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The first memory she has is of her mother.
In the end it's not even a significant one. She has no doubt the famed General Organa would never have committed this moment to memory. If nothing else in the wake of her daughters betrayal would've banished it from her mind.
Yet it is this that she finds coming to her in her brief moments of temptation from the light.
A young girl - a young Princess Breha II - sitting in front of a mirror as her mother combs her hair back from her face.
There's a holiday. A day of mourning coming up. Sadness lingers at the corners of her mother’s eyes and in the back of her head, something Breha senses but never dares to speak of.
In spite of that feeling, she runs her fingers through her daughter's hair with a soft touch. Deft fingers turn dark waves into two braids, which twist around the sides of her head.
When she looks in the mirror she is hit by the sudden awareness that they match. That they are one in the same, cut from a cloth that shines both ways.
The memory fades after that. Maybe her mother speaks, imparts some of a galaxy weary general upon her only child? Maybe they speak of trivial matters of pilots or weather?
It doesn't matter. The touch of the light always becomes too strong. She pushes it away before it can take hold of her once more –
There are those who had underestimated her in the past. Who look at her circumstances and turn up their nose. Who insist that she must rid herself of her pride and let the will of the force flow through her?
She fails her meditations yet again - unable to find this foretold peace - convinced it does not belong to her.
It is then that she reminds herself who she is. That she is the daughter and granddaughter of queens. Ruling is in her blood. It burns through her veins reminding her of her birth right.
She finds in herself to be worth so much more than her current situation - banished from her family home, forced to meditate and practice he same motions over and over again.
The voices in the back of her head always agree, insist repeatedly that she deserves better, that she should take from those which have wrong her. When the voice in her head promises that long awaited throne, promises to crown her empress of a new empire, she lets it overwhelm her, lets the force create visions of her ruling, of a red blade striking down through the pouring rain.
Giving into the anger she had so long tried hide had been almost too easy.
Her palms never looked more beautiful when they were stained with blood –
Men often wonder if the rumors that the creature in the mask can really be a woman after all. They cannot believe that the hurricane around them could be a she. That the one who relishes in bleeding them dry could have once held a feminine touch.
They forget in their foolishness that women see more blood than men do.
They forget all that she has endured –
She will recount this feeling years later, as she washes fresh blood from her fingers, watching as the woman across from her does the same, their hands plunging into the wet basin in near synchronization.
Her mask. The disguise that she had carefully crafted lays abandoned on the floor. Baring her features for the first time to her General.
“Shall I call you Lady Ren from now on?”
Her General belays the words in a tone that is matter of fact. Business as usual. This is her consistent manner.
Her snort echoes across their small space.
“You could call me Queen if you like. As I should have been.”
This time it is her General’s turn to snort.
“You cannot be a queen when your planet is nothing but stardust.”
It does not strike her to wonder until later how her General knew this. Not until her hands are free from the blood of her enemies. Not until they have skirted across goose pimpled flesh, and brushed through soft auburn hair. Not until her fingers had slipped into a warm heat that belonged to them –
In the years to come they will tell stories.
Of the Knights of Ren.
Of Sith Lord.
Of the monsters that lurk under each child’s bed.
They will tell of her. Them, the two people who could have destroyed the universe had they not been consumed with the need to destroy each other.
They will get it all wrong, get lost in the details. Trying to pretend that this might have been something else. The foolish might even call it a love story.
But she never stood on the edge of the precipice of that which she knew and that which she was about to lose, shouting a love confession into the wind, only to hear that her love is returned.
She is not her mother. She never has been. She never will be.
That is how the stories ought to remember her. The anti-thesis of the woman who created her. A creature born from light yet found darkness in spite of that, allowed the feeling to consume her until nothing more remained but the need to take which was predestined before her.
She is never queen. Never empress as the voices in her head promised.
Instead she is held by hands that tried to be harsh night after night as worlds explode around them –
Some will say that Alderaan was lucky to have been blasted to ruin, so that the one who bears their last queen’s name could never have ascended to power. But they are foolish and are often forgotten –
It is not her that they remember in the end.
Not Princess Breha Organa II or even Lady Ren.
The legends will spin false tales, saying that the only child of the famed General Organa was killed in a massacre at the Jedi temple, that the creature that rose from the ashes of that battle could not be the child that was lost.
They will call him Lord Ren.