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“You got off lightly. Just an arm. Look at me, farmboy.” She waved her cane for emphasis. “I’ve got one eye, a busted leg, a mouthful of metal, and a nose like a spoiled janja fruit. I used to be a princess. Now I look like a monster.”

“No.” He put his arms, one plasteel and one flesh, around her shoulders. “You look like a rebel.”

Then he kissed her, and the cane in her hand clattered to the floor, and soon she realized her black durasteel teeth might be ugly, but they had an unexpected benefit: they were removable.

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There were nine of them, taking her three at a time.

The first time one of them stuck his dick down her throat, she’d bitten him. That had earned her a punch from an armored first that broke her nose and left two of her teeth on the floor.

After that she decided she’d let them fuck her if it meant she could still eat solid food afterward.

It went on and on until she had forgotten everything – her rage, her fear, even her shame – and surrendered herself to the waves of mindless pleasure.

Princess? Hah, she thought to herself in a moment of lucidity, while the troopers were switching off. Whore, more like. I’m glad Father isn’t alive to see this.

And the rape continued.

Then the room blazed with a sudden blue light, and in a matter of seconds nine rapists had become nine freshly dead corpses.

That was unexpected.

Looked like farmboy knew how to swing that saber after all.

But her rescue made her more afraid than she’d been when the stormtroopers were fucking her brains out.

Because Vader’s trap had worked. And because of her, the man she loved, Luke Starkiller, was in mortal danger.

Chapter Text

“You shouldn’t have done it.”

“You needed the medicine. You were hurt.”

“But—”

“I’d do it again if I had to. A hundred of them rather than ten. I couldn’t bear seeing you in pain like that.”

“But—”

“Because I love you, farmboy. And I’ve seen enough people die. My whole goddamn planet is gone, remember? I don’t have any parents to be ashamed of their royal daughter becoming a royal whore.”

“Leia—”

“You’re OK. That’s what matters. Now come over here. This cell’s cold, and you’re the only one who’s got clothes on now.”

He did.

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“That’s all of them.” He gestured with his glowing red lightsaber at the pile of black-armored bodies on the floor of the speeder garage, then shut it off and returned the hilt to his belt.

“But how did they know?”

“I can guess.” He pointed at her red shoes, their tips sticking out from below the hem of her coarse woollen robe. The tear in his shirt-sleeve exposed the muscles of Annikin’s tanned arm. She realized she was impressed with his muscles despite herself; her escort might be a cad with no manners, but apparently Jedi training did wonders for one’s physique.

“Scarlet leather. Nobody but royalty wears those on Aquilae. Your robes may look like a peasant’s, but one glimpse of those shoes and you might as well be wearing the Waterstone Crown.”

“But they’re the only pair I have! I can’t get rid of them!”

“Yes, you can. Plenty of peasants don’t wear shoes.”

“But—”

“Take ‘em off. Or this whole trip is for nothing, and we might as well go back to the capital and turn you in for the reward money.”

“The speeder’s broken! I can’t walk the whole way to Gordonton barefoot!”

“If the sand’s too hot, I can carry you.”

She bent down to remove her shoes. “…I can walk.”

“All right. Hold on to those for the moment, though. We can dump them in Carter’s Ravine on the way. Don’t want any troopers finding them here when they search the scene.”

Leia flung the offending footwear at him, and he barely ducked in time despite his Jedi-trained reflexes. “Sure. Be my guest.”

And she flounced out of the garage, biting her lip to keep from giving Annikin the satisfaction of hearing her gasp at the burning heat of the Aquilaean desert sands.

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From his seat in his throne room in the Palace, the Emperor of the Galaxy could watch through transparisteel windows the battle unfolding in the skies above Had Abaddon; retractable holo-screens set near his throne depicted the Rebel fleet’s desperate battle against two Death Stars and the armed might of the Imperial Navy.

But his gaze was fixed instead on the hilt of the dagger embedded in his chest, and the bloodstain spreading across the breast of his white navy uniform like a Felucian bloodflower.

He tried to call out, to summon his loyal Guards to his aid, but he found his tongue and lips would no longer work his will.

So.

This was it, then.

This was how he was going to die.

“Coated with Kondorian dragon venom. It’s a fast-acting paralytic, a favorite of torturers. Extremely painful. I can tell you from personal experience, Your Majesty.”

Ignoring the pain like fire blossoming in his veins, he mustered the effort to raise his head, looking up at the false Guard who spoke to him, standing over his throne, the one had dealt him his death-blow.

The black-robed guard removed his helmet and cast it to one side, revealing the face of a woman with short brown hair… and scarred, empty eye sockets.

No.

“It’ll take a while for your heart to stop,” said Leia Organa, last Princess of a vaporized world. “Time enough to pay you back for how your men took my eyes.

“Do you remember? They held me down on the floor as you watched, and put them out with a red-hot iron. And then, because that wasn’t enough to satisfy their cruelty, they pissed in the sockets. With their Emperor’s approval.

“You know the old saying: an eye for an eye…”

She smiled, a broken grimace like a row of knives, and the dying Emperor knew his death could not come soon enough.

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From his seat in his throne room in the Palace, the Emperor of the Galaxy could watch through transparisteel windows the battle unfolding in the skies above Ton-Muund; retractable holo-screens set beside his throne depicted the Rebel fleet’s desperate battle against three Death Stars and the armed might of the Imperial Navy.

But his gaze was fixed instead on the hilt of the dagger embedded in his chest, and the bloodstain spreading across the tunic of his white navy uniform like a Felucian bloodflower.

He tried to call out, to summon his loyal Guards to his aid, but he found his tongue and lips would no longer obey his will.

So.

This was it, then.

This was how he was going to die.

“Coated with Kondorian dragon venom. It’s a fast-acting paralytic, a favorite of torturers. Extremely painful. I can tell you from personal experience, Your Majesty.”

Ignoring the pain like fire blossoming in his veins, he mustered the effort to raise his head, looking up at the false Guard who spoke to him, standing over his throne, the one had dealt him his death-blow.

The red-robed guard removed his helmet and cast it to one side, revealing the face of a woman with short blonde hair… and scarred, empty eye sockets.

No.

“It’ll take a while for your heart to stop,” said Leia Organa, last Princess of a vaporized world. “Time enough to pay you back for how your men put out my eyes.

“Vader had already had me beaten so badly I lost an eye. But that wasn’t enough for the Empire, was it? Your guards held me down on the floor as you watched, and finished the job with a red-hot iron. And then, because that wasn’t enough to sate their cruelty, they pissed in the sockets. With their Emperor’s approval.

“You know the old saying: an eye for an eye…”

She smiled, a broken grimace like a row of knives, and the dying Emperor knew his death could not come soon enough.

Chapter Text

From his seat in his throne room in the Palace, the Emperor of the Galaxy could watch through transparisteel windows the battle unfolding in the skies over Jhantor; retractable holo-screens set beside his throne depicted the Rebel fleet’s desperate battle against three Death Stars and the armed might of the Imperial Navy.

But his gaze was fixed instead on the hilt of the dagger embedded in his chest, and the bloodstain spreading across the tunic of his white navy uniform like a Felucian bloodflower.

He tried to call out, to summon his loyal Guards to his aid, but he found his tongue and lips would no longer obey his desires.

So.

This was it, then.

This was the moment of his death.

“Coated with Kondorian dragon venom. It’s a fast-acting paralytic, a favorite of torturers. Extremely painful. I can tell you from personal experience, Your Majesty.”

Ignoring the pain like fire blossoming in his veins, he mustered the effort to raise his head, looking up at the false Guard who spoke to him, standing over his throne, the one had dealt him his death-blow.

The scarlet-robed guard removed his helmet and cast it to one side, revealing the face of a woman with short red hair… and dark, empty eye sockets.

No.

“It’ll take a while for your heart to stop,” said Leia Organa, last Princess of a planet burnt under his rule to ash and dust. “Enough time to pay you back for how your men put out my eyes.

“Vader had already had me beaten so badly I lost an eye. But that wasn’t enough for the Empire. No, your guards held me down on the floor as you watched, and finished the job with a red-hot iron. And then, because that wasn’t enough to satiate their cruelty, they pissed in the sockets. With their Emperor’s approval.

“You know the old saying: an eye for an eye…”

She smiled, a broken grimace like a row of knives, and the dying Emperor knew his death could not come soon enough.

Chapter Text

To her face, they call her the Masked Queen.

Behind her back, they call her the Whore Queen.

When General Vader’s lackeys had held her captive on the Imperial space station – now space dust – orbiting her home planet, her jailors had broadcast a live holo-feed of her torture sessions across the entire planet.

So the entire population of Aquilae got to watch as Leia, their rightful monarch, eldest child of the murdered King Kayos, was brutally tortured and raped repeatedly.

They saw her eyes put out and her ears cut off, and her right arm sheared off above the wrist. They saw her fiery red hair burnt off forever with a fusion cutter, and her nose cut away from her face like a slice of bantha steak.

They saw her captors take her again and again, and heard her cries of mingled pain and pleasure.

She herself could not tell which was which.

Eventually, to her great relief, she was rescued by Annikin Starkiller, the handsome dark-haired young Jedi from whom she’d been separated by her capture on Yavin. And he had an unexpected companion in arms: Prince Valorum, late of the Empire’s Sith Knights, who betrayed his order after General Vader took his eye, as punishment for allowing her to escape occupied Aquilae.

She lost her other arm retrieving a belt with the DNA profiles of Aquilae’s top scientists, stolen from her when she was captured. The belt was stored in a booby-trapped locker, and while Annikin and Prince Valorum debated how to disarm the trap, with black-armored stormtroopers drawing ever nearer, she stuck her left arm in and pulled the damn thing out.

By the time she freed the belt, the flesh of her remaining arm was charred and falling off the bone. Annikin had to cut off her arm below the elbow.

Soon enough, Annikin lost his own right arm in a saber duel with Darth Vader. Fortunately, his training as a Jedi warrior served him well: he survived, but Vader did not.

As General Vader bled out on the space station’s deck plates, his aide Kuro gashed open her throat with a lightsaber. It was a treachery he paid for with his life.

Still, she might have suffocated or choked on her own blood, had not Annikin come to her aid with a healing draught he’d been given by the Wookees of Yavin. It turned her skin milk-white, and restored her breath; but it could do nothing for her ruined voice, now a hideous, barely-audible croak.

Now, with Vader’s troops gone and her throne re-established, the one-armed Annikin is her Lord Protector and official consort; Prince Valorum, whose white armor and gleaming eye patch contrast nicely with his dark skin, is her general-in-chief. The two of them sit on either side of her during audiences.

Having two strong men in her life makes her bed much more comfortable at night.

Getting dressed is a very different task than it was before the Imperials came.

For one thing, she doesn’t need a mirror.

Now, she wears a pair of cybernetic arms, usually covered by metal bracers and silk or leather gloves. But even the best surgery cannot restore her ruined face.

She will not accept grafts of cloned flesh. It would be far too easy for unscrupulous geneticists to make a duplicate of the whole person rather than just a portion; and then there would be a pretender to deal with. Nor will she let herself be given droid eyes or a cybernetic voice box. She is a queen, and cannot afford to grant hostile spies the opportunity of seeing all she sees or listening to her every word.

So she wears a mask, silver with fine-molded eyes and nose and lips, and a silken headdress atop it to cover her bald head. On high days she swaps this out for a wig of blue beads, made of a precious stone mined from the planet’s Fourth Moon.

A pair of cloth-of-gold panels hanging from a metallic chain at her waist completes her attire.

Since the Wookee healing draught, she has found herself better accustomed to cold temperatures; but on a desert planet like Aquilae, wearing the voluminous robes she grew up with makes her sweat now like a porg in a saucepan.

Hence she wears as little as possible. To hell with the scandal. She’s the Whore Queen, after all.

Besides which, she’s blind, a double amputee, with a face out of a horror holovid. If she wants sensory input, she has to get creative.

And she always hated corsets, anyway.

Now dressed, she hurries barefoot down the palace corridor, luxuriating in the feel of the cool marble floor beneath her soles.

Better not be late for the dinner party. Annikin and Valorum are already there; and she’s the guest of honor, after all.

It’s her fifteenth birthday. The cake is strawberry. Her favorite.

Chapter Text

Leia Aquilae was in pain.

One of her eyes was swollen shut; her nose was flattened against one side of her face; two of her front teeth had been knocked out; her back was livid from a flogging session with a vibrowhip; and her thighs ached from the guards having “fun”.

Her arms were fastened above her head, held in restraints dangling from the ceiling, forcing her to stand constantly on tiptoe. By now her arms and calves hurt so badly that she’d have slept with thirty of those Ureallians for a five-minute break.

(She remembered with a blush of pleasure how, at her request, Annikin had taught her that sex could be joyful rather than painful. Unlike her first instructors, who were now very dead by his hand.)

And, to top it all off, she had to pee.

