Disclaimer: I don't own Star Wars (if only!) and write this story not for profit, but solely for my own amusement.
Setting: 25 years after NJO
A Note: This is the series I began quite a while ago, titled "The Story They Don't Tell." I renamed it and performed a slight revision of these two and plan to write more. Any suggestions for potential characters will be welcomed, and I have a few in mind right now anyway.
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Leia
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The apartment is finally quiet now. For the last hour or so I've listened to my grandmother crying in the next room. What her tears are for this time, I don't know. But I certainly can't fault her for them, whatever the reason.
Ever since I was a little girl my mother has told my older brother and I stories about the galactic civil war my grandmother helped lead and my grandfather joined – the war that turned my grandparents and their good friends into heroes while taking away any hope they might have had for a normal life. Then there are the other stories, the stories about another war that turned my parents into heroes as well.
So when I hear my grandmother cry, I can't help but wonder what her tears are for this time. Are they for having taken other people's lives when she was younger than my own nineteen years? Perhaps they are for being forced to watch as everyone she knew was killed and her home was blasted out of existence?
Or are they just from the fact that she devoted more than thirty years of her life to fighting for a peace in the galaxy that she never thought she would live to see? Does she cry for all the friends she's lost through those years, all the pain she's witnessed, felt, and inflicted upon others? Are her tears for all the innocents whose lives have been lost during, and because of, her fight for justice and peace? Does she cry so often in private because she's spent so many years putting on a public show of courage and fearlessness?
Then there is my mother. There have been many nights I've seen and heard them together, mother and daughter, talking, laughing and crying over my uncle Anakin who I never had the chance to meet. They've told me through their tears that he died a hero, that he died saving so many others, and I can see how proud they are of him. But I can also see that their pride in his achievements and his sacrifice only serves to increase their pain, as if they can see what a great man he would have been had he lived just a little longer. And now his death is yet another wound left open, one that will probably never be healed.
I try to picture my mother and grandmother as pilots and gunners, wielding lightsabers and blasters, at my age. And I can't. Part of the reason for that, I think, is that I picture them as myself. And I can't picture myself doing those things. I've certainly been trained to use a lightsaber in battle, and I'm a pretty fair shot with a blaster, but I can't imagine having to kill anyone. Maybe that's due to the fact that I haven't grown up in the same galaxy they grew up in. I haven't had to fly a fighter except in practice or use a blaster on anything but targets.
I didn't have to fight an evil Empire, knowing with every step I took that I could be executed for treason. I didn't have to face off against an alien race bent on destroying anything and everything in the galaxy. I haven't had to watch everyone I know leave on dangerous missions that no one has any right to return from. I've never had anyone tell me that my brother or my lover or my best friend or my parents were never coming back to me.
So each time I hear my grandmother cry I try to imagine what her tears are for this time. But there are so many possibilities. There are so many wounds that will never heal, wounds that cause her such immeasurable pain that I cannot begin to fathom its intensity. So I don't think that her tears are for any one thing. I think they're for everything she's seen and done and felt, everything she hopes my brother and I and all of our generation will never be subjected to.