As always, I thank you for taking the time to look at my fic. It's really very nice of you, and I am in your debt. This is actually a side story to my much longer WIP, The Widow Skywalker, but it can be read as a stand alone. Once again, it stems from my fascination with Vader/Padme, and my curiosity as to just how much Leia remembers about her mother. This story was beta-ed by the lovely and wonderful Leia_N, who receives in return pounds upon pounds of chocolate and my everlasting gratitude.
I would dearly love you if you could take the time to comment. Come on... you know you want to! ^_~
And so, without further babbling on my part...
-Meredith
DATE BEGUN
: December 8th, 2003DATE FINISHED
: April 13th, 2004================================
In A Faint, Uncertain Voice 1/1
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
================================
No one ever told me the same story about my mother.
Really, in some ways, it was as if I didn't have a mother at all–I was some type of halfling, a vague experiment. My past had been changed for me, and I knew it without being told. No one ever said to me, 'you mustn't say this', or 'never tell anyone that'–instead, these instructions were unspoken, understood. Good people don't put their feet up on the table, cultured people don't say 'poodoo', good little girls go to the tombs, lay flowers of pale pink and blue on the familiar name of an unfamiliar woman. They would never say, 'that's not my mother'. Even if they knew it wasn't.
Keiko Strom–the name on the tomb–in silver, swirling calligraphy. A polite fiction. I remember seeing a picture of her once, so she must have been real; a narrow face and blue-black hair pulled up high, a foreshadowing of gray at her temples. She didn't look anything like me, which was puzzling, because although I knew she was not my mother, I assumed she must have had something to do with me.
People don't just appear out of no where.
But I did.
I am my own vanishing act; the woman cut in two by a droid's laser, who is suddenly revealed to never have been there at all. My mother vanished, scattering like so many fire-bugs–for a moment clustered into a single shape, but shattering, startled, and then gone. She did exist–though when I reached the age of womanhood, I became less and less sure of this fact. There were no holos of her, no letters, nothing that even belonged to her, save a tiny carving of a bird I wore, sewn into the lining of my school robes. Unlike the yawning, unfilled mouth of Keiko's grave, my mother had no final resting place, no repository for my weekly flowers or ritual offerings of food. On Alderaan, the dead were sacred, cloistered in their own cities that seemed to hum with anti-life; but my mother was no where and everywhere at once. I was constantly ripping and mending my outer-robe, the gray one with white and scarlet fretwork; I felt the need to read in, touch that carving. The weight of it next to my heart was not enough, but if I held it up to the light, I could trace the wings with my gaze. That was Mother, going up and up, until she dissolved to a place where I could not follow her.
Luke loves the truth. He really does–he seeks it, courts it, reaching out with kind hands to lure it from the shadows. He wants to _know_, to drag everything out where everyone can see it, gape at it, pick it apart; he doesn't understand that some things just _are_. They have no parts, they can not be understood–they can't even live exposed to the sun. What starts out in the darkness has to stay there, like races accustomed to one range of gravity, or else they crumble in upon themselves. He fits into that shadow, the Jedi Master in black, even if he doesn't know it. I see the way people look at him when he passes, with an awe that's laced with healthy fear. Luke wouldn't hurt a rhonto, not if he could help it, but they sense in him still that faint air of electricity, the smell before a rainstorm. Because even though he _wouldn't_, there's always still that slim chance. There's always an _if_, in the back of their minds. In the back of my mind.
I don't ever want anyone to look at me like that.
Sometimes, I catch myself between times. There's a moment of breathing space between this meeting and that, or a sense of suspension, just before I crawl under the covers with Han. It's like stepping through a mirror, and I think, 'I never expected to be here'. I turn my gaze away from reflective surfaces–which are everywhere because the whole of Coruscant is vain–afraid to look to closely. If I don't walk carefully, I'll fall through the cracks–I'll be six, or nine, or twelve again, or worse. I'll be a child again, no longer a woman the size of real people, but that pixish halfling and then he might get me.
I always knew who my mother was. My father knew he didn't have me fooled–I think in a way, it relieved him. Other people accepted, nodded and spared me the glance due to an heir of the House of Organa, but they hadn't lived in my mother's world. From Her, I learned that things could be and not be in the same breath. I learned 'mehou', Alderainian for 'magic'; I learned what was beautiful and what was kind, and I learned fear.
Maybe she didn't mean to teach me that at all. Maybe she meant for me to learn something else, but that's what I picked up instead. By mistake.
I try to think about my mother and... and Vader-- I try to think of them in the same room, existing side by side, without one canceling out the other. I don't see how this is possible, but it must have been, once. She would have been lithe, at once strong and fragile, next to Vader's voided being. Luke says our father's name was Anakin-- he's very careful to hold onto that, as if it keeps him from tripping, unwittingly, over the edge.
