Chapter Text
Nobody would ever say General Leia Organa was weak.
When Luke and Rey went after Snoke, they left behind a woman with one purpose: to bring her son home.
The landing bay was massive and though almost all of the ships were gone, it wasn’t abandoned. Not quite. She could feel him nearby, and she quickly checked her blaster and the saber holstered at her side.
Weapons were rather a secondary thing, in her mind. She was rather out of practice with a lightsaber. It wasn’t politically appropriate to carry to negotiations, and it was impractical to carry in a firefight. Still, the blade in her hand had an uncomfortable familiarity from years before, and perhaps a modicum of genetic memory. The Force was more reliable, never far away and never disused enough for her to fall out of practice. It had been decades since she’d first felt the shift in the Force that a force-choke required. She’d felt it in Vader’s presence, the subtle shift of flesh crushing itself, and once she understood the Force more thoroughly it just clicked. Use of the force to levitate and move things came more naturally, but she’d hardly ever used it in combat.
The sight of him was surreal. He was like a shadow, stalking angrily across the bay, closing the distance between them. He was taller than she’d thought he would be, with broad shoulders and an aggressive walk she couldn’t place.
She knew her emotions sent ripples through the Force, and he paused. Stopped. He turned around and she knew, she just knew, that this was the end.
Even across the bay, he could feel the weight of her emotions. He honed in on them, pinpointing the turmoil and heading in her direction.
She could feel him. There was no need for her to hunt. He was coming to her.
There was a strange sense of destiny about it, simply waiting for him to come back to her. She’d searched for him over the years, but he’d blocked her every time she drew near. She’d eventually given up hunting for him through the Force, and placed her faith in Han to bring him home.
The surge of loss she felt was still raw, even moreso with their son’s approach. She could see him striding across the bay, and from a distance he held a disconcerting likeness to his grandfather. As he drew closer, she took deep breaths, gathering her strength and trying to prepare herself for the confrontation to come.
She looked smaller than the last time he’d seen her. Older, too, but not diminished. He looked at her through the darkened glass and felt the whisper in the Force. Take off the helm.
He’d taken it off the last time he’d seen his father. There was a certain symmetry to it.
She stood her ground, bracing herself as he unfastened the helm and pulled it away, tucking it under his left arm. As much as she thought she’d prepared herself, there was no real way of preparing to see your only child. He’d been little more than a child the last time she’d seen his face, and suddenly the world was falling down around her.
His face was so much older, thinner. She’d seen him in her dreams, tried to pull him back to the light, but since he’d fallen he’d stood in shadow, running away from her as she pursued him through mottled darkness and light. The few times she caught him, reached for his hand, he whispered away like a ghost in the force.
He’d grown into a man, the lines of his face echoing a bit of Han, a bit of her, but mostly an older version of the boy she’d raised. His eyes were the same, dark, serious, and fierce. The gash…she didn’t want to think about the pain it must have caused. From the look of it, he’d refused treatment for it…or perhaps he’d been denied treatment. She pushed the thought away. It was hard to look at him and not see the child she’d loved for decades. She stifled the prickles that seemed to well up, pushing the sorrow down. If she started crying, she wouldn’t stop.
The look on his face flickered once as her expression changed. She could feel the shift in the Force, the way he was unable to keep the splinter of hope from exposing him.
“Is this how you looked at your father?” The words shook, but she threw them into the air between them like a challenge. She hesitated. Hope? Hope for what?
“No.” Silence stretched. “I’d hoped he’d see me for what I am now, and not for what he thought I was. It didn’t work.”
And he was hoping she would see him as the monster Han had denied. Kylo Ren. Not likely. She let out the breath she’d been holding and steeled herself again. “I felt him die, you know.”
“I knew you could.” To her surprise, she could feel remorse.
“And I felt you, as much as you tried to repress it. Your pain is loud.”
His hand hovered by his lightsaber, uncertain. “Then there’s no use in me denying it. But I didn’t want to do it, if that assuages a guilty conscience. You never should have sent him after me.”
