"We'd better leave. It seems that the Alderaani Security Force has orders to shoot us on sight." Boba Fett said as he reached for the thruster controls. Based on the hostile movements of the ships out there, there was no way the Slave I would be allowed to land on Alderaan intact. It would seem that Bail Organa could hold quite the grudge if he got a mind to. He could hold a grudge himself, and he would never forgive Bail for stealing his daughter.
"But Alderaan doesn't have any weapons!" Luke exclaimed, looking slightly stunned as he watched three brand-new fresh off the Kuat Drive Yards assembly line patrol craft begin to pursue them, illustrating the falseness of that claim.
"They seem to have made a special exception for our case." he said as he started the calculations for the jump into hyperspace. He and Luke would have to find some other way to get his daughter back. They wouldn't be able to do so while in the Slave I or any other ships that were registered to his name, as the Alderaani security had apparently been ordered to shoot them down if they ever tried to land on the planet. He was somewhat surprised that they hadn't seriously tried to terminate them already.
"But my sister's down there. We can't leave her." Luke said as he reached for the ship's controls in order to turn the ship around and try one of the insane maneuvers that had earned his birth father Anakin Skywalker the moniker of "The Hero Without Fear", which only a Force user like Luke could pull off.
"We can't rescue her if we're dead." he said, even though the words tasted bitter in his mouth, as he batted Luke's hands away from the control console and made the jump to lightspeed. He knew how Luke felt. He would be the first to race into the open maw of Hell if it would get Leia back. Leia was family. Leia was his daughter. It hadn't been just Luke that she had been taken from by that asshole Bail who seemed to think he was entitled to things that weren't his.
He mourned the loss of Leia almost as strongly as Luke had. For the past six and a half years, the three of them had been a small family much as he and his father had been, and the Slave I had been their home. Much of what they had done had been dangerous, but he had carefully calculated the risks and kept the children out of harm's way as much as possible.
The children had kept him company during his exile from his home, and now one of them was gone. Getting her back would be difficult, and he didn't know exactly what he would get back when they did so, if the rumors of the mind-wipe were true. He wouldn't give up however, he would just have to plan more carefully. There was no point in getting Luke and himself killed if it didn't free Leia from the clutches of Bail and his Jedi allies.
&!&!&!&!&
Fett never exactly knew why he had called Sintas after Leia was taken, but the call had allowed him to re-connect with his ex-wife and the child he had left behind when he had been exiled from Concord Dawn. His relationship with Sintas would never be like it was, but he had finally realized how damned stupid he'd been when he'd completely cut his daughter out of his life. The child had been an innocent party in the mess her parents had gotten themselves into, and hadn't deserved what she had got as a result. He could have at least visited the girl once in a while rather than entirely cutting ties, as Sintas had moved away from Concord Dawn after he left.
Concord Dawn had been more his home than hers. It had been the home of his father's ancestors, and that had been why he had chosen it despite the tragedy that had occurred there in his father's time. After he and Sintas had married, he had tried to settle down into the life of a Journeyman Protector like his grandfather. That was not to be however. One of his superior officers had raped his wife, and he was exiled from the planet when he had killed the man for doing so.
Sintas had immediately been taken with Luke when she met him, mothering him every chance she got every time they visited which was somewhat strange considering the fact that Sin was just as tough a bounty hunter as he was. And, while Luke eventually warmed up to his adoptive sister, it was clear that he would never have the same affection for her as he had for Leia.
The years began to pass, and every attempt they made to rescue Leia had been foiled somehow, one try having been foiled by the very security officer who had helped them off the planet when he had first taken Leia. Over time, Luke grew up, grew older, grew colder, and grew far more dangerous, much as he had done after the death of his father. It was almost as if any joy the boy once had had been sucked out of him with his sister's departure, and been replaced by some sort of darkness.
Luke eventually started hunting on his own, with each new hunt being longer and far more dangerous than the one before it. There were times when Fett wondered if Luke would just decide to not come home one day, or if the boy would die in the middle of nowhere and he would never know his fate.
