Work Text:
Leia Organa stands in the forest with a lightsaber in her hands.
The air is thick with fog; night came swiftly and quietly, the forest eerily still. The willows do not swing or sway. The ponds and creeks lie still in sleep. Whatever living creatures wander here in the day have fled to their homes to hide among their families, safely curled in their burrows, nests, and caves.
It is her lightsaber, technically. She built it with her hands, with her mind, with a great and all-consuming self doubt gnawing at her.
Now she has been left alone with it. Luke went back home and he thought she did too; yet she stands still with the training mask on her head, protective gloves discarded on the ground at her feet, and the extinguished weapon balancing carefully in the palm of her hand.
The Empire lies dead at their feet. It has been gone for months now, and in the aftermath she found ways to keep busy, aiding all Rebel efforts in any way she possibly could. Rebuilding the system is in many ways a more arduous task than destroying its predecessor. This did her good; there was no need for her to think if she barely had time to sleep. She was always two steps ahead of her terror.
Now it has caught up to her, starving and desperate. Nobody needs her. There's nothing more to be done tonight. It is just Leia and the forest, and the saber in her hands. In her she can feel a great, overpowering question bubbling to the surface; one she has not dared to give the time of day lest it snuff out her fire.
She's got nothing to lose. Leia inhales deeply through her nose and closes her eyes. She thinks carefully of scratchy beige robes, and the feeling of her hand in one much larger and more calloused than her own. She thinks of how the desert smells; a shawl, a father's hands, a baby's cry.
"Help me," she whispers. "Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
Leia slowly opens her eyes.
The forest is empty. No one is waiting to greet her but for fog and open air. She curls her free hand into a fist at her side and turns sharply, only to-
"Leia," a soft voice says. "You called?"
She gasps. Can't help it- there he is, clear as day, awash in eerie blue light. It is her old friend Ben, back from the dead.
Perhaps not back- only visiting.
"About time." Leia frowns, crossing her arms. She can't help but feel a little indignant- she'd called out to him before with no answer at all, yet it seemed he'd always come to Luke's aid at a moment's notice. It's a bit funny- when Luke described him, he always saw him as he was in his final moments. The man standing before her doesn't look a day older than he did when he came to her rescue, dressed in blue, nursing an injured hand.
"I'm afraid it's more a game of chance than your usual holo-call," Obi-Wan replied, grasping his belt with both hands and looking her up and down. "...I sense discontent from you, Leia. Why did you call for me?"
She stares at him for some time, so incredibly frustrated that she feels she could scream, or cry. It'd be much easier to stomp off into the swamp from here than bear the vulnerability. Leia debates the pros and cons of being pursued through the mud by a ghost for several seconds before finally acquiescing. "Luke is trying to train me."
"That's good," he replies, a tentative smile dancing across his face. "I trust it's going well?"
She clips her lightsaber to her belt and scoffs. "I know how to turn it on."
"You cannot learn it in a day. Jedi learn from a very young age- you remember what I told you?"
Of course she does. It has been burned into her mind since she was ten years old. "Perhaps I wouldn't struggle if that were the case in my life."
"I'm sure you are excelling." He folds his hands behind his back, slowly walking to stand closer. "Don't undersell your skill. You have always had sharp instincts."
"Instinct means nothing in the face of education, knowledge-" Leia squeezes the hilt of her saber and turns her face away, staring into the fog.
She doesn't know why she called him here. What use is there to such a conversation? It's not productive, just-
"... Is it only the training that is troubling you?"
Jedi. She scowls, jaw clenching. "What else could it possibly be?"
The forest is silent. Nothing moves. Even the Force flows slowly around them.
Obi-Wan steps closer. She pulls back. "Tell me what's wrong."
She once asked him, are you my real father? back before such questions possessed dangerous answers.
"I miss him," she chokes out, and her voice comes out more angry than anything else. "I want them back. My parents."
Obi-Wan's face, when she dares to glance at him, has fallen. His brow furrows, mouth closed in a tight, sad line. Just as she remembers him. He searches for a response. "Bail was a great man. And Breha was… inspiring."
"I know they were," she snaps. Where has this anger come from, all black and bubbling up inside her? She thought she'd locked it properly away. Leia bites her tongue until she tastes copper and turns to point at him. "Why can I see you, Obi-Wan? Why are you here?"
He looks unmoored- a little upset. Obi-Wan swallows and blurs at the edges. "I am one with the Force- through it, I have-"
"No!" she shouts, much louder than she meant to- how dare he lecture her on the way of the Force when she's spent weeks learning it, studying that which he never thought to teach her? He flinches and she doesn't care, because- "I don't want you, Obi-Wan! I don't want you! I want my father! I want my mother!"
She steps closer, shoving her hand through his ephemeral blue chest. It feels cold. "I don't need a ghost, I need my parents." Leia's eyes burn. Her head feels hot, a radiant spike of pain shooting through her head. "I need my parents."
Suddenly all the energy has fled from her. She sinks slowly to her knees, turning away to kneel among the reeds and grassy underbrush, wiping her face with the heel of her hand.
Ever-so-slowly, Obi-Wan lowers himself to the ground beside her. He leaves little distance between them. It is so quiet. He doesn't breathe, she notices. He doesn't breathe at all.
"I wish I could give them back to you."
They sit for some moments in silence together. Leia cries into her hands, her face burning hot with shame and frustration. Her arms are sore from the training, and the saber digs uncomfortably into her hip. It is all too much. She realizes only now that this is the first time she wept since it happened-
Since that white star in the sky disappeared from sight.