The silence stretched on, like empty space. The air between them was full of things unsaid, fourteen years of things unsaid. She finally broke the silence. “I’m not going to ask you why. I know why. But if I call you Ben, what…”
“I’m not him anymore.” His words were harsh, but not quite angry. Hopeless.
“You're a liar. You’re not the son I remember, but you can’t change who you are. Who you were has changed. You’re still Ben Solo, but now you're a murderer many times over and there's no escaping what you've done.” She sighed. “It’s almost just as well you changed your name, your uncle thought you were undeserving of it.”
His eyes widened with shock, and for a moment she could see the child he’d been, the surprised expression he wore when he was unable to avoid a verbal thrashing for something he’d done. His mouth ticked up, the barest hint of a smile. “I should have known you would have seen straight through me.”
“Always could. In retrospect, that’s why I never should have let you out of my sight.”
He shrugged, relaxing his stance and putting his hands on his hips. The lightsaber hung at his side, untouched. “I grew up. You couldn’t have controlled me.”
“I didn’t need to control you, control is obviously a shit method of teaching you.” His eyebrows rose and she shook her head. “Oh please. You’re not a child anymore and I’m not here to debate with you. I’m here to figure out where I went wrong.”
“Would you like a nice cup of caff and a chat?” his dry sarcasm had a bit of a snarl around the edges. “I’m sure we have all the time in the world.”
“Think about it. You know why I’m really here. If you want to fight, we can, but I’d rather talk.”
He hesitated, then closed his eyes and felt about in the empty space of the Force for a clue. Leia knew what to expect and had felt it in the back of her mind, but he found it more quickly than she thought he would. The conflict on the other side of the planet sparked and popped like distant emergency flares. His eyes opened and his eyebrows rose, an expression she recognized as one of her own. It stung. “Hm. A distraction. Clever.”
“Your choice. We can keep fighting, or we can talk and you can put your own damnation off awhile. Besides, you know that Snoke’s methods are, at their core, the same as your uncle’s.”
Ben, because she could see straight through the front that was Kylo Ren and it was definitely Ben by now, snorted. “Everyone wants control.”
“Which is why I said I could have helped guide you, but I couldn’t have controlled you. Your uncle was always a bit too…idealistic. Believe me, I remember his training methods.”
“If you’re here to lecture me about what I deserved, it won’t change anything.”
Her casual demeanor vanished. “If we’re talking about what you deserve, you should be dead. You’d be dead for the children you killed, those that looked up to you, the people you’ve killed with the First Order and the deaths you’ve caused through your command,” Leia snapped like a spring wound too tight. “You don’t deserve anything but death, and if you were lucky it’d be quick.”
Her words sent him reeling. All the times she’d reached out to him through the Force, he’d felt mercy and love. This, though, this was pure, unadulterated anger like he’d never felt from her. From anyone.
A choked laugh left him, whooshing out of his lungs like he’d been slugged. “Really? I never expected this from you, of all people. Not quite as good as you always pretended to be, are you?”
“Good? You think I’ve had an easy time? You’ve never known life and loss the way I have.”
“I’ve got a decent idea,” he said, kicking the floor.
The punch of her anger that flared through the Force was like nothing he’d ever felt, something deep and raw and old. It knocked him back, and as he caught himself, the helm dropped to the floor with a ringing thump. “You think you’re the only one that’s ever been tempted to the dark side? Like your uncle wasn’t? Like I haven’t been? You’ve lived a pretty easy life, what could your rage possibly be based in?”
“You and dad left me!” In the blink of an eye, he lunged forward, his hand reaching for his saber on instinct. To his surprise, she reacted just as fast, force-locking him, his fingers only inches from his saber. He strained against his bonds, his voice cracking as it rose to edge on a scream. “I lost the people I cared about!”
“And you think your pain is somehow greater than everyone else’s?!” Her voice rose to a new level, matching the strain and snap of the Force in her as it caught him by surprise, shoving him back into the wall. She took a deep breath, attempting to calm herself. “We were all still alive. We were waiting for you to come home. You left us, you destroyed everything your uncle worked for. You hardly know loss.”
