Chapters 7-20 were betaed by AO3 user Saveloy. She is some sort of superhuman and all the thanks in the universe is due to her for her work on this.
Luke couldn't seem to take his eyes off of her as he ate.
He tried, at several points during his breakfast, to communicate with her via their bond some more. Brief flashes of awe at her knowledge of the Force, as well as worry over her counterpart.
Every time she felt his worry she sent back how sure she was that the other her would be well taken care of. Leia's timeline was, for the most part, a happy one. Her counterpart would be safe, get to meet their parents, and would have access to the greatest minds the Jedi Order had ever had in their ranks.
The worst she'd probably face is a headache from trying to parse out Master Yoda's cryptic lessons.
Both Sana and Han had departed not too long after Luke had arrived, clearly frustrated with the way the two of them kept staring at each other without speaking. Leia was used to reactions like that; she'd been told constantly throughout her life that she and her brother were "creepy" together, and that was coming from people who had grown up around them. It must have been an even stranger sight for these two spacers.
As Luke and Leia exchanged thoughts and feelings back and forth, it reinforced and strengthened their fledgling bond. By the time Luke had finished eating they were able to communicate with each other in whole words.
Thank you, Luke sent her as he bused his tray. He sat back down and grinned at her, "I've been trying to learn the ways of the Force on my own for so long, I was beginning to think I would never make any progress. Thank you. Would you mind showing me more?"
She beamed back – there was nothing she would like to do more than that. "Is there somewhere we can go to practice? Just the two of us."
He sent back the image of a decent sized room, empty save for a few training remotes. She got the impression of Luke running through some basic learning exercises, and his frustration whenever the low setting blaster gave him a zap.
There was also the impression of a voice, her voice, scolding him when he expressed his desire to give up, infusing him with her boundless faith in him and his potential.
"There is something about you, Luke. Something I feel in my bones. You're going to be the bravest Jedi ever. I just know it." Her voice echoed through his memory, colored through Luke's own lens of absolute love and trust.
She sent back her emotions towards her own twin, a sort of mental hug, and promised that eventually they both would be reunited with their proper sibling.
She gestured for him to show her the way to this training room of his, and the two of them set off through the base, side by side.
The more she got to know this boy, the more she came to understand the ways he was different from her brother, and also came to like him in his own right.
He had this wide eyed earnestness about him, an innocence she could tell was not thanks to a lack of experience, but instead due to a deep inner strength. He refused to let the things he had seen and done fundamentally alter his faith and trust in people, no matter how many times he was hurt.
He was also somehow harder than her brother was.
Where her Luke was all soft rounded edges all the way down, this boy was sharp and hard, yet it was a sharpness he had taken great care to temper down until all one encountered was the padding making it safe and soft at the surface.
She could also tell that unlike her brother, he had killed before.
He carried the lives of far more than she would have expected with him, thousands it seemed, and he was aware of that weight in everything he did.
She could sense he was working through that weight in his own way, processing and letting it go slower than she had been taught to do, but doing so all the same. She wasn't sure that showing him the methods the Order had taught her to both honor and let go of those burdens would be any better than his own method. Whatever he was doing was working. He was still firmly in the Light.
Why had this Luke murdered thousands of people? How had he been able to walk away from it untainted by the Dark Side?
She needed to talk to Luke, really talk to him, and learn all she could about this timeline.
They reached the room he'd shown her. Even though it, like the rest of the base, had only recently been set up, there were already scorch marks scattered across the floor.
"This is it. All I really do is train against the remotes. That's pretty much all I can do." He went to a cupboard in the corner, and from it took a thick handwritten book, to her surprise.
Leia had never seen a physical print text like that outside of the Archives before. She recognized the handwriting on the cover as Uncle Obi's, it read "The Journals of Ben Kenobi."
"Ben left me this, in his hut on Tatooine. Just this book, a handful of lessons, and my father's lightsaber. From this I have been trying to cobble together what I can, but it is hard."
He put the book down, and this time took a lightsaber out from the cupboard. "I collect Jedi artifacts when I can, this one I got on Rodia. I hate taking other people's lightsabers, it feels so wrong, so I left all the ones Grakkus the Hutt had behind. This one, however…" He looked at it, so impossibly sad. "The Jedi this belonged to, Huulik, he made it home to his family before he died. His niece, she made sure he got a proper burial, that he was remembered as something more than a traitor to the Republic. She gave this to me, told me he would have wanted me to have it." He placed it back in the cupboard, near the book.
