Conspiracies
"Tell me everything you know about General Anakin Skywalker. And this time, don't leave anything out."
Mon Mothma held Leia Organa's gaze like it was a contest of wills, like she was pitted against a terrible adversary. And that might be exactly how the Alliance's chief architect saw it, the princess conceded. Leia's tone was dripping with anger, threaded with notes of hard-wrought pain and hatred like bitterness, like the dregs of a bottle of sour wine.
Even the largest interrogation cell on Home One was small enough that the two imposing women took up most of its space. Sitting across from each other at a hard, plastex table, they stared, fire and ice, neither willing to break the small impasse to which they had come. Mon the mentor, Leia the mentee, and yet something had drastically changed.
Inexorably. Irrevocably. Here, Leia had the upper hand, and Mon knew it.
"What I know is what I told you before," Mon Mothma finally replied. "He was a Jedi Knight, a general in the Clone Wars."
"What you suspect, then."
The older woman studied Leia's eyes, and the princess knew what she would find there. The pain, the betrayal, the heartache that fought for supremacy inside her heart, but also the clear, tight control she maintained over those feelings.
One good thing to come from Bespin, at least. She had a phenomenal hold on her emotions, relying on Luke and the Force to keep everything smoldering beneath the surface. Was she in perfect control? No. But the Force was flowing through her, and it was doing the real heavy lifting. There was, after all, quite the gushing river at her back, quite a buildup of unfettered power and trauma boiling deep within.
Like a dam, it stood to keep the flood at bay.
Quiet like a mausoleum, then:
"Where did you learn his first name?"
The Force surged through Leia, tamping down the bitter anger and revulsion that threatened her. And she accepted its coolness, its bacta-like properties, as she struggled to find equilibrium, as memories of Bespin flashed by her in wave after wave of heat and despair.
She missed Han so much she could barely breathe. The feeling had metastasized in the twenty-four hours since his loss, an aggressive cancer, igniting all her organs like a thermal detonator. Everything in her screamed as if some essential part of her was missing. Her brain or her heart, maybe: a part that was responsible for the functioning of the whole.
That was not pathetic. It wasn't. It was real and it was human and she was allowed to feel this way.
She wanted to find him now, rescue him now, so that she could ensure his safety outside of the blue-white room she had created for him. But she had also needed to get her brother to the Alliance for medical care. That had taken precedence.
Focus, she heard, and it sounded like Yoda or maybe Bail. She wasn't sure.
Fine.
"He told us, shortly before he cut off Luke's hand," she answered.
Mon Mothma's lips opened in silent exclamation, then shut into a hard line. Part of Leia enjoyed this supremely uncharacteristic reaction; it validated every suspicion she had held on the interminable journey back to the Fleet from Bespin. She wasn't exactly sure what Mon knew, but she knew something more than she had previously disclosed.
So Leia decided to dive right into the deepest part of the lie they had all told. She couldn't care less about anything at this point.
"Were you aware that Anakin Skywalker had become Darth Vader?"
In her political life—and that life felt like it belonged to another person entirely—Leia had never been so blunt. Viceroy Organa would not have allowed such a liability. She had been carefully—painstakingly—educated in rhetoric and diplomacy. She knew persuasion. She utilized compromise.
Mon had furthered her education, adding subtlety and cool indifference into the mix.
But Leia was becoming entirely convinced that there had been some ulterior motive for said training, and her success in such matters was either the influence of her adoptive father or a complete and total accident. She should not have pursued politics. She should have been trained as a Jedi long before she had been presented in the Imperial and Core World courts.
There were far too many questions to ask the dead.
Mon seemed to struggle for an answer, and while Leia couldn't pick up anything through her developing skill with Luke's colors, the unguarded look on the older woman's face was convincing.
"Not … definitively," she answered.
But Leia understood the pretext in that answer. "You suspected."
The Alliance's highest-ranking member, the former senator from Chandrila, swallowed, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. When she next spoke, it was in a tone of defeated, guilt-ridden self-consciousness, and Leia knew she was about to hear the unvarnished truth of the events of her birth from the perspective of a woman on the sidelines, watching the catastrophe from a distance.