When she’d been first brought aboard the Imperials’ orbital prison complex, her jailors had given her a set of prisoner’s clothes: a white collarless shirt that opened down the front, white trousers that came to just below the knee, black shoes and matching black gaiters.

Considering her only garment when she was captured was a tattered skirt, thanks to the Ureallians’ assault, the prison garb was actually an improvement. The stormtroopers had even replaced the trousers (but not the shirt or shoes) after they were done raping her.

So clothing was available; and the prison rations, though tasteless, were edible enough. And her captors could certainly make time for torturing her every few hours; her wounds were evidence enough of that.

But they couldn’t be bothered to let her out of her chains for five minutes to give her a bathroom break.

By now her bladder was throbbing worse than anything else in her body. Damn it, she thought, after all I’ve been through, I’m not going to be defeated by my own bladder.

Or am I?

Crap.

Finally she couldn’t hold it any longer; a small rivulet trickled down one leg.

What the hell.

She let go.

Leia Aquilae, heir to the throne of a conquered planet, pissed herself like a dog.

Her initial urge had been satisfied, but she didn’t stop; instead she kept peeing until her bladder was empty, and that source of discomfort had been dealt with as much as possible.

In for a credit, in for a crateload. And I’m not the one who has to pick up the laundry in this place.

By the time she was done, her white trousers were soaked with yellow liquid; her equally sodden gaiters stuck clammily to her legs; the entire room stank of ammonia. Stray drops of urine continued to trickle down her legs, further soddening her pants and gaiters as they went, and her bare toes struggled to maintain their grip on the duracrete floor, made slippery by the puddle directly beneath her.

But she had to admit, she felt a hell of a lot better.

If the Empire couldn’t be bothered to give her a fucking toilet, the least they could do was clean up her filth afterward.

When her bowels rumbled, she didn’t even bother trying to hold it in.

Serves them right, she thought to herself with a wicked, gap-toothed grin.

Chapter Text

“The fierce and savage Wookiees of Yavin… The Empire considers them a race fit for servitude, hardy and strong albeit mindless in their savagery, but some Aquilaeans have lately submitted pious protests arguing for the abolition of Wookiee slavery to the Senate of the Alliance of Independent Systems. It is unlikely that any resolution to that effect will emerge from that famously gridlocked democratic body.”

-- Entry on “Yavin,” Encyclopedia Alderaanica

---

It was the worst dinner to which Zara Alderaani had ever been.

Not because of the food, which was tasty, if unfamiliar.

Not because of the company, which was horrendous.

It was the worst dinner she’d ever been to because she was mostly naked.

She’d stumbled out of her lifepod, dazed but uninjured, and pondered her situation. She could follow the tracker beacon to the other lifepods, regroup with the Jedi, and remain their hostage; or, she could make a break for it into the wilderness, and brave the unknown dangers of the Yavin jungle.

Zara was still pondering when Luke Skywalker caught up with her – that annoying Prince-in-exile from Aquilae, the mineral-rich sandball by whose recent conquest her royal father had fulfilled a thousand-year family ambition.

She’d tried not to speak to him, and only succeeded in revealing that her vocabulary was rather larger than a princess of Alderaan would be expected to admit.

But he had a lightsword and a blaster, and she didn’t. So she didn’t have much of a choice of itinerary. Grudgingly she let him shepherd her off towards the spot where their trackers said the two Jedi’s lifepods had landed.

The trail led them into the midst of a Wookie village, but nobody barred their progress. All the inhabitants were gathered in a clearing in the village centre, forming a circle around the others of their party: the two Jedi-Bendu, their droids, and the slave they’d freed on Ophuchi. The old Bendu Master, Mace Windy, was deep in conversation with one of the Wookies, with the butler droid translating. Evidently this was a chief of some sort, judging by the medallions on his chest and the feathers into his fur.

Then the chief caught sight of her, and he grew angry. Howlingly angry. He roared to the treetops and beat his chest with his massive paws and thumped his chieftain’s staff against the side of a massive tree trunk. And suddenly from all sides a dozen Wookies towered over her.

As they closed in on her, she wondered what in the name of the Seven Moons she could have done to piss them off so badly. Was it really her fault? Were they just savage beasts, like Father always said? Was it something the old wizard had—

Then it hit her.

It was her robes. The golden, gleaming, fur-lined outfit she’d worn to keep warm on the wind-swept heights of Ophuchi’s floating slave markets, before the Jedi had made their daring escape and taken her as hostage to flee in safety.

That elegant, well-kept fur trim on her golden robes was Wookie fur.

Father always did love his trophy hunts.

If it hadn’t been for the protestations of Master Windy and Prince Luke, she might’ve been killed outright. Fortunately, the old coot and that horrid princeling had managed to convince the chief that she hadn’t been responsible for the slaughter of the Wookies whose pelts she was wearing.

Afterwards, they let her have a place at the chieftain’s dinner table, along with the rest of her involuntary companions. (“Wookies are quick to anger, but they know the meaning of honour,” said old Master Windbag.)

Still, death would have been quick, at least. And as it was, Zara thought she might die from shame in any case.

They’d stripped her of her garments: hat, boots, cloak, shirt, and trousers; everything that bore the offending fur or the telltale gold of her highborn station was torn from her body, and taken to lay on the Warriors’ Pyre. Leaving her in only the dirty white loincloth she’d had on underneath, still bearing the piss stains from where she’d soiled herself when the Jedi used a shock-stunner on her during their escape.

And they roughed her up a bit, for good measure. But they didn’t use their claws, since she hadn’t intended to cause offense, and in Wookie culture apparently the use of claws was held honourable only in open combat against a declared foe.

Still, angry Wookies aren’t very gentle.

And so Zara winced every time the fireberry wine she swallowed went past the gaps where her two front teeth had been, and squinted down at her plate of well-seared meat and strange blue vegetables through the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut.

She kept one arm crossed over her breasts in an effort to retain what she could of modesty. But it wasn’t much. The meat on Zara’s cast-duriron plate was a large portion, uncut, and using the crude knife and fork they’d given her required both hands. Meaning that every time she cut off a slice of meat, she ended up letting everyone see perfectly well how the weather on Yavin was just a little too cool for her liking.

Prince Luke, in particular, seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes off her nakedness, which was just the sort of uncivilised behaviour Zara expected from the likes of Aquilae’s so-called royalty. Back on Alderaan, she mused, anyone unfortunate enough to glimpse her in such a state of undress would have had his eyes put out, if he wasn’t killed on the spot.

Maybe she would get around to that at some point.

---

Leia, meanwhile, was wearing one of Luke’s spare outfits, looking thrilled to suddenly own more clothes than the threadbare rags she’d been accustomed to wearing all her life. The Prince was almost a perfect match for her in size, even down to their boots – something that caused Master Windy, Chuiee noticed, to stroke his beard, like he always did when he was pondering deep matters far beyond his Padawan’s powers of analysis.

Their faces were similar too, in point of fact. If Leia’s hair was blond like Luke’s instead of that striking blue colour, Chuiee would almost say they were related.

That thought sent his mind back to Aquilae, to something just before the invasion and the death of the King, Annakin Starkiller; how the old king had mentioned that his nephew Luke had a twin sister who died in infancy.

He suddenly wondered how easy it would be to fake such a death – and what sort of gel-dyes or dietary supplements a slave-master might use to alter the appearance of his concubines.

And now Chuiee thought he could guess what weighty matters occupied the wily old Jedi-Bendu Master’s mind after all.

(v1.1)

Chapter Text

(A)

Leia, meanwhile, was wearing one of Luke’s spare outfits, looking thrilled to suddenly own more clothes than the threadbare rags she’d been accustomed to wearing all her life. The Prince was almost a perfect match for her in size. In fact, if he’d had a spare pair of boots they’d probably have fit her too – though as it was she kicked her bare feet to and fro beneath the enormous wooden table, the carven stool she sat on having been made for Wookies twice her height.

(B)

Leia, meanwhile, was wearing one of Luke’s spare outfits, looking thrilled to suddenly own more clothes than the threadbare rags she’d been accustomed to wearing all her life. The Prince was almost a perfect match for her in size. In fact, his spare boots would probably have fit her too – but Leia had never been given shoes during her years as a slave, and she was so accustomed to going barefoot that she refused the footwear when offered.

(X)

Even their faces looked strangely alike: the same hair, long and dark and straight, the same nose and shape of the eyes, the same finely-cut cheekbones and jaw that, in Luke’s case at least, denoted the resemblance to his late uncle.

(Y)

What was more, Leia and Luke also both had that same bright-blond hair color that looked like it could’ve come out of a gel capsule.

(ABXY)

The resemblance, Chuiee noticed, was something that caused Master Windy to stroke his beard, like he always did when he was pondering deep matters beyond his Padawan’s powers of analysis.

Back on Aquilae, before the invasion and the death of the King Annakin Starkiller, the old king had mentioned that his nephew Luke had a twin sister who died in infancy.

How difficult would it have been to kidnap a royal infant and stage a death scene to cover it up? And who would have concocted such a dangerous scheme, only to dump the stolen child in an Ophuchi slave market? It sounded outlandish, but he and Master Windy had untangled thornier and more sordid stories in their travels.

Chuiee thought he could guess what weighty matters occupied the wily old Jedi-Bendu Master’s mind after all.

(v1.3)

Chapter Text

The download had been complete for five minutes and Luke Skywalker was getting more and more nervous.

This was a top-secret disguise mission – time was absolutely of the essence. There were three parts: break into the central computer room of Alderaan’s floating prison; download the technical data on the new Death Stars the Empire was building; get out and bring the data safely back to the Alliance.

Two steps down. One to go.

For the thousandth time, he wondered why Leia was taking so long.

She’d gone off in another direction after they’d cracked the central vault door – had said she felt something pulling her towards an office back down another hallway.

Ever since she’d saved his life at Acquis, sensing Luke’s distress even when she was half-dead herself, Luke had known Leia was Force-sensitive. He’d started trying to teach her some basics, and she was clearly a quick study. But without Ben, it was difficult to know how well he was doing as an instructor.

He was barely a Jedi Knight – his nearly dying to Vader in their duel on Acquis proved that, he thought ruefully, flexing his prosthetic hand – and now he was having to take on the responsibility of a Master. If he hadn’t rushed off to confront Vader, if he had stayed and listened, Ben would have survived rather than coming after him; surely Obi-Wan would’ve provided Leia with better training…

Beside him, Artoo-Detoo, his distinctive green-and-white paint job covered over with nondescript Imperial gray, trilled sympathetically, interrupting Luke’s gloomy thoughts.

The Jedi shoved the black-hued reminiscences out of his mind with an effort, suppressing a last guilty twinge. It wouldn’t do to dwell on what might’ve been. Focus, Skywalker. He knew he had to remain anchored in the here and now, but it was difficult with nothing left to do but wait.

His thoughts turned back to Leia. What was keeping her? It wasn’t as if she had any fond memories of this place. Far from it. True, this castle in the clouds was where he and Han and Chewie had met her for the first time; but back then she was an Imperial prisoner with the bruises to prove it, and she’d just seen the first Death Star destroy her homeworld of Organa Major mere hours before.

About the only place that could rival it for bad memories would be Acquis. Where Vader had baited a trap for him – with his friends, and Leia in particular, as the bait. And it had worked spectacularly. True, Luke had escaped in the end, with the help of Leia and Ben Kenobi; but Ben had paid with his life, and without his mentor’s guidance Luke was less certain than ever that he had what it took to be a Jedi.

And after what Vader had said – revealed – what other lies had Obi-Wan told him that Luke still didn’t know about?

On the other hand, if Vader’s trap hadn’t worked, Leia and Han and Chewie might have died instead.

As it was, Leia had a regimen of anti-disease pills for couplings with various species that took months to complete, and a prosthetic eye that glowed faintly even under her closed eyelid when she slept beside him in the dark of his cabin.

That was when things had started going wrong for the Alliance, he mused. When Rebel forces began meeting reverse after reverse; when Imperial troops began showing up with uncanny timing to foil even their most secret operations. High Command was convinced there was a spy in their midst, but nobody could figure out with certainty who it was. Even Luke’s Jedi skills didn’t sense in anyone the cloud of deceit he’d expect to detect in such a case – unless maybe the spy was actually a Sith Lord…

This time it wasn’t Artoo who interrupted his reverie.

Alarms blared, shrill and sudden. Red lights flared on the large central viewscreen and on the console in front of him. Automatically, the massive doors to the computer control room began to seal shut in lockdown mode. Luke hurried to the exit, followed by Artoo, chirping up a storm of what sounded suspiciously like expletives.

Great.

From a hidden compartment, Artoo produced the hilt of Luke’s lightsaber. The blade leaped into Luke’s palm; he kept it ready, thumb on the trigger switch in case he needed to ignite it.

