WHO: Anakin Skywalker, Leia Organa (canon) WHEN: Several weeks ago WHERE: JJ's or lunch. WHAT: Anakin and Leia agree to have lunch together, but it's kind of hard when your father was a homicidal maniac who tried to kill you a bunch of times. TRIGGERS: Talk of Jedi Temple slaughter, Padmé's death, and you know, general Star Wars deaths.
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Anakin had been thrown, but in a welcome way, that his Leia actually wanted to spend time with him. He had a jumble of feelings about her requirement that it was in public, but it was still going to get to spend time with her. He welcomed that, even if it didn't go well. They'd agreed on meeting at JJ's, somewhere Anakin hadn't eaten at before despite how many people on the network raved about it.
It still felt strange seeing that she was older than him now, older than he would ever live to be. She had always looked so young to him before, too young for the burdens she carried. So many of them were of his making. He kept staring when he should have been deciding what to order, and he picked at random. The food wasn't important.
Vrogas Vas. She'd somehow managed to get the jump on Darth Vader, she was so close to taking that shot. She had been so determined to take out the Emperor's second greatest weapon, not knowing anything about the man inside. She had been fine with that at the time. He was a monster, one she's witnessed in the flesh. He'd tortured her. They'd killed her world, and he held her back while they made her watch. No one knew his weaknesses, and many said he didn't have any.
But he did.
She wouldn't know it until several years later, but he was her father. Luke was her brother. Things were not as straightforward as she'd thought. If she'd made that shot and taken him out that day, would they ever have found out?
Being here worsened it. Bail and Breha Organa were her parents. They'd cared for her until their untimely deaths, and she'd learned everything she knew from them. Here, there was Padmé Amidala and Anakin Skywalker, her biological parents, and while she wanted to get to know them, she wondered if it was a disservice to Bail and Breha. Did it mean that she'd chosen one over the other?
No.
Leia smiled at the waitress after ordering a coffee, black, and JJ's famous waffles. She passed the menu to her and told the woman to take her time. Just not on the coffee. If she was going to get through this meeting, she was going to need something to keep her hands busy. It wasn't long before two cups were set in front of them, along with the pot. Leia immediately reached for it.
Leia was a great orator when she had something to say. When she didn't, well, she often would sit in silence until something jumped out at her to say. She'd spent so much of her life with something important to discuss, plans to make, or speeches of hope.
Maybe they could talk about work. They were both at the Bureau, in different departments. "Have you met Michael yet?"
Anakin noticed in the brief interaction with the waitress how Leia treated her. She wasn't "the help" or someone to be ignored; she was a peer. Anakin, as Anakin, had been like that. Darth Vader wouldn't have even noticed the waitress as a person, just as the role.
It was disturbing for him when those thoughts crept in. He didn't feel as divided against him as he had last year, after the funhouse brought him his own memories, but he still had his moments and brief shifts. Sometimes fleeting thoughts that he could attribute to his later mindset. Impulses quickly shut down.
Michael was someone Anakin knew of. "I've seen him around, and seen his work, but we haven't met. Those giant reports of his are, uh..." He tried to find the right word.
"Ridiculous." Leia was friendly with Michael, would probably consider him a friend if they kept up their Sunday coffee meet-ups. He needed someone after his best friend Janet left, and despite his insistence that he didn't need anyone and that he was evil, Leia could see the good in him. The conflict. "He does that on purpose. He knows that most people cannot stand to sift through droll paperwork of any length. It's a form of torture."
"Ridiculous. That's it. And that's a really tame idea of torture." That wasn't exactly a good topic for them, what with the torture that had gone on between them, so he was quick to move on. "I never looked to see who he thought was our... 'anchor'?"
It took a moment before Leia understood exactly what he meant by anchor. Michael had a theory that there was a tether between certain dimensions the Displaced came from. If that tether was severed then several others would disappeared as well. As far as Leia could see, there were several who could be a tether for their group.
