: During and immediately post-ROTJ
Genre: Drama, Romance
Summary: Miele has her own reasons for being in Jabba's palace. But when she's forced to play reluctant nursemaid to a wounded Boba Fett, she finds her life taking a very different path.... (Slightly AU, since there is a different version of Fett's return in Tales of the Bounty Hunters, but this is my idea of what could have happened instead.)
Cover Art!
Also, if you're interested in more OC romances, you might want to check out the An Original Romance discussion thread and index!
Blood and Ashes
They had been gone far too long, that much she knew. Although there were no chronos in the kitchens of Jabba's palace, Miele had trained herself to make a rough estimate of the passage of time without any visual aids. She knew that at least four and possibly closer to five hours had to have passed since the inhabitants of Jabba's palace had enthusiastically climbed aboard his sail barge to watch the baiting and eventual deaths of his latest batch of prisoners. One of them had even looked a little familiar, as if she'd seen him on the streets of Anchorhead, but she knew better than to hope she could do anything to save him.
Unlike the others, she had no stomach for that sort of thing. The palace had emptied down to the lowliest kitchen drudge -- save for her. She had a knack for hiding in shadows, making herself easily overlooked, and so no one had come looking for her when she had vanished into one of the larders as everyone else was hastening out the rear entrance of the palace and onto the barge. At the time she had only thanked whatever powers might be that she would have a few hours of uninterrupted time to resume her careful slicing into Jabba's security system.
That fat slug would probably have had an apoplexy if he knew how far she had already gotten, but she was careful to cover her tracks. Anyhow, she knew the basics of the system well enough; it was her father who had programmed it, after all, and he had trained Miele in the tricks of the trade. Good thing that Jabba hadn't bothered to investigate Lestan Fels closely enough to discover that Tatooine's best slicer had a daughter, let alone one who rivaled her father in her ways with a security system. No, Jabba had thought himself very clever to hire Fels and then have him killed once the security system was in place. He hadn't thought that there was anyone on this miserable rock who would bother to avenge the dead slicer.
She had come here two months ago, already aware of what had probably happened to her father, and she'd been careful to come disguised. Jabba's lechery was legendary, and Miele, after carefully regarding her reflection before setting out, had come to the dispassionate conclusion that she was just pretty enough to attract attention if she didn't do something to alter her appearance. Nothing drastic, of course, but it was amazing what deliberately dirty hair pulled back in a severe knot, a few carefully applied blemishes, and exaggerated shadows under one's eyes could do to make a person look absolutely unappealing. Even so, she'd been on the receiving end of a few nastily significant glances from Bib Fortuna, Jabba's majordomo. She counted herself lucky that it hadn't gone any farther than that -- and perhaps his unhealthy interest was what had led him to hire her in the first place.
But now -- she settled back on her heels and sighed. She'd made good progress during the past few hours and felt confident that, given a little more time, she would finally be able to slice the codes that protected Jabba's vaults and gain access to the treasures she knew he hoarded there. Of course she would never be able to bring her father back, but at least she could steal his murderer blind and finally get herself away from this forsaken planet once and for all.
The silence around her was disturbing. She knew the palace as well as anyone, but it was an unsettling place even when fully occupied and much worse when it was apparently deserted, as it seemed now. What could possibly have happened? There had been whispers that one of the captives claimed to be a Jedi Knight, but she had dismissed that rumor out of hand. The Jedi Knights had been dead and gone for a long, long time.
Still....
Miele pushed her chair away from the computer console in the guards' chamber. Like the rest of the palace, the room had been hewn out of the native Tatooine sandstone, but the banks of machines were an incongruous note in the otherwise primitive surroundings. It was cool in here, though, the conditioners working overtime to ensure that the precious computers didn't overheat. Perhaps it was the temperature of the room that made her shiver.
Or perhaps it was something else. She suddenly felt that she couldn't stand the silence a moment longer. The air seemed laden with ghosts suddenly; she wondered how many hapless prisoners had met violent deaths in the palace, and she shivered again, harder this time.
Anything would be better than sitting here and wondering until she slowly drove herself mad. She remember how her father used to tease her for her endless questions. Why are there two suns, Da?...Why do the sandpeople hate everyone else?...Why do stormtroopers wear that armor? Aren't they hot?
Anything of course, but the questions she had really wanted to ask. Why don't I have a mother like everyone else? Why did she hate me so much that she left? But even at five Miele had known better than to ask some questions....
Shaking her head as if to rid herself of these unpleasant recollections, Miele made a sudden decision. She knew where the palace 'speeders were kept, and of course she would have no difficulty getting through the security system that sheltered them. If something really had gone wrong, wasn't it her responsibility to discover what had happened? She hadn't allowed herself to make any friends during her tenure at the palace, but at the same time she didn't think she could leave people she had worked with to die out in the desert. Assuming that the worst had happened, of course. It was entirely possible that the Sarlacc was being more than usually entertaining and they had just stayed out longer than usual. Somehow, though, she knew that was a false hope.
The parking garages were located at the rear of the palace, not far from the small docking bays Jabba kept for the private use of certain guests who didn't wish to fly into Mos Eisley. There were five landspeeders, all looking the worse for wear. Looks were deceiving, as she knew all too well; Jabba's mechanics kept them well-tuned. On one wall of the garage was a gun locker, and she keyed in the code -- stolen during one of her slicing sessions -- and lifted out a heavy blast rifle and a pair of smaller blasters. It was getting close to dusk, and although she knew the sandpeople kept a respectful distance from Jabba's palace she wasn't about to take any chances.
She selected the landspeeder closest to the garage entrance, more for ease than because it looked better than any of the others. Since it was an older model, it had a chip-matching system, but the chips had been stored in the locker along with the guns, so it was easy enough to get the thing started and maneuver it out of the garage.
Even now, this close to dusk, the heat was intense, enervating. Miele knew she would never get used to it, even if she lived to be a hundred and died on this rock. But she had brought a few flasks of water with her, knowing that even without direct sun she could die of dehydration within a few hours if she weren't careful. She took a few sips, then set the flask down on the passenger seat. The next stage of the journey was going to require both hands.
The Sarlacc pit was located roughly southeast of Jabba's palace. Even going as quickly as the terrain would allow, it was a good hour's ride. Miele cast a nervous glance over her shoulder at the setting suns and prayed that she could make it there before the last bit of light disappeared. Jabba or no, the sandpeople considered everyone fair game after sunset, and she didn't care to become yet another statistic. No one would come looking for her if she disappeared.
The smell of burning greeted her long before she reached the actual Sarlacc pit. Acrid, heavy, the scent of smoke hung in the hot desert air like the memory of a bad dream, impossible to ignore. Miele slowed the 'speeder's headlong flight as she came onto the site of the disaster.
There was nothing left, save scattered wreckage and a few unpleasant dark blotches on the sand. Whatever had been the cause, the sail barge and everyone on it apparently had perished in one colossal explosion. Black smoke still swirled heavily in the hot air with no breeze to disperse it.
She brought the landspeeder to a stop, then reached for one of the blasters. Just because she saw no movement didn't mean that predators couldn't be lurking nearby -- at the very least, Miele expected to see a sandcrawler pull up at any moment. She couldn't imagine that the Jawas would allow such a large piece of salvage to go untouched for very long.
After making sure that the safety on the blaster was off, she climbed out of the 'speeder and moved toward the Sarlacc pit, stepping carefully between the pieces of shrapnel and other, less-distinguishable bits of wreckage. The cloying smell of burning flesh rose to her nostrils, and she forced herself not to gag, making herself breathe through her mouth despite the painful dryness at the back of her throat.
