In a universe full of Yavins, Hoths, Balmorras and Belsavises, Jadesea was atypically straightforward in its nomenclature. The main city floated on a milky-green ocean that rolled in picturesque waves, and everywhere Leia looked seemed to be perfectly groomed as to make the best picture possible. It was beautiful, to be sure, but she still couldn't figure out why Vader wanted to go on leave in the kitschy tourist town. Quite frankly the slim possibilities were making her worry.

He, however, seemed perfectly nonchalant, as irritatingly usual as that was for him. While she mentally fumed, Vader merely adjusted the sleeves on his tunic to pull down underneath his gloves. She gritted her teeth in momentary irritation before the elevator's doors hissed open, and immediately she put on her best diplomatic smile.

"Chancellor Yvarran, how good to finally meet you. We've enjoyed our time on Jadesea here immensely, and all of the enlisted men are -"

"Right, let's get this over with," Vader said, talking over her as he strode past.

Her smile froze on her face as she paused, mid-handshake with the richly dressed chancellor, who seemed equally confused. "Ah. Chancellor, my apologies, Commander Vader sometimes, ah..."

"I'm going on leave in fifteen so hurry up," he declared impatiently to the row of honor guards. "Well, go on. I haven't got all day."

"Just a moment," Leia beamed before turning to Vader, the smile being wiped from her face in one brief instant. "What are you doing?" she hissed underneath her breath, going to stand beside him.

He looked down to adjust one of his gloves once more. "One of these men in the Chancellor's guard is about to turn traitor and try to assassinate you. If I'm not mistaken, by..." Vader looked into the middle distance, cocking his head as if listening to some distant noise. "...Poison dart, most likely. I'd like for them to go ahead and get on with it."

Leia reached up to pinch her nose as the Chancellor, behind them, was affably baffled. "Excuse me? Is there a problem, Ambassador Organa?"

"Erm, nothing, just some extra security precauti-"

"One of your men is about to attempt to kill the princess," Vader interrupted with typical bluntness. "Not that I don't sympathize with the impulse. It's just a futile gesture while she is under my command."

The Chancellor looked roughly as if he had just swallowed a raw fillet of gundark ear. He gulped solidly, and started to break into a sweat. "All of these men were thoroughly vetted beforehand, Ambassador Organa, I can assure you..."

"Well, one out of eighteen isn't entirely bad odds," Vader noted before staring down the line of honor guards. "Still unacceptable, but at least not as bad as it could have been."

"It's fine, I'm sure that with another security check this, ah, misunderstanding will be cleared up," Leia said cheerfully before catching herself and having a brief internal scream about how blithely she was dismissing dangers to her person. "Now, Chancellor. About Jadesea's contributions to the Republic, both financial and material..."

That was when the second-to-last guardsman, who had begun to sweat profusely, charged out of position in order to grab at something at his belt. The small box spun out of his hands and onto the floor as Vader tackled him, bringing him to the ground and wrenching his arms safely back so that the other man cried out and cursed. There was the loud pop of a shoulder being dislocated. Vader, if anything, wore a wicked smile of enjoyment.

It was such a flurry of activity that for a brief moment all Leia could do was blink, her train of thought utterly lost.

"Wonderful," Vader finally said, standing up and dusting off his hands as the Rebellion security corps rushed in to handcuff the would-be assassin. "Now I can finally start my shore leave."

Jadesea was a city of wealth at the extremes; glittering spires housed salons and galas for the rich, just as it was a show of wealth to build down deep into the non-platonic seas of shearing force and crushing waves. That left the middle as a desert of cheap taverns and poor man's general stores, unkempt and untidy and everything the city wished to hide with its tourist-friendly smiles.

That was exactly why Vader had changed into plainclothes and now was cruising through the sidestreets on the battered old swoop bike he had scavenged from Taris. Finally he seemed to find what he was looking for, and parked in front of a grungy dive bar. Immediately he was an object of suspicion, the bartender glaring at him before he opened the door, and all of the lowlife regulars staring at him as he slouched into a seat.

