Signs of Life
By JalendaviLady
Chapter 12
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Disclaimer: I do not own Star Wars.
If you recognize any characters, locations, or things in the following story, George Lucas owns them.
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Anakin woke the next morning to salted-shut eyelids from crying himself to sleep. He groaned slightly, fumbling to clean them.
"Shh, Father. Just be still." Leia gently dabbed at his face with a wet cloth. "Relax. You had quite a shock yesterday."
Anakin opened his eyes, squinting at the light in the room. He saw and heard Leia fumble for something and the lights dimmed. "Thank you," he whispered. "Sorry to be such a bother..."
She held his hand firmly. "Father, there is nothing for you to apologize for... nothing medical, at least. And the non-medical things... you were lied to and manipulated. I doubt very many people would blame you and you alone for anything that happened. The Emperor taught you to blame the world for what was his doing..." She was rambling and Anakin knew it.
He weakly squeezed her hand, then let it go. "But I was already falling to the Dark Side when I fell into the lava."
The memories washed over him like a tide unturnable. He felt tears run down his face.
Leia wiped at his face again. "Shh. You're safe now. And without Palpatine's lies, I doubt you would have fallen so far or stayed there for long."
If Palapatine had never touched the galaxy, the Trade Federation would never have acted on Naboo. Padme would have been a great senator, maybe even be Chancellor by now. Obi-Wan would have ended up on the Council, eventually. Qui-Gon would have lived to see old age. Hannar would still be alive. I would still be on Tatooine, if not as a slave then as a poor moisture farmer. I would have been there to help Mamre, though I wouldn't have had the knowledge how...
I would have died with her. I owe my current existence to the machinations of the Sith.The knowledge settled coldly in his mind.
Leia's voice interrupted his thoughts. "The medics want you to try something."
"What?"
"They need you to see if you can manage drinking some water, just to see if it might jump-start something... besides the fact you dehydrated yourself slightly by crying yesterday and there's only so much stuff they dare stick in your bloodstream at once."
"All right." He moved to sit, not accepting her offers of help. "If I can still use my own muscles to do something, I need to." It took a few moments and some artful piling of pillows behind him by Leia, but he was finally somewhat upright.
She walked away for a moment and came back with a drinking bulb. "I'm going to have to help unless you really want to wear this, and considering how much trouble you already have with being too cold..."
"That's fine, Leia..." he mumbled, smiling weakly at her. "My hands were shaking so much yesterday when everything happened that I'm surprised I managed to hit anything, actually."
...
Drinking after nearly 20 years without doing so must be a unique experience, Leia thought. Other than a few instances over the past few days, she knew of no times anything other than an oxygen mask or the... horrid thing... had touched his face. He only let it show occasionally with little involuntary flinches as if he didn't quite remember what to expect from the touch, but overall he seemed to rather enjoy such contact.
This, however, was a more trying situation. We should have expected this.
While Anakin did seem to be able to handle general physical contact, mouth contact with anything was another story.
We should have foreseen this when he struggled on the shuttle. His mind forged an association between the mask and any sort of anything touching his lips or even getting close to doing so.
After half an hour of trying, she hadn't managed to get the bulb any closer to his face than a few inches. It seemed the second he stopped being able to see where it was precisely, he started reacting involuntarily. Most of the time it was a simple fear reaction that ended in him trying to duck his head away, although a few times he had unconsciously tried to use the Force to take the thing out of her hand.
"Can't you just stay still?" she finally griped, hair disheveled from all the attempts to keep him from squirming away somehow.
"I can't help it! I'm trying, believe me, I'm trying."
They sat for a moment, both thinking. After a moment, Anakin leaned back a bit, letting his head rest against the wall. In another moment, his eyes were drifting shut again.
If we can't do this the easy way, we'll have to do it the hard way.
Before he could possibly react in his condition, she had gotten a firm grip both physically and in the Force on the drink bulb, was gently but firmly pinning his head to the pillows with one hand, and had poured fully a fifth of the contents in the general direction of his mouth. While he was still busy reacting to the stream of water running down his neck from where she'd missed for a moment, she held the drink bulb to his mouth, making him adjust to the contact. "Shh. It's okay, Father."
After a few tense moments, he finally relaxed. Good. Maybe we won't have to go through this again later.
He carefully and shakily reached up to place his hand on hers on the bulb and tipped it back slowly, eyes closed.
Leia would have laughed if not for the utter heartbreaking nature of the scene before her.
When she had been just barely 9 years old, one of her distant male cousins had turned 21. As was customary at such celebrations in the Organa family, there had been a public party, a more sedate family party with speeches on the responsibilities of adulthood in the galaxy's nobility, and then the adult men of the family had wandered off.
Leia, being the curious I-wanna-know-now bossy princess she had been at that young age had followed them, even into the deeper parts of Aldera Palace that she wasn't supposed to ever go. Finally, they entered an old wine cellar deep under the main Palace.
The little princess hid behind some of the larger casks near the entrance.
Bail had rummaged deep into the room, through at least two different locked containers, and had pulled out something that looked to be a firkin encased in some sort of durasteel, though the sheen was wrong in the low light. The way he carried it made it seem lighter than it looked.
"There was once a flower, the Ambrosiana dulcedina, that lived on our plains and bloomed in the springtime," Bail explained to the young man. "It's nectar was said to be the most pleasant thing to ever grace the human palate.
"But people heard of it far and wide once the hyperspace routes opened up. They came and plucked the blossoms recklessly to harvest the sweet nectar. Soon the flower was rare, found only in the farthest reaches of the plains and in the most elite and guarded flowerbeds. Within a century, the flower was found only in the royal garden. The queen at the time, Lady Leilani, sent half of the seeds one year from the plot in her garden, enough to cover an acre of land full of the blossoms, to a friend far away so as to try to raise the population, for her plot was as large as she dared let it be.
"No one knows what happened to those seeds.
"She collected just enough nectar that year to fill this container to the brim and hid it, letting no one but her husband know about it.
"That winter, Aldera froze for the first time in a thousand years. All the seeds she herself had kept died. Not a one ever showed a leaf above the ground. The price of the nectar, already elevated, rose higher as the last remaining carafes slowly were consumed.
"Several years after the last drop in the last carafe disappeared from sight, Lady Leilani died. Her will told of this place and instructed that upon reaching his 21st year each man in the proper, noble Organa male bloodline was to taste one drop of the remaining nectar, to know intimately what his people had lost due to their own greed and short-sightedness in not protecting the plant while it was still wild."
She could still see the look on her cousin's face as he experienced that one taste.
It was the same look she saw on her father's face now.
"Good water?" she asked once the last drop was gone and he had let his hand drop back down to the sheets.
He nodded, eyes still closed. "Good water."
Lando stuck his head in the door. "Leia, weren't you meeting Han for lunch? You were supposed to call me over half an hour ago so I could take over watch and let you leave."
She gasped. "I almost completely forgot. Father, you mind if I leave for a while and Lando stays here with you?
"Leia, you have a life. Go on. Have lunch with the smuggler." After a moment of silence in the room, he slightly opened his eyes. "Leia, it's fine. Go on and leave."
She left.