They had to look remarkably out of place, Leia thought, she and Han sitting on the broad staircase leading to the old Senate chambers. Young, motionless; attractive and waiting. Who sat outdoors in Imperial City?

The sky was dull and gray, the steps shallow and broad. Her long vest shimmered silver, like a distant sword glinting in sunlight. And the deep red of her tunic and billowing pants, cuffed at the ankles, was the color of dried blood.

Han had watched Leia choose her ground. She couldn't say why the step called her. It was near halfway from the base up to the old Senate entrance. The building was getting a new facade and she sat with her back turned to it. He didn't sit at first but shrugged the backpack off his shoulders to drop two steps down from her. It landed with a thud, weighed down by her clothes and the thought bowl wrapped inside them. Then he paced a square around her; first up some steps, then across and behind her, down, and below her across to where he started.

Leia pulled the holocube from her pocket and wondered about Han. To an Alderaani his movements were striking. Tracing a square was what a weaver did. The ends of a thread were carefully hidden at the back of a piece, tucked under other strands to disappear into the work.

It was very unlikely Han knew that. Perhaps it was a Corellian thing to do. Modern Corellians descended from a warring culture; their history was rife with fractured kingdoms, broken alliances, and shifting territory. Leia recalled a conversation with Luke, who repeated an expression his Corellian flight partner had mentioned, an idiom incorporating a sword dance. Maybe Han was enacting some forgotten tradition and forging a shield around her, a magical barrier against trespass.

But there was no magic. And Han had scoffed at the power of the Force. Leia decided he was learning the lay of the land. It seemed like something Chewie might have taught him, and that thought pleased her almost as much as the idea he tucked himself around her.

He finally sat next to her backpack, his imaginary square well defined, and began to stare down passersby, daring them to look at him. Some beings gave them a fleeting glance, but most avoided eye contact.

"I could set out a begging cup," he offered as a joke.

"We wouldn't earn much," Leia observed, and he chuckled.

While she waited he watched. They had arrived early. During a lull in pedestrian traffic, when there was no one to answer his glower, Han turned his head to look at her. She answered his gaze by raising her brows. His wasn't glaring. It was interested.

"What's that?" he asked, his eyes falling to the object she held in her palm.

She displayed it in the center of her hand. "A holocube. It belonged to my father. He had been to Yavin before. I found it during the evacuation among some unclaimed things."

"Huh." Han reached a long arm up the two steps and she let him take it from her. "Holocube of what?"

Leia watched as he took his time with each holo. "Things my father loved."

He smiled slightly at the one of her as a child, then moved his eyes back up to her, regarding her face with an artist's appraisal. "I'm seeing if I can recognize you backwards."

She allowed his scrutiny and glowed. "Do you?"

"I don't know," he said honestly. "Maybe. Your cheeks aren't as chubby. Something about the eyes, though."

"Do you believe in spirits?" Leia asked.

"No."

"Or fate, or something. This," Leia reached out to tap the top of his rugged hand that held the holocube, "is so precious. After I had lost everything, I found it. And it tells a story, do you see?"

"Uh, not really. I see... time, I guess. From you as a little girl to almost now." He rolled the cube so the one of Leia as sworn-in Senator was face up.

"Yes." But he didn't see the whole story, the father and the daughter and the succession of queens, all the way back to the twelve goddesses dancing. It wasn't finished, and she was intrigued by the idea that it would never be finished.

"And this is your mother," Han surmised, moving to a different holo.

"Yes, but as Queen." He let Leia move the cube. "This one-" it was the one where her mother playfully chomped at the stylus- "is my mother."

Han nodded. "Was she like that as Queen?"

"She could be."

"And this one? Your father loved this guy?"

Leia hesitated; her lower lip parted and she looked at Han's face. "That's- you've not seen the Emperor as a younger man?"

"What- that's Palpatine?"

