Working with Leia was always a bit like working with a stubborn bantha, immovable and intractable and, very occasionally, temperamental. Okay, maybe not very occasionally, more like all the time or maybe every time. Enough so that Qi’ra was beginning to think she was always this unpleasant and it wasn’t just Qi’ra’s bad luck getting in the way. “You do realize, of course, that I could just walk away with all of this stuff and find another buyer?” The question was rhetorical, snide, and made a little smarmy by the way she crossed her arms and leaned against one of the crates in illustration. If she did it in the hopes that Leia would look at her rather than the array of goods she was trying to offload to Leia’s silly, pointless, and dangerous rebellion, that was her business. “Someone who could actually pay me what it’s worth.”
That part always got stuck in Qi’ra’s craw, but she refused to give that thought the satisfaction of prodding further at it. It didn’t deserve the consideration and anyway, she was mercenary, but she wasn’t that mercenary. Not everything had to be about money all the time. Some things, she’d learned, could be about principles. Especially when they came wrapped in a package as furious and charmingly angry as Leia Organa.
That was also a thought she wouldn’t satisfy with more in-depth contemplation, at least not until she was halfway across the galaxy again and alone in her quarters.
“You’re all heart,” Leia replied. Though she spat the words at Qi’ra’s feet, they didn’t manage to burn a hole in the ground, so Qi’ra counted it as a win. Her gaze flicked, lightning quick, to her face and then was gone again. Leia didn’t like dealing with smugglers who wouldn’t commit to her little crusade here and she always seemed to take Qi’ra’s disinterest as a rejection of her personally. The truth of the matter was she appreciated what they were doing here even if she thought they were a bunch of idealistic fools. Qi’ra may not have thought they would win, but in the meantime, they were making things a little bit easier on the galaxy as a whole. There was value in that.
Just not enough to get Qi’ra on board. Already she did too much. If the Empire found out, they’d label her a collaborator and torture the life out of her just as thoroughly as they would a true rebel. That should have been enough for Leia. It was more responsibility than Qi’ra wanted, that was for sure.
That knowledge alone sometimes stopped her in her tracks. She might be doing something as innocuous as finishing her evening meal when she remembered that, oh yeah, she’d made a stupid decision years ago to help the princess of Alderaan and now she was stuck with this, this small, annoying, and ever-spreading stain on her otherwise pristine record.
The Empire might forgive her the laws she’d broken—she was that good at what she did, there were opportunities to leverage that, even for the bureaucrats with sticks up their asses who decided everyone’s fates, even for the corrupt who only wanted to get ahead, and Qi’ra was happy to exploit all of them—but they would never forgive her this disloyalty. Not even if she handed them the Rebellion on a platter.
Not that she would do that. Qi’ra crossed a million lines every day, but she wouldn’t cross this one.
“That heart bleeds for you, Princess,” Qi’ra answered, sweet and poisonous, and just as she expected, Leia stopped, her eyes going wide. She wasn’t used to backtalk and insincerity. No, Leia’s problem was too many people venerated her, but she was a woman like any other, flawed and human and all the more wonderful for it. She just needed a reminder from time to time. Qi’ra was perfectly happy to provide it.
Cheeks flushed, Leia opened and closed her mouth and then sighed, planting her hands on her hips and rolling her eyes. ”Fine,” she said, a little gruff as her hand twirled in the air with an impatient flap. She bowed slightly, quick and sharp, a sarcastic gesture for a sarcastic woman. Would her mother have approved? Qi’ra hoped so. She’d heard so many wild tales about Breha of Alderaan, may she rest well. “I’m sorry. Thank you for—”
Qi’ra waved her off. “It’s not your thanks I want.” As always, what Qi’ra wanted was complicated and frightening to her. What she wanted from Leia was even more nebulous and half-formed. In general, she might have liked her freedom and safety, but those had been taken away from her long ago, the moment Lady Proxima scooped her out of the sewers and started her on this perditious path. This was the closest she’d ever gotten to both freedom and safety and she’d clawed and scraped and bled and killed and stole for it. But this work she did for the Rebellion, for Leia, it wouldn’t get her any further on that score. In fact, it set her back.
Qi’ra was marked. Cursed.
Worse, she was afraid that what she wanted from Leia was diametrically opposed to her desire for that freedom and safety. And one day, she’d have to make a decision or risk losing both.
“If it’s credits—” Leia started, annoyed, because this is how their arguments always started and always because Leia sometimes couldn’t see past Qi’ra’s job to her true motivations. She tended to see smugglers, bounty hunters, and mercenaries as money-grubbing opportunists before she saw them as anything else or more. Qi’ra tried and tried again to get her past those judgments—one day, that assumption might get her into trouble, there were so many more dangerous motivations out there—but the lesson had yet to stick.
She smiled, vicious. Cruel. Today was not going to be the day they saw eye-to-eye. Which was too bad. Qi’ra had high hopes for it. She’d been particularly proud of this haul of cargo before this meeting. She thought it might have gotten her somewhere for once. “It’s not the credits.”
“You’ll have to forgive me, then. It’s very confusing when you saunter in here talking about how much more this stuff is worth elsewhere.”
