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A cool breeze tickles her cheek. She becomes aware that her eyes are closed and opens them to a bright light that doesn’t startle or blind her. A white sun roams the sky above; the landscape before her is spread like a map, picture-perfect mountains needling the clouds. Her legs dangle over the precipice of a mountain valley, the rocks underneath her steady. It will be her choice, if she jumps.
“Is this Alderaan?” he asks.
She turns her head to look at him. He’s sitting with her on the precipice, peering around at the mountains behind and below them with naked wonder on his farm boy face. He’s always been with her, even if he hasn’t always been next to her like he is now.
“Yes,” she says. It is. This is Alderaan, the world of her heart.
The dead world.
“This is your death, then,” he concludes. “I always see Tatooine, and what the homestead looked like the morning before… Never mind. Leia, we won’t have much time.”
Leia nods. Luke, her brother and the other half of her heart, frowns, then lowers his voice. “I’m sorry, Leia. I didn’t want it to come to this.”
Memory trickles back to her like snowmelt. Leia sits up a little straighter. “It’s not your fault,” she informs him. “He— what did he do? It clearly wasn’t you, but—”
“Our father will not let me die,” Luke says. “And he will not let me live, either. I’m a corpse on strings with the memories he made, most of the time.”
“But not now.”
“Not now. Not yet.”
“Our father?” She has to ask, even though here, in the world of the dead, one with the Force, she knows all. She remembers all. And she knows why she remembers Padmé Amidala as kind but sad, even though she never knew her.
“It seems so.” Luke looks heartbroken for her, which Leia resents, because he should be heartbroken for himself. “But I think I can fix this.”
“This?”
He waves a hand—at Leia. At the red ribbon scar she realises adorns her throat. “He did it. So can I—at least for a little while. It won’t be for long, and it won’t be enough, but it’s my fault you’re dead and you’ve already had so little…”
“It’s not your fault I’m dead, Luke,” she assures him.
“I think I can bring you back, Leia,” he says. “For a time. But I don’t want to do it unless you want it too.”
Leia looks down. The chasm of the mountain sings with the wind beneath her feet. All she has to do is jump, and then? Nothing.
No more fear. No more anger. No more Empire.
She looks at Luke. “Have you tried to jump?”
Luke’s smirk has no mirth in it at all. “That’s how I got into this mess.” Then, at her gaze: “Every time. A hole opens in the sand, swallowing everything, and I try to dive in, but…” His hand drifts to his stomach. “Something pulls me back.”
“We know what pulls you back.”
“Yes.” His smirk widens. “We do.” A pause. “But he doesn’t know about you yet. You can still escape.”
“Until he drags me back like he did our mother?”
Luke looks at the mountain valley below them. Water winks at the bottom of the chasm, a jolly little stream. “I can try to stop that from happening.”
“You won’t be you.” Her voice softens. “And more importantly, you won’t be coming with me.”
Luke’s shoulders slump.
“He will never let you go,” she presses. “Just as the Empire will never let the galaxy go. You will never be free.”
“But you will be.”
Leia raises her head to look around. Alderaan aches in her heart: this afterimage before her, though compelling and true, is not the home she grew up in. It’s a careful mirage designed to make things like dying seem less daunting.
It would not necessarily be giving up. It would be going home.
But for her, it would be both.
“We made the same decision then,” Leia says. “Alderaan, that is. We were a Core world. The Empire touched us, but they didn’t trample us. We could have escaped violence, war… continued to serve as a beacon of peace and beauty. An idyllic world that the refugees in the Outer Rim could never reach.”
She looks at Luke. “But what help is that to anyone?”
“A dream of safety,” Luke says. “If I knew that you were alright—”
“We chose then to fight for others as well as ourselves. My peace is nothing if my brother is at war.” She swallows. “Will I be… like that? Will I think I’m—”
“No,” Luke said hurriedly. “I love you, Leia.”
She knows that.
She shouldn’t have doubted, that.
“But you will have to pretend,” he admits. “So that he doesn’t catch on. So that he doesn’t kill you and resurrect you himself, in his image this time.” He looks her up and down. “Can you do that?”
Leia snorts. “I pretended to be a meek Imperial Senator for years.”
“You have never succeeded at pretending to be meek.”
She laughs, but it peters out quickly. The world around her wavers like the haze it is. Her dream of home is fracturing before her eyes. She risked Alderaan once, in order to help others. And despite the horrors, she has always known that she would do it all again.
There is no peace for her if it is not for everyone.
“I love you, Luke,” she tells him, in case he ever forgot. He is about to forget everything, she knows. His figure is shimmering too, as Vader undoubtedly summons his puppet prince back from the dead.
“I love you too, Leia.” He reaches out a hand to tangle his fingers in hers, then kisses her cheek. “Exactly as you are.”
