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One day, mother returns.
If her leave was dark and in the night, her return is anything but. Strange, bulbous, organic, wrong , shapes of Calamari cruisers fill the sky, bloating out the sun, their privileged sun of the upper levels, with their shadow. Starfighters roar down the canyons of Coruscant, not in the ordered formations of the Imperial fleet but in two’s and and three’s and four’s, pilots recruited from the backwards worlds on the Outer Rim ignoring the sky lanes maintained by centuries of law and tradition.
Their security team is the first to go. Having done good service against rioters and looters, the mercenaries have little inclination to fight New Republic shock troops and when a squad of the latter arrives, their dropships falling from the invading fleet like inkblots to surround their mansion, her husband's men lay down arms with businesslike continuance. The squad commander, a Devoronian by the name of Ishik, she believes, is courteous enough but makes it clear that for their own safety they are to stay indoors.
Locked into her own apartments by her mother. It's almost nostalgic, thinks Leida as she holds onto Davo, the setting sun darkened by the warships floating through her windows.
Mother doesn’t come. As ever, mother forces her to come to her.
They take a speeder, an imperial model with hastily reapplied republic symbols on it down the sky lanes, toward the old Chandrilan embassy. The message had not specified whether she was supposed to bring Davo and a spit of adolescent fury made her leave him with his nurses.
Their old home is a husk, its once pristine walls marred by filth, brighter spots were priceless artworks once hung, now being sold for a pittance on the lower levels. A service droid lies busted by a wall, chest dark from a blaster bolt, the rest stripped for parts. Silent security personnel patrol the already broken grounds, stopping to occasionally mumble something into their com-links.
Mother is standing in their old dining room, empty but for the table too heavy to move, back turned towards her.
”Senator,” Major Ishik says before turning on her heels, leaving them alone.
Mother turns. She is thin, Leida notices, gaunt even, her hair cut short, her clothes pristine and deceptively simple.
”Leida,” mother says, her hands held out, that smile for everyone but her plastered onto her face.
”Mother,” she stands still, not running away (where could she run to anyway?), not moving to meet her either. The table and decades of history lie still between them.
Its return to origin. Point zero (zero zero zero).
Safe in the braid of the old ways.
The thing that is so galling about mother, Leida will reflect years later, is not that she is unloving. She loves, Leida knows. She loves the refugees crowding the core worlds even before the wars, she loves the downtrodden and unemployed of Coruscant, she loves the innocent who are caught in Imperial dragnets, as if anyone has ever ruled anything without collateral damage (Leida, who much to her chagrin has suffered some of the finest education the galaxy has to offer, knows this).
Mother loves them all equally and thus she loves Leida just as much.
Except of course, Leida is her daughter, not some refugee from the outer rim.
Mother has to work sweetie. Mother has an important debate to prepare for. This proposed law is important.
Mon Mothma is one of the leaders of the opposition, she has no time for trivial things like daughters.
It wouldn’t be so hurtful if she didn’t know she cares.
But not for her.
Leida, after-all, is a good daughter. She knows so, even before she found the Elder and was made to understand that her way of thinking was as natural as the silver seas of the homeworld.
True and steady and braided in trust.
There is a memory Leida holds dear.
She is seven and they have returned to Chandrila. She was but a newborn last time so it is the first time she can remember even leaving Coruscant, not to mention returning to their home.
Her grandparents are proper, distant somewhat but not unkind. They ask about her school, about her friends, absent-mindedly caring for the granddaughter they never see. Grandmother walks her through the orchards that stretch around the family mansion, each tree individually pruned and watered by hand. They care for such things, on Chandrila. These trees have been standing for five centuries, grandmother says as she plucks a purple fruit from a thin branch. The centre of the galaxy may be changing but on Chandrila the old ways still rule.
One day grandfather takes them sailing, his old style sailboat long and sleek, made out of Sprussa wood from the hills that disappear into the horizon beyond the orchards. Disdaining any hint of countergrav, the sleek vessel cuts through the gellaming waves of the silver sea, she and father laughing as the spray hits their faces, mother’s smile warm but brittle.