There was nothing here, nothing to salvage, no one to save. Perhaps the rumors in the kitchen had been true, after all. Miele couldn't imagine anyone but a Jedi gaining the upper hand when he was so grossly outnumbered.
It was stupid for her to have come; all she had done was risk her own safety when she could have holed up in Jabba's palace and worked at the security system until it yielded its remaining secrets. Obviously no one would have come back to disturb her.
With a sigh, she turned and took a step back toward the landspeeder. It was only then that she heard the faint moan from somewhere behind her.
Whirling, she held the blaster out in front of her, one trembling finger hovering over the fire button. "Identify yourself!" she called into the gathering dusk, hoping that her voice sounded more confident than she felt.
No reply save another faint groan, this one fainter than the last. Whoever or whatever it was, they didn't sound very threatening. However, she knew better than to lower the blaster as she retraced her steps toward the pit of the Sarlacc, taking care to maintain a respectful distance from the actual opening. The whispered horror stories she'd heard from the other kitchen drudges were enough to convince her that she needed to give that dark, gaping hole in the ground a wide berth. From what she could see in the rapidly gathering dusk, however, it appeared that the Sarlacc wouldn't be digesting anyone ever again. The sides of the pit were scored and black with blaster fire, the sandstone smeared with gore.
As she came closer she finally saw the man who lay face down in the sand. From this angle he looked dead, armor scored and even smoking in a few places from the stomach acids of the Sarlacc, his helmet knocked clean from his head and lying a few paces away. Even in the dimming light Miele could see blood gleaming in his short-cropped dark hair, black against black. But then she saw one of his hands move slightly, a futile clenching gesture that seemed as if he were trying to gain a purchase so as to pull himself farther away from the pit.
Although she'd never seen his face, she recognized the armor. Boba Fett. The bounty hunter. Just one of the myriad scum Jabba had infesting his palace. For one moment she was tempted to leave him there to die -- after all, the man had made his living from human misery -- but almost as soon as the thought crossed her mind she knew she could not abandon him to the desert, no matter who he was or what he had done. Anyone who had the strength of will to survive the Sarlacc deserved a second chance.
She squatted down in the sand next to him. "Fett?" she said softly. "Can you understand me?"
The smallest movement of his hand was his only reply.
Still, it was better than nothing. "I've come from Jabba's palace," she went on, thinking that perhaps her words would give him something to hold on to besides the pain. "I have a landspeeder. I'll bring it closer so I can take you back."
This time there was no answering movement, and Miele could only hope that he had heard and understood. As quickly as she could she threaded her way through the wreckage back to the 'speeder and then maneuvered it as close as possible to the wounded man. Once she had clambered back out again she looked at Fett and swore softly. He would be no help to her, in his condition. How she was supposed to maneuver his approximately fifteen stone of dead weight into the landspeeder was beyond her. There was nothing in the immediate vicinity that would help her leverage him up off the ground, and she was afraid to leave him to go look for something in the wreckage farther away.
In the end, she did it through brute strength and sheer force of will. She was young and healthy enough, and the last few months had hardened her muscles to the point that she found in herself the power to do what was necessary. Oh, she knew she'd have sore muscles tomorrow, and even now there was a worrisome twinge in her lower back, but somehow she managed to half-lift, half-drag him to the speeder and then push/pull him into the passenger seat. These operations did nothing to improve his condition -- halfway through her maneuvering he finally fainted, for which she was grateful. She hated to think of even Boba Fett suffering the kind of pain her awkward handling must have caused.
Finally she was able to take the driver's seat and then push the accelerator to maximum, retracing her path back toward the palace. At some point during the time she'd been dragging Fett into the 'speeder one of the suns had set, and now the remaining star was only a bloody disk on the far horizon.
Speed was the only thing that could save the both of them now, and she used it brutally, jouncing the landspeeder with reckless determination over landscapes that weren't meant for that sort of travel. She had thought Fett still completely dead to the world, but after one particularly harsh drop-off she suddenly felt his hand tighten on her leg. Startled, she'd looked down for a second to see him shake his head slightly.
"Don't do that again," he whispered, before passing out once more.
"No problem," she muttered, but she did ease off the accelerator just a bit. He was right -- it wouldn't help if she upended the 'speeder in a ravine or particularly deep sand dune.
After what seemed like an eternity but was actually less than an hour, she saw the domes of Jabba's palace appear on the horizon, glimmering faintly in the purple-hued hour after sunset. The security perimeter was still in place -- she could see the faint bluish haze between each of the markers -- but she had a remote with her that would deactivate it long enough to allow them inside. What she was going to do with Fett after they reached the relative safety of the garage, she wasn't sure.
Whether it was just luck or the aura that still surrounded the palace even though its owner was now dead, they managed to slip inside the perimeter unremarked and unmolested. Miele pulled the landspeeder into the garage, then leaned over to make sure that Fett was still just unconscious and not actually dead. Yes, there was still a pulse in his throat, but it was thready and weak. She needed to get him into a med unit as quickly as possible.
For Jabba did have a fairly well-stocked med center in his palace, for whatever reason. Possibly to keep his victims alive between rounds of torture, or possibly because he did have some valuable slaves and other hangers-on who were of more use to him alive than dead. Like everything else, Jabba had wanted to take care of medical emergencies in-house. Although she had never been there, Miele knew where the med unit was located; she had made it her business to learn as much as she could about Jabba's palace and its inhabitants.
Again she spoke to Fett, not knowing whether he could even hear her. "I'll be back soon. I have to get a stretcher for you." She was thankful that the med unit was equipped with a repulsor-powered stretcher, for she knew that there was no way she could have dragged Fett all the way from the parking garage to the second level of the palace where the med unit was located.
As it was, the trip nearly finished him. Just the act of dragging him out of the landspeeder and onto the stretcher caused him to cough up a great gout of dark blood, staining what remained of his jumpsuit and half of the shapeless tunic she wore. After that his swarthy skin took on a strange, grayish pallor, and the black shadows beneath his eyes seemed to spread. All Miele could do was push the stretcher along as quickly as she could, keeping one hand resting on his as she did so. Somehow she thought it was important that he know at some level someone was still with him, even if he had retreated so far into unconsciousness that it seemed almost like death.
The medical droid with which the med unit was equipped was an older model, barely self-aware, for which Miele was thankful. She'd had enough of the newer versions' chatty bedside manner when her father had had a heart attack a few years ago and had to go into a clinic in Anchorhead. Its hum seemed to become steadily more disapproving, however, as it moved its sensors over Fett's motionless body, almost as if it thought she were somehow responsible for his current condition. After a moment, though, it began hooking him up to various life-support devices, even as it started to cut away his shredded jumpsuit and the few bits of armor that still clung to it.
Cheeks reddening, Miele looked away, but not before she could see the extent of the lacerations that covered his torso, angry burns and something that looked suspiciously like marks left by enormous suction cups. She shuddered, then went to one of the cabinets off to one side of the bed on which Fett now lay. Her back was beginning to ache more than ever, and she hoped she could find some sort of painkiller to keep it from getting any worse.
Sure enough, there was a row of analgesics and narcotics in the first cabinet she opened. She selected something low-level enough that wouldn't make her drowsy but at least would take the edge off the pain. She had a feeling this was going to be a very long night.
Behind her the medical droid methodically worked away at Fett, wrapping his body in some sort of healing pads until he was practically cocooned in them, with only his face visible. He had a few cuts and bruises across his forehead and on his chin, but that seemed to be the least damaged part of him; Miele supposed his helmet had saved him there.
