Work Text:
Leia’s Laugh
Alderaan, 2 BBY
Bail Organa watched the evening shadows stretch across the rolling hills of the estate.
Behind him, a blaster fired.
A target exploded.
He glanced over his shoulder just in time to see the droid register the hit.
“Perfect.”
Leia lowered the blaster and frowned.
“I hesitated.”
“You hit it.”
“Late.”
Bail sighed.
The sun had dropped low enough that the far edge of the training field was beginning to disappear into shadow.
“Leia, sweetheart, it’s getting dark.”
She turned toward him immediately.
“And how many ambushes have you heard about that happened in broad daylight?”
Bail raised both hands.
“Point.”
Leia looked smug.
“But,” he added, “even the finest soldiers in the galaxy occasionally stop to eat.”
“That sounds suspiciously like something a hungry politician would say.”
“It happens to also be true.”
“One more round?”
She gave him the look.
Bail had faced Imperial committees, hostile senators, diplomatic crises, and men who believed intimidation counted as negotiation.
None of them had prepared him for his daughter’s eyes.
“One more round.”
Leia smiled and reset the target droid.
Bail stepped back.
The droid darted across the field.
Leia fired.
Once.
Twice.
The second shot caught it cleanly.
Better.
Much better.
He should have been pleased.
He was.
That was the trouble.
Leia had taken to every part of the training with the same fierce determination she brought to everything else.
Weapons.
Escape drills.
Surveillance detection.
Interrogation resistance.
Most parents in their circle insisted their children learn at least the basics. The galaxy was not becoming a safer place.
But with Leia, the lessons had never been merely precautionary.
Bail watched her adjust her stance and felt the familiar knot tighten beneath his ribs.
She was sixteen.
There were moments when he could almost forget everything else.
When she complained about formal dinners or teased Winter or left books scattered across three rooms because she was reading all of them at once.
Moments when she was simply his daughter.
Then she raised a blaster with practiced ease, and he remembered why he had made certain she knew how.
Why Breha had agreed.
Why there were things Leia had been taught years before most children would ever need to know them.
The Empire knew Anakin Skywalker had fathered a child.
Perhaps someday they would know more.
Perhaps someday someone would look too closely at the Organas.
Perhaps someday all the precautions in the galaxy would not be enough.
Bail had lived with that possibility for sixteen years.
Leia fired again.
The target flared.
He remembered another room.
White walls.
Muted voices.
A newborn child wrapped in blankets.
We’ll take the girl.
Such a simple sentence.
He had thought, then, that he understood the promise he was making.
Protect her.
Raise her.
Love her.
He had not understood that the last would make the first so much harder.
“Hellooo?”
Bail blinked.
Leia stood several meters away, both hands on her hips.
“Alderaan to Bail Organa.”
He smiled despite himself.
The blaster had already been holstered, and the target droid was trundling obediently toward storage.
“That was much better.”
Leia narrowed her eyes.
“You didn’t see it.”
“Of course I did.”
“You were staring into space.”
“I was thinking.”
“You were sleeping standing up.”
“I was not sleeping.”
“I thought only really old men could do that.”
Bail gave her an offended look.
“Really old?”
“Ancient.”
“I am beginning to regret teaching you to speak.”
Leia grinned.
He slipped an arm around her shoulders as they started toward the house.
She fit there less easily than she once had.
That startled him sometimes.
Not long ago, it seemed, he could carry her through these fields on his shoulders.
Now she was nearly grown.
“You were thinking about me,” Leia said.
Not a question.
Bail glanced down at her.
He had long ago stopped being surprised by that.
“What else is there?”
Leia laughed.
Clear and bright and completely unguarded.
Bail closed his eyes for half a second.
Just long enough to keep the sound.
Then he tightened his arm around his daughter and walked with her toward home.