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Space travel had slowly irked Leia over the years. The human body was not equipped for it.
Another routine visit to Chandrilla. Chancellor Mothma had called another emergency session of the Senate in light of a new discovery on the Imperial Remnant. The fight always continued. It never ended, did it? She paced in her room, silently wishing Luke had joined her. Her twin, her star. Like binary sunsets that shone forever.
Exhausted, she decided to meditate. It had never done her many favours. She fidgeted and lost focus too quickly. Sitting still was never her strength. There was too much to do. Still, she tried. Peace, she called into the force. And yet her mind plagued her with a thousand different thoughts.
Giving up, she walked to the cockpit to obsess over how much time remained on her flight. Threepio had powered down for maintenance, while R2 sneakily altered his code. She was too tired to interfere.
As she passed the viewport that stared deep into the hyperspace, she caught a flicker that sent dread through her spine. A cold chill, and repressed rage swelled to the surface. She saw him.
She had seen him before. With Luke. And sometimes, sometimes, he would appear to her. Apologies and regrets and a thousand other pointless platitudes. Did he believe it would calm her? Did he believe it would absolve him?
Her anger was pronounced in every step and etched into every corner of her face. How dare he! She opened her mouth to scream, and found it shut when he spoke first.
“Did you know that I fell when I was twenty-three? I died on the Death Star at forty-six. I have eternity to contemplate on that split.” He turns towards her, and she finds the anger in her throat died almost immediately. She never truly looked at him. Not closely. Afraid of what she would find, of who she would see in his eyes, or his jaw, or his smile and nose. “I was a hero in the Clone War. Does a lifetime of good absolve evil? Or does a lifetime of evil wash away the good? I don’t know.”
What good was the hero if the monster prevailed? And he must hear her thoughts as he looks at her oddly and nods. “Why don’t you just leave. Become ‘one with the Force’ and leave me be!” She screams.
“It’s tempting. I grapple with that every moment. Release. Give it all to the Force. Be free of pain, and sorrow, and hurt, and regret.” It isn’t fair, she wants to scream. Why does he get to live on in peace, and countless others don’t? Does he know the name of the people of Alderaan? How long would it take him to recite each and every one?
“I know that you are angry. It’s justified. I won’t deny it. And I didn’t come here for forgiveness. I don’t deserve it. Not from you. Not from anyone.”
“I wish Luke would see it that away,” she grits, spitting her words at him like venom.
He smiles. “Luke is better than me. Better than all of us. Lukka, the fury, the freedom. Good, in all the ways I wasn’t.”
“Why are you here?”
“You asked for me.” He says simply.
“Please, I’d never.”
“But you did. In the Force. In the tempest.”
“Go away. I don’t need you. I’m not Luke, I’m not.. I’m not your wife. You’re nothing to me. I’m nothing to you.” He doesn’t respond. She can see the conflict on his face, until it fades away and into a resolute acceptance.
She turns and leaves, but stops right before the door. She turns back, expecting him gone. He isn’t. “Don’t just stand there, go!”
Still, he stands there and stares. From here, he looks like a man. Shorter than she expected. Nothing like Vader, and still so much like him. She can feel him studying her face. Every wrinkle, every blemish. She squirms beneath his gaze.
“You look like someone I once knew.” He says softly. She almost doesn’t hear him. But his eyes are full of sorrow, and that she cannot miss.
“Is that why you won’t leave?” She laughs sardonically, and it burns. “I hated that I never looked like my parents. It was a constant reminder that I had other parents, ones that were gone. That must be my curse, looking like her.” She had wanted Bail’s nose, and his smile. She wanted Breha’s eyes. Instead she was left with a stranger’s face. She spent hours analysing old photos and holograms. As much as he wanted to tell herself she looked like Padme Amidala, she couldn’t. And the truth of who she looked like burned her throat and angered her soul. And it was the truth she couldn’t escape. It found her in every mirror.
He looked shocked by her admission. She felt shocked by her admission. She never wanted him to know anything about her. He didn’t deserve her secrets. Not when he tried to rip them out of her.
