this is a disclaimer.
AN: vague connections with just try not to worry, which is basically my 'go to' fic for when I'm getting into Leia's head.
think our paths are straight
All her life, Leia has known she's an orphan. No one ever told her she was adopted; the knowledge was just there, in her mind - and her heart, to be honest. She spends a lot of time as a teenager scorning anything resembling sentimentality, but it's a front and she knows it.
Too much time spent pining as a kid for something she'd never have and couldn't put her finger on to ask for it anyway. When Winter comes to live with them, she thinks maybe -
But Winter calls her Princess sometimes, when she forgets that they're sisters now, and even after she's stopped doing that she plainly doesn't forget the imaginary gulf between them. It's only a hair's-breadth wide, but Leia thinks it must run deeper than the sea.
She's never dared look too closely at it herself.
Mom's always so quiet, so calm: the first time Leia hears the word stately, she thinks of Mom. It fits too well. Dad -
Leia adores her Dad.
Doesn't mean she understands him.
Doesn't mean he understands her, either.
(You're their Princess, not their playmate.)
(Sabé says you've been moping again. Leia, I will lock the observatory door, you know - you can't stargaze your life away, and anyway, growing girls need sleep!
Only almost teasing.)
The thing is: he makes speeches about peace but he still gets Sabé to teach her to shoot, and he tells her how important family is but he still misses her tenth birthday party because of Senate stuff, and he wants her to be happy but he still makes her learn her lessons - far more lessons than the other girls - rather than letting her play.
And he arranges piloting lessons for her, but there's always something about him when she comes home from a lesson: something pale, something wary. After the first few times, she tries not to look so happy whenever she touches down; tries not to bounce into his study and blurt out all her aerial adventures nineteen-to-the-dozen.
Dad, Leia comes to understand, doesn't like it that she likes flying.
(So she stops liking it.)
She's not very old when she realises she can always tell when people are lying to her.
(It takes her longer to realise that not everybody can do this.)
Of course, this is not an ability that Leia ever scorns: it's useful, so she uses it. The trouble started when she noticed her parents were lying to her.
(Your mother was an amazing woman, Leia. You're just like her.)
(She loved you very much - more than anything in the galaxy.)
The only thing her Mother loved more than anything in the galaxy was her Father, Leia will think one day and wrap her arms around the other half of herself and won't be able to find words to admit how grateful she is to their Father for not being the same way; but that's decades in the future and for now all she knows is that there's something wrong with what her Mom's just told her about her mother.
Your father used a different weapon, but he was a fighter pilot, so yes, he was an excellent shot.
Used a different weapon.
A different weapon.
Knife whip broadsword bow and arrows what?
"Dad, was my father a Jedi?"
Dad jerks.
"No," he says. "No, sweetheart, he wasn't."
(Not a lie.)
"The Jedi didn't have families - they weren't permitted to marry, and very few of them knew who their parents were. It was how they lived, without attachments," Dad explains.
Shivers chase up Leia's arms. "That's -"
(few of them knew who their parents were - just like me)
"That's awful."
Pause. Dad stares at her. She frowns back, puzzled at his reaction.
Finally, he nods, slow, thoughtful. "I suppose it... must have been."
He sounds a bit puzzled himself.
Like he's considering some new idea for the first time.
Leia can't quite remember the day she decided that the Empire needed destroying and she would do everything in her power to make it happen, but she remembers the day she realises that the only way for her to get any power is to do what Dad says - be what he is.
Lessons are over, but duty comes first after all.
She (day)dreams about deserts a lot. Not sure why, except that she's never been to one and she can't imagine what they must be like: endless empty sand dunes, no rainstorms to send her home shivering and wet through, no mountains impassable to block her path.
Sometimes there's a boy: a boy with silly jokes and blond hair and a fondness for Kyrithian sweetmeats.
(Another thing Dad doesn't like her liking. They come from a planet in the Outer Rim controlled by gangsters; Leia supposes that's why.)
The boy likes to stargaze, too.
(He bursts into her cell one day when they're grown-ups after she's become a proper orphan; her (hollow) heart recognises him years before her mind does.)
(There's no gulf there, hair's-breadth or otherwise.)
She never stops calling herself Leia Organa, but she's secretly glad the kids never use it. It's personal.
(None of them ever bother to hide how much they like to fly.)