Alright, so this is a short chapter, and I'm also really uncertain about the characterisations of Qi'ra and Jyn. I need to rewatch Solo and Rogue One (again) to try to nail it in future chapters, but in the meantime if you have any questions/points about their mannerisms or characterisations (or even their relationships with Leia!), please let me know.
Hyperspace was an emptiness in the Force, or more accurately a blur. All Leia could sense when she meditated were the weak presences of Wedge and Biggs, playing dejarik in the main room.
Oh, and the blinding little troll sitting opposite her.
"Feel the Force, you must," he said. "Not just the dark, is it. Reach out, past your feelings, and—"
"I think I get it."
He sighed. His ears drooped a little. "Much anger, you have in you."
She rolled her eyes. "I wonder why."
"Angry, you are," he reiterated. She barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes again. "Understandable, this is; angry all beings must be, in the natural way of things. But learn to let go of it, you must, in order to—"
"Reach the light," she parroted, shifting in her spot on the floor of her quarters. "I know."
He tilted his head ever so slightly and closed his eyes. His lips twitched. "Then, if understand, you do, follow my instructions, you must."
Leia gritted her teeth.
"Relaxing, that requires."
"Don't preach at me."
A grunt. "If you are to learn, young Skywalker, listen, you must." Then, before she could snipe back with a reply— "Follow instructions, also."
She made a grumbling sound, low in her throat, but closed her eyes and sank into the Force.
It wafted around her, like a cool, fresh breeze on Mustafar. She let herself breathe, lips curling as images from that appalling rescue attempt played in her mind and her own anger and fear fizzed in her veins—
"No."
She let out a breath, throwing her hands up. "What?"
"Exactly what you are doing wrong, you know."
"I—"
"To learn the ways of the Jedi, want to, you must."
"Jedi?" She scoffed. "I promised Ahsoka I would learn the light side, so that Palpatine would not be able to predict and control me. I said nothing about becoming a Jedi. . ."
Yoda sighed. His ears drooped again.
"Reach for the Force, you must," he said gently. "Peace, you must feel. Ignore your feelings—push them away. If touch the Force when you are calm, at peace, you do, clear from the dark, the light will be."
"Ignore my feelings?" That. . . didn't compute. "How?"
Yoda—raised a Jedi, lived a Jedi, for nine hundred years without entertaining or considering other ways of the Force—was silent.
Leia let out a breath between her teeth.
Right.
She just had to do everything herself then—
The Force rushed into her, intoxicating and glittering in darkness as it always was, but when that familiar cold started to bite she. . . didn't push back, but she turned away. Towards something else.
When they'd started being trained, when their age was still in single digits, her father used to chide her for turning away from true power, for what she chose to turn her attention to. What her priorities were, not in the general scheme of things, but in that moment.
Every time she discovered something new, she would turn to share it with Luke.
He would do the same.
A tension she hadn't even realised she was carrying bled from her spine as his young face came to mind, chattering excitedly, speaking half in images and feelings, half in words, in his attempt to convey the sheer wonder he felt at this bright, brilliant gift they'd had their whole lives. . .
Warmth flooded her, and a feeling like. . . sunset light and chiming laughter and the smell of jogan-scented detergent the droids used to clean her bedsheets on Mustafar. . .
Something evaporated deep inside her. . .
She took a deep breath, eyes still closed, and released it .
When Yoda smiled, and shook his head, she did not see it.
That peace only lasted so long.
Soon he'd moved them to the main room and had her running basic exercises: flipping credit chips, levitating whatever debris she had in her bag or on her ship, standing on her hands and balancing when Wedge accidentally got them into a dogfight—
She was sick of it.
"I've already mastered this," she complained, sending Yoda's gimer stick pin-wheeling around her head and straight back at the diminutive Jedi Master, narrowly missing—a terrified yet fascinated—Biggs on the way. "Do I really have to—"
She ducked as it shot back at her. Her lightsaber flew from belt to hand to flash in an arc around her.
The gimer stick clattered to the floor in two smoking pieces.
Yoda narrowed his eyes at it. "Hmph."
"Sorry," she said. She wasn't, really. "But I really don't need to do this." She said to Biggs, still staring at the stick, "Stop it."
"Sorry."
She rolled her eyes.
Yoda was watching her. "Patience, you must have. Out of the habit of the darkness, train yourself."
Putting up with Yoda was not going to help her stop reverting to the darkness.
Biggs offered, "You're great at this."
"Thanks," she bit out, glaring at Yoda. "Is there nothing—"
"Patience, you must have." His lips twitched in that infuriating smile of his. "Learn to—"
"Shut up."
"Useful, manners can be."