The security door rumbled shut behind them, and as the klaxons continued to wail, he caught sight of Leia running down the corridor in their direction.

And she was wounded. Badly.

A strip of cloth had been torn from the hip-length hem of her Imperial uniform tunic, and wound around her head as a makeshift bandage. It covered the socket of her prosthetic eye, and was already stained through with thick dark blood. Some of the blood wasn’t absorbed by the soaked bandage, and dripped down her face, leaving wet red trails on her cheek that looked like a bad parody of tears.

“Leia!” he shouted.

She drew to a stop, chest still heaving with exertion and the adrenaline of trauma. Luke put his free hand gently on her shoulder and reached out with the Force to calm her. Now was not the moment for Leia to collapse into shock. They’d have a fight on their hands soon, and he needed her as capable of fighting her way out as possible. Afterward there’d be time for medical attention. Hopefully.

“What happened?” he asked her, gesturing to the blood-soaked rag covering one side of her face.

Unexpectedly, Leia grinned at him.

“Good news, Luke,” she panted, elation glowing in her single eye like a fire-coal. “I’ve found the spy.”

Chapter Text

The Force swirled around Darth Vader like a chill wind as he leaped out of the newly-made hole in the glasteel wall of his castle’s gargantuan dining room, out into the air, then down through the broken skylight of the adjoining corridor one level below.

For a moment the toxic air of Condawn, reeking of the planet’s omnipresent lava flows, made Vader’s ravaged lungs burn and threatened to choke him; but then the metal flooring of the service corridor rang out beneath his boots, and his breathing eased as he returned to the highly oxygenated atmosphere that was kept constant throughout the interior of his palace.

One could hardly hold a banquet without being able to remove one’s helmet to eat, after all.

Vader’s gaze swept the deserted corridor, looking for any sign of Luke’s presence as he probed with his Force senses to the same end. The Jedi was masking his presence in the Force far better than he’d ever expected; perhaps he was learning some restraint after all. But those raw emotions still flowed deeply beneath the surface, without doubt; Vader still remembered the way the boy had fought so wildly on Acquis.

Passion and drive, tempered by cunning and subtlety.

Yes, given training and the right incentive, his nephew would make a fine Sith.

One such incentive – the destruction of the Rebel fleet – was even now, surely, being accomplished by the Emperor over Ton-Muund. And another was currently lying on the floor of his throne room, bleeding and insensate.

When this battle was over, and the Rebels were crushed at last, he and Luke could bring down the Emperor together. A skilled warlord he might be, but that old fool was not a Sith. He would never see it coming. They could rule the galaxy, uncle and nephew – with a joint consort between them.

Oh yes. From their fight earlier Vader knew that her Jedi training had progressed by leaps and bounds already. The Princess had the makings of a Sith within her, beyond doubt. So much anger and hatred, so much drive. The greatest difficulty would be overcoming her dogmatic devotion to the Rebellion and the cancer of democracy it hoped to resurrect. If her faith in that worthless cause could be shaken – say, by the total destruction of the Rebel fleet at Ton-Muund – the rest would be easy.

But if her stubbornness won out, and she refused to join Vader and his nephew… well, who was to say she would have any choice in the matter? Droid parts could have minds of their own, as her prosthetic eye had proved. Positronic neural nets were making great advances. It would be child’s play to install one in her head as she was being given a new pair of arms.

Yes, that particular turn of the erstwhile three-person duel had enraged his nephew greatly. He did show promise, Vader mused. All the more reason to bring things to a conclusion and cement his turn to the Dark Side. It would be such a waste if the boy had to die like Anakin.

Vader scanned the corridor again. At one end was a small door, opening onto a balcony in his throne room where his rifle guards were stationed during audiences. The hall’s other end had a solid durasteel door leading to the service wing. The hallways were lined with maintenance panels for various pipes and electronics whose workings had to be kept out of the state rooms.

The durasteel door at the far end hadn’t been damaged or tampered with. Perhaps Luke was hiding behind one of the maintenance panels; Vader could open them and check in each one, but that would take valuable time he didn’t want to spend if Luke was elsewhere.

There.

A faint trace of blood on one of the panels near the door to the throne room. Faint enough that Luke must have cut himself during the fall and not noticed. The reddish glow of Condawn’s eternal fires seeped into the entire hallway through the skylights overhead; it would have been only natural for the boy not to see the bloodstain he’d left behind as he fled from the Dark Lord’s pursuit.

Vader’s yellow eyes shifted to deep amber in satisfaction, and he permitted himself a rare smile.

His icy-blue blade flared to life as the Sith Lord advanced boldly down the corridor. He spoke aloud to the prey he knew was within his grasp.

“Now, Skywalker, you are mine.”

From behind him came the clang of a maintenance panel, opening from the inside, and the snap-hiss of the red lightsaber in the Jedi’s hand.

“Never.”

Luke attacked fiercely, passionately, but with restraint, putting energy into his sword strokes but not so much as to tire himself; pushing Vader farther and farther back, down the corridor, through the doorway, and onto the balcony overlooking the throne room. With his back to the railing, the Sith Lord rallied for a moment and attempted to drive Luke out into the hallway again, but he was overborne by the Jedi’s onslaught, and stumbled head-over-heels to the polished floor below.

Leaping nimbly over the railing, Luke floated down into the great throne room, using the Force to slow his descent, ready to continue the duel upon landing.

As he glided down, his senses heightened from moment to moment by his Jedi attunement, Luke could take in the whole throne room at a glance: Vader, just in front of his landing point, picking himself up with a weary effort…

…the pièce de resistance of the throne room’s collection of art and artifacts, a stuffed four-horned Organian bull set near the throne room’s entryway – a gift from the Emperor, Vader had claimed, but Luke thought it was mostly a damned good way of riling Leia up with a mocking reminder of her lost planet…

…the enormous windows along one wall that gave a view of the lava plains of Condawn, and the giant viewscreen overhead, displaying the battle currently taking place at Ton-Muund, where the fate of the galaxy hung in the balance…

…and in the center of the room, lying on the intertwined seal of the Empire and the Sith graven into the marble floor, Leia, semiconscious and moaning with pain, her severed forearms lying beside her.

Luke’s gut churned with anger.

He remembered Leia’s screams.

And this time, when Vader raised his lightsaber to continue the fight, Luke’s swordsmanship lacked all restraint.

The furious strokes drove the Sith Lord back, back into a corner, up against the massive windows that stood beside the tall throne. One blow shattered a colossal pane of glasteel, letting in the harsh fumes from the lava churning below; another nicked Vader’s armor at the shoulder, with a shower of sparks; the third took off Vader’s sword arm just below the elbow, sending blade and limb alike through the broken viewport to be lost in the inferno outside.

And now Luke held his sword to the Dark Lord’s armored throat. His chest heaved with rage and the weight of his exertions; the sword in his hand wavered, and he tightened his grip to avoid cutting into Vader’s neck by mistake.

To his surprise, he could see that a tangle of wires poked out from the charred stump where Vader’s arm had been severed. He thought back to losing his own hand in their previous duel, at Acquis. How long has this cycle been going on? he wondered. How many generations has it claimed?

Luke’s eyes roved upward from Vader’s injured arm to meet his unmasked gaze. The glow of his uncle’s yellow eyes was dimmer now, but not entirely extinguished.

And there was a smile on the Sith Lord’s lips.

“Well done, my nephew,” Vader congratulated him. He coughed intermittently as he spoke, lungs evidently straining against the impure air coming in through the broken window. “I am beaten. Kill me. Take my place as the Lord of the Sith and the galaxy will be yours!”

The lightsaber trembled in Luke’s grip.

He should do it… He ought to, no matter what Vader said about the Dark Side, the galaxy would be better off without such a monster…

His hands, flesh and cybernetic, twitched again.

But this was his uncle.

And whether he died or not, it wouldn’t change things. The Rebel fleet at Ton-Muund would determine whether the Empire ruled a thousand years or fell today. Vader was beaten, and this battle was over. Now was the time for mercy.

He shut off his lightsaber and put it back on his belt.

“No, Uncle,” Luke said. “There’s been enough blood shed today.”

He extended a hand, an offer implicit in it: helping his fallen foe to his feet, helping his uncle back to the Light.

But Vader didn’t take it.

Instead, his smile curdled.

“If you think so,” he snarled, “yours shall be the last.”

The Dark Lord levered himself to his feet with sudden agility, legs bending with unnatural quickness that had to have cybernetic origins. He stretched out his left arm, and the lightsaber on Luke’s belt jumped into his hand, igniting as it came into his gloved palm.

Luke backed away, watching Vader carefully, all his senses trained on the Dark Lord. Something stirred in his peripheral vision, but he couldn’t afford to turn his head to see it. In Vader’s hand his own lightsaber blade hovered before his face, its crimson glow consonant with the eerie light of this hellish planet.

He was going to die.

“Now, young one,” said Darth Vader, “I will send you to join your father.”

And then Leia charged.

Blindsided by her approach, encumbered by the stolen blade being in his opposite hand, Vader did not raise his blade in time; and as Leia barreled into him, the lightsaber in Vader’s left hand sputtered and died as his finger slackened its pressure on the trigger switch.

Her momentum carried them both through the broken window. The Princess and the Sith Lord tumbled out into the boiling cauldron of Condawn’s atmosphere, and down… down, into the raging lava river whose edge came up almost to the foundations of the throne room.

The liquid magma splashed upward toward the blood-red sky, its fiery embrace enveloping both of them… and then they sank down without a trace into the burning ocean.

Luke followed them out of the jagged hole, his mouth closing instinctively against the sudden rasp in his throat as the burning air of this hell-planet irritated his sinuses. Drawing lightly on the Force, he landed on his feet on a narrow lip of rock just below the shattered window, between the molded durasteel walls of Vader’s palace and the liquid flames of this natural inferno.

The hot winds battered at Luke with their sulfurous gusts, but he paid them no heed. As he looked out over the roiling expanse of lava, his heartbeat hammered in his chest with the agitation of a caged dune-cat, and his mind struggled to process what it had just seen.

His uncle was gone.

Leia was gone.

He was alone.

In the searing heat of that awful place, the tears that came from his eyes evaporated almost as quickly as they formed.

But then, to his great surprise, something happened that justified their drying up.

The surface of the lava at Luke’s feet began to churn and bubble in one particular spot.

A human head, bald and raw and blistered, broke the surface… then a torso, heavily burned all over, its forearms sheared away… and Leia, her entire body covered in horrific burns, levitated herself out of the fiery ocean.

Luke could hardly believe his eyes.

For a moment Leia floated in midair, the power of the Force holding her in place above the lava currents. Luke ran to the edge of the rock, his heart leaping with joy and worry as he held out his arms to receive the injured Princess. Her single eye was whitened and blind from the inferno she’d suffered through, but she sensed his presence, for with a rasping breath she propelled herself forward into his arms…

…and then collapsed unconscious against him, her body going limp, and her already shallow breathing slackening so that it was nearly undetectable.

She would die without medical help.

But there was no one aside from Luke who could help her, and no aid besides what healing he and the Force could provide.

Luke turned quickly back to the castle, springing up with the reflexes of a Jedi back through the shattered glasteel into the purified atmosphere of Vader’s throne room.

Gingerly, he laid Leia on the floor in the center of the room. Her entire body was one mass of burns and blisters, but as he lowered her back onto the marble tiles inlaid with the ornate seals of the Sith, she didn’t even flinch. That was a bad sign, Luke knew.

He put a hand on Leia’s naked chest – her clothes had all been burnt away in the flames – took a deep breath, and called upon the Force.

Please, he told it.

Please save her. Heal her. Let her live.

I don’t want her to die.

I love her.

His other hand came to rest on her breast also, where Leia’s breathing had by now stopped entirely….

…and a glow enveloped Leia’s body, erupting like a sudden spurt of lava from the volcanoes outside, so bright and blinding that Luke had to close his eyes. But he kept his hands on her as the Force surged out through him like a torrent.

He could feel it at work inside her as it mended ravaged lungs, rebuilt shattered capillaries, smoothed out the blisters and burns that covered her from head to foot. It was life and light and energy, flowing like water, from him into her, through Leia’s body, then back into him and out again: a cycle of healing that went back and forth, over and over.

Throughout the ebb and flow, Luke could feel his own Force strength diminishing, passing from him. But he didn’t stop. Somehow, even as his attunement with the Force weakened more and more, it didn’t feel wrong or strange; it felt right.

The last of the Force energy in Luke’s body gave itself up, and the glow around Leia diminished. Luke opened his eyes, and as he did so, realization came to him.

He would never again be a Jedi.

Luke contemplated the idea, idly, with a detachment that would have been unthinkable even five minutes ago. To his surprise, he realized it didn’t bother him at all. Becoming a Jedi Master, having the raw power of the universe at his command in ways others could only dream of, would have been meaningless if the person he loved most was gone.

But she was here, and through him the Force had healed her. That was worth more to him than any Jedi power could ever be.

