Long Forgotten – At The End

Character(s): Leia Organa Solo, Luke Skywalker
Period: ROTJ
Genre: Angst, Drama
Summary: Luke remembers his father's death

"Do you remember father's last words?"

It is with more than mild surprise that I look up from the datapad I've been tapping. My sister had been curious of the events above Endor and had gotten debriefed several times over the years. I always stop short of reliving the moments in emotional play-by-plays, as she holds herself back from the story, not letting it touch her fully. This way she can stand back and hear in a military fashion the events that effectively ended the Empire. Dutiful and strong.

My sister is very practical, and her dedication is her anchor. It is also her shield. Leia keeps many things at arms length, afraid that if she lets it in it will break her. And if she breaks, we'll all break. She's just that strong, or she tries to be. I catch her sometimes though, looking out of a viewport, eyes far away. A moment of weakness washing over her. A moment where she isn't the one holding the galaxy up on her small shoulders. There have been more of those moments as we have gotten older. She's learning to prioritize more, let the Force guide her. Her family is her real strength. Han is the best thing that ever happened to her, and her children show her that life goes on, and that one day the galaxy will have to survive without us. I'm thankful for my own wife and child, Mara and Ben make me see more than ever that family is what's real, our blood holds us together and makes us strong. It will be there in our children when we die as it was when we were born. Wherever we were born.

"What do you mean by 'last words'?"

I'm not going to get conned into one of these conversations again. We've been here before, and I end up being "naive" and more than a little "too trusting". I don't say this in a bad way, as my sister and I have a special relationship, we can be honest with each other. Besides our spouses, we are as close as two people can be. Leia is protective of my more "trusting" instincts and I look over her downright stubborn nature most times.

She looks at me with the look that had probably brought diplomats to stuttering conformity on more than one occasion. "I mean... what was our father's last words?"

I just look at her, sometimes she is almost as a big an enigma as my wife. I want to know everything... No! Don't tell me anything! I don't want to know.

"Tell your sister you were right about me." I speak the words a flatly as I can muster, the beginnings of memory brought back. I look at her expectantly. So, there. That's what he said.

It's been a while since I've turned those events over in my mind. There was a time that they lay there right under my consciousness, touching the top. Making sure that I remembered what I had accomplished that day. What Obi-Wan and Yoda could not, maybe even what my mother could not. Certainly what my father, Anakin, could not. I got through a barrier that no one had touched in over twenty years, and it cost my father his life. He gave it up willingly. I always make sure to tell Leia this when I tell her this story. We've never gotten to the point where our father's last words are spoken between us. The duel and events leading up to it are all she knows. Words that cut more than a vibroblade. As long as its taken, today brings us to a new level as brother and sister.

I watch her carefully. She seems to be more open to a conversation I had long ago given up having with her. Her face is open and inquisitive. Sighing she turns to me and I can tell she has given up the fight. I don't know what has prompted her in her quest to know the details of mine and my father's trial above Endor, but she seems at peace with the decision to know everything.

"So tell me, once the lightning stopped, what happened?"

"He fell to the floor." I look at her, my expression masked with boredom. The illusion of speaking of the latest episode of a popular holodrama, or the weather on Tatooine. She knows better though. We have a special bond. Her look softens. I am not fooling her in the least.

"He fell to the floor, and I somehow found the strength to get to him." I'm suddenly reminded of the smell of burnt circuitry and leather. My father's breath dwindling to poorly drawn wheezes. He doesn't look as big as he did when he stood before me, blade drawn. Suddenly his shoulders are those of a man, not of a machine, hunched forward in pain.

"What happened then?" Leia's voice pulls me back to the present, before I get lost in something I haven't felt in years.

"I took his arm and hauled him to his feet." I bet we would have looked absurd to an onlooker as we were trying to escape. My father stood a foot taller than me. "He couldn't really stand, I'm not sure the suit was working that well."

"Did you get him far?" she asks, patiently waiting for the rest of the story.

"We made it to the hanger, but the suit didn't last but a few more minutes after that." I didn't remember the sounds around me, now the blaring horns slowly register through the fog of my memory.

"We had just made it to the ramp of the shuttle when he fell, lights going off on the chest plate of his suit. He wanted help with taking the mask off, so that he could see my face, and I argued that he would die. He told me there was no stopping that now. "

Surprisingly Leia blanches at this part of my memory, it all becoming too real.

"Once the mask was off, he told me to leave him, and I told him 'No'. I don't know how I thought he could survive, I had seen the lightning lighting up his skeletal system. He had been hit with a barrage that was ten times more lethal than I had been. My opinion is that father paid for some of his transgressions with that last bit of lightening, it was horrible." Leia winces, she takes my word on how painful Sith lightning is, as she says she never plans to find out for herself.

I continue, too far in the story to stop now. I can almost feel my father over my shoulder, waiting expectantly. Hoping that I remember that he did love me in the end, and that he loves my sister. "In the end, he told me that I had saved him and to make sure I tell you. You were the last thing on his mind. After that, he didn't seem to worry about where he was going or the fact that he was dying, he just wanted me to go, to get away to safety." I take a deep breath, relief that the story is finally told. These words locked in me for so many years, not for anyone's ears but my sister's.

She's looking out the viewport again, an unreadable expression on her face. Sadness and acceptance all in one. "I understand some of what you have always said about family, Luke. Han and the kids have shown me that. You've become the anchor of our family that our parents could not be, the position that was taken from them so long ago, and I'm sure they are very, very proud of you." She looks over at me, savagely fighting tears, because my sister does not cry. "You know I'm the oldest though, right?" We laugh, its funny to think that we were there for each other in the beginning. In a dreamlike time when all we had were each other.

I put my arm around her shoulders and she puts her hand on mine. We've come a long way since I broke into a Death Star prison cell in ill-fitting storm trooper armor. I reach over and kiss her cheek. "I love you, sis."

"I love you too, Luke."