It was easy to pretend to be a bratty Sith princess when Leia wanted nothing more than to burn the palace down.
She had never enjoyed the pomp and pageantry of royalty. Her mother had fought and fought her to partake in it when she was young, and even once she was older and understood the importance of it, she never revelled in the experience. It was a duty, just as serving in the Senate was. Just as ruling would have one day been.
Now, it made her sick to her stomach.
The dresses she wore weren’t even attractive. They were all modelled after a twenty-year-old style from Naboo that was particularly flamboyant and show-offish, meant to demonstrate the wearer’s ostentatious wealth. (And, she had to admit, stop the Naboo queen from looking so young.) That style was the sort of thing Padmé Amidala had worn, yes, but it hadn’t been in fashion for years. And it looked so much more jarring when the only colours she could wear were black and red.
Luke’s outfits were more muted, at least, if extravagant and expensive in their own way. Leia supposed that Vader’s primary reference for men’s fashion came from two decades of serving Palpatine, and that didn’t exactly leave a person with a refined palate. But Leia…
She missed white.
It was her colour. It meant she was still a princess, not yet the queen. It meant she was home. And more importantly, it was her favourite.
She didn’t have handmaidens, either. Padmé did, and sometimes they slunk in to help Leia because she was less likely to bite their heads off for minor mistakes, but otherwise Leia’s existence hadn’t been previously known to Vader, so he hadn’t made space for her in his dream household. She was the spare part, slotted in because it turned out that for one piece of machinery, you could only buy a twin pack.
It meant she was sitting at her desk before their next royal address, frantically trying to comb her own hair into a delicate updo. Briefly, she wondered if she could get away with putting an Alderaanian style into her hair without raising Vader’s suspicions. She could do them herself with ease: she’d had to often enough on Hoth, even if Luke had helped sometimes with that. But these Naboo ones? They were so much more complicated than they looked, and on her own…
There was a knock at the door. Leia twisted around in her chair to see Padmé step through, already dressed up as Vader’s doll of an empress. She smiled at Leia, and there was something awkward and shy about it that didn’t match the ruthless Sith empress that Leia had watched on the holonet for months after Luke’s disappearance.
It was bizarre, this mirage of Padmé Amidala that Vader had concocted for himself. She was cruel one moment—especially to Vader—then gentle and maternal with Luke. Leia had finally come around to believing that maybe Amidala and Vader had been married once, and maybe they were her birth parents. Her time in the Force had told her the truth about that, if nothing else. But she still didn’t know what to make of this woman.
Padmé didn’t know what to make of her, either. She was so loving towards Luke, then stiff and quiet with Leia. Maybe it reflected the fact that Vader didn’t know what to make of her either.
“Are you having trouble?” Padmé asked Leia, her tone level.
Leia relaxed her shoulders. “No one showed up to help me,” she complained, as if she’d expected someone to, as if this happened every day. “Mother, these servants are—”
“I can help you.” Padmé stepped forwards, cutting her off. Leia controlled her eyebrows before they flew up her forehead.
She huffed instead, her tone still frustrated and sharp. “Thank you, Mother.” It had been so long since she’d allowed herself to act like a brat. If nothing else, it was amusing to see a couple she hated scrambling to handle their insolent daughter. She was happy to interrupt Vader’s perfect family arrangement.
Padmé stepped forwards and took Leia’s hair delicately in one her, her jewelled hairbrush in the other. Leia hated that hairbrush—Naboo had been a close friend of Alderaan, so she had never admitted this out loud, but she could admit now to a dislike for how ostentatious some of its artefacts were. Why did you need jewels on a hairbrush?
A different history, she reminded herself. Alderaan was the one with an inherited monarchy. Naboo was a democracy; its queen exerted power in totally different ways.
Padmé ran the brush through her hair. Leia closed her eyes before she could dwell too long on the image in the mirror of her and her mother, side by side. They did look so alike. Their hair was identical, which was no doubt why Padmé was manipulating it so easily.
In the weeks since Luke had brought her back, Leia had thought on this so often. Her birth parents. Who they truly were. She still couldn’t reconcile it—the fact that this life Vader had them acting out might have been hers, had things gone differently, but also the fact that these were her parents at all. Her parents were dead.
Soon, they would all be dead.
She wondered how Luke had processed this. If he’d ever had the time to process this, in between all of Vader’s brainwashing.
“How are you, Leia?” Padmé asked at last, quiet and hesitant.
Leia opened her eyes again to watch her mother in the mirror. “I’m well,” she answered. “Other than annoyed at the servants—”
“Are you feeling up to this speech?”
Leia hid her frown. “Of course. It is nothing.”
“It will be the first time you’ll be presented to the galaxy. I understand that’s nerve-wracking.”
