Warnings for references to slavery, rape/sexual assault and suicide in this chapter.
Leia slept terribly.
She always had, since she'd left Coruscant. Luke's pain rattled the Force with every scream, every twitch, every tear. But now it was worse.
Because the dreams were different.
A deep bass rumble. She couldn't make out the words, but she knew that voice, as intrinsically as she knew her brother's, or her own. She knew the shape of that shadow, the creeping cold that accompanied it. . .
And every time its questions went unanswered, pain followed.
She woke up sweating.
No.
She scrubbed at her eyes with the heel of her hands, still feeling the. . . sludge of that dark presence curling around her shoulders. No, he couldn't—
Her father wouldn't—
No.
She didn't know what to think.
A glance at the chrono told her it was only three hundred hours, when she wasn't due to report to her menial tasks and pretend nothing was wrong until six, but. . . there was no way she was going back to sleep now.
No way she was going to risk seeing. . . that. . . again.
So she grimaced and swung her legs out of the bed, reached up to undo her hair from the plait she'd slept in. She changed quickly and didn't pause until she went to pick up the hairbrush.
Finish that sentence and I will ram that hairbrush into you so hard you get imprints on your colon.
Remembered Luke's comfortable laugh, the ease with which he'd settled onto her bed and started doing her hair himself—
What is this Empire coming to?
The lie tinged with guilt, the secret neither of them had been able to voice yet—
—it's up to us to changes things—
—and how she'd just. . . let him lie.
They'd drifted apart so much in the road to defection. And then, of course, camaraderie had brought them back together, but it hadn't been the same.
How would it be when she reunited with Luke for a third time?
And, after. . . everything. . . where would their father fit into it?
She finished tying her hair and left the room, thoughts still far, far away. But it didn't mean she didn't notice, when she passed Padmé's office, that there was someone inside it.
Padmé was inside it.
She frowned.
Wandered up to the door and knocked, sharply; heard the intake of breath and felt the momentary surprise. Then Padmé said, "Come in."
Leia pushed open the door and immediately frowned further when she saw her mother seated at her desk, datapads stacked higher than her head at her elbows. She glanced up briefly; she smiled when she saw Leia, but it was. . . bleary. . . and her brow creased in concern as well. "Shouldn't you be asleep?"
"Shouldn't you?" Leia countered, sliding into the seat opposite her at her desk. "Did you just get up early or have you slept yet?"
Padmé didn't answer. Leia really didn't want to be the one lecturing here, but. . . "Running yourself into the ground isn't going to help Luke."
Padmé's lips twitched. "One might suggest you take your own advice, Leia."
Frustration welled inside her, but she had nothing to say to that.
Padmé glanced down at the datapad she was reading and put it aside, folding her hands on her desk. "The leaders of the other Rebel cells have pledged support—or, at least, approval—for rescuing Luke. We can go ahead with a full military attack."
Leia frowned. "And we couldn't before?"
"I'm the figurehead of the Alliance, motley collection of Rebel cells as it is. Each cell remains more or less independent, so I'm in charge of organising cooperation between them. I'm sure you've noticed this is just a token administration base—I don't have any great number of troops to command myself. I'm not a military leader."
Leia tapped her fingers against the arm of the chair. "And now you've got approval? Support, from the others?"
"Yes."
"What changed their minds?"
Padmé shrugged. "Who can say? Ana— Vader's picked up his attacks in the Outer Rim territories after he finished trying to tie up loose ends with you and Luke, so maybe they feel pressured to do something they feel might strike back at that, or draw him away. Maybe they didn't want to look bad, considering Saw Gerrera agreed to the rescue when they didn't. I don't particularly care right now." She rubbed at her eyes with her thumb—they were surrounded by two indigo hollows, like bright bruises.
Leia said, "You're terrified for Luke, aren't you?"
Padmé froze.
She lowered her hands back to their folded position; this time, Leia suspected, it was to keep them from trembling.
"Of course I am," she said. "I. . . may not have the Force"—Leia winced at the memory of their. . . disagreement—"but I still have nightmares about him."
Leia swallowed and didn't say anything.
"Why would you think I wasn't?"
She worked her mouth for a moment, closed it, then opened it again.
Finally she settled on, "You've seemed. . . distant." They'd been over this, but she reiterated: "Like you were avoiding me. Or avoiding thinking or caring about him. And. . . you left. . ."
"Yes," Padmé said. "I left."
She looked down at her hands and sighed.
Then she leaned back and went rummaging around in the drawers in her desk.
"I didn't want to leave you," she said as she searched, her movements quiet and precise. "I hated Tatooine, but I loved living with you two, Owen and Beru. . . You'd just taken your first steps when Ahsoka found out I was alive and contacted me, and I realised that I couldn't stand by any longer. I—" She choked a little. "I thought you'd be safe, on Tatooine. With those two."
Finally, her hand closed around something and she drew it out, passed it across the table.
