So, I've apparently been out of the fanfic loop for awhile, if my good friend Trout is to be believed. Being completely startled to realize it was true, I decided to post this ... another one of those "I wrote it, I looked at it, I forgot about it" fics. It was an exercise of descriptive writing for me, thus explaining the nature of this (long) vignette.
Enjoy!
"Being Unbroken"
KnightedRogue
The minute she stepped into the room, she knew she was different.
The walls were crumbling while the fabric split and the windows cracked. The paint had peeled, so the brown looked more like dirt than wealth, and the floor was littered with piles of dust and scraps nearly as tall as her knee. The air felt warm when she walked in, but it rapidly became much, much colder. Leia shivered and crossed her arms over her chest to preserve a semblance of humanity among the decay.
Most of the expensive décor had been looted years before. Or broken, as much of the litter on the ground contained bits of porcelain and clay that had once been priceless and now could barely be identified. The floor, once a pure imported hardwood from Dantooine, now appeared dirty and cheap with the waste of Imperial possession spilt on its once golden surface. Enormous slices of glass haunted the floor and cracked as she stepped.
But it wasn't that the room had changed. She knew it wasn't that. She could tell by the shards of fabric hanging from the window hooks. Or by the scraps of Alderaani silk that still hugged the ancient frame of the bed. The priceless artifacts that lay scattered on the floor didn't cause the room to change.
She had changed. The room was the same.
If she closed her eyes, she could picture how it was, nearly six years ago, when she left her quarters to recover the Death Star plans. Then it had been rich, complete, a cloud of green and soft browns that felt real, natural. The draperies had crossed here, the bookshelves had been situated there, next to the contemporary vase that held Alderi lilies – three of them, she remembered. The hardwood paneling had ended here, beside the understated desk, where datafiles had obviously been ransacked and confiscated.
They had left just enough for her to remember it fondly.
Her old senatorial quarters on Coruscant: survivor of the duplicity and authoritarianism of Palpatine and his Empire. The emperor was gone, the Empire still a formidable entity in the galaxy, but without her traditional seat of power. The Rebels had freed the planet almost two – no, three – months ago. They'd suggested that those that had had quarters before in the Imperial City complexes should enter their old inhabitations first before the demolition and remodeling crews arrived.
Some had jumped at the chance. Left their commands to rediscover their past fortunes, hopefully hidden from the plight. Leia had stayed on Rebel Dream, had vehemently told Mon Mothma and Carlist that there was no force in the galaxy that could force her to join their ranks and attempt to reconcile their past lives to these new people they'd all become. She waited until they'd ordered her to clear it out for the Ithorian delegation that was to arrive in three weeks. She was to repossess anything that belonged to her and quickly vacate it for the duration of the delegation's stay.
She almost convinced herself to let the Republic confiscate whatever was left.
Almost.
It hadn't been until Han had suggested that she do exactly what she had been attempting to convince herself not to do that she had finally consented to resume ownership of the ruins of her life, though he wouldn't let her call it that.
"You're being morbid."
"I'm being metaphorical."
"You're being stupid. It's just a couple of datafiles, some old clothes at worst."
"It's just what's left of –"
He'd kissed her to shut her up and to prevent her from being morbid. It didn't stop her from thinking, though, about the past more than she'd done since –
When? The first anniversary?
She stepped further into the room, heard glass crack under her shoe. The dust flew up around her as she sidestepped a toppled bureau and wisped a hand across the face of a dried-up moss painting, and she briefly caught a reflection of a mirror to the side, the reflection tarnished and darkened. She pivoted around, catching a torn bedcover between two fingers, feeling the silk slide and aggravate her skin. Her eyes were watering, not from the memories, but from the immense dust that permeated the air and every pore in her body. She felt cold and desperately feverish all at the same time, and her stomach was tightening of its own accord, flipping over and over.
She looked up at the chandelier, the darkened glass less entrancing now that the crystal seemed to dangle precariously from its prison, not floating, as it used to, with the childlike fantasies she once entertained ensconced within the covers of a bed that was too big and too comfortable to belong to either a child or an adult. She sighed and sat down on the remains of the bed, aware that her legs had decided to shake when she was not feeling anything at all.
It was a lie. She knew it was. It was just easier to lie to herself than to work it all out in her mind, where there were no ends or conclusions. In her mind, every sentence ended with a clause missing, without punctuation, missing an essential verb agreement and a few memories that she'd rather just not pick up on again. Lying to herself served her best when her environment was dangerously juxtaposed with the slip-cover Leia she propagated to almost everyone she met, and it provided the added benefit of making her as emotionally invincible as was possible without truly sacrificing the one person she seemed at all capable of understanding.
He still didn't know how much she lied to herself.
She let her mind dwell on her uncommitted, uncontrollable liability, purely because opening her eyes hurt too much and because the mere act of seeing brought with it evidence that her lies weren't working too well. She still considered him a liability because that's what he was in his crudest form. She'd once told him his epithet, in a moment of absolute anger and revulsion, when more truth had spewed out of her mouth than she ever wanted to admit.