Young Mon Mothma had been nineteen when she had first been elected to the Galactic Senate and only twenty-nine when the Republic had spectacularly fallen into fascism. Idealistic, she had gravitated toward the senators most outspokenly working against then-Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. A small cohort had brought her onboard, a confidence of allies bordering dangerously on treason. Bail Organa of Alderaan. Fang Zar of Sern Prime, and Padmé Naberrie of Naboo.
But inexperience had blinded her to the true nature of the lives her colleagues had lived.
Padmé was a close associate of the Jedi. Mon had known this. Bail had had some dealings with Obi-Wan Kenobi, as well, but Padmé's life seemed … more involved. She demurred when asked, but the association had seemed very, very strong. Comments here and there. Missions during the Clone Wars that no senator in their right mind should be participating in. Odd calls in the middle of committee meetings.
But on the whole, it had not involved Mon, and so she had made note of such behavior and simply followed the course of events. All senators had dealings with others: planetary governments, sector royalty, corporations, trading firms. This was no more her concern than it was Padmé's concern that Mon was tied deeply to the biopharmacological giants on Thyferra.
They all had alliances. They all had fundraising and lobbying concerns.
When Padmé had become noticeably pregnant, it had likewise been of little concern. The Republic was in its death throes, focus was on internal squabbling and the increasingly broad powers of the executive. In the context of a constitutional crisis, no one cared much for one being's pregnancy. There was work to do. This was the moment they had been dreading.
And then it happened. The Republic fell, and in its still-smoldering ashes stood the Galactic Empire with Palpatine at its head. And just to the right of him, quite suddenly and without introduction, was a gleaming, seven foot tall nightmare wielding a lightsaber.
Mon was on Coruscant that night. She had heard the first reports about the massacre at the Jedi Temple. Frantic for clarification, she had commed the two beings she knew who had ties to the Jedi, but Padmé and Bail had not answered. The Jedi were marked as traitors, and all those connected to them were murdered in the dark of night, behind lies and conspiracies that she still hoped would someday be revealed.
When the dust cleared, Padmé was dead, along with her unborn child, and Bail was suddenly—inexplicably—adopting an infant. He would not answer any questions about who his daughter's birth parents had been, other than to say she was a war orphan. Mon had been suspicious, but never confronted her friend about it. Much had happened in that terrifying week after the Purge, many innocent people had been slaughtered in their homes, and if Bail had somehow managed to save Padmé's child, then what of it?
Mon tried not to speculate wildly, but she thought it quite possible that the father of Padmé's child could be either Obi-Wan Kenobi or Bail himself. Either way, Bail would have a vested interest in protecting the child. She didn't bother thinking of it too hard. She knew she would never be told. The true parentage of the child was always going to be a mystery.
The Jedi were gone. In their place was Vader, a being obviously trained as a Jedi but horribly, unbelievably cruel. Rumors had swirled about his identity: he was quite obviously human (from the reports of oxygen chambers being installed in his private quarters), and he used the Force in ways the Jedi never had. She had asked Bail once who he believed lived in that suit—the former Jedi who had obviously been the lynchpin to their ultimate demise—and he had convincingly responded that he didn't have the faintest idea. His only tell was that her follow-up statement—that Obi-Wan Kenobi's death had never been officially reported like the other Masters'—had been firmly and somewhat angrily denied.
Obi-Wan is dead, he had forcefully said.
So it wasn't Obi-Wan in that suit. It had to be another.
The mystery slowly became less interesting as Mon navigated the parameters of her new life as an Imperial senator. There were committees to hold, hearings to run, complex reorganization of the minutiae of a governing body to undertake. Life moved on, albeit with a longing for the safety and freedom of the past.
She missed Padmé, but held onto the growing knowledge that Bail was raising her daughter. It was unmistakable. Leia looked just like her. She spoke like her, she fought just as hard for the ideal of social justice, and she was loud. Blatant. Completely unstoppable in her zeal.
She had all the graceful empathy of an Organa, but her unbridled strength of will was undeniably that of Padmé Naberrie.
