Archive of Our Own ^beta

X

The thing about horrible bloody vengeance. 

It was complete in itself. It created a fragment out of the memory of something larger. 

The lights flickered. And it was her ship, and she was herself, scattered as she was by time, crouching in the wreckage of his body.

She categorized: his white-specked lungs, with the nodes big metal hooks like her mother’s, yes her mother had implants but they glowed. Had glowed. His were mean and sinuous. He gasped. Had gasped. And the corrugated spine, the missing links replaced like teeth with iron fillings, his insides sweated. He smelled more like oil than blood. 

His throat still bubbled. The slime of his insides were slowly making their way out of him. She could see his face too. It looked soft, like sticky dough, like if she touched it he would slough off in her palm. The mouth was not worth thinking about. How was his mouth the most obscene part of him? she wondered. It had told her things in its natural voice, which for her whole life had been sheltered in the sound of the respirator. 

The thing about flesh was that it was only that. The man she hated disappeared. She could no longer talk to him. Her white dress was sopped with blood that was no longer his. It was just blood. 

What she had gained was nothing but familiarity. She knew the gray fizzing of his kidney, the plastic lining that held his stomach, the color of his heart. She knew each port that sent chemicals searing through his veins, she knew his eyes. 

The noticing hurt her. 

Leia Organa stood slowly, again, looking to the bodies around her, which she had both scattered with power and killed with her hands, she again closed her eyes. 

Again. 

She opens her eyes to his bulk, she stares up impassively. She is nineteen, her parents are waiting for her to call them. Alderaan lives. Darth Vader stands before her and she knows exactly how to kill him, down to the minute, the second. After him will come Tarkin. This time she plans to hit him with her fists until he dies. Sometimes she eats the blaster after that. Alderaan always goes up in smoke. Nothing she could ever do to stop it. 

It took her a long time to realize. Then she promised she would kill them one time for every soul on Alderaan. She often checks herself for signs of slowing, but now her pace is something natural. She kills them before they can see her grief, like she was only doing it for their benefit. 

X

“I don’t understand, I don’t understand,” she whipped around frantically, like someone who was well and truly on her way to execution. Alderaan was a whole blue melon in the viewing glass of the Death Star. She was going crazy. It was a trick. This was the drugs. This was her sense of reality rebelling. 

“You’ll find it’s perfectly clear,” Tarkin said, his lips tugging up into a dignified smile. He was enjoying this. 

“This happened,” she said, gasping. “This happened already. Let me go!” This last rebuke she spat at Vader, who held her at the shoulder and wrist, lazy and powerful. She looked up at his mask, the performance of his eyes. He was uneasy. She could tell but didn’t know how. 

“You know,” she said. He said nothing. 

“Princess,” Tarkin said, and was much closer now. He grabbed her face and forced it back towards the view of her planet. “You must focus.”

She was a better spy than she was a citizen. Her whole life she never deserved to be a bureaucrat. No one should ever be given the privilege. She had chosen something over them, over a whole people, she realized. She would do it again. 

But now she knew the score, and something inside her was broken. It was a tear through which other things could get lose. 

Even then, her heart pounded. She was so scared it hurt in her teeth and the roof of her mouth. 

“Too late,” Tarkin said finally, to her wretched silence. The switch was pulled. She still couldn’t close her eyes to it. 

She realized that her pain was radiating out of her and into Tarkin. She realized this only after she had snapped his neck. Vader looked at her, startled. 

Then she started screaming. 

When she finished there was a hole in Vader’s head and the rest of the troopers lay scattered around her. She didn’t know what she was anymore. Again, she looked to the empty space where her planet once was. 

Again.

The world is whole. Her hands shake themselves of phantom blood. His body is upright and as shiny black as space itself. She wants to see her Papa and her Mama. And she can. She can. If only she does it right. 

X

The thing about unspeakable violence. 

She went mute. Language left her. The noises that occupied her life were the heaviness of her own breathing, the script that Tarkin followed, the delicate crunch of his skull. The plastoid of Vader’s suit cracking open so she could pull the meat out. 

She had no human comforts. She didn’t need them. She ate nothing, drank nothing. The time went back and back. She wondered if she was becoming like him. She wondered how many people he had killed, the grand total of it. If this would make her feel better. She counted how many times he had died. 

It scared them, she realized, how silent she was, how numb she was to her planet dying. That somehow, somewhere, she had become a predator, and that all she was doing was waiting. 

Tarkin’s eyes twitched. Vader rasped. The room got closer and closer until it ruptured in on itself. She was always the only one left. 

Again. 

