Author's notes: Since a few people have asked, I am freely blending characters from both the Disney Canon and EU / Legends, while very occasionally adding someone of my own. Also, several people have pm'd about illustrating my work; that is not something I'm interested in pursuing.

Prologue (35 ABY)

This was not what Leia Organa had expected from death. She'd thought about her own death quite a bit over the years, as the people she loved were torn from her, in moments of mass horror or singular anguish. She'd even talked to her brother about it, once, on a bleak morning when she was willing to turn to a Jedi Master for wisdom. All she wanted was to know that she'd rejoin some of those people she'd loved, somehow, as energy or atoms or as a glowing blue ghost. He'd reassured her, in that strange, half-embarrassed, half-confident manner he'd adopted in those days. And she'd believed him, even when she lost faith in so much else.

But nowhere in her imagination had she envisioned this…this space which wasn't space, time which was no time, and, most terribly, the complete emptiness.

She felt like herself, not a force ghost or an energy field. She seemed to have legs, anyway, and feet, under which was a…flat thing? Or flat nothing? She was able to turn around in the darkness and feel the sense of turning. Finally, she opened the mouth she had not expected to have and asked the most pertinent question on her mind:

"What the fuck?"

Okay, not her best line. But it did get a response, a sort of … movement? Later…or much earlier, depending on how such things are reckoned, she would not remember the shape of the being who responded to her query, nor what language it used to answer her. It didn't really talk as such. It just dropped a question into her mind, a request. Frankly, it seemed a bit embarrassed about it, but what it wanted was clear.

She wanted to say no. Desperately. She was tired, old and tired, and she'd fought so long, so hard, even when almost everyone else had given up, and she felt she'd earned her rest. She wanted her family, her parents, her brother, her husband, her child. She wanted to go home, to have a home again and be surrounded by the love that kept being relentlessly stripped from her despite all her efforts.

It was time to be a blue ghost, dammit. Couldn't she finally rest?

The…entity…still waited. Was it the Force? Or was it some powerful Force user, trying to drag her back into the universe, into all that pain and loss? Was it a trap?

Yet no matter the time or place—even in timelessness and emptiness—she remained herself, and it was not in her to give up. Not when there was still hope, however feeble and unlikely. Dead or alive, she was still General Leia Organa, and given the opportunity to make the galaxy a better place, she would always return to the fight.

The entity, whatever it was, clearly expected her acquiescence. It had not expected her try to lay down conditions, however. What kind of mortal, offered the chance to return to the living, tried to broker a deal? One who had been raised by a diplomat and married a smuggler, of course. She started with a truly bizarre list of demands (what did supportive undergarments have to do with fighting the Sith, anyway?), but in the end…or the beginning…or neither…it agreed that she would retain her memory of her previous life and that she would regain a physical form undamaged by torture, injury or abuse. If she was going back into battle against Darth Sidious, she would need to be sound in mind and body. That such a transformation…transmutation…whatever, would cause pain was a given and did not intimidate her.

Pain was the one thing she expected from the new life ahead of her. It had, after all, been her most steadfast companion in the last.