Bail was obviously in a bind. As Leia became older, as she became more and more vocal and it seemed obvious that the girl was going to run for galactic office at an unbearably young age—as her birth mother and Mon herself had done—he reached out to Mon and asked her to mentor his firebrand daughter.
Please, Mon. She desperately needs your mentorship.
But by then, Mon was a senior senator and had no time for a fourteen year old nightmare, no matter who her mother had been.
I'm sorry, I simply don't have any more time to offer—
Bail had interrupted her. I am begging you. Please.
She had looked at this man, her friend, her ally, and saw such a total consumptive need for help that her brain had cleared, and the only thing she could say was: she's too much like her mother.
Mon did not mean Breha Organa, and neither did Bail when he simply paused, and then nodded.
And that had been that. Mon had endeavored to smooth out the roughness in young Leia, the obvious similarities that she presented to her biological mother. It was hard work, but one she relished. Though she never spoke of it, not to anyone, not even to Bail, she found solace in seeing Padmé's fire still alive in the galaxy. Mon had purpose beyond just the fledgling Alliance, she had another generation of leaders to train, and powerful ones at that. She might not live to see a New Republic established, but maybe Padmé's daughter would.
Leia was brought into the secret coalition of senatorial Alliance sympathizers when she was officially elected, and the machinery of forward progress wheezed on and on. It seemed all was going as it should, that the Alliance would continue its anonymous guerilla attacks on supply depots and outlying, poorly-attended Imperial bases, when suddenly there had been a turning point.
Plans of a superweapon, and only one trusted person who would be close enough to receive them and transmit them to the Alliance safely. Bail had commed Mon, frantic, before he had seen Leia off.
If we send her, she will be outed completely as a rebel.
We don't have another choice.
He had sighed heavily. My child, Mon. My daughter.
She couldn't speak to that. She was not Leia's parent, though she definitely was incredibly fond of her. But that fondness was not the love a parent would have for a child, and she wouldn't cast shade on Bail's very understandable worry.
He continued. If I tell her of this mission, she will agree to it.
Mon nodded. Yes, she will.
She will see this as a duty.
She nodded again.
I will not be able to protect her.
A brief silence in which his face suddenly turned very determined. Dark eyes narrowed, handsome features hardened, lips pursed.
Mon, if anything happens to me in this, if they come after me or my wife on Alderaan, I need you to do something for me.
She had been too sad for her friend for her curiosity of the past to pique, and so she had said: nothing is going to happen. The Way is ready for her, she will be taken care of—
She must go to Tatooine, he interrupted. She must meet my old friend and … and her brother.
It took Mon Mothma several beats to understand and interpret what Bail had said. The first puzzle—that of his old friend—was a blip she rolled past too quickly and regretted not asking about later. The larger one, that of a long-lost brother, was paramount, and she had gaped.
Brother! What the hell are you telling—
He interrupted again. Promise me.
And Mon Mothma had only two seconds to think before she agreed, wholeheartedly, to his request.
"That was the last time I spoke with him," she finished, after a long pause. "He … well. You know what happened next."
Leia breathed deeply, summoned all the peace she could from the Force. It was a treacherous precipice she balanced on, but it was not nearly as bad as others she had faced. Compared to Bespin, compared to the Death Star, this was low-hanging fruit.
"I knew the minute you returned with Commander Skywalker who your parents were," Mon said into the silence that followed. "But the promise I made to Bail had already been fulfilled. Somehow you had found Obi-Wan, who I now presume Bail meant by old friend, and your brother was with you. I didn't see a need to complicate matters further."
Complicate matters further. Leia wanted to laugh. Telling Leia that she and Luke were siblings would have been an earth-shattering revelation. It had been an earth-shattering revelation.
"You said you suspected Anakin Skywalker had become Vader?" Leia asked.
"His was on a mental list of names I kept that had never shown up on death notices the Empire released during the Purge. By all reports, he was a very powerful Jedi."
Leia rolled her eyes but didn't comment further. Vader's power was no longer in question to her. He was, simply and totally, the strongest aura she had ever experienced. His power dwarfed Yoda's. His power dwarfed hers and her brother's combined. He was a behemoth presence in the Force, and she was only now truly realizing how dangerous he was.
