#like i know luke was exhausted at this point and his voice wasn’t its strongest but HELLO the harmonies in the first chorus | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

frumfrumfroo · 4 years

Text

I wrote a thing (Leia and Ben reunion angst)

Lamentations

Leia Organa hadn't really planned on getting old.

Not that she’d particularly expected to die young, either. The possibility (even probability) was certainly very real considering her tireless campaign to put herself in the thick of imminent danger, but logical reasoning about the likely outcome was never any match for her ambitions in life. Sheer bravado and the arrogance of youth had always been more than adequate to the task of pushing the reality of death from her mind. Even when fear or doubt got a grip, she had taken for granted that her rude good health and unshakeable self-assurance would continue in perpetuity as long as she managed to survive.

She hadn’t counted on a day dawning when she could no longer take matters into her own hands if need be. When tenacity might not be enough.

Now, hobbling down a corridor with the cane she hated but couldn’t yet do without no matter what her pride said, finding it slightly hard to catch her breath, she felt the years like anchors on every limb. She felt the weight of her choices pressing her shoulders down from their habitual imperious uprightness into an aged stoop.

She was on her way to meet her own son for the first time as a grown man and the harm she had done him, her failures as a mother, trailed her like a colossal shadow. She sensed the cold presence of the past looming over her, its encroaching guilt nipping at her heels, and it made her feel more ancient than the deepest rivers of the Force. As if her bones were formed from brittle primordial rock, apt to shatter with a touch.

If Han were here he’d cut her down to size for thinking she was the one keeping the whole universe together, for trying to bear every burden, fight every good fight. He’d depreciate himself and distract her from her navel gazing, bounce her back into reality and remind her not everything depended on her. But small things did. Smaller things than she ever remembered to notice. He’d kiss her on the forehead and forgive her for her self-importance. Han had kept her human when single-minded, hotheaded determination threatened to turn her into some kind of overbearing political droid.

But he wasn’t here and never would be again.

When the girl, Rey, repeated her story of what had happened on Starkiller Base, this time after her sojourn on Ahch-to, and in much more detail than before… It was the first time Leia wondered if she ought to blame herself a lot more personally than she ever had, if it were her fears and hurts, her emotional retaining wall which created an opportunity for Snoke. Perhaps it wasn’t so inevitable, the enemy wasn’t so crafty, and she had simply abdicated her post as guardian. Every far-flung, bleeding heart responsibility she’d voluntarily taken on in her life- some she’d deliberately snatched out of other, more cautious hands- and she’d shunned the one which had the strongest, most natural claim on her. It was the one job she was worried she couldn’t do.

He’d been so small when she’d pulled his childish, clutching fingers away from the folds of her dress and pressed him firmly towards his uncle. He’d been only just as tall as her chest, gangly and skinny in the aftermath of his first growth spurt. His eyes had looked huge in his slim face, enormous and soulful pools of hazel gold and brown. Pleading. She remembered putting her hands on his shoulders and smoothing back his hair as she looked at him and tried not to notice the sheen of unshed tears, the trembling of his lower lip. She’d decided this was best for him and so she had turned a deaf ear to any potential entreaties, unwilling to be swayed from wisdom by sentiment. It had to be done. For his own good, she had to pretend this didn’t hurt. She couldn’t waver.

All her life she hadn’t had time for her sorrows, all her life she could ill-afford the luxury of indulging her feelings. When was it time? When had she fought for long enough?

When she won. That was always the answer. She’d rest, she’d have a life, when she had made a universe worth living in. When she’d made things right. What could be more important?

“There’s always some new crusade, though, isn’t there, sweetheart?”

Han’s voice, sharp on the endearment which he’d always used equally often in chastisement as in affection, laden with barely concealed hurt. She heard his pain, but she chose not to listen to it.

She’d thought there’d be time to make it up to him. She thought they would wait for her, her family, that her life would wait for her.

Her step faltered when she found herself standing outside the room in the med suite where Ben was recuperating. He was mobile now, his wounds were closed and his ribs were healing. He’d needed a lot of rest, more for mental and spiritual exhaustion than physical damage. He’d become a conduit in the Force the like of which was only heard of in legend and there had been some question if he would survive. She’d kept abreast of his condition since she’d been told of his arrival three days ago; he’d been in her every thought and breath and prayer, but she couldn’t visit. There was too much to do, too many people to oversee and decisions to make. She had plenty of excuses to keep avoiding the reckoning.

Reportedly Rey hadn’t left his bedside once, never further from him than the fresher in the corner of the room. Poe said she was like a wild animal with a cub, hovering protectively over his prone body and questioning anyone who wanted to get near him. She’d maintained a death grip on his hand which only loosened slightly when she fell asleep in her chair at his side. Her own injuries were tended by a droid, under protest and without anaesthetic.

Leia leaned against the corridor wall and tried for what felt like the latest in several trillion attempts to come to terms with what Rey had told her about Luke. About Ben.

And she knew she deserved to blame herself. She knew. If he’d thought he could come home, he would have, and who had made him think he couldn’t? Han had fought for him and she’d have to tell him that no matter how painful it was to admit, she’d have to make sure he understood it wasn’t his father’s idea that Anakin’s blood flowed with latent corruption- not until she’d convinced him it did. Not until her secret festering fears clouded over the dawning love and hope they’d sacrificed so much to have.

The supreme necessity of forgiveness, of giving it and receiving it both, had become the hardest lesson she would ever learn. Her famously indomitable righteous anger had perished with a whimper, suffocated itself in weariness and despair; it was only fear that lived forever. It was fear which chained love, shackled hope, and bound the soul in darkness. And forgiveness drove out fear.