Her lips twisted. "On occasion." She felt a minute vibration in the ship. "Realspace?"
"Yeah." Biggs got to his feet. "We're back at Dantooine. Amidala should've got here before us—we took a few extra stops and Alderaanian cruisers have particularly good hyperdrives. . ." He trailed off when he saw Leia's face.
Luke would've been interested. She was not.
"Good," was all she said. Then, kicking the two halves of Yoda's stick out of her way, she stalked back into her cabin.
After a moment's thought, all the stuff she'd been levitating slung itself out after her.
"Thank you for taking the detour to Alderaan," Padmé said when she marched into her office. "I know it was inconvenient, but—"
"He's a menace."
Padmé laughed. "Your father used to—"
She paused.
Swallowed.
"I've heard that opinion before," she amended. "But he's been teaching for eight hundred years. He must be doing something right."
"Or the Jedi are doing something wrong," Leia muttered.
Padmé tilted her head. "I concede the point. He must have taught you something useful, though?"
Leia grumbled.
Padmé laughed. "Alright."
"That not what I came in here to talk to you about," Leia said. "Luke. . ."
Her mother, suddenly, looked like she'd aged ten years. "The rescue attempt failed—"
"So what are we doing about it?" she demanded. "What else can we do, how else can we get him out?"
Padmé sighed. "Leia. . ."
"Don't Leia me. You said we could rescue my brother. He is still in Imperial custody. So how are we going to rescue him?"
"We lost our last agent in the Palace in the first failed attempt. We spent a lot of resources on the second failed attempt—"
"And you said that you gained a lot of valuable prisoners too! So why not—"
"Leia," Padmé said. "This is, to an extent, diplomacy. Unless I can get the cell leaders to agree, I can't justify the waste of resources again to infiltrate Coruscant—"
"Waste?"
"—for one boy."
Leia said stiffly, "That boy is your son."
Her father would not have questioned this, she knew. If Luke or Leia had been held by the Rebels, he would have burned the galaxy to the ground if it meant he could retrieve them safely.
Padmé's throat bobbed. "That makes it worse."
Leia made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat and clenched her fists. Her limbs were trembling.
Padmé was not Force-sensitive, but even she could feel the temperature diving.
"Leia," she said, gesturing for the seat opposite her desk. Leia thumped down into it. "Didn't Master Yoda. . .?"
Leia grunted and. . . let go. Or rather, she clung even more tightly to her images of Luke, of the both of them, happy and safe and loved. She didn't relax—not until the image of Luke sparring with her after the revelation about Tatooine, in so much pain and so confused but shoving that aside to comfort her, flashed to mind.
Her brother was kind, and brave, and strong.
She just hoped it would be enough.
Padmé breathed again when the temperature began to resemble something more like normal.
"I will look into the possibility," she said. "Believe me, Leia, I'm not going to give up. But you have to understand that Palpatine clearly wants him—you both—very, very badly, and if it turns out to be too late for Luke. . ." She swallowed. "You should learn to—"
"Let him go?" Leia's voice was icy. "He's the other half of my soul."
Padmé grimaced, and nodded. "I know."
Leia's hands made to clench into fists again.
It was then that there was a knock on the door.
"Come in," Padmé called, and Leia begrudgingly lifted her gaze from where it have been inspecting a peculiar twist in the wood grain of Padmé's desk to land on a newcomer.
She looked. . . oddly familiar.
Her brown eyes narrowed, and Leia's eyes narrowed to meet them. An image flashed to mind: a prisoner in a cell, disappointment and a rush to keep going—
"Did you find Luke in the end?" the woman whose cell she'd opened, then left open, asked her.
Leia gritted her teeth. "No."
The woman—a very glamorous woman, now she was cleaned and freshly dressed and put together, perhaps ten years older than Leia—nodded gracefully and brushed a lock of hair out of her face. There was simultaneously a carefulness and an arrogance to every one of her movements, every one precise and intentional. "I'm sorry to hear that."
"Leia," Padmé said, "this is one of the valuable prisoners we did manage to rescue from Coruscant. Qi'ra. She works in Intelligence—she's one of the best."
Leia raised an eyebrow as Qi'ra took the seat next to her, and accepted the proffered hand. "Qi'ra. . .?"
"Just Qi'ra," she said with a small, tight smile.
Leia didn't push.
"And this, Qi'ra," Padmé returned, "is my daughter, Leia Skywalker."
Leia jerked at hearing Padmé use that word—not that she didn't say in it private, but it said a lot about how much she trusted this woman.
