Chapter Text
Leia loathed Darth Vader, the masked monster, with a rage that would never rival all that he had taken from her. Some days, this was all that kept her on her feet, all that kept the vast oceans of guilt from swallowing her up completely.
Tarkin had pressed the button. On a fundamental level, Leia understood this, but it was impossible to quantify the distance between the one who had pushed the button and those who had stood by - and perhaps in this way she was no different than her father, for she too was to blame.
On some level, Leia understood that action could have only meant failure, understood that Alderann had been gone the minute she stepped aboard her ship, her decisions nothing more than drops in an ocean, insignificant in the face of the Emperor’s great plan. On some level, Leia understood that she had been powerless, understood that the light from dying stars would still shine even when they are gone, but she was unable to stand by. Of this failure, she was no less guilty than Vader.
It was possible to cross the galaxy at speeds faster than light, and sometimes Leia longed to steal a ship and fly until she was far enough away to undo all that she had done, until she existed in a time and place - however temporarily - in which Alderann was not yet gone.
Leia loathed Darth Vader more than herself, but it was a close match.
After the Battle of Endor had ended, Leia had found Luke in the forest, staring into the flames of Vader’s pyre. She had watched him from between the trees for a moment, flames reflecting off of the tears that streaked down his face, the lines of his face sharp in the flickering firelight. Brother, Leia called him, for she knew now that there must have been a man behind the mask, but all that she could picture was the durasteel as it burnt, acrid and sharp, black smoke rising to blot out the stars in the sky.
Brother, Leia called him, the word bitter in her mouth - for though Leia loved Luke with everything she had left inside of her, the only person she hated more than herself was their father. Luke had smiled at this, warm and bright and so unlike Leia’s own and she had wondered where the darkness inside of her came from, stared up at the stars and saw nothing but smoke.
Her brother’s voice shook as he described how he had fought the Emperor, how Vader had turned to the light to save him in the end; Leia listened and despite this, could not find it in herself to forgive him. In this way, perhaps, she remained her father’s daughter.
When she had been young, Leia used to look up at the stars and wonder where the pieces that created her had come from, used to guess which planets her birth parents were from, spending hours studying the slope of her nose or the color of her eyes for answers. Her father had been an adventurer, Leia decided one night, someone who was kind like Bail but wouldn’t have scolded her from climbing onto the roof. Her mother was smart, just like Breha, but never so busy with work that she would leave Leia behind. They had loved each other, Leia knew; she sometimes hoped they loved her too, loved her enough to come back for her.
Bail and Breha had looked at Leia with barely disguised horror when she had asked them about the woman in white who haunted her dreams, shock turning into a guilt that hung heavy in the room. After this, Leia had known better than to ask of their fate. Many brave men and women had died during the Clone Wars, Bail had told her, and had died fighting to uphold the Old Republic. He had smiled sadly at this, and for a moment he had looked impossibly tired, before turning off her lights.
“They died fighting for what was right, “ Bail had whispered to a dark room, “for a better future for you.”
As she grew older, Leia had forgotten about her fascination. Her parents were the ones that had raised her, whether or not they shared blood. This was something that Luke would never understand, Leia knew, forged as he was by twin suns and burning sand and reckless hope. Vader hadn’t been free until the very end, Luke insisted, something like awe in his voice as he recited words in a language that she could not understand. Leia smiled tightly and nodded as though she did not remember the feeling of mechanical arms around her neck.
Luke saw the good in things. He looked at something broken and wanted to fix it, to make it into something better than before. Perhaps this was a remnant of Tatooine, of scarcity and stubbornness, of making the best out of the worst, because optimism was as necessary as water to make it out of such a place alive.
There was an asteroid field where Alderann had once been, an entire planet reduced to fragments of debris that bumped against the spaceship as it drifted, small rocks floating past the window. There was nothing here to repair, Leia knew, nothing that could be undone. Staring at her people’s unmarked grave, Leia feared the fire in her chest; the anger at those who had wronged her and at herself for simply standing by.
