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Leia froze at the edge of the medical suite. It was deserted, save for the droids, whose programming would soon be erased. The suite aboard the flagship of the Rebel fleet was isolated and private. It was a suite designated only for the Rebellion's top operatives. And, even then, it could not be accessed without her personal clearance.
The rest of the galaxy believed the man within the suite was no more. And she intended to keep it that way. No one was to know of the suite's solo dead occupant. Luke's injuries were treatable, but he was now unconscious in the ship's only bacta tank, and would likely remain there for the next many hours. His indisposition meant that she was left alone to decide and ponder the fate of her unlikely prisoner.
Leia sighed heavily, nails digging into her palms as she considered the ramifications of what she had done. Hatred for her prisoner swelled in her chest. If her favor to Luke ever became public knowledge, the New Republic would brand her a traitor. It seemed unlikely, but there was always a risk.
Ever since he had been smuggled off the Death Star, Vader had been unresponsive. From Leia's vantage point, the only sign of life was the arcing of the heart monitor and the whooshing of the external ventilator on which his ruined lungs now depended. What remained of his flesh was scored with eruptions of electricity, raw, oozing, and begging for a bacta tank that she simply could not use for fear of discovery. Three out of four of his glitching prosthetic limbs had been removed, the one right arm that remained had been so badly damaged that the droids hadn't been able to disconnect it.
Against her better judgment, the Princess had allowed the droids under the command of her highest-grade medical bay to care for the most grievous of his injuries. Except the ugly hardware embedded in his body, his entire frame was wrapped in bacta salve and bandages meant to cover the ugly explosive burns that dotted his body.
With Luke out of the way, she could have thrown the man to her generals and the fledgling New Republic to be torn apart like a scrap of meat. And she would have been lying if she said she had not thought of it. However, as appealing as the idea was to her in the abstract, it was not the precedent that Leia wanted to set. No. Darth Vader died a pathetic death aboard his own superweapon. That was the story the galaxy would remember. There would be no revenge. No blood. No pathetic attempt at "justice" that could never be achieved. That option was off the table. It would do no one any favors. Least of all, herself.
For now, the man within the med bay clung to life; aided by the med-droids crude interventions.
What else was she to do? He was a war criminal. Yes. But he was also Luke's father, and Luke cared a great deal about that fact.
Vader was already close to death. It was possible that nature could run its course, and the world would be rid of him without anyone being any the wiser. On the other hand, some small part of her thought it might be punishment enough to force him to continue his putrid existence.
He was nearly blind, that much the droids had told her. His arms and legs were gone. As were many of his visceral organs. He could barely speak, could barely breathe, and could not move! He was like some pale earthworm, baking under the sun.
She would not underestimate him. Oh, no. Force forbid. But she knew when a man was beaten. And Vader, perhaps more than anyone, was beaten.
Although she did not fully understand the nature of the Jedi and the Sith, the way Luke told it, Vader had all but refused to defend himself when the Emperor had goaded them into a duel. And when Luke would not turn to the Darkside, Vader had decided that he would have rather died than be the cause of Luke's demise. Whether that change of heart was due to sentiment or monumental selfishness, Leia did not know. But, either way, Vader could not have both Luke and the Empire, and it seemed clear to the Princess which he valued more.
She could not feel him. Unlike her time on the Death Star, where she had felt his pervasive cold fill the air with a chill, here she sensed…only a vague sense of mourning.
Oh, he was not dead. Her life would have been simpler if he was. But no, he was merely far away.
After a moment, the Princess composed herself, and forced herself to draw nearer to the monster who had tortured her. The man who had killed millions. The man whose blood ran through her veins. Vader looked so pallid that a part of her wondered if he was even alive. She had often fantasized of turning the tables on Vader, of torturing him as he had tortured her. And yet, the impulse eased upon the realization that, whatever Vader had done to others, it had clearly been done to him twice over.
It seemed like an eternity passed as she stood there staring at his form. Her heart swelled with hatred, anger, sadness, and longing. Why did this monster have to be her father? There was no reason for Leia to be afraid, and yet she was as she tentatively placed her hands on the top of his chest. Her fingertips were unkempt, dirty. But they looked as clean as a bridal gown against his bandaged skin. It only took a moment before she moved her fingers lower. The tips running lightly over each jagged scar.