"You're a liability."
"You're an investment."
She understood immediately what he meant by that, and felt completely justified in her anger.
"You're wasting your time."
"You're wasting our time."
She had felt like he had slapped her, the echoing 'time' reverberating against the walls and slamming full-forced against her ears.
"What do you know?"
He'd nodded, action at odds with the word. "Nothing."
He lied, too, only he playacted like he was ignorant rather than actually confessing to the crime he committed daily.
"Too much," she had said, and it had been the end of her resolve, her will to surrender, because fighting took too much exhaustion and she was beyond the point of having a second wind. "You know too much."
He hadn't really agreed with her, although she knew he did in his mind because it was a compliment and those were sparse in their relationship, partially because they shouldn't need them and partially because compliments cheapened the whole thing.
She shook her head, tired of the train of thought, and plucked once again at the coverlet rolled up against her thigh. She followed the crack in the mirror directly in front of her with her eyes until it splintered off into two hundred different pieces and it became too difficult to distinguish between her reflections in the shards. The frame had cracked, too, spilling out the reflections like drops of blood on the hungry hardwood floor.
She was becoming too morbid. She needed to find something here worth salvaging. She needed to prove to him that she could pick up and move on, that she had.
He knew very well that people don't just pick up and move on.
She stood up suddenly, afraid she'd fall dead into the arms of the waiting bed, and moved towards the closet. It was almost entirely empty. Her gowns and her jewelry were gone, as she knew they would be. Two shoes, from two different pairs, guarded the door, and she nearly tripped on them. One sodden wrap hung across the bar of the closet, clinging to its support with every bit of energy it had left.
A catch of white caught her eye. She moved towards it, unsure whether to approach cautiously or to feel idiotic for being wary of a train of fabric, and then decided that it was better to go quickly than slowly.
Lifting a hand to her eyes to ward off the dust, she crept to the white fabric, hesitating once she saw what it was. The formless white gown was white-hot, she was sure; she couldn't touch it. Her eyes took in the cloth, high-necked and desolate, but maintaining a pure glow despite the dark of its tomb in the belly of her beast.
She found herself unwilling to examine it and yet was sure that she had to, if only because this was the core of the person she used to be, a thousand years ago. Her old robes, the mark of a politician. What she was sure she no longer was.
Or perhaps it was exactly what she was now. She wasn't a politician before. She'd been too good to be a politician. Too pure.
The fact that she couldn't quite define herself should have been frightening, but then, she reminded herself, she hadn't been able to do so for years, since the day she'd been convinced that human nature was inherently evil and that the best anyone could do was to survive until something better came along. That was the day she'd lost her purity. That was the day she'd become a politician.
Ironic that now, facing a politician's quarters, a politician's wardrobe, a politician's life, she'd decided that she couldn't stand the duplicity of politics.
She reached for the robes. The cloth burned her skin, but she grabbed it anyway, sure that whatever miasma of virtues she was now couldn't really be scarred anymore than she was already and that it was, after all, just a set of robes. The cloth felt more like paper to her, thin and frail beneath fingers calloused by joysticks and blaster triggers. She watched the fall of the material. It shifted down to trail on the floor, where the edges dipped in a puddle of fetid water that had coalesced on the hardwood.
Leia heard her liability enter the quarters, sure it was him because he stepped hard on his heels and the footsteps sounded to her like their owners owned the place as well. She turned, saw him saunter into view, holster dragged low, head held high, trailing an aura of confidence with him like the capes he despised when he saw them on other men.
He stopped by the mirror. His reflection looked pure and whole from where she stood. "Not much here," he said, by way of introduction.
"Everything worth anything is already gone." She stepped out of the closet and walked to the bed, laying the robes out on top of the coverlet.
"You sure?"
His voice was a constant reminder to her that she had to be careful about what she said when she felt this way. He cared more about her than she did.
But, she thought, she'd always suspected the same was true with her.
"They were pretty thorough," she said, fingering the robe. "I guess they took traitors seriously."
He reached up towards the chandelier, fingered the pieces as the fell morosely from the ceiling. "I guess." He took a step towards her, heard the cackle of broken glass beneath his boot, grimaced to himself. "Hell of a lot of glass to break."
She looked up at him, smiled at his unintentional double meaning. "Some things are better off broken."
He looked up from the glass on the ground and shook his head, then reached for her hand across the bed. "C'mon."
"C'mon, where?"
"C'mon, I like you better at our place," he smiled genuinely, without a hint of condescension or pity.
She took a short glance at the white senatorial robe laid out on the bed, grabbed his hand, and stepped up beside him, kissing his knuckles. She looked up as he led her from the quarters, hoping to catch her reflection in the mirror as they passed, broken, fragmented, hopeless and seething. But Han's body was in front of it, keeping her away. And she thought, maybe she could get used to the irony of it all.
After all, isn't that what moving on is all about?