Prompt 25 - Wildflowers
"Leia, your parents had real good taste in vacation spots," Han said as he lay back on the picnic blanket.
Leia snickered. "Well, it wasn't exactly a vacation spot so much as a hiding-from-assassins spot."
"Details," said Han, reaching over and plucking a deep purple flower. "Sides, they probably still vacationed her after they were married."
"Probably."
Han held the flower up to his nose and inhaled deeply, savoring the sweet odor. "Mmm, Leia, this smells like you."
Leia lay down next to Han, gazing up at the clouds and remembering how she and her adopted parents had often looked for pictures in Alderaan's clouds. Naboo's clouds were similarly puffy and ever-changing and even without trying Leia could see a womp rat and then a mountain similar to Alderaan's.
Maybe in another reality, one where Anakin never turned to the dark side and Padme never died, they would have taken her and Luke to this very spot and they would have all looked for pictures in the clouds together. They might have picked flowers and chased butterflies and rolled down the hills . . .
But then she wouldn't have had a childhood with the Organas.
Her throat suddenly tightened. In a world where the old Republic never fell and no Empire rose and millions of lives were saved . . . the people her heart called her mother and father wouldn't be her mother and father. Bail and Breha might have only been people she saw in passing – or maybe she wouldn't even know them at all.
All those childhood memories – watching the sun rise between Alderaan's mountains, Bail and Breha teaching her to skate on the lake by the palace, she and her parents chasing each other down the halls of the palace – would never exist. There would be different memories, of course, and she would probably cherish them as much in that alternate reality as she cherished her Alderaaan memories now, but they wouldn't be the same memories.
Suddenly she realized that Han was waving the flower in front of her face.
"Hey Leia," he was saying, "you okay?"
"Oh, I'm fine," said Leia, reaching up and brushing her fingers against the petals. "I was just thinking."
"Bout what?"
Leia let out a long sigh. "About a world where the Republic never fell and Luke and I grew up with our birth parents."
"You mean a world where we never met?" There was a hint of horror in Han's voice.
Leia sighed again. "Yeah, I guess we wouldn't have met if the Empire hadn't risen . . . but then Alderaan wouldn't have been destroyed and countless people wouldn't have died in the war. If I'd lived a different life with different parents and maybe even a different husband."
"Wait, different husband?"
Leia grabbed the flower from Han and sniffed it – it really did smell like the Alderaanian soap she used. "I'm sorry, but if that were my reality, I wouldn't know anything about this reality and so I'd never miss it, and the galaxy would be better off . . ."
"You don't know that," said Han. "There are a million billion trillion variables in the universe. You can think all you want about alternate realities, but this is the reality we have." He squeezed her hand. "No matter what could have happened differently, this is what did happen.
Leia squeezed his hand back. "Han, have you ever looked for pictures in the clouds?"
"If I did, I don't remember it."
"Then let me show you how."