Leia took the disc in both hands. She turned it over in her fingers for a moment before she lit the holo, and some unnameable emotion bloomed in her chest, behind her eyes.
It was Padmé. The woman in front of her was years older and unhappier, but it was still obvious.
Padmé was smiling, broader and more brilliantly than Leia had ever seen anyone smile—apart from Luke. She was holding the hand of a small, golden-haired toddler sitting on his bottom, who beamed back up at her in response. And he in turn was holding the hand of a dark-haired toddler, standing, face screwed up in concentration even as her brother weighed her down.
Leia took several breaths before she was able to actually breathe.
"I watched the Trade Federation invade my planet," Padmé said softly. "I watched your father the day your grandmother died. I watched the birth of the Empire, and I watched Anakin as he grew overwhelmed by the thought that I'd betrayed him and tried to kill me—and you two, inside my womb.
"But the day I returned to Tatooine to find you gone," she finished, "was the worst day of my life."
Leia was silent for a moment, taking that all in. Then she smiled weakly and said, "So, we have a plan to rescue Luke?"
Padmé smiled back.
"Actually," she said, "we were hoping you could help us with that. . ."
It was three weeks of planning, poor sleep and pacing, but eventually the day came.
Leia was going to get her brother back.
Padmé, for obvious reasons, couldn't come to Coruscant with them. But Ahsoka did. And it was her who picked up the slack where Padmé couldn't do any motherly fussing herself.
"Are you sure it's wise for you to come?" she asked, even as the Hidden Star closed its landing ramp and took off. Leia rolled her eyes and inspected the passengers aboard it over Ahsoka's shoulder.
"I'm certain," she replied. "I'm going to rescue Luke."
The first test came, as expected, when they reached Coruscant.
It came even earlier for Leia, who gasped the moment they slipped out of hyperspace and darkness swamped her senses; she chucked up shield after shield, praying that she stay invisible, silent as a ghost, barely a ripple on the Force. . .
Ahsoka gave her a tight look. "Can you sense him?"
Him was left unclear. Luke, or Palpatine? She'd give anything to never have to sense Palpatine again, but she'd give ten times as much just to feel Luke once, to know that he was alright—
She shook her head. "No. Shields are up."
"And so are ours," Wedge said from his point in the pilot's seat. "They're hailing us."
Leia sucked in a breath, leaned back in the chair behind Wedge and closed her eyes. She didn't dare check with the Force what was going on, so she just scrunched up her eyes and begged, begged anyone who could hear her. . .
If this ship's captain was already wise to what was going on. . .
"Trading ship Iego Rising, state your cargo and business on Coruscant."
Biggs flipped the switch and replied, barely keeping the distaste from their voice, "Uhhh, manual labour for Imperial City," he replied. "We should be on the roster."
There was an audible pause, then the Imperial hummed when he read the records he'd pulled up in front of him. "Confirmed, Rising. Transmitting approved course to Imperial Palace now. If you deviate from this course, you will be fired upon."
"Copy that," Biggs replied. He managed to keep the shaking out of his voice until he finally breathed a sigh of relief. "That's it. We're on our way in."
Quiet exclamations greeted the news; even Leia smiled a little, meeting Ahsoka's eye.
"I'll go make sure everyone's ready," she said, and slipped back into the passenger's hold.
There were all watching all expectantly from the moment she entered, dressed in their roles of tattered slaves and armed slavers. Leia herself was wearing the same plain, poor-quality clothing slavers dressed their merchandise in, and condescended just like the rest of them to being shackled in a line, the thin metal binders rubbing at her wrists the moment they went on.
"You look tense, Skywalker," one of the 'slavers' murmured. Leia glanced up; it was Erso.
She had to be a slaver, Leia thought. They wore full-face helmets; the slaves didn't. And Palace security knew what Erso looked like.
They knew what Leia looked like as well, but that didn't matter. She wasn't going in the front door.
"Funny, that," she murmured back, then Erso wandered back down the line and someone nudged her with her shoulder.
"You alright?"
She nodded grimly. "You know, you can stop asking me that."
Ahsoka grimaced. "No I can't. You're Padmé's kid, I've got to look out for you."
"And make sure I don't break into Imperial strongholds unsupervised?"
"Exactly."
The Star shuddered as it set down on a landing pad outside one of the trade entrances to the Palace. She kept her gaze on the floor, letting scraggly, greasy strands of hair hang down to obscure her face, hoping desperately that the bloody makeup they'd applied to it held up for at least initial inspection. She'd dyed her hair black and put in contacts to help; hopefully that, combined with the fact there seemed to be a fresh cut right across her face that bisected her right eyebrow, took out a chunk of her nose and twisted the left side of her lip, would help her pass.
To anyone who didn't know her well, of course.
It was not intended to fool Luke.
"The moment we reach that speeder," she murmured to Ahsoka, "jump."
She really hoped Erso was right about there being a convenient kitchen midden directly below.
