Disclaimer: I am not George Lucas or in any way affiliated with him. I do not own any of this. Not making any money. Don't sue.
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I lie here, helpless.
It's an interesting feeling, one I haven't often felt. I decide I don't like it. Throughout my life, I made things happen. True, my meddling generally messed everything up, but at least I was doing something, and it all worked out great in the end, anyway. Mostly.
Except for Chewie and Anakin. It didn't all work out great for them. When they died, they left a gaping hole in my life that even now, over a decade since they died, still exists.
But after their deaths, I did something. I admit that it wasn't the best thing to do, but it was something.
This time, there's nothing I can do. Nothing anyone can do. Not even the staff of Orowood Medcenter. Not even Luke, or any of the Jedi. Not even Leia.
Leia's the one that insisted that I come here. I didn't think that anything was wrong. It was just a headache. I survived years as a smuggler, I fought in wars against the Empire, Vong, and whoever else decided they didn't like the New Republic, I raised three children. I don't have to go the medcenter for a headache, of all things.
I guess she must have gotten some warning or something from that Force thing, because about three hours after she made the suggestion, I had a seizure in the middle of the hallway. Not just one of those blank-out-for-half-a-minute things, either. No, I had a full seizure—lying on the floor shaking, drooling, my eyes rolled back in my head. I don't remember it. I just remember walking down the hall, and suddenly everyone—and I mean everyone—was crowding around me. Emergency medics, NR officers, random bystanders. I even caught a glimpse of one of the Noghri.
It was one of the most terrifying experiences I've had, and I'm not ashamed to say that. It wasn't as if any time elapsed for me. It was as though, in the blink of an eye, everything around me changed. I lost a chunk of my life, and that chunk ruined it.
The medics rushed me to their speeder in a stretcher. I hate stretchers. They make me feel weak and completely dependent, which, to be fair, I suppose I was at that moment. I was close to going into shock. My emotions were so jumbled and confused that I didn't really feel anything. I moved like a zombie.
When they reached the closest medcenter—I don't even remember which one it was—they rushed me in, took a blood test, and promptly scanned my brain.
After the scan, which took about thirty seconds, Leia and I simply sat talking as we waited for the results. We talked about her day at the Senate, about how Jaina and Jacen were doing, about the weather, about anything but what was going to happen now. She tried to convince me to eat, but if I had had anything more substantial that water, I'm certain that it would have come right back up.
Then the medic came back with the results and my world came crashing down around my ears.
I have a brain tumor, and there's no operation that can do anything about it. If they tried to remove it, I would die in the process. It's too close to the important parts of my brain, the technical names of which I don't happen to remember.
Leia ordered me moved to Orowood, partly because she helped set it up, and she completely trusts the medics there and partly because it was very Alderaanian-style, and she thought that would calm me. In reality, anything relating to Alderaan, except Leia, of course, makes me tense. But I'd never tell her that.
The medics tried to do all that they could, but they warned us at the beginning that it was most likely a futile effort. It was horrible. I would have preferred death in battle a thousand times over to this slow degradation. It began with the loss of basic functions. I can't speak clearly anymore. I have to have my nutrients injected, because I don't have enough co-ordination to swallow. I can't see a thing; I am reminded horribly of my captivity at Jabba's, only this is a hundred times worse. My hearing has blurred, but still remains. I wish it were gone. All I hear now is Leia sobbing. I try to comfort her, but I gave up when I accidentally hit her yesterday because I couldn't see her. She understands—this is one of the few times that I'm grateful she has the Force—but I still hate myself.
Now I have an almost full-body paralysis. Leia's been forced to make a decision for me, a horrible decision and I know it.
She has to decide whether to have the medics keep sustaining me, or to have me put to sleep.
She knows what I want. We've discussed this, and I told her that if it came to this, I wanted out. I despise this dependency I've been forced into.
She makes the right decision. I can hear her sobs, along with those of Jaina and Jacen, but I can't help but feel an overwhelming relief. I love them, but this is no life. We are all better off with me gone than like this.