"Will he live?" she asked finally, as the med droid stepped away from the bed and began disposing of the bloodied pieces of jumpsuit it had cut away from Fett's body.
If a droid could shrug, Miele thought it might have. Instead it said only, "A chance. Not much. He is strong. That helps."
Yes, it does, she thought. She supposed he would have to be, to survive for so long and so well in a profession as ruthless as his.
"The night will tell," the med droid added cryptically.
For a moment she could only look at it, uncomprehending. Of course, she thought. If he lives through the night he might survive after all.
"I want to stay with him," she said at length. "Stay here, of course, but you can shut down for now. I'll call you if I need you."
The droid nodded its assent, then resumed its normal station in a far corner of the room, powering down against further need. The light in its eyes dimmed, and its head slumped forward.
Miele waved a hand to bring down the light level in the room; it was too harsh, too bright. She didn't know how Fett could rest in that sort of light. Once it was a softer, more reasonable level, she went to one side of the room and brought back with her a chair that floated on its own repulsors, then drew it close to the bed. Then she took one of his hands in both of hers, but lightly, so that the pressure of her fingers wouldn't do any more damage to the wounded flesh underneath.
"I'm here," she said again, wondering as she did so whether it made any difference. Really, why should she care if this man lived or died? She didn't know him. She was nothing to him. But the irrational tears rose up in her throat and choked her as she thought of her father, dying alone and unregarded in this palace, surrounded by strangers who had laughed and jeered at him. No one should have to die that way. Not even Boba Fett.
Was it her imagination, or did she feel a momentary pressure on her fingers from the hand she thought had lain so still beneath hers?
"I won't let you die," she whispered fiercely, and there it was again, a flutter so infinitesimal it could have merely been an involuntary reflex, just overtaxed nerves twitching beneath the flayed skin. But she refused to believe that.
The night will tell, she thought.
But what the next day would bring, she didn't dare think. All she could do now was sit here in the soft semidarkness and pray that the palace wouldn't claim yet another uneasy ghost....
-----signature-----
Imperial propaganda...um...fics in profile. Master to His_Tallness, MsLanna, and unknown_shore. Official Grammar Queen.  Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.--Erwin Rommel
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VaderLVR64
Title: Fan Fic Manager in Combat Boots
Registered:
Feb '04
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Date Posted:
7/23/05 10:04pm
Subject:
RE: Blood and Ashes (Boba Fett/OC...because Boba needs love, too!) ~ Cover Art!
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This is a great fic!  I can't wait to read more. I started reading it on the Beyond board and loved it there, too!
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If you have to choose between tears and laughter, remember that laughter burns more calories.
Proud New Army Mom - off to bootcamp!
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VadersMistress
Registered:
Apr '04
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Date Posted:
7/23/05 10:35pm
Subject:
RE: Blood and Ashes (ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC...because Boba needs love, too!) Cover art added 7/23!
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You're too right; Boba DOES need love too! There simply aren't enough fics about him out there.
Very well done. This is an excellent fic.
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And what it all comes down to is that I haven't got it figured out just yet.
Would I rather be feared or loved? Um... Easy, both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.
Persia pwns your face.
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spiritgurl
Registered:
Jul '03
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Date Posted:
7/24/05 6:28am
Subject:
RE: Blood and Ashes (ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC...because Boba needs love, too!) Cover art added 7/23!
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You know, I've already read this part and told you what I thought, but I thought I'd say again. I really like this OC so far. 
sg
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My fics: http://zalibethe.com/kenobi/storylisting.htm (update 6/29) Master of Solo-Evenstar ~ August Epic of the Month - Spirit Warriors of Angharad by Ophelia http://boards.theforce.net/The_Saga/b10476/15836193/p1
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GrandAdmiralV
Registered:
May '05
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Date Posted:
7/24/05 10:54am
Subject:
RE: Blood and Ashes (ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC...because Boba needs love, too!) Cover art added 7/23!
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VadersMistress posted:
You're too right; Boba DOES need love too! There simply aren't enough fics about him out there.
Very well done. This is an excellent fic.
Thank you! I always seem to gravitate toward the secondary characters -- I guess I just feel that I can find more to write about them because you don't know every detail of their lives. As Anne Shirley once said, "There's more scope for imagination in them."
-----signature-----
Imperial propaganda...um...fics in profile. Master to His_Tallness, MsLanna, and unknown_shore. Official Grammar Queen. Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.--Erwin Rommel
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Darth_Scroobius
Registered:
Jun '05
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Date Posted:
7/24/05 11:31am
Subject:
RE: Blood and Ashes (ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC...because Boba needs love, too!) Cover art added 7/23!
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I've never read a Boba fic, before. And while Boba hasn't really done anything yet I'm enjoying this. Miele is an interesting OC, part humanitarian/part vigilante. I like the way you bounce in and out of your character's thoughts; that's something I like to do as well.
Apoplexy, lechery, flayed: lots of fun words, too .
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I might be a rocket scientist, but when I get up in the morning I put my pants on both legs at a time, just like everyone else, ROTO (ANH AU): http://boards.theforce.net/The_Saga/b10476/20767721
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GrandAdmiralV
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May '05
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Date Posted:
7/26/05 10:44am
Subject:
RE: Blood and Ashes (ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Chapter 2 Added 7/26!
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Thank you for the lovely reviews -- I'm glad you're enjoying the story and Mièle so far (it's tough to be an OC!). 
Oh, and I have to thank the creators of "Troops" for the "ass-end of space" line I slipped in here.
II
At one point during the night Mièle was certain Fett had died. She had slipped into an uneasy sleep even as she sat in the repulsor chair next to the hospital bed, only to be awakened by the strident beeping of the equipment monitoring his vital signs. Before she could fully realize what was happening, the med droid was already at Fett’s side, making adjustments to the liquids that dripped into his arm, and sliding an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. When that didn’t produce the desired result, the droid shocked him twice with the fibrillators built into its hands, and suddenly the alarm subsided into the low-level pulsing of a normal sinus wave. It was probably the soft murmur of the machine that had put her to sleep in the first place.
Through all of this Fett hadn’t moved. Mièle reflected, as she tried to settle herself into a more comfortable position in the chair, that the only thing about him which seemed alive was the pulsing light of his heart beat on the monitor.
“You shouldn’t scare people like that,” she said finally, after making sure the med droid had settled back down into deceptive quiescence. Obviously it was on a hair trigger if anything in a patient’s condition changed -- she hadn’t even awakened fully before the droid was already at work on Fett.
She wondered whether the bounty hunter could hear her at all. Somewhere she thought she had read that people in comas could still sense when people were talking to them, but perhaps that only counted when the people involved actually knew one another. At any rate, talking to him made her feel better, and she hoped it would help keep her awake.
“You don’t know me,” she said, making her tone as soft and reassuring as she could. “My name is Mièle, and I work here in the palace. That’s where you are now, in the med unit. You’re going to be fine.”
Pausing, she glanced down at Fett’s slack features and thought he looked anything but fine. Still, a little misplaced optimism couldn’t hurt. “Anyhow,” she continued, “I’m hoping that you can help me out once you’re on your feet again. I want to get off Tatooine, and I know you’ve got a ship out back in one of Jabba’s private docking bays.” Again she laid her hand on top of his bandaged one. “And if saving your life isn’t enough, I’m willing to share Jabba’s treasure with you. I’m close to cracking the code. A day or so more, probably. That’s what I’m doing here -- I’m no more a kitchen drudge than you are, but it was a good disguise.”