She didn't know herself. It wasn't like she'd frequented the Palace kitchens often—or dared to look too closely at Palpatine's endless parade of slaves.
Voices, outside. Leia strained her ears to hear them, hoping—always at it with the hope—that her tension could be misconstrued as fear.
The ramp came down and Erso shoved an inactive stun baton into the back of the last person in line. "Get moving," she ordered, and the line started forwards.
This part of Coruscant was just starting to edge into dusk, and the light tinged everything bloody as the slaves filed out to be presented to the Imperial inspection team. Leia stood in line with everyone else, head bowed, but she shook. With cold, with anger, with adrenaline; she didn't know. But she stood there and shook as the inspectors made their way down the line.
"What was your name again?" one inspector asked a slaver, already sounding bored. He took a Rodian woman's chin roughly in his hand and pried her mouth open to inspect her teeth; he shut it with a scoff. "Your merchandise isn't as high quality as what your boss usually delivers."
"Yeah, well, Crimson Dawn has been in decline for quite a while," replied the slaver in an accented voice. Leia frowned for a moment before she managed to place it: Andor. "Since the top man died—"
"I don't care." The inspector waved his hand. "That one, that one and that one, we don't want. Throw them back in your ship, throw them off this platform, I don't care. We're not paying for them."
"Alright," Andor said, "we can toss them back in the ship and find another buyer. No need to waste them." He made a short, sharp gesture with his hand and Erso stepped forward to release the indicated slaves from their cuffs, steering them back towards the Star.
The inspector moved along the line again, more quickly this time. His gaze, flinty and cold, swept from slave to slave with a ruthless efficiency—then stilled on Leia with a sneer.
A hand around her chin yanked her forward. She stumbled with the chains, rubbing her wrists raw and snapped her gaze up to glare with all the fury of a thousand suns—then snapped her gaze down just as quickly when she remembered her situation.
"Feisty, this one," the inspector observed, his grin tightening on her chin. "I see she's already paid the price for it."
Andor laughed nervously. "Indeed. If you think this is lively, you should have seen her when we first picked her up—"
"She's pretty, I admit," his hand felt from her chin and Leia scowled at the ground, "but the Emperor has no use for a pleasure slave whose pretty face has been marred like this."
"Oh no, she's a cook," Andor blurted out as fast as he could. It was like he could feel the temperature dropping around them, Leia's storm barely contained by her adamantine shields. "She's seen plenty of use from past patrons in both areas, I'm sure, but she's one of the best moonglow chefs in the Outer Rim. Surely her value only increases once her. . . temperament has been calmed."
The inspector had already moved on. "Surely."
Leia took a deep breath and tried not to collapse there and then.
Ahsoka bumped her shoulder in support.
"Hey," she said.
"No talking!" Erso snapped.
After another excruciating minute, the inspector was done. Their number had been halved, and Andor was busy grumbling about it to the inspector the way any cheated slaver might, so Leia just exchanged one weighted look with Ahsoka. It was time.
Ahsoka drew a long, rusty nail from her sleeve, then the barest touch of the Force—so light there was no way Palpatine had felt it, surely—had both their cuffs springing open, clattering to the floor. Ahsoka dropped the nail as well.
There was an indignant shout behind her, the Imperial inspector—
Then they both surged forwards and jumped.
The fathomless levels of Coruscant flashed before her eyes for the briefest moment, then she saw the ledge she was supposed to grab and grabbed it, praying to the Force for guidance as the force of it nearly yanked her arms from her sockets and sent her careening into another platform landing knee-deep in something she really didn't want to think about.
Because this. . . wasn't a platform they'd landed on.
Ahsoka grunted, wading through the mess. "I thought Jyn said they didn't dump their waste until full sundown?" she groaned.
"This isn't full waste. Just the leftover from sunrise."
"Ugh," Ahsoka said, and gagged good-naturedly. "Middens."
Paradoxically, Ahsoka's distaste for the situation cheered her up more than anything else. She started wading after her.
"We just need to climb up to the top and sneak into the secret passages before they dump it," she said.
Ahsoka's knee hit something. It looked like a nerf's skull.
"I can't believe I'm saying this," Ahsoka said, "but I wish we could've taken the sewer."
Jyn kept her back straight and her face straight, for all that it couldn't be seen behind the mask, as they all rushed forward.
The Imp inspector knelt down to pick up the rusted nail between thumb and forefinger, like he barely wanted to touch it, and spat, "How did your merchandise get ahold of this?"
"They must've picked the lock," Cassian said, shouting Jyn a faux glare. "We'll make sure nothing like this happens again."
"It had better," the Imp growled. "Crimson Dawn really is going to the dogs." He waved a hand. "Leave them be; forget about it. If the whores would rather kill themselves than serve in His Majesty's palace, then so be it. But I am not paying for them."
Cassian said something in response, but Jyn just stalked up and down the line of remaining 'slaves' wordlessly. She was smirking behind the mask.
Time for phase two.