Looking at her, he saw that the burns and wounds that had disfigured Leia’s every inch had disappeared. Where blistered flesh and raw bloody sores had been mere moments ago, now there was healthy unmarred skin… though not, Luke could see, unchanged.

As he watched, Leia’s chest heaved with a sudden rattling intake of breath, then settled into an easy respiration, no longer pained by her former injuries.

She was alive. She was healed.

Her eye opened, clear and bright and strange.

“…Luke?” she asked. Her voice was weak with disuse, but not pained.

“Easy there,” he said. “You nearly gave me a fright.”

And as a smile lit up her face, he had a moment to take in the full truth of what his earlier glance had told him.

The woman he had prayed to the Force to heal was a human.

The woman he had resurrected was a monster.

Her arms had not grown back, nor her missing eye; it seemed those were injuries the Force could not, or would not, repair. But the charred stumps where her forearms had been sheared away were gone, replaced by smooth healthy skin where her shortened limbs rounded off just below the elbow. Even the empty socket in her face, where two eyeballs had rested in succession, looked less angry, less red, than Luke remembered.

Her glorious hair, golden brown, was gone from almost every inch of her body; save perhaps for her eyelashes, she was as bald as a newborn babe, and would stay so all her life. On the bright side, Luke thought wryly, she would never have to worry about shaving her pubic hair again.

All that was, at least, understandable. But the Force’s healing had wrought stranger things with Leia’s flesh.

Her skin was whiter than normal human skin could ever be; its hue was the color of newly exposed bone, of white milk freshly poured into a crystalline cup, of stars glimmering radiant against the vacuum of space. From the crown of her head there had sprouted four long, smooth ebon horns, their tips sharp as a lightsaber’s molten point.

And Leia’s one remaining eye, whose iris had been the blue-green of a cold mountain stream, was now a burning golden amber, with three pupils small and dark, clustered together: the distinctive eye of a full-blooded Organian bull.

She was a monster. Beautiful and terrible.

And Luke had never loved her more than he did in that moment.

The viewscreen hanging from the rafters of the throne room showed the victory of the Alliance: two Death Stars exploded in succession over Ton-Muund, and the Emperor’s Star Destroyer met its fate as well. Its sumptuously appointed escape shuttle launched, but not with its intended occupant on board – rather, it had been commandeered by pretended traitor Lando Calrissian, whose “defection” was engineered for precisely this outcome.

On the marble floor of the late Darth Vader’s throne room, Luke and Leia celebrated their victory in a particularly pleasurable fashion.

And, as Leia’s toes curled in ecstasy, some of the eclectic artifacts which the Sith Lord had placed on pedestals at the fringes of the room began, seemingly of their own will, to float upwards.

Chapter Text

Her skin was whiter than normal human skin could ever be; its hue was the color of newly exposed bone, of white milk freshly poured into a crystalline cup, of stars glimmering radiant against the vacuum of space. From the crown of her head there had sprouted four long, smooth ebon horns, their tips sharp as a lightsaber’s molten point.

And Leia’s one remaining eye, whose blue-green iris had embraced a typical human pupil, was now a startling golden amber. It bore two teardrop-shaped pupils, set vertically end to end, with their tails pointing outward and their wide curved edges almost touching in the middle: the distinctive eye of a full-blooded Organian bull.

She was a monster. Beautiful and terrible.

And Luke had never loved her more than he did in that moment.

Chapter Text

The violently shimmering rainbow hues outside the cockpit windows gave way to serene white stars suspended on a sea of black, as the battered Millennium Falcon emerged from the twisting tunnel of pocket-space into less dangerous environs once more.

Han checked over the instrument panel in front of him, taking in the array of flashing warning lights. “OK, Chewie. Looks like we won’t be going anywhere for a while. Hyperdrive is shot… shields are down… we’d be sitting ducks if somebody unfriendly came this way.”

Chewie barked his agreement, followed by a query.

“Don’t worry. He’ll be here.”

Another growl, this one containing an undertone of doubt.

“You don’t know Arkei. He and I fought together when I was with the Imps, before we both left. Saved me more times than I can count. Real trustworthy. In fact, I always figured he was far more likely to end up in this Rebellion thing than I was. Maybe that's his plan now. Anyways, if Arkei Marekal says he’ll show, he’ll show.”

I hope, Han thought.

The navigational instruments didn’t recognize any of the stars around them. That was one good thing, Han supposed: in a far-flung corner of the galaxy like this, there were fewer people likely to bear a grudge against two smugglers-turned-Rebel-agents. Though if anybody bearing a grudge did show up, they were as good as dead. Chewie was right about that.

Still, the Arkei he’d known wouldn’t leave them hanging out to dry, and would have their backs if matters came down to a fight.

But people change. And ten years was a long time.

It was over a decade now since he’d last seen Arkei Marekal. Since Arkei disappeared during a smuggling run, shortly after he and Han had deserted from Imperial service.

The Targon system, on the edge of Wild Space, had a cluster of stars that warped the fabric of space, making it extremely dangerous for ships to pass through. Ideal for smugglers – as long as you didn’t mind the chance of getting killed, or swept into some alternate dimension that might be fatal to carbon-based organics. And that was the route Arkei had been using to avoid Imperial patrols when he vanished.

Han had figured his friend must be either dead or held captive in one of the galaxy’s worst hellholes. Either way, he hadn’t expected to hear from him again.

Then a few days ago, shortly before the base on Hoth fell, Alliance High Command had discovered a damaged transmitter buoy near the Targon system. Its make was utterly unfamiliar, and its contents were encrypted with a method that Alliance slicers didn’t know. But they could decipher just enough to see that it was a message addressed to Han Solo.

Han took a look at the encryption and realized it was a cipher he and Arkei had come up with during their smuggling days. Half an hour later the blue-tinged face of his long-lost friend was staring up at him from the Echo Base holo-transmitter: a few more wrinkles around the eyes, a strand or two of gray in his hair, but still the same dashingly handsome, smooth-talking Arkei Marekal.

<< This message is for my old friend Han Solo, >> the image had said.

<< Han, if you’re hearing this, I bet life under the Empire has probably gotten worse while I’ve been gone. For you and everybody. >>

Not a hard guess to make, he’d thought.

<< I’m sending this to you because I’m in a position where I might be able to do something about it. But I don’t want the Empire finding out about this, and I don’t know if there’s anyone else on your end I can trust. So I’m encrypting this with our old smuggling codes. >>

That was Arkei – always pragmatic.

<< Listen, Han, I want us to meet up. An old friends’ reunion. Perfectly safe. I’ll give you more details then. But you have to come in person, or there’s no deal. >>

There were a vanishingly few people Han trusted with his life – Chewie, a spitfire princess of a vaporized planet, and an annoyingly earnest Jedi-in-training – but that was more than he’d had when Arkei had known him. More than had ever seemed likely back then, in fact.

<< If you’re interested in what I have to say, take the Falcon – if you’ve still got her – to the Targon system, and input the following coordinates… >>

The hologram message continued, rattling off a string of navigational waypoints leading into the Targon star cluster, then diving straight into one of the pocket-space apertures which branched off from the fabric of normal reality in that damaged part of the universe.

Where it had spit out Arkei all those years ago, the gods of Corell only knew.

And now, throwing caution away like a coronal mass ejection, he and Chewbacca had followed.

Proximity alarms blared to life in the cockpit as a starship dropped out of hyperspace – slid out, really, in a fashion Han had never seen before – directly below the Falcon’s saucer. The curving bulk of the new arrival was much larger than the nimble smuggling vessel; on his display panels Han could see that the ship had a gargantuan array of hyper-engines.

Chewie growled in surprise and alarm.

“No, I don’t know who they are. Might be Arkei, might not. Get the shields up and try to draw power to the lasers – shut down the gravfields if you have to…”

Perfectly safe, the words echoed in his head.

His furry co-pilot pushed buttons and flipped levers frantically, and Han did likewise, trying to coax his beloved ship into a semblance of battle-readiness. Shields were still low, and the hyperdrive was offline, but at least the gun turrets ought to work: hopefully they’d be good for a little surprise. Always be prepared if things go badly, Arkei liked to say…

“Han Solo. Long time no see.”

That voice hadn’t come over the comm system.

Han swiveled around in his chair.

There, a broad grin set in his lean brown face, was the familiar figure of Arkei Marekal: older of course, and a little more filled-out than Han remembered, but still Arkei. He was wearing an old, battered leather jacket over some sort of uniform, well-fitted and kept immaculately clean.

Before he knew it, Han had risen from the pilot’s chair to his feet, and wrapped the older man in a bear hug, one that was reciprocated if anything with greater strength.

“How are you doing, you old spacehound?” Han burst out. “I never thought I’d see you again!” He felt himself on the verge of tearing up, and blinked his eyes rapidly to hold it off. Don’t cry, his smuggler reflexes said. Space pirates don’t cry.

Arkei’s eyes also gleamed, but he didn’t seem to mind when a tear traced its way down his cheek. Instead he just gave Han another flash of that winning smile.

When he spoke, his vowels were liquid with subtle hints of a strange accent, as if he hadn’t spoken Basic for a long time. “Han Solo. Damn, am I glad to see you. I thought I’d never find a way back to that old armpit of the universe… but those mapping surveys the Fleet has been launching finally paid off.

“Tell me, how've you been? You've taken care of the Falcon pretty well, I see. Apart from the scratches. But I'm being rude - who’s this?” He pointed an arm at Chewie, who by now had also risen to his feet; the top of the Wookiee's furry head grazed the ceiling of the narrow cockpit.

“This is Chewbacca. He's a Wookiee. My co-pilot these days. We’ve been together almost since you left. Arkay, Chewie; Chewie, Arkay.” The elder space pirate held out his right arm, to which Chewbacca gave him a quizzical bob of the head and a short trill of inquiry.

“Oh, sorry. I forgot you don’t do that,” Arkay said. Han wondered for a moment who, exactly, did do that, but let the thought pass as his friend continued. “Did you learn Shyriiwook to speak with him, Han? I always knew you were smarter than you let on. But if you’d gone with me, you wouldn’t have had to bother. In fact, we’ll probably be able to hear him talk Basic soon enough, and vice versa.”

Han shook his head. Wherever he’d been all this time, clearly Arkei had forgotten some basic things about their galaxy. Maybe he needed a reminder.

“You know Wookiees can’t speak Basic. Something to do with their… wait a minute, ‘Fleet’? What fleet? Who are these people, and what did you bring me here for anyway?” Han considered stopping there, but his curiosity had been piqued, and he wanted answers. “We’re Klor knows how many parsecs away from every known star chart. You said you’d explain things if I came in person. Here I am. Explain away.”

Arkei took a deep breath. Whatever he was about to say, Han realized, it was probably something his fellow smuggler (ex-smuggler?) had thought over for years, hoping he'd get the chance one day to say it - to Han or someone else from the past he'd left behind.

Well, he could listen. Arkei had been out here in uncharted space for a long time.

And as Han knew from his own upbringing, there were some things you couldn’t talk about except with people who’d shared your own life experiences.

“The people I’m running with now… they’re amazing, Han. It’s like the Old Republic days but better – fairer representation, equal rights for all sentients, and comfortable living conditions for everybody. We’ve got tech that’ll have Chewie speaking Basic like a Coruscanti native before you know it. And our computer systems…”

He continued on in this vein. Enthusiasm radiated off him like a fever. And yet, the more Arkei spoke, the more Han’s puzzlement grew.

The Arkei Marekal he’d known was an intensely pragmatic man, suspicious of outsiders, who kept his cards held close to his chest: necessary traits to survive both the Imperial Navy and the cutthroat world of smuggling. But now, ten years on from when Han had last seen him, he was waxing rhapsodic about whatever group he’d fallen into bed with.

What had changed? What had turned the cold-blooded space pirate into a starry-eyed idealist?

Han realized his attention was wandering. He cleared his thoughts with as stealthy a head-shake as he could manage, shifting focus back to his old comrade instead of remaining mired in his own befuddlement. But there was something gnawing at the edge of his brain, something important…

“…Still don’t have much in the way of droids, though, and our ships’ stardrives are a lot slower than yours. But—”

He had it now.

In all the drama, first of being reunited with Arkei, and then listening to this big speech, there was something significant he’d overlooked right at the start. Now Han knew what had been bothering him, and he was damn well going to ask about it. The panegyric to whatever little far-flung peacenik outpost this was could wait.

“Yeah, that reminds me,” Han broke in, raising his voice just a bit louder than normal, to be sure Arkei got the message. “Your ship. How did you get in here so fast? I didn’t see your ship send over any shuttles or docking tubes.”

“They didn’t.” The smile on Arkei's face was becoming downright infuriating. Had it always been that way? Han couldn’t remember. “Here. Let me show you.”

