could you write about post-rotj leia struggling to come to terms with being her father(s)'s daughter?
[in the style of “Shifting the Sun” by Diana Der-Hovanessian]
When your father dies, say the Coruscanti, you are left clutching a star map for a different galaxy.
Leia never had a body. Even Luke had that, a black hunk of plastiform in the shape of a man, and she’d watched him—hidden behind the treeline as acrid smoke curled around her brother and up to the sky. He’d burned the creature who claimed to be their father, and Leia watched him in silhouette, knowing without ever once seeing his face that he was howling, all agony, and alone.
The flames had burned down to flickers, and she was still watching Luke. Even when he went to his knees and pressed his face, hands, into the dirt and screamed, like an animal, like something was being amputated.
(Later, Leia will think:Â yes, it was like that, exactly like that.)
She’d crept back into Han’s bed in the grey-cold hours of the morning, tucked herself in the warm curve of his body. He’d let out a string of sleep noises and shifted to wrap an arm around her, his hand spanning the soft rise and fall of her stomach. Leia had been dizzy and overwhelmed with the sudden warmth of him, and she found herself tucking her face into the crook of his arm, crying.Â
If Han noticed his sleeve was wet in the morning, he had the unlikely grace not to mention it.
She hadn’t had a body to bury, that was the thing. She hadn’t had any bodies to bury, or burn, even a stone to carve their names into. The Falcon had flown through Alderaanian space afterward, on a mission for the Alliance; she’d been grateful for the blue-white blur of hyperspace, hiding the enormous absence of her planet. Like an abscess in the world.
It occurs to her later—much later, after Endor, after the New Republic, holed up in some rusting base repurposed for the Resistance—that she lost her father and met her father in the same breath. Exit Bail, enter Vader. Leia wasn’t consulted on the transition, but she never has been. She’s someone tragic things happen to, not someone who decides if they’re happening.
(She inherited this from her mother, more’s the pity.)
“I used to dye my hair,” Leia Organa says to Poe Dameron once, and it’s unfortunate, that she’s drunk and he isn’t, but she also ordered men into battle—to fight and die under her command, and he didn’t, so maybe that justifies it. Leia Organa hasn’t killed many sentients, but she’s commanded enough of them to die between the first war and the second, she’s not certain of the dividing line.
So. She says, “I used to dye my hair. Black. Like my father’s. I wanted to be…everything he was, I wanted to be him.”
She told Luke this, once—not when she was drunk but when they’d been shoved together in a bolt-hole at a cantina, waiting the owner to deal with the troopers. Everything had to be whispered, their mouths close to one another’s ears, and Leia had been very aware of the complicated, shivering and ineffable thing between them, whatever it was. So she said—and Luke had smiled (it was too dark to see, but she knew) and leaned in close, said, You’d look good with black hair. And maybe it was the proximity of him, the inexplicably familiar shivering-feeling—
Do you think he’d be proud of me? she’d whispered, and though she never told Luke—or Han for that matter—she never recovers from the stab of love she felt when Luke said, Well, the rest of us are.
(She doesn’t know what color Anakin Skywalker’s hair was.)
“Ma’am,” Poe says in the present, touching her shoulder with a kind of rare gentleness. “Get some sleep.”
Leia sleeps, and does not dream.
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