She stopped then, wondering if she had said too much. What was to stop him from killing her after she had broken Jabba’s security system? Oh, she had saved his life, but was that enough? She knew next to nothing of him save his reputation as the most ruthless bounty hunter in the galaxy, but even bounty hunters had to follow some sort of code, didn’t they?
Well, there was no help for it now. Very likely he couldn’t understand or even hear what she was saying, as far into unconsciousness as he had retreated. And if he had heard and understood, perhaps the lure of Jabba’s riches was enough to give him the will to survive. It was what had sustained her over the past few months, ever since she realized that Jabba had murdered her father after the final code for the security system was delivered. The money...and revenge.
At first, of course, she had merely been unbelieving. Her father had been secretive about his latest job, but he had promised her that it was finally the big score, the one contract that would earn them enough to get off Tatooine forever. His skills with computers had never translated to any sort of talent with finances, and they had always led a precarious existence, never sure if they were going to make the rent or have enough to eat -- at least until Mièle was old enough to take matters into her own hands. From the time she was fourteen she had managed the household, and things had run a bit more smoothly as a result, but they had never been able to scrape together enough credits for passage off Tatooine.
Her father, Lestan Fels, actually was an offworlder, a native of Ator. It was a freelance assignment with a mining company that had brought him to Tatooine, where he fell in love with the beautiful red-haired daughter of a moisture farmer from Anchorhead. That much Mièle knew, but what exactly had transpired when she was barely six months old her father would never say. All she knew was that her mother had left, apparently with the remainder of his earnings from the mining contract. Lestan ended up trapped on Tatooine with an infant daughter to raise and no immediate prospects of returning to his home world. It was not in his nature to complain, but Mièle knew he hated Tatooine almost as much as she did.
When he had been missing for two days, she’d known that the worst must have happened. Although of course Lestan hadn’t told her for whom he was working, it didn’t take a differential equation to figure out that there were only one or two potential clients on the planet who had both the need for that high-level a security system as well as the means to pay for it.
Not knowing what else to do, she’d gone to the local Imperial garrison to make a report. Unlike most of the other inhabitants of Anchorhead, she was on good enough terms with the troops stationed there. Perhaps the rumors of Imperial oppression were true, perhaps not. All she knew was that the presence of the squad of stormtroopers and the officers who led them kept at least a semblance of order in the rough desert town. Certainly she would not have been able to walk the streets so freely if it weren’t for Captain Malec and and his men.
It was Captain Malec who saw her, and for that she was grateful; he was young for the post and had always been friendly. Too much so, her father had grumbled -- he didn’t like the idea of his daughter flirting with the leader of the local garrison. Mièle hadn’t seen what the problem was. Captain Malec was charming and only seven or eight years older than she, and certainly of a far higher caliber than the local boys, who talked incessantly of moisture farming or tricking out their sandhoppers and not much else. At least Jerran Malec was educated and well-spoken, which was more than she could say of the Anchorhead set.
But when she had sat down in his office and poured out her troubles to him, at first he had looked away, his pleasant features clouded.
“We can file a missing-being report, of course,” he said formally, and she could see his blue eyes shift past her to the two stormtroopers standing on either side of his open door.
“How can he be missing if I’m pretty sure I know where he is?” she had demanded, and after that he had stood and palmed the door shut, then returned to his desk.
“I wish I could help you, Mia,” he said, and even the sound of her father’s nickname on his lips had brought the tears she’d been suppressing for too long to her eyes.
“Why can’t you, Captain Malec?” She had been deliberately formal, using his title, although she had spoken his given name before in private.
Even though the door was shut, he had lowered his voice. “The Empire has a policy of not getting involved in Jabba’s affairs. We leave him alone, and he leaves us alone. The arrangement has worked thus far.”
“Even if innocent people are involved.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
She’d wanted to hate him then, but couldn’t; the dismay in his face was all too obvious. He wasn’t responsible for the Empire’s edicts and was only trying to make the best of a difficult situation. An officer who asked too many questions would soon find himself on the fast track to nowhere -- although she couldn’t think of many posts worse than Tatooine. It was, as she’d heard one of the troopers comment once, the “ass-end of space.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” she’d asked at length. “Just pretend that nothing’s happened?”
“That would be the wisest course, yes.” Unexpectedly, he had reached out and taken one of her hands in his. “I know this is improper of me, but -- “
She’d narrowed her eyes then, wondering what was going to come next. Unwanted advances were certainly the last thing she needed right now.
But he had surprised her. “I have enough saved to get you offworld. You could be in danger, if your father has let on to Jabba that he has family in Anchorhead. Let me get you away from here -- my tour is over in three months, and I could come to see you before I’m sent on to my next post.”
The unexpected generosity almost undid her. It would have been so easy to let Malec take care of her, hustle her offworld to someplace safe. Perhaps he had convinced himself that he was in love with her, or perhaps it was merely some sense of old-fashioned honor that spurred him to attempt her rescue.
She hadn’t known what to say. She’d made a few inarticulate attempts, had begun to really cry, then let him fold her into his arms and hold her while she wept. If nothing else, it had felt good to have his strong arms around her, to feel the reassuring roughness of his woolen uniform against her cheek.
In the end she had been able to leave without really promising anything, knowing even then that she would never forgive herself if she didn’t do something to avenge her father’s death. What poor Captain Malec had thought of her disappearance, she didn’t want to contemplate. Probably that Jabba’s goons had spirited her away, finishing the job once and for all.
But now Jabba was dead, along with all the rest of his court. It wouldn’t be too long before the next piece of scum rushed in to fill the vacuum Jabba’s death had caused, but Mièle thought they had a few days before the news spread. She only hoped that a few days would be enough.
The palace was empty of all but a few lower-level droids, for which she was thankful. Several of them would have been difficult to manage, such as EV-99, but they had been destroyed along with everything else on the sail barge. She never thought she’d be grateful for Jabba’s raging ego, but obviously he had wanted the largest audience possible for his latest Sarlacc-baiting.
There was the slightest shift of the hand which lay beneath hers, and she looked down, startled. Fett did look better after all; the shadows under his eyes seemed a little less black, and that frightening grayish tint had disappeared from his face. And now she could actually see his chest rising and falling as he breathed, sending the healing oxygen through his body.
“You’re too mean to die, aren’t you?” she asked, but softened the words by reaching up to touch the dark wavy hair at his temple, now matted with blood. Once he had recovered enough he was definitely going to need a good cleaning up.
Mièle wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw the smallest quirk at the corner of his mouth. Then again, it could have just been a trick of the lighting.
Speaking of cleaning up, she thought, looking down at herself as if for the first time. The right side of her tunic was splattered with blood, and she was streaked with grime everywhere. Fett looked as if he were holding on, and now she could think of nothing else but a long soak in a ‘fresher. There had to be something fit for use somewhere in the palace.
After rousing the med droid and instructing it to keep a close watch on Fett, Mièle went down the hall and up to the third story, where she knew the slave girls’ dormitory was located. She thought that might be her best chance at finding the toiletries she needed, along with a change of clothes.
Sure enough, the bathing chamber was stocked with all sorts of little luxuries; apparently Jabba liked his slave girls sweet-smelling and moisturized before he tossed them to the Rancor. Mièle stood in the ‘fresher for the longest time, reveling in the warm water that cascaded through her filthy hair and washed the grime from her body. She had to wash her hair three times before she felt it was clean enough, and it was utter bliss to finally cleanse her face of the dirt and false blemishes she had adopted as part of her disguise.
