Follows a year and a half after the events of chapter 8 of "Love Thy Enemy" after Leia is rescued on Ryloth.
Leia and Anakin do not converse. Even when visiting Ossis with Jaina and Jacen in tow.
Leia prefers it that way. Prefers it to stilted interactions with the man she has come to accept as her blood father. He has written his fatherly affection in the trail of blood and death that led to her rescue on Ryloth. His actions have claimed a small part of her heart. And yet, somehow, restored to the routine of daily life, he has yet again become frightening and alien.
As she stares at him, sitting across from her in his deceptively commonplace shack, she is reminded of why she avoids him. The suit is gone. As is the armor. But she can still picture it. Picture it in the set of his shoulders, the flex of his cybernetic fingers. She can almost imagine that labored breathing mechanism, echoing inside her memories as flashes of pain and horror-
No.
Leia stops the line of thought.
Breathe.
She focuses on the smell of earth. The plain brown walls. The sunlight filtering through the shutters. She is alive. She is not in an interrogation chamber. He is no longer her torturer...
Her torturer...
The quietitude drags as he looks at her. His mouth twitches as if he wants to speak yet thinks better of it. He looks far healthier than the last time she'd seen him. The doctors she had paid for had probably helped with that. She wants him to live, it is true, but that certainly does not mean she knows what to do with him.
At the moment, the toddling twins are with their uncle learning "secret" Jedi arts—really, she thinks they are just playing, but far be it for her to stop Luke from being a doting uncle—leaving her to amuse herself in Anakin's home.
He has made her a cup of caf, but it sits on the table before her, growing colder and colder.
"You look troubled, Leia…"
She starts as he speaks to her, breaking the sanctity of silence. He is staring at her, those strangely blue eyes following her with a pained expression.
"If there is something you want to ask me. Something you want to discuss. I will answer any question you like."
"What is there to discuss?" She says quietly.
He gives her a noncommittal shrug. "You may ask anything of me without provocation; I owe you that much…and far more."
"What would I ask of you?" She says with affected nonchalance, her voice growing tight. She has tried to forget…even as the memory rears its head again and again in her nightmares.
"Would I ask you how it felt to torture your daughter?"
His face twists, and his eyes lower.
"You may ask that of me if you wish."
His voice is so gratingly quiet...
"We both know what you did. There is nothing to ask." She is speaking from deep in her throat now, the words low and forcibly clipped.
His hands are folded over in his lap now as he glances up at her and then down at where his cybernetic fingers work against one another.
His sheepishness is irritating. Provocative, even. Where is the indomitable Sith Lord? Where is the towering wall of terror? How can they all be bound up in this old man who is so scared of a little silence…
"If you have a guilty conscience…then just come out and say it. Try your hand at some pathetic apology…" Leia feels heat working up into her face now. "But you won't; I know you won't. You will not because you cannot. You cannot apologize. You saved me, and I am grateful; I may not want you dead, but I do not want to sit down and chat with you about what you did to me."
He takes her anger with a patient yet sorrowful look and answers only when she pauses, taking breaths to calm her pounding heart.
"I cannot undo what has been done—"
"Oh, really? What was your first clue?" She asks, standing up to pace the floor of the small shack, her heart beating faster, veins pounding with phantom terrors. "My father pumped me full of poison and tried to tear my mind apart."
Anakin's face has grown tight and pained, yet his gaze remains unflinching.
"You...you...raped my soul." She stumbles over the word but does not stop. "You did that to your daughter. Your own daughter! You sensed Luke! You knew that he was your son...Why didn't you sense me?"
Hot tears suddenly pool in her eyes, tears she had not expected to shed.
"…why couldn't you sense me…?" The words come out brokenly now, and she curses her cracking voice.
He looks as if he wants to comfort her but understands its futility.
"I—" His own voice breaks. "I do not know why I did not see. Perhaps…perhaps it was because I did not want to see it. You look so much like your mother; I hated you for it. The thought of her….the thought of her was so painful…I was too blinded by my hate, and I—"
"I know you hated me. That was abundantly clear!" She snaps, interrupting him. "And I hate all the parts of me that remind me of you!"
She sees that the barb has drawn blood as he glances to meet her gaze but says nothing. Good. She wanted him to feel it. The pain. The hurt. The betrayal.
"I hope and pray that, somehow, your poison spares the twins and stops with me. Because that is what you are to me, Anakin, a poison. A curse passed down in my blood."
"Leia, I am so s—" He stops himself, catching the words that had been so close to falling from his lips.
"I know you're sorry," Leia responds, her voice leveling into an affected air of ice. "And, to make it all worse, I—I...care for you. I care for my torturer. That is the most awful part. You are my father and rescuer. But you are also the specter that haunts my dreams, the twisted mirror that reflects what I might become. How am I supposed to live with that?"
He finally lifts his face to meet her eyes. His gaze steady and unflinching. There is suddenly wisdom in those furtive eyes as he rises, towering over her. It is only then that she remembers how small she is compared to him, how wan and thin compared to his frame of flesh and steel.
He crosses the distance between them, even so, she does not move, instead, she lifts her chin, staring up at him with the same defiance she'd shown on Tantive IV.
To her surprise, he smiles at her, a thin, sad, proud smile.
"You are as much your mother's daughter as you are mine. You will not become me, Leia. Do you know why...?"
He pauses. She does not dare to breathe. As if all the world depends on his next words.
"...Because you are better, Leia. You are better than me."
And with that, he turns and leaves her, his form striding out the door of the shack.
Stunned, Leia blinks owlishly at the space he had occupied just a moment before, hardly believing the words they have exchanged, thinking that, perhaps, she had imagined the whole thing.
At last, Anakin has given her what she wanted.
He has left her in blissful solitude with a cup of caf that she has only just realized is still warm.
...After a moment, she lifts the cup.
And takes a sip.
I thought about posting this blurb separate but then I thought, what the heck, why not? Did you like the coffee metaphor? I always love a good review!