"Tarisian ale."

A grunt for a response. A few moments later the bartender slid him the drink, and he caught it neatly. Up above the holoscreens played and replayed highlights from a race - the bar shared a track with others around the city.

After all, shore leave was for having fun, wasn't it?

He couldn't help grinning into his drink as he watched the replay of the swoop bikes going around the track, one spinning off the walls to ricochet towards the other two. And as he watched, he could feel every glare burrowing into his back. This place hated him. Every single person in it; every chair, every spotted glass, every tsotchke on the wall. It was pleasantly familiar. Homey, even.

"So." He set his drink down. "When does the track open?"

"Half an hour, when the young punks get off work and come wanting a race." The barkeep turned and spat into a spitoon, half out of necessity and half for rhetorical effect. "What? You want in?"

"Mmn." A grunt and a nod. These were not the type of people to respond well to more than the minimum amount of words, and Vader respected that.

"In that pile of bantha fodder out there?" He gestured outside the window. A murmured laugh ripped through the patrons in the bar.

"She's got it where it counts," Vader said quickly before considering how much he had accidentally sounded like Han Solo and deciding the proper response was to gulp his drink.

"Track's not built for swoop bikes. Just speeders and the occasional rich kid's landspeeder. Besides..." The bartender leaned forward, staring Vader down with incredulously narrowed eyes. "You do know you're on Jadesea, right? That sea out there ain't like a normal one. It punches back. So thick of chemicals and sludge that running into a wave's same as smashing into a plasteel wall."

"I know." Vader couldn't help the small smirk that made its way onto his face.

"And?"

"I'm still going to be on that track when it opens. And..." He turned around the empty ale glass with a slow flourish. "I'll win. I'll even bet you, oh..." Vader's eyes wandered the back of the bar before poking at an ornate bottle in among the other spirits. Every bar had one - the aspirational bottle, the bottle kept just in case some high roller breezed through ready to spend as much money as possible at a time. This one was an elegant dome of glass topped with a gold tassel. Fancy. Impressively and insufferably so.

"That. I'll bet you that I'll win."

"And if you don't?" Snapped back the man.

"Twenty thousand credits, plus whatever the Rebellion pays you for your trouble to scrape my body off the walls. But that's not going to happen." He smirked around another sip of the ale.

The entire bar stared at him. The entire bar loathed him. And finally the barkeeper gave a bark of a laugh.

"Fine. Terms accepted. But if you're racing, I'm cutting you off now after that one ale."

The racetrack was obviously salvaged from old sewer and flood lines. It was dark and smelled, well, quite interesting, to put it delicately. The concrete groaned from each slam of the seawater outside, and shivered as it dripped through. It made Vader glad he had brought his racing helmet.

Slowly, other racers began to gather - the track was to expensive to run for just one person. They were obviously outsiders as much as Vader was, all of them young and appearing fresh from school. Likely they'd only held their speeder licenses for a few months, and all of them apparently had money to burn on their rigs. Each speeder was festooned with kit parts and shield generators to stand up to Jadesea's unforgiving ocean. The roar of the engines starting up was nothing like the din on Taris, even bouncing and echoing on the concrete walls. In fact, everything was pale imitation.

He didn't mind. His blood itched for another chance to achieve that slim bit of bliss - nothing else to think of but himself, the swoop bike, and the track.

The other racers were laughing at his bike behind his back - laughing at his age, to boot, but he didn't mind. Soon enough he was comfortably seated in the swoop bike and the electronic scoreboard was ticking down the minutes until start. Three. Deep breaths, he thought, letting each one settle into the pit of his stomach before exhaling. Two. He flexed his hands against the steering handles. One. His chapped lips almost tasted like blood, but no time to deal with that now.

One. Seven-eights. Two thirds. One half. One quarter.

The last light flickered out, and then the horn sounded, and they were off.