If Ben could forgive her, it seemed a mere pittance to forgive him.

When she rounded the corner the kids were silent but clearly communicating, the power of their connection like a subtle crackle in the Force which raised the hairs on the back of her neck. Rey was sitting on the edge of his cot, their heads very close together and her hands clasping both of his. Leia absorbed Rey’s mood first because it didn’t hurt nearly so much to look at Rey. The smile on her lips and the contentment in her eyes spoke of a peace the girl had never shown before. There was a confidence about her now, a knowingness. Leia had sensed she was searching for something from the moment she’d first seen her, noticed the void she was trying to fill. Leia had an eye for pressure points in people. She’d made use of Rey’s in hope that it would help her reach Luke. There might be an apology owed in that quarter too, but all thoughts of Rey vanished when Ben noticed her presence.

His head turned towards her and his face froze in an expression between horror and anguish, his pleading eyes just as she remembered them. He had a lot of his father in him, so much that it was striking, and a stab of agony lodged itself between her ribs that felt like her heart being pierced. But there was also so much of her in those eyes, in the slope of his jaw and the shape of his chin that she almost felt as if she were looking into a kaleidoscope reflection of her younger self. The certain, unshakable self she still half expected to see in the mirror before she turned on the vanity lights. He was a perfect marriage of her features and Han’s, with his broad cheekbones and regal profile, his full mouth and deep set eyes.

It was probably because he seemed in that moment somehow both a mirror and the spitting image of her husband that it was the shame which hit her first. She couldn’t help but spin around and cover her mouth to try to swallow a cry.

There was a tiny gasping noise from behind her and then Rey’s voice murmuring something. She couldn’t focus on the words, couldn’t understand what was being said, but she knew the sound of pain was from Ben. He thought she couldn’t bear to look at him.

And she couldn’t, but not for the reasons he must be imagining.

She gathered her dignity and forced herself to look again. He was clutching his blankets where they pooled at his waist, his long black hair falling in soft waves which framed the drawn pallor of his face very starkly. He looked ill and frightened. Vulnerable, a child again.

“Ben,” she choked out. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, my darling boy. I’m so sorry.”

She didn’t know how long she’d been weeping into her hands when someone began to gently pry them away from her face, but her cheeks were wet and her eyes stung. She raised her gaze only to be confronted with a wide expanse of chest covered in the soft, oversized hospital smock which was standard issue for checked-in patients. She looked up, and up, and up to meet his eyes and couldn’t remember ever feeling so small in her life.

Leia was a short woman and used to fighting to get the world on her level, but this was her baby. She’d carried him in her belly, held him in her hands, she’d last seen him when she still had to crouch to speak to him eye to eye. His once little fingers now dwarfed her entire arm where he was holding her wrist and he towered over her to such an extent that the top of her head barely reached the middle of his sternum. Her baby was grown up and she hadn’t seen him in person since he was ten. Since their heights had been the inverse of this tableau. He’d become a man and she’d been there for none of it. She’d chosen not to be.

Ben was leaning down, studying her with trepidatious concern, and she couldn’t help but reach up and touch his face. She put his hair behind his ear and cradled his cheek in her palm, feeling the living warmth of his skin and the tickling sensation of a hot tear which rolled down from the corner of his eye and under her thumb.

“Look how beautiful you are,” she said, almost without meaning to.

He ducked towards her hand, hiding behind his hair.

She wrapped her arms around him and he folded into her, dropping nearly to his knees so he could hug her back, so tightly that it almost hurt. He was very strong, the harsh conditioning of a footsoldier obvious in the broad muscles of his back beneath her hands, and it hurt to think how badly he must have needed to be, how much he’d needed to rely on himself and his ability to fight. How he’d never been safe anywhere from the moment he was born.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. He sobbed hard into her shoulder, as if the words had broken a dam inside him. Deep, wracking sobs that shook his whole body and made her hold him as close as she could and whisper to him the way she had when he was a fussing infant, when the nightmares she never dared to tell her brother about had gripped him in their malingering claws. When the fear of darkness which ended up swallowing their little family encroached too close. “Shhsh, shhsh, it’s all right now.”

His voice cracked when he finally managed to tell her, “It’s me- I'm sorry; it’s me, it’s me, it’s me. How can you stand it, how can you stand it?”

Leia suddenly found herself meeting Rey’s penetrating gaze over his head. If there was judgement there, it was less harsh than it justly could have been.

“I should have protected you. I didn’t protect you.”

“Mother,” he croaked with enormous difficulty, “I killed him.”

Her stomach rolled over and her vision blurred with fresh tears, but she held him with her, gripping the fabric of his shirt with white-knuckle intensity. “He loved you. I love you. I’m so sorry.”

His face collapsed like wet linen and he slid to the floor at her feet, burying his head in her skirts. There was a mantra of apologies and self-recriminations amongst the desperate sobs and she lowered a shaking hand to stroke his hair.

“Ben, don’t. Please. Please don’t. Your father knew, he understood.”

Red eyes peeked up at her, his chin was trembling and those same fingers were clutching her skirts again and she wished she could go back to that day and tell herself her child needed her more than the galactic senate ever would. He needed honesty, his mother and his family, not a comfortable lie, a Jedi master or a carefully constrained destiny. She wished she’d seen him as clearly then as she did now, that she hadn’t been too afraid to look. She wished Han could be here to celebrate beating the odds one last time.

“If he could, he’d tell you this was the fairest trade he ever made.”

#basically a companion piece to my earlier fic #because fuck tros Leia didn't need to die and everyone killing her all the time is bullshit #this really isn't what I wanted? I don't know that the voice is right at all? idk angst because I'm mega depressed #is it cathartic at least?#fanfiction

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