"Details," I said, once, half annoyed, "Semantics. It's not as if they were two different people." I remember the look Luke gave me, very carefully restrained, but none the less disappointed. Combative, perhaps, at the core.
"Anakin Skywalker was a good man," he insisted. It sounded rote; he wasn't even thinking about what it was he said. About the contradiction.
I try the name out. Anakin. An-akin. Ana-kin. I write it down, on the edge of some unimportant memo that will be melted down anyway-- but I'll be sure to do it myself, this time. I am superstitious; I understand that "dead" does not mean "unconcerned" or "powerless" or even "inactive". It just means you are in a place that's different from the world of the living. What would he look like, this Anakin? I have Mother's coloring, I know that much, so he must have looked a little like Luke. In my mind's eye, he has longish blond hair, kind of rakish and resting against his black robes. He looks like a barely-reined-in creature of the wild; he looks like someone you would give wide berth.
Luke said that, under the mask, Vader's face had taken on those same shadows-- so it was hard to tell what he might or might not have looked like, when he was young. And anyway, there was a lot of scarring. He must have looked like a thing locked away in the dark for a long time. Like those fish-- eitsuyah, they say on Alderaan-- that swim in underwater tunnels. They don't have any eyes, because it's so dark that they don't need them.
But Vader's eyes, Luke said, were blue. They could cry, and the machine-man even almost smiled, sadly, as he touched my brother's cheek, before dying.
I really wish he wouldn't tell me these things.
So here is this blown-in-by-the-wind warrior-- with blue eyes-- blond hair kept just neat enough to scrape by as not qualifying under the term "mess". He would be tall, because I can't imagine Vader _not_ towering over me, and he would have been a Jedi. The Force only knows what _that_ means. He would be like a warped mirror of Luke, I sometimes think. He would be everything I'm afraid might happen to my twin, to me. Intense. Protectiveness turned into aggression, justice turned into a preemptive strike. Did he love my mother?
He hurt her a lot-- so I know she loved him.
That's how you know when you love someone-- it _hurts_. It tears you up, it rends you seam to seam and leaves you in pieces that need to be sewn back up. That's why they say, 'pull yourself together'. It's really hard to do, when you're scattered about. With Han, I hurt easily and deeply-- it scared me to feel anything, really. I would lash out, just to see him pull back, to see the walls come up behind the hazel eyes. I could do that to him-- take him aback, make him think twice. At the same time, I couldn't stand to see him that way, sort of exposed, like a raw wound. I wanted to protect him as much as I wanted to poke at him, just to get a reaction.
My father-- _my_ father, Bail Organa-- also loved my mother. But he couldn't hurt her, at least not as much, so I know that she didn't love him. She and I lived in a little house away from the main Organa compound and it's courtyards. He would come and visit us, sometimes-- somehow, he made the trip seem very far-- and we'd sit outside on the little pavilion, eating fruit and watching the great black water-birds, out on the lake. Or rather, I would glance at the birds, my real gaze flickering back between the two of them. He would watch Mother, and Mother would pretend she didn't notice. If he caught her eye, it made her color in a way I didn't like, and she would tilt her head down-- so as much as I loved Bail, I sometimes wished he wasn't around.
My mother was different around other people-- and I learned all my masks from her. Part of this was because she was only supposed to be my nursemaid, and could not jump to my defense when High Ladies from other Houses, over for noon meal with my father, criticized me and discussed me as if I wasn't there. I remember standing there, in front of their painted faces, listening to the 'chink-chink' of their bracelets as they moved their arms to point;
"Lord Organa, your daughter-- such a lovely face, but perhaps too tan, for a Lady. Don't let her play outside so much."
"The little princess, she is very clever. It is not wise, however, to speak so much. Best to hide your wisdom for the right time."
Always like that, always a barb, a condemnation wrapped neatly in polite words and required compliments. My mother would stand off by the door while I endured this, a calm sentinel behind their backs, her lips forming silent encouragement. In her plain smock and thick braids, she imparted wisdom no one else knew. Her unpainted face spoke earnestly, though not always the truth. From her, I received as much truth as was safe at the time; at least, that's what I tell myself now. What would I say to her, if I could speak to her now? How could I, despite all my love for her, keep myself from calling her in to account? I would be like a little girl again, I think, thrusting my nightmares of Vader towards her like black, molten coals taking the flesh off my palms. Part of me will always want to ask, "How could you?"