Everyone else was burdened by shields, ready to cut through Jadesea's hard oceans, so he skipped ahead nimbly. Before long it was just him and the old sewer pipe echoing around him, occasionally glimpsing a side-street of dingy neon and rot out of the corner of his eye. He adjusted his fingers on the handles, rolling his shoulders and stretching his neck. This was the easy part - the boring part. But sunlight was up ahead.

Sunlight, and the sea.

Jadesea's ocean was a particular marvel of the universe, after all. It was so thick with small organisms that an entire city could still be buoyant, and large waves rolled sluggishly in choppy surf around the harbor. Tourists outside would stand in the puddles collected specifically for them, walking easily on top of it in order to take pictures to send to family back home, but swimming in it was as impossible as swimming in transparisteel and the waves were similarly as unforgiving. Smashing into one at speed would mean certain death.

That's why Vader gunned it, engines roaring, and sped into the bright light at full speed. Up the side of one wave - he rode the crest as it crashed down, and then straight into another, along the inside curve. He wrestled the swoop bike in along the outside edge once more before finally with a jolt landing back on the concrete that connected the city's vast sewers.

It was a moment, gleaming and perfect, of bliss. And that's why he shook off his helmet, steering lazily with one hand while clipping the thing to the back of his seat. He could almost feel the heat of the stares of everyone in every seedy pub the camera feeds went to. That made it even better.

Another slim bit of sunlight slicing through the dingy darkness. Another rendezvous with the sea.

This time the surf was choppy and stilted, skittering away from the concrete edge of the city in short echoes. Off one three-foot-high wave's crest and onto another jarred him so hard he could hear his teeth clack. One enormous wave crested over him, blacking out the sunlight and turning the light green-grey as he gunned the swoop bike faster. It was curling in on itself - starting to collapse - and if he was caught, he'd be crushed or worse, drowned -

The engine roared in the sound chamber of the wave, already working at its fastest; all of his counters and dials flashed red as he leaned forward in his seat -

The wave crashed down behind him.

He had barely escaped it, but still, he turned the swoop bike around sharply, aiming back out into the sea. There were only two chances in the circuit to get out onto the ocean, and he was going to make the most of it. The others were still ponderously making their way through the ocean by brute force instead of skipping on top of it like a leaf riding a pond's ripples. He wheeled it out into the open ocean, grinning like a madman as he rode another wave's crest, and then another, slamming down hard and avoiding the ricochet off the city every time. Then, finally - the sound of heavy engines to his back. The others were catching up. As much as he loved the ocean, he loved first place more, so it was back to the concrete for an easy finish to the lap.

Vader didn't notice until then that one of the shards of the ocean's water had come down on him, cutting into his cheek. It was bleeding freely. No matter. That just made the victory even better, if his enemy was the type to draw blood.

When he made his way back into the bar, dead silence and stares greeted him. Instead he slouched into a seat, motioning the bartender for another drink. The bartender looked him up and down with apparently fresh eyes before pouring the Tarisian ale and handing it to him.

"Don't expect them to applaud or anything," the bartender grunted. "You just lost them a lot of money. They all bet against you." Begrudgingly, he pulled out the gold-tasseled bottle of Corellian whiskey and slammed it onto the bar in front of Vader. He considered it a moment before opening it, taking a sip of ale, and then chasing it with a gulp of the whiskey. Pleasantly smooth, and delicious, especially given that it was free.

"So. What else is there to do in this town?"

Author's notes: I'm baa-aaack. Anyone miss me? :)

Seriously though, this fanfic is the most important one to me, and I'm dying from just not being able to write it anymore. So the quality of my writing may have gone downhill, but with my trusty beta amarielah I'm continuing on. I hope that you all understand - being disabled from chronic pain is no fun, but I'm writing despite it. Anyway, hope you enjoy a couple of chapters of us getting back into the swing of things - don't worry, the heavy stuff is still on the table!