Leia raised an eyebrow. "I wasn't paying attention. If Luke was here, I'd say it was him."
"I wasn't paying much attention either," Anakin admitted. "I would've guessed Luke, too. The idea of skimming through that much paperwork isn't exactly appealing to me. But did he think the idea of finding out what he'd said was so appealing that people would... willingly torture themselves?"
Without knowing Michael, he could only guess at the motivations based on the torturous impulses of people he'd known. People he'd worked very closely with, and had allowed or even encouraged to take such actions.
"There were some people who enjoyed reading it." Her co-worker, Maria Hill, was interested in all the garbage documents that Michael seemed to put out. Leia didn't know when he found the time to write so much, but he seemed to get some sort of glee about dumping it there for the public to slough through. Maybe he thought he was doing a legitimate service.
At least July was fairly quiet, with him having to fulfill his end of their bargain.
"I hear Sabine's moved to the shift with you and Ahsoka."
Anakin nodded and pulled a face. "I don't understand how this guy just comes in, with no leadership skills I can see, and suddenly we need evaluations and training overseen by him. I don't know why exactly it is that Sabine decided to join us. Me, that is. She, uh... doesn't exactly like me."
Leia brought her coffee cup to her lips and just raised her eyebrows at him over the top of it. There was a reply on the tip of her tongue that really ought to be quelled by taking a sip of her hot coffee. Can you blame her? was right there, waiting, and perhaps she didn't even need to say it after all.
It didn't really need explaining; Sabine was a Rebel, he was Darth Vader. Of course she hated him. But it was different from the general hate he got from Rebels who never actually met him, so he felt like needed to say a little more. Leia's eyebrows weren't exactly asking him to, but he did anyway.
"I ordered a trap laid for her squadron. It worked. She tried her blaster on me, but I deflected it back at her. I pursued the fleet and destroyed many of them personally. And, of course, there was Ahsoka..." He shouldn't have even brought her up. He didn't know what Leia knew about Malachor, so he abruptly switched from that subject. "Did you hear about her paint bomb?"
"I assume that Ahsoka is the reason she changed schedules. Sabine and Ahsoka work well together, you and Ahsoka work well. It doesn't take much of a genius to figure that out." It was also a good strategy to find out how your enemy worked by working with them. You learned their strengths and flaws, and how to exploit them.
She shook her head. "What paint bomb?"
"Yes, but she doesn't exactly like working with me." He had been training her, despite her reluctance, but that was different from the potential for battle. That wasn't life-or-death stakes where you needed to trust your team. He knew Sabine trusted his abilities, but that wasn't the same as knowing someone would have your back. It wasn't like it'd been with the other Jedi and his troops.
"Well, she has a real talent for explosives, and for art. I sent her a gift that I thought she could appreciate, these really interesting paints. Sort of a peace offering. When I was physically here as Vader, we had a... bad experience, but anyway--" He detailed how Sabine had laid her trap, the explosion of fruit-scented paints that got everywhere they could reach, trying to scrub paint out of and off of every surface, his clothes, his protective glove…
It was increasingly harder not to start laughing at the image of Anakin Skywalker, future (and past) Darth Vader, covered in fruit-scented paint. She could almost hear the cursing coming out of his mouth as soon as the first paint explosion went off. Stars, she would love to see that happen all over again. Maybe Sabine could be convinced…
"It could have been worse," she tried to say around her attempts not to laugh. "She could have just forgotten the paint in those explosions."
"You're allowed to laugh at me, you know." He grinned at her. "Once I was done being angry and confused, I could see it was pretty damn funny." He held up a finger. "Ah, but that was the genius of it. Real explosions, real danger, could've tipped off my senses. Plus, she'd have consequences. Only hurting my dignity..."
"She's smarter than the average mynock then. Probably all that time she spent pranking Ezra. And maybe Kanan." Leia allowed herself to laugh, though it wasn't loud by any means. These days she didn't have a whole lot to uproariously laugh about, but she had people that she counted on and wanted to see happy. She was beginning to see why her brother had run off to an island in the middle of nowhere. Escaping sounded like a great idea.