He pointed at the remotes. "I got those on Devaron. At an old Jedi temple I found. I'm getting better at fighting with a lightsaber thanks to them. That's it. All that I have to learn from. People keep dangling the promise of more in front of me, and even though I know each time it's a trap, I can't turn them away without being fully sure."
His soft and sad expression turned to steel. "Don't be another person who uses this to hurt me. Don't pretend you can teach me if you can't. I know how I come across, that all anyone sees is a farmboy who can do nothing more than make a noodle flop about with the Force, but know that I am not as naive as everyone seems to think. I know you aren't my Leia. That you are someone different, someone I do not know. If all you can teach me is how to communicate in the Force, and nothing more, please be upfront about it. Don't string me along."
She wanted to find each and every person who had made false promises to this boy, and shove her 'saber up their ass. She did not let him know that.
He had done so much with so little, had emerged from what increasingly seemed to be an impossible circumstance still pure and good and kind, and she did not want to blemish that. To let her own lifelong need to protect her brother overshadow his own need to be seen as a capable and strong adult. Someone able to take care of himself.
So instead of pledging to keep him safe, or even beginning the conversation she had wanted to have about the history of the timeline she was in, she folded herself into a meditative position on the ground, and gestured for him to join her.
He didn't need a conversation about the differences between their universes right then, didn't need to recall the traumas he had undergone or hear how much better her world was than his. She needed those things, but if she was going to teach him she would have to learn how to put his needs ahead of her own.
He copied her position exactly, an intense desire to learn as much as he can overtaking him.
"I won't make you empty promises. I don't know everything there is to teach, I am just a Padawan myself. I will do my best, and will teach you what I can." How strange. Just yesterday admitting she did not know everything she needed to to be a Knight had been impossible. Yet now she knew that to move forward, to help without causing harm, she had to own her own failings as much as she owned her strengths.
Maybe she was going to pass her Trials after all.
She felt his relief in the Force, and a genuine smile had overtaken his face once more. "Thank you, for being honest. For agreeing to try and teach me."
"No. I am not going to try. I am going to do it. There is no try."
"Huh? What is that supposed to mean?"
She grinned back at him, and laughed. This was going to be fun.
Their destination was a luxurious penthouse at the very top of a tall building in the Federal District.
Leia noted, with some shock, that this building had not existed on the Coruscant she knew. In fact several parts of the skyline looked all wrong to her eyes, while others were achingly familiar.
This particular building was somehow taller than The Pinnacle, which Leia could see not too far away from it in Core Square.
Taller than The Pinnacle, and Leia's birth family lived on its very top floor.
They must really enjoy showing off their wealth.
Senator Amidala's stoic expression gave way, once they were in her home. "Is there anything you'd like to eat? Or drink? If there is anything you'd like that we don't already have I can always have it delivered."
Amidala's mask had slammed back into place before Leia had even begun to answer.
"Just some water, thank you." Her headache was gone, but in its place her mouth had become terribly dry.
Her birth father went to get it for her, but as he passed her he stopped and turned around, and there was something in his gaze that inexplicably reminded her of Luke. While his eyes were shaped so much like her own, the blue of his was the same shade as Luke's. It made her feel bad for being so cold towards him. He stared at her for a bit, looking conflicted and sad, and then headed into what Leia assumed was the kitchen.
She felt terribly awkward here, in this apartment. Maybe she should excuse herself to the 'fresher to get away and gather her thoughts.
Amidala sat on the large couch in the center of the room, and gestured to a chair across from it as she sat. Ahsoka was already in a matching chair next to it, lounging across the chair sideways, very much at home in this apartment. Leia folded herself into the indicated seat.
The three sat in an awkward stiff silence.
C-3PO emerged from the room Leia's birth father had gone into. He was carrying a tray with several glasses on it.
"Threepio? What are you doing here?" He'd belonged to Leia's birth parents? What were the odds of that? He'd probably know the answer to that question if she asked him.
"Hello Mistress Leia! May I say, I do like what you've done with your hair. It looks so much nicer than its usual mess and-"
"Thank you for the glasses, Threepio. We'll let you know if we need anything else." Amidala cut him off with fond exasperation. She gave Leia a small apologetic smile. "He isn't wrong though. You do seem to have a better style sense than my daughter."
Leia's birth father – why hadn't he told her his name, and what was keeping her from asking? – followed after the droid, holding a large pitcher full of water. He gave her a fascinated look. "You know Threepio?"
"Yes. He belonged to my family for as long as I can remember. Both him and Artoo," she said as she glanced at the blue and white astromech that had followed them from the ship.