His hand bursts out of the rubble that he is, holds her elbow. His mouth says, “Princess.” Something akin to begging. 

Tenderly, she shoots him dead. 

X

Every time she left the station she died. She attempted an escape pod and was shot. She spaced herself and floated. Her lungs didn’t pop, her breath was cold, and eventually she was stone. She stole a comm connection to her parents and heard them die.

Leia, Leia, we love you. 

When she returned to the beginning, she sat down and cried great gulping frustrated tears. Love was a piece of rope attached to no one, it was letting her fall and fall and fall. It was less than useless. 

He held out his hand again. He was nothing. He was something that would soon be dead. 

She took it and he roughly brought her to her feet. 

“Take a hold of yourself, Princess. You will need your strength,” he said, as if he really cared to warn her. As if it was a threat. He was unnerved. She smiled grimly through her tears. He was certainly right to be. 

Tarkin would be disappointed in her blubbering, she knew. He liked her at her most defiant. But he wouldn’t have to be disappointed for long. Maybe she’d steal the plasma instrument at Vader’s side again, the one that sucked all the light out of a room. 

They shuffled into the interrogation room. She sat, sniffing. Sometimes she killed him here. It made killing Tarkin harder, but there was a certain satisfaction of a small black box to bury him in. 

She’d dug her fingers into his trachea. She’d opened his veins, pierced his eyes from behind with fragments of his orbital, nasal, and lacrimal. They sat across from each other. Alderaan was still and placid somewhere in the near distance, she felt it like a headache at the top of her spine. 

She said nothing. 

He didn’t bring out the poisons. This was new. 

“You never say it,” Darth Vader said. “It’s the only thing that will make anything different, and you don’t say it.”

Her whole body went cold. Did he? Would he? Could his power, which was like her power, make time shrink into a relapse of itself? Or was she still in that first iteration, this cell, hallucinating. 

He shook his head, the vocoder crackled ruefully. She had gotten so used to its static he no longer sounded like a droid to her. 

“You’ve taken control, Princess. I don’t know if you’ve realized.”

She gaped at him. There was a flinch, there, in his voice. 

“You’ve put me here,” she said, finally, her voice gravely with disuse. And then again, “You.”

He shifted slightly. “I only entered that which you created. I thought maybe you would change your answer.”

Hot rage. The thing about anger was that it made more of itself. 

She wondered if he had let her kill him all those times. She crossed the room quickly, took his mask in her hands, and pulled it off. 

His eyes were the same water they always were. They only stared at her. There was no fear. She grasped him by the sides of his head and snapped his neck. He let her. 

Shame billowed up inside of her. Poison again. 

Again. 

She breathes solidly through her nose. She’s eye level with his control panel. Once she crushed it with her fist and he took hours to die. She had watched. 

“I will never change my answer,” she says, still fumbling over the unfamiliarity of words in her mouth. 

He picks back up where they left off. “Not even to see what would happen? Just once?”

She almost laughs. 

“You have forgotten, Darth,” she says, “I am still working through the two billion souls. You might still your tongue before I start thinking of the animals and the birds as well.”

He nods. He nods as if he understands. 

She cannot escape her anger. It grips her, and she lunges toward him with her teeth bared. 

X

The thing about violence undone. 

What she perpetrated against their two bodies was somehow private, it was devoid of context, it was silent and ritual. She was getting better at it. 

“You can leave, you must leave,” Vader said garbled as she reached into him and squelched the soft things in there with invisible fingers. 

“You remind me of someone,” he said. He meant himself, she thought. 

“Is that supposed to hurt me?”

“I can help you. You are strong in the force. You could be an apprentice. A bargain.”

“You only want me to stop,” she said. 

He laughed, it wheezed through his vocoder. Then he died, a smile in his voice.

Again.

How can a person feel only one thing? How can there be space for all of it? She tries to make space for it. She stumbles. She tries sadness. And grief. 

There’s no place for it here. Here the sleek metal of the interrogation room has a slant to it, which leads to a metal grate. She knows how well the place drains its blood. 

The great cruelty is that she doesn’t want to leave. If she leaves, the children of Alderaan are gone forever. Blotted out of existence. She doesn’t know truly, if they will have ever existed at all. 

X

“My mother only ever killed one man,” he said. They were sitting on the floor. He had not much longer to live. For once it hadn’t been Leia. He took his own mask off after she stopped Tarkin’s heart, just a gentle squeeze, as if telling the muscle it was all right. It had done an honorable job. 

She looked up into his face, his doughy horrible face. He sank to the floor slowly, and she joined him. 