After that she dried herself off and then wrapped the towel around herself, going in search of something to wear. Although Mièle didn’t doubt Boba Fett would enjoy waking up to see her in one of the slave girls’ scanty dance costumes, she had something a little more substantial in mind. She had seen several of the girls when they arrived at the palace, and they had worn ordinary enough clothing. It had to be around here someplace.
As it was, shoved into the farthest corner of the wardrobe that all of the girls had apparently shared. Mièle thought she even recognized the fitted tunic and loose pants the Twi'lek girl Oola had first worn when she came to Jabba’s palace. That was good, because Oola was closer to Mièle’s size than any of the other slave girls, and the costume fit very well.
It felt odd, to be wearing the clothing of a dead woman, but Oola certainly didn’t need it anymore, and Mièle did. Besides, the feel of something besides roughly spun bantha wool against her skin was pure heaven. She didn’t know what the low-necked dark tunic and pants were made of, but it was definitely some exotic offworld fiber, silky and sleek. And it wasn’t any of the endless variations on off-white, ivory, and beige that were ubiquitous on Tatooine. Mièle thought she could go her entire life without wearing a single one of those colors again.
But she had spent enough time here. She ran a comb one last time through her damp tresses, then slid on a pair of sandals she had found on the floor of the wardrobe. Finally she left the room and headed down, past the second floor where Fett slept, all the way to the cellar where the kitchens were located. Although she felt considerably better than she had before she showered, she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep going without a cup of caf...or several, she thought. It wasn’t the first time she had pulled an all-nighter, but a healthy dose of the stimulant drink would be just what she needed.
It was somewhat unpleasant to be returning to the kitchens, where she had labored in ugly anonymity for several months, but at least now she felt like herself again. She made short work of brewing the caf and decided to bring the whole jug of it with her back to the med unit, along with half a loaf of only slightly stale bread. Mièle couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten anything, and the bread was better than nothing.
When she returned, all was as she had left it: the med droid hovering by Fett’s bedside, the bounty hunter lying still under his covering of bandages.
“How is he?” she asked, as she set the jug of caf and the bread on a counter.
“Better,” the droid replied, and pointed at the monitor as if it thought she could translate its readings. “He comes out of the coma soon.”
“Good.” She busied herself with pouring a cup of caf; behind her the droid seemed to hesitate for a moment, then moved off to its corner.
The rush of the stimulant along her nerve endings was almost as heavenly as the shower had been; she hadn’t realized how groggy she was until she let the caf wake her up. The bitter-chocolate taste awoke her stomach as well, and she pulled off a chunk of bread and took several healthy bites. It was only after she had satisfied her appetite somewhat that she picked up her cup of caf and resumed her watch over Fett.
She didn’t think him particularly handsome, although there was something about the mouth that suggested he might have a nice smile -- not that he would have much use for it, probably. Certainly he seemed swarthy and exotic when compared with someone who more closely fit her masculine ideals, such as Captain Malec.
Not for the first time since coming to Jabba’s palace, she found herself thinking of the young Imperial captain and his offer to her. Was he even still on Tatooine at all? He’d said his tour was up in three months, and she had been here more than two. It was entirely possible that he would be gone by the time she finally cracked the security system here at the palace. No, her only real hope of leaving remained with the man who lay so still before her. At least now she was certain he was going to make it, although she couldn’t imagine at the cost of what pain. Right now the med droid had a heady cocktail of narcotics coursing through his system so he might rest, but he couldn’t function that way indefinitely. Sooner or later he would have to heal on his own.
Despite the caf, she could feel her head beginning to droop. Perhaps it would be best if she went back up to the slave girls’ dormitory and caught a few hours of sleep on one of the narrow beds there. Fett didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger, and right now her eyelids were beginning to feel like lead.
So she rose, and turned to set her empty cup down on the counter, but not before a hoarse whisper from the bed behind her halted her movement.
Mièle whirled to see Fett staring at her, eyes very black beneath the heavy brows.
“Did you,” he asked, in so soft an undertone she could barely understand him, “say something about Jabba’s treasure?”
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Imperial propaganda...um...fics in profile. Master to His_Tallness, MsLanna, and unknown_shore. Official Grammar Queen. Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.--Erwin Rommel
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Darth_Scroobius
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Date Posted:
7/26/05 2:38pm
Subject:
RE: Blood and Ashes - ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Chapter 2 Added 7/26!
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Yay! We get more. It seemed very Fett for the first words out of his mouth to be about money, to be so mercenary. Excellent update.
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I might be a rocket scientist, but when I get up in the morning I put my pants on both legs at a time, just like everyone else, ROTO (ANH AU): http://boards.theforce.net/The_Saga/b10476/20767721
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Kezler
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May '05
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Date Posted:
7/27/05 4:06pm
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RE: Blood and Ashes - ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Chapter 2 Added 7/26!
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This is professional quality stuff! Can't wait to read more of your work. Better than some of the commercially available books!
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GrandAdmiralV
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Date Posted:
7/30/05 11:01am
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RE: Blood and Ashes - ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Chapter 3 Added 7/30!
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Thanks for the reviews and the nice comments! It's hard for us newbies, so I'm glad someone is reading this, LOL!
III
For a moment all she could do was stare at him, not believing he could have actually spoken. A few drops of caf spilled from the mug that dangled from her suddenly heedless fingers before she recovered herself enough to place it on the counter.
“You heard that?” she managed at last.
His eyes shut briefly, lashes black against his bloodless cheeks. “I heard a voice. Gave me something to concentrate on.”
“Does it -- does it hurt very much?”
There was no mistaking the ironic glance he gave her as he opened his eyes once more. “Probably not as much as being completely digested would have.”
Well, she had deserved that. Obviously he was lucid, if still very weak. And since he had heard her comments about Jabba’s treasure, there was no going back now. She said, “Jabba hired my father to rebuild his security system. Then he had him killed.” She paused, but Fett made no comment. “So I came here to crack the security system and steal whatever Jabba might have hidden in his vaults. Now he’s dead, so my job is a lot easier.”
“But you need a way out of here,” Fett whispered, his voice cracking on the last syllable.
Concerned, Mièle looked over at the med droid. “Should he have some water or something?”
The droid hurried over, looked at Fett’s vital signs, then laid a temp strip across his forehead. After that it flashed a light into each of his eyes. Through all of these dubious ministrations the bounty hunter remained stoic, unmoving.
“Water, OK,” the droid finally announced, pulling a perma-sealed moisture pack from one of the cupboards and attaching it to a long flexible tube. It pushed one end of the tube through Fett’s cracked lips and hung the pack from the multi-armed rack that held the various fluids which were slowly seeping into him.
Fett took a few careful sips, then nodded at the droid, which removed the tube from his mouth. “Better,” he said. “So you’d give me half Jabba’s treasure just to get you offplanet?”
“That’s right.”
He was silent for a moment, considering. “You don’t need me to get off Tatooine.”
Mièle tried to remind herself that he was in a lot of pain. “Well, yes, I do, actually, because you’ve got a ship right here. I don’t know how much is in those vaults, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than I could load onto a landspeeder, and those are the only vehicles left in the garages now. And in case you weren’t aware of the fact, the chances of a single unarmed ‘speeder making it all the way from here to Mos Eisley are pretty slim. So you and your ship are my best bet.”
Before answering, he gestured with one bandaged hand to the med droid to give him another few sips of water. Then he said, “Better half than nothing?”
“Exactly.”