"I'm … so sorry, Leia," Mon whispered.
Turning her head, she looked at her former mentor. Mon seemed smaller, somehow muted by the enormity of the conspiracy she had unknowingly participated in. Leia allowed the Force to flow into her, opened the vast chambers of empathy Bail Organa had instilled in her, and realized that Mon was, for all intents and purposes, just as much a pawn in this game as Leia herself was.
"You tried to protect me as a child," she said, quietly.
The older woman grimaced, uncomfortable. "I didn't do a very good job of it, then, did I?"
A flicker of humor raced through Leia's chest, and she tried a very small smile. "Who knows? Maybe you gave me a few more years of relative normalcy."
Definitely uncomfortable now, Mon stood from the plastex table and made a hard tsk sound. "I doubt that very much, but thank you. Now I hope you will consent to a proper interrogation about your whereabouts the past month? There are still questions."
"That depends."
Mon cocked an eyebrow. "On what?"
Swallowing, Leia leaned forward and rested her weight on her forearms. "On how much of this personal history I am going to disclose to High Command."
Uncomfortable quiet settled in the interrogation room, and the two women stared at each other for an extended period of time. When the silence became too uncomfortable, Mon cleared her throat and said, "While I can empathize with your desire to keep your parentage to yourself—"
"It's more than that," Leia said. "There are those in the rank-and-file who are already suspicious of Luke and me as Jedi. I don't think revealing more sordid history confirming their biases is going to benefit the Alliance in any way."
"Then we do not disclose it to the Alliance proper," Mon offered. "But High Command will be debriefed. You are in an interrogation cell, and this interview has been recorded."
Leia rolled her eyes before she could stop herself, a remnant of that uncontrollable teenager Mon had spoken of. This was the foremost reason she believed the former-senator when she said she had had very few dealings with the Jedi. She naively believed that Leia wasn't already planning to destroy those cameras the minute she left the room.
Being underestimated wasn't the worst thing in the galaxy.
"Jan will question my loyalty," she said instead.
"Let me worry about Jan."
Furrowing her brow, Leia said, "After finding out about my relationship with Commander Solo—"
The pain loomed, like a thunderstorm over a ridge, and she welcomed the salt-tinged relief of that near-fantasy room in which Han slept peacefully. Stay here, she had said to him, and that was the only reason she didn't break.
Luckily, Mon caught on quickly. "That doesn't matter."
"It very much will matter when I go to get Han back."
The older woman's eyes narrowed, and Leia knew she presented quite a large problem to her former mentor. The Alliance didn't officially know what had happened to Han. Leia had told Salla and the Mercs in a moment of commiseration in the bay, but there was a great deal the ranks knew that High Command didn't, and vice-versa.
Mon was a wise woman, so she left that tidbit for a different time and a different interrogation.
"Wouldn't it be better for Jan to know now than to form a conspiracy that will only make him more suspicious later?"
True, but …
"He will request my immediate dismissal from High Command."
Mon nodded. "Yes. And he will have my agreement on that."
Betrayal shot through Leia's chest like fire, and all thoughts of cool, blue-white rooms disintegrated into nothingness. "What?"
"Think logically, Leia," Mon said. "Think as your … as Bail would."
The verbal misstep nearly crumbled all of her self-control. The anger threatened, beckoned, reached for her with invisible, seductive hands. It was always ready at the periphery, and while her shields were constantly being reinforced, she knew she was forever one trigger away from losing it all.
Calm your anger, Yoda's voice whispered in her ear. Serve you, it does not.
"I am still the same person, Mon," she said, fighting for an even tone. Fighting for her very life. "Nothing has changed."
"That may be true, but there is far more at stake than just your personal war."
"It's the same war."
Mon sighed, noticeably shifting back into her military role. "The Alliance must have confidence in their High Command. Without it, we are doomed, and you know that better than anyone, Senator."
And that stopped Leia in her tracks as surely as a blaster bolt would. Out of everything in her life—the loss of her homeworld, the lies about her parentage, the confusion of her Jedi training, the torture of the man she loved—she had never wavered in her faith in the Alliance's cause. That was the marrow in her bones, the air she breathed. Nothing trumped her opposition to the Empire. Nothing.