She ghosted her fingers over mottled flesh, almost admiring the artistry of whoever had meted vengeance out upon his body. Despite her trepidation, her hands became confident as she pressed her whole palm to what remained of his ribs. This was her tormentor. Her nightmare. And her sire.
Her nails continued to graze over him as she circled him like a curious hyena on a wounded lion. The respirator was harsh in her ears as she considered the butchered prosthetic that remained attached to his right arm. She was so lost in her thoughts that Leia didn't notice that the heartbeat monitor had begun to flutter with increasing intensity.
The Princess pulled her hand away with a jerk as she realized his milky pupils had fluttered open and were resting intently on the pale fingers that had touched even paler flesh.
The two met one another's gazes, frozen in a strange standoff until he made a rasping sound, the meaning of which she could not quite discern from behind the oxygen mask that covered his lower face. After a moment, he repeated the noise with greater insistence and a kind of questioning desperation that glowed aimless from his half-blind eyes until, at last, a coherent word came out:
"...daugh-ter?"
The word was spoken in the tone of a man begging for water.
Although she might've marveled at the contrast between the pleading, pathetic voice, and the violent warlord she remembered, the word sounded like a mockery. He had brutalized her and murdered her true father. How dare he beg for her sympathy! How dare he try to solicit her familial pity!
Leia said none of the above. Instead, she spat out the threat that was welling in her throat.
"Don't. You. Dare."
He flinched as though she had struck him, his pupils roaming her face with a searching kind of grief. After a moment, his eyes squeezed shut with pain that a part of her knew she enjoyed.
Leia wasn't proud of it, but twisting the knife had felt good.
After several moments, his face relaxed, and he looked for all the world as though he had lost consciousness, but, much to her surprise, Leia felt something old and tired and full of shame brush against her mind, like a street mongrel begging for scraps of affection.
Leia saw red. Before she even knew it, the Princess lashed out, and a kaleidoscope of feelings burst from behind her shields, driving off his cloying presence.
"You are only alive because of Luke," she snarled. "Do not think that I care."
With a harsh breath, she turned to stalk away. Leia could not stay here with him a moment longer; if she did, she knew she'd be tempted to do something rash for which Luke would never forgive her. She didn't pause or look back as she stormed from the room and headed straight to her quarters.
When Han called on her later, not even he could lure the angry tigress from her cage.
~0~
After several fruitless hours of insomnia, the increasingly exhausted Princess was startled by a secure comm from the surgical droid overseeing her clandestine prisoner: "Your Highness, the patient has become agitated and uncooperative; he is attempting to remove the secondary life-support systems. Although safety and restraint measures have been implemented, I thought it best you be apprised of the situation."
It took a moment for her to comprehend what the droid had told her, but her comprehension was quickly followed by mortification. What would happen if Luke awoke to find his father dead? Vader meant little to her, but Luke…Luke was all she had left of her family. She did not want to find out how he would react if she allowed him to die on her watch. She quickly hailed the surgical droid, but the hailing frequency went unanswered. A sinking feeling filled her stomach. When she tried again, she was met with the same blank wall of silence.
With sudden haste and certainty that something terrible had happened, the Princess threw on her boots and jogged to the secured wing as fast as her feet would carry her.
The doors hissed open as her access codes were accepted, and she opened the inner corridor with a viewing window for the surgical room. Leia ground to a halt at the sight that greeted her. It immediately became clear why the hapless surgical droid had failed to answer: his frame lay crushed at the foot of the med berth. The rest of the room was in a similar state of disarray, and the attending nurse droid lay decapitated on the floor.
The figure on the table seemed deceptively limp for the amount of chaos and destruction he had clearly wrecked about the room, but, worst of all, it appeared that he had succeeded in ripping off the oxygen mask and several of the life support tubes from his body.
Leia's heart pounded with adrenaline as she rushed to his bedside and fumbled to reattach the instruments that he had torn from his face and the ports that bloomed grotesquely from his torso. The oxygen mask and respirator came first. They were the most important of them all. As she managed to manually re-seal the gasket that held the respirator in place, she found herself unexpectedly relieved to hear its rhythmic hiss fill the space where the horrible wheezing had been.
Her eyes swept over the heart monitor at first but quickly returned as she realized the little blips were so faint on the screen as to be nearly invisible.
As the machine forced oxygen back into his crippled form, her eyes furiously roamed the monitors, searching for any sign that he was responding. Minutes passed, but still, the heartbeat remained stubbornly faint.