“You were the ones that left me.” His voice cracked with emotion, years of anger and resentment spilling out.
“You were a child. We left you to protect you, to let Luke train you until you were strong enough to keep yourself safe.” Her voice was solid, without room for question.
The shriek of anger running in his blood quieted as he stared his mother down. She was smaller than he remembered, or perhaps he was taller. Despite her size, her grip on the Force kept him pinned, unable to move.
“Listen to me. I never wanted you to understand the kind of suffering that leads to the dark side because I never wanted you to walk that path. I never wanted you to have a reason, so I sent you away from me to keep you safe. And in doing so, I put you on the path you took, the one that led to this mess.”
“I can feel the words you didn’t use. A fall. You don’t want to say I ‘fell’ from the light,” he said bitterly.
“You fell alright, but not at the beginning. You had a chance, and I should have dragged you back to the light when you were young.” Her lips pursed and she closed her eyes for a moment. “You’ve been trapped between the light and the dark for years, and I’ve felt it, but you’ve blocked me each time I’ve tried to show you. Perhaps I should have shown you when you were little, maybe that would have changed everything.”
She lifted her hand to him and fear like he hadn’t felt in years stabbed through him. Someone looking on them would have found it almost comical. He was tall, looming over most people in the Order, and between his helm and dark robes, he cut a striking image. Even without the helm, the scar that bisected his face was enough to frighten people. She, on the other hand, was tiny, just over five feet tall, with an almost unassuming presence. Yet looking into her eyes, he saw a determination he’d never seen before, and his stomach twisted in fear.
As tiny as she was, she was the one he’d been afraid of. His father had always been a legend, someone to be reckoned with, but more of a story than anything else. General Leia Organa, though, was terrifyingly real. Everything she’d ever done, it was real. She’d helped bring a very temporary peace to the galaxy, a feat in and of itself. She’d fought, escaped, directed, and led in the name of diplomacy in the galaxy, and suddenly the reality of his mother came crashing down on him.
All of those meetings she’d taken him to when he was tiny, a mere memory in the back of his mind’s eye now, were a variety of diplomatic meetings and negotiations. The times he’d been sent out with his father and Chewie, when she’d been on ‘diplomatic’ missions, none of them had been what he’d thought.
The woman in front of him was terrifying.
And she was his mother.
“I’m sorry, but you need to understand.”
There was pain. So much pain. Torture of the likes he’d felt before, but when he opened his eyes it wasn’t Snoke inflicting it, but Darth Vader. His grandfather, the man he’d looked up to for decades, was to blame. The helm, in perfect condition, was impossible to read. Pain screamed through him, and he tried to scream at the man in front of him, but he couldn’t push words into the sound.
He watched as a planet was destroyed, the horror and pain of loss ripping through his chest like tectonic plates jolting along each other. He knew people there, he knew so many people there. It was…his home planet, it had to be. Everything he knew and loved, destroyed in the blink of an eye. His family, dead, murdered. The loss was crushing, and he felt that the weight on his chest was pressing through his ribs, shattering the world and spearing him on the splinters.
The loss of the planet was still fresh, the pain still raw like a missing limb, when the next scene became clear. Han. He could see him, young and afraid, and he could feel the fear in him, the pain from the torture. His father was lowered into a terrifying mechanism and raised back out encased in a block of carbonite, barely alive. He knew his father would survive, he’d heard the story time and time again as a child, but the loss and despair he felt nearly overwhelmed him.
Then there was more pain and something he recognized the bitter sting of: humiliation. He could see the faces of the people laughing at him, staring at him. He could see the giant Hutt that oogled him and occasionally groped him, and mortification gripped him.
Through it all, Vader’s shadow loomed over everything, no longer a figure to be admired, but a nightmare encased in an unreadable helm.
And then, when it seemed like it was all over, after he felt Vader’s life gutter out and somehow, there was the possibility of real life again and peace, then he found out that his father, his real father, was the monster that had caused so much of his pain and so much pain around the galaxy.