Leia nodded, amused at Han's incedulity. "They were Senators together. He may have been Supreme Chancellor in that holo by then; I don't know. He was for a while. He kept managing to get his term extended because of the Clone Wars."

"Gods, he looks like a man there. It's funny," Han broke off to lift his eyes to scan the steps, "the Empire has always put humans way above others, but I never think of him as one. He's kriffing ugly now."

"There's much ugliness in humans. How old are you again?"

"'Round thirty. Why? Am I ugly?"

"No," Leia indulged him, "I think you know you're not ugly." She ignored his puff of pleasure. "Because I think he's only looked as he does now-" Leia broke off and frowned. "He claims there was an attack on his life by the Jedi. It all happened at the same time. Dissolving the Republic, and eradicating the Jedi. That was only about twenty years ago. So surely you must have seen him as Chancellor. You were a child."

Han shrugged. "Kid princesses pay attention to politics; not regular kids. Though I do remember the Empire. We had something new to recite in school, and they put his picture up." Han hmphed. "Made a girl cry. I remember that."

Leia's thoughts were miles away. "Memories are deceptive, what we choose to remember. What my father loved was the Republic. This holo reminded him of that."

"And the one that destroyed it."

"Yes."

"The Rebellion, too then."

"He didn't love war. The Rebellion was for the Republic." She took the cube back, feeling cooler towards him suddenly. "Do you know how hard it was for him to plan war? He was Alderaani, for goddess's sake."

Her irritation didn't bother Han at all. "Too bad the Jedi didn't succeed. Why didn't they?" he suddenly wondered. "They had him looking like that. Must have had the upper hand. Then we wouldn't be in this situation."

Leia nodded distantly. "He wages a very different war, doesn't he."

"No, I'd say he's pretty damn violent. Moved on from bombs to destroying whole planets."

"There's a deep current of subterfuge. And at the same time this... these perceived truths, or attitudes." She stirred herself enough to answer Han. "Bombing Corellia wasn't military strategy. It was punishment."

"Yeah," Han conceded.

"You're not familiar with Chancellor Palpatine?"

"Not really."

"Or the Jedi? Luke told me he didn't even really know what the Force was until he met General Kenobi."

Han's lips were pursed thoughtfully. "What I heard was different than what the old man told Luke."

"Don't you see how remarkable that is? The Jedi Order lasted for centuries. Centuries, Han. You can see the Temple spire, right over there." Leia pointed in the direction of a blackened tower in the city skyline. Speeder traffic buzzed all around it. "When you were a boy, that was occupied. And within the span of twenty years, Palpatine has managed to mostly undo all of that. The people of Imperial City live in the shadow of a ruin centuries old and they're not even curious.

"It's quite an achievement, if you think about it," Leia finished.

"You gonna fight him, or admire him?"

"Oh, I'm going to fight. If I have to be military I will be, but as Princess of Alderaan I am in the position where I can fight like he does."

"He fights dirty."

Leia smiled. "You saw Danneria. She didn't know which way was up."

"If she gave it a moment's thought she would," Han retorted. "She didn't wanna know."

"You could be right," Leia acknowledged. "But it stems from the Emperor."

"And that's what this is about." Han's outswept hand took in the broad staircase. "You're- going to war. This is a battle?"

"It's my opening gambit. He hasn't named me; he hasn't addressed the lawsuit or the reparations. Which he's paying. Publicly he presents a different face to the one the Alliance sees. He also has downplayed the existence of the Death Star."

"You could be painting a big red target on your back."

"I don't think so," Leia disagreed. "Because if he aimed at me that way, then everyone would know I spoke the truth and I'd be martyred."

Han looked doubtful. "A war of words then?"

"You get enough voices and the words have harmony," Leia said.

Han took in a bushel of air and raised his brows. "I'd pay a hundred credits to see a year from now," he said. "So you're thinkin' the best Palps can do to you is character assassination?"

"Save your credits for your gangster Hutt," Leia said.

"Hm," Han grunted darkly, and he stopped talking.