She often smiles like that, especially on Chandrila. Mother loves everything and thus love their homeworld as well but that is a love, Leida will come to learn, that is edged with disdain. Mother loves the environment brought by the traditions of their home but chafes when they personally discomfit her.
Maybe, Leida reflects much later, mother was born to be a rebel.
The old ways hold us.
A good daughter, Leida will come to learn, respects both their parents yet she cannot but help to value her father over her mother. This is not, as some would insinuate, because she is blind to his faults. She knows about the laziness, the drinking, the jealousy, the utter lack of a sense of responsibility. She will come to know of the drinking and, eventually, of the philandering (though that will be much later and not until after her mother makes it quite clear she has little interest in any part of their life).
But she also remembers a warm smile those (few) times father would come into her room and send the tutor-droid away, playing with her toys until he inevitably got bored and left her sitting among a pile of soft animals. She remembers hooting from the sidelines of her school's grav-ball game, of the shared candy down at the shopping arcade.
Father has many flaws. But he is, unlike mother, honest about them.
Much like mother father doesn’t really understand her venerations for the traditions of old Chandrila.In his own way, father is as disinterested as mother but while she quietly may rail against them he takes them in stride. In his own way, father floats along as he always has. Mother doesn’t understand this, the quiet ease of acceptance and hence see it as a conspiracy
Equally mother is surprised, Leida is sure, by her love, and trust in aunty Vel’It certainly surprises mother, though she is so obviously grateful that Leida has one confidant.
Vel doesn’t much follow traditions either. But unlike others she never makes much of a show of doing so (and yes, Leida very much knows about aunty Vel’s preference for women) preferring to stand proud in her own way. Leida respects this, though the elder says it's wrong and in the end it is simply comforting that there is someone who’s always glad to see her, even if only to gift her clothes bought in trade ports on the rim.
Aunty Vel has a kind smile and the most amazing stories. On the Chandrila they treat their traveller with equal respect and consternation. And, much like her, Vel has never quite gotten on the same page as her own mother, Leida’s grandmother's sister. They don’t see each other much either, having agreed to disagree that Vel can do whatever she likes as long as she doesn’t parade around the results on the homeworld.
Safe in the knot, in the binding.
She is not much older then mother and father were when she marries.
Neither of them seem to really approve of the match. Mother, well what mother thinks of the things that make Chandrila Chandrila is well known. Father is more circumspect in his dislike. She knows that had she chosen differently, to not follow the old ways they would have happily supported her, mother because she’s mother, father because he does respect her choices.
Beyond that she simply suspects that father considers the Sculduns a touch gauche, as grandfather puts it. Her grandparents does not much appreciate having to leave Chandrila, even for her wedding, and it is grandmother who tells her that Sculduns are not quite proper, in the sense that they care too much for money and too little for the order of things. Leida laughs at this. She might honour their ways, she tells grandmother before giving her a quick peck at the check, but this is a new age, a new order.
With their hands in-twined upon the elder, they both recite the words. And so Leida becomes a married woman.
The ceremony, held in the grand reception of the Chandrilan Embassy, is gorgeous and the only thing that annoys Leida is mother and her incessant pain. She smiles of course, that practised politicians smile that Leida has long learned how to recognize. She wonders what it is mother is concealing this time. At one point she catches mothers eyes across the room and there is this intolerable sadness in them, as if she wishes to apologise for something, of what Leida does not now. Leida looks back, not smiling (for Leida is honest), in defiance.
She is a married woman now. And she will do better. So she has vowed.
The old ways teach us.
She found the elder down a once-access tunnel now turned up-scale bazaar, primarily frequented by the planet's ever increasing population of bureaucrats, the sort of place that tries to offer everyone a piece of their far away homes.
Coruscant is filled with places like this. It is a world without real surface, grandmother would say, who constantly has to bring in anything that's true, anything that's real from offworld. Leida, who still can remember her disappointment when her parents in a rare case of agreement didn’t let her climb the planet's one remaining mountain peak cannot help but agree with that observation.