Guilt washed over him then, swamping him, drowning him. He gasped for air at the revelation and tried to scream, but his lungs failed him. The guilt seemed to go on and on, never lessening and never abating, although eventually it fell to the back of his mind as fresh pain gripped him.
This pain, he recognized. Betrayal, guilt, loss. So much loss, it felt like something had pried his chest open and ripped out his organs. It was only when he saw his own face on a holoscreen, young, barely fifteen, that he realized what he was feeling.
He was feeling it all through her. Her pain was his pain, her memories were his memories.
He recognized the boy’s fears and tried to reach out to him, but there was nothing he could do. He watched the scene play out on the holoscreen, as fresh as the day he’d done it. The deaths hit him fresh, this time through the eyes of a parent. Leia felt the loss of each padawan learner acutely, tiny sparks of light in the Force snuffed out one by one.
The despair that struck him down was crippling, but he somehow found his feet and stared himself in the face. He stared down each of his actions through her eyes, from the rumors of raids to the hell he’d put the fighter pilot through, Leia felt it all as though she were there.
When Starkiller base was finally activated, it brought all the pain of Alderaan’s loss back, and fresh despair. The government she’d worked to build, to restore some semblance of a Republic to the galaxy, was annihilated in minutes. Decades of work, billions of lives, gone.
And then, sheer blinding loss. Pain. Screams echoing through the Force, screams he recognized from the inside of his own head. She had been right, his pain was loud.
And hers was quiet.
The pain of the last loss was blinding.
She released him from the force-lock and he crumpled with her pain, dry-heaving. It was a mercy he hadn’t eaten in days, the anxiety of this encounter looming over him. Tears streamed down his face, unbidden and unwanted.
Reality. Reality was the bay floor under his knees, the desire for it all to end. He retched again and spat bile.
“How did you bear it?” He looked up at her, disbelieving. The pain and loss that had tempted him to the dark side felt miniscule in comparison. “How did you resist the dark side?”
She was quiet for a minute and he knew the answer before she spoke. “I didn’t. Not entirely.”
Impossible. He looked up at her, for the first time seeing General Leia Organa, a Skywalker and a Solo by marriage, as a flawed but complete person.
“How?” he repeated.
“That was part of why your uncle and I clashed so much. I believe in democracy and peace. And sometimes my anger got the better of me, and the dark side crept in. But I have never, and will never, bend to the Sith.” She looked down on him and held out a hand. “So this is your last chance. There’s no redeeming you from what you’ve done, there’s no coming back from that. But there’s darkness in all of us, the same as the light, and you can still stop this. The Sith, the Knights of Ren, even the Jedi, they’re flawed, you know it as well as I do. But the Force is beyond all of those things, and you can still turn back to the light.”
The weak laugh that bubbled its way out of him was a measure of emotion that he didn’t want to express. Still, at that point he would laugh or he would cry, and there were few other options. “Snoke is too strong.”
“You don’t have to serve the Order. Let me help you.”
“I’m beyond help.” He tried to find his feet, but the world seemed to shake around him.
Her face crumpled for a moment, and he felt her pain, fresh and raw. “Let me try.”
"There's nothing to go back to, even if I went turncoat on them." He felt like he was choking on his own lungs. “You'd have to put me on trial. We both know there’s only one way to end this.”
“Don’t talk like that,” she snapped. She’d tried to prepare herself for every possibility, but this had been so unlikely she’d barely considered it. "You could go into hiding."
"They would know. You're a good liar, but you, of all people, can't hide a traitor from them." The bitter laugh that left him was awful. “You came here to kill me if you had to, and now you won’t?”
“It’s a lot harder knowing I’ve made you see sense. You’re still my son.”
“If you don’t do it, I’ll walk out of here and put a blaster in my mouth.”
She stepped back, horrified.
He took a deep breath, feeling a surreal sense of fate wash over him. He wasn't quite sure how it had come to this, but now that he thought about it, it seemed that their paths had led them to this point with ease. “I want you to do it.”