Perhaps the only other person who felt as fervently about the cause was Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila, who had lost a husband and son to the Empire years ago. If anyone could understand Leia's need to take it down, it was her.
If anyone could understand Leia's compulson to redeem her good name, it was Mon.
So Leia tried to analyze the situation rationally, as her father had taught her to do. How likely was it that High Command could keep news of Luke and Leia's paternity secret? It was more likely that the twins would go join the Empire, and that was such a laughable possibility that it didn't bear a second thought. The rank-and-file would find out one way or another. And when they did, would it look better to have hidden behind the same damn conspiracies of the past or to be the ones who had spoken the hard truth in the moment?
You can wait a few months, she thought. Give yourself some time to figure it all out. Rescue Han, return to Yoda, have a plan on how to take down Vader …
But that had also been the reasoning behind hiding her Force-sensitivity from Luke, and in the end, it had only led to pain. She could hardly imagine making that choice again. It had devastated Luke, left Han in the brig, and wasted time in the forward motion of their training. Even if she hadn't felt prepared to handle the consequences of disclosing that information at the time, it had ultimately led to skills she had needed later.
So. What was the likely fallout of the entire Alliance learning that Darth Vader was their father?
She would have to leave High Command anyway. No reasonable person would trust them with authority over other lives anymore. Even if they had already done so. Even if Leia and Luke knew that they were one thousand percent committed to the destruction of their father and his legacy. Even if their father hadn't taken nearly everything from them already.
But they didn't know that.
And while that was painful—so horribly painful—it would be worse to live with the knowledge that someday someone would discover it on their own and she and her brother would look even worse than if they had just come clean in the first place.
She was not a liar, despite Yoda's opinion of her character.
Resolved now in her decision, she sought peace and precariously took a deep breath, thrusting herself back into the blue-white room. This was her tried-and-true method the past twenty-four hours, as she had held together the canyon that shuddered apart whenever she had to face yet another consequence of Bespin's revolting revelation. She refused to think about any such thing in depth while in the presence of anyone else, even—and perhaps especially—Luke, as he had suffered on the flight back to the Alliance rendezvous.
She couldn't think about Vader. Or the guilt associated with Luke's lost hand. Or what Bail had or had not known.
But she could think about Han.
There he was: hair rumpled over his forehead, lips slightly parted, breathing deeply. His scarred chin, tucked down toward his chest. One foot sneaking out from the crisp, white sheet that covered his hips. Long toes motionless as they hung over the edge of the bed.
And the utterly divine feeling of the Light Side of the Force as it swept through her like a brushstroke. She could recognize it for what it was. The only remedy for that beckoning hand of rage and despair. Her love for Han had always made her power stronger in the Force, they had seen that again and again, and when she harnessed it this way, when she allowed the confidence in his love to dominate, she could feel a modicum of security.
Imagining strong arms wrapped around her shoulders, she remembered peace. Remembered inappropriate jokes, teasing repartee, the fortitude of a man who was every bit as strong as everyone claimed she was, especially as he had begun to embrace his own vulnerability. She thought about what she would say to him when she could finally awaken him, when she could brush her fingers against his jaw and see for herself that he was breathing and alive somewhere outside of this room.
Eyes still closed, she heard Mon continue into the silence. "A conspiracy of lies is what led us here in the first place. Do you really want to be party to yet another, Leia?"
Stay here, she ordered the sleeping Han, and then opened her eyes. The table no longer separated them; Leia had stepped around it in her moment of seething anger, and they were now standing face to face, not two meters away from each other. Mon was awash in a very light green glow, almost mint, barely emanating from her skin. It was still and calm, softly rippling around her form.
And Leia brushed the bright presence in the Force she easily recognized as her brother, full of eagerness and heart and love for them both, and told him that she was authorizing the free release of their most despised secret.
He didn't answer in words, and instead sent a swell of gentle encouragement.
"Please tell them," Leia finally whispered, trusting the Force to take this worry from her, too. "And then send for me so I can resign in person."