Author's Note:

A while ago I was trying to shoehorn these scenes into my longer Bespin story, "Three Long Weeks", where some of you may have already seen a heavily edited version of it. This version stands alone and is based on text I found in my archives, from a far earlier version, before I started monkeying with it.

Crossed Wires

During the trip to Bespin

Sitting alone in the dark cockpit of the Millenium Falcon, Leia Organa stared out the transparisteel viewport at the stars crawling slowly past... far too slowly for her taste.

Leia was tired of going nowhere. Literally and figuratively.

She'd lost count of how many hours she'd been sitting in this stupid cockpit, staring out at the same stars that never changed.

Had it only been two days since they'd left Hoth? It seemed more like two weeks that they'd been running, bouncing from one disaster to the next, making it up as they went along.

No. Unless the Falcon's trip chrono wasn't working – which was, of course, a distinct possibility - they had logged barely fifty hours of flight time. The navi-puter estimated just under three weeks stretching out ahead of them before they'd make Bespin.

Gods. How was she going to survive another twenty days - maybe more - cooped up with the Falcon's captain? She had the disconcerting feeling that they'd crossed some line, somewhere, when she hadn't been paying attention.

Something had certainly changed in their relationship in those fifty hours. He was still the same man who'd been alternately attracting and infuriating her for three years. But now... he kept invading her mind at the oddest times. And somehow, it seemed harder to stay angry with him now that it had been just a few days ago.

Just now, for instance, she was remembering the look in his eyes when he'd left her alone in the cockpit not long ago. He'd been heading down to the lower level of the ship to assist Chewie with repairs and he'd turned, in the hatchway, to look back at her, in the same instant that she'd turned in his chair to look back at him. The expression she'd caught on his face was a very different one than he usually wore. There was longing, and sadness, and something else she couldn't identify. For a moment she'd thought he was about to say something, and for a moment she'd wanted to ask him to stay. But then the moment was gone and so was he.

What was wrong with her? She'd been content. All right, maybe not content. But... comfortable. She'd been comfortable, for the first time since Alderaan, having a handful of friends and companions with whom she could be herself. She had people who knew her – Leia Organa - and not as a figurehead, a legend. People who knew the truth, and liked her anyway.

Sometimes Solo exasperated her, but he'd come to be one of the ones she trusted. One she could call friend. Most of the time, at least.

But down in the circuitry bay, he'd stopped being a friend and turned into something else entirely: A handsome man who seemed genuinely interested in her. Despite their years of bickering and tossing barbs at one another, it hadn't occurred to her that the game they'd been playing was anything but a game. He was older than she by at least ten years, and even if she had been looking for romance – which she wasn't, who had time for that in the middle of war? - she certainly wouldn't have considered him a prospect.

True, for three years she'd been hearing a near-constant stream of verbal innuendo from him, but she'd assumed he'd been mocking her, that he did it because it annoyed her.

All those years, she'd never imagined that he saw her as anything but an uptight and spoiled comrade, It hadn't occurred to her that any of his teasing sexual remarks had been serious... until the moment when his mouth had found hers, and the universe had spun out of her control. .

In that unexpected moment, he'd raised the stakes on her, and for the first time, she understood that she might well have more to lose in this sabaac pot than he did.

His kiss had awakened something inside her she hadn't been willing to admit to herself was even there. She heard his words in her head, "You like me because I'm a scoundrel. You haven't had enough scoundrels in your life." It was true. He was utterly unlike any other man she'd ever known. And that was what made him so appealing.

Thinking about it was giving her a headache. Would her life never be simple?