Arkei’s right hand moved under his jacket. Han braced himself; for a moment he half-expected his old friend to draw a weapon on him. But instead the ex-smuggler rested his hand on something metallic pinned to the front of his uniform. A rank plaque? Insignia?

Another flash of that old Arkei grin. Yes, Han had definitely forgotten how irritating it could be.

“Your shields are still crap, by the way.”

He tapped his finger, and the metal breast-pin beeped.

“Challenger, Commander Marekal. Three to beam up.”

“What—"

The world suddenly shimmered around Han, and before it dissolved into a haze of blue particles, he turned to glance out once more through the Falcon’s cockpit windows.

Some lettering was visible on the hull of Marekal’s enormous ship.

USS CHALLENGER

NCC-73980

Chapter Text

“I’ve decided to keep it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not entirely, but… yes, basically. Just until the birth, at least. It’s what we’d have done if this happened back home on Organa Major.”

“On Organa Major anybody who dared so much as look at you the wrong way would have been executed—”

“I seem to recall that’s where you came in, farmboy.” She tapped his mechanical arm. “But it’s what we were always taught, growing up there. That you shouldn’t blame the child for the sins of the father. Even if that father was Force knows which one of those dozen priapic stormtroopers you so gallantly deprived of their heads.”

“But you’ll be out of action for months.”

“I would’ve thought you’d have welcomed me being stuck behind a desk for nine months instead of being on the front lines of the war.”

“And what about afterwards?”

“I thought about it. Being a mother,” she said wistfully. “But it wouldn't be right. Not here. Not now. Being part of this war, I never know if I'll be alive tomorrow, let alone in nine months. The Rebellion is no place for raising a child.”

“So what will you do?”

“When the birth happens, we can drop the baby off at an adoption center on one of the safer planets in the Outer Rim, like Setevos or someplace. He won’t even have to know his name or who his parents were. We can spare him from all the violence we have to deal with. Protect him. Give him a clean start.”

“He?”

“Well… that’s a guess. But it’s what my gut is telling me.”

“Funny. I’m kind of getting the vibe that it’s a girl.”

“Do you doubt my woman’s intuition, Skywalker?”

“Well, I am a Jedi—”

“If you finish that sentence I’ll leave you on Setevos.”

“Fine, fine.” He held up his hands to show she’d won that argument for now. “But, Leia, can the medical—”

“2-1B is perfectly capable of delivering all sorts of babies, from Abednegoids to Zabraks, and you know it.” Her tone turned playful. “And if you think this will get you out of your night shift of bed-warming duties in my quarters for the next nine months, Luke Skywalker, you are sorely mistaken.”

He gave her a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

Chapter Text

“If you only knew the power of the dark side,” Darth Vader intoned, the breath from his respirator still steady and unlabored by the exertions of the fight. “Obi-Wan never told you the truth of what he was.”

“He was a Jedi!” Luke shouted, as he scrabbled backwards onto the narrow sensor platform. “Not a traitor like you! Obi-Wan was a better person than you’ll ever be.”

Still Luke backed away from the towering figure of the Dark Lord, right onto the edge of the sensors that hung perilously over the great hollow shaft below. In the center of the shaft, protected by layers of shielding, was the central core which the sensor systems monitored around the clock: the reactor that kept Spire City floating just above the churning crimson waves of Acquis’ planetwide ocean.

Luke held on for dear life with his one hand to the sensor cone at the center of the platform, squeezing all the harder to drown out the burning pain where Vader had severed his sword-arm at the elbow.

But soon Vader’s words cut him far deeper than the lightsaber had.

“Obi-Wan Kenobi was a clone. A relic from the days when the Jedi feared losing battles more than training children to fight from their first day of life. They were corrupt and dogmatic, and deserved their extinction. Obi-Wan was no different. For he was always but a pale imitation of his model.”

“You mean…?” Luke asked, horror rising in his gut.

“Yes, young Skywalker,” said the dark figure in the hideous mask. “I am Ben Kenobi.”

Chapter Text

"Well, there she is. The Rebel base. Yavin VI."

Chapter Text

The fireworks overhead, the bonfires out beyond the trees, the starfighters streaking across the night sky leaving colorful jets in their wake: all of it was part of the Rebels’ celebration to commemorate the victory at Endor. The demise of the tyrannical Emperor Palpatine and his second Death Star. The death of the Sith Lord, Darth Vader; who was also Anakin Skywalker, their father.

Luke made his way over to a secluded corner of the Ewok village, shrouded by a high canopy of trees, where Leia stood alone, drinking from wine in an earthenware cup and staring out at the bonfires in the distance, evidently lost in thought.

“Hey,” he said, putting his gloved hand lightly on her shoulder. A faint mechanical whirr emanated from the prosthesis underneath, where the servomotors had been damaged slightly when a blaster bolt hit it during the fight on Jabba’s sail barge.

“Hey.” She kept her eyes on the glowing fires on the horizon.

“Have you told Han? …About us?” He brought up the topic of their being siblings as gingerly as he could.

“No.” Leia took a gulp from her cup of strong Ewok wine.

“When are you going to?”

He wasn’t at all sure, he reflected, that Han would take it well to hear Leia had unknowingly been sleeping with her twin brother on and off during the past few years. Would he be sympathetic because of their ignorance? Or horrified by their violation of such an ancient taboo?

And even now, Luke asked himself, how was it that, despite such a fundamental alteration in the nature of their relationship, his own feelings for Leia hadn’t changed at all?

Would Leia understand? Would she feel the same way?

Or would she turn her back on what they shared, what they’d been to each other, and try to forget?

His thoughts were interrupted when Leia shifted from staring at the bonfires; now she was looking him right in the eye, with that expression of quiet determination he knew so well. She had something important to say, he could see. When she was like that there was no stopping her; even if someone cut out her tongue, gods forbid, she’d just shout at people’s minds with the Force.

“I think, Luke,” Leia said, running a finger along the flap of his shirt where it hung open, “there are some things the galaxy doesn’t need to know.”

Of course she understood, Luke realized. Of course she felt the same way. How could she not? She was his missing half, his mirror image. His twin.

Leia downed the rest of her drink and set the cup down on a currently unused drum of animal hide. She smelt like wine.

Then she leaned in to kiss him. He didn’t pull away.

“And some things…” she said, reaching for the fastening of his trousers, “…ought to stay between a brother and sister.”

Chapter Text

The small durasteel cubicle of the prefab barracks room was spartan, but not unlivable. Luke was thankful that he’d been given a room to himself. A perk of being the hero of Yavin, he supposed. It had been Red Leader’s before; thankfully, someone had cleared it out before he’d moved in.

Most of the pilots who fought at Yavin were dead now. He and Wedge were the only survivors. Small wonder they could afford to give him his own room.

And anyways, the evacuation would begin in a day or so, now that the medal ceremony was over. He’d have little enough time to enjoy the peace and quiet before moving on to whatever quarters awaited him at the Rebellion’s hastily assembled new base on Stoovu Cohr.

The silver medal still hanging around his neck was heavy. Luke wondered if the lesser-ranked golden medals Han and Chewie had received were lighter.

The doorbell request chime interrupted his melancholy musings.

Luke pressed a button on the communications console built into the wall by his bunk. The door slid open, and Princess Leia stepped through. A long cloak in spotless Organian white, fastened by a pin at her throat, draped her slim frame.

“Leia! What… uh… what are you doing here?” Luke stammered. He was still not quite used to being on familiar terms with royalty.

“Hey, flyboy. That medal going to your head yet?” Leia smiled at him. The door had slid shut behind her, but she remained at the edge of the cramped room, evidently hesitant to invade Luke’s personal space.

Luke tugged at the ribbon of the medallion around his neck. “I hope not.”

“Good. That was some fancy shooting. Saved all our skins. We might need more of that in future.”

“It wasn’t just me. It was the Force. Ben could tell you more about it than I could—” He cast his eyes downward awkwardly to his boots; it was still awkward for him to talk about such an important, cosmic concept when he’d only learned about it a couple days ago.

He noticed Leia was barefoot.

“I know, Luke. That’s not why I’m here.”

Luke raised his head up again to look at her. “Oh?” He was surprised to see she wasn’t meeting his gaze, either. Instead, Leia – whose blue eyes could practically bore holes in duracrete – was fixing the comm panel with a vague abstracted stare.

“Luke, I…” Leia rubbed the back of her neck, apparently embarrassed by something. “I need a favor.”

“Favor?” he repeated, playing idly with the medal.

There was a definite blush on Leia’s cheeks.

“I… I’m a virgin. And I need to not be.”

This was not going at all how he’d imagined. “What—”

She did look him in the eye now, deadly earnest. “On Alderaan Base, before you showed up. During the torture. They made me suck them off, five of them,” Leia said, holding up her fingers to illustrate the count. “That was my first time doing that. They could’ve gone farther. And if I ever fall into their hands again they probably will.

“I want to feel what it’s like. Doing it with someone nice, for the right reasons. I don’t want my first time to be a gang-rape. Not when there’s somebody brave, intelligent, kind… I could do a lot worse than the Hero of Yavin.”

She unfastened the pin of her white cloak and pulled it from her shoulders, setting it down on the chair by the desk built into the wall. She was naked underneath. And her eyes, so often the icy blue of mountain glaciers that Luke knew only from holos, were warm like the coals of a fire in the desert night.

“Think you can handle that, flyboy?”

Luke gulped. A reciprocal blush was burning on his own cheeks by now.

“Leia, I… I’ve never done it before either.”

She strode across the cubicle to stand right in front of him, fingering the silver medal she’d given him just mere hours ago.

“Then there’s no time like the present to get started, is there?”

Chapter Text

“Last time we met, Princess,” said General Phemos, gesturing to his electronic ocular implant, “you took my eye, remember? Back on Yavin when we surprised your little evacuation party. I think it’s high time I repaid the favor.”

The vibro-scalpel buzzed in his right hand as he brought it closer and closer to her one eye that wasn’t swollen shut.

Leia screamed.

And then her world went dark.

He didn’t stop with just her eye.

He had a pair of pliers among his torture implements, also, and when he was done with them her mouth was a toothless gaping hole.

A hammer, too, which he used to break her fingers.

But Phemos wasn’t done with the vibro-scalpel. He carved a word into her forehead – it was CUNT, she realized, from the shape of the slashes he made, one after another, in her flesh.

And then he unlocked the restraints holding her in place against the wall. She might’ve tried escaping, but blind and with her hands mangled, she didn’t fancy her odds. So Leia didn’t resist when he grabbed her by her forearms and dragged her roughly across the room. She indulged in the thought for a moment that it might be over, that Phemos’ bloodlust might have been satisfied and he was taking her back to her cell, but she was soon disabused. He yanked her arms upward with a sudden jerk, and fastened a pair of manacles around her wrists. She gave them a tug, experimentally, and realized they were attached to chains hanging securely from the ceiling.

She was stuck standing here in the middle of the room, naked, with her arms stretched out painfully over her head, waiting for the first cruel kiss of knife or hammer or tongs that would reveal whatever terrible thing her tormentor would do to her next.

Her mind supplied plenty of bloody possibilities. But, even after what had happened to her on Alderaan, she clearly wasn’t versed enough in Imperial depravity, because she hadn’t even imagined what did follow.

He used the blade to peel back the skin from her breasts, cutting it off bit by bit, inch by inch. Until the fatty tissue was raw and exposed, naked to the chill recycled air of the station’s torture room. Only her nipples were left untouched, like twin mountains of brown earth emerging serenely unconcerned from amidst a sea of blood.

She screamed as he peeled the flesh from fat and muscle, not from terror this time but sheer animal pain: screamed again and again, until her voice gave out and she was left hoarse and wordless in her agony, with only dull inarticulate moans coming from her ravaged throat.

By the end of the flaying she’d passed out – but Phemos slapped her face to make sure she stayed awake. He wanted her conscious, wanted to revel in her agony when he brought the whip down on her back. She might’ve disappointed him on that score, at first. It hurt, but not the way her breasts did: they felt like twin sacks of hot coals sewed to her chest, as if some demented artist had chosen to sculpt his visions of Hell in flesh rather than marble.

Twice the whip struck the flayed sacs of her breasts. The first time it happened, the pain was so intense her vision swam and she nearly passed out again; she felt urine trickling between her legs, and she knew she’d pissed herself. The second time, she vomited, acidic bile spilling down like fire onto the fleshless fatty deposits laid bare by the vibro-knife. This time she did black out again, only to be brought round by another slap to her stinging cheek. Phemos didn’t bother to clean her up, but kept on with his whip-strokes. Leaving the vomit to soak into her ravaged chest, burning as it dried.

It could have been hours that had passed, or days, or years, when the whipping ceased; but what mattered was that her torturer’s fury was finally sated.

When Suul Phemos strode from the room, his general’s uniform stained with blood, he left her there, forced to stand upright with her arms stretched to their limits, wrists hanging from restraints secured to the ceiling.

But he turned on a switch as he left.