So instead Coruscant brings the outer worlds to itself, repackages them, changes them, sells them. There are more Naboo teas on Coruscant than on Naboo itself and one can never be sure whether the bag one buys is the genuine article (her parents, in another rare case of agreement, import theirs directly from the homeworld).
But Leida is in a way as much Coruscanti as she is Chandrilan so she knows how to navigate, how to avoid the cheap imitations sold to those too poor or foolish to avail themselves of the opportunities offered by the capital.
She has heard of elders, of course, in the abstract, even read a few passages in school. But finding one changes her life.
For one thing, it shows her what her family could be, if her parents would just stop their interminable bickering. For another, it shows her what her homeworld, her real homeworld far beyond the duracrete and plastisteel towers of the capital is.
Many years later she will by chance come across multiple rebel manifestos urging the peoples of the galaxy to rebel (some even supposedly written by her mother). She will give them a disinterested look, for she will already have found hers.
Bound against the wind, tied to shore.
Their home was always white. White and gold, pristine clean colours that unconsciously or not meant safety to Leida as she grew. Warm and soft colours, at least when applied by the artisans brought in from the homeworld at great expense.
The ISB’s interrogation cells are not that kind of white.
Clean, pristine and cold, like a surgeon's suit they are, where men and women with the same bored but concentrated countenance try and cut the imperfections from your body, try to identify the truth in the cancerous miasma of lies. To cut out rebellion like the cancer it is, the affront to the order of things as one old ISB colonel at one of her father-in-laws incessant cocktail parties had put it.
It had been the first and only time she had any contact with the ISB before mother left. They normally don’t, their kind. The ISB is for other people, not them. But one day they come into her home (her own home) and drag her off.
Mother has left, without as much as a word. Mother is a terrorist, a traitor, has squandered her inheritance on weapons and war (that would almost be funny under other circumstances) and have finally fled the capital with half the imperial fleet in pursuit.
They don’t touch her. But she will spend she’s not sure how much time in that white square, answering the same questions over and over again.
She answers of course. Leida’s never been anything but honest and an upstanding, loyal citizen. But beneath her breath she keeps repeating her mantra, their mantra, the words of Chandrila that mother abandoned the same way she abandons everything. It keeps her balanced, just as it meant to. There was always wisdom in the old ways.
When she is released Stekan meets her outside, holds her in her arms and all but carries her into their speeder. As they fly he platters on excitedly, of the strings his father had to pull to get her out as quickly, of how said father has insisted they should return to Chandrila for a while, away form the limelight of the capital world. Her husband asks her to stay with him but she quickly leaves, returning to her childhood home only to find it in shambles where the search parties have done their work. Father is standing in the ruins of his home and status, just released from interrogation himself, his robes in disarray and the hand that holds a steadying tall glass shakes enough that he spills across the floor that the staff is desperately trying to clean.
Leida never much learns to forgive after that.
Tethered in permanence.
She is already a mother herself when the emperor falls and the empire they thought would give them safety and security crashes down around them.
Even the imperial propaganda machine cannot keep such news secret, especially when they would not, could not, foresee such a contingency. Fear and panic and elevation hits Coruscant like a wave, swamping the planet and its untold billions of citizens. People take to the walkways to celebrate, troops are deployed to show that the imperial order is still alive only to show the opposite. She can see one of the walkways from her windows, plastisteel overlooking a large square where people from the lower levels suddenly gather, shouting, screaming their anger and lust. Few are there to try and stop them and those that do fare no better than their emperor when facing the guns of the rebel fleet. She can see one man, a stormtrooper with his white armour interrupted by the red streaks of the Coruscant guard, disarmed and hoisted aloof by the mob, carried to the edge of the walkway only to be thrown over the ledge to his death below. She can imagine the man screaming all the way down, even though she cannot hear him.
There is to be a new order, so Stekan says, as he is packing up to leave. Chandrila, where father retired after his old fun friends stopped taking his calls once his wife turned traitor, has already fallen to the advancing rebel, no, New Republic fleet and her father-in-law has decided to send his son back to look after their interests there. She chides her husband, lightly, as a wife should, for abandoning them to the tender mercies of the mob. He laughs and kisses her temple and Davo’s forehead and promises to be back. He leaves her alone with their son, their home, their staff and their guards.