A terrible question-- one I'm glad I can not ask. Because as much as Vader hurt me and those I love, he hurt her a thousand times over, more than that. A number so vast it defies understanding, the little cuts and scars on her heart. When I was young, I foolishly thought I could somehow protect her the same way she protected me. In my dreams, I wandered foreign landscapes in search of the dark shape that caused her smile to fade, her gaze to drift away at odd times. I would wake next to her in the low, soft bed with the moon coming through the curtains and be overwhelmed with how much I needed her. How much I was always afraid she would go away.
She was different when we were alone. At once more solid and less substantial, she held me close to her and showed me the world. She spoke to me in an odd mix of languages, so that everyone and everything sometimes had two or three words. We spoke Alderaanian, of course, and another, similarly soft tongue I have never been able to identify. When she cursed or expressed displeasure, it was in a harsh, clipped speech that made her flinch and put the back of her hand to her mouth. It was only many years later that I heard it again, when I least expected it. In Jabba's palace, at my lowest point, stripped of all dignity and made at last a soulless doll my tutors and teachers has tried to hard to mold, I clung to the strange gift my mother had given me. The other language, the language for curses was Huttese.
It had been so long since I'd spoken it, and anyway the sounds were such that scraped against the back on your throat, making it raw. But I understood bits and pieces of conversation, certain phrases. Pressed against that terrible, slimy beast, my mother's voice told me what to do.
'Chuudougest' is a Huttese phrase that means something, roughly, like 'to be hung by your own pride'. It was something my mother muttered under her breath about the Emperor, and it was something Jabba tossed out concerning Luke, his belly gurgling with rotten laughter. When we reached Mos Espa, rumors were already flying about the slave girl who strangled Jabba with her own chains; the bars were rife with it, whores and servants moving hands and slim pipes to illustrate. I remember Luke's smile-- the shy, boyish one I hadn't seen in so long-- aimed at my covertly beneath his black robes. He told me later that even Moisture farmers had felt the tyranny of the Hutt, his secret satisfaction at the irony of it all. I could have told him what Mother had told me, that there is a goddess of justice evaded, who brings all sins back around in the end. What do the Jedi believe? I honestly don't know, and I don't think Luke does either, really. So much was lost, so much was hidden that we only have bits and pieces without context. My brother is archaic, the piece of the past adrift in the present.
If I'm honest with myself, so am I.
Sometimes I have a dream in which I am walking across the high bridges near the Senate building, calm while the wind chills my body, and something makes me turn. There, across the way, I see my mother's lithe form, dressed just as she was the last day I saw her. She waves to me, beckons to me and, just as I move to find a way across, I become gripped by the crippling certainty that I will never be able to cross. I wake crying, to find Han holding me, smoothing my hair and calling me 'sweetheart', and this surprises me sometimes. I expect to be back on Alderaan, in my new bedroom in the main house, where I cried myself to sleep waiting for my mother to return.
Do I really remember that day? Sometimes I think I've made it all up to close over the wound, that I've made my own truth so I won't go looking for the real thing. We sat on the bed while she combed and braided my hair, telling me stories. She wore a dark blue, high-colored smock over a dusty rose skirt-- I remember because she embroidered the edges herself, in a style not at all similar to most on Alderaan. As she plated my hair, I chased her sleeves with my small hands, trying to run my fingers over the soft thread lines. She laughed, she called me her imp, balancing me on her hip as she carried me outside for breakfast. I clung to her happily, still young enough to see little distinction between her and myself. It must have been First Summer, then-- Alderaan has two hot seasons-- we ate the very last red-fruits of the harvest. And then... Mother was reaching for the pitcher of juice, filling her cup again before she just stopped, holding herself perfectly still. Such a look on her face-- that's what makes me think I really remember. I couldn't imagine such pain, such terror laced with a relief you feel when you've finally been caught, twisted and self-destructive. She closed her eyes, drew in a shuddering breath. She began to say something-- a name? a curse?-- and caught herself. Quickly, she pulled me out of my chair, and as I stumbled across the pavilion, unable to keep up with her frantic strides, all the glass in the house became to shake and hum slightly.
Luke did that once, distressed by dreams of Obiwan and veiled truths, and it just about stopped my heart. I couldn't even look at him for a few moments, terrified of this reminder, knowing that even as I shunned that part of him, I also shunned myself. The first time, the only fear I felt was my mother's. I was entranced by this new magic, wanted to reach out and touch the vibrated glass. Instead, she pulled me over to the wardrobe, pulling off my light summer nightgown. As she fastened the tiny buttons on my blue over dress, she told me I was to go down to the beach and walk along the shore until I came to our favorite picnic spot. She laced up my high boots and told me to stay there at least until the sun was over the hills. Pulling away while she tried to rub sunless cream onto my face, I looked at her with wide eyes-- I could see myself in the darkness of hers, along with a shadow that didn't have a name. The look on her face as I walked slowly down the path... I can't describe it. She stood at the door, nodding each time I looked back, urging me on. And when I started to turn back, to run to her, she tilted her face away. Her sad profile is the last thing I remember, the truth I told Luke on Endor. My mother was very beautiful, and very sad. So much had been stolen from her. And then, she was stolen from me.
