Growing up, Leia never wanted to not be the Princess. It was who she was, same as describing she was female. But sometimes she wanted to be alone.
Not like this, she told that god of irony and truth, moving around the courtyard, making sure to look into the eyes of each student and adult, dissolved of one weight but taking on another. This was not my wish.
Always there were twelve maidens following in her shadow, knowing her better than perhaps she knew herself.
"You belong to everyone," her mother the queen had once told her.
And sometimes she wanted there to be another; someone like her, who existed on a special plane.
"Are you going to get another Princess?" she used to ask her parents when she was very young, sometimes hopefully, sometimes jealously.
Leia knew the circumstances of her birth- actually, she was beginning to sense she had not been told the whole story- but adopted was much like saying short or brown-eyed.
"You can get another," she would tell them, "even a Prince. I could get used to a boy."
Comments like that made her father smile. "You would like a brother, would you?"
He would have liked another child, Leia suspected now, but her mother had grown sickly and frail, and thoughts of growing the family ceased.
So Leia grew up with a mother and father who belonged to everyone, and sometimes she felt lonely and sometimes she wanted everyone to go away.
That was not my wish.
That loneliness had been... crowded. Now it was echoing.
When a weight was lifted it was the maidens who shared it. One was thirteen, Leia thought now. She came on only a year ago, when another left to marry.
Twelve maidens for the twelve goddesses.
She loved her people, she saw now as her fear dissipated, but she thought it might kill her.
General Rieekan had slipped out. She looked around for him, for someone to make the excuse-
She was a new Princess. Without maidens, without goddesses. A leader, one who would bring them all out of this nightmare. And then what? She might...
She might stop. Leia couldn't picture anything, imagine anything. In her mind's eyes, she just stood there. Was anything even happening around her? Was she in the Graveyard? Was it a portrait?
Unidentified, she thought. One couldn't know the future. Just like her father couldn't know what would- if he-
Just go on, Leia told herself. One can't stop. Because life goes on anyway.
The baby had chubby hands, and she leaned forward from her mother's arms as if to leap into Leia's.
Leia stepped back, and remembered to smile. "So playful," she murmured at the mother.
"Yes." The mother kissed her daughter's cheek as she curtsied to Leia. "She's a blessing. I'm so glad I have her."
Leia's smile fought to remain, suddenly bland and uncertain. She glanced around. "And you have a son?"
The mother nodded in the direction of where her son sat with two other boys on the floor. They were doing something, leaning back on their palms and hitting their heels on the floor, talking. Being boys, but a sadness hovered in the air.
"Bail," the mother said. "He was born a few weeks after the Queen died. It was so sad, Your Highness, I want you to know how she affected us all. I told my husband, I said, 'we have got to honor her'. I was pregnant you know, crying all the time."
Leia's brows rose in polite question. The mother chatted easily and openly, much like a spy had relayed a secret message to her once. Leia really didn't know much about pregnancy, and certainly not that it made a new mother cry. But she listened intently, just like she had listened to the spy, for she didn't know which part of the message had any meaning for General Dodonna, only that it was contained in there somewhere and she had to know every word.
"He turned out to be a boy," the woman told Leia unnecessarily, her eyes directed at her son, "and your father had been named Viceroy."
"My father loved my mother very much," Leia said, struggling to participate. She'd had instructions how to answer the spy in conversational lapses. Though if her father were alive she never would have uttered such a statement. It seemed like since the roles of Viceroy and Queen had been obliterated, it was best her parents be remembered as people.
"This has been... tough on my Bail, on us," the mother was saying, jiggling the baby up and down. "He hurts so bad."
"You must, too," Leia said.
"I do." The mother nodded frankly. "I do. Thank the goddesses we have each other. It's more than others -" she pressed her lips together. Leia could see the woman forcing the change of subject, pushing it past her lips. "But you know, this little one keeps me so busy. Look at her, Your Highness. Doesn't she seem like she wants to know all she can?"
The little girl was chewing on her fist. The fingers were wet with saliva and every once in a while she leaned forward, trying to get to Leia. But her eyes shone with keen curiosity and she seemed to be taking everything in with a solemn observation.
"She's so... oh, pure," the mother said. "Bright, and eager. Everything is brand new. If it scares her, I'm there to help her through."
"Who is she named after?" Leia asked.
"My mother. Maline."
The baby heard her name and her fist popped out of her mouth. She looked at her mother.
The mother smiled, tears in her eyes. "She's the future, Your Highness. Not the one I wanted for her or imagined, but that was my idea, wasn't it. She's wide open. She can handle anything. I think of her as the goddesses reborn."