Leia didn't mind; she suspected herself of deliberately ending the conversation. She gazed at the portrait of her parents and thought of Luke, who liked to annoy Han just to get him to think. She also wanted more time to prepare herself. It was a risk, this attempt at war.

Did Leia even have an army? She worried more about the reaction of the surviving Alderaani more than she did her colleagues in the Alliance. What if Palpatine succeeded in raising their anger against her, their Princess?

He already sowed the seeds. They will see there is no need for a Queen, was one of his few public statements about the aftermath of Alderaan.

What if they blamed the House of Organa for what happened to Alderaan?

The one thing no one could ever see was how she had blamed herself. Tarkin wanted to use it, she repeated Luke's words to her. Leia saw herself held back against Vader's chest, straining so hard she couldn't scream. It was Tarkin, she said to her past self. And she repeated it to the regal and dignified portrait of her parents. Tarkin is responsible for the destruction of Alderaan.

It was hard to separate mother and father from Queen and Senator. The populace was their family. Leia was Princess. Was she ever a child?

Mother, she pleaded. Am I doing this right?

Her father had supported the throne. It wasn't until a few years after her mother's death that he grew closer to war. And it wasn't because he grew distant from his wife's politics; Palpatine's actions put the safety of the galaxy at increasing risk.

Unease grew, slowly. War snapped into being.

Leia's childhood occurred during this unease. She remembered playing under the conference table, hopping a stuffed animal around the forest of feet; maidens sitting at the base of the Chandrilan Gift tree, waiting for their Princess to jump off the swing into mid-air; for a few years, she and Lennist had actually had fun at Harvest Balls, jumping from tile to tile with great leaps, her long skirt folds gathered in her fists. "We're tadtoads!" he had exclaimed. This was when their understanding of the marriage contract was put in simple, friendly terms by the adults in charge. "You are forever friends," it was described.

Her father hadn't included Lennist in the holocube set. Things my father loved. He didn't love Lennist? His future son-in-law? How could he, Leia sniffed, same as her, for in later years she barely saw the young man her childhood friend became. The innocent feeling of forever friends changed when the meaning of their pact grew up with them.

He had kissed her once. It had come too early. "We are to be wed," he had said, not yet a man, and leaned closer, his eyes already closed. Leia had allowed it, because she was curious. She wanted to know if his lips would fill her with a magic glow, if their souls awaited this long-sought bonding.

What happened to the boy who pretended to be a tadtoad? Was he still there, underneath the pull of power caused by society and sex? Leia saw now she was troubled early on. She had wondered as his lips touched hers, what happened to forever friends? Why had their families chosen for them? Why couldn't they enjoy love the same as that sensation of flight off a swing's bench, high in the air?

"Here comes one, I think," Han interrupted her thoughts.

Leia blinked, and followed his gaze. She nodded, and put away her holocube. She had been lightyears away. Her thoughts had to travel across time and space, back to the present, and it made her stomach thump.

Han, who had traced a square, and let her be. Whether she was flying through the air or planning a war, he was there. And she put her hand back in her pocket to caress the unseen portrait of her playful mother. It occurred to her, and she would love to have been able to discuss this with her mother, that quite possibly Han factored in with some choice Leia had made.

It could have been anyone. Where did it start? Did the twelve goddesses dancing have anything to do with destiny of a certain Corellian? Or was that god of irony and truth, interfering in her father's open resistance, or with General Kenobi in a cantina? It could have been anyone, she thought again; Luke, or she could have forged a friendship with those simpering generals at Yavin.

But she couldn't evacuate in a single cockpit X-Wing; she didn't ask for a switched assignment. Nor had she gone along with the plan. She knew what she was going to do, and she selected the Millennium Falcon.

Leia was without a mother, without a Viceroy, without a planet. She had no one to answer to, no defense to make. She was on her own, and it wasn't that frightening.

Whatever this is, she told her mother, however it turns out, I will do this.