Another, longer silence this time, one in which she could only imagine what he must be thinking. Probably that she was unbelievably naïve and would be easy enough to take advantage of later on, after the treasure was actually secured. There were hundreds of places to stash a body in the palace, after all....
“All right,” he said finally. “I owe you one.”
That was the second time this evening he had managed to render Mièle speechless. She had expected much more of an argument over her request, but she should have known that whatever else he might be, any bounty hunter as successful as Boba Fett would have to be a realist.
However, she was able to recover herself enough to nod coolly and say, “Good.” Inwardly, though, she was cheering. Now all she had to do was crack that damned code.
He nodded, but his eyes were sliding shut already. Even that brief exchange seemed to have exhausted him.
“Sleep now,” she said, “but I’ll just be upstairs. Have the med droid call me if you need anything.”
The barest movement of his head was the only reply she received, but Mièle was satisfied. He seemed willing to help her. The best thing now was for him to get plenty of rest so that he could heal as quickly as possible. In the meantime, she needed her sleep as well, if only for a few hours. Then it was time to really review the defenses of the palace and hope that she and Fett could retrieve the treasure and take off before any of Tatooine’s teaming underworld showed up with the same idea.
###
Mièle had planned to sleep for only a few hours, but almost seven had passed before she awoke with a start, fumbling for a few moments at the unfamiliar covers before she realized that she had put herself to bed in the slave girls’ dormitory, and not on the lumpy pallet which had been her sleeping accommodations for the past few months. A few narrow bars of sunlight made it past the heavy metal shutters on the window, bright and sharp as laser beams in the otherwise dim chamber.
She had been so tired the night before she hadn’t even tried to find some sort of garment to sleep in and instead had collapsed onto one of the narrow cots fully clothed. Now the garments she had chosen so carefully the day before were crushed and stale, but she couldn’t worry about that now. She had work to do.
The computers in the guard chamber were as she had left them, of course, still humming quietly to themselves in the unnaturally chill air. Mièle had made a brief detour to check on Fett as she made her way down here, but he slept soundly, with the med droid a watchful shadow in one corner. She thought there had been one or two fewer bags of medication attached to him than there were the night before, and once again she had uttered a silent prayer of thanksgiving for his apparent resilience. Perhaps they could get out of here even more quickly than she had hoped.
Her father, like most slicers, made a habit of building back doors into his code. Although clients disliked the practice and usually hired other slicers to come in and disable the back doors, the truth of it was, if you were hiring the best, there wasn’t much you could do but pay your experts enough to keep them happy so that they would have no reason to use the back doors -- or you could just have them killed, as Jabba had done with her father and no doubt countless others. Mièle had so far been able to access the standard security protocols, the automatic systems that kept the perimeter activated and restricted entry in and out of the palace save to those who knew the access keys, but so far she had been unable to pick her way through the forest of code that protected Jabba’s vaults and the databases that contained his personal financial information.
She could not allow herself to become frustrated. Unraveling code was as delicate and time-consuming an affair as picking apart a skein of spider silk, and one false move could be just as deadly. The standard bits of data her father usually embedded so that he could access all areas of a system without having to go through the regular protocols were suspiciously absent in Jabba’s security systems. Either Jabba had been wise to him from the beginning, or he had worked scared, burying the back doors so deeply that even his own daughter could not begin to guess at the keys that would unlock them.
The hours passed, uncounted and unnoticed. It wasn’t until the pain behind her eyes grew too sharp to ignore any longer that Mièle finally sat up from the console, leaning back against a chair that had been intended for a far larger occupant. It was then that the base of her spine added its protest to her already outraged brain cells.
“OK,” she said softly, easing herself out of the chair. Dimly, she realized she was hungry as well. What time was it, anyway?
She glanced up at the chrono on the wall, saw that more than six hours had passed, and swore. No wonder her head was killing her. And what of Fett?
When she arrived in the med unit after a guilty dash upstairs, Mièle saw that her concern was unfounded. The bounty hunter was sitting propped up against the cushions, sipping some kind of broth through a tube.
“Nice of you to drop in,” he commented.
“I figured you weren’t going to die any time soon,” she said, giving him a sour look.
“Right. ‘Too mean to die’ is what you said, I think.”
“Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.” What was it about him that just rubbed her the wrong way? He was far too self-assured for someone who had just been puked out of a subterranean digestive tract.
Her stray thought of the evening before had been correct -- he did have a nice smile, even with the chapped lips and abrasions marring his chin and left cheek. “I’d say that assessment was correct.”
“Hmm.” She made a show of scanning the life-support machines at his bedside, although she could make very little sense of most of the readings, save the heart-rate monitor. “So you’re eating already?”
“The med droid seemed to think it was OK.”
“Well, that’s more than I’ve gotten today,” she said, aware all over again of how empty her stomach felt.
If it was sympathy she was looking for, she had definitely come to the wrong place. He just watched her, face expressionless, and she was suddenly all too aware of her rumpled clothing, the hair she had knotted back into a careless braid hours ago when she tired of it continually falling into her eyes. Of course, what the hell did it matter what she looked like, anyway?
Annoyed, she said, “Since you’re obviously not going to drop dead any time soon, I’m going to fix myself something to eat. Then I’ll get back to work.”
“Sounds like a good idea.” Fett’s tone was carefully neutral, but she got the impression he was laughing at her.
Son of a -- she thought, but just gave him an irritated nod before stalking out. Who knew she could have come so close to throttling a man she had just saved the day before?
###
Several days passed in much the same fashion. Fett continued to gain in strength, although the med droid insisted that he stay in bed and not risk disturbing the bandages that concealed his healing flesh. Mièle knew he must be in considerable pain -- she could see it in the sudden tightening of his jaw sometimes when he spoke, or in a subtle deepening of the lines around his eyes, but of course he uttered not one word of his discomfort.
The forced inactivity must have been driving him mad -- Mièle knew she would have been climbing the walls in similar circumstances -- but he never let on that his convalescence was anything more than a minor inconvenience. His only request was that she retrieve a data pad he had secreted in the apartment Jabba had given him for his use after delivering Han Solo to the palace. She had done so, and after that he had sat up for hours in bed, speaking into it in a gravelly undertone she found completely incomprehensible. No doubt he would have preferred to write his notes instead of speaking them, but his heavily bandaged hands prevented him from doing so.
For her own part, Mièle felt no closer to breaking her father’s code than she had when she first arrived in the palace. She knew intellectually that that was not exactly true, but still the hours of careful tinkering with very little to show for them were beginning to wear on her. Fett’s silence on the subject didn’t help, either. After one inquiry -- to which he received a reply that even she had to admit was snappish -- he had refrained from mentioning the subject again.
Failure was not something she could begin to contemplate. Hadn’t her father trained her in code since she was old enough to understand what it was? Couldn’t she, even before she was out of what passed in Anchorhead for a school, slice programs that people twice her age couldn’t crack? So what was it about this one that seemed so uniquely unbreakable? Mièle had to give her father grudging credit for what was undeniably his masterwork, but at the same time she found herself wishing that he could have been just a little bit less thorough.
It was after one of these brain-bending sessions that she found herself distractedly wondering what was going on in the world outside. They had been so isolated here, so hidden away, that she’d forgotten time was passing for the rest of the galaxy as well. So far there had been no challenges to the security of Jabba’s fortress, no interlopers seeking to seize the apparently unguarded palace, but Mièle knew that could change soon enough.
