The casino at Canto Bight sparkles around you, its denizens garbed in black and white and little else. You feel a little shabby in comparison, your own clothing far less ostentatious than the gowns and tailored suits around you, but when your companion looks at you, you can’t help the warm flush that spreads from your cheeks to cross the bridge of your nose. Ducking your head, you try to hide the thrill of excitement you feel at being here. Of all the places in the galaxy, you never expected to end up on this planet at this time with this man.
Lando Calrissian, recent convert to the Rebellion cause, and in need, he’d said, of a companion for the evening. You hadn’t jumped at the chance, expecting him to choose a more recognizable face for the task, one of the Rebellion’s great heroes. Instead, he’d asked you, a pretty, pleading smile on his mouth, his hands clasped together in hope. “Would you mind terribly?” he’d asked. “I do know it’s an imposition.”
A free night out in a place like that? You wouldn’t have turned it down even if it hadn’t turned out to be a crucial mission.
“Credits,” he murmured, his breath brushing your ear as he guides you toward the sabacc tables. Your attention is more fully on the warmth of his palm against your lower back, but you nod as though you give even half a damn about credits and the procurement therein. “It always comes back to credits.” You turn your head quickly enough to see the flash of a mischievous grin on his mouth. “Good thing I know a thing or two about that.”
He’d explained a bit about his many and varied theories of sabacc during the trip through hyperspace. You’ve played more than your fair share of hands of it, but his ideas make it seem like a whole different card game than the one you now groaned about whenever someone brought up the possibility of playing. It had sounded interesting to you then. And it still seems interesting now as he takes a seat, elegantly flicking his black, silver-lined cape to the side to avoid sitting on it. It fell around his ankles and you can’t help but be a little distracted by the way his foot hooked around the stool. You take the seat next to his, receive your cards, know full well that you don’t stand a chance against the card sharps around you. They practically salivate at the thought of fleecing one another despite the massive amount of wealth congregating at the table.
Tamping down on your anger, you stare hard at the holoprojector that stands in the middle of it all, the bit of luck that made so many people think of sabacc as a game of chance rather than skill. It’s not true. At least, that’s what Lando says. You’ve had enough hands go bust on the whims of the gods of random number generation to believe otherwise. “Play the odds. Only ever play the odds,” had been his suggestion. And then, with a wink, “And sometimes just gamble it all away anyway. What’s life without a risk?”
There must be something to what Lando says, though, because he rakes in double what the Rebellion had sent him here with within the first ten hands. Even you’ve won one by following his suggestion, which delights the both of you to no end. This’ll be a story you’ll get a lot of mileage out of, that’s for sure, and you can’t wait to rub it in your colleagues’ faces. They’ll be jealous for ages. Of you. For getting to go to Canto Bight. For spending time with Lando Calrissian. For playing sabacc instead of working.
It’s the best night you’ve had in a long time.
When Lando—and you and the Rebellion as a whole—come out of it three times richer than you’d expected to come out of this scheme, you wish it didn’t have to be the only good night you have with him. He seems to sense your melancholy, because once you reach the Lady Luck and he has handed you up the ramp toward the lounge area just inside, he smiles a little more softly, a little more genuinely. “I had a nice time tonight,” he says, devoid of motive or plan. “I hope you did, too.”
Your eyebrow climbs your forehead. “You must have a strange idea of how I spend my days if you’re not already certain of that,” you answer. “It was incredible.” They’d had fun and they’d taken credits from the kind of people who funded the Empire… and would use those credits to fund the Rebellion instead.
There is no bad here.
Except that it has to end.
And then he smiles at you one last time and you know for a fact that this won’t be the last you see of Lando Calrissian.