“You put yourself in front of a crowd when you were much younger than me,” she pointed out.
“Yes, but…” She trailed off, watching Leia intently. “The galaxy is much larger. And there are… implications, Leia. You will be associated with the Empire from now on, as your brother is.”
“Of course I will be.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m the princess.”
“You won’t always be.”
What was this? A queen-to-princess pep talk? Leia had had enough of those in her lifetime, and they would never be relevant again. She would never rule Alderaan. And as for the Empire… She was pretty sure that even if Vader ever let Padmé die, Luke was the one he had in mind to take her place, not Leia.
“I’m working on making it easier for us,” Padmé said, just as carefully. “I have plans. They’ll take the pressure off the royal family. Make the Empire a more just place.”
“The Empire is a just place,” Leia said, and immediately wanted to rip out her own tongue.
But she didn’t take her eyes off of her mother in the mirror. Padmé’s shoulders slumped—minutely, but in the world of politics that was a reaction that shouted her emotions from the rooftops. Why was she disappointed? What was she looking for?
She reached up and finished tying Leia’s hair into a complicated-looking bun. Leia turned her head to examine it, frowning. She did look like an Imperial princess. A black dress, silken against her legs, in a mockery of the whites she used to wear. A tight, corset-style waist that would probably kill her in the lesser gravity of a spaceship. A high collar.
And a red ribbon tied in a bow around her throat.
Leia reached up to tap her fingers against the bow. “Is this necessary?” she asked, tone whiny. “I feel like I’m choking.”
“Do not joke about that,” Padmé said automatically. Leia’s eyebrows did shoot up then, and Padmé noticed. She avoided Leia’s gaze in the mirror. “Yes. It is necessary.”
“Why?”
“Because it is,” Padmé snapped. But it wasn’t the cruelty of Vader’s empress. It was something far more stressed. “Don’t lose your head over it.”
Leia sucked in a breath, twisting her head to look at Padmé. “What does that mean?” she bit out, heart pounding. Did Padmé…? Did she…?
Her mother, still standing, stared down at her. She rubbed at her chest fiercely, unconsciously. Her brows were creased in pain.
“Are you ready?” Padmé reiterated. Her tone was lower now, more controlled, but Leia looked at her with narrowed eyes.
“I’m ready, Mother,” she said.
Neither of them knew what to make of that.
Padmé was giving her speech from the balcony of the Imperial Palace. It would be witnessed in person by thousands of Coruscanti residents; it would be streamed all around the galaxy for all Imperial citizens to catch a glimpse of their mysterious, benevolent dictator. The royal family would stand at her side. Leia didn’t know if they were going to announce her as the Imperial princess here—justifying, in their twisted little family, that this was just their little girl’s public debut—or if Vader intended for her just to stand there, her presence spreading rumours to the Rebellion of defection or capture. It was what he’d done with Luke, at first. He’d allowed them to catch glimpses of him at Vader’s side, then later at Empress Amidala’s side, before formally introducing him to the galaxy as the prince. Even if the rest of them weren’t supposed to know what was going on politically, Vader certainly did.
But Leia was here to rescue Luke, so she had to bite her tongue and bear it. When she and Padmé strolled towards the balcony in question, Luke and Vader were already standing there. Luke turned to smile at her, and her heart ached.
“You finally got your hair done?” he teased, holding out a hand to help her up. His gloves were as black as hers were, his frockcoat dark red with gleaming gold buttons. He’d stand out beside Padmé, in her black and red finery, while Leia would melt into the background beside Vader. No announcement for Leia today, then.
Confusion creased her face, before she realised what he was talking about and rolled her eyes. Of course, he had sensed that through their bond. She realised now exactly how much their bond could do, and she wished she had known this when they were both still alive.
“Eventually,” she grumbled, then accepted his hand and stepped up to stand beside him. He was a warm presence at her side.
Before she could think better of it, she kissed his cheek. He still smelled like Luke, if nothing else.
He laughed against her cheek and gave her a kiss as well. From her experience of him as an annoying brother, instead of her dearest friend, he would have teased her for this as well, but he didn’t. Apparently some feeling of their old dynamic remained, even if their intimacy had changed, and he knew not to push her like this.
“It’s just a speech,” he reassured her. She wondered if he thought that was what she was worried about: appearing in front of the galaxy for the ‘first’ time. It would be like him to comfort her, anyway. “You don’t have to do anything. Your actual debut will be later.”
“But likely still soon,” a voice boomed. Leia contained her flinch and looked up at Vader, standing on the other side of the balcony, watching them. She wanted to glare. She wanted to smirk. No matter how Vader tried to control Luke, he couldn’t take away his love for her. “You must be prepared.”