Around them Coruscant burns.
Smoke lifts from the markets, from the Bazaars and from once gleaming towers. Law and order breaks down. Her majordomo informs her one day how the prices of certain necessitates have gone up and she absentmindedly tells him to open new lines of credit with her father-in-law's firm. So many of her friends abandon the world, leaving their mansions to be sacked by the angry and desperate. Troops are nowhere to be seen, whoever is in charge pulling them back to defend bases and government buildings or to be shipped offworld. There are new empires to be built, so the rumour goes, on the Rim, now that the new order is no more with no replacement. The news bulletins, both the official and the unofficial ones, are numbing by now. Long litanies of battles, sieges, terrorist attacks and uprisings. Sullust, Fondor, Jakku, some of them famous, some she’s never heard of. Her husband is barely in touch, her father in law, who ever since mothers flight has seen her as more of an embarrassment then anything else, does not visit or contact them. Her friends are leaving.
Coruscant, the shining centre of the galaxy, is increasingly adopting a patina of smoke and desperation and fear.
Then mother returns.
Yielding in acceptance
“Leida,” mother says again. Her face is thin, brittle almost. And for one time in her life Leida breaks and rushes into her arms.
She doesn’t cry, she will go to her death claiming not having cried. But she holds onto mother, grasping her like a tree in a storm, as the sun falls through the tall windows and the distant engines of the warships rumbling like a far away storm. Her body is as thin as her face, Leida can tell, her pristine robes hanging off her frame, all skin and bone, hair cut shorter than it ever was when Leida was young. It is as if whatever passion always burned within mother has been given free reign once she no longer had her family to ground her, once she no longer needed to hide, and that fire has now burned her to a husk of what she once was.
A thousand things go through her head, a thousand accusations ready to be flung, a thousand slights remembered. But for one second, one singular moment of weakness, Leida allows herself to forget that.
Singular moments end, as are their wont. They separate, again.
“How have you been?” mother asks.
How has Leida been?
She has been lonely. Marooned, here in her home as the planet burns around here. She has seen all she has built torn down, twice, both times by this woman she calls mother.
“Fine,” she answers.
Mother smiles, the way she always smiled when you affirmed her preconceptions. She turns around in this charred husk of a home, looking disapprovingly at the walls marred by rebel fire, the cabinets looted by insurgent rioters. “The home’s a mess,” mother says lightly, as if she is not responsible.
“Yes,” Leida says. The silence stretches out before them.
“Will you tell me about Davo?” mother finally asks.
“I don’t remember telling you his name. You weren’t here.”
Mother looks crestfallen for a moment, ”No, I wasn’t. I’m sorry, Leida,” she looks up again, eyes filled with regret, “but there were things that—”
“—things that you had to do, I know.” She twists the knife further, now that it’s in “There usually is.”
For a moment, mother does not have the courage to meet her eyes. But then she looks up and there’s steel there, the kind of determination she was always hiding, the kind of determination and fury and will that sets galaxies aflame and governments tumbling to the ground and for a moment Leida, who has never had much respect for her mother, understands why there are millions who will fight and die on the orders of this woman, for an ideal.
“I did what I had to do, Leida. For you, for the galaxy, for your child. But I am sorry, truly, for how that might have affected you. I regret—”
“—Would you have done anything differently if you could?” Leida interrupts.
Mother is silent for a moment. Then she answers.
“No,”
Leida nods and smiles, the way she was taught to. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. Is there anything else, Chancellor?”
Mother stands there, regal in the light of the upper levels, shrouded in the shadows of the fleet she brought to Leida’s home. “No Leida,” she says, ”no I suppose there isn’t anything else.” She nods to the guard, who offers Leida an inviting hand to the waiting speeder. She leaves Mother there, in the broken ruins of the house where she grew up.
Leida leaves Coruscant for Chandrila the next day, never to return. Mother stays, to rebuild what she can.The new Chandrilan government never bothers repairing the old embassy and the house stays broken until someone else, unaware of the history, moves in.