Father


Trigger warning: severed limb.


Leia's first thought in hearing those words—I am your father—was simple denial. It was a lie told by a sociopath to disarm them into weakness. She had a father. That role was not vacant and she was not accepting applications. Famously, her father had been Bail Organa, Viceroy and senior senator from Alderaan, until the vile creature in front of her had assisted in taking him away from her.

Raising her chin like the Organa she was, Leia primly replied, "No."

"That's not true," her brother said, but his voice was shaky. Unsure. "That's … impossible."

Isn't it? he sent her.

Shocked by the uncertainty in Luke's tone, she cocked an eyebrow. "General Skywalker," she answered confidently.

The loss of Han faded into a dull throb, and here she was grateful. In this she could help Luke, could take the brunt of his confusion. He had helped her so much—through the horror of the past few days, the past few minutes—that she finally felt a modicum of control. For his sake alone.

Poor Luke. So desperate for connection, so hungry for a family, that he could be swayed by the outlandish lies of a monster. He didn't have the personal history, the experience, to fend off such a blatant trick. He had told her that his aunt and uncle—their aunt and uncle?—had loved him, but there had always been a block. They had not understood him. They had almost seemed to fear him.

That fear had left him sensitive in a way she was not. Bail and Breha Organa had been her parents, as sure as the sunrises on Tatooine. Regardless of the circumstances of her birth, despite her uncertainty now in their knowledge of Luke's existence, the Queen and Viceroy of Alderaan had loved her as their child.

More precisely, if Vader had been right—that he had sired them—her parents would have told her. She would not have been presented to him so young in court.

… she had been a Force-sensitive child during the Purge and the years following. Why had they presented her in court…?

Shaking her head, she refocused on the matter at hand. Vader wanted them to join him. This was a last-ditch effort at emotional manipulation, and she had to protect Luke.

Right, Luke sent her. General Skywalker. That's right.

"Anakin Skywalker," Vader hissed. "Anakin Skywalker was weak."

Luke found his voice. "No. He was a great general in the Clone Wars. You murdered him before we were born."

… It would have been the epitome of danger, a lamb to slaughter, for Bail and Breha Organa to present a Force-sensitive child in court so young. Why had it not occurred to her until this very moment to wonder why…?

Focus.

The bitterness was strong in her brother's tone. Don't let him have the satisfaction, she sent him, and he brushed her presence with his in the Force, full to the brim with gratitude for her reminder.

"Is that what he told you? Obi-Wan?"

Leia didn't answer him directly and Luke followed her lead, hanging onto the lightsaber with fingers that suddenly felt numb. Tentatively, he reached out to his colors, tried to sort the emotions emanating from Vader and tease the reason behind his absurd lie.

"Clearly General Kenobi is a weak point for you, Lord Vader," Leia answered in her calmest voice. Luke had to admire how unrattled she seemed when she had been a raging nightmare just moments before. "It appears you have not eliminated all your weaknesses."

"Obi-Wan killed Anakin as much as I did," he boomed in answer. "He stole you from me. He stole your mother from me."

Leia smiled and opened her mouth to speak defiantly, but Luke didn't hear the words. The numbness in his hand spread through his forearm and a chill went down his spine.

Search your feelings, he heard. You know it to be true.

His swordhand started to shake. Leia.

But she wasn't listening. "Such a desperate lie. I expect better from you."

Leia.

"I do not lie, Princess."

… Something she had said to Han on their journey, just a week ago. My father gave me tutors for information I might need for the Alliance. Everything I learned was highly cultivated …

With a laugh, she shook her head. "That is all you do. "

Leia.

… How cultivated had her education been? Cultivated enough to defeat the Emperor? Hand-to-hand combat, blaster safety and targeting, underworld languages, military theory.

Fencing.

Leia, please.

"What?" she answered Luke out loud, her thoughts bursting into fractals, her mind spinning. Frustrated by his mental tugging, she rounded on Luke like a Yla-snake, but stopped at his horrorstruck expression: his wide eyes, his gaping mouth, his quiet, ragged breathing.

"His colors," he breathed.

To Luke's eye, the Dark Lord was surrounded in a deep royal blue efflux. It was pure, untethered by his evil intent, and it was utterly calm. No whirling emotions, no sense of deception or guile.

Still, serene waters. Truth.

Leia's eyes caught his, and for the first few seconds they were clear. She did not believe him, did not doubt her absolute faith. Defiant and bold, she was in full control, fueled by an inner fire that for the very first time, Luke regarded with fear, because it reminded him of … of …

And then his words cracked through her armor, shattering the thin veneer of control that she held in place with raw grit.

"No," she whispered.