It both warmed and ached just a little hearing Leia laugh because of something he'd shared with her; the slight pain over thinking of everything he'd missed was worth it. He grinned and nodded to her. "She's crafty in more than one sense. Did you ever meet any of her crew? I'd expect General Syndulla."
"I had one particular relief mission to Lothal. My ships were, unfortunately, stolen." The again was implied, as far too many of her Alderaanian ships would somehow get stolen from her on those missions. "Hera and I were actually very good friends. She really dove into training missions after — they lost Kanan and Ezra. I don't think she ever went back there, but my memory is a little hazy. It has been about thirty years."
Anakin couldn't help a small eyeroll. 'Stolen' ships, of course. Certainly not a coordinated transfer to the Rebels that she could protest was an unfortunate theft from her. His expression went more sober, though, as she continued. "Ah. Of course, the explosion, and the... Lothal incident." The reports out of Lothal had been a mess. Purrgils seemingly out of nowhere, Grand Admiral Thrawn MIA, Imperial facilities destroyed, the Jedi Temple seemingly vanished and the inexplicable mural of the Mortis gods with it... It hadn't been the worst setback, but it was still a disaster. "Your friend Syndulla was an exceptional pilot."
"She definitely is." It had been quite some time since Leia had seen her. Many of those who were in the Rebellion went on to do their own thing, and sometimes you lost track. Leia herself had been shuffled around from government office to another, to married life and being a mother. Mon Mothma and Amilyn Holdo remained her closest friends after the war. "I assume that her father taught her to fly, and considering the chances he took over the course of his life…"
Well, it didn't need saying.
"Ezra called purgills with the Force. That's what I was told by Hera in the aftermath. Ezra, Thrawn, and the ship he was on… All tangled up in purgills and then they jumped to hyperspace." Leia frowned. "I know what Captain Syndulla reported, but the Imperial propaganda machine was running pretty heavily then."
"Cham." Anakin voiced the name without thinking, then wondered if he should explain. Maybe if Leia asked, but probably better not to volunteer it. She'd probably assume anyway that it was from his Imperial dealings rather than his Republic. "The machine certainly had a lot to cover up there. And that wasn't exactly the end I ever would've imagined for Thrawn's career. It sounds so... absurd."
"Cham and I had major differences of opinions on how to rebel, but he certainly knew how to take risks. He passed that onto his daughter. The same as Saw Gerrera." Leia left out that Hera was pregnant and would eventually have a son she'd named Jacen. The name struck Leia as odd, considering the other version of herself had twins named Jaina and Jacen. "I thought Thrawn would be one of our bigger threats, but he was taken out by one teenage Jedi."
The subtle jab at how inferior Thrawn actually was hung in the air. Leia was going to be as honest and blunt in her feelings as she had always been. She never cowered before Darth Vader, and she certainly wasn't going to start now. After Alderaan, she thought of nothing but destroying him and she'd do it with her very last breath if she could. Things were only slightly different here.
"They were both extremists." Anakin hesitated, and swirled the coffee around in his cup as he considered whether or not to share. Well, what could it hurt now? "... I helped train Saw, and his 'freedom fighters'. I brought Ahsoka, and Obi-Wan, some troops, but they were following my lead. It's a strange symmetry, isn't it? I taught them how to rebel against the Separatists, and they used those same lessons against the Empire."
He didn't miss the jab, and smirked a little at it. He'd never considered Ezra Bridger a real Jedi, but for Thrawn to meet his defeat at a barely-trained teenager's hands… he'd underestimated Bridger. "I don't know if you ever heard, but when I met the Ghost crew, they dropped walkers on me."