&!&!&!&
Time had passed for Leia as well, she grew up well loved by her father Bail, her aunts Tia, Rogue, and Celly, her cousins, and her best friend Winter who played with her just like she used to when they were children. Several times, the "People who had tried to take her when she was sick" attempted to kidnap her once more. Each time, they were foiled by planetary security, but always managed to escape. Each time they failed, Leia wondered why a part of her seemed disappointed that they had done so. Every night, as she fell asleep, she saw the same blonde haired boy she had seen on the night after she had woken up from her coma. Now however, instead of simply looking lost as he had in the beginning, he looked sad and angry.
Over the years, she came to secretly suspect that there was something wrong with the story of her illness and coma. There had been a number of things that didn't quite add up...
When she went to school, at her own insistence since she didn't want to be stuck in the palace all the time, she had been determined to catch up with her age-mates. But, she discovered that somewhere, a part of herself knew the answers to just about everything in the curriculum except for local history. She was also able to read at a level that was well above that of most of the rest of her classmates, despite the fact that she had only just recently learned how to read on her own when she had fallen ill. That, and her knowledge of current events throughout the galaxy was eerily accurate.
She also rather swiftly discovered that she had combat skills and mechanical skills that she had never been taught. She had discovered this one night when she had snuck out in order to escape from Aunt Rogue who had been using her as a living dress-up doll for most of the week prior. She had somehow managed to disable the security alarms around the palace, and had almost effortlessly dropped one of the patrolling guards on her way out to a swoop bike race that she'd heard about but never reached because she'd stood there stupidly after she had dropped the guard, stunned that she had been able to do so and had been escorted back by another guard who had come and found them.
Her father Bail came to her one evening and explained that the reason for these hitherto unexplained oddities was because she had some abilities with the Force, and that it had to be kept a secret, because the Empire hunted down and killed what Force sensitives that the Emperor didn't enslave. His answer, though it pretty much explained everything, didn't entirely still a small suspicious corner of her mind which grew little by little over the years.
When she was seventeen, her father Bail took her to Coruscant so she could learn her future place in the Imperial Senate, a place that she had wondered that she would be able to competently take considering the six year gap in her life. This position would be the necessary cover for her activities in the Rebellion however, so it would be given to her when she took up her father's mantle there as well. As the planet and her fate drew near, the part of her that wanted to be drifting amongst the stars doing something else began to resurface from where she had forcefully pushed it back to. She did her best push it back once more. It was her job to help those less fortunate than she, but in order to do so, she would have to work to bring down the Empire. She couldn't do that if she was out wandering the stars doing kriff and all.
Bail, who had been carefully watching his daughter now that they were away from the safety of their homeworld noticed her uneasiness, and briefly wondered if he had brought her to Coruscant too soon. It was too late for such worries though. He had brought her, and made a number of arrangements that couldn't be canceled. What was done was done. It was about time that Leia learned what her future responsibilities would be. It was past when she would have started learning if Fett hadn't taken his child. Fett whom he hadn't seriously attempted killing on the off chance that the boy who constantly traveled with him was really Luke. Kenobi had been somewhat cagey the last time he'd asked about the boy.
"Leia, you're almost an adult, and it's time that you learn what your responsibilities will be when you're grown up." Bail said once again, placing a hand on his daughter's shoulder. He had been telling both her and himself this since the day he had made the decision to have her replace him as Senator of Alderaan.
Soon, the ship landed, they disembarked, and a speeder arrived and brought them from the space-port to the Alderaani Consulate.
The Alderaani consulate on Coruscant was a place that Leia vaguely remembered from early in a childhood that had six years stolen from it by a coma. She once again vowed to get her revenge against the person who had stolen that time from her as the speeder made its way to its destination. When they reached the building itself, she pushed back the part of herself that automatically began analyzing all of the entries, exits, and potential weak points in security. This would be her new home for an indefinite period of time, it wasn't a place that she would need to escape from.
Over the next year and change, Leia studied to become a senator, and leader of the Rebellion as her father wanted her to be.
Edited on 3/13/2012