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He is there waiting for her when Leia passes into the Force.
She feels the moment that her child dies, giving all his life energy to save Rey. There is no doubt in her mind that he is gone, but he also came back to her at the end, and Leia wakes into another world with the same mingled grief and joy that has marked so much of her life.
She finds herself not on the other side of life, exactly, but within it. A place that isn't a place, a world within the world, both a part of the universe and separate from it. Nothing about that feels strange to her, because she has known the feeling of it all her life.
And she knows from the first instant that she is not alone, because she can feel a presence beside her, as if someone is guiding her through.
It makes her think of the first thing a Jedi ever told her about the Force, so long ago.
What does it feel like?
Have you ever been afraid of the dark? How does it feel when you turn on the light?
I feel safe.
Yes. It feels like that.
It's been such a long time. Perhaps not since she felt the first tendrils of darkness inside her son, or perhaps as far back as those carefree days on Alderaan before she really knew what the Empire was. For the first time in far too long, Leia feels absolutely and entirely safe.
And Obi-Wan Kenobi is there again, showing her the way.
He appears before her as she knew him at ten years old. Gone are the white hair and extra years she saw so briefly on the Death Star; his face is still heavily lined with age and many cares, but less burdened than she remembers him. He is smaller than in her memory, of course; to a child, he was a giant of a man. In spirit, he is that still.
Obi-Wan smiles at her, and it is the same gentle smile, full of love but tinged with aching sorrow.
"Welcome home, Leia," he says, and that is all it takes to make Leia feel like she might cry. He says her name as no one has said it in years beyond count. "My dear Princess."
"I knew you'd come," she says, and isn't quite sure if she means that he would be here when she died or all that time ago when R2-D2 carried her desperate plea for aid.
She hasn't asked for him often, like they agreed when she was young, but she has wished for him twice now and both times he has come.
"I am so glad to see you," he says, sweetly fond but so very sad. "I can't deny I hoped I would be waiting longer."
It is a sudden shock to find that there is a comfort in talking to him that she has not known in decades. It occurs to her that she can tell him anything and not need to worry about appearing strong. There is no need for distance here, to keep her own fears concealed to be a beacon to inspire others. To speak to him is like being able to speak to her mother and father again; to feel that she can lean on someone else.
"It didn't happen like I thought it would," she says, which is a hopelessly insufficient way of referring to the last few decades of her life. "I feel like I failed him."
There is no question of who she means; she sees in his face that he knows, and Leia wonders how much he's seen.
"I understand," Obi-Wan says heavily, and she believes him. Who might understand more than the man who raised Anakin Skywalker, with all that he became?
Something must show on her face, because he gives a wry smile. "I know," he says. "But Anakin was family to me, and I was the one who taught him what I thought he needed to know, and guided him as well as I knew how. We cannot shield them from everything, in the end, including their own choices."
"No, we can't," Leia agrees, and she means it. Ben's actions are not hers to bear, and yet - "It never quite changes how much you blame yourself, though. No amount of understanding quite takes away the feeling that I could have done more. He was my son."
"For what it's worth, I don't think any of it was your fault, Leia."
And -
Well.
Leia is a grown woman, close to an old one, and it is long since she has needed anyone's reassurances to stand strong.
And yet a surge of heat prickles behind her eyes and she finds that she has wanted this, far more than she let herself admit.
Obi-Wan reaches out and grasps her hand. She is glad to find that she feels his touch as though they were both still alive - his fingers are strong and warm, rough but careful.
"And he will not blame you either."
Leia's breath leaves her in a rush, and it is a moment before she can find another. "You can't know that."
"He's here, Leia. Can't you feel him? He found enough peace to join the Force, by the end."
And she can. Leia opens herself up to the Force and finds a point of light under heavy shadow, a ray of sun through thick cloud. He shies away from her awareness but it is guilt and grief that turn him away, not hate and anger.
Her relief is absolute. Bittersweet, yet all-encompassing, and yet another thing to be grateful to Obi-Wan for.
"Obi-Wan, is he..." She trails off. She no longer means her son but she cannot bring herself to speak a name. She understands that Obi-Wan won't call him Vader, but to say that Anakin Skywalker is a different man from Vader has always bothered her. Luke seemed to separate the two in his mind, but Leia has always understood the Dark a little differently from him. There isn't Light or Dark as two separate wholes; there is a constant struggle between the two, and balance within a single person is a sliding scale, a war that must always be fought. Her son's terrible deeds as Kylo Ren will always be his. She will always love him but she may never be able to forgive him, and she's not sure she should.
