this is a disclaimer.
AN: something of a companion piece to think our paths are straight; title from razorlight. (sooner or later I'll run out of ways to make wire to wire lyrics into fic titles and be bitterly disappointed.) References to the Ilias (via Marlowe), Shakespeare, and the ouroboros that symoblises the cycle of death and rebirth. A perpetuum mobile is a machine that produces more energy than it takes to keep it running, operating indefinitely.
(talk about a posting spree.)
where the wild blood flows
The shock of the last few days is sitting so deeply in Bail's bones he feels like an old man whenever he moves (or tries to). Thousands dead, the Republic destroyed, the threat of imprisonment and execution hanging over his head.
Padmé was right: he mustn't do a thing to draw attention to himself. It's too soon. Palpatine will move quickly to consolidate his power base now; to oppose him would be suicide. Bail knows his own limits. He is a skilled politician but he is, essentially, a boring one. It would take a rabble-rouser to oppose Palpatine now, someone with courage and charisma who could rally thousands to their cause, be a shining figurehead, a light against the darkness. Mon Mothma might do it, in a few years. Bel Iblis, perhaps.
But not Bail. He'll go home. He'll tell his wife the truth of what happened here, as much as he can bear to. He'll try to forget the way Padmé sobbed on the birthing table, how she pleaded for her husband.
The helplessness of Yoda himself, faced with that final, most commonplace miracle in the galaxy, and Bail doesn't know if he means childbirth or love itself.
(It's no wonder she died, Breha will shout at him during some argument years in the future, surrounded by metal and droids and heartless old men who've been locking themselves away from their own emotions for as long as they've been alive! and Bail will wonder if things would have been different if there had been a woman there, someone less distanced by grief than Obi-Wan, less cold than Yoda.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. When he thinks, in later years, of Padmé's death, he thinks of ice, of snow in the mountains, of the warm, suffocating weight of being caught in snowdrifts and letting yourself fall gently into sleep, cradled in white.)
The children are gorgeous, healthy and strong - almost abnormally healthy, although they are strangely quiet, not at all what he'd been led to expect of newborns.
They're Force-sensitive, aren't they? Perhaps they know their mother is gone.
Bail smiles down at them, reaches out to touch Leia's cheek, then Luke's forehead. "Ah, little ones," he says gently. "I'm so sorry for all you've lost today. I wonder if you'll ever find a way to make peace with it."
Very softly, almost inaudible, "I wonder if I'll ever have something as precious as you."
Lost the will to live. Left you behind.
Traumatised, cowardly, exhausted and injured, self-aware for the first time in her young life, all her illusions gone, betrayed and attacked by the man she loved, and still she believed in him?
Foolishness. Call that love? Infatuation, on both sides, the kind of all-consuming passion that launched a thousand ships: a ferocious thing that turns upon itself like a maddened snake that eats its own tail, round and round in a devil's circle until the energy burns out and there is nothing left but ashes.
Lost the will to live, indeed. There's no such thing as a perpetuum mobile.
And that boy, that reckless boy who disobeyed every rule the Jedi created to indulge himself and put his so-called love above his duty...
"That's not what love is," Bail tells the children suddenly. "That destruction, that's not love. Love is a foundation, little ones, it's something to build on and build with. It doesn't burn your life away like that."
A heartbeat later, wryly, "And if it does, then you're doing it wrong."
He wonders if they'll remember that, when they're grown. Luke blinks at him slowly. Leia purses that tiny mouth and flexes her fingers, just a bit.
For never was a story of more woe...
Bail's head is still pounding when Yoda calls him and Obi-Wan to conference, spinning like a top: what will happen to those children now that's not what love is they should have listened to those who knew better that's not love what about those children -
The offer to adopt Leia slips out before he realises he wants it. Yoda appears to give it no more thought than Bail, saying yes without considering any of the ramifications, the possibilities that will haunt Bail for the next nineteen years. Obi-Wan seems entirely uninterested in the girl, all his attention on her brother as if Luke is a second chance instead of a person in his own right, and that too will come back to haunt Bail: if a woman had been there...
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
But he takes Leia home with him, and she cries for the first time as Obi-Wan leaves the Tantive with her brother in his arms and doesn't stop for hours, distressed beyond measure, finally falling into exhausted sleep as they leave hyperspace and enter Alderaanian orbit. He tells Breha what he can bear to of the truth, and is sure she works out the rest for herself. He loves Leia without measure, teaches and guides her as best he can, frets over every similarity he sees between her and her biological father.
Foolish boy. He'd had the makings of a good man - an exceptionally good man, one whom Bail would have liked and respected, and he threw it away through pride and false resentment of his mentors and destroyed a galaxy when he did.
Still, it gives Bail a shock when he tells Leia about the Jedi, about their Code and their way of life, and she says:
That's awful.
Bail looks at his fiery enthusiastic smart-mouthed too-clever fiercely idealistic little girl and imagines her cold, dispassionate, rationally calculating. Imagines her with Obi-Wan's distanced compassion, with Yoda's terrible calm - grieved calm perhaps, but terrible all the same, deciding over the fate of Padmé's children the way he would direct troops on a battlefield, pieces on a chessboard...
It makes him shudder.
I suppose it... must have been, he says, and for the first time in years he thinks of Anakin Skywalker as a lost boy, instead of a foolish one.
The next time he meets Lord Vader, Bail feels a whisper of something like compassion for the man, and suddenly a part of his fears for Leia seem thoroughly absurd: after all, Leia is not lost.
Nor, he is sure, is her brother. It's a comforting thought.
Almost hopeful.