She had to go to Jabba’s chambers for a comm station that connected into the galaxy-wide communications net -- probably he hadn’t wanted his underlings to be informed of current events. Previously she had avoided Jabba’s noisome personal suite, having no reason to go there, but a scan of the communications system for the palace showed that his were the only rooms which had the properly connected console.
Even after standing empty for days, the chambers emitted a foul reek, as if something had crawled in there and died -- which it might very well have, she reflected. But the rooms seemed empty enough, although she tried to avert her eyes from the walls, which were covered in the Huttese equivalent of erotic art.
The comm. station, in direct contrast to the barbaric decorations of the rest of the room, was sleek and new, a very late model. Nevertheless, she had a difficult time finding a clear channel at first -- many of the images that came through were fuzzy and filled with static. Most disturbing of all, the channels that usually carried the official Imperial newscasts and approved programming were completely blank.
“What the hell...?” she murmured, hands moving over the keyboard. Had the entire galaxy erupted while she and Fett were secreted away here in the abandoned palace?
Apparently it had. Finally she was able to locate a relatively clear station, one that was filled for a moment with an unfamiliar symbol, blue against white. Then a polished-looking, fair-haired woman’s face filled the screen.
“Although isolated fighting still continues, largely it appears that the Empire has collapsed with the death of Emperor Palpatine over Endor. Leaders of the Rebellion are now convening on Coruscant, where the interim government is extending open hands to all beings of the galaxy. Former Senator Leia Organa is asking for cooperation from local governments to keep civil unrest to a minimum. During this period of transition, all beings are urged to remain in their homes whenever possible -- “
Hand shaking, Mièle turned off the comm. It was too big. How could the Emperor be dead? How could the Empire -- the only government she had ever known -- suddenly be gone? Of course she had heard of the Rebellion, had even heard rumors that the Empire had suffered a terrible defeat a few years ago when its Death Star superweapon had been destroyed, but was it possible that the Rebels had succeeded at last and had brought about the complete destruction of the Imperial order?
What this might mean for her, she wasn’t sure. The Empire had kept a light rein on Tatooine all these years, but its presence had maintained at least a semblance of order. That carefully groomed announcer could mouth whatever platitudes she wanted about local governments curbing civil unrest, but the truth of it was that there wasn’t any real local government on Tatooine if you discounted the Imperial garrisons.
Mièle found herself hoping that Captain Malec had made it offworld before the Empire fell. Perhaps he had been off-duty, enjoying the brief leave he had mentioned to her during that long-ago meeting in his office, and so was safe. She had a feeling that the denizens of Tatooine would not treat the troops of the local garrisons well once they realized there would be no fear of reprisals....
Her mouth was dry, and it wasn’t just because of the parched air. Perhaps she and Fett were safe here for now -- or perhaps the collapse of the Empire would be the final impetus to send all the scum of Tatooine running in their direction. Even as she hurried down the deserted corridors of the palace she found herself mentally reviewing all its defenses, hoping they would be enough, worried that they were woefully inadequate. Maybe it would be better if they just ran for Fett’s ship now and got out while they still could.
Not that Fett would have any reason for taking her with him now, before the treasure had been secured. There was also the very good chance that he was still far too unwell to pilot a landspeeder, let alone a spacecraft.
Mièle hadn’t even realized she was fleeing to the med unit until she found herself pausing at the open door. She waited there for a moment, looking in; Fett seemed to be asleep, the data pad propped up against his chest, his bandaged hands folded across its closed case.
“You’ve been running,” he said then, even though his eyes were still shut.
Had she really been breathing that loudly? She supposed she was; she knew her heart was beating so heavily she was surprised he hadn’t mentioned that, too. “I just -- “ she began, then realized she didn’t know exactly what to say. Again, the enormity of the situation hit her, and she began to shake with delayed reaction.
At that point Fett did open his eyes and look over at her; she thought she saw the faintest flicker of concern cross the swarthy features, but his voice was expressionless enough as he asked, “Is there a problem?”
“You might call it that,” she said, and gave a short, only slightly hysterical laugh, which she clamped down even as it escaped her lips. If she started in with that there was no telling where she might end up. “I just monitored the comm. station in Jabba’s chambers. Fett, the Empire is over! The Emperor was killed at some place I’ve never heard of -- Endor, I think. They’re saying the Empire has fallen apart!”
If she had been expecting any sort of outward response, she would have been disappointed, but by now she had come to realize that Fett revealed very little of his emotions. Still, with news as astounding as that, she’d have thought he would have looked at least slightly shocked.
He didn’t, of course. The dark eyes narrowed a little, but that was all. “Interesting,” he said, after a lengthy pause.
“’Interesting’?” she demanded. “That’s all you have to say?”
With that he did give her a quick glance, and there was the faintest quirk at the corner of his mouth. “All that’s changed for me is who pays the bills,” he replied.
Outraged, she glared at him, wanting to say something witty and cutting in response, but she knew that was impossible in her current state. “So what are we going to do?” she managed at last.
“What we have been doing. I’m not fit to get out of here yet, and you haven’t broken the security code. So I don’t see much changing.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Although if you could work a little faster, it might be a good idea.”
All the epithets her father had hurled at recalcitrant computers and Imperial tax collectors came bubbling up to her lips, but Mièle knew better than to say anything out loud. She couldn’t risk antagonizing Fett now, not when things were even more unstable than she had thought. “If you think I haven’t been working myself to death over that code -- “ she spluttered finally, knowing even as she said them how weak the words sounded.
“I know you have,” he said, and although she should have been reassured, somehow she wasn’t -- there was something very cold and measured in the glance he gave her. “Believe me, if I’d thought you weren’t doing everything in your power to break that security system, I’d have been standing down in the guard room with you, holding a blaster to your head.”
He meant it, Mièle knew. For the first time she realized how dangerous he really was -- and how very little she meant to him. She was a tool, nothing more. And if that tool should prove to be unreliable....
“I’d better get back to work, then,” she said at last, when she thought she could speak without completely breaking down. She had no idea how she could possibly concentrate at such a time, but she also knew she had to get out of Fett’s presence as soon as possible.
“You do that.”
And taking those words as a dismissal, she turned and fled in the direction of the guard chamber. It was only once she was there in its relative safety that she collapsed in her usual seat, shaking in the overly conditioned air, forcing her palms against her eyes in a futile attempt to hold back the tears that had already begun to stream down her cheeks.
Once the fit of weeping had passed, though, she felt a deeper chill take hold of her. All this time she had feared the outsiders who might converge on Jabba’s palace at any moment -- and all the while she had been harboring a man who could prove to be a greater danger than any of them....
-----signature-----
Imperial propaganda...um...fics in profile. Master to His_Tallness, MsLanna, and unknown_shore. Official Grammar Queen. Mortal danger is an effective antidote for fixed ideas.--Erwin Rommel
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Darth_Scroobius
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Date Posted:
7/30/05 12:37pm
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RE: Blood and Ashes - ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Chapter 3 Added 7/30!
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This update is great.
...the Huttese equivalent of erotic art. - A very interesting (and disgusting) detail. Cringe-worthy.
I'm interested by how you interpreted the time-line. I always figured that there were weeks between Han's rescue and the destruction of Death Star II: The Revenge. But the movie itself provides no actual hints as to the passage of time.
I like Fett's stoic, laconic personality. They are definitely in the ESB Han/Leia constantly getting on each others nerves stage of the relationship.
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I might be a rocket scientist, but when I get up in the morning I put my pants on both legs at a time, just like everyone else, ROTO (ANH AU): http://boards.theforce.net/The_Saga/b10476/20767721
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GrandAdmiralV
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May '05
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Date Posted:
7/30/05 3:34pm
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RE: Blood and Ashes - ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Chapter 3 Added 7/30!