Something about it all struck him like a memory of the day he’d left to go train with Luke. It was a goodbye, of a sort. He vaguely wondered if he was even strong enough to come back as a Force ghost. He’d never mastered the techniques Luke had tried to teach him, but maybe the other things he’d learned would count for something? Only the masters ever came back as ghosts. Fear clawed at his chest again and she flinched away from him, feeling it. “I’ll try to…to talk to you.”
She snorted, trying desperately to insert some humor into the situation. “Make peace with yourself before you do, I don’t want to hear it until you figure out how much of a...” the words trailed off as it became blindingly obvious what they were talking about.
“I’m afraid.”
She looked up at him. “Me too.”
He could feel her, heart fluttering with pain and loss and the anticipation of loss, a light in the Force burning and jumping like a candle. They stood there, both of them locked in fear and pain.
Eventually, the shake of her head was tiny, almost imperceptible. “I don’t think…I can’t…”
“You’re not weak like that. I’m not that stupid. I’ll put the mask back on, if that…if it helps.” The weight of her pain was like a boulder dropped on the level sheet that seemed to make up the Force.
“No.” She gritted her teeth at the word. Weak. She’d known what she faced coming here. “I’m not taking that thing back.”
“Then do it.” He drew his saber, ready to threaten her if he had to. “I’ll fight you if I ha…”
His eyes went wide as he felt the pressure close on his throat, surprise catching him as he was yanked from his feet. He dropped his saber and a choked gasp left his mouth. She stared him down, her eyes not leaving his as they filled with tears.
Somehow, he’d thought her the same as his father, ultimately too weak to do anything to help him. He’d thought himself beyond their influence. Even her offer of help had seemed like a promise she was doomed to break, but as his throat closed, his hands scrabbled for purchase for a moment before realizing she’d meant every word.
Memories flashed like lightning. His childhood, time aboard the Falcon, the years spent training under Luke, his teenage years trying to find his place in the Order, trying to find balance within himself to become the man his grandfather had been. He could feel the memories as vibrantly as if they’d been made only hours before, and judging by his mother’s face, she could as well. The bond she’d made by sharing her memories wasn’t a one-way street, and his fear echoed through it.
He could feel his chest starting to burn. Words and feelings echoed through the bond, directed at him. Please understand. I love you.
I know.
He felt the way she reeled at his words, and he lashed out at her, suddenly terrified that she’d lose her nerve at the last moment. The force on his throat increased and his vision spotted.
As the burning in his lungs flared up into a fire, her control very nearly wavered. He locked down on the fear and pain and tried to hide them, to push them down somehow. It was hardly a moment before he could feel her pressing on his emotions, trying to soothe him, reassure him, to somehow take away the pain.
And she did. The pain abated, and he could feel her taking it into herself. What replaced it was a calmness he’d never felt before, what he imagined Uncle Luke had spoken about when he spoke of oneness with the Force.
It was nothing but tranquility and love and peace flooding his senses until the world whited out.
She held him there until she felt the light of his life gutter out, flickering desperately a couple times before going dark.
His body hit the floor, nothing so dramatic as a ton of bricks. It hit the floor like a hundred and eighty pounds of lean, scarred flesh and bone, so much more than the six pounds the doctor had placed in her arms when he’d been born and yet somehow so much less. At birth he’d been six pounds of potential, a well of life and energy. What was left was nothing more than an empty husk.
As it hit her that she’d done what her father had been above doing, her legs gave out under her. Tears didn’t come, couldn’t come. There was nothing left but the hollowness of loss she’d felt time and time again and the echoes of pain he’d left her.
Half a planet away, Luke dropped to one knee with the sense of loss that blazed across the Force. Snoke, bleeding out slowly, was getting desperate, launching attack after attack at the both of them. Force lightning, every conceivable mental attack he could muster, he flung at them. Rey felt the wave of loss and stumbled, but recovered fast enough to catch the chunk of the cavern Snoke tried to bring down on her master's head. They grappled, fighting for the fate of the galaxy.
It ended with a pile of bloody robes and two force users, broken and battered.
When Luke and Rey went after Snoke, they left behind a woman with one purpose: to bring her son home.
She brought him home in a body bag.