Leia blinked, and her breathing shallowed. She felt exactly as she had after the mind probe had left, successful and sick. She felt like Maline was the mind probe, a chubby baby girl who had recently learned to walk and liked to stick her fist in her mouth. The mother didn't notice, cooing at her daughter, while several feet away her son was stomping his heel on the floor, talking with a couple of other boys.
And there was Major Klander, lurking politely outside the courtyard. Leia drifted from the mother. That boy Bail had at one time been brand new too, she thought, at a time when the planet mourned their Queen. A queen's loss happened once in a lifetime, sometimes not even that.
And at one time, twenty years ago, Leia was named by an unknown dying mother. Was it cruel that she emerged from the womb able to carry on- willing, eager to carry on- despite the loss of the woman who had nurtured her?
Major Klander said something Leia barely heard, her heart was so loud in her head. "...talk to them as a group, tell them about the resources we've set up, Your Highness?"
"Of course," she breathed professionally. The stone bench from where she had addressed the group was on the sea end, across the floor, and Leia wanted to be able to slip out as General Rieekan had. The exit was on the mountain side.
Leia took a breath, like a royal, she thought in a loving nod to her mother. She projected her voice, and its deep clear tone quieted the room.
"Weavers," she gathered in everyone with her eyes. "I'd like to introduce Major Jaf Klander. As you heard on the landing pad, Buteral is a crisis base. The Alliance for the New Republic will occupy it along with you, to ensure your physical safety while the war wages.
"There's more than just physical safety, however," Leia said, and next to her Major Klander nodded. "What happened to us, to our home... it's on a scale that has never been seen before. We are faced not just with recovering our well-being from the perspective of the individual, but from that as a people. Alderaan has," Leia paused, hearing the present tense, and she decided to not correct it, "has a tradition of grace and composure, of empathy and concern."
She wanted to say more, but anything that came to her lips sounded emptier than encouragement. She finished with, "That is who we are."
"Thank you, Princess Leia," Major Klander said. "As Her Highness said, I'm with the Alliance, Recovery and Assistance." He left out the T of his department, Leia noted, Trauma.
Major Klander rubbed his thinning red hair. "A terrible thing has happened. A terrible thing for the galaxy at wide; a terrible thing that means more to you than the rest can understand. You're going to ask why. For the rest of your lives, maybe."
He had a casual manner, almost folksy. Leia knew his specialty was winged beings, but since he was human he would have no trouble making the shift to helping the Alderaani.
"Why now," he was saying, pacing a few steps before turning back and pacing the other direction. "Why you. Why Alderaan. You're going to ask why- how- are humans capable of doing such evil to each other. You may come to a process in your thinking where you ask, how did the goddesses allow this to happen to something they created? And you'll wonder, pleadingly, if they can't rebuild it."
He was doing a good job, Leia thought. He had spent many hours with her, asking about the culture of Alderaan, and he was hitting to the heart of their origins.
"Some of these questions we may not be able to answer," he told them. "Some of these questions we've been asking since time began. Maybe the Force knows. Maybe we'll find out in the after life. Maybe our loved ones already have that answer." He looked around at the group, his face sad. "We'll have to console ourselves with that."
Leia sought the baby Maline, who was being blessedly quiet. She was sitting in her brother's lap now, and he held his palm up for her to clap while his other arm snaked around her belly, holding her still. Every so often, though his eyes were on Major Klander and he looked morose, he moved his palm to the side, and Maline missed. Leia smiled at the baby's reaction, who was surprised each time it happened.
Leia quietly took her leave. Maline knew the answers to Jaf's questions, she thought. A new soul, fresh from the Force. Still of the Force, Leia thought, only able to respond to her instincts. Pure, as her mother had said.
There was no way this baby could conceive of harming her fellow beings the way the Empire harmed its citizens. They way Tarkin harmed Alderaan. She loved her brother, her mother. She loved her father, whom she wouldn't remember but forgave for dying. A baby was love and trust.
How did a human learn hate?
I hate, Leia thought definitively. I hate Tarkin. I hate Vader. And I hate the Empire.
When the war was over, and Force be willing the Alliance won, then what? Would Leia still hate?
Another thing the Death Star left her. It took the things she loved, and gave her something to hate instead.
Jaf Klander's voice drifted softly out of the courtyard as she descended the mountain path. She wasn't sure if she would plead with the goddesses to recreate Alderaan. But love... Life went on, and it couldn't without love.
If there was something, or someone, to love-
Was love truly physical, in the heart, as the goddesses said? Leia's hurt all the time.