“Yes, Father,” she said coldly, then turned back to Luke. Her brother welcomed her further attempts at conversation, but Leia only spared half her mind to pursuing them. The rest of her was hyperaware that Vader was watching her.
Still frustrated. Still confused.
He still knew something was out of place.
Padmé’s speech flew by. Most of it was waffle, pretty words designed to disguise the horrors of empire, as Padmé outlined her plans for the next year of her glorious reign. Leia tuned it out, but a mention of the word Senate had her dragged back out of her daydreams.
“…and that is why I am working to reinstall the Imperial Senate,” she said. “As a place where citizens’ concerns can be heard.”
Leia stared at her. Vader stared at her. Luke, as always, looked calm and unbothered.
Padmé didn’t elaborate further. “More details will follow soon,” she promised, in the tone that Leia knew meant don’t ask me questions until I have all the answers perfectly prepared for you. “I look forward to another glorious year.”
The applause was deafening. Leia, still reeling, hardly noticed it. She let Luke lead her off the balcony, still slightly stunned, and only once the door slammed shut behind them did she register her parents arguing.
Well. Arguing as much as they ever did.
“The Senate?” Vader asked calmly. “My love”—he still said my love like it was a title; it unnerved Leia—“the Senate was abolished for a reason.”
“Palpatine abolished the Senate. And you know I hardly agree with him on everything,” Padmé said lightly.
Leia remembered what had happened the day she was dragged to the palace and killed, and she braced herself for it to come next. Vader looked Padmé up and down, then placed his hand on her shoulder. “The Senate failed the Republic, Padmé,” he said. “I do not understand why you would want it back. You are a far better ruler than any of that squabbling rabble.”
Padmé’s back straightened. She blinked briefly, eyes losing their focus, then she blinked again and fixed her gaze back on Vader. “You’re right, of course,” she said gently. “I should have considered that.”
Leia gritted her teeth. Perhaps there was something of Padmé Amidala still in there. Or rather, there had been. And Vader had taken it away before her eyes.
Luke breezed to the door, Leia still on his arm, but Leia stopped and let him go ahead without her. She waited by the door for them to leave as well.
Vader moved his hand to Padmé’s cheek. “You are the Empress,” he agreed. “That is why we set up this system. You deserve to rule unchecked. It is the only way the galaxy will have peace.”
She sighed. “I had forgotten…” she said. “Of course. I will hand-select senators, then. The Senate can return in name only. I have already promised it; I have already promised elections. But I will ensure that every senator is loyal only to me. It will not be a democracy,” she assured Vader, laying a hand on his arm, “but I will have more servants to enact my will for the galaxy.”
She was lying.
Leia narrowed her eyes. Her demeanour had changed. And… Leia couldn’t tell why she knew, but she could tell that Padmé was lying.
Vader was satisfied, though. “Of course,” he said. “Forgive me.”
“Always,” Padmé promised sweetly. Then she saw Leia. “Leia? Will you walk with me?”
“Yes, Mother.” She smiled broadly at Padmé and ignored Vader altogether. He radiated satisfaction, though uncertainty tinged it—as it did every time he looked at Leia.
Padmé hooked an arm through Leia’s, and they walked together down the corridor. It wasn’t far to Padmé’s personal chambers; once they were inside, Padmé dismissed the handmaidens that were waiting there.
“What did you think of the speech?” Padmé asked delicately, sitting down at the sofa in her receiving room and lifting one of the cups of tea from the small table beside it.
Leia sat down opposite her. “You’ve been pretending this whole time.”
Padmé raised her eyebrows carefully, lowering the cup. “Leia? What are you—”
“You remember everything,” Leia said. “You remember how you died. You know what Vader is doing.” She leaned forwards and pointed to the red ribbon around her throat. “And you remember this.”
Padmé put her cup down altogether. “Clearly, you do too,” she said. “You have also been pretending.”
Her tone was accusatory, but it didn’t hide anything. Her shock and relief were written large across her face. The breakdown of weeks of deception.
“How did you break Vader’s hold on you?” Leia asked. “He— I saw you, when he first dragged me in here. He had you in the palm of his hand.”
“As he still has Luke.”
Leia swallowed. “Yes.”
Padmé folded her hands in her lap. “Luke loves you more than anything,” she said.
“I know that.”
“Do you?” Padmé pressed. “Vader didn’t know about you. You are not a factor in his daydream of a perfect galaxy. He planned to have Luke kill you, to test Vader’s hold over him and to ensure that you never threatened it again, and he failed. And now that you’re back, Vader hardly understands that you’re his daughter. He didn’t at all at first. But he had to rewrite his entire daydream because without you, he couldn’t have Luke anymore. You disrupted everything he built. But with you, he has to fight to keep Luke, because the only person Luke has ever loved more than his dreams about his father is you.”