“Who?” she said. She had never heard anything about Vader’s family. There were rumors that he was a clone of the Emperor himself, kept weak for Palpatine’s enjoyment. 

“He was another slave,” Vader said, “He tried to force himself on the sister lying next to her in the quarters. She hit him with a rock. And he died.”

He sighed the breath out of his deflating lungs. “She never told me the whole story, I had to get it from other people, who heard it from other people. She wouldn't regret it, but she couldn’t stand having done it. She told me she had grown up with him, she only knew after the sister rolled him off her.”

Leia stared at him. “Your mother was a slave?”

He didn’t respond. He was dead. His dead skin was again unchanged from the skin of his living face. 

Again. 

They look at each other. Her —  up at his black and gray tower. Him, a speculative tilt. 

“I want Alderaan safe,” she says. A lie. She wants it to have never been killed. She wants him to feel it. She wants to be the glacier moving pain over him for millennia until he understands. But killing him is only worth the feeling. She’s nineteen. She’s a politician. He is a well of information and he just started feeling chatty. He said she could leave. 

“The location of the rebel base,” he replies, a palm outstretched. Like it was something she could physically hand to him. 

“No,” she says. “Something else. You said I have the powers you do. I’ll come with you when we leave. Be—” what had he called it?—  “your apprentice.”

He considers. 

“I could crack your head open for insolence.”

“You’re welcome to try.”

X

He had killed her, once. She flung herself at him near the beginning and he crushed her between his heavy hands. It hurt quite a bit. It was miles better than killing him. It was miles better than his interrogation in the small black room of her memory. 

All of her body released itself from her. 

More often than not they stood together talking. 

His wife had been a senator. This is what baffled her more than anything, more than his mother, more than his apparent participation in the Clone War. A general. Her father might have known him. But the fact of his politician wife was what made him human. Someone had loved him other than his mother. She may have been just as wrong, just as senseless as him, but she had loved him. 

He had turned pensive after her offer. “There’s a rule,” he said. “If my Master wishes to replace me with another I would have to die. And if I were to take an apprentice I would need to kill him.”

Leia balks at this. She hadn’t asked him for treason. It was better than expected.

“Who made those rules?” she asked. 

“Sith. Many years ago.”

She had no idea what Sith meant. She had never heard of it, and she had read most of the Alderaanian National Library, and half of the Senate archives —  redacted as they may have been. But maybe his ideology didn’t need to make sense to him, it just needed to be expedient. 

It was now his job to plan this killing. It seemed like he had most of it already sketched out in his mind. 

“You’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” she said.

“Yes. But no one was good enough.” She does not take this as the compliment it is so clearly trying to be.

“You’re loyal to Palpatine.” It wasn’t a contradiction. He was. 

She wanted some kind of disavowal, some page they could stick their parallel causes to. 

“He will understand,” was all Vader said. Leia had a feeling that he wouldn’t. 

She imagined the Emperor in his private quarters in his senatorial palace, nodding tolerantly as Vader put the plasma saber through his stomach, patting his giant caped shoulder. 

She was to find the best way to dismantle the Death Star in the air. Again. All she has is time, and all she needs is more. 

Again. 

It goes wrong. The failure is not hers, but the system surrounding her, the anger, the minutes ticking by. He helps but not enough.

Again. 

She believes that she will never make it out with her people intact. She believes it almost to the point of surrender. Almost. 

X

When she emerges bright faced on the other side of victory, he is there with her. She shot Tarkin cleanly through the head. It was easy, even knowing it was permanent. He fell with a muted thump of fabric and muffled bone. 

Here, if she wants to kill Vader and his tubes and his brutal, broken flesh, she’ll have to mean it. They stand near each other, but not next. They had to touch in order to exit the time she trapped them in together. Now her palm itches with the memory of his false skin, which she had touched only in violence, and which was always warmer than she expected. 

Alderaan is whole. The Death Star is neutralized. Set to blow. For a wild minute Leia thinks—  and me with it , before remembering she wishes to live. She wishes to see her parents, who are alive. She bargained her way out. It’s more than she deserves. 

She’s looking at him when she realizes she isn’t angry. Or her anger makes less sense now. He’s holding himself very still, perhaps waiting for a fight. And she can see it— bringing his saber to her hand, the fight for it squeezing the air into smoke, the time left before the station exploded, her hands that knew the red insides of him so well. And he who let her. 

He who, she knew, killed thousands of people every senatorial quarter. The casualty numbers stacked neatly in the public records of government expenditures. His salary slotted under the weapons budget. 

Leia never really did the things she should do. She extends her hand.