"Huh, so whoever took you must have gotten the droids as well." As he spoke he set the pitcher down on the caf table, and sat at his wife's side.
"I wasn't taken, I was adopted."
"Right. Sorry, I just really don't like the idea of someone else raising my kids. So who was it? Who adopted you and your brother?"
"I don't have a brother."
He scowled at her, and his voice got deeper as his tone shifted from polite to frustrated. "Of course you have a brother."
Leia did not know how to respond to that.
She was saved from doing so by the ping of an incoming call coming from a holosystem in another room.
Neither the politician or her husband seemed eager to take their attention off her and answer it.
"Please, don't ignore that on my behalf." Anything would be better than sitting here with these people focused on her.
Senator Amidala nodded, and squeezed her husband's arm as she stood to make her way to an office that came off of the larger living room. She didn't bother to shut the office's doors, so Leia could easily overhear what was going on in the other room.
"Bail! Is everything alright?"
"Yes Padmé, this is actually just a social call. I have almost finished up all of my work for once, and thought why not see if you wanted to have dinner with a friend later this week? I promise there will be no work discussion during our meal."
The rich baritone of his voice washed over her. She could feel parts of herself, parts she had locked up inside ever since that horrid day on the Death Star, start to ooze out from where she had been keeping them. Leia thought she could listen to that voice endlessly, forever, without any complaint.
"As wonderful as the thought is, I'm going to need to call you back later. We're in the middle of something here actually..."
Eager to get close to him, even if he was just a holo recording, Leia rushed over to where Amidala stood. Her eyes eagerly took him in, happily making up for the head start her ears had had in reacquainting themselves with him.
Leia had watched, rewatched and rewatched again countless holos of both of her parents in the days since Alderaan's destruction. Simply knowing this feed was live, not a recording of a past event but instead capturing him in this very moment, made everything about his blue-tinted image that much more precious.
"Dinner sounds wonderful! Why don't you come here and join us, sometime soon? Maybe even tonight?" She knew she sounded overeager, and her face was flush. She did not care.
Her father was alive.
He was alive and she was speaking to him and maybe, if she played this right, she could have dinner with him tonight.
"Oh! I had not realized you were home, Leia. Are you sure you'd want me to intrude on your family time?"
Intrude on her family time? What a joke. He was her family, far more than these people could ever hope to be.
She gave her father the smile she only used when she wanted something from either her mother or him, the one that had gotten her out of trouble more times than she could count.
"I wouldn't be asking if I didn't want you to accept. Please, I'd love to see you."
He looked startled, but smiled back all the same. Now that her eyes had reached his face, she'd been captivated watching the rise and fall of his chest when she first stepped into the room, she could tell it wasn't the right sort of smile.
Yes, there was affection there, but it didn't fill him with love and joy and paternal pride.
His eyes did not sparkle, the corners of them did not fully soften.
She was his best friend's daughter, not his own.
Her father was truly dead.
Even in this impossible world where Bail Organa was alive, her father was dead.
"Well, who am I to turn down such an invitation?" His image made eye contact with Amidala, "I will leave you to it tonight, but perhaps tomorrow we should finalize our plans, my friend?"
"Of course Bail, we're looking forward to it."
As the holo shut off Amidala regarded Leia curiously. She was going to ask her something, the unspoken words already hovering in the room, but before she could begin to speak them her husband had stormed over with obvious distaste.
"Why'd you invite Organa over? We are kind of having a family crisis!"
Leia's posture stiffened. A good argument would truly do wonders for banishing the pain that was infusing her now. "Yes, which is exactly why he should be here."
"Is that supposed to make sense?"
The two attempted to stare the other down. Two sets of jaws clenched tight, both with the muscles in them jumping with the intensity of the clench.
"Ok you two, time to break it up," Amidala pulled off that parenting trick of both laughing and scolding at the same time, "It's nice to know that even if you weren't raised by us you still have Ani's temper Leia – it makes me feel better about my daughter's behavior."
Leia did not like being told that she had inherited traits from these strangers. It threw into sharp relief that even in her own world she was intimately tied to them, yet here her tie to her parents did not exist.
Amidala's attention turned from Leia to her husband. "As for you Ani, why not let her explain her actions before jumping down her throat? You need to remember that she isn't our Leia. She's from a place where her life was very different from what we know. We are strangers to her." Her voice broke on her last sentence. She paused, steeling herself before continuing. "As much as it hurts to contemplate, she probably is more comfortable in Bail's presence than either of ours."