Leia’s eyes grew hot; she blinked the tears away. “What does that have to do with you?” she demanded.
“With you here, Vader has to fight for every second to keep Luke under his control,” Padmé said. “He doesn’t have the attention to pay to me.”
Realisation dawned on Leia. “He’s spread his resources too thin. And he doesn’t even know it.”
“And I don’t intend to let him know it. I will turn this Empire into a Republic under his nose before he notices. If I’m going to live, I’m going to do something with my life.” Padmé’s hands, Leia suddenly realised, were clenched in her lap. “Now. How did you escape Luke’s control?”
“You said it yourself,” Leia said. “Luke loves me.”
“He let you go?”
“He never tried to control me in the first place.” Tears were threatening again. Leia fought them. This might be her mother, but she was still a stranger. She couldn’t cry in front of a stranger. “He didn’t want a version of me to live. He wanted me to live. And I wanted to save him.”
“From what?”
Leia gritted her teeth. “Who else? From Vader.”
Padmé went quiet for a few minutes. “You mean to tell me,” she said, “that Anakin could have done this as well.”
“Anakin? Oh.” Anakin Skywalker. Luke’s father. Leia’s father.
Vader.
“Yes.”
“He could have brought us back as we were. He didn’t have to control us.”
“Luke asked him that one time, when he was fighting back against it.” Leia knew this the way she knew so many things from death and the Force. Even if Luke hadn’t told her directly, he’d told her in the pain on his face and the love that bound their hearts into one. “Luke chose to die, on Bespin. He didn’t want to live with Vader as a father. And maybe that was a premature decision.” She thought of her own grief, when she’d seen his body. She remembered wondering what had driven him to that—an accident? Vader trying new ways of killing Jedi?—and had never guessed that Luke might have jumped. “But it was his choice.”
“Vader didn’t respect it,” Padmé observed.
Leia shook her head. “Luke knew who he wanted to be. If Vader had brought him back the way Luke brought me? Fine. Maybe. I don’t know. But he brought Luke back and made sure he would never, ever be able to leave him again. He took away his ability to want to.” She pointed at the door. “Have you seen Luke? He’s so… meek. He agrees with everything Vader says. That’s not my brother.” This time, she couldn’t stop the tears. One rolled down her cheek. “That’s not my best friend.”
Padmé closed her eyes. “Anakin knows that we will never support the Empire he built for us,” she said. “But he does not want to lose either.”
“Whether it was a good choice or not,” Leia said. “Luke made a choice. He never wanted to become… this. And Vader made him anyway.”
“Anakin made…” Padmé pushed her hand against her chest. Her voice cracked with pain. “…me…”
“You keep doing that.”
“What?”
Leia put her hand on her own chest. “That.”
Padmé pressed down on her chest harder. “I died of a broken heart,” she admitted. “When you and Luke were born. When the Republic died. The same way Luke bleeds and gets headaches when he remembers the truth, I…”
“You’ve been in pain this whole time?” Leia asked. “So long as you remember?” Padmé nodded. Leia’s voice loudened, slightly. “Pain that killed you the first time?”
“I have had time to sit with my grief.” But Padmé looked away from her, and Leia could tell she was lying again. “I couldn’t go on, then. I can’t go on now. But I must.”
“I—”
“The Jedi saved you before,” Padmé said. “You must know how much I trusted them. But no one will save you and Luke now.”
Leia swallowed. She looked at Padmé, this mythological woman she only remembered in snippets, stories, and through the haze of a Sith Lord’s obsession. The true woman—insofar as anything undead like them could be true—sitting before her didn’t live up to what she’d heard. The legends swelled her to a gargantuan size; Padmé was hardly taller than her.
But Leia thought, nonetheless, that perhaps she could see the quiet strength that had kept Padmé going for so long until it failed her. Perhaps she could tell how a small woman had built that legend: brick by brick.
“I’m here to save Luke,” Leia said.
“I know.”
“I’m going to kill Vader.”
Padmé closed her eyes. “I loved Anakin,” she said. “I still do.”
“Anakin is dead.”
“I know.” Padmé’s hand fisted over her heart. “But I have to hope he can be resurrected.”
“At what cost?” Leia’s voice was rising again, now. Heat bloomed in her cheeks. She might respect Padmé’s style of strength, but that was not her style. She would not tolerate it interfering with— “Luke’s life? Luke’s soul?”
Calming herself again, she lowered her voice. But it was still razor-sharp. “You’re a politician,” she said. “You know how to cut your losses.”
“As do you, Princess,” Padmé said mournfully. Leia felt like she’d been slapped.
Leia stood up. “I still have contacts in the Rebellion,” she said. “Mon will still respond to me if I reach out—”
“Mon?” Padmé’s eyes brightened. “Senator Mothma?”