She was panicking now. Visions of Luke, ablaze in righteous fury, left her scrambling to the shattered nurse droid, desperately seeking to reactivate its severed head.
As her fingers fumbled with the internal wiring of the droid, Leia murmured incoherent profanities at the prostrate man. For every minute that passed, Vader grew closer to death, and panic rose within her. In desperation, she flipped switches and stretched wires until the droid finally flickered online. As soon as it had fully rebooted, she fed it the data on Vader's vitals and demanded an immediate diagnostic.
A part of her considered sending word for Luke to be pulled from the bacta in which he was currently resting, but to do so would not only put Luke at risk but also raise all kinds of suspicion that could only result in them both being tried for treason.
After conducting its analysis, the droid responded with all the preprogrammed bedside manner of a Holonovel doctor. "I cannot explain the patient's sudden attempt at suicide nor the continued weakness of his vitals. He should be showing signs of improvement by now." The droid's affected eloquence and impassivity grated on her frayed nerves.
"Are you meaning to tell me that there is nothing to do?"
The droid's eyes flashed in the midst of accessing its databanks. "Negative. There is one potentially effective solution cataloged that I am currently reviewing."
The droid paused again, a time that felt like an eternity to her. "When patients struggle in recovery from trauma and oxygen deprivation, the touch of a loved one has been known to reduce mortality by up to 20%. Does the patient have any loved ones to whom a message could be sent?"
No one loved Vader. No one except Luke. And Luke was hurt; plus, he would be disoriented coming out of the bacta. There was no way she could get him on his feet in time for that to make any difference. As if reading her thoughts, the droid's vocalizer buzzed again. "If there are no loved ones available, the touch of a volunteer of the same species may also be an effective alternative."
Leia swallowed.
She couldn't do it. She had barely been able to touch him when she'd thought him comatose.
All these years, she had hated him. Not only because he had been the Emperor's soldier—that she might have been able to forgive—but because of the cold glee with which he'd tortured her and allowed for Tarkin's genocide. It had been too brutal, too personal. Before the events of the previous day, the only way she would have ever wanted to go near him, let alone touch him, was to watch him scream as she flayed him alive.
She hated everything about him, every memory he poisoned, everything he stood for! And yet, as her eyes came to rest on the Sith Lord's broken body, she came to a realization.
There was one thing she could love Vader for…and that was Luke. He had been the reason that Luke came home to her, and he was the reason that Luke existed. Luke wanted him to live and had entrusted her with ensuring that he lived. And for Luke's sake…Well, there was no limit on what she would do.
Leia swallowed thickly. "How would one touch the patient to maximize the chances of success?" The droid's eyes flashed again. "Any form of contact is beneficial, but the most effective method is a prolonged embrace."
Leia felt bile rise in her throat at the thought. But even as outrage swelled in her chest, she moved toward his sickbed, setting the droid's head watchfully upon a nearby instrument table. No matter how much she might want to deny it, some small part of her knew that his attempt on his own life had been precipitated by her rejection. The thought made her feel powerful and nauseous all at once.
The berth creaked as she sat heavily upon it, her eyes darting to the monitors that testified to the state of the man hovering between life and death.
She knew that Luke would do this without hesitation. For both their sakes, if Luke could see the humanity in Darth Vader, then she would have to as well.
After a moment, Leia arranged her frame to lay alongside his armless form as she placed the length of her arm over the remains of the flickering chest panel. Leia's skin crawled as she allowed her weight to sink into his bandaged frame and felt the forced breaths of the respirator rise and fall against her. With a pang of anger, she realized this was not the first time they had embraced—he had held her forcibly to his chest as she'd watched Alderaan die. Her people, her culture, her planet, and her family were torn away as he'd made her watch the result of Tarkin's bloodbath.
She suddenly wanted to crush his body under the heels of her boots, but her desire to honor Luke overrode the fury of her righteous anger.
Leia's heart jumped as a mechanical voice came from the instruments table and pulled her from her memories; "I cross-referenced the data I provided with my auxiliary database; it appears that speaking affirmations to the patient has also been shown to increase their vital scores, even when unconscious."
Leia bit her tongue. Touching him, perhaps, she could tolerate. But if she spoke of anything but her conflicted hatred, it would be a lie.
And so her tongue stayed silent.