Obi-Wan is more like Luke in this, she thinks. He was always ready to forgive Anakin, despite all that he did as Vader.
"He's here, isn't he?"
"Yes." He's always been as honest with her as he could be, and Leia is grateful for that. "He won't come unless you ask for him, he's promised me."
Another shield he has raised for her. There have been so very many.
"He's gone to find Ben," Obi-Wan continues, and Leia feels her face do something complicated. "It's alright, Leia, I promise. He's been waiting for this for a long time. He tried to talk to him before, but Ben couldn't hear. The way the boy idolised the worst of him - believe me, Anakin is the best person to help him through his return to the Light."
Leia is going to need some time to think about that, but for now she trusts Obi-Wan and sets it aside. "You seem more settled now. Things are..." It's hard to ask. She desperately wants to think that Obi-Wan has found happiness here, that these decades have been kind to him, but it's hard to think of her birth father without thinking of torture and murder and the death of Alderaan. "Things are good between you?"
He squeezes her hand, and the gratitude in his eyes shows he knows what it cost her to ask. "It took a long time," he admits, and that's not surprising after all that was between them. "But yes. We are perhaps as we should always have been; honest and open in a way I'm not sure we ever were before. He is a good friend. He is my brother again."
And when she sees the way he smiles - how the expression lifts the shadows from his face, lights his eyes and spreads such a sweet unburdened joy throughout him - Leia takes a piece of a very old anger and lets it go, dissipating into the Force. She does not need to forgive Anakin to be glad that he is here to unburden someone dear to her.
Obi-Wan lived such a sad life, and he deserved so much more.
"My father told me so many stories about you, after I got home," she says. "I wouldn't stop asking for them. Some stories he only told me when I got older, and some he never told me at all. They were a guiding light to me. My fight against injustice began with the Organas, but it began with you, too."
Everything he has done, all these years. It's not so hard to imagine she can see the truth of it in the lines of his face, the hurts and losses that weigh him down.
"The one thing they'd never tell me is where you'd gone, only that you were on a secret mission. I imagined that meant you were always on the Path, fighting and hiding people, because you came alive out there. But it was so much later that I realised even that was another thing you gave up for us, for me and Luke. You had to stop fighting just to protect him. All those long years, so alone."
It is a terrible thought. Leia's family has always been her greatest source of strength and her greatest comfort. She has known such terrible losses, but that has always held true. Obi-Wan lost everyone, and spent so long on his own.
"I stopped fighting for a while," Obi-Wan says regretfully. "But I found my strength again in you, Leia, as so many others have. Bringing you home, looking out for Luke from afar - that was my fight. And it was worth everything it cost me, a thousand times over."
"But it did cost you, didn't it?"
Obi-Wan raises one hand to the opposite arm, and she wonders if it was subconscious. She didn't know about the burn there until Haja told her on the way back to Alderaan; with an adult's hindsight she's almost amazed he thought that a good thing to tell her, but she'd known even at the time that he was floundering for ways to talk to her.
And it wasn't only that. Knowing Obi-Wan, the physical injury was probably the least of it; she hates the thought, but she can imagine facing Ben as Obi-Wan had faced Anakin. She knows she would - the cold hard truth is that if she had to choose between the entire Resistance and fighting her child, she knows what she would do. She sent her best fighters against him often enough.
It's why Leia could have been a Jedi. She loves, deeply and fiercely, but she is prepared to let go.
The pain, though, always lingers.
"You died for us." It comes out raw, a hurt that's never quite healed. "You put yourself between him and us again, just like you did back then on Jabiim, and when you drew him away from the ship and the Path. And, I think, any number of times that we never even knew about. Thank you, Obi-Wan. I don't think you've been told that enough. Thank you for everything you did for us."
He looks... startled, at first, and then his face softens into wonder. He's not smiling, exactly, but there is something in his eyes so bright and tender she doesn't quite have words for it.
She was right about him. He takes far too much guilt upon himself, and has been too rarely recognised for all the good he has done.