Padmé, Leia remembered, something inside her quailing, had founded the Rebellion.
Did Vader know that? Had it changed anything he had done over the last two decades?
“Yes,” Leia said. “You’re trying to form the Senate? That will take forever. Vader is not that stupid.”
Padmé snorted. “I could convince him.”
“Not that far. And if he turns his attention back to you fully, you are lost.” She jabbed a finger at Padmé. “He needs to die. You know that.”
Padmé bit her lip. “I know.”
“It’s the only way we’ll all be free.”
“We’ll all be dead, Leia. He is the only thing keeping us alive.”
“But the galaxy will be free.” Her shoulders heaved. This was the same sacrifice she always made. She did not stop. She did not settle. It was freedom for the galaxy, or nothing at all. “And we will be too. In a different way.”
Padmé was silent for a moment. And, because Leia was afraid, she wouldn’t pretend, she had to ask: “Do you remember?”
“Do I remember what?”
“What happens.” Leia swallowed. “After.”
But Padmé shook her head. Leia should have expected it. She knew that there were no easy answers, for this. For anything. She knew that fear was a constant, and she had to do it anyway.
“I tried to kill him once,” Padmé admitted. “Or rather—I tried to make myself. When I flew to meet him on Mustafar, after Order Sixty-Six, I held my dagger in my hand and considered it.” She shook her head. “But I loved him.”
Leia thought of Vader looming over her in that cell on the Death Star. She thought about her throat hoarse from screams. “Do you know what you could have prevented if you have?”
“I didn’t then.” Padmé’s voice cracked. Leia peered at her and saw that she was crying. She met Leia’s gaze steadily, nonetheless. “But I do now. And I won’t stand for it. I love Anakin too much,” she gasped, and rubbed her chest, but kept talking, “to allow this to continue.”
Leia asked, “Do you still have that dagger?”
It didn’t take long to set everything up. The Rebels were ready and waiting. Padmé had acquired and handed over all the security codes, all the weaknesses, all the intel they could possibly want for a ground assault of Coruscant. They had given away the keys to the castle, and all that was left to deal with was the king.
Leia met him in the throne room once, when he was pacing.
“Father?” she asked, frowning. “What are you doing in here?”
His gaze snapped to hers. “Do you have something to do with this?”
She acted affronted. “To do with what? You always blame me—I bet it was actually Luke—”
“Do not mention Luke,” Vader growled. “Someone has hacked into our system and handed away our secrets. This is a data breach the likes of nothing I have ever seen.”
She rolled her eyes. “Wow, you’re a little uppity as a teenager and now you’re accused of treason…”
“The Rebellion could take advantage of this.”
Her cheeks went pale. Her bratty tone tailed off. “The Rebellion? How?” she asked. “Would they—” She glanced around the throne room. “Would they come for us?”
She wrapped her arms around her torso, radiating fear into the Force. She imagined Luke, dying all over again. “Luke?”
It was the name of the person they both loved to death that seemed to calm Vader down. He stopped pacing and watched her, closely.
“You are my daughter,” he said.
She gave him a look. “Yes…” She huffed a quick laugh. “You’d have thought you’d have figured that out by now, Father.”
His shoulders relaxed minutely. “Indeed,” he agreed. “I just never expected…” He broke off. “You look a great deal like your mother. I never realised.”
Never realised? She bit back her snarl. How many times had she argued with him? How many times had he hurt her? Now was the only time he bothered to stop and notice her resemblance to the woman he was obsessed with?
“We have not spoken,” he added, “much… recently. Not since…” He didn’t appear to know how to finish that. He didn’t seem to know how to talk to the daughter he knew too well in all the wrong ways at all.
“Not since I woke up on the throne room floor covered in blood,” she supplied, if only because she was curious what he would come up with to justify having that in his twisted family hologram. They hadn’t spoken about it, in the weeks since Luke had resurrected her, and she’d begun the most taxing political work of her life. Vader just seemed to operate on the assumption that if he ignored it, everyone else would.
And that would work, if he was the one holding the strings, wouldn’t it?
“I was concerned about you at the time. Luke killed the criminal for me, and at the sight of the blood you fainted. I had the body escorted out as quickly as possible, but not before you found your way into the mess, like always.” He tried to inject humour into his voice. Luke always laughed at his awful imitations of jokes, so Leia laughed too.
“I fainted?” she asked. Her laugh continued, if only at the absurdity of that. Leia was a general. As far as the Empire was concerned, she was a terrorist. But the moment she was Vader’s daughter, he wanted to pretend she was an Imperial princess who fainted at the sight of blood?
