Leia stood on the landing platform long after Luke left. She hugged her arms across her front and her face remained tilted upwards, having watched his ascent through atmo. She would give Buteral's dark sky starlight if she could, and it would come from her eyes, those glittering unshed tears, crystallized in the vacuum of space.
Luke had almost taken her headlamp. He had to stop preflight to re-open the cockpit canopy, and tossed it to her with a laugh. She wouldn't hear what he said over the noise of the ship engines, so he pointed to his temple and made a funny face.
You can have it, she would tell him if he could hear her. Take it.
But it was hers again, the strap curled into her fist.
So much... longing, and she didn't know why. Different than what she had for the Princess who boarded the Tantive IV. Different; not new. Like a warmth grown cold.
Luke caused it, somehow. He brought it out in her. He made her aware of an absence, something she should have but she would never learn what; only that it would never be. He gave her this loneliness, that a friendship of several hours was her greatest treasure. And they had discussed the refugees, and Leia had wanted to tell him how nervous she was, how anxious, but she couldn't.
Right now Leia missed her mother. And she missed Alderaan's queen, both one and the same.
Her mother rose to the throne at age twenty-four, the same Leia would, if the institution would continue. Twenty-four was the sum of the two groups of maidens; the spiritual ones who created the planet and the corporeal ones who helped maintain civilization. A beloved queen, though her reign was short. To prepare, Princess Breha had held ministry positions. She'd stayed inward, with her planet, while Leia chose to pursue an intergalactic path for her government training.
At age twenty, the same as Leia, her mother would still be a princess. Alderaan had never been tested the way it was now. And the bitter taste was there was no Alderaan. How to test something that didn't exist? Leia was expected to rule; tradition was royalty, after all, but rule over what?
Daughters wanted their mothers, Leia knew. Daughters wanted the wisdom of experience. They wanted to be good women, in all the roles they took on. Lovers, mothers. Leaders.
She took a big breath, and kept her face up to the sky, thinking of her mother's composure. It came from the crown. Wearing it, the weight of centuries of tradition and queens past, must have caused a kind of interface that gave the wearer a special wisdom.
Leia lowered her chin, and kept the length of her neck over the rest of her spine in imitation of her mother, and all the queens that came before. The queen listened and spoke from beyond hooded eyes, and the angle of her head caused her to react slowly, because of the concentration it took to balance the crown. The design was deliberate and symbolic.
Leia had done things her mother never had. She had been arrested and tortured. She wore the uniform of treason. But her mother had died.
Durocrete was a dull gray, and Leia suddenly realized she was seeing in color. Gradually, the ground in front of her took on light, and Leia had a shadow. It was a moment before she realized the cause was another's lamp. The light bounced and expanded, and Leia turned, shielding her eyes. The sense of absence disappeared.
It was General Rieekan, strolling slightly stooped, his hands clasped behind his back. He had moved his lamp over to his left temple so as not to blind Leia, and his expression was apologetic.
He cleared his throat. He did that, Leia suspected, because she forbid him to ask if he could stand in her shadow out loud, but he couldn't not ask, and this was a compromise. Then he said, "Your Highness."
"Thank you for allowing Commander Skywalker to land, General Rieekan," she said.
"Glad to be of service," he replied without a touch of irony.
A generous man, Leia thought. He might have wanted to ask about Luke, but out of deference to his position, he didn't. "I came to find you," he added. "You weren't in your office. I expect you'll meet the passenger ship at arrival tomorrow?"
Leia grabbed at escaped hairs from the sides of her head while she considered what to answer. Her mother would attend. Even as a twenty year old princess. "Yes," she said.
"We're scrambling to finish," Rieekan said. "They're testing the lights in a moment. Rooms will smell like paint, but I told the foreman that's probably better than the smell of low tide."
Leia offered a slight smile which he probably couldn't see.
Rieekan bowed his head and exhaled noisily. "If you will accept my weakness, Your Highness," he said against the wind, "I am... on edge."
"Regarding the refugees?" Leia asked. "Are they safe?"
"Whether they'll feel safe on Buteral, or indicate they're neglected," Rieekan sighed in quiet frustration. "I don't know what to tell them."
Leia held her own head as if the weight of the crown was upon it. "I will do the speaking," she said, though the decision was brand new.
"This... " General Rieekan began and stopped. "We have a role in this," he managed finally. "What happened. They don't."
Leia nodded quietly. It hadn't occurred to her before, and it should have. Carlist Rieekan was Alderaani and a newly ranked general. His station was no coincidence. She wondered with whom he spoke, Klander or Renzatl. Probably Dr. Renzatl, Leia figured. The same as her.