Because that good is limitless and reaches beyond what either of them will ever know. And she looks at him and finds that she adores him for it. She loves this man who has devoted his life - and his afterlife - to the galaxy and to her family. Who tried his best for her birth father and was a friend to her birth mother, who saved Leia's life and protected her brother. Who, along with Bail and Breha Organa, Beru and Owen Lars, defended Luke and Leia with everything he had out of love for children he barely knew. Out of love for their parents, and hope for the world they might build. And he gave his life for that hope.
Everything Leia and Luke tried to do began with him. Everything the Resistance now achieves, that Rey and Poe and Finn manage to build, will stand on the foundations of faith, compassion and hope that this man laid.
"You give me too much credit, Leia," he begins, and she cuts him off sharply.
"None of that," she says so firmly that his mouth snaps shut, and it makes them both smile. "Take the compliment, Ben."
"Yes, Princess," he concedes as grandly as if yielding to her on a battlefield. His eyes sparkle with mischevious humour.
Ben. So much is about legacy, in the end. All of them thought they'd finished the fight back there on Endor - her and Luke, Han and Lando. Thought they'd won peace that would be handed down to the generations that came after them. But war had come for them too, and she hadn't been able to stop it. They've passed that responsibility on now, and it's a heavy one that she wishes she could have kept from those bright lights who were in her charge.
But she looks at Ben and sees the same in his eyes, and she understands it in a way she never could when she was ten years old and annoyed that the holster he gave her didn't come with a blaster. He knew she would have to fight one day, but he would have done anything to keep her from it.
She wonders if she is the same age as him now. It is an odd thought.
The days with Obi-Wan are strange to remember. It was such a short time of her life, and so different to the rest of her childhood, but it changed everything. In those days, the safest place in the galaxy was at his side, or sheltered behind his back, or her small hand enveloped in his. How quickly she'd come to care about that tired, heartbroken man, with his sad eyes and old face and unfailingly gentle spirit.
She's never forgotten how it felt to fling her arms around him and be held tightly in return. She was embraced countless times by her parents, of course, never doubting her love and protection in their arms, but there was something a little different about Ben. He held her like he loved her even before he knew her, and like just the sight of her filled him with wonder.
She didn't understand it until she was much older and looking into the eyes of her newborn baby: Ben had looked at her like she gave him hope.
It was because of that hope that she had known, in that moment, the name of her son.
"I am sorry, though," he says, levity again eclipsed by that wellspring of grief. "For all you've suffered, you and Luke. I'm sorry the world you built didn't get to last, that you didn't have more time, and for all that happened to your son."
"It's not about us any more," Leia says, and there may be sorrow in that, but there is relief too. Perhaps she will have some role in the future, when Rey and whoever might come after her look for guidance from the Force, but it is another generation who will carry the torch and that lifts a weight from her that she has carried for too long. "The Jedi will live. My children will bring them back."
Something has begun to change, and it takes Leia a moment to place it. Until now she hasn't been aware of where they are - or rather, they haven't been anywhere at all. Now something is beginning to take shape around them; shadowy forms, and a faint hum.
If Obi-Wan notices, he isn't concerned; he's studying her curiously. "Ben-"
"Ben is dead," she says, aching for the boy he was and the man who is in the Force and all he did in between. "But he is not my only child." The words come from somewhere deep inside, never spoken aloud before but one of the truest things she has ever known. Her father's words echo in her ears, as they have always done. "Rey is mine, in every way. And Poe. Finn, too. And all the rest. The children of the Resistance are mine."
And they have always been brilliant. Rey's resilience and courage, Poe's daring and loyalty, Finn's wisdom and fortitude. They are an echo of what came before but they are also something wholly new, and she has faith that they will build something better than those who came before. That faith is entirely enough for her.
"What could I have left behind more beautiful than them?"
His eyes shine. Obi-Wan steps closer, cups her cheek with one hand, and bends forward to press a kiss to her forehead. Leia closes her eyes, tucking the moment into her heart like a flower pressed between the pages of a treasured book.
His words are just as precious.
"I never had a daughter, but I am so very proud of you, Leia."
The memory comes to her in a flash. The rush of the escape from Daiyu - their cover story - a father and his daughter, and her sceptical whispered granddaughter, maybe.