The metal floor began to heat up.

And her feet, naked like the rest of her, began to burn.

They left her there for hours, shifting from foot to foot, trying to keep the burning from getting too severe in any one spot. Which meant in practice trying to keep her feet as evenly grilled as possible. It wasn’t possible to keep them from burning at all.

It was agonizing. Tiring. Exhausting. And with her remaining eyeball stuck under a swollen lid, it was easy to let the darkness take her. She wanted to stay awake, to protect her feet as much as she could. But for all that Ben Kenobi liked to say Jedi Knights were luminous beings, Leia at least was still made of crude matter, and her body had been pushed to its limits.

Eventually she drifted into sleep.

The floor still burned.

When Luke came for her – when, she’d always known it was a when rather than an if – she was still in that damn torture chamber, though the heated floor had shut off at some point.

His lightsaber made quick work of her chains, just as swiftly as it had separated Phemos’ head from his body when he tried to bar Luke’s way to the detention cells. But Leia’s feet were covered in blisters and burns, and she couldn’t walk back to the shuttle Luke had arrived in.

So he carried her.

Ben Kenobi was there, waiting in the shuttle. The old Jedi put a hand on her head, and she felt an irresistible compulsion to sleep: gentle and calm and soothing, far different than the bone-weariness she’d given into in the torture chamber. She had no compunctions about letting herself fall asleep this time.

Later, she learned what had happened afterwards. How Luke had gone back to scrub any information she’d given to her torturers from the Imperial databanks; how Vader had intercepted him as he was returning to the shuttle. How Luke had lost his hand, and learned Vader’s true identity. How Ben Kenobi had sacrificed his life so Luke could escape with her in tow.

But that came afterward. She didn’t wake up until she was back at the Rebel fleet, floating in a bacta tank, naked again save for a respirator giving her oxygen and a diaper making sure she didn’t pollute the healing liquid.

Still, Leia was getting used to it. She’d practically been naked when Luke and Han rescued her on Alderaan. As long as nobody was hacking bits off of her, she didn’t mind.

When Luke, freshly discharged from his own stay in the infirmary, came in to check on her, she gave him a wink with her single eyelid.

The Rebels had managed – unofficially – to secure a couple of cloning vats to replace lost tissue. Doing so was still technically illegal according to Alliance regulations, which still abided by Old Republic rules in that respect, but High Command was increasingly turning a blind eye to such replacements in what was an ongoing and bloody conflict. The more soldiers and pilots they could keep healthy enough to fight, the better.

Nonetheless, Leia was technically violating the law with the medical treatment she received, to regrow fat and flesh where the skin had been flayed from her body.

Her breasts were contraband. That was an amusing thought.

Still, the expertise to clone certain body parts was all but nonexistent these days, outside of scattered sects of revanchist Mandalorians who wanted to refight the Clone Wars. Eyes, for instance, couldn’t be replaced organically, nor could teeth. So Leia had taken to wearing a black patch, like the ones space pirates wore in cheap holodramas, and her new teeth were dentures made of durasteel. (Removable, as she’d specifically requested.)

Even where cloning would be the best way to heal the wounds inflicted on her, it wasn’t always feasible to do so. The resources of the Alliance were limited, and there were always wounded casualties to treat. Nor did Leia want to be in the infirmary for longer than necessary. So she didn’t bother getting cloned skin for her back or her forehead. Bacta had helped them heal, somewhat, but the wounds from the whip and the vibroknife were too deep to efface entirely, and they still showed visibly as scars where smooth skin had once been.

Likewise with her feet; the burns were healed by the bacta, and she could walk around again now, but she didn’t have time to sit around in medbay and wait while the medical droids cloned the toe they’d had to amputate. People were relying on her to help them win this war, and she couldn’t afford to spend valuable time and resources on such luxuries. At least her broken fingers could heal with just bacta and splints once the med-droids had set the bones.

Plus, cloned tissue wasn’t always perfect. Her nipples, which had survived the torture, were as brown as ever. But on the cloned flesh surrounding them, replacing natural skin that was equally brown, there was the whitish starburst pattern, almost as pallid as flimsiplast, which some Togruta and Pantorans had.

Luke had been surprised the first time he’d seen her reconstructed breasts. But not displeased.

No, she thought, remembering the feel of his tongue and teeth, not displeased at all.

One of the pilots had come up with the idea of throwing a “Heroes’ Ball.” Everybody was supposed to wear clothing with portions cut away to show the scars they’d gotten in battle for the Alliance. Luke showed up in a tunic with the right sleeve missing, showing off the hand he’d had cloned. But it was Leia whose outfit turned the heads of everyone there.

A calf-length skirt with a fancy belt. No shoes; even her feet had wounds to show, and high heels just got in the way of dancing. And definitely no shirt.

The eyepatch stayed in her quarters.

And – though she usually styled her hair these days so her natural frizz hung down long in the front – she’d gathered it into two large buns just above her ears this evening, showing off what was written on her forehead.

Let Emperor Pestage and his minions gawk. She wasn’t ashamed. They might have written their contempt literally on her forehead, but she’d be writing their obituaries.

This cunt was going to bring the Empire down.

Chapter Text

“Last time we met, Princess,” said General Phemos, gesturing to his electronic ocular implant, “you took my eye, remember? Back on Yavin when we surprised your little evacuation party. I think it’s high time I repaid the favor.”

The vibro-scalpel buzzed in his right hand as he brought it closer and closer to her one eye that wasn’t swollen shut.

Leia screamed.

And then her world went dark.

He didn’t stop with just her eye.

He had a pair of pliers among his torture implements, also, and when he was done with them her mouth was a toothless gaping hole.

A hammer, too, which he used to break her fingers.

But Phemos wasn’t done with the vibro-scalpel. He carved a word into her forehead – it was CUNT, she realized, from the shape of the slashes he made, one after another, in her flesh.

And then he unlocked the restraints holding her in place against the wall. She might’ve tried escaping, but blind and with her hands mangled, she didn’t fancy her odds. So Leia didn’t resist when he grabbed her by her forearms and dragged her roughly across the room. She indulged in the thought for a moment that it might be over, that Phemos’ bloodlust might have been satisfied and he was taking her back to her cell, but she was soon disabused. He yanked her arms upward with a sudden jerk, and fastened a pair of manacles around her wrists. She gave them a tug, experimentally, and realized they were attached to chains hanging securely from the ceiling.

She was stuck standing here in the middle of the room, naked, with her arms stretched out painfully over her head, waiting for the first cruel kiss of knife or hammer or tongs that would reveal whatever terrible thing her tormentor would do to her next.

Her mind supplied plenty of bloody possibilities. But, even after what had happened to her on Alderaan, she clearly wasn’t versed enough in Imperial depravity, because she hadn’t at all been prepared for the horror that did await her.

He used the blade to peel back the skin from her breasts, cutting it off bit by bit, inch by inch. Until the fatty tissue was raw and exposed, naked to the chill recycled air of the station’s torture room. Only her nipples were left untouched, like mountains of brown earth emerging serenely unconcerned from the middle of a sea of blood.

She screamed as he peeled the flesh from fat and muscle, not from terror this time but sheer animal pain: screamed again and again, until her voice gave out and she was left hoarse and wordless in her agony, with only dull inarticulate moans coming from her ravaged throat.

By the end of the flaying she’d passed out – but Phemos slapped her face to make sure she stayed awake. He wanted her conscious, wanted to revel in her agony when he brought the whip down on her back. She might’ve disappointed him on that score, at first. It hurt, but not the way her breasts did: they felt like twin sacks of hot coals sewed to her chest, as if some demented artist had chosen to sculpt his visions of Hell in flesh rather than marble.

Twice the whip struck the flayed sacs of her breasts. The first time it happened, the pain was so intense her vision swam and she nearly passed out once more; she felt urine trickling between her legs, and she knew she’d pissed herself. The second time, she vomited, acidic bile spilling down like fire onto the fleshless fatty deposits laid bare by the vibro-knife. This time she did black out again, only to be brought round by another slap to her stinging cheek. Phemos didn’t bother to clean her up, but kept on with his whip-strokes. Leaving the vomit to soak into her ravaged chest, burning as it dried.

And then, when Suul Phemos had had enough of cutting her back to ribbons, he took up the pliers once more. He brought them to her left nipple, crushed the nub in their vice-like grip, and yanked.

The nipple tore free, along with several of the fatty ducts around it.

Leia heaved again, once more covering her mangled chest in her burning stomach juices. This time, when the darkness took her, it wasn’t a slap that woke her, but a punch that flattened her nose.

Yet the whipping ceased; evidently her torturer’s fury was sated.

When Phemos strode from the room, his general’s uniform stained with blood, he left her there, forced to stand upright with her arms stretched to their limits, wrists hanging from restraints secured to the ceiling.

But he turned on a switch as he left.

The metal floor began to heat up.

And her feet, naked like the rest of her, began to burn.

They left her there for hours, shifting from foot to foot, trying to keep the burning from getting too severe in any one spot. Which meant in practice trying to keep her feet as evenly grilled as possible. It wasn’t possible to keep them from burning at all.

It was agonizing. Tiring. Exhausting. And with her remaining eyeball stuck under a swollen lid, it was easy to let the darkness take her. She wanted to stay awake, to protect her feet as much as she could. But for all that Ben Kenobi liked to say Jedi Knights were luminous beings, Leia at least was still made of crude matter, and her body had been pushed to its limits.

Eventually she drifted into sleep.

The floor still burned.

When Luke came for her – when, she’d always known it was a when rather than an if – she was still in that damn torture chamber, though the heated floor had shut off at some point.

His lightsaber made quick work of her chains, just as swiftly as it had separated Phemos’ head from his body when he tried to bar Luke’s way to the detention cells. But Leia’s feet were covered in blisters and burns, and she couldn’t walk back to the shuttle Luke had arrived in.

So he carried her.

Ben Kenobi was there, waiting in the shuttle. The old Jedi put a hand on her head, and she felt an irresistible compulsion to sleep: gentle and calm and soothing, far different than the bone-weariness she’d given into in the torture chamber. She had no compunctions about letting herself fall asleep this time.

Later, she learned what had happened afterwards. How Luke had gone back to scrub any information she’d given to her torturers from the Imperial databanks; how Vader had intercepted him as he was returning to the shuttle. How Luke had lost his hand, and learned Vader’s true identity. How Ben Kenobi had sacrificed his life so Luke could escape with her in tow.

But that came afterward. She didn’t wake up until she was back at the Rebel fleet, floating in a bacta tank, naked again save for a respirator giving her oxygen and a diaper making sure she didn’t pollute the healing liquid.

Still, Leia was getting used to it. She’d practically been naked when Luke and Han rescued her on Alderaan. As long as nobody was hacking bits off of her, she didn’t mind.

When Luke, freshly discharged from his own stay in the infirmary, came to check on her, she gave him a wink with her single eyelid - a gesture he returned with a wave of his bandaged stump.

The Rebels had managed – unofficially – to secure a couple of cloning vats to replace lost tissue. Doing so was still technically illegal according to Alliance regulations, which still abided by Old Republic rules in that respect, but High Command was increasingly turning a blind eye to such replacements in what was an ongoing and bloody conflict. The more soldiers and pilots they could keep healthy enough to fight, the better.

Nonetheless, Leia was technically violating the law with the medical treatment she received, to regrow fat and flesh where the skin had been flayed from her body.

Her breasts were contraband. That was an amusing thought.

Still, the expertise to clone certain body parts was all but nonexistent these days, outside of scattered sects of revanchist Mandalorians who wanted to refight the Clone Wars. Eyes, for instance, couldn’t be replaced organically, nor could teeth. So Leia had taken to wearing a black patch, like the ones space pirates wore in cheap holodramas, and her new teeth were dentures made of durasteel. (Removable, as she’d specifically requested.)

Even where cloning would be the best way to heal the wounds inflicted on her, it wasn’t always feasible to do so. The resources of the Alliance were limited, and there were always wounded casualties to treat. Nor did Leia want to be in the infirmary for longer than necessary. So she didn’t bother getting cloned skin for her back or her forehead. Bacta had helped them heal, somewhat, but the wounds from the whip and the vibroknife were too deep to efface entirely, and they still showed visibly as scars where smooth skin had once been.

Likewise with her feet; the burns were healed by the bacta, and she could walk around again now, but she didn’t have time to sit around in medbay and wait while the medical droids cloned the toe they’d had to amputate. People were relying on her to help them win this war, and she couldn’t afford to spend valuable time and resources on such luxuries. At least her broken fingers could heal with just bacta and splints once the med-droids had set the bones.

Plus, cloned tissue wasn’t always perfect.

Her right nipple, the one that remained from before, was brown in color, with a large areola barely distinguishable from the cloned flesh around it. But the left nipple, the one the med-techs had made for her, was almost as pallid as flimsiplast, like a Togruta’s, with a small areola that stood out distinctly against her brown skin. And it was more sensitive to temperature changes than its counterpart, which was a little disconcerting.