"From what I gather, the Separatists liked to run things the same way the Empire did. Blockades. Tariffs. Hostages. Blackmailing. It's no surprise they didn't like the Empire when it came along." Saw Gerrera was an extremist, one she'd run into before she'd even joined up with the Rebels. He'd killed Moff Panaka when she was very young. In retrospect, it made sense. She'd been wearing a Naboo royal gown when she arrived on Onoam, and having seen holograms and now meeting her mother, she understood why. Leia had been hidden, and he knew Padmé. That was a secret that they could not afford to get out.
The corner of Leia's mouth quirked upward. "I tried to drop a walker on you too."
"Considering Palpatine ultimately ran the Separatists as well, is that any surprise? But Saw took things further than our lessons. 'Collateral damage' never bothered him, did it?" He could tell that Leia was remembering something and it made him curious. "What's on your mind?"
The same corner of his mouth quirked, too. "Whatever wall or ceiling it brought down on me was more effective. It actually knocked my helmet off. You almost suffocated Darth Vader. Or maybe... squished."
"I met Moff Panaka once on Onoam. I was there delivering supplies to the miners there. The Queen was requested by Panaka and I was to come with him. I had nothing to wear, so the Queen put me in one of the royal gowns." Leia had those gowns now even. She'd gotten them well after the war. "Saw killed Panaka shortly after. I mean like I was walking down the stairs after. He probably noticed the resemblance. That's all I was thinking of."
"Panaka..." Anakin's eyes went distant and his expression stilled. "... Yes, he very well might have noticed. He was your mother's chief of security when she was queen. And if you were close to that age, wearing something she might've worn or actually wore..." It hadn't happened that way, but it was a horrifying thought all the same. Panaka had changed; what if he had noted the resemblance and told someone of it? "I'd imagine Saw targeted him for being a traitor, becoming a Moff of all things."
"I never took Panaka as a traitor. I saw him as extremely loyal to Palpatine whom he had known for decades. So many of those Core Worlds had only known him as the Chancellor who had finally put an end to the Clone Wars." She paused, thoughtful. Leia didn't vilify everyone who worked for the Empire. Some people had been forced into it. Some people believed the propaganda, especially the people in the Core Worlds who saw nothing of hardship and whose lives were not affected by the change in government. "That was before I became involved in the Rebellion. My parents were trying to keep it from me, but I kept getting in the way of their plans with my ideas of taking people off Wobani. Whatever their plans had been, I'd messed them up by causing the Empire to take a closer look."
"You have a more forgiving view of him than I do. He betrayed what the Naboo stood for in embracing the Empire, even if he remained personally loyal to Palpatine." Anakin's expression twisted a bit with distaste. Of course, he saw many sides of Palpatine that nobody else actually saw, even if they suspected they were there. Leia knew very well about Palpatine's horrors and witnessed many of them, but not all. Her instinctive connection to the Force may have even let her feel what so many beings never noticed; the Jedi Masters hadn't detected how Palpatine was filled with the dark side while he let the darkness he'd unleashed across the galaxy cloak himself from their detection.
"Your parents were counting on the Empire's disinterest, but you drew too much attention?" He smiled just barely; Leia could hide herself when she wished to, but staying quiet clearly wasn't her nature.
"In retrospect, it makes sense that they wouldn't want me involved for more reasons than just that I was their daughter. I never doubted their love for me until things with the Rebellion were growing bigger. A lot of hushed meetings and fancy dinners I wasn't allowed in anymore." Bail Organa had prided himself on allowing Leia into his office. He didn't mind her questions on politics or how laws and government worked (or should have worked), and that was why she decided that was something she wanted to do. She worked in his office before, even becoming a junior legislator at the age of fourteen.
Leia's eyebrow rose. "I have a more forgiving view than you do of a lot of people."
"Right at a time of life when humans are especially sensitive to any perceived rejection. How much did they know about... everything?" He'd watched the film last year with Ahsoka, but he hadn't paid any special attention to Bail; he'd been much more preoccupied with other revelations.