Her eyes ticked back to Vader, then back to her brother's shocked, speechless form, and she tried to rebuild the shield she had held in place. No. Absolutely not. Bail would have told her.

He wouldn't have left me.

He had sent her to Tatooine that fateful day. Not Raltooine or Yavin or any number of allied worlds.

Tatooine.

Her brain went into overdrive. She had assumed the Organas had directed her to Obi-Wan to reunite her with her brother—a hard enough truth to swallow—but … if their parentage was a danger to them, they would have needed protection.

They would have needed training.

"You look so much like her."

Vader's voice was soft, gentle, and suddenly she fully grasped what Luke was telling her. His gift … if she acknowledged his gift, and he said that Vader wasn't lying …

No.

She took a step, confident and sure, but fell. Weightless and yet duracrete-heavy, she tumbled through the sky like a rock, the dark clouds of the storm devouring her whole as she slipped beneath the city. They offered nothing to stop her fall; she reached and reached but nothing had shape or form. It was all cloud and vapor.

Disgust swept through her, then a blind anger that blew into the cells of her body like pure energy, a firestorm of emotion that centered very clearly on Vader himself.

She didn't have words for this rage. It felt old, older than her memory, dug into the marrow of her bones by genetics or self-hatred or betrayal, and it overtook her.

It swallowed her whole.

She had no defenses left. They had been blown apart a million times now, and she was easy prey, felled like a tower made of flimsy.

Bail. Han. Alderaan.

No.

You have questions, Vader said to her silently. I have the answers.

Answers.

I have them.

Answers.

She wasn't sure if the voice had form or not, if it existed in the midst of the freefall or only in her head. It felt close, like a breath on her neck. Near enough to fight, surely, and she was ready to fight for her men, for the men who fought for her …

The dream came back to her in all its horrible darkness. The reach for Luke, Han, Chewie. The fall. The darkness, the cold. I have them, he had said.

Her men. Her family.

And the answers.

Father, she reached out for Bail like he could hear her, could apparate and dispel this asinine lie. But Bail was dead and could not answer for his crimes.

Crimes?

Yes. Crimes.

He knew.

Force-sensitive twins separated at birth for their own safety. Luke's childhood made a kind of sense. Isolated, protected by the master who had trained Vader himself. But she had been thrust headfirst into galactic fame as the heir of a Coreworld Ruling House.

She had been introduced to Darth Vader as Leia Organa at the age of thirteen. And she looked like her biological mother? Someone Vader had at the very least known?

It takes great love to create great loss, he had said only minutes before.

Had … had she been designated for sacrifice? Vader would discover her parentage, kill her, and the better-hidden child would be the savior, saved by his obscurity.

But Luke shared General Skywalker's last name?

None of this made any sense. And yet, as she looked at Luke, saw his sincere terror, she knew that no one here was lying.

He's our father, Leia, her brother said. He is General Skywalker.

Luke held her eyes until she ripped them away, such intense hatred flooding her chest like she had been caught in a monsoon. Quick, deadly, and utterly preventable.

She tried to cry out but the darkness enveloped her. She resisted, flinging her arms and legs wide to fight, but it was too strong, like a heavy, cold, wet blanket. She couldn't move, couldn't breathe, couldn't think.

"You," she spat. "You destroy everything."

Alderaan. Han. Her own parents.

"Weaknesses, all of them," Vader answered her thought out loud. "Join me. Eliminate those weaknesses."

Weaknesses? Weaknesses?

There was no control to be had. None. She was instinct and anger and nothing else, pure adrenaline and reaction. Her brain could spin its wheels, through conspiracy and conjecture, but none of it mattered.

Nothing mattered.

Luke witnessed the wildfire of anger that whipped through his sister, and realized that whatever his own shock, it was nothing compared to Leia's. Leia, who held things so tightly inside, with such a capacity to withstand blow after blow, such devastating will to overcome the darkness.

Leia, who was falling into the wildest parts of herself with every second that passed.

But nothing mattered. She had already fallen.

He caught her intention just before she moved, rebuffing her intense Force pull on his swordhand. She pulled again, and he took a step back as his hand rose, gripping the lightsaber hilt for all he was worth.

"No, Leia," he bit out. "Don't."

Utterly focused now on eliminating the source of all her pain, she didn't register his words. She was utterly terrifying, her face screwed up in anger and impatience and her eyes tight.

But Luke refused to back down. "He is baiting you. Remember your training."

"Training," she muttered. "I've been trained my whole life to kill him."

Her hold on the hilt of the lightsaber lessened as she spoke, though, and so Luke continued to try to pull her back from the edge. "Not like this."

"Then how?" she spat. "He deserves to die."

