Title: Dreams
Author: upsidedownbutterfly
Summary: Six-year-old Leia knows things she shouldn't and it's making Bail nervous. Not actually quite as light-hearted as that description made it sound.
Rating: G
Disclaimer: They're not mine, people.
Author's Note: This is my third Star Wars fic in a week. I'm not sure what my brain is doing.
It was the third night in a row he had awoken to the sound of Leia crying. He found her sitting up in her bed, clutching her stuffed bantha to her chest with big blubbering tears rolling down her face.
"Did you have a bad dream, sweetheart?" Bail asked as he slid onto the bed beside her and wrapped his arms around her tiny frame. She curled against him, buried her face in his chest, and continued to cry as Bail held her, rocking her back and forth and whispering soothing nonsense into her hair.
It wasn't until she'd nearly drifted off again that she spoke, murmuring sleepily into his chest: "They took him away from me."
Bail felt his blood run cold even as he told himself it was only a dream. Somehow he knew that it wasn't.
The next night Bail awoke to an entirely different sound. "I can't find him," Leia wailed as she bent over a drawer, frantically pulling out toys and tossing them over her shoulder to add to the chaos that already littered the floor. She wasn't crying this time, but there was panic in her voice.
"Can't find who?" Bail asked, even though he knew the answer better than she did.
"I don't know," she replied, scrunching up her little face in a way that would have been adorable if she didn't look so wretched. "Someone who's supposed to be here. With me."
"Okay," said Bail in his most soothing voice. "Let's look for him together." He held out his hand and Leia took it, and they spent the rest of the night hunting through the palace for a boy Bail knew was light-years away.
The nights were quiet after that, and Bail allowed himself to relax. Then one day after lunch he found Leia hunched over her crafts table with art supplies strewn around her, yellow watercolor drying in her hair, and a painted desert on the paper before her.
"I saw the sand in my dream," she informed him sagely and reached for the orange crayon, and Bail's heart sunk still further as she used it to trace a second sun into the sky.
He tried not to choke on the tightness in his throat as he wondered out loud whether next time she might try drawing something on Alderaan. "How about the mountains outside your window?" he suggested.
Leia looked up at him then, brown eyes wide. "You don't like it?" She sounded as heartbroken as Bail suddenly felt. His assurances to the contrary sounded false even to him. He turned away so he wouldn't have to see the disappointment on her face.
She did draw the mountains next, but the sand returned time and again until one day he found her in the palace library with a star chart open before her to a file on Tatooine. She was beaming with pride as she explained to him how she had found the sand from her dreams.
She shrieked for him to stop as he snapped off the display, but Bail barely heard her in the rush of his all-consuming panic. It was no secret his home was under Imperial surveillance, and while Tatooine would mean next to nothing to most Imperial agents, if Vader were to discover someone in his household had an interest in the planet…
He was shouting without realizing it, desperate inarticulate pleas of never again, until Leia ran from him calling for her mother as tears streamed down her face.
Bail sat before the terminal for a long time, cradling his head in his hands as he willed his heart rate to return to normal. Only then did he set about systematically erasing any record of the search from the computer archives. He'd apologize to Leia later. He only wished he could also explain.
"What aren't you telling me?" Breha asked that night as she brushed her hair. She'd thought it was sweet that Leia had an imaginary friend. "But it's got you so on edge."
Because he isn't imaginary, Bail wanted to say but held his tongue. It'd put them all in danger if she knew – him and Breha and Leia and the boy, her brother, Luke. For a moment, Bail had forgotten his name.
It was safer this way he reasoned and tried not to remember that he was already risking her life just by having Leia there. That one day Vader and Palpatine might show up at their door to kill them both and take Leia away, and Breha would never know why.
"Something with the Rebellion then?" she guessed when he was silent too long.
"Yes," Bail whispered and hated himself for being grateful for the lie.
"I'm sorry, daddy," Leia said as she climbed into his lap. "I didn't know it was bad." Bail could have cried. Instead he held her face and kissed her cheeks and made her promise not to mention the dreams or the sand ever again. She did so with all the solemnity a six-year-old should never possess.
"There's someone hiding in the sand," he told her when she asked why, "and we don't want anyone to find him."
She kept her word like he knew she would, and maybe the dreams even stopped after a while, but in thirteen years Bail never dared broach the subject again to find out. Then suddenly his little girl with the dreams of sand was a young woman and a senator and an integral part of a Rebellion that was gaining both strength and Imperial attention every day, and Bail knew his silence couldn't protect her any longer.
"Find General Kenobi on Tatooine," he told her one day as she boarded the Tantive IV bound for Toprawa. "He'll help you if I cannot."
He told himself he imagined the flash of recognition in her eyes until she spoke: "Someone hiding in the sand." Her gaze was unfocused and her voice sounded distant, like she was already standing in the Dune Sea.
"Yes," he said, which was another lie really, but what was one more at this point, now after he'd raised her on a lifetime of them. Yes, go to Kenobi, he thought, and let him tell you all the truths that I could not.
Out loud he said, "Remember that whatever happens, I love you, Leia." He only hoped that when the time came she'd understand that had been the reason for the secrets and the lies.