I wonder, sometimes, about being a twin. I think about Luke as a part of her sadness, never knowing where he was, how he was. I think about a missing piece of myself, how I was drawn to Luke the moment I met him, wanting to understand why he seemed like someone I ought to know. Such a strange thought, sharing the womb; Luke and I suspended, growning together. It's a companionship that seems unnatural to me; I have always, even in the echoing Senate chambers, felt alone. Mother vanished, someone
(I know who!)
disappeared her. Sucked out her substance like a _chiitabe_, a vampire, desperate to live. Can you live off that-- can you have any sort of extistance, depending on what is stolen?
Vader would know.
I came back to our little cottage much earlier than my mother told me to. I was bored and worried, watching strange ships cross over the normally empty skies. I came home earlier, but in many ways I never came home again. It was as if I had been gone a million years. Everything was chill, despite the heat, so that I untied my over-dress from around my waist and put it back on. The house was a mess-- everything off, wrong, bowls shattered on the floor, doors scorched, but all my mother's things remained. I searched for her frantically, remembering the pinch of anger I felt when she turned away at the door, how I'd sulked on the edges of the waves, feeling abbandoned. Intention, my mother always said-- think about intention. Hurting people will only hurt yourself.
I was in the bedroom when I heard him.
I hid under the bed, rushed there by the hiss of what sounded like a snake and the sound of heavy boots-- those boots were what I saw, polished and black, as Vader prowled about what had been my mother's inner sanctum. I've never held myself so still as then, not daring to breathe, instinctively _thinking_ myself into something small and unimportant. He took some of her things, that sithing unman; I watched him gather them up, and when his back was to me, I reached up and snatched off the nightstand the only thing of Mother's I have left. The little bird carving, which looked at once like a ship and an elegant swan, the one that had been made by (who's?) hand.
They told me she was dead. Threw herself into the river to escape Imperial capture. How could I ever believe that? How could I stand at her funeral and cry when I knew she was more powerful than that, when I had sensed the shadow man searching, _searching_ for someone alive. The Ladies of the House all said how well behaved I was at the service, not a tear-- after all, 'she was only a servant'-- still and silent as magicless glass.
Vader didn't have her, and I didn't have her, but neither did Death-- though in my mind, he and Vader were one and the same. I glared at him hatefully when he began turning up at the house, asking questions, demanding my father prove his loyalty, asking about the harbored rebel spy. Did she have a son? I could have laughed and laughed and laughed-- how clever my mother, to make me a girl! A disguise like in one of her stories, ten thousand ways to save yourself from disaster, always remember you'll have to pay it all back someday. Little Princess, he said to me with a voice like the hot edge of a knife, tell me of your nursemaid. I was as silent then as I was on the first Death Star, lips clamped shut, as silent as the grave.
I'm silent still, in many ways. Luke had a mother, in a way-- he had his Aunt Beru, who loved him and sheltered him against his Uncle's misdirected resentment as much as she could. He even had Vader, who searched so thoroughly for him-- who, Luke says, redeemed himself in the end. I tell Luke about Mother, or at least I tell him what I can. Some things won't pass my lips, no matter how hard I try; some things are buried forever within me, because I don't think he would understand.
How can he, when he never saw Mother's tear-stained face. Never knew the touch of her hand, the lilt of her voice?
In a land that no longer remains, my mother once told me, there lived a young woman and a man with many faces. This woman and man, they were in love-- brilliantly, wildly, so that they could not see anything else. The Many Faces man went away, returning with not just a different face, but a different name, and the young woman did not at first see the change. Love blinds like that, so dangerous and close to your skin. As wanted as breath, as sweet as your own destruction.
What happened to them? I can't remember-- maybe I never knew that part to begin with. Maybe my mother didn't know the end herself, or was afraid to tell me, crouched as the truth was in the weave of a story.
Let Luke know Vader, and keep his secrets. I will keep mother close to my heart, sewn into the lining of my jacket just like that little bird. I try, I really do, to share what I have of mother, despite my fear that there is not enough to go around.
I do know one thing about Vader that Luke does not.
I know he needed my Mother-- I know he searched for her without hope, without end.
And I know that, in some ways, I am his daughter, because it pleases me to think he never got her back.