"I can trace my... the history of the planet, and see... where I enter," he was saying. "What I did, to cause this. They can't. They just woke up one day, somewhere-"
"In a temporary place," Leia offered.
"- and learned the planet was gone."
"Yes."
"For some, it might have taken days to learn the news. We had the advantage of Alliance communication."
I had the Death Star, Leia thought, but she didn't say it. She thought of Luke, bored and so far from the hub of the galaxy. Had the news reached Tatooine yet? Surely it had.
"I can't imagine," Rieekan said. "To go on for days as usual, and then to find out while you ate, while you laughed, and slept and worked and walked, your life was-" Rieekan couldn't find the word. "Gone," he settled on lamely.
She recognized Rieekan's heart. The same feelings that festered in his had beat hers as well. But Luke had given her something else during his visit. Not absolution necessarily, though it had the same effect. And not forgiveness. For Luke, there was simply nothing to forgive. Tarkin just wanted to use it.
"Will they know of you?" Leia asked. "Your involvement? Or mine?"
"The particulars, no. They may only blame the Empire. But things like your mission, no. The Alliance does not reveal the names of operatives, not until twenty years after it has been declassified."
"From the Empire, then. Palpatine's psychological war."
"I don't think so. At least, not immediately. He hasn't named you. He hasn't addressed it publicly at all. He's been centered on building anger and resentment against the Alliance, and Mon Mothma.
"The Death Star was his secret weapon. Our sources tell us he is furious about its loss, internally. There have been demotions and executions. But he's still keeping a lid on what exactly happened to Alderaan."
"Uncertainty," Leia realized. "Causing beings to question the war."
"Perhaps. But not a happy time to be in the Emperor's inner circle."
The statement tickled Leia's imagination. If Tarkin had survived the Death Star, she wondered, he probably wouldn't much longer when the Emperor summoned him to demand why a piece of his Empire was disintegrated while the rebel army had grown stronger.
"Did you know Grand Moff Tarkin?" she asked Rieekan.
"Not personally, no. I'd heard of him. His ambition." Rieekan's voice dripped with distaste.
Leia nodded. "Add him to the path of history you trace, Carlist. He was the one."
The lights turned on. Leia hadn't been aware there were so many, strung high, wires tracing the shape of the shoal dangling high above and swaying in the wind. "Oh!" she gasped, and put a hand to her mouth.
The sea was visible, rolling, still black; all of it and not just what could be seen from the beam of a lamp. It was wild, and glorious but all around were signs of men. Perfectly square platforms; narrow, railed bridges; squat, windowed structures jutting out of the sides of the thin mountains.
"The lights work," Rieekan said happily. He and Leia watched the water.
Once upon a time, a different sea rolled gently on Alderaan. Leia could see it from the high tower of the palace.
She couldn't leave Alderaan yet. "You were counsel to my father about his activities," she told Rieekan.
"I supported your father," Rieekan answered gravely. "I worried for his safety. I suppose I've been on edge ever since Palpatine declared himself Emperor. But your father felt it a better course for Palpatine to purge his enemies rather than bomb a populace as he did Corellia. Your father believed an enemy became more powerful from the grave. He was willing."
"He used to say to me," Leia said, "'no one retires from this'."
She could see Rieekan's fond smile now. "I'd heard him say the same. Were we in denial?" Rieekan asked, but it was a rhetorical question. "We knew of the Death Star, we knew of its capabilities, we knew its purpose, and yet-"
"I know you worked to keep Alderaan safe," Leia consoled. "To use the Death Star... It's insane," she said. She thought back to that moment on the bridge, Vader's fingers digging into her shoulders, both she and him listening to Tarkin's reasoning. "It's still insane."
"Sometimes..." Rieekan said. "Do you sometimes have to tell yourself it's true?"
"I went to the Graveyard," Leia said sadly. "I know it's true." She let the noise of the sea wash over her, and thought of her father, and his last moments.
"My father must have had a message for- for those-" she broke off. Maybe they listened to him as if their souls depended on it. Maybe there was full-blown panic, people trying to escape, and no one heard him.
"He may have," Rieekan agreed."It would be like him." Suddenly, his voice was anguished. "We put you in this position," he couldn't look at her. "Your father would beg forgiveness."
Leia shut her eyes tightly. It was so much more complicated than that. Father and daughter, Viceroy and Princess. Traitors and operatives.
"He would have it," she said.