This story was inspired by a prompt on Bite Sized Bits of Fic on Livejournal. The prompt was "Leia is Anakin's daughter." This is my first piece of fan fiction ever, and it's really more a character study than anything else.

Understanding (PG)

by: WingsandRings

Setting: Soon after ROTJ (less than 2 years). I haven't read anything in the EU, so if this contradicts anything in the EU, that's why.

Disclaimer: George Lucas owns all these people, etc.

When the truth of their parentage became known to Luke and Leia, they both dealt with the revelation in their own separate ways. Luke became obsessed with discovering everything he could about them, especially his father. Leia researched a few of the basic facts about each of them and was satisfied with the obvious: Luke was Anakin's son, with his blond hair and bright eyes and force ability. Leia was in every way her mother's daughter: a petite, strong-willed senator who fought fiercely for what she believed in. She was proud of that branch of her parentage, identified with it, and let Luke worry about what it meant to have Darth Vader as a father.

In his desire to discover more, Luke had gone back to Tatooine. There he had found a little-known story about their father…and their grandmother. Leia had noticed her grave when she visited the Lars Homestead once with Luke, but hadn't thought much about her. But Luke said they way he'd heard it she'd died a terrible death, in Anakin's arms, after months of captivity and torture by the sand people. Anakin, frenzied by grief, had slaughtered the entire tribe.

"Can you believe that?" Luke gaped. "The whole tribe! Women, little children, people who had NOTHING to do with her treatment, people who couldn't have done anything about it even if they'd wanted to. And this was years before he became Vader! I can't imagine having that much hate, that much anger inside me, that I'd kill innocents just to purge the feeling."

But Leia remained silent. A chill was creeping along her spine…because unlike Luke, she could imagine that much hate. She had felt it. And for almost the same reason.

Leia loved her home planet, was fiercely proud of being its senator, and until the end of her life retained the title "Princess of Alderaan." But at the moment the Death Star fired on her beloved planet, she was not thinking about the millions of voices crying out. She was only thinking of two. Her parents – her real parents. Beautiful, gentle Breha and honorable, sincere Bail. Knowing that she'd never hear her mother's voice again, or get another silly holorecording from her father on her birthday – the pain was too much, it was unbearable. At that moment, if she could have crushed the life out of everyone on that death star, from Tarkin to the lowliest janitor, if doing so would have brought her parents back, if it would have even mitigated the smallest amount of the pain she was feeling, she would have done it. The only reason she didn't was because she was only one small girl, barely reaching Vader's shoulder. She didn't have weapons or force abilities, only hate. But her hate…the Death Star itself couldn't contain her hate.

And when Luke fired that fateful shot, and the Death Star exploded, Leia wasn't thinking about what a decisive victory this was for the rebels. She wasn't even thinking about how it was payback for what happened to her beautiful Alderaan. She thought "That's for my parents, you bastards." And smiled.

So yes, Leia knew. Luke might have just found his father more incomprehensible than when he began, but for the first time, Leia really, truly, understood him. She shuddered. Perhaps there was more of Anakin in her than she thought.