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At age three, Her Highness Princess Leia Organa, Heir to the Throne of Alderaan, sneaks away from her minders, finds herself in the Queen’s personal garage, picks out the fastest speeder, climbs into it, and then promptly falls out of it and breaks her arm.
It will be said by Palace staff for years to come, that the resulting sob can be heard throughout the Galaxy. A bacta cast is applied, but still the crying doesn’t stop. “It hurts,” She sobs into her fathers shoulder. She doesn’t stop, even though all the best doctors and healers on Alderaan are consulted over the next week, assuring the Queen and her consort that there daughter is perfectly healthy. Her arm should be mostly healed, they say, there shouldn’t be any pain. She might have gone into shock briefly, but now she’s fine.
She does stop crying, after about a week, but she doesn’t stop muttering about the hurt, pointing to her arm, her heart, her head, her foot, everywhere, when an adult asks where the pain is coming from. No one knows what to do.
***
On Imperial Center, Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader, awakens suddenly. He doesn’t cry out, he’s in too much pain constantly for that. But he does glance at his right arm. Phantom pains are not new. Though they normally don’t effect the first arm he lost, and he doesn’t recall them ever feeling like a broken bone. It is of no mind. He goes back into fitful sleep.
***
On Tatooine, a little boy cries. He insists that it hurts, though he’s spent the last two days doing nothing more strenuous than helping his Aunt can food. Owen’s in Anchorhead, selling their produce this week, and so Beru just rocks the boy until he cries himself to sleep. He’s quieter about it the next day, but no less distressed. Beru isn’t sure what to do. The healer in Anchorhead is something of a last resort, its so time consuming and expensive, particularly when there is no obvious sign of actual physical injury.
After three straight days, she calls the second to last resort. He’s free, but he’s a bad omen, and if Owen were home, he wouldn’t approve. Still, Obi-Wan comes.
He spends a few minutes with Luke, rocking the child on his knee, full of a sad, resigned kind of affection. Beru can’t help but wonder if maybe they should let the boy see him. He clearly care, in his own way. He’s able to sooth him, and eventually Luke falls into what might be his most restful sleep ever.
“The force bond broke.” Obi-Wan tells her as he lays Luke in his bed, brushing blonde hair out of his face as softly as any uncle would.
“He can’t be a Jedi anymore?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that...though perhaps more traumatic.” He is briefly silent, contemplative.
“I told you there were twins.” he says after several long minutes. “Well, siblings, any biological relatives, supposedly, but siblings are what we had access too, who are both force sensitive develop a bond, it’s just natural. At the temple we did what we could to lessen it, to prevent attachment.” he rolls his eyes, and Beru gets the distinct impression he didn’t think that had been a good idea. “But twins were something else entirely. They shared a force bond per-birth. And they were both very strong in the force. Being separated so far, I can’t imagine it was easy. And now, something traumatic must have happened to Le...to his twin” He still wouldn’t share the other Skywalker child’s name with them. “The bond snapped as a means of protection.” he strokes the little boys hair, and makes an aborted gesture, like he’s going to kiss his forehead before getting a hold of himself, “Though, judging by the state he’s in, it didn’t seem to do much good.”
“So.” Beru say slowly, “his... sister?” Its a guess, Obi-Wan’s never told them, but then, Luke’s never asked where his brother is. “She died?”
“Oh, no” Obi-Wan shook his head, “He’d be in much worse state in that case. Its a severing, like a broken bone, I think, or a torn muscle.” He considers it, “I can’t make it go away, but I should be able to ease the pain.”
“Please.” Beru asks.
After that night Luke stops asking for his sister.
***
She stops complaining about it eventually. Stops even really registering it most of the time. But it’s always there. And she never manages to truly forget.
***
Luke Skywalker sits in Ben Kenobi’s hovel, and watches the halo of a princess beg for help.
Obi-Wan considers the twins, the children of his best friend, his brother. He wants to tell them everything great and good about Anakin, but all he can do is share on kind mercy. The father is dead, a monster killed him.
The broken force bond still lingers around Luke, though he clearly doesn’t really feel it. Obi-Wan hopes Leia is ok, without a force healer to ease the break.
Luke has a force presents like his father, but also...different. Anakin had been all blinding light and power. Luke’s is warm, less like staring into the suns and more like being surrounded by them. No less dangerous, potentially, but also, gentler.