For a diplomat, politician, and occasional spy, Leia Organa could be naïve and frustrating enough to—
Qi’ra’s eyes dropped to Leia’s mouth in a mirror of Leia’s earlier flinching glance. It would be so easy to stop up her words with a kiss, make this whole argument go away in a conflagration of ill-timed, ill-suited action. But Qi’ra knew better and knew she was as likely to end up slapped across the face as get what she actually wanted or even part of it.
Qi’ra’s hands wrapped more tightly around her sides and her shoulders hunched forward as tension climbed her back, locked her muscles up and tossed the key at Leia for safe keeping or disposal. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Sometimes I wonder why,” Leia snapped, almost enough to free Qi’ra again if only so she could defend herself against the worst of Leia’s implications.
“Because I—” But no, no. Qi’ra couldn’t say it, wouldn’t say it, not unless Leia admitted to it first, because Qi’ra had been down this road before and it never ended happily. Love was for other people. Even lust. Infatuation. Caring. Whatever it was that Qi’ra felt for Leia, she wasn’t going to expose herself that way. Leia already had more power over her than Qi’ra was entirely comfortable with despite knowing it was her own fault for handing that power over.
“Because you what?” Leia strode toward her, tiny legs chewing up the distance between them more quickly than was entirely fair. With her chin tilted upward the way it was, their mouths were almost perfectly aligned. Her eyes narrowed to slits and the fan of her eyelashes shrouded Qi’ra from the worst of the heat of her anger and disappointment. Leia seemed very determined to keep her gaze centered on Qi’ra’s nose, not quite challenging, but deliberate in an affected way.
Qi’ra wished they could go back to the way things were when they first were getting to know each other. At least back then, the antagonism was fun, lighthearted. It didn’t hurt then the way it hurt now.
They didn’t always end up fighting these days, but Qi’ra couldn’t deny it had gotten more frequent of late, more mean-spirited and brutal.
Something had to give.
Something did give. Because Leia’s hands were suddenly on Qi’ra’s face and Leia’s eyes dropped one final time to her mouth and before Qi’ra could react—push Leia away or pull her close, Qi’ra didn’t have time even for either of these most basic of responses—Leia’s lips were against hers and Leia’s teeth were tugging at Qi’ra and Leia’s tongue was opening Qi’ra up, demanding all of Qi’ra’s secrets without a single gods-damned word being uttered by either of them.
Leia Organa could sometimes be a bastard, too. She contained multitudes. And like any pushy bastard would do, she shoved Qi’ra toward the crates that no longer seemed to matter much to either of them despite instigating this whole—this whole whatever it was. They’d started this and could’ve ended up sucked into a void for all it mattered at the moment.
Qi’ra would have to be forgiven for her hubris and the uncharitable nature of her thoughts. She was still stuck on the part where Leia Organa was kissing her and kissing her well, with far more finesse than Qi’ra would have expected for a princess in general and for Leia specifically, who never seemed to let anyone close enough to touch her. And, to be honest, she wasn’t patient enough to take her time. Leia wanted everything right now and to her exact specifications. That didn’t always make for excellent moments of intimacy, but…
This was, well. It was good and giving, Leia all but pouring herself into Qi’ra and letting Qi’ra do with that what she would. Qi’ra knew, of course, that Leia was generous, too. But she was generous to the Rebellion, to the downtrodden, not to Qi’ra, who drew her scorn at least as often as she earned Leia’s praise for a job well done.
Within the span of a few seconds, Qi’ra felt she knew Leia more thoroughly than she’d ever hoped to know her.
Burying her hands in Leia’s hair—loosening the braids she always wore and how glorious it was to be able to do that, she hadn’t known how much she wanted to do it until it was done—she groaned and pulled Leia closer, hooked her leg around the back of Leia’s calf to drag their inner thighs together.
This probably wasn’t the most appropriate time or place to do this and Qi’ra was wildly, desperately cognizant of that fact. Pulling back, her heart stuttering and her chest tight with the need for air, she brushed a couple of flyaways behind Leia’s ear, the hairs soft and stubbornly resistant to being smoothed back. “Your Highness,” she said, finding a modicum of cool somewhere in the deep recesses of her heard. “That wasn’t what I was expecting at all.”
Leia, still flushed, her lips pink and tempting, rolled her eyes. She couldn’t have been too annoyed though, because there was a smile curling at the corner of her mouth and her eyes sparkled a bit. It was captivating. “Then you don’t know me very well.”
“Well,” Qi’ra said, letting her voice go a little deep as she dragged her fingers down Leia’s throat, her thumb settling at the base of Leia’s neck where she could feel the fluttering of her pulse. “I think I’d very much like to, Leia.”
It was the first time that Qi’ra could remember ever saying Leia’s name aloud, at least not without her title attached to it. She was surprised by how much she enjoyed the taste of it there on her tongue. She said it again just to experience it anew and smiled when Leia ducked her head as though suddenly shy.
“I think,” Leia answered with as much dignity as she could muster, “that we could arrange that.” Qi’ra was going to suggest right now, back in her quarters on the Falcon, but Leia’s eyes skimmed the room around them. “After this all gets cataloged and verified against your manifests, of course.”
Always the work first, that was Leia Organa to the end.
And yet, as Qi’ra huffed in amusement, she knew she would always follow Leia anyway. That was Qi’ra. Right to the end.
This time, she couldn’t find it in herself to regret that fact.