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Darth_Scroobius posted:
I'm interested by how you interpreted the time-line. I always figured that there were weeks between Han's rescue and the destruction of Death Star II: The Revenge. But the movie itself provides no actual hints as to the passage of time.
Yes, they're never really clear about it in the film, but I always felt as if it was around a week or a little less, so that's what I went with here. It's interesting that you felt it was longer than that. Any particular reason why?
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Darth_Scroobius
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7/30/05 5:06pm
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RE: Blood and Ashes - ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Chapter 3 Added 7/30!
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Yes, they're never really clear about it in the film, but I always felt as if it was around a week or a little less, so that's what I went with here. It's interesting that you felt it was longer than that. Any particular reason why?
Several, actually. First, I think hyperspace travel takes time. So when Luke is gallivanting across the galaxy, there is an implied passage of time. This dovetails nicely with my second reason: that Han would require time to rest and recover. He volunteered for the Endor mission, which presumably meant that he had time to not only recover but also to re-integrate himself into the Rebel leadership (not to mention Lando leading the fighters after being undercover for some time). The big GL is notoriously bad at letting us know when time has passed, just look at how Padme's pregnancy magically advances during ROTS; she goes from barely showing to having twins over what would otherwise seem like a week or two.
Disclaimer: That's my impression from the movies. It would be possible to come up with perfectly plausible explanations that circumvent the above analysis. In fact, I'll do so right now:
Hyperspace travel could be done by creating a wormhole through which the vehicle travels. If that's the case, then it should be nearly instantaneous. Evidence for this includes the Rebel fleet jumping from Sullust to Endor in what the movie vaguely suggests is the blink-of-an-eye.
Also, Han may have rapidly recovered from hibernation sickness, and, due to Leia's influence and his own reputation, had an easy time getting back into the Rebel hierarchy.
That's my four cents on the issue (two cents on each side ).
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I might be a rocket scientist, but when I get up in the morning I put my pants on both legs at a time, just like everyone else, ROTO (ANH AU): http://boards.theforce.net/The_Saga/b10476/20767721
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GrandAdmiralV
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8/4/05 4:07pm
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RE: Blood and Ashes - ROTJ; Boba Fett/OC/Adventure/Romance -- Chapter 3 Added 7/30!
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Well, Scroobius, you saved me having to argue my own timeline, so thank you for that! Seriously, I think the fans have been given a lot of play in that area since it's so vague in the films, so I'm just going to stick with it for now.
IV
In her dreams Mièle heard an insistent shrilling that went on and on, a sound that could not be ignored. With a gasp she sat up in bed, clasping the side of the cot on which she lay in an attempt to orient herself. The room was dark, save for a luma she had left burning at quarter-power in the dressing area, but it took only a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the dim light. Nothing seemed any different from the time she had put herself to bed -- had it been hours or only minutes ago? Then she realized the screaming sound had not originated in her dreams but had actually interrupted them -- it was the siren for Jabba’s perimeter security system. That could mean only one thing.
Cursing, she pushed the covers away and bolted for the door, tripping over the sandals she had left on the floor next to her bed. She paused just long enough to gather them up and half-skip, half-run as she slid her feet into first one, then the other, even as she pounded down the hallway to the staircase that led to the ground floor of the palace. As Mièle passed the landing to the second floor she heard a loud crash from the vicinity of the med unit and looked back, startled, only to see Boba Fett stagger out into the hallway, pulling at the bandages on his hands even as he headed toward her with grim determination.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demanded, stopping to let him catch up to her.
“Is that the perimeter alert?” he asked.
She scowled at him, provoked that he was out of bed at all, and even more irritated that he had so obviously brushed off her first question. “Yes,” she said shortly. “I can handle it.”
“You?” he asked, and raised an eyebrow. Before she could reply, he went on, “Are the main defensive controls in the guard chamber?”
“Yes, but -- “
He didn’t bother to wait. Limping a little, he hurried down the stairs as Mièle trailed in his wake, desperately searching for arguments that would be effective in getting him back into bed and finding none.
At this hour the palace was dark; no one was around, after all, to see that proper illumination was provided. Fett seemed to have very good night vision -- he must have eyes like a Tusken Raider, she thought -- but even he accidentally collided with some low-hanging chimes in one doorway, the sound a sweet discordance against the continued shrilling of the siren.
She wondered how he was able to find his way to the guard chamber so easily. It was not as if he had been a regular inhabitant of the palace, after all, but perhaps it was his practice to familiarize himself with his surroundings wherever he went. Again she thought of his long, bloody career, and of all the survival skills he would have been forced to develop along the way.
Light flooded out of the guard chamber into the dark hallway; Mièle wasn’t sure whether she had forgotten to shut it down when she had retired for the evening or whether the overhead lighting came on automatically once the perimeter security system was activated.
Fett pushed on ahead of her into the chamber, heading automatically for the main security console. The view screens revealed only dark desert, broken here and there by the bluish glow of the perimeter wards -- all screens save the one that showed the rear approach to the palace.
“What is that?” she asked, pointing at the dark bulk that seemed to fill the screen. In shape it recalled vaguely a jawa sandcrawler, but otherwise it resembled those slow, lumbering vehicles about as much as the Anchorhead boys’ sandhoppers did an X-wing fighter. The unknown vehicle had an oily, gunmetal finish that shimmered oddly in the glare of the activated defense field; its outline seemed to be spiked with a number of strategically placed laser cannons.
“Get me into the system,” Fett commanded, once again ignoring her question, but Mièle knew better than to argue. She hastened to the console, tapped in the code, then stepped aside.
Fett lifted his bandaged hands to the controls and paused. Then he seemed to shake his head slightly, and pulled at the wrappings that covered his fingers. One by one they came away, revealing mottled, half-healed skin still marked by livid bruises and angry red abrasions.
Swallowing slightly, Mièle forced herself not to look away. If his hands were still that bad after healing for almost a week, she hated to think what his wounds must have looked like when the med droid first treated him.
Now unencumbered, Fett’s hands flew over the controls. Mièle watched as he poured extra power into the shields that protected the rear of the palace and activated the laser cannons mounted to either side of the massive front gates.
“But why -- “ she began. She couldn’t understand why he was bothering with the cannons if the attackers were coming from the rear. Even as she spoke, however, the forward perimeter defenses flared as small dark figures came out of the night, blasters firing.
“Take the controls,” Fett said, and she hurried to take his place at the keyboard even as he moved to the right, grasping the heavy console-mounted cannon grips.
The palace defenses were good against most types of blaster fire, but no defense field could keep out biological attackers, which was why Fett had increased power to the shields guarding the rear of the palace. Somehow he had known that ground forces would be attacking the main gates, and that increasing the force field there would have been of no use.
He had pushed as much power as he could to the rear shields, but he didn’t know the system the way she did; Mièle had spent hours working through its subroutines and codes and knew where she could steal the power they needed -- from the backup generators, the underutilized environmental controls, even the power-cell chargers in the garage. She was but dimly aware of Fett working beside her as she hacked away at the computer system, shunting power to the rear defense fields. The only systems she considered sacrosanct were the weapons controls, of course, and the environmental support systems for the ground floor of the palace; the last thing she needed was for either her or Fett to overheat and collapse in the thick of battle.
No sooner had she completed the first pass through the system than the laser cannons on the massive vehicle threatening the rear of the palace let loose, bombarding the shields with heavy pulse | |