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The first time she saw him, he was on his knees. He looked sullen and mutinous, eyes narrowed and lower lip getting gnawed to hell. His hair was heavy with sweat, the curls gone lank, and a bruise was darkening one cheek. His chest heaved, his shoulders bowing and spreading as he breathed; behind him, at his lower back, the binders rattled on his wrists.
"Lose something?" The bounty hunter asked Leia as the holo rotated before them.
She saw the small of his back, exposed behind the binders, the gap at the top of his breeches. His knees were splayed apart, his ass raised a bit, thrust back. That was a posture she had heretofore associated only with certain social clubs in Coruscant and elsewhere, places where beings gathered to test limits together and explore the endless galleries of pain and pleasure.
On a captive, it was surprising, to say the least. All the more so, given that it seemed to be unconscious.
"I don't know him," she murmured. "Who is he?"
The bounty hunter snickered. "He sure knows you."
They were Zygerrian, jewel-bright tilted eyes shining through the slit in their helmet. Close up, they smelled musky. They flipped the switch for audio and the holo guttered for a moment before brightening.
Who're you working for? a disembodied voice demanded.
The young man on his knees shook the hair from his eyes and lifted his chin. He was almost unbearably young to Leia's eyes — smooth-faced, despite the dark shadow of stubble along his jaw, unlined and firm.
Poe Dameron, he said, captain, New Republic Star Force, serial number 05-25-772187.
Who are you working for?
Poe Dameron, captain, NRSF, 05-25-772187. He managed, somehow, quite admirably, to sound bored by interrogation.
The off-screen presence kicked him in the side, then slapped him when he grunted. Who?
He spat to the side, then looked up and swallowed a few times. The bump in his throat bobbed; his shirt was torn open halfway to his waist and the holo picked up trails of sweat and blood criss-crossing the skin.
He smiled. That, Leia knew immediately, was when she knew what she was going to do. The kid smiled at the asshole beating and interrogating him, all cocksure and obnoxious, and said, Maybe you didn't hear? Poe Dameron, captain, NR—
"You see," the Zygerrian said to Leia, "he's yours."
"Mmm," she said, and replayed the holo, the audio muted. "You know it's been a while since I was affiliated with the republic."
They grinned at her, flashing their fangs. "So they say."
Leia watched the holo. "Where did you find him?"
"Poaching spice routes out of Kijimi. Nasty little pirate op, hiding out behind a dead star, cloaked in its decay..."
She didn't listen all that carefully. The squabbles of petty criminals were not her concern (though almost out of habit, she thought of the ingredients of a a joke: about her marriage to one of the pettiest of criminals and their near-constant squabbling. Perhaps squabbles, like paranoia, were inseparable from the vocation.)
Turning off the player, Leia brushed her hands on her heavy woollen cloak and said, "How much do you want for him?"
The Zygerrian made a show of thinking it over, despite the fact that they both knew they'd entered the room with a price in their head. "For you?"
"For me." She nodded.
They dumped the bounty, wrapped in a short-run biosuit, on the nose of her corvette. Grumbling, Chewbacca hauled the cargo in and when the locks were set, she went to greet her new hire.
He was still on his knees, still heaving, though now it seemed to be a panic attack. The biosuit helmet obscured his features, yet he was even more handsome in person than the holo had been able to capture. She knelt to help him twist off the helmet; when the seal broke and she lifted it off, he blinked blearily.
"My crew'll pay whatever you paid, just get me back, I —" He stopped, and seemed to wobble, though they were both kneeling. "You're Leia Organa."
"Most of my life, yes," she told him. "And who are you, really?"
He'd used his real name (I keep forgetting covers!, he protested, this was just easier!) and his mother's old serial number from the days of the rebellion. Leia learned all this as she helped him hobble to the ship's rudimentary refresher. Dameron was unsteady; he'd been starved and beaten, it stood to reason, but there was something else to his closeness, something she could not put her finger on.
"You're not a very good criminal," she told him while the refresher charged up. She handed him a cleanser pak and watched him scrub the worst of the blood off his face. He hissed when he pressed too hard on the bruise.
"I get by," he replied. He sagged between her and the wall. "Is this a B-7?"
She checked with Chewie, then confirmed that it was. "Good eye."
He grinned at that, wide and happy at the praise. She nodded, confirming something else.
Dameron went to climb into the fresher then, but Leia stopped him. "Clothes?"
"These are shit, I —"
"Nevertheless," she said, and helped him strip off the filthy jersey and step, with difficulty, out of the stiff breeches. One of his boots fell apart under his hands; the other adhered to his foot and they had to pull it off like marionettes in a children's play. Leia half-expected to go flying backward when it finally came loose.
"I'm naked," Dameron said hoarsely, and glanced down, then back up, grinning again. "I'm naked in front of Leia Organa."
"Get clean," she told him and swatted his ass, nudging him to the refresher. She'd seen more than enough in her long life already. He was handsome, and fit, and clingy. A woman could start to get notions if she wasn't careful.
He sang while he bathed. Leia recognized some of the songs from the old days. Pathfinder marching songs and obscene ballads, mostly, rendered into a pretty catchy mash-up in Dameron's reedy baritone.
She recycled what was left of his clothes and set out fresh pieces from the ship's surplus. Chewbacca questioned her judgment, meeting a prisoner unarmed, let alone helping him bathe, but Leia shushed him. She hadn't gotten this far — wherever she was, it certainly was far from where she'd started — without trusting her instincts.
She would offer the kid a job. The Zygerrian told her he was an excellent pilot who'd been troubling the more established crews and syndicates for a few seasons now. They'd discounted his bounty, in fact, so eager were they to get rid of the thorn in their sides.
Leia would offer him a job, keep an eye on him, train him up. She'd done it before, and she planned to keep doing it until her last breath.
She did not plan, however, on a freshly-scrubbed young man, pink and ruddy from the refresher, limping a little from his injuries, to find her in her cabin. To kneel before her, as naked as the day he was born, and look up at her with lights in his depthless, beautiful eyes, and say, "I'm yours. Where to?"
No one could have planned for that, not even Leia.