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Our Lady of Sighs 3/?
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
http://www.demando.net/
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She lay with her arms crossed over her chest, staring at the subtle metallic ceiling above. Leia breathed carefully past her lips, not making a noise, and her heart hammered under her hand. Struggling to keep her eyes open, she focused on the shifting shapes and colors brought on by exhaustion; if she fell asleep, if she closed her eyes at all, she might get up and leave her body behind. As a prisoner, she felt only fear of her own failure, that her secret might be pried from between her ribs no matter how hard she held on. With that, she didn't have room to be afraid of anything else. Her cell was small, and her body sang with pain from the preliminary beating administered by the Stormtroopers. Her lips bled, but precious words had not slipped past them. The bench she rested on embraced her without pity, like a coffin.
Well, it was about time someone got around to burying her.
"Where is my Nana?" asked the faceless little girl.
She was faceless to them; an incarnation of House Organa
in ribbons and lace, not an individual.Tripping over her long
pink dress as she fled the house. She tripped, fell to her knees
and tore her skirts, her delicate slippers dissolved under the dirt
and grime of the real world.
They said, "Your Nana is dead," and they used the
word as though she was supposed to understand.
She ran through the sunset courtyard, past the shadows
with nothing to hold them up, begging her mother's name. Nana,
her true mother, (i am born of and bound to you) who held
the world in the gentle circle of her arms. She wanted to scream "Mama!", no matter what the consequences, to bestow this truth
upon her Nana and make her come back.
"Tell me where my Nana is!" the child, "Where did you put
her, let me see her again, I want my Nana!" All in one breath.
"Such a scene," shadowy hands and shadowy fans making
little corridors for the whispers. "Over a servant, too," they said in
the same tone her father used when he told her to sit up straight.
Her puppy fat hands fisted in their silken gowns and dowry lace
and rhinestone gemstone layered shawls. She grabbed at the
curls of her caretakers, while the wind whistled into the courtyard
and lifted the leaves in a dance of frustration. The women's faces
where bland and their eyes like the broken beads she and Nana
used to play board games on the bathroom tile.
"Stop lying to me!" she felt like an animal, the wolf she was
named for, and she tore at the arms of the women determined to
mold her a china back and call her a lady.
Crying. Face turned into the velvet pillows on her mother's
blue-fog bed. She could still smell her mother's burnt flower scent.
Dreaming, she saw two beautiful youths dancing with masks in
their hands, saw her mother standing at a window while a man
set the world on fire. She screamed with silence in her throat,
awoke and moved through the shear curtains with the light of
Alderaan's moon.
There was a white pearl coffin the family chapel, ; it
blushed pink like the morning at the edges like the morning,
marble roses crawling over it. They had put Nana in the box,
like the musical jewelry case where the lady sang, you'll never
know dear, how much I love you... Leia, the little princess
who was perhaps too fiery and too loving and too real to
actually deserve her title, crept under the moonlight,
avoiding the colors on the floor mosaic.
Step on blue, nothing is true;
Step on green, never be clean,
Step on yellow, rise high and low;
Step on black, take it back;
Step on red... soon be dead.
Moonglow fell in white squares from the window; she
passed between them like stepping-stones in the the under-
water blue of the night. She put her hands on the lid at last,
mourning in barely remembered baby language.
"Nana," she said in her own tongue, "Mother, wake up.
I can smell the flowers and the water. Nana-Mother, come out
and play." If her Nana was a mist, a insubstantial phantom, she
wouldn't be afraid. Leia thought her mother would make a
beautiful ghost.
She pushed up, wedging herself against the floor, arms
straining to lift the lid. The coffin shivered, making the sigh of
stone on stone, but try as she might, the covering was too heavy,
the weight of her sorrow on her shoulders. A cry split her lips as
she hunched her shoulders desperately to make another attempt.
Nothing still, and a sadness laced and tainted with her child's
anger rose up and spread its wings, burning everything it touched.
There came something like lightning and thunder and a tower
falling down; Leia curled into a ball with her hands pressed to her
ears, terrified. The monster wasn't in the closet, or under the bed,
or even under the dark bridge. This time, the monster was inside
her. The night became silent once more, the smell of rain rushed in
the windows and promised a storm. Climbing to her feet, Leia held
her nightgown tightly against her body, slowly turning around.
The lid was on the ground unharmed; the contents of the coffin
once more barred to the world.
Rushing with arms open wide, she jumped, trying to reach
the high sides over the dais on which the coffin sat. She would
climb in with her mother, and lay in her still arms-- it didn't matter
if Nana was cold because they would be warm. Father and the ladies
and everyone else would just have to put them in the ground together.
With a running start this time, Leia jumped, pitching over
the the side in a tumble of white skirts and brown curls. She
landed with a cushioned thump that was only the sound of dry
blossoms being crushed. From inside the narrow box, the world
seemed so much larger, Leia tried to scream, but the relief pouring
down her throat canceled it out into silence.
Nana was not in the coffin.
Sometimes (said the old cooks at the Organa summer
house) maidens walk in the blue violet forest and vanish;
sometimes the most well behaved daughters, women of
the sweetest disposition, simply fade away, dissolve into the
Force, which devours their wisdom, embraces their eternity.