It made sense, considering the persona he’d constructed out of his misunderstanding of Luke’s personality. Luke was a gentle, agreeable soul as far as he was concerned, kind and loyal and only a formidable fighter when his father wanted him to be. His desires for his daughter, in this happy family situation, must be much the same. At heart, he didn’t want a Sith or Imperial family. He wanted a family who happened to be Sith who ruled an empire. And he didn’t see anything out of place about that.
Vader’s tone was affectionate, which insulted Leia just as much as it made her heart ache. “Fainting has always been something you struggled with. You faint often.”
“Do I?” she drawled.
She missed having a father. Not enough to accept Vader, but enough to make this hurt all the more.
Leia was here for her brother. He was the only family here she’d had before she died. But so long as she existed in this palace, she had a family again, and she didn’t know what to do with that. Padmé wasn’t Breha. Vader certainly wasn’t Bail. They were her family, but they were painful strangers to her.
She thought she might understand the obsession Vader had had with Luke, when he first learned his name. She knew what it was to be totally without a family and have one come to her out of the blue, especially one as lovely as Luke, and for their existence to promise an end to that loneliness.
This palace… if, in some bizarre twist of events, it had been Leia’s real parents, the Organas, she was trapped with… would she have even minded? What bliss did Luke know, mind controlled as he was, only aware that he was with a family he’d always known and loved? What was it like to live unaware in this constructed utopia?
What did it mean that despite everything, Leia understood why Vader had made it?
Again, not enough to save or sympathise with Vader. Only enough to make it hurt.
Vader confused her in ways that took her whole attention, and that Leia didn’t like to understand. The parallels between them that neither had ever observed before. The blood they shared, long dormant now awake. Enemies bound together by love of others that they had no desire to escape, even as they fought to reject or escape each other. She confused him just as much, she knew. That was why she was here, keeping his attention fixed on her.
Her existence challenged him. It forced him to reconcile violence with blood; cruelty with consequences; history with the future. Princess was such a versatile term, and in this transformation she had kept her title, but she knew that just as every time she called herself one she addended of Alderaan to the end of it, so did Vader. Neither of them forgot where they had come from. And neither would compromise in allowing the other into their happily ever after.
Briefly, Leia wondered: if their familial relationship had come to light in other ways, if he had shown his devotion to his children through other means, would she ever have forgiven him for what he did to her?
If he had tried to love, instead of possess, would she have allowed it?
It didn’t matter now.
Now, the only thing left was to take the blood in blood ties to its natural conclusion.
They were still looking at each other. Vader broke away first, staring at a point over her shoulder. “I apologise, daughter,” he said. The word was foreign on his tongue. He repeated: “You look… a great deal… like your grandmother, as well.”
“Grandmother?” That was a new one. Leia had heard Luke speak of his paternal grandmother—the only grandmother he knew about—briefly before. What was her name? Leia had listened. She always listened. “Grandmother Shmi?”
Vader gave a little start of surprise. Leia didn’t blame him. But that had seemed to convince him that this was, in fact, a girl who thought she was his daughter, who thought she was his Imperial princess, and viewed him as her family, no matter how he viewed her. He nodded his head, slowly.
“She would be so pleased,” he said slowly, “to see how far we have come.”
Leia took a step closer to him, until she had to crane her neck to meet his gaze. The door to the throne room opened, and they both turned to look as Padmé waltzed in, right on time, with Luke on her arm. Leia had to distract Vader, to confuse him, to force him to reckon with the anomaly of violence she represented in his carefully curated exhibition of devotion, and thus tear holes in the tapestry he wove. With the both of them there, his attention would be split again… he would not have time to react when he realised what was happening…
But in the end, it was easy. Leia should have known it would be easy. Vader had made them adore him, because he adored them in return. He would never have seen this betrayal coming—not from the doll that was his wife.
“Vader,” Padmé said, smiling at him and gliding him to put her hand on his elbow. “There you are. We were wondering where you had got to.”
Luke slid over to Leia and put an arm around her shoulders. It was a very Luke gesture, but in such a grossly performative way that she fought not to tense up. “Did we interrupt anything?” He looked up at Vader, who had placed his hand over Padmé’s on his arm but was still staring at Leia. Realising the intensity of that gaze, Luke lowered his voice. “Father?”
“Your grandmother,” Vader said, and Leia thought his voice was on the edge of cracking. “She would be so proud of what we became.”
Luke’s eyes welled with tears. Leia made a tense, strained smile. It was Padmé who shook her head, her free hand snaking down to fasten on the lightsaber at Vader’s belt.
“No, Anakin,” she said. “She would be horrified.”
She yanked the lightsaber off Vader’s belt and drove it through his chest.
Vader staggered back, a long, slow wheeze seeping out of his vocoder. Padmé slashed again, carving a hole in Vader’s breastplate wide enough to fit a fist through. Leia could see broad daylight on the other side.
