Title: the last moment
Author(s): vaderincarnate
Timeframe: RotJ
Characters: Luke, Leia
Genre: angst
Summary: It's the last moment.
Notes: More a writing exercise than anything else and, thus, not that ... good. Flex my mental muscles and all that.
It's the last moment.
Leia is fierce and Leia is strong, but Leia is trembling as she desperately holds onto him. She can't cry, won't cry, because Luke's (her brother's) last memory of her can't be tears. It can't be this wrenching pain that's threatening to tear her heart asunder, even if it's the truth. Because Luke fights for a better world, a kinder one that Leia doesn't even quite remember ever existing. All she knows is fighting: hangers full of pilots that don't always come back, hospitals full of patients that don't always live, whispers of dark times that haven't ended and perhaps never will.
Luke fights for the right of coming home. She can see it in his eyes if she looks hard enough; he fights for a world that will never exist, of sunburned children sweaty from jubilant exertion and endless summer days and a father that should have would have been there for them all. A fireplace to gather in front of when the rains come, stories to blot out the thunder.
He imagines a family that can never be his, rosy-cheeked and thickly-loved -- imagines a father who would love his children and protect them from all harm, imagines a mother who would never abandon them to the whims of a cold and uncaring galaxy. He imagines the happily ever after that, if justice were fair, they have all truly earned.
Luke fights for Love, and Leia doesn't think he really knows what it is. And now she doubts he'll ever find out what it truly is, but that's how it goes. The hero fights for a world that he doesn't even belong to, for the people who betrayed him.
The hero dies to save the unworthy.
She knows this, and she's terrified. She grew up on tales of princesses and knights in shining armor, but she's grown up enough now to know that the hero doesn't always survive. That happy endings are only for children too young to know that, in reality, good things don't always happen to good people. They are too old to be counted as children now -- the war has marked them in ways the years never could, their father marked them deeper still.
It's the last moment, but it can't be. She doesn't want it to be. When he walks away, neither of them knows what will wait for him. And even if he survives their dark father, neither of them knows what will happen next: if he'll come back, if he'll still be him when he comes back or if he'll be someone (something) else altogether.
He'll come back. And everything will be the same when he does; she has to believe this, or she'll go insane. He'll still be Luke Skywalker, boy hero of Yavin, golden-haired hero of the Rebellion. She can't let herself think that anything will have changed, that maybe, somehow, he'll be ... different. (Like their father.)
She has to believe.
She has to let go.
But.
She's not like this. She's fierce, she's strong (she's scared). She's a grown woman and she's faced down Darth Vader and stood helpless as her world was destroyed and her lover was plunged into an icy hell. She can do this.
She can let go.
But.
But.
She doesn't want to.
End.