Qi'ra glanced between them, clearly tracking the similarities in their faces, their figures. Leia swallowed the bitter thought that with her glacial calm to Leia's rage, her poise to Leia's constant conflict, her easy smile to Leia's perpetual scowl, Qi'ra looked more like Padmé's child than Leia suspected she ever word.
"Charmed," she said.
She'd left soon after that, to let Padmé talk Intel or. . . whatever Qi'ra had been there for. Induction into the workings of the base? Discussion of whatever dirt Qi'ra had on the Empire, Palpatine in particular? Leia didn't know.
Instead of heading back to Yoda and his empty platitudes and insistence on uselessness exercises, she went back to maintenance. The poor woman there looked at her like she'd seen a ghost—Leia wondered if, with all the missions she'd been on recently, they'd half-hoped and half-worried that the sullen and irritable yet effective errand girl wasn't coming back—but Leia just did her best to drag her face into a smile.
She probably looked a little crazy, but the woman sighed and sent her to one of the hangars, to organise and document all the things in the crates that were being sent in. Saw Gerrera and his Partisans were coming to roost here for a while, until this tentative partnership inevitably collapsed, and until then there was a lot to do.
It was while she was there that she was interrupted.
The door to the hangar hissed open behind her. Leia was crouched on the far end behind the cargo shuttle, knee deep in boxes that some wermo had left inside for her to have to drag out herself. She barely glanced up from her datapad, and the box hovering in midair—with the light side, so Yoda didn't get all fussy, which took enough of her concentration as it was—but called out, "If you're here to remove the shuttle, I'm not finished yet; otherwise you've probably got the wrong hangar—"
"There aren't enough hangars on this base to get confused by." The newcomer snorted. "I'm looking for you, Skywalker."
Leia glanced up then, to see Jyn Erso pick her way round the ship and stand in front of her, one belligerent eyebrow raised.
"Erso," she greeted. "You did well on Coruscant."
"And you failed on Coruscant." Erso cut her eyes from Leia's face to the datapad to the hovering crate. Not self-conscious, but starting to feel the strain of her split attention, Leia put it down. "And it's just Jyn. You're not with the Empire anymore."
Leia bristled, but didn't respond.
"Why were you looking for me?" she said instead. "It's not like we talked much before the mission."
"No. But if Saw's setting up shop here for some time, I figured we should."
"Afraid you won't be the only one with a reputation for bluntness and sullenness on this base?" Leia asked.
Jyn barked a laugh. "In a way." She sat herself down on one of the crates.
"I can sense you're curious as well," Leia told her, checking something off on the datapad without really looking at it. If she was going to be blunt with her—which Leia genuinely did appreciate—then she was going to return the favour.
Jyn smiled a tiny bit, leaning back. "Who wouldn't be, when the demon twins defect?"
Leia grimaced. "How many of your people know about that?"
"Me and Saw. And Cassian, but I guess he's technically one of yours. An in-between." Jyn tilted her head as she saw Leia move onto the next crate, and hurried to glance at the datapad and assist. "Why? Afraid of the truth getting out?"
"I just don't want to deal with even more stares."
"And if your brother arrives and things start to get obvious?"
"When my brother arrives," Leia corrected, "I'll be able to handle it."
Jyn blinked. "It's on your own that you can't do it?"
"Yes." Was that not natural, for someone to want to not be alone?
Jyn frowned. "If you've got a twin brother," she said slowly, "I guess I get it." But she didn't understand it.
"You have the Partisans. Weren't you practically raised with them?" What would you know about being alone?
Her question wasn't spoken, but it hung clear as day nonetheless. Jyn stiffened.
"Saw gave me a loaded blaster and abandoned me in a bunker when I was sixteen," she said. "I spent three years alone—didn't come back to Saw until he asked me to, for the Kuat mission you so royally shot to hell. I may not have someone I'm tied to, heart and soul and whatever else demon stuff you have"—a look at the crate that had been levitating—"but some of us just deal with it."
Leia swallowed at the bitterness in the tone.
"I'm sorry," she said. She was surprised to find she meant it. "But I miss him. I—" She swallowed as images of Tatooine, the homestead, flashed to mind. "I. . . remember what happened the last time I lost family to the Empire and I'm—"
"Afraid."
"Yes."
Jyn was looking at her again. "You've lost family to the Empire? Your family is the Empire."
Leia didn't say anything—just bit back her retort and nodded.
Jyn seemed very. . . disturbed.
She'd been raised by Gerrera from a young age.
"My parents," she said in reply to Leia's look.
Leia guessed, "Galen Erso?"
Shock, surprise, defensiveness—then a slow nod.
Leia smiled sadly at that surprise. "I'll explain everything to you," she said, "if you explain everything to me."
Jyn watched her for a moment, head tilted, before she said: "Deal."