Fortunately, it responded to stimuli just as well as her original. Luke’s tongue and teeth had proved that much.

One of the pilots had come up with the idea of throwing a “Heroes’ Ball.” Everybody was supposed to wear clothing with portions cut away to show the scars they’d gotten in battle for the Alliance. Luke showed up in a tunic with the right sleeve missing, showing off the hand he’d had cloned. But it was Leia whose outfit turned the heads of everyone there.

A calf-length skirt with a fancy belt. No shoes; even her feet had wounds to show, and high heels just got in the way of dancing. And definitely no shirt.

The eyepatch stayed in her quarters.

And – though she usually styled her hair these days so her natural frizz hung down long in the front – she’d gathered it into two large buns just above her ears this evening, showing off what was written on her forehead.

Let Emperor Plaaton-Bas and his minions gawk. She wasn’t ashamed. They might have written their contempt literally on her forehead, but she’d be writing their obituaries.

This cunt was going to bring the Empire down.

Bonus: some text I wrote in early drafting, before I decided Leia should be a woman of color in this fic - clearly not as interesting as what ended up in the versions above

Her right nipple, the one that remained from before, was light pink in color, with a large areola barely distinguishable from the surrounding cloned skin. But the left nipple, the one the med-techs had made for her, was brown, and its areola was small and distinct. And it was slightly more sensitive to temperature changes than its counterpart, which was a little disconcerting.

Fortunately, it responded to stimuli just as well as her original. Luke’s tongue and teeth had proved that much.

Chapter Text

She’d never had her hair in side buns before Acquis.

That was where Darth Vader had captured her, in her frantic flight after the Rebel base on ice-bound Dagobah fell; captured her, and turned her over to his hand-picked train of stormtroopers, who followed in his wake obediently like a pack of white-furred rothhounds. The Emperor’s second-in-command threw her to his soldiers like a piece of meat, letting them fuck her and beat her bloody as a reward for their loyal service.

But just gang-raping her wasn’t enough. Oh no.

On Vader’s express orders, his stormtroopers had tattooed the Imperial prison sigil on the center of her forehead, and a prisoner ID code just below it, using a tattoo-blaster full of indelible scarlet ink: something normally inflicted only on prisoners of state condemned to a lifetime sentence or a swift execution. Though what, precisely, the Dark Lord had planned for her, she’d mercifully never found out before Luke showed up and helped her escape. The ink was made with a self-regenerating polymer, so she couldn’t erase it, even after a thousand debriding sessions with a med-droid. The prisoner’s mark would be stamped on her face forever. (Though that meant, she realized, it might last longer than the Empire that had marked her with it.)

What was more, to further humiliate her, Vader’s lapdogs had cut her hair into the style worn by prostitutes in the Coruscanti brothels of old – before the Ruusan Reformation, with its pious puritanism, outlawed such things and succeeded merely in driving them underground.

The troopers shaved bare a wide swathe of skin along the center of her head, from her forehead to the nape of her neck, leaving two separate sections of hair hanging like twin red-gold waterfalls over her ears. And they rubbed perma-depilation cream all along the naked middle of her scalp, to make sure that, even after she’d escaped Acquis, she could never erase her shame.

Yet the joke was on them.

There were enough good people suffering unjustly in Imperial jails that Leia could wear the mark of the Empire’s top-security prisons with pride. And the hairstyle, quite frankly, was a challenge she couldn’t resist. Leia Organa, princess of the lost world of Organa Major, was no prude – and she was always, always, fashionable.

If Darth Vader and his goons wanted her to hide her head in shame, she wouldn’t oblige them in the least. No, she’d make her new look the talk of the galaxy.

So Leia braided her remaining hair and coiled it into twin buns, one over each ear. She put on some makeup, just enough to show she’d applied it, but made sure the tattoo on her forehead was still perfectly legible. And she got Luke to take some holophotos of her, wearing nothing but a strategically brandished blaster – then made sure that some of those holos were “accidentally” leaked to the galactic press.

It worked like a charm. Within a week, media outlets across the legitimate and underground HoloNet, from the Empire Times to the Journal of Freedom, were discussing the photos: arguing over who had taken them, who had leaked them, why Leia wore that hairstyle, what message she was sending and to whom, whether it was really a bald cap, who was on the receiving end of her affections currently, and just what had gone on during her time in the cloud-city prison of Alderaan anyway…

The standard sources of Imperial propaganda, direct and indirect, worked hard as usual to blacken her reputation. But the one thing Vader’s lickspittle minions couldn’t say was that she was afraid to show her face. And, sure enough, the twin-buns-shaved-middle hairstyle, now known as the “Princess’ Pleasure”, started to become popular among Rebels and political dissidents.

Leia smiled every time she walked into the mess hall and caught sight of someone new wearing that haircut.

The Empire might have branded Leia Organa a fugitive and a whore for all to see, but she knew there were worse things by far. Things like the hypocrisy of subjecting a teenager to a gang-rape and permanently disfiguring her, and expecting her to be the one ashamed of it.

Order and decorum might sound nice in theory, but all too often in practice they were the buzzwords mouthed by Emperor Plagueis’ most ardent cheerleaders. A pristine white biography was the telltale sign of conformity; hence why it appealed to the mindless fascists in pristine white armor. And well-behaved women weren’t the ones who usually made the history books, to say nothing of restoring freedom to the galaxy.

Leia Organa would far rather suck cock than lick boots.

Chapter Text

His sword was like a flame in sheath;
with gems was wreathed his helmet tall;
an eagle-plume upon his crest,
upon his breast an emerald.

- JRR Tolkien, “The Song of Eärendil” (unpublished draft, intended for use in The Lord of The Rings but supplanted by an earlier version by accident)

“Your father’s lightsaber… and his sword-belt. Here, try it on.”

“It’s a bit large for me.”

“You can adjust the sizing. This switch on the buckle. Here.”

“Thanks. That’s much better.”

“Try turning on the blade,” said Ben Kenobi. “Make sure you’re not pointing it at anything. Then press that large switch, there, on the side.”

Luke depressed the switch Ben indicated with his thumb and, with a strange snap-hissing sound, the golden energy beam of a Jedi’s lightsaber flared to life in the large cavern of the old wizard’s underground dwelling. It glowed like the blinking status lights of the moisture vaporators, like the fires of the far-off Tusken camps at night, like the suns at midday when he hadn’t bothered to pull on the green-tinted sun goggles that always hung round his neck.

It was like magic.

“Keep your finger on the switch, else it’ll deactivate,” Ben instructed, as the noise of the igniting blade settled down to a gentle hum. “Careful now. Give it a swing or two, gently. Feel its weight. In time, with practice, it will become as much a part of you as your own arm.”

Luke gave the blade a few passes, experimentally, hefting its weight in his hands, listening as the hum of the lightsword changed with his motions, watching as the glow it cast on the walls waxed and waned as the emitter regulated the flow of energy. He was holding the weapon of a Jedi Knight! An actual lightsaber! It was incredible. He could never have imagined getting this opportunity.

Finally, realizing there wasn’t anything in the room he could practice on for the moment, he made a couple more passes in the air with the energy blade, then deactivated the sword and held it out to the aged Jedi.

To his surprise, Ben refused to take it.

“Put it in the leather pocket, on the hip. The cylindrical one, that’s it. Open the snaps, then put the blade in – emitter down – and close the flap again. It is yours now.”

Luke complied with the old wizard’s instructions. But as he inserted the metal hilt into the cylindrical leather pouch, making sure to keep the emitter pointed downward as Ben had indicated, a question occurred to him.

“How come the saber has a sheath? The blade just retracts when you let go of the switch. Seems like it’d be a dangerous time-waster in a fight to get the flap open and pull it out.”

Ben Kenobi closed his eyes and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. In some ways, he thought to himself, Luke was all too like his father… and his brother. But this was something the boy needed to learn.

He returned his gaze to the young boy with short sandy-brown hair standing in front of him. “Luke, to walk the Jedi path is not solely a matter of seeking excitement and adventure. A Jedi is committed to defending the weak and the innocent. The lightsaber is the symbol of our order; but so also is its sheath. Jedi use violence only as a last resort. The sheath and its flap remind us that we are – we were, and one day, I hope, shall be again – keepers of peace and justice. To rush into a fight eagerly can be just as dangerous as not having a sword at all.

“A sword which has no fasteners to secure it against being drawn is apt to leap into its wearer’s hand all too readily. And when a hand grows too accustomed to drawing the sword, soon enough the mind forgets other ways of dealing with things. Remember, the sword that fights for justice can just as easily be turned to tyranny. That is the Dark Side, and a Jedi must always be on guard against its temptations.”

“I see… I think,” said Luke, snapping the fasteners shut.

“I have no doubt that you will, in time.” He patted Luke on the shoulder. The boy was thin and wiry, like a wolf of the desert. Jedi training would build up some muscles on him, Ben knew. Still, there were more important matters to deal with at the present moment. “Now then – you said that your droid had a message for me?”

Chapter Text

“Come on, quick! Into the TIE scout ship,” urged Luke as he guided Leia over to the ladder leading up into the cockpit of the two-person craft. “It’s got hyperdrive so we can take off in it. No shields, though.”

“Great,” sighed Leia, running a hand through her frizzy red hair. “So our chances of escaping are only mostly impossible.”

“You’ll have to take the pilot’s chair,” he said. “The flight controls on these things won’t work with only one hand, but the gunnery stick will.” Luke gestured at the cauterized stump of his right arm, a fresh wound inflicted by one of the yellow-eyed Sith Lords serving on the Imperial flagship.

(One of Lord Palpatine’s faction rather than Vader’s men. Vader might be a tyrant who contested the rule of the Empire with his erstwhile master, and the black-armored Sith Lord and Palpatine would both likely have rather died than make common cause with the so-called traitors of the Rebellion; but Leia knew from personal experience which groups’ Sith Lords did and did not rape their captives.)

Hearing Luke’s escape plan, Leia had to wonder: was he out of his mind? Or did he just forget what made that arrangement of piloting duties completely nonsensical? If she were talking to somebody she didn’t like so much, she might have called it “blindingly obvious”.

“Skywalker, in case you’ve forgotten, I don’t have any fucking eyeballs.” Leia pointed at her mutilated face for emphasis.

Luke was unperturbed in that way of his that so frustrated her sometimes. “Reach out with the Force. I’ll be your eyes. You can see what I see. I know you can do it,” he told her, patting her bare shoulder.

“Right. I’d roll my eyes at that, but since I can’t…” Leia sighed and tried to clear her mind, concentrating on the mental image of Luke standing in front of her, trying to imagine what he was seeing.

She wasn’t at all sure this would work, to be honest. If Leia hadn’t fired blindly – no pun intended – and shot out the lock of the door to this empty hangar with her stolen blaster, triggering the emergency seal, Luke would have been dead at the hands of that Sith Lord a moment later. A vague but immediately demanding sensation in the Force telling her to fire here, now, was the only thing that had saved them both. That was hardly the same thing as actual eyesight, though – something that the Emperor’s goons had taken forever from her during her latest stay in Imperial hospitality.

She was still new to this Force business, and now she was going to fly a ship based on images coming to her through the ether from somebody else’s eyeballs? Even for Jedi apprentice and her dashing would-be rescuer Luke Skywalker, that was a stretch.

But it wasn’t like she had any better ideas. And the Sith Lord’s lightsaber was starting to melt through the inner edge of the heavy durasteel blast door. So she pushed out her doubts and fears and tried to focus on getting a mental picture of whatever was in Luke’s field of view.

An image swam into view in her mind. Her, standing by the ladder of a two-person TIE fighter, clutching a standard-issue stormtrooper blaster in one hand. Her face marred with bruises and the blood from her ruined eye sockets. Still clad only in the grimy, tattered skirt that remained from the elegant pale blue dress she’d been wearing at the gala where the Emperor’s goons had kidnapped her.

“Wow. I look like shit. Bet you were enjoying the show, though.” Leia watched herself through Luke’s eyes as she waved her free hand at her breasts, noticing how her nipples had hardened in the cool air of the Star Destroyer’s docking bay. Through their Force connection she could feel Luke’s embarrassment, and she smiled with broken teeth. “Ah well, no one ever said being a Rebel was glamorous.”

“You go first,” Luke said, gesturing with his good hand to the ladder leading up to the TIE fighter. It was strange, Leia thought, how his arm appeared in her borrowed vision where she normally saw her own.

She handed Luke her stolen blaster; he thrust it awkwardly into a loop on his utility belt, which he’d likewise taken from an Imperial soldier who no longer needed it.

She walked over to the ladder and grabbed hold of it, putting one bare foot on the lowest rung gingerly. It was cold. She climbed up into the cockpit. Luke kept his eyes on her, watching as she ascended to make sure she could see where to put her arms and legs.