She needs more than just her parents. She needs her language, her friends, all the people who kept her safe. It is an unfathomable loss, as steep and wide as a canyon. There's a blank, empty gap in space where two billion lives should be.
"Why not me, Obi-Wan?" She raises her face from her hands, her voice barely a whisper. "Why not me?"
"Would you have wanted to be a Jedi?"
It is an unanswerable question. She can still recall a time when she'd been small, running through the forest with a stick in her hand and pretending that just this once, she was the Jedi Knight with a shining crystal blade. Then again, she loved her parents. She wanted to be a politician; to change things from within, before this aspiration proved impossible.
She thinks too hard about it and then she's back in that black, shiny room, looking out at a trillion stars, one light short.
"I just think- perhaps I could have done something. Maybe I could have stopped it."
He folds his hands in his lap. Obi-Wan's voice sounds admittedly mournful. "The destruction of Alderaan."
"Yes. I could have done something, Obi-Wan! I could have protected them."
Rather than stand there, useless, thrashing against her captors, girlish and wide-eyed in the face of her people's genocide. What could she have done if she'd been stronger? If she could have turned and broken that man's spine?
"Why not me, Ben?"
He looks at his hands. He flounders in the face of emotional questions even in death, it seems. "Leia- do you remember what I told you?"
She turns to squint at him. "What?"
"When you asked me what the Force felt like-"
She'd repeated it to herself night after night, whenever the nightmares came and she'd needed something to reach out to- some thought to linger on, to distract from the horrible fear. Of course she remembers. Leia nods. "A light in the dark. A light when you're afraid."
"Yes. And think now of how we each perceive that light differently. No one is afraid in the very same way."
"And..?"
"No one feels the Force the very same way, Leia. You see the Force through other people. You… you know them, intimately. You pierce right through their souls to the very marrow of their being. Did that skill not aid you as a diplomat, as a leader?"
She thinks of her cousin and the shock on his face when she'd spiritually stripped him clean for vulnerabilities. She thinks, too, of all the times she employed the very same tactic in the Senate.
How much more could she have done with proper training?
"I could have fought them if I'd been like Luke."
Obi-Wan reaches out to tenderly cup her cheek. She cannot feel it, but for the cold breath of air that brushes past her. "Your mother was not a Jedi, and still she prevailed over all number of foes."
"She couldn't prevail over Vader," says Leia, pulling her face away. "She died."
"In childbirth. She did." Obi-Wan frowns, seemingly deciding on a new explanation. Finally he sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and settles in to answer firmly. "I shall tell you as bluntly as I can. You were a princess , Leia, with a castle of aides, guards, and handmaidens. All eyes were on you. Already, your intelligence and your foresight made you a target of suspicion. You wanted to work in close contact to the inner workings of the Empire, directly under their noses. Don't you think.. a trained Jedi would have stood out? That they would have noticed you before you could ever have made a difference?"
It's not enough. She understands, and still it is not enough.
She thinks back to that moment in which she comforted Luke for his loss. His parents were dead. Obi-Wan was gone. She understood more than most- but she couldn't let herself cry for any of it, especially not Obi-Wan himself, whose loss broke her heart, too. Just when she thought it couldn't break any more.
"I'm sorry for saying that," Leia murmurs. "I am glad I can still see you."
He tentatively reaches out to rest his hand over hers again. "As am I."
"It's so hard, Obi-Wan. To live on when everyone else is dead and gone." She sniffs, wiping at her reddened nose and eyes, feeling properly disheveled. "I don't know how to do it."
Obi-Wan thinks on it for a moment. He nods solemnly. To his credit, he does not lack empathy. "I can remember a time when I was all alone, with no friends at my side and no family. They'd all been killed. Much of it was of my own doing- my own fault. I thought it best to walk away from it all."
She sniffs. She knows this story. Tap, tap, tap, she taps her boot on the grass-carpeted forest floor, flexes and pops her knuckles as she listens. It's so hard not to be restless.
"I lived a mundane life. I was afraid all the time. All the time, Leia, every day, and every night. I called out to dead men and yet I pushed away the love of the living. Nothing could touch me." He inches forward to face her more directly, hands balancing in the air as a living person would, miming a comforting touch. "Then I met a little girl who told me how to live when you're all alone, when everyone is dead, and it all seems hopeless."
He smiles very softly. "You rely on the kindness of others."
His hands move to her face again, a gesture so similar to one her father made over and over again through the years. She can remember his touch, how he smelled- can still feel the crisp, freshly pressed textiles of his cloaks against her face.
She can't feel Obi-Wan, but it's the closest thing anyone has done to that gesture since her father died. So she sinks into it, tries to pretend.
"How can anybody help you, Leia, if you're always running, pushing it down?"
He's a hypocrite. He lingered, wallowed in his sadness for ten years before rolling over and stepping into the sun. But he did it to save her, and that holds merit.
Leia sobs. Slowly, all that sorrow she's curled up and clenched into a tight little ball in her chest starts to unwind; uncontrollably fast and intense, the grief of her entire planet comes crashing down on her. She weeps for every blade of grass on Alderaan, every song, every drop of water in every clear blue stream.
"How do you- how do I-" she sobs, barely capable of getting the words out. She chokes on her own cries, leaning into an embrace she can't feel. "How do I live with this?"
Obi-Wan curls around her, miming an embrace. When she was little she would crawl into her parents bed and be held like this. Back then, the nightmares went away when she opened her eyes.
He tenderly brushes her hair out of her face with his ghostly blue hand.
"You cry."