Her grip slackened even more, and for once, Luke was happy to see that his telekenetic abilities still won out over hers. He doubled down on his hold, and tried to speak calmly to her.

"Killing him won't bring them back. And we can still save Han."

She blinked, and it was just enough of a pause for him to wrench his hand away from any hold she might have on the lightsaber. His right hand flew backwards, exposing the wrist to the red flare of Vader's lightsaber and with no sound at all, his father severed his hand.

Slow motion.

He watched his hand leave his body, watched the blue lightsaber fall down to the reactor core shaft, watched in ugly fascination as his eyes understood a reality that his brain and nervous system had yet to accept.

And then the pain struck, and he fell to his knees with a scream.

It was enough to pull Leia from her wrath. Like the springing of a trap or being doused by cold water, Luke's pain pulled her from the brink of total collapse, and she didn't have a moment to breathe. Reality flooded her as the pain struck, and was it her brother's pain or hers?

Agony. Cruel, bloodcurdling agony.

Energy-sharing, she heard the tenor whisper, but she was far too consumed to give it more than a passing thought to Vader's mutterings. The shock began to envelop Luke but for Leia it was phantom pain, psychic pain, and she had no ability to comprehend it. It washed over her, and she marveled at its heat, its loathful weight. It was all Luke could feel, all he could understand.

But it was not the worst pain Leia had felt.

For Leia, it was centering.

For Leia, who had delved deep into the oceans of pain, it was yet another experience to survive. She had felt such pain during her interrogation on the Death Star. She had felt it again here, on Bespin, from Han. Pain was nothing new.

She understood better than anyone in the galaxy the pain that Vader could cause. She was an absolute expert.

The focus came to her with such clairvoyant calm that she only recognized it by the stark difference between her circumstances now and the last time she had felt it. That beautiful morning on the Falcon, when the Force seemed so close at hand, when meditating had allowed the Force to wash over her like the greeting of an old friend. When she had last felt so in control.

She felt buoyed. She felt strong. She felt like the galaxy had opened wide to her capable hands.

And … and her brother needed her.

With a snap, she threw her entire energy—all she was worth, all of her rage and loss and humiliation—into one Force push that caught Vader by surprise. He sidestepped and lost his footing on the narrow gantry. Another push, stronger, and the demon was holding onto the gantry by gloved fingers as his body dangled precariously over the abyss of the reactor core.

He would be so easy to kill.

But no. Luke.

Leia used her time wisely. With a grunt of effort, she hooked her arms under Luke's and tried to pull him off the platform and into the hatch on the other side of the platform. She didn't have the strength to do the work herself, and so she fully opened herself to the Force, trying to utilize its intense power to help her save her brother. Help me, she prayed to the Force. Help me save him.

Fine, it seemed to say, and Luke's weight was heavy in her arms but suddenly quite manageable.

"Ben," Luke mumbled.

She couldn't answer him, couldn't speak through her exertion. All she knew was the gray of the hatch, and then the gray of the corridor, and then the screaming masses of people who stared at her in horror, hauling a handless man through the blazing white marble elegance of Cloud City. When stormtroopers fired, she swiped the bolts away with a careless hand, using a skill she hadn't believed she could replicate, but here it was instinct. When Luke muttered incoherence, she tried to offer comfort through the Force, their only manner of communication with the enormity of what they had just witnessed together.

And she held onto her composure by a thread. She could go back. Kill the bastard.

But she didn't.

Luke.

The East Platform. Through yet another hatch. The wind whipped her hair into a frenzy. The Falcon fired her belly gun to clear a path for her to drag a now-unconscious Luke through four stormtroopers and an otherwise ghastly field of blood with at least ten other downed troopers. A ramp, and then Lando Calrissian, lifting Luke from her as easily as he would a feather, and Leia slammed her hand against the ramp controls, collapsing to lie on the floor, leaning against the inside of the navigator's station.

Father, she thought. One word, over and over again, despite Lando's quick charge through the hold, racing to the cockpit. Father, despite the rumbling of the Falcon's engines through first atmosphere, then vacuum, and then lightspeed. Father, when the black hole of Han's absence from his beloved ship hit her where it hurt most.

Father, she thought as she blacked out.


Author's Note: I'm going to post both Clay and Pearl and Specter on Ao3 in the summer. Rumor has it that FFN update notifications aren't working anymore, and I just want assurance that anyone can access these stories whenever they feel like reading them. I'm thinking of just updating a chapter a day for a few months, like a little delayed-gratification game. You know, something to look forward to. Either way, you'll be able to find these stories over there at Ao3 as well as here on FFN. My user name is KnightedRogue there, as well.

The epilogue to Specter will be posted here Saturday, July 1st. Can you believe it? What a helluva journey this has been. -KR