It took years to rebuild the Republic, for victorious speeches to turn into actions towards a tentative peace. Still, this was merely the beginning. Leia blinked back the burning in her eyes as she watched millions of rebels return home, joyfully reuniting with those lucky enough to survive. She smiled and held her head high although there was no longer anything home for her to return to, the only planet she had ever known reduced to a field of asteroids and an empty hole in her heart. Leia smiled, for she was strong enough to survive such a terrible loss.
The grief threatened to pull her under whenever she did not hold its leash, begged to steal the air from her lungs and the warmth from her bones until she was more dead than alive; and perhaps this is what she sound have been, reunited with her people at last. Leia was no more than a child, trying to fit the pieces of a broken vase back together, no more than a sailor, bailing out a sinking ship. More than anything else, Leia was terrified that one day she would forget all the things that lived on only in her mind, terrified of the history that would die with her.
On her tenth nameday, Leia’s parents had gifted her a mouse droid, a tiny thing that followed her around the palace. She had loved it more than anything, brought it everywhere with her, until a visiting imperial had kicked it off of a balcony when it crossed his path. The poor thing had shattered on the path below, a life ended with one simple choice. Leia had been furious at such casual cruelty, had sobbed and raged and begged, but none of this had brought her friend back.
It was not possible to look back, Leia knew, so she distracted herself with the future, with the goal of rebuilding a galaxy better than the one that had been destroyed. She spent her days leading meetings and writing reports, and desperately hoping that - this time - they would get it right. She spent her nights staring at the glow of her holoscreen through tear-blurred eyes until Han came in and helped her to bed with gentle hands and a gentle voice that would finally lul her to sleep.
Some nights, she lay her hand on her stomach and thought about the life that they had created and wondered if her father would have been proud to know he had a grandon. Wrapping herself in her husband’s warmth, Leia hid herself from the darkness, a lone candle amongst a sea of lights that had been blown air. The air still smelled of smoke.
As much as Leia turned towards the future, Luke yearned to learn more about the past, about the Jedi, those who had come before him, who had been destroyed when everything went wrong. Her brother set out for months at a time, returning with stories and relics, his eyes alight with quiet, confident light.
He had found old holograms of Anakin Skywalker, Luke hesitantly told her one night as they lay in the gardens, had found evidence of the man he believed to have come before Vader. Leia smiled at him even as her heart sank, for she was certain that there was no before and after, that the man and the monster were one and the same. She did not wish to know the face of the man who had murdered her father, she responded.
Anger was a dangerous thing, Luke retorted, was something that she had to let go of. As she stormed out of the room, Leia responded that she did not know how.
She did not wish to embrace the darkness that clung to her, did not want to live with such pain, but she did not understand how to leave it all behind. Forgiveness felt like a betrayal of her people, of the millions who had not survived; only through her suffering did their memory live on.
A particularly long session of senate had recessed and Leia returned to her apartment in the early hours of the morning, cursing Vader for the mess he had left her behind. The New Republic’s victory was still fragile, the remaining imperial fragments fighting to regain control of a system that could not yet bear its own weight. War was still threateningly close and Leia struggled to swallow her bitterness at the role the sith had played in this.
There were some days that were harder than the others, some days when she could barely come up for air.
Leia felt Lord Vader’s presence before she saw him, thick and cloying, and suddenly it was hard to breathe - she was nineteen and he was alive and Alderaan was not yet gone - even through the pain she knew this. She had felt it once again as she stood before his pyre, had turned and ran from the forest, ran until all that she could hear was the sound of her heartbeat, until all she felt was rage and grief and nothing else.
She hesitated, trapped somewhere between memories and the room she stood in, at some crossroads of ignorance and knowledge and regret. Leia did not want to know the face of the man who had slaughtered her innocence, did not want to look him in the eye, but to flee would be surrender, and Leia was nothing if not stubborn to the end.
Balling her hands into fists to keep them from shaking - from fear and from anger - Leia drew a careful breath in, counted to ten, and turned to face the man who had killed her father. A barbed response already on the tip of her tongue, Leia was prepared to meet the monster’s eye, or perhaps to meet the eyes of the man whose skin it wore like a mask, the man Luke claimed as father. Instead, she was met with the terrified eyes of a child who barely came up to her waist, blue and familiar and pained, the edges of his gaunt frame a blurry blue.