The coffin was filled to the brim, overflowing with flowers the
color of Leia's tears; she was drowning, up to her eyes in that
strange blue color that always made mother sad. They'd see it
sometimes, Leia remembered, walking on the beach just before
a storm, laying in the summer grass with the stars overhead.
'Look,' Nana would say, her large hand smoothed over
Leia's own like a glove, guiding it to point, 'see that color? See
the blue in it, how hard it is, and the black that makes it darker--
oh, there's a bit of the sky in it too. Someone has eyes like that.'
Leia always tried to guess who it was.
"Mama?" asked Leia softly, feeling the casket as wide as the
sea, as though she would drive down through it and find her
beloved one there. There were some of Nana's things, buried in
the petal-laden waves; Leia laughed suddenly, brightly, as though
she and her Nana had been dancing in a careful circle singing and
then had fallen down-- the sound rose to her mother's praise.
My Nana, Leia thought, has been taken bodily into heaven.
She couldn't remember how the lid came be replaced, but
the feel of the moon on her back as she climbed through her
window was still fresh in Leia's mind. She crept back to the high,
silver snow canopy bed with flowers in her hair.
Afterwards, at the funeral, they said what a good girl she
was. So composed. Just like a real princess.
There came the sound of boots on the unforgving metal floor, and Leia stiffened, her childhood falling away from her. he Stormtroopers dug their spider-fingers into her arms, carrying her so love that her calves and ankles dragged on the floor. In the polished metal of the corridor walls, they looked like indistinct falls of snow, as though someone had shaken the branches of bare trees. There were turns upon turns until Leia stopped keeping track-- at last they lay her on the floor and she rose onto her knees, gasping as though she'd been thrust from the ocean. An officer in black said something to her, but she didn't register it. Instead, her eyes caught on the coil of ebony in his hands, and she understood his purpose in a way words could not convey. The whip uncoiled like a snake, snapped like a serpentbug on a string. That was a memory-- her father, when she was old enough to know she was sometimes someone else in his eyes, and they sat on the edge of a summer lake. 'See?' he said, tying a string about a captured serpentbug, 'It's like a kite.' The little creature spun about wildly, then dove into the lake, suicidal. Even the best people can be cruel.
"Where are the plans?" it was one voice and many voices, the agonized cries of those the terrible station might destroy. Strengthened, Leia arched her back and endured against the cutting edge, feeling her throat pluck like harp strings. She could almost see her voice instructor, the one from the Alderaa University who's lips, when not pursed to produce music, were always closed around the sweet role of an obsidian pipe.
'Reach! Another octave!' the teacher would say, striking a long, metallic key. Leia reached with her scream, cupped her lips towards that high silver note. The whip came down on her back and blood flew, became a rainbow in the air.
And then--
A warm place, a crimson ocean where the thunder in the distance was really a heartbeat. She was suspended beside him-- they touched and connected, grew.
I am you and you are me.
Neither of them needed to breathe.
The length of Leia's voice extended loud and clear, the kind of beauty that shames crystal into breaking. She understood, vaguely, that she had fainted or was in the process of doing so; in the void, the young faces of her choir-mates clustered about her, framed by school-girl's braids. And past their nonexistent shoulders, Leia glimpsed a young boy towards the back with an earnest face and eyes that were a blue she knew but had never seen.
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She woke with the feeling of a child standing the shadow of a monolith and knew instantly that he was looming over her. Breathing deeply, Leia shifted on the bench, still laying on her stomach. For a moment, the image of herself as a beached mermaid danced in her mind and she laughed out loud despite the pain it caused. His breath was the soft hiss of death, and her own pattern immediately settled directly into on opposite his. As a child, her nightmares had been dominated not by her own fear, but by her father's, by the images of the Dark Lord swirling in Prince Organa's mind. Now the borrowed fear only inspired defiance in her veins. After all, she had something the Sith did not.
"Is there something you want, Lord Vader?" Her eyes were open now, staring fixedly at the flickering lights of his respirator. Sugar-laced acid dripped from her lips, she could taste it on her tongue.
"I would know where the plans are, your highness." The last words were heavy with his disproval, and something else entirely.
"You know very well I'll go to my grave before I tell you," she said, her tone almost civil. In spite of the pain, she rolled on her side, cupping her chin with one hand. Her eyes searched the void of his, staring into her own distortion in the ebony lenses. Softening just a little, Leia allowed her expression to neutralize, not out of pity, but out of understanding. A look passed between them; she sensed his own gaze (a hard blue; like the boy at the back of the auditorium in the vision, watching her sing).
Silence, save for his breathing.
You could start the story "once upon a time", but that
wouldn't be right. There was a beautiful, wonderful queen,
and her orphaned daughter, a kind father and a monster;
but some of them were confused as to who they were, and
the story didn't have a happy ending. It didn't really end at all.