Her shoulders sagged, and she looked at Leia again. "That's who adopted you, isn't it? The Organas? Your face lit up the moment Bail started to speak, the same way my daughter's does when she is with us. I had been wondering why it was you seemed so… restrained, compared to the girl I know, but that is what was missing isn't it? We really are just strangers to you, but Bail… Bail isn't."
Ahsoka poked her head up over the back of the chair she was still sprawled in. "C'mon Skyguy, you're fine with me being here, what's wrong with her inviting Senator Organa to join us too? Especially if he is her dad."
He sputtered something unintelligible, unhappy to hear someone other than himself be acknowledged as any version of Leia's father. He scowled deeply, and flexed the hand in the black glove.
Rolling her eyes as she did, Amidala lightly shoved her husband back towards the couch they had vacated.
Leia followed them back to the seating area, still reflecting on her father's holocall. She took note of how different the room seemed now, as she sat. The formal atmosphere was gone. The call and short argument had brought emotions to the surface, and shattered any delusion of formality.
Leia was still sure the conversation ahead of her was going to be an interrogation of sorts, but at least it would be a casual one.
Amidala poured herself a glass of water. "How did you get here? Maybe if we understood that better we could retrieve our daughter and send you home?"
"I was at a party. On my way back to my room to sleep, I noticed a hole in the cliff wall where there shouldn't have been one." Why hadn't she waited until morning to explore that tunnel? "I, well I had a bit too much to drink earlier at the party, and decided to investigate it on my own. Ahsoka was waiting for me when I emerged from the passage. I thought… in my timeline there was a founder of the Rebellion I am a part of, who went by the code name Fulcrum. I mistook Ahsoka for her when I saw her, and I believe she has told you what happened from there."
"Maybe I am this Fulcrum," Ahsoka said, "Obviously not me, but the other me in your timeline." She grinned, "You said she went out fighting a Sith on Malachor? That's quite the impressive way to go."
Leia didn't agree. The loss of the original Fulcrum was a major blow to the Rebellion. She had been the lynchpin holding several cells together, one of the most important leaders they had, and in the short gap between her death and Chancellor Mothma officially starting the Alliance there had been a wave of confusion that cost them the lives of far too many good people.
After a brief awkward silence, Amidala questioned her again. "Breha and Bail had told you who I was, but not that I was your mother?"
Leia nodded. "The official story is that you were killed by the traitorous Jedi, but my father told me that was not the case. It was Palpatine. Given what I know now about my parentage, I think it is safe to assume he was present when you died."
Amidala's husband was clearly very uncomfortable with this topic, so Leia was surprised when he had a follow up question for her. "Traitorous Jedi?"
"Yes. Palpatine claimed that the Jedi tried to assassinate him, and in response he both had the entire Order executed and reformed the Republic into a Galactic Empire under his rule."
Obviously he had not been expecting that. "He managed to kill the entire Order?"
"There were a handful of survivors, on the run and in hiding. Those who were left, that we know of, joined us in the Rebellion. I've only ever met two survivors from the old Order, and both of them are unfortunately dead now too."
"What were their names? The survivors you encountered that is."
"The first was a Knight named Kanan Jarrus. He had taken an apprentice, a boy my age named Ezra Bridger."
"Huh." Ahsoka looked puzzled. "I know an Ezra Bridger," she said, "he's Caleb Dume's Padawan." She shrugged, almost apologetically, "I've never heard of a Master Jarrus before."
Leia's birth father confirmed that he did not know who Jarrus was either, and Leia wondered if he was connected to the Jedi in some way. He raised an eyebrow towards Leia. "And the other?"
"General Kenobi. He was hiding on the planet Tatooine."
Leia's birth father stood, his body jumping out of his seat spring loaded. "What? Why would Obi-Wan be on Tatooine? The only reason to go there is to torture yourself." Amidala gave her husband a wry look at his exclamation and he sat down, still muttering. "Obi-Wan sunburns easily. Endless sand and sunburns, some life."
Amidala gave him a fond smile. "Did you get it out of your system Ani, or should we expect to hear more about the sand?"
He blushed, looking very uncomfortable. "I don't like thinking of him burning to death, ok? Plus, he's Obi-Wan, he'd never be happy getting all crusty and dirty in the desert."
She shook her head at him, and turned back to Leia. "How did Obi-Wan die?"
"He vanished, while fighting Darth Vader. I was there when it happened." Perhaps now that she could speak to actual Jedi she could finally understand what had happened.
