disclaimer: Star Wars and all recognizable characters, places, and things are not mine :(
rating/warnings: Teen / graphic depictions of violence
notes: I published this on my tumblr about a week ago and it was very well received. I hope you like it too.
bleed the blood to a river of fire
*6*
He is four, and the water closes over his head with a roar like a dragon, dragging him down, down, down to the dark abyss of the ocean's floor. The sand touches his feet, his calves, his back as the riptide drags him past rock outcroppings and tongues of stone, abrading his skin until it bleeds scarlet ribbons into the blue, blue water. He screams, and it dribbles from his mouth in a stream of bubbles. Fingers claw at the waves, feet scrabble against the ground, and he heaves his small, frail body in defiance of the might of the ocean.
He wins.
*5*
He is fourteen, and the Alderaanian Civil War has begun. His House—the Antilles of the Southern Reach—has allied itself against the ruling House Organa in the desperate hope of gaining more political and economic power. They fight what Bail believes to be a lost war, shedding blood and begetting pain and death the likes of which Alderaan has not seen in a millennia, since House Organa first took the planetary throne.
Bail is sent, against his wishes, to Coruscant. There he lives with—and serves as aide to—his uncle, Bail Antilles III, who is Alderaan's current Senator. It has been Madera's—his mother's—wish, since he was a boy, that he become Alderaan's next Senator—a wish that Bail himself chafed against since he was old enough to understand what it meant.
"I know you do not want to be here," his uncle says on the speeder ride to his apartment, after picking Bail up at the spaceport. "But try to make the best of circumstances. Who knows—you may even find that you enjoy politics."
"I want to be a historian," Bail says, surly and angry—angry with being sent away from home, angry with being sent to his uncle, angry with his mother and his father and his family, angry with the war that has exiled him. "Not a politician."
His uncle smiles. "As you say, nephew."
For all his anger, however, Bail does his duty, and does it admirably. He follows his uncle, taking notes and taking names, memorizing faces and thoughts and agendas. He finds he is good at discerning motives, and even better at exploiting them.
He is good at politics, his uncle finds—better, even, than Madera had dreamed.
"He is a natural," he tells his sister when next they speak, "for all that he resents it."
Two years into the war—two years into Bail's exile, wherein he studies under his uncle and applies to the University of Coruscant (and is accepted, for all that he is only sixteen)—the war catches up to him.
He is walking to the transport station after a long day at the Senate building when Bail senses that he is being followed. He quickens his pace, trying to reach the station before his pursuer can catch up—but to no avail.
"Your Family has been a thorn in the Organas' side for too long," says a voice behind Bail. He turns to see a face ugly with a sneer and a scar. The man is tall and clearly Alderaanian, with amber eyes and golden hair, skin Southern Continent dark. He presses a blaster into Bail's side and says, "Maybe this will teach them their place."
He fires.
Passersby hear the blaster discharge and rush to see what happened. Bail lays in a slowly spreading pool of blood, gasping against the pain and the darkness closing in over his eyes, trying to remember how to stay conscious. There are screams, and cries for help, and then the sirens of police droids arriving on the scene. He hears a scuffle, and then the man who shot him screams, "Glory to the Organas!" before he is silenced.
Then darkness claims him, and he knows no more.
*4*
He is nineteen, betrothed to the future Queen of Alderaan, and he lies in a growing pool of his own blood. It runs down his neck, stains the collar of his white shirt, muddies the ground to clay. The sky above is as red as the pain in his body, and it is all he can do to drag in one breath after another, after another, after another.
"Mother." Breha kneels above him, her hands pressed against his weeping neck, slit jugular to spine. "Mother, please. Stay with me," she orders, and it is a breath, a whisper, a plea born of desperation and need. "Stay with me, Bail." And once more, "Stay with me."
Bail reaches for her. He yearns to comfort her, to assure her that he is going to be fine. That all is well. That nothing is wrong.
His fingers tap an unsteady rhythm against the ground, and he falls still and silent.
Then: nothing.
The empty, haunting gaze of the Lord of Death stares down at him, as eternal as the vacuum of space, as commanding as the waves of the ocean that had nearly drowned him as a child. Bail sees him, and stares back.
"Not yet," Bail says, dredging the words from his soul. It takes all the weight and strength in his body, mind, heart to speak beneath the gaze of Death himself, but speak he does. "I'm not done yet."
"No," the Lord of Death says in return, and in his voice echoes the voices of a hundred million men, women, and children, each a different color, different temperament, different hue. "No, you are not done yet."
Bail wonders, suddenly, if this is the Force.
The Lord of Death touches Bail on the temple—and Bail wakes.
*3*
He is thirty-three and Padmé Amidala almost dies.
Two days later, a bomb embedded in the engine of Bail's speeder explodes while he is climbing into it. He is thrown through a window and three meters across the hangar, breaking both bones in his right arm, five ribs, and his skull on impact. It is the internal bleeding, however, that nearly claims his life.
Two days in bacta later, and Bail is once more on his feet, fighting in the Senate against the formation of an Army of the Republic. No one could tell, unless they knew, that he had just days before been at Death's door.
He smiles, and laughs, and pretends that he does not remember the crunch of bone as he landed on the permacrete floor, nor the rip of skin from his cheek, shoulder, arm, hip.
He smiles. He laughs. And he pretends.
*2*
He is forty-five, and he is grabbed on the way back to his apartment from the soup kitchen he volunteers at, and has volunteered at once a week ever since the rise of the Empire.
They beat him nearly to unconsciousness, then shove him in a dumpster crammed into the back corner of a forgotten alley. His blood coats the waste and refuse dumped into the dumpster, and the smell and taste of iron mingles with that of rotted vegetables and rat shit.
He tries to climb out, clutching at the edges of the dumpster and shoving at the lid.
He fails.
He falls unconscious two minutes later, drowning in the taste of his own blood. The refuse cushions him, holds him close and warm until his guards find him an hour later, led there by their Queen's directions.
Bail will only learn later that his wife knew where to find him because of a dream his daughter had.
Neither of them will tell her that her dream was a prophecy, or that it saved his life.
*1*
He is fifty-seven and there is a star in the daylight sky.
Bail sees it, and knows it for what it is.
He holds the glass of brandy in his hand—the glass of brandy he had been seeking to drown his sorrow in—and the shattered watch that Leia had given him for his forty-sixth birthday in the other. He had always thought that, so long as the watch remained ticking close to his heart, his daughter would be safe.
It does not tick now, broken as it was by the wall that he had thrown it at, when he had learned of the meteor storm that destroyed the Tantive IV—the meteor storm he knew was as likely real as a cover for the Empire's discovery of her treachery.
He sees the star—and knows that it is the Death Star, come at last in all its grand destruction, to cast judgment on him and his planet for his traitorous thoughts and actions.
There is the sound of a thousand dragons roaring.
There is the groan of the earth giving way.
There is a thousand screams, a hundred thousand, a billion all crying out as one, his voice among them.
There is green.
And then there is nothing.
end notes: so what did you think?