“You—” Realisation dawned in his voice. His fingers curled in that familiar vice grip, and the muscles in Padmé’s throat worked and warped, but she didn’t reach for her throat. She knew it would do no good. “Padmé…”
“She was a slave woman,” Leia said, stepping forwards. She had no clue where this sudden ferocity came from, over a woman she’d never met and had no connection to—except she did. Because that woman was her grandmother, that woman was a good woman who had touched Luke’s aunt and uncle just as much as she had touched Vader, so she must be a wonderful person who did not deserve for her son to use her name like this. “And you think she would favour control?”
“You know nothing, Princess,” he spat, turning to her. The muscles in Leia’s throat constricted, now, and she did reach for that, her cry cut off. It hurt. It hurt so much, and the pain in her neck was intense—
But Vader, in turning on her, had lost his hold on Padmé. And her voice was devastated.
“When Luke brought Leia back, he didn’t control her. She’s been pretending all along. He saw no need to make her into something she was not.” Padmé made one last slash with the lightsaber. It carved through the front of Vader’s throat: not quite decapitating him, but probably damaging whatever was left of his voice box. His vocoder spluttered, its input frail and unreadable.
But the force of his mind still spoke.
I LOVE YOU, he said before he died. He stared at Padmé. Then he stared at Luke, who was still watching him with horror, watching Leia and Padmé with horror, but barred from intervening the way Luke usually would because this was not usual Luke, and he had no agency when his father did not allow it. Then finally, he looked at Leia.
Leia swallowed.
Padmé deactivated the lightsaber. “I know,” she murmured.
Vader collapsed to the floor. His respirator kept heaving long after his lungs gave out.
Luke knelt next to him, his face still that mask of devastation, but one of his arms was wrapped around his abdomen. He looked up at Leia. “You did it,” he said. Grief still choked his voice. Leia should have expected that—she had just been thinking how blissful it must be to be happy, and not know the complexities of this hellshow—but it cut her to the core, all the same.
“I promised I would,” she said. Her throat still hurt like hell. Vader wasn’t choking her anymore but… but…
Padmé pressed her hand to her chest. Tears slipped out of her eyes as she looked down at her husband. Her son. Up at her daughter, whose eyes she shared, though Leia’s were not glistening.
“The Rebels have the information?” she asked. Pain made her voice jagged and sharp. Urgent.
Leia nodded. “They’ll take the Empire within hours. There’ll be a bloody civil war, but—”
“We won’t be here to see it,” Luke said from the floor, lifting his hand from his belly. They all looked down at it. It was red with blood.
“No.”
Padmé knelt beside Vader. She placed the lightsaber back on his waist. Let them wonder what happened here. Let them never understand the knots of blood that had made them who they were. That had led to this.
Once she was done, Padmé lay on her side beside her husband. She took his helmet off, arms trembling, and sobbed at the side of the scarred face underneath. Leia felt pain there too, but a numbness was taking over her.
Their fight was done. There was nothing else for them to do.
Padmé lay down beside Vader—beside Anakin—and stared into his eyes. She went still a few minutes later.
Luke, still on the ground, shuffled towards Leia and held out a bloody hand. She sat down on the floor beside him, turning their backs to Vader, and stared through the vast transparisteel window at Coruscant, and the galaxy beyond. Leia imagined ships storming through the spires, shattering all in their path. She imagined the death that this tragedy would precipitate. She imagined them all kneeling on a knife’s edge, about to plunge the galaxy into the abyss.
But the galaxy had been in that abyss for a long, long time already. She should know.
Luke wrapped his arm around her. “I never doubted you,” he said.
“You didn’t have the capacity for doubt.”
“Exactly.”
She chuckled through the pain in her throat. It was sharpening into a single cut, and she knew what it meant. Luke’s hair was matted with blood as well. She wrapped her arm around him in return, selfishly pulling him closer to her, and selfishly so she could feel his heartbeat.
There was nothing left that either of them had to say. They knew what they had done. They knew why they had done it. And they knew what was about to happen. First Luke, slowly; then, in one flash of darkness, Leia.
Leia said it anyway: “I wouldn’t change anything,” she said.
Luke raised his eyebrows. “Nothing?”
“Even if I’d known what would have happened to Alderaan, I would still have joined the Rebellion. And even if I’d known we would end up here, like this, I would have still come to save you. I would still have loved you with the other half of my soul.”
Luke kissed her cheek. His lips were cold. “The love was worth the pain.”
Leia leaned her head on his shoulder. It would roll off, soon, and both their bodies would slump to the ground. But until then, they sat there: two children, drenched in legacies of violence and salvation, watching the sunlight glint off the gleaming spires as they waited for the end of the world.