Аннотация: Leia attempts a sexual fantasy, but her conscience keeps intruding. Английская версия рассказа "Ночи вроде этой".
Notes:
So the large general plot line of the Star Wars Expanded Universe goes like this:
- after Palpatine's death, Thrawn was the only one who knew about the coming Yuuzhan Vong invasion and tried to prepare for it;
- he was also the only one who had a decent chance of a clean and relatively quick military victory against them, with no great loss of civilian lives;
- he got betrayed and killed as a result of Leia's influence on the Noghri people;
- Leia herself did nothing to prepare for the coming war at all;
- the Yuuzhan Vong came and murdered something around 365 trillion inhabitants of the Galaxy Far, Far Away.
One has to wonder how the citizens of the Galactic Alliance would react to this unfortunate chain of events when they grasped that it exists. I have a feeling they would not be pleased with the way history turned out, and with Leia's role in it.
"I wish Grand Admiral Thrawn had raped and killed you, bitch."
She had received a number of that kind of remarks in the aftermath of the Yuuzhan Vong War, when the galaxy got a chance to exhale, to wake up from incredible horrors - and to begin understanding that, but for one stroke of a dagger, they could have been averted.
If only Grand Admiral Thrawn had survived.
If only he had won in 9 ABY.
Lying in bed with her sleeping husband - another evening in another week without sex - Leia pondered the imagery of the hateful remark and its hideous, personal nature. "He certainly could have done that", she had retorted coolly the first time it had been said to her face, "strong and ruthless enough, he was." She had used the lurid brutality of the hate speech as a defense, making herself appear a victim (of mere words) when she had been the killer in fact. It had worked, she'd shut up the hater that one time. But the remarks kept coming through the grapevine from different corners in a small but steady trickle, never really ceasing with the years. Not even when her older son betrayed her Jedi faith, became a Sith and had to be eliminated by his own family. Jacen, her bright and heroic boy, killed without remorse by his own twin sister, her daughter. If anything, the quiet hatred many subjects seemed to be feeling for Leia Organa-Solo became even worse after that.
Citizens, she reminded herself, turning restlessly, staring at the sleeping Han's bare shoulder. They are not subjects; this is not the Empire. They had created a republic, Mon Mothma, Ackbar and Leia herself, with her bloodied hands. A New Republic, better and stronger than the old dead one. Their young system had not survived the war, the Yuuzhan Vong had killed it as surely as she had killed Thrawn, but the seeds had been sown - the new Galactic Alliance was built on Republican principles in its core.
It all was worth a murder.
She had dreamed of Thrawn in the aftermath of the war, of his heavy hands on her throat, his hateful glare. Not of the suggested rape but of the killing, the stranglehold. The dream did not return, but it seemed to hover in the back of her conscience on nights like this. Would it be worth it, to die, and in such a disgraceful way, to prevent trillions from dying in ways that were far more cruel? Trillions of intelligent beings, an untold number of animals; thousands of lost worlds, each as rich and vibrant with life as her own lost Alderaan. One life - hers - against all of theirs. A bargain?
She closed her eyes and imagined her husband, Han, strangling her, taking Thrawn's place in a morbid half-sexual fantasy that she has been attempting to have. But it did not really work - Han had always been on her side. Not she on his, mind, for Leia always came first. Her plans, her interests, her ideas.
Her plans, ideas and interests meant the blue-skinned warlord had to die, indispensable genius that he was. And so would Han Solo, if ever the need arose. She could and maybe yet would send him to his death at her word, she knew it - but she wouldn't go to her death for him. She had higher values than that.
Maybe that was the reason for this latest turn of her thoughts, for Han's imagined hatred. Guilt. A strange, new emotion.
Leia chased away this image of Han, the sudden connection between him, a loved one, and the dark and unwholesome fantasy of her dying. She needed something to close the day, something to satisfy for a night the strange growing void of her mind and soul. Marital sex would have done that, the tender, familiar love, but Han had gotten into a habit of gently refusing her, longer and longer, after they'd sentenced their son to death for his apostasy.
Stretched out on her back, Leia placed her hands on her breasts and imagined herself in about 10 ABY, still young and pretty, her body slender, skin taut and not yet ruined by politics, drugs and losses. Rukh's dagger had merely wounded the Admiral, failing to kill. History took thenceforth a different course. She was now a spoil of war she had lost, a prisoner on the Imperial flagship Himaera, undergoing endless tormenting interrogations and, in between them, serving as Thrawn's personal comfort woman. Time and time again, she would be given a bath, dressed tastefully and then taken, too tired to resist, to the Admiral's quarters. Thrown onto a bed by her conqueror, her new master, her dress torn all the way down the middle with her wearing nothing at all underneath it; Thrawn savagely looking down at her naked body, his red eyes dark with barely controlled wrath, before raping her with the brutal passion of a victorious warlord towards a captive. By that time he would already know she had been the driving force behind the Noghri's betrayal...
...if only he had survived it.
She had a long-standing suspicion that Thrawn preferred men. Would he have made her an exception?
The fantasy wasn't working. Leia couldn't make it continue, for the living glare in Thrawn's eyes was judgement and sentence - murder and not sex at all. He knew what she was, all that she had done, knew of the countless lives she had sacrificed to the idea of Republic as unto a savage bloodthirsty god. How many?
She rolled up on her side and thought yet again, without emotion, of the war's dead - all 365 trillions of them.
Too many.
She felt a cold anger grow inside. Too many. So what?
She had never promised them, or anybody, to prevent their deaths in war. Not in a war of that scale. She'd promised to restore the Republic - not even democracy, for she knew these were different things - and she had delivered on the promise. Thrawn really had been the one with the goal of protecting innocent lives - him with his flawed genius, the pathetic humanist martyr. Princess Leia Organa was historically responsible for a far greater thing - a majestic and sacred government system, no, a system of life and thought of which she, along with and after Mon Mothma, had become an embodiment and a symbol. Sacrificing her power and herself so that hundreds of trillions could survive? An irrational thought. Who were they, after all, those hundreds of trillions, and what were their lives in comparison to her mission? Many probably had been barbarians who'd never heard of the Old or the New Republic, knew no civilization. They might even have held ideals of authoritarian rule not unlike the Empire's. To give up her holy historical struggle, maybe even to die for the sake of their survival? Ridiculous. Lives like these weren't really worth the air wasted by their breath, much less such a great sacrifice. As for the New Republicans who'd also become casualties of war... well, she mourned them. And moved on to continue her work. They would understand. Lives were transient after all, far more so than ideas.
Thrawn watched her from a recess inside her mind, dark and silent, his face full of utter scorn and disgust. As if he was looking at something rotting and evil - an undead bloodsucker, for example - and not the attractive young woman she was, in her fantasy, for his pleasure.
No, she thought. He would not have made an exception.