"Of course you do, but who could blame you if you weren't forgiving of an Imperial?" It amazed him anyway that she was so understanding. He'd tended to quickly demonize his enemies even as a Jedi. Her parents— the ones who'd actually loved and raised her— must have instilled that in her.
"After I forced my parents to let me help in the Rebellion, my father told me almost everything." Obviously, she had no idea of her true parentage or how her mother had truly died. "He told me how he watched a Jedi youngling get murdered while begging for help. How the entire temple went up in flames, then Palpatine turned it into the Imperial Palace." Her father had a lot of faith in the Jedi, and a good deal of friends among them. He always spoke of those times with a reverence and Leia could always feel his turmoil.
Anakin's face froze and the color drained from it. Of course. Bail had given a story later, hadn't he, about looking for survivors at the temple. There were none. Nobody in the temple had survived the clones.
Nobody had survived Vader.
But Bail hadn't told Leia about her birth father's identity, so he hadn't told Leia that her birth father had personally led that massacre. The youngling Bail saw had been one of very many, maybe even one that Vader had directed his troops to take while he murdered a different one.
That was a good moment for the waitress to return with their food. Unfortunately, Leia was now in no mood to eat. She'd suspected that Vader had a hand in some of these dealings, as he'd been the Emperor's right hand since the beginning. There was a difference though between believing it and watching the color drain from Skywalker's face.
Leia turned to the waitress and put on a very well-practiced smile. "Do you think I could get this to go, please?"
Anakin had no appetite, either, or will to speak. What could he say? He wasn't thinking about getting the food to go; he was remembering the younglings. The Masters and Knights and older Padawans he'd murdered could be falsely justified to himself as enemy combatants, but the younglings never could. He'd known exactly what he was doing and had made the choice anyway.
He waited until the waitress had left to get to-go boxes to attempt to speak. Funny how his voice felt choked off when he'd done it to so many. He looked outside, though, unable to make himself look at Leia.
"... They were my soldiers. My orders. I was with them."
Leia didn't believe that people were born monsters. She believed they were carved or forged from their upbringing, from the choices they made. She believed that (almost) anyone could turn back from that path. She'd sent Eneb Ray to Coruscant to spy, which meant he'd had to take on a new identity, bury himself so deeply into the Empire and its atrocities that he'd become something he considered a monster. He thought he could teach her a lesson: that to destroy an enemy as heinous and evil as the Empire, you had to become like them.
Leia could shoot stormtroopers and strangle Hutts and leave people to die on a Death Star that would be consumed shortly, but she could never kill younglings. Her mind never worked in the way that allowed younglings to be injured if she could help it. She never entertained a thought that meant the death of someone utterly helpless.
"This was a mistake." Things seemed to have been going so well too.
Why had they let themselves discuss those times? Of course it would lead to the horrors. Anakin's horrors, or Vader's, willingly inflicted on others. He could have just not acknowledged his role at the temple purge or tried to change the subject or otherwise attempted to avoid it, but Leia would know, he was sure of it. Not admitting to his own actions wouldn't repair things between them, though facing them wasn't feeling very healing, either. He felt exposed and pained and more than deserving of it. Maybe they never could have any real pleasant conversations because everything he'd done would always find a way to come up and wreck it.
"Why?" He still couldn't look at her directly. "Why was it a mistake to try?"
It drove Leia even more frustrated that he couldn't look at her. Yes, he was owning up to his mistakes, and he seemed genuinely ashamed of them. She could feel it roiling off him in waves. She just wasn't ready to talk about his atrocities with him. Stars knew she had enough to deal with her son, who claimed he had changed and yet still blamed everyone else for his mistakes.
"It was a mistake to go into detail about what my father told me about the end of the Clone Wars." Bail rarely hid anything from her, and when he did, it was with good reason. He'd entrusted the Death Star plans to her because he'd trusted her with his life (and she'd failed him). "Everything we have in common is mired in murder and oppression."