Instead, her eyes settled on the heart monitor, watching it for any sign of improvement. It was the one monitor she could easily understand, but it also reminded her that, beneath the mass of monstrous soul and flesh, there was still a human being. And somehow, that thought made her position beside his mutilated body more tolerable
As minutes passed, his heartbeat began to fade in-and-out as though it was uncertain whether to stop or keep on beating. It seemed as if every time it was about to stop, the old muscle would rally itself to pump blood through his veins just one more time. Even so, these rallies began to fade, and his heartbeat slowed till it was almost non-existent.
In distress, Leia wrapped herself tightly around his frame, willing and pressing the weight of her life into his veins.
"You don't get to die like this!" she whispered fiercely, a sudden thickness creeping into her voice, "Do you hear me? Luke needs you. He risked everything for you! Don't you throw this away!" Her voice was rising in volume now, her grip tightening on his white shoulders as worry overcame her disgust. Vader's face remained limp and drawn beneath the mask. Even as she spoke, his heartbeat faded from the monitor, and the Princess became increasingly frantic.
She sat up quickly, her arms grabbing his biceps as she shook him violently. Even as she did so, she heard the warning alarm ring shrilly as his heart flatlined.
"Don't you dare, don't you dare. Don't you dare!" She raged. Before she knew it, tears were running freely down her face and onto his bandaged skin as she found herself clutching his battered body. "Don't do this to Luke." She whimpered, her face burrowing into the deathly torso, her shoulders shuddering with silent sobs.
"Don't do this to me…"
It took her a moment to realize that she had uttered those words, but once they were spoken, she was forced to admit that they were true. She didn't know what she wanted. But, she didn't want him dead.
Even so, it was too late for remorse. Now the respirator only moved the lungs of a dead man.
The Princess found a swirl of unexpectedly fierce emotions bubbling in her chest as she threw herself fully upon him and began to weep into his cooling breastbone. Poor Luke would wake from his bacta to the loss of the person for whom he'd risked everything. His father. Her father. And once she told him the truth, Luke would hate her. She'd failed her brother. The one thing he had ever asked of her, and she had failed him.
As she wept, her hands beat upon Vader's shoulders, the blows growing softer until, eventually, her cries died down and disappeared into silence.
She buried her face into the hollow chest and lay frozen in aching silence. In another lifetime, she might have scoffed at the notion of clinging to Vader's corpse like the lothcat kits she had once found clinging to their dead mother, but with a wave of pain, she realized the comparison was more apt than she had initially thought. He was certainly not her mother, but he was her parent. And a part of her did not want to let go.
Leia closed her eyes as her thoughts continued to drift in grief until she found herself in that space between the conscious and unconscious, her exhausted mind blending the world with dreams. In her mind, she felt her arm being squeezed by Bail Organa, his loving reassurance filling the void of comfort that she so desperately craved. Leia smiled at the memory, even as her waking mind reminded her of the cold reality she was about to face.
After a moment, Leia pulled herself back fully into consciousness, her eyes blearily registering the vaguely human shape beneath her field of vision. In a haze, she tried to sit up only to find herself held in place by a heavy but gentle weight on her shoulder.
Leia froze.
Her eyes swung around, and, to her shock, she realized that the wrist of Vader's one remaining limb, handless though it was, had been wrapped around her thin shoulder.
The Princess's breath came faster, hardly daring to hope as her gaze darted toward the monitor where a steady heartbeat bounded on the viewscreen. Only then did Leia turn her eyes to his face, watching with conflicted hope as his lashes fluttered, and she found his tired gaze looking down at her with what she numbly realized must have been affection.
The two stared at each other, neither daring nor trying to speak.
Against her better judgment, Leia did not draw away.
Instead, in silence, she acted on impulse and did something that she would never quite be able to explain.
Without hesitation, she laid her head upon his sternum and began weeping quietly with relief. He groaned softly behind the oxygen mask, but whatever pain she caused him, he didn't seem to mind, because, after a moment, his damaged arm pulled her closer, cradling her protectively to his chest.
It was only then, sobbing into her greatest enemy's embrace, that she allowed herself to accept that the war was over. Truly over.
Leia knew that when she got up from his sick bed, she would be a general of the Rebellion once again, and a leader of the New Republic. The spell would be broken, and the Princess would have to remember who Vader was and what he had done. She would hate him all over again. She hated him still.
But for now, she relished the feeling, no matter how fleeting, that, even still, she remained somebody's daughter.