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Leia knows that Lord Vader does not tolerate disrespect. And, if one manages to disrespect him and live, the slight is not easily forgotten.
Vader tortures Leia. He holds her in place as she watches her planet, her people, her family die in a fraction of a second. Vader hunts down the Rebellion; he kills her friends. He tortures Han, and then her again for good measure. Leia has humiliated him, ruined his Master’s plans, defied him publicly and successfully. Vader hates her, and it is a personal hatred, in the way few of his hatreds are now.
He does not care to know this, but the sentiment is returned.
It is more than a year after Endor. Ben is four months old, sleeping in the next room. Leia has just been elected to the Senate of the New Republic, and the new apartment on Chandrila is just starting to feel like a real home. Han is away with Chewie—the first time since Ben's birth. Luke is off searching for Jedi artifacts, and Leia is alone.
Leia is tired, and grateful that Ben is asleep. She should be asleep too, but insomnia has been a companion to her for a long time. When she was in the Imperial Senate, she would spend sleepless nights sitting by the window of her apartment and listening to the noise of the city as she did the tedious parts of a rebel spy’s work, reading and constructing documents, sometimes wishing that she could be out there doing something. Nights on Chandrila are quieter than nights on Coruscant.
Leia decides to meditate. She remembers her time with Luke on Ajan Kloss. Reach out with your feelings, Luke had told her. It had taken her a while to understand it, but it brings her comfort now. Leia sits cross legged, closes her eyes, steadies her breathing, and she reaches.
She feels the background hum of Hanna City first, teeming with life of all kinds. Leia focuses, and then she feels Ben’s light, so small and yet already so familiar to her. She relaxes, and then reaches out further. Faintly, ever so faintly, she can feel Luke. Her brother, her twin, he was a part of her even as he was halfway across the galaxy. It is so easy to see like this, that it is all part of the Force, all life is the same, from the smallest skittling creatures to the sentients roaming around Hanna City, to Luke, wherever he was. Leia reaches further—
—and then she senses a presence right in front of her.
For a moment, Leia is frozen. She stares at the man—the blue, glowing man—in front of her, all of her words failing her. The only coherent thought Leia could manage was that he was lucky that Luke had warned her about this, or Leia would have just scarred her nice wall with blaster shots.
“Leia,” he says.
He says her name so softly, almost with reverence. She hadn’t known he was capable of sounding like that. She has only ever seen pictures of him looking like this, but she recognizes him immediately. He looks very young, and Leia hates the fact that her brain immediately begins to recognize familial resemblances. He looks at her with the hunger of a starved man in his eyes. He is probably doing the same thing. Seeing similarities to whatever woman was foolish enough to allow him in her bed. It is so much more than the pictures Luke showed her. He is physical proof of what Luke told her on Endor all that time ago, and if she hadn’t believed him at that moment, then she would now.
He’s a ghost, she reminds herself. He can’t do anything, can’t interact with the world—Luke had told her that, and he wouldn’t lie to her. Leia thinks she is going to scream, but the politician in her manages to start with words.
“What,” Leia says, clenching her fists so hard they turn white. “What are you doing here?”
“I felt you reaching out. Did Luke tell you? I wanted to apologize to you. For everything.”
Luke had, in fact, told her that this spirit wished to speak with her. Leia had previously assumed that Luke had in turn relayed, probably in a more diplomatic tone, Leia’s response to that request.
Perhaps she had been wrong about that.
To her stunned silence, he continues. ”I know I can’t make up for any of it, but I know your brother told you about me, and I would like to know you better. You and Ben.”
Leia blinks. Her head was swimming, her heart pounding. She wonders if she’s dreaming, because certainly this man would not have the absolute gall to show up at her house and start demanding things from her.
She stands up.
“You want to get to know me? And my son?” Leia repeats incredulously. “You—you? I want nothing from you. Get out of my house.”
He was silent for a long moment. “I am sorry.”
“Are you,” she says, dryly. “What are you sorry for? Tell me, please, and be specific.”
“For what I did to you. How I hurt you. I—you need to know, I didn’t know who you were, not until the end.” He was fighting to keep his voice calm, gentle—and wasn’t that a thought, him choosing to be gentle.
“And if you had known? Would that have changed anything?” Leia asks.
“Of course it would have! You can’t understand how sorry I am.”
“Really?” She laughs, mirthlessly. This is too much. This is ridiculous.
“Tell me, did you know Luke was your son when you cut his hand off and let him try to kill himself in front of you?” she asks, even though she already knows the answer.
“Leia—please, Leia,” he says. “You have a son now, you must understand—you’re my daughter.”
“Tell me,” says Leia, and her voice could be mistaken for conversational if not for the look in her eyes. “Would you have ever spared a thought to what you did to me again if I wasn’t?”
He is struck silent by that.
“The Force may forgive you. Luke, the Jedi, whatever is left of them, may forgive you. I don’t. The galaxy won’t either. I will have to live with your mistakes,” she says, nearly shaking with fury. “I will have to try and fix your mistakes for the rest of my life. Maybe—maybe if I’m lucky we’ll get halfway back to where we were before you decided to help destroy the galaxy.”
Leia shakes her head, and sits back down, feeling absolutely drained. “Even if we do fix it. It won’t change what happened to the Jedi.” Leia knows the litany of names by heart and knows that as despicable as the Empire’s genocides are, they only represent a fraction of its crimes. “What happened to Lasan. To Geonosis. To Mandalore. To Alderaan.”
“Anakin,” Leia says, and she could tell that her use of his name surprised him. She doesn't care what he called himself now that he could no longer hide behind that mask. The name he was born with might make him listen to her. “If you ever speak to me or my son again, one with the Force or not, I will find a way to make you suffer.”
“This isn’t necessary. Leia, if you would just listen—” he begins.
She stands up. “I will make sure that Luke never speaks to you again.”
He actually looks alarmed at that, his eyes widening. “You can’t—”
“I can. If he wants to keep speaking with me.” Leia smiles, joyless and sharp. “Who do you think he’ll choose?”
He is silent for a long moment. Then, he bows his head in acknowledgement.
“I am sorry, Leia,” he says quietly. “I give you my word that I will not bother you again.”
He vanishes. Leia puts her head in her hands and focuses on breathing. Her heart is racing. Her hands shake. She checks on Ben, who is still sleeping, completely undisturbed. She tells herself over and over: she is home, she is safe, and that spirit cannot harm her anymore.
It takes Leia an hour, and a bottle of Corellian wine that Han had deemed half-decent, for her mind to stop racing. She comms Han and can’t make herself tell him what happened. She tries to comm Luke, but according to Artoo, he's busy. She wonders if he already knows what happened.
For the next week, Leia dreams of ghosts long dead. She dreams of her parents, frozen in time as they always would be, who would never know the woman she had become. She dreams of a mother who she never met, who she can only remember by the echoes of her grief. She dreams of the Death Star, of Alderaan’s destruction, of Tarkin.
And she dreams of Vader.