“You don’t,” she looks at him strangely, “You don’t look like Padme. Not really. That’s all Luke. He has my eyes, but he’s all her. My Lukka, in all his light.” He smiles to himself, and she finds herself repulsed by the sight. Vader, happy. The idea of him, behind that mechanical mask, feeling joy was so foreign.
“I suppose I inherited after you. Another sin for you to atone for.”
“You don’t look like me either.” Now her confusion is almost comical. He laughs. It sounds nothing like Vader. It sounds human, like a man. And she hates it. “You look like my mother, Shmi.”
Shmi. And the word loops in her head. And the word reaches into the corners of her heart that she never knew existed. The missing piece she’d searched for her whole life. The oddities in her face and in her voice and in her laugh she could never place. Shmi.
He looks distant now, staring into a place far beyond her. Glistening droplets of light fall across his face. Tears, she realises. She thought that the sight of his sorrow would fill her with joy, with satisfaction. But it doesn’t. It hurts, she finds. A different kind of hurt. The type that feels like longing, like love with nowhere to go, so it burns and burns and becomes something darker.
“She was beautiful. And wise, and kind.” He grins as his tears continue to fall. “My mother. My mom.”
My grandmother. And the word feels so right in her mind. “Tell me about her.” And he stares at her and her question. And he smiles again, and Leia finds it hurts less to see it now.
He talks for hours. Every story and every kind word. Of her life, of the slavery and her freedom. Of Ar-Amu, and Ekkreth. Of the Jedi, and his promise. Of her death, and his rage. Leia was entranced. In every word was a different life. In every word was love. In every word was a person, one she would never know but would yearn for in sleepless nights.
He bows his head and clenches his fists by his sides. “I never saved her. And perhaps that is my greatest sin. The one I can never truly atone for. I didn’t save my mother. My mom.”
He turns away from her, walking to the viewport. His gaze lingers on the hyperspace, and the faint flicker of stars beyond it. “Instead, I made a mockery of the name she gave me. Ekkreth, the trickster who freed the slaves and led them into the stars. I left her.”
“You were a child.” She can’t believe she defended his actions. But he was a boy, and the better part of her knew it.
“It doesn’t matter. I promised. I promised , Leia.” She says her name so softly, with such care. In another life, she hears him say it again. Kinder, with love, and without the sadness behind it. “Instead, I left her. And when I came back it was too late. And when she died I became something else. A monster. I was a Skywalker. Skywalker. I was supposed to be Ekkreth. I was supposed to be good.”
Leia could feel the anger swell around him, and then she felt it quashed with shame. “And then I pretended she was never real. Like she had never sung to me. Never held me when I cried, never loved me when I raged.”
He stared at her for too long, searching for a face he loved long ago. “Because admitting she had been real was to admit that she would be ashamed. And I never wanted that shame. I never wanted to face her again. My mother, my mom.” He looks to the hyperspace again, and whispers. “My Shmi.”
They sit there in silence as Leia absorbs his words. She doesn’t know how to feel. She never wanted this, sympathy for a monster. And yet she felt it anyway. To forget Anakin was to forget Shmi. She didn’t think she could live with that.
“She would have loved you. In all your kindness, in your rage, and resilience.” He nods his head, and then holds it high. “She does love you. In the Force, always.”
And she held her hands tightly. And she fell into an old memory, and Luke’s soft words. “No one’s ever really gone,” she whispers. He looks at her differently. With a soft smile, and an old memory swirling in his eyes. He looked to the hyperspace one last time, and then to her, before vanishing.
Years later, when she falls pregnant again, she feels an old presence. He never appears, but she feels him all the same. Her rage had long mellowed into acceptance.
When the child is born, it is a girl. A beautiful daughter, with her eyes, and Han’s smile. There’s a little bit of Luke, and Padme, and even Anakin. And beyond them, there’s the little oddities again. The one she had found on herself time and time again.
She knows what the child’s name will be. She had heard it so long ago. She had known it even before she was born. It had lived in her heart forever. Her son would be a Solo, but her daughter. Her daughter would be Ekkreth. Child of the desert. Like her grandmother before her. Shmi.