"Not everything," Anakin said, finally turning his head back towards her. He felt stubborn on that point, even though he couldn't quickly call to mind something that wasn't exactly what she'd said. There had to be something that wasn't immediately related to oppression or murder in some way. The problem was, even the innocent things were still touched by it because of him. It wouldn't be a far stretch to make the connections.
She'd kept Threepio; he built Threepio as a slave, and Threepio passed on to Bail because he'd killed Padmé. Oppression and murder. The planets they could discuss, the people, the events, everything was tainted with his darkness eventually. He lowered his eyes again and exhaled heavily. "Maybe you're right about that. Do we just never talk about anything that isn't right here and now?"
"I guess that depends on what you want out of this, and how hard you're willing to look at yourself." Leia wasn't faultless by any means, but she was never afforded any softness when it came to Vader. She knew he was her father only near the end of his life, and before then she'd never met with him under the guise of anything more than enemies.
That was a good deal of why she'd never told Ben about her parentage. Vader was nothing more than her torturer, a weapon who tried to kill her over and over again. Sure, Luke says he changed in the end, and she believed it, but she'd never seen it or experienced it with her own eyes. She never felt one ounce of love for that man. As far as she'd been concerned Bail and Breha Organa were the only family she needed. Padmé was the one she wanted to know more of, but aside from cursory talk about what was happening in the world here, she didn't really know the woman. "So what do you want?"
"I want to..." How did he phrase it in a way that didn't sound impossibly ignorant to the realities of their situation? He stopped, rethought his words, tried again. "I'll never get to be your father. I know that. Even if I somehow earned that right, you already had a father and I was complicit in his death. And maybe I'll never get to be your friend, either, with everything between us. But I'd like to know you anyway. You're... you're my child, even though you're older than me and we never had that relationship. I still feel that. I wanted so much to be your father when I learned I was going to become one. I don't expect you to like me, but if there's something you want from me, I'll do my best to give that to you. I just don't want to be shut out of your life despite everything. You have every reason not to include me, but you have done so anyway. What do you want?"
"I want to understand you the way Luke did. I want to see the side of you that he saw, that made him want to save you."
Of course, that was when the waitress came back. She'd brought enough to-go boxes for the both of them just in case. Leia smiled, thanked her, and set the boxes down between them before she picked up the conversation after she left. "I don't know how that can be done."
Anakin was curt with his thanks, not nearly as polite as Leia. At least it had given him a little more time to think.
"Leia, I have no idea what he saw in me." He held up his right hand, leather creaking slightly as he flexed his fingers and clenched them. "I tortured his friends, took his hand, continued to pursue him... yet he 'saw the conflict.' That there was 'still good' in me, and I have no idea how. Even when he surrendered to me, I still gave him to my master. I still fought him until I thought he was nearly pushed into turning. If the Emperor hadn't tried to kill him..."
Luke would have died. Luke would never have turned, and the Emperor would never have let Luke live. "I don't know what he saw or how he saw past everything to see it. You'd have to ask him to know that."
And, of course, that was currently impossible. "But maybe just talking to each other, one person to another, will grow your understanding of him even if you never share his view of me."
"That was my implication. I can't take Luke's place in our world so I will never know how he came to think the way he did. The only thing I can do is talk to you and find out along the way." She looked down at her waffles. The butter was melted and seeped into the crevices. Luke was just better at all this Force stuff that she was. He'd taught her things over the years, and she'd excelled, but she never depended on it the way Luke had.
"I'll never know, either. He saw something in me that I didn't see in myself. He believed in it, somehow, and that brought it out of me. I know that one act of saving him isn't enough to wipe clean all my other actions. But I'm glad to find out with you, even though I know it won't be a comfortable journey."
She glanced back up. "Maybe next time, we can try not to talk about the murder of younglings at lunch."
It wasn't actually funny, but his sense of humor had darkened over his decades in the suit. He just barely smiled. "Maybe not with any meals, not just lunch."