This was a very sudden idea I came up with last night, and decided I had to write it down before The Last Jedi came along and rendered it null and void. It's based around the whole "Rey Solo" theory, once again demonstrating my ability to not pick a freaking side when it come to the debate about Rey's parentage. (My favourite theory on the matter is actually that Rey's parents are nobodies, but that's irrelevant to the story. And that theory's not as fun to write fanfic about anyway).
It was basically written as an excuse to explore Leia's attitudes towards the legacy in both the Skywalker and Organa (and Solo, a little bit) names.
Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars.
There were three names Leia had the option of bearing: Solo, Organa, and Skywalker. They all had a heavy legacy to them.
But only one was a legacy she was willing to bear.
Solo meant loneliness, meant being the last one left, meant Han Solo striking out on his own as a smuggler, hopeless enough, desperate enough to take work even with bosses as cruel and capricious as Jabba the Hutt. It meant being left alone with only a name and the knowledge that nothing else would be there for you forever.
Leia couldn't relate to that. She'd always had hope.
Organa meant royalty, meant dreams long turned to dust, meant a blue and green nation called the most beautiful planet of all, beautiful enough that its leaders started the Alliance to Restore the Republic in the hope of letting other places experience that beauty. It meant a father and a mother and a people she'd sworn to protect. It meant stardust and debris glittering among the sands of time.
Skywalker was barely even an option. Its legacy was too heavy to bear, the darkness heavy and cloying; Leia had no confirmation she wouldn't succumb to that darkness herself in the future, no matter how saintly she might appear. Skywalker was her brother's name - not hers.
And so she was Leia Organa, even as she married Han Solo, even as she was the sister of Luke Skywalker; all she ever accepted from her bloodline was the fortitude and memory of her birth mother, the solidarity and companionship of her twin brother.
Otherwise, she was Leia Organa: the Last Princess of Alderaan. A walking relic.
When Ben was born, she heard him crying and cried too.
The doctor asked her what his name was. "Ben" came easily enough; she and Han had discussed it, discussed first names and middle names and second middle names and sometimes even third middle names, when they were especially indecisive or in need of a distraction. But they'd never discussed last names.
So in the heat of the moment, Leia looked over at Han, a question in the arch of her brow. He nodded, deferring the choice to her.
She looked down at the little bundle of flesh and bones and blankets in her arms. Her son. Ben was her son.
She started crying again.
Leia was a princess, and Ben. . . Ben should've been a prince. Should've run round the royal palace in Aldera City, chattering away to his grandfather, his grandmother, the gardener, the groundskeeper, the chef and the maid and everyone within the walls of his home. Of his planet.
But his planet wasn't there anymore.
Her planet wasn't there anymore.
So he wasn't a prince. He was just Ben.
Organa was a name for royalty. It was the name of the noble and the good and the residents of those who lived in the most beautiful land of them all. It was a fairy tale.
Leia had stopped believing in fairy tales the day she watched the planet that taught them to her explode before her eyes.
She did not want to be reminded of what should have been every time she shouted her son's name.
"Solo," she gasped out. "Ben Solo."
Naturally, Ben's name soon became an omen of what would come to pass.
He was an outsider at school, in large due to his famous parentage. He was not hopeless, he was not desperate, but he was alone.
And Leia knew that loneliness - knew the feeling that came from having no peers, no one your age to interact with. And she knew from her own childhood that no amount of adult intervention could change it.
Ben's loneliness scared her more than she liked to admit, as did that dark cloud that always seemed to be watching her son. And she wondered whether naming him Solo had been the right choice.
She wasn't superstitious, but she believed in the Force - how could she not, after everything? - and she wondered if it was at play here.
When her second child was born - a baby girl, this time - some ten years after Ben, she didn't want the same thing to happen to her.
She wanted her daughter to be named Solo as well; she didn't want there to be an invisible divide between her family. But she couldn't be the only one to carry the Organa legacy anymore.
So she named her daughter Rey. King.
Queen.
Princess.
They were all nicknames whispered over the cradle, to her daughter's head pillowed on her chest, to a laughing toddler barely learning to walk. She tied Rey's hair into buns like those she'd occasionally seen the noblewoman wear at home, and eventually taught her to do it herself, until she could almost maintain such a hairstyle even if she was in the middle of nowhere, living day by day.
Naturally, no doubt due to the Force's fondness for irony, it became necessary.
Years after Leia's heart broke over her daughter's inexplicable kidnapping, it broke again over Ben's betrayal.
Over Luke's flight.
Over Han's abandonment.
And though Organa might be a burden and Skywalker might be a curse, though she loved Han - oh Force, she loved Han so much - Solo might be a blend of the two.
When Leia saw her daughter again one day, years later, on the Resistance Base, her heart stopped in her chest.
Desert robes, tanned skin, sand in her very joints - Rey looks like Luke's daughter more than she seems to be mine.
Another, more unwelcome thought: she looks like Anakin Skywalker's granddaughter.
She staggered out of the Falcon with her face compressed in a rictus of grief, her eyes tracking the injured defected stormtrooper, clinging onto the landing strut like the world had been ripped from beneath her feet. Leia had felt Han's death, knew what her daughter must be feeling. Nevertheless, for a moment she felt nothing but unfettered joy.
Han had said he'd found their daughter, and she hadn't doubted him, but- but-
Rey. She wasn't sure if she said it aloud or not.
It was Rey.
Rey's eyes found hers. And though Leia's (admittedly near-non-existent) Force affinity detected no surge of realisation, of relief, something in her face cracked at that contact. And then they were hugging, gripping each other like drowning sailors grip onto driftwood, and Leia was standing on steady ground for the first time in far too long.
She told Rey the story later that day, in bits and pieces, of the princess of a lost planet and a daughter she called King.
Rey listened.
There were no Solos left, was what they both understood. Kylo Ren. Leia Organa. Rey. The Solo legacy had returned to whence it came - ashes and dust and desperation.
But they could still bear it well.
And when an R2 unit kept on Base awoke with the map they all needed, when Leia said to Rey "May the Force be with you", when Rey piloted her father's ship to go and find her uncle. . . there was closure for the both of them.
When Rey held the lightsaber with the legacy her mother had run from out to Luke Skywalker, her lip wobbled, her eyes wept, but her chin was strong and proud and regal.
She was Rey Organa, who carried a princess's name, a farm boy's lightsaber, and a smuggler's spirit.
She had a heavy legacy to bear - one that her mother had shrugged off for fear of what it might do to her. To the galaxy.
She bore that legacy well.