Father forbade her to visit Nana's grave. To other adults,
in hushed conversations over tinkling glasses of pink-yellow wine,
she heard him say that it was morbid, that it was only a servant,
that he wanted for his precious daughter a happy childhood. To
her, he simply said no. She attended the grave in secret, somehow
understanding that her childhood was already over. She went
simply to be near something that was her mother's; though the
casket was empty, her child's mind that that perhaps it was like
a Holocom. Whispering against the marble head stone, Leia closed
her eyes and willed Nana to hear her words.
After school, in her white button-up uniform dress, sitting
with her lunch box on her knee, and she closed her eyes and waited,
listening the wind make it's was though between the graves. Rain
lay over the headstones and grass like a fine veil; Leia was wet through
her skirt and just a little bit happy. She was seeing her mother, dancing
in waves of midnight blue and candlelight-- the kind of happiness you
hold in your hands. Even presently, she had no understanding of what happened next, only that she felt a tugging on the precious memory and
her mind tensed in a way that came naturally. She opened her eyes and
saw Vader standing straight as any head stone; and because she knew
nothing of him, she felt no fear.
He didn't ignore her, and he gave her no outward side of notice
as he came to kneel before Nana's gave. Somehow, she felt as if his shadow
was watching her. A single, thick black finger traced the complicated swirls
and strokes Leia was just learning to make. Alderaanian-- the characters
for heart and moon and snow. Padme Nabberrie.
"She's not in there," Leia said softly. He made no human show of
grief, but it hung heavy about him in the moist after-rain air, and she
somehow felt a little sorry for him.
"What?" the word was intense, and Leia faltered, stumbling from
her perch on the side of the headstone and onto her feet.
"She's not in there," she repeated, holding her lunch box o her
chest as though it was her armor. It didn't come out in words, but she
heard him somehow ask her name.
"I'm Leia Organa," she said aloud. The curtsies and soft coos of
her teachers leapt into her mind, but she folded her hands at the small
of her back and bowed like a boy.
"Prince Organa," Vader's voice thundered without menace. Leia
beamed, the title sounded so much better without the 'ess' on the end.
Her smile didn't last long; the questions he wasn't asking rushed over
her and stung. The roaring in her ears was deafening.
"Where is she?" he asked with words.
"In heaven," Leia answered firmly.
"The body." A command.
Her lips were dry and hurt somehow, "Not in the ground."
Studying her for a moment, he asked, "You're the child of Prince
Organa and the secretary, correct?" His helmet nodded just slightly
towards the Organa mausoleum, where a woman named Keiko Strom
was buried.
"My mother is dead," Leia answered honestly. The nebulous ideas
of true mother and woman-with-the-title-mother stayed locked in her
throat-- the only thing she understood was the fear attached to it. Her
father's.
"But she," the word was a prayer as he once again caressed the
carving of Nana's name, "she lives."
"No!" the word burst from her throat with a violence that left
her blushing under Vader's heavy gaze. Princesses, after all, were not
supposed to be loud. "I saw her dead," she lied. The desire to protect her
mother burned inside, "She's just not in the ground."
A noise came from Vader, low like grief and sorrow and just a
little disbelief, but so hard it was a weapon that could cut. It settled
over the cemetery and Leia, until he placed his heavy claw-hand on her
shoulder and began to usher her away.
"Come, little prince," he said, "You have been a great help to
me. I will take you home."
How wide her father's eyes were when she came up the long
courtyard with her giant shadow, how pale his face and how strange
the sound of his mind working! He'd scooped her up in his arms,
holding so tight she felt her bones bend, and later she came to suspect
that Vader took her home for just this reason. She did not understand
their subtle stabbings of one another, but she did understand the pain
as her father shook her, saying in a loud voice how she should never
speak to Vader, never tell him anything. Later, her father's voice was
softer, saying that he was sorry, that he didn't mean to be upset, that
he loved her and didn't want her hurt and didn't she understand?
That's where the story should end, but that's where it doesn't
end, because so much was left unsaid. She saw Vader many times
afterwards, always measuring herself by how much she had to crane
her neck to look him in the eye. He felt she owed him something, he
wanted something from her and she held onto it because it was all of
her mother she really had left. Once, she had a dream of her mother in
a garden and herself standing at a window, watching as Vader leapt
over the fence, a fearsome grim reaper, and spirited her away. There
was something about that in a hymn-- dark upon light, because it hurt
too much.
"You're not here for the plans," Leia said with sudden insight. Her eyes changed from the color of a polished drop of blood to the soft brown of a baby doe. Vader remained were he was, and Leia listened to his breathing, trying to decipher his strange language. She felt a light relief in her throat, like water smoothng over her pain, somehow faded; unconsciously, she tipped her head back as though she could drink it before she realized it was merely a sensory gift; Vader's memory of water. Wide eyed, she rolled back on her belly, resting her cheek against the cold metal and hating the feeling of being in debt.
"What was in the coffin?" he asked finally. The words lay on the floor, begging to be traded.
"Flowers," Leia closed her eyes at last, falling away from her body, "Ameshien." He stood still, and she could sense him waiting. "Forget me nots," she elaborated, "they're called forget-me-nots."
"Your father is a thief," Vader said with new harshness in his voice. With that, he turned and the door erased his presence.
Leia smiled blindly, "Ah, but so are you."