As his brother’s daughter pleads for his help, he wonders what she feels like in the force. It has been such a long time since that brief first meeting.
Luke, for all he looks like his father, has his mother’s kindness in his smile, her hope in his eyes. Leia, despite being a daring senator at a young age, has her father’s stubborn set to her jaw, his fire in her brown eyes.
Soon, he thinks, as he invites this young, force strong boy of Tattooine to become a Jedi Knight, soon I will know what Leia Skywalker feels like in the force, soon I will see what Anakin’s children can be together.
***
Her Highness Princess-Senator Leia Organa, Heir to the Throne of Alderaan and one of the last surviving members of the Planet, is walked back to her cell. Its as though she can physically feel the death of her planet, a force pulling at her body, weighing on her mind, overwhelming her heart.
The old wound, which she’d stopped paying attention to many years ago, seems suddenly gaping and raw. And yet, she can’t sob like she is three and it first appeared. She’s got too much to cry for and not enough tears, this old pain seems trivial to her head. But still, she can’t ignore it.
***
He felt the destruction of Alderaan. He disapproves. But his master commanded it, so he accepted it. Still, he finds no comfort in the cries of the dying people. He’s found release in the deaths of others, but never comfort, never power. Now is no different. He wishes there were a junior officer around he could really take his feelings out on. Blasting a planet to oblivion is so devoid of emotions, so callous, so impersonal, so uncivilized. When he brings death, he brings it.
He supposes there is only a matter of time until he’s told to execute the princess. He should at least take comfort in the fact that soon she will pay for her betrayal. He doesn’t.
His right arm aches, it’s a strange sensation all these years later.
***
“I’m Luke Skywalker, I’m here to rescue you.”
And despite everything, something inside of her begins to knit itself back together.
***
He shivers on the Falcon, as they make their escape, and the princess, the beautiful woman who had lost even more than he has, assures him it wasn’t his fault.
He use to ask his aunt about a sister, He thinks suddenly. He wanted one very badly as a child. He doesn’t know why that thought occurred to him, except perhaps its the fact that Ben Kenobi knew his father, was the last remaining link Luke had to family in the galaxy. It’s all gone now.
And yet, he doesn’t feel alone, like he things he should. He wonders if this is the force. This sense of completion, ever growing.
***
Her people are gone. The man whose help she begged for is dead. She is on a rusty junker, piloted by a stubborn idiot, leading a weapon of complete annihilation to the Alliance.
It is, empirically speaking, the second worst day of Leia Organa’s life.
And yet, as she wraps a blanket around a blonde boy who is freezing in the cold vacuum of space, for the first time in 16 years, Leia doesn’t hurt.
***
“Then you know why I have to face him.” and she thinks of the hurt. The gaping wound that was no where and everywhere in her body.
She hasn’t felt it in four years. The idea, that she might feel it again, or something so much worse if Luke leaves, is almost too much for her to bare.
And she thinks on that, and not the other revelation. She doesn’t think about being twelve and the Emperor’s terrifying agent paying her father a visit. She doesn’t think of staring into his cold black eyes and hearing, clearly but distantly, and echo of an echo, “I hate you.” Or the pervading feeling of blistering hot fire that seemed to exist in every room he was in even when she wore her lightest clothing.
She just leans into Han and wills the hurt not to come back.
***
He had thought, when he’d found out about his son, that that long ago premonitions of a daughter had been something of a wish fulfillment fantasy. His love for her mother, and his own, perhaps even his own pathetic desire to make up for the mistakes he’d made with Asho...with his Jedi apprentice had made him think he was going to have a daughter because he wanted one. He’d dismissed those thoughts as the silly musings of a once sentimental fool.
But now, with the truth, two children, twins, all of those fantasies suddenly come rushing back to him. Maybe, he could have her.
He wondered, in the brief moment before his son attacked, what had happened to Leia’s right arm.
***
They can see the Death Star blow-up from the moon. She feels, something, an extinction of life, and she wants to cry because Luke was on the station, he must have been.
Despite herself, she reaches out for the hurt. It has been four years since it went away on another space station, but she remembers.
She braces herself for the pain of the severing, and so much worse, as Luke’s death comes to her.
But she finds something else instead. Where she remembers the hurt, this is a warm feeling. Bright and powerful, but gentle and comforting. Like a sun, or two.
Its Luke. Its her brother. And for the first time, in 23 years, as bright and clear as day, she can feel him.