Leia did not know him for long, but she knew him utterly. What more has any father ever done for his child than this - that he devoted his life through pain and loneliness without complaint or hesitation, all for the protection of the Skywalkers?
So many people have died around her, victim to the greed of the Empire and the Dark - so many people who fought to defend the Skywalker twins. She has never quite grasped the enormity of it and will never know all their names. It has always been a heavy legacy, and in many ways she's glad she didn't know it sooner. She wishes she could have done more to honour it.
Leia blinks, and a world forms around them. The shadows grow definition and light and colour, and she realises they are trees. The hum is the sound of machinery and ships, which are constantly landing around them. They are at the edge of a clearing, and the clearing is full of people. The noise is muted, and their forms are still unclear to her, but Leia knows what she is looking at.
They are on Ajan Kloss, and the Resistance has made it home.
The Force, Leia thinks wryly, is not subtle. As faces come into focus, beings of a hundred species from a thousand planets flinging themselves at each other in celebration and grief and delight, she understands what she is being told.
This is the legacy she was left, and it lives. It has survived because of her.
Leia's family is the one she has chosen. Choice - choice is everything. Bail and Breha chose to take her in, to love her as their own and protect her despite the danger. Han, Luke, Chewbacca, Lando, her son for as long as she had him - she chose to take them all to her heart, to build a family with them. Blood is the least part of love.
Bail Organa is her father, always has been and always will. But just as she can refuse her birth father, she can open her heart to another.
"Do you forget so quickly, Ben?" she says, and feels her mouth curl into a grin that makes her feel young again. "You have a daughter."
He folds his arms, tucking his hands into the folds of his robes. Perhaps he thinks she's teasing him. "Leia..."
Leia goes up onto her toes to press a kiss to his cheek. "You chose us. I never forgot, Obi-Wan. And I chose you too, a very long time ago."
"Oh, Leia," he says, and she is not entirely surprised when tears slip down his face. "I have loved you since the day you were born."
And she knows it's true because she can feel it, all around them, the brilliance of the way he loves her. The Force is radiant with it, pure and kind and unfaltering. And she realises that she knows this feeling because it's always been with her, even at her lowest, and she understands at last that she has never been alone.
Leia reaches for him then and finds that she is small in his arms once more. He kneels so she can fling her arms around his neck, and the hands that meet there are tiny while his are big and comforting around her. She is ten years old again and it's not strange at all because she is all things within the Force, every version of herself that she has ever been.
Anakin Skywalker might exist here only as he was in the Light, but Leia at ten is the core of all she has ever been: fearless, tenacious, and with a heart big enough to save the galaxy.
And just as she was when she was ten, Leia Organa is safe, and she is loved.
They stay like that a long time, and when they finally part, Leia studies him carefully, running her hands over the line of his brow, his cheeks, beneath his weary eyes. Everywhere she touches, he seems to grow younger too, until she thinks she can see the Jedi Knight in him - but he has been that all along.
"You'll stay, this time? You're not leaving?" It feels like a child's question, and maybe the unselfconscious way she asks it is dictated by the form she's taken; she doesn't mean he ought never to have other people to see, but she has the sudden thought that he might only have been waiting for her before passing on into some other, more final death and it sends a jolt of fear through her.
But he meets her eyes steadily and squeezes her shoulder.
"There are others who want to see you, but I will still be here. I promise."
And Obi-Wan holds to his word, as he always has. He's beside her when she returns to her older form to watch her children return from the war, and when she cries to see the way Rey and Finn and Poe cling to each other like they will never let go. He's there the first time she sees Luke, both of them nineteen years old again - wiser and sadder but allowing themselves this joy, a moment of uncomplicated reunion and happiness.
And he's there when Rey goes to Tatooine and Luke shows Leia how to appear as a ghost, blue-tinged but able still to watch over her child. There will be long years to do so, to help and guide and continue to learn herself, and merely to enjoy being with those she loves. Not all of them - Han is lost to her for good, as are her parents, and those hurts will never really fade. But she has a purpose still, and she also has time simply to rest - and to feel a true, pure joy as Rey claims their family as her own.
Beyond them, hidden from Rey's sight, Obi-Wan watches across the sands. He's smiling as he stands as he ever has, guardian and defender and family of the Skywalkers.
The Force welcomes them all home, and there is peace.