Now, I am left alone with my thoughts. Unwillingly, my mind drifts back into my memories. Back past the Vong War, past when I met Leia, past my smuggling years, to when I was just an Imperial soldier. Back to when I met Chewie.
To this day, I can't say what drove me to free him. I had a perfect life—a successful soldier, despite my rebellious nature. I had friends, I was in a relationship with a perfect, law-abiding Imperial woman, and I was rising quickly in the ranks.
So why did I risk all of that to free a tortured Wookiee?
The best answer that I could give to that question would be that I couldn't leave him to the Imp's mercy. But why that specific Wookie? I'd seen other non-human's subject to worse.
Maybe it was like a vornskyr pulling at a leash. Eventually, it would break. Why that precise moment? No one knows. That's just when it broke.
Regardless of reason, I threw caution to the winds, took my blaster, put the stormtroopers guarding him out of their misery, grabbed the Wookie, and ran for it. (Come to think of it, that's not all that different from what happened with Leia years later. Only that time, Luke grabbed Leia.)
After that, my perfect life was officially messed up. For several years I survived as a smuggler. It was exciting and unpredictable; every day was an adventure.
Though I once would have protested this fact with every fiber in me, I've had far too much adventure in my life.
Despite the excitement of life as a smuggler, the years blur together now that I look back on them. Nothing much important happened in that time, except that I won the Millennium Falcon from Lando, and I gained a death warrant from Jabba the Hutt.
And then I met Luke—my future brother-in-law, though I obviously didn't know it at the time. I didn't think much of him on first impression. He was just a scrawny farm kid, totally and annoyingly naïve. When he made that boast about how he could have flown his own ship—well, I was irritated. Scrawny, annoying, naïve farm kid with an ego to match. I thought it was going to be the worst job of my life.
With what I know now, I guess he wasn't really boasting. He destroyed the Death Star his first time in a starfighter; he probably could have flown a ship to Alderaan. Provided he knew enough not to accidentally navigate through a supernova. Which is doubtful.
It wasn't such a bad trip, either. Luke's personality grew on me a bit by the time we reached Alderaan, or where Alderaan had been. It almost became that his naïveté wasn't annoying; it was refreshing. As a smuggler, almost everyone I dealt with was pessimistic. Luke's optimism, however misguided, made a nice change.
He's lost some of that optimism now. He's grown, I suppose, and seen far more than he deserves. It says a lot about his character that he could go through as much as he has and not sink into a deep depression—or the Dark Side, since he's a Jedi.
All of us have been through more than we deserve. Especially Leia. She shouldn't have had to go through anything, but she went through everything. Her home planet's destruction. Discovering that her worst enemy was her father. Being threatened time and time again. Battles with the Dark Side. Anakin's death. And through it all, she had to keep an emotionless face for the public and win her stupid political battles.
The first time I met her, I thought even less of her than I did of Luke. She was beautiful, yes, and worth a bundle of credits, but those were, I thought, her only good points. She was arrogant, bad-tempered, and, to top it all off, a politician. I hated politicians at the time. As a matter of fact, I still do.
But Leia's never been a politician at heart. She's not like Borsk Fey'yla. She hates politics, but is bound by her sense of duty. She survived in the Senate not by her ability to lie and bribe, but by her ability to keep a clear head in a crisis and her natural leadership abilities. And her reputation probably helped a bit.
I'm drawn from my thoughts by the beeps that this ridiculous contraption I'm hooked up to makes. That's my heartbeat. It's decelerating quickly. I don't have much time left.
I've always been afraid of death. When I was a smuggler, it was because I didn't understand it—for the same reason that I was afraid of the Force, and many other things. More recently, I was afraid because everyone in my family, except for Chewie, are Jedi. I was afraid that, since they have the Force, and I don't, that we'd be separated in some way. I couldn't bear that.
That still terrifies me. But now that I'm dying, it's not so bad. All of my fears seem unreasonable compared to this pain I'm going through.
And anyway, I can't stop it.
The heartbeat moniter keeps slowing down. Suddenly, I hear no beeping, and I know that it's over.
Then it all vanishes, and there is only light.
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