"Vanished? What do you mean vanished?" Ahsoka seemed as confused by General Kenobi's disappearance as Leia was.
Great, would she ever find someone who understood what she had seen? "I don't know how else to describe it. One moment General Kenobi was there, wielding a laser sword against Darth Vader, and the next there was just a pile of robes on the ground."
"Oh, of course he'd leave a discarded robe just lying on the ground. That's so like him." Leia's birth father muttered from his seat on the couch.
Leia didn't know what to make of the jokes being thrown into the middle of it all. It wasn't that she had a problem with banter, she understood its place and importance for relieving stress. There was nothing like gallows humor to help soldiers cope with the weight of their own looming mortality. What she did have a problem with is civilians who had never even known the oppression her universe toiled under, making light of the deaths of those who had sacrificed to help bring down the Empire.
She understood that the deceased individuals she mentioned might be alive in this timeline, but that did not make the very real tragedy of their deaths any less serious.
"You've mentioned a Darth Vader several times now. Who is he?" Amidala asked.
"A Sith who serves Palpatine, a monstrous pet on a leash." She tried and failed to suppress the memory of him torturing her on the Death Star.
Amidala noticed her slight shudder. She frowned at Leia, concerned.
Her husband didn't notice, and made another comment directed towards Ahsoka. "He must be Sidious' apprentice. I wonder where he found someone stupid enough to con into taking that position."
Amidala seemed to have put together that Vader was not a topic Leia wanted to dwell on, and she very quickly changed the subject. "Tell me about this Rebellion of yours. Who is in charge of it?"
"Mon Mothma is our leader. She, along with my father and… you, are credited as some of the movement's most early ideological founders." Amidala looked like she wanted to hear more about her involvement with the movement's ideology, so Leia continued. "In the waning days of the Republic, the three of you authored an objection to Palpatine's powers, known as the Delegation of 2000. In time the Delegation of 2000 grew into our Alliance."
"And Mon is your leader? Really? She's brilliant, yes, a good friend and someone I personally trust to always do the right thing politically, but she's never been a leader within our party. I suppose she must have adapted with the circumstances."
Leia couldn't imagine Mon as anything but a leader.
The woman had taught her so much about being aware of how history would remember your actions, being accessible to those you had command over, making hard but necessary calls, and especially how to hold your ideology close even when the situation demanded compromise. Chancellor Mothma had taught Leia both how to play the political game, and how to know when it was time to abandon it fully.
There was no living person Leia admired more than the Chancellor.
"What were you doing on Horox III, before you found me? Aside from partying that is," Ahsoka asked.
Leia blushed. What an impression of her these people must have! She didn't normally go to parties. Or to be more accurate she didn't go to many parties by her own initiative, or parties she actually enjoyed. Attending elaborate soirées for the Coruscant elite had been a major part of her life when she was still a part of the Imperial Senate. "We were setting up a base. We had only been there for a week when this occurred."
"Snips, you said you thought Leia was receiving her Trials?" That was two times now Leia had heard her birth father call Ahsoka that. She wondered where the nickname came from.
"Yes. I didn't see any path through the cliff when she told me about one. Plus the Force seemed to really want her to go down it. After I knocked this Leia out I even went over and felt the entire length of the cliff, and it all felt solid. I had Artooey scan it too, and I took the ship around to the other side to make sure before we left. Nothing on that side either."
Her birth father nodded, and then gave Leia a particularly odd look. She felt that same tingling sensation she'd experienced when she had spoken with Ahsoka by the cliff, but this time it felt far stronger. As the tingling stopped, she felt something brush up against her mind. It almost felt like someone knocking at a door asking permission to be let in.
She focused hard on keeping whatever it was out. She'd had enough of her mind being invaded when she had been on the Death Star, thanks.
Her birth father looked hurt. She didn't know him well enough to guess at why. She decided to focus on the glass of water in her hand rather than the way he was gazing at her.
"The Force does seem to want you here, at least for now. I don't think we're going to be able to retrieve our Leia yet either. This is very clearly a case of the Force working in mysterious ways." Was he a Jedi, like Luke's father had been?
She still didn't know this man's name, aside from that diminutive the Senator had addressed him with, and the nickname Ahsoka had used earlier.
"What does Ani stand for? I don't even know what to call you."
There was something lurking in his expression that seemed unstable, but it was fleeting, gone as quickly as she saw it leaving him looking impossibly sad. "I'm sorry, I should have introduced myself. I'm Anakin Skywalker."
Leia choked on the water she was drinking.