As she reached the starfighter’s lower entry hatch and put her hands on the rim, preparing to haul herself up into the cockpit, Leia realized she – and he – could see beneath her skirt to where her underwear wasn’t. All the way to Coruscant. Said cunt, and her asshole and thighs too, were still sticky with dried stormtrooper semen, not all of it the white of human come.

She could feel Luke’s blush, his embarrassment vying with indignation, and then her world suddenly swiveled wildly as he averted his eyes, giving her a good look at the shiny hangar deckplating.

Dammit, she thought. This is no time for modesty.

She realized that Luke must have heard her thoughts, because he returned his gaze to her position on the ladder. Leia pulled herself up through the starfighter hatch and into the fuselage, seeing it from Luke’s vantage point below as her legs disappeared into the TIE fighter. Wow, my feet are absolutely filthy.

Weren’t you the one who pushed us into a trash compactor back on Alderaan Fortress? said Luke’s voice, teasingly, in her mind.

Oh, shut up and get in here, she sent back, in equal jest. (So she could dish out cutting remarks even with her mouth full? She could get used to this.)

Luke took longer to climb up – she could see that he had some difficulty clambering up the ladder with only one hand – but eventually he managed it, and Leia grabbed his arms to pull him into the cockpit.

He took his seat in the gunner position next to the pilot’s chair. Leia watched with his eyes as Luke used the Force to fasten his harness, then turned his gaze to her so she could get her own straps in place.

As Luke’s attention focused on the cockpit instruments so they could get the ship ready for takeoff –starting by retracting the ladder and closing the entry hatch – Leia looked out through the cockpit windows and breathed a sigh of relief. The side-by-side twin viewpanes of the TIE scoutship meant that Luke’s point of view in the gunner station was close enough to her own in the pilot’s seat that this might actually work.

“Right,” Leia said, reaching for the throttle controls as she positioned her feet on the attitude pedals. The damn things were freezing, made of durasteel like the ladder. At this rate she might come down with frostbite in a fucking TIE fighter. She hoped they’d get back to the Rebel fleet before that happened – though they’d no doubt have to deal with an Imperial farewell committee first.

“Time to start literally flying blind.”

Chapter Text

In the past, before the peace of the Republic era, there had been Queens and Kings of Organa Prime who made Renunciations in wartime: vows to the gods to refrain from some practice or other until they were victorious. Like King Malcomflorii’da, who kept a vow he made to refrain from shaving until he regained the throne usurped by his cousin. Or Queen Sygnix, who had given up meat-eating until she drove out the Verbretians invading from a nearby star system.

As a Princess who had just come of age at 16, newly inducted into the Rebellion against the Empire, and deeply interested in the more obscure corners of her planet’s history, Leia was considering making a Renunciation of her own. However, she hadn’t settled on what it should be before her ship was captured by Darth Vader.

Then she was taken as a captive to the floating fortress of Alderaan, the Empire’s infamous prison-city, whose tall, towering plasteel bulk, a white and windowless shaft of substantial diameter with a triangular head, suspended amidst poison-green clouds, was like exposed bone jutting out from dead, decaying flesh… and her own world died also, blown to space dust by the Death Star, as she watched in horror from the viewscreens of the prison’s overbridge.

Did the gods of Organa Prime still exist? Did they still watch over those of their people who by whatever chance had happened to be offworld just then, and so survived the cataclysm? Or had they been blown to dust along with their planet and most of its people?

Leia hoped that they still existed, as long as there were Organians left who prayed to them.

Beliefs, traditions, memories kept alive by the survivors: that was all Organian culture could be now, without a homeworld to sustain it. And even in the Outer Rim, there weren’t many deserted planets without pre-existing governments of some sort that might serve as a suitable colony world for survivors. That search would have to wait, anyways, while the insurrection was still going on against the Empire. Mere survival had to come before healing.

So, with Leia now thrust in one moment of horror into the new role of Queen of a nearly-murdered people, keeping the traditions of her planet’s faith alive was all the more important. Assuming she somehow survived imprisonment on Alderaan and escaped, that is.

She was more than ever determined now, if she survived her imprisonment, to make a Renunication in the spirit of the Organian monarchs past, but she still wasn’t sure what it should be…

…and then it came to her, while she was lying on the bare duracrete floor of her cell, taking stock after the latest torture session through the one eye not glued shut by a throbbing bruise.

She was certainly hardly the picture of royalty seen in holodramas. She didn’t have a mirror, but her nose felt like it had been badly broken, and there were scabbed-over gaps in her mouth where several of her teeth had been pulled out with pliers. The fingers on her right hand had all been broken, and they were swollen and purple, like sausages prepared by some demented chef. Touching them to anything was painful enough to bring tears to her good eye, and she avoided using that hand to grab the meager bowls of mush, without utensils, which they gave her as food.

Her outer cloak was gone, revealing the sheer sleeveless top she’d worn under it in a small act of teenage rebellion even against the conservative dress standards of her vaporized homeworld. Her bare arms bore the needle marks of the interrogation droids, and through the sheer cloth of her shirt her nipples had visibly peaked in the cell’s cold air. The hemline of her once-white skirt was ragged and filthy, and the crotch of it was stained (being tortured didn’t come with bathroom breaks, it turned out). Beneath the ruined skirt, where her underwear had once been, was a more painful and more intimate wound that she was still trying not to think about. And in the course of her suffering that latter wound (painful, it was painful, and definitely nothing else), her boots, like her cloak, had been taken and never returned to her, so her bare feet were blackened and filthy from the duracrete floors of the floating prison facility.

Huh. That gave her an idea.

She could give up wearing shoes until the Empire was defeated. Yes, that would make a good Renunciation.

Maybe she’d even get to crush the Emperor’s face beneath her feet. Let him taste the dirt on her soles as she felt his blood oozing between her toes.

But even that wouldn’t bring back Organa Prime. No, she’d wait even after the Emperor was toppled, until she had the soil of a new homeworld under her feet. Then, and only then, would she put on shoes again.

And, if nothing else, it gave her an excuse not to wear the stupid high heels that Organian ladies normally wore to formal receptions.

Chapter Text

Version A (unpublished)

What a surprise! Here’s another AU based on the 1975 third-draft script.

I might update & extend this as part of a standalone fanfic at some point, or I might just post additional chapters here. Who knows?

In the past, before the peace of the Republic era, there had been Queens and Kings of Organa Prime ho made Renunciations in wartime: vows to the gods to refrain from some practice or other until they were victorious. Like King Malcomflorii’da, who swore to refrain from shaving until he regained the throne usurped by his cousin. Or Queen Sygnix, who had given up meat-eating until she drove out the Verbretians invading from a nearby star system.

As a Princess who had just come of age at 16, newly inducted into the Rebellion against the Empire, Leia was considering making a Renunciation of her own. However, she hadn’t settled on what it should be before her ship was captured by Darth Vader.

Then she was taken as a captive to the floating fortress of Alderaan, the Empire’s infamous prison-city, whose tall, towering plasteel bulk, white and windowless, suspended amidst poison-green clouds, was like exposed bone jutting out from dead, decaying flesh… and her own world died also, blown to space dust by the Death Star, as she watched in horror from the viewscreens of the prison’s overbridge.

Did the gods of Organa Prime still exist? Did they still watch over those of their people who had been offworld and survived the cataclysm? Or had they been blown to dust along with their planet and most of its people?

Leia hoped that they still existed, as long as there were Organians left who prayed to them.

Beliefs, traditions, memories kept alive by the survivors: that was all Organian culture could be now, without a homeworld to sustain it. And even in the Outer Rim, there weren’t many deserted planets without pre-existing governments of some sort that might serve as a suitable colony world for survivors. That search would have to wait, anyways, while there was an insurrection going on.

So, with Leia now thrust in one moment of horror into the new role of Queen of a nearly-murdered people, keeping the traditions of her planet’s faith alive was all the more important. Assuming she somehow survived imprisonment on Alderaan and escaped, that is.

She was more than ever determined now, if she survived her imprisonment, to make a Renunication in the traditions of the Organian monarchs past, but she still wasn’t sure what it should be…

…and then it came to her, while she was lying on the bare duracrete floor of her cell, taking stock after the latest torture session through the one eye not glued shut by a throbbing bruise.

She was certainly hardly the picture of royalty seen in holodramas. She didn’t have a mirror, but her nose felt like it had been badly broken, and there were scabbed-over gaps in her mouth where several of her teeth had been pulled out with pliers. The fingers on her right hand had all been broken, and she avoided using that hand to grab the meager bowls of mush, without utensils, which they gave her as food.

Her outer cloak was gone, revealing the sheer sleeveless top she’d worn under it in a small act of teenage rebellion even against the conservative dress standards of her vaporized homeworld. Her bare arms bore the needle marks of the interrogation droids. The hemline of her once-white skirt was ragged and filthy, and the crotch of it was stained (being tortured didn’t come with bathroom breaks, it turned out). And her boots, like her cloak, had been taken and never returned, so her bare feet were blackened and filthy from the duracrete floors of the floating prison facility.

Huh. That gave her an idea.

She could give up wearing shoes until the Empire was defeated. Yes, that would make a good Renunciation.

Maybe she’d even get to crush the Emperor’s face beneath her feet. Let him taste the dirt on her soles as she felt his blood oozing between her toes.

But even that wouldn’t bring back Organa Prime. No, she’d wait even after the Emperor was toppled, until she had the soil of a new homeworld under her feet. Then, and only then, would she put on shoes again.

And, if nothing else, it gave her an excuse not to wear the stupid high heels that Organian ladies normally wore to formal receptions.

Version B (as initially published, maybe with some minor edits)

What a surprise! Here’s another AU based on the 1975 third-draft script.

I might update & extend this as part of a standalone fanfic at some point, or I might just post additional chapters here. On the other hand, I might also simply let this chapter suffice for this particular AU, since I don’t want to do the same thing over and over. Who knows?

In the past, before the peace of the Republic era, there had been Queens and Kings of Organa Prime who made Renunciations in wartime: vows to the gods to refrain from some practice or other until they were victorious. Like King Malcomflorii’da, who kept a vow he made to refrain from shaving until he regained the throne usurped by his cousin. Or Queen Sygnix, who had given up meat-eating until she drove out the Verbretians invading from a nearby star system.

As a Princess who had just come of age at 16, newly inducted into the Rebellion against the Empire, and deeply interested in the more obscure corners of her planet’s history, Leia was considering making a Renunciation of her own. However, she hadn’t settled on what it should be before her ship was captured by Darth Vader.

Then she was taken as a captive to the floating fortress of Alderaan, the Empire’s infamous prison-city, whose tall, towering plasteel bulk, white and windowless, suspended amidst poison-green clouds, was like exposed bone jutting out from dead, decaying flesh… and her own world died also, blown to space dust by the Death Star, as she watched in horror from the viewscreens of the prison’s overbridge.

Did the gods of Organa Prime still exist? Did they still watch over those of their people who had been offworld and survived the cataclysm? Or had they been blown to dust along with their planet and most of its people?

Leia hoped that they still existed, as long as there were Organians left who prayed to them.

Beliefs, traditions, memories kept alive by the survivors: that was all Organian culture could be now, without a homeworld to sustain it. And even in the Outer Rim, there weren’t many deserted planets without pre-existing governments of some sort that might serve as a suitable colony world for survivors. That search would have to wait, anyways, while the insurrection was still going on against the Empire. Mere survival had to come before healing.

So, with Leia now thrust in one moment of horror into the new role of Queen of a nearly-murdered people, keeping the traditions of her planet’s faith alive was all the more important. Assuming she somehow survived imprisonment on Alderaan and escaped, that is.

She was more than ever determined now, if she survived her imprisonment, to make a Renunication in the spirit of the Organian monarchs past, but she still wasn’t sure what it should be…

…and then it came to her, while she was lying on the bare duracrete floor of her cell, taking stock after the latest torture session through the one eye not glued shut by a throbbing bruise.

She was certainly hardly the picture of royalty seen in holodramas. She didn’t have a mirror, but her nose felt like it had been badly broken, and there were scabbed-over gaps in her mouth where several of her teeth had been pulled out with pliers. The fingers on her right hand had all been broken, and they were swollen and purple, like sausages prepared by some demented chef. Touching them to anything was painful enough to bring tears to her good eye, and she avoided using that hand to grab the meager bowls of mush, without utensils, which they gave her as food.

Her outer cloak was gone, revealing the sheer sleeveless top she’d worn under it in a small act of teenage rebellion even against the conservative dress standards of her vaporized homeworld. Her bare arms bore the needle marks of the interrogation droids, and through the sheer cloth of her shirt her nipples had visibly peaked in the cell’s cold air. The hemline of her once-white skirt was ragged and filthy, and the crotch of it was stained (being tortured didn’t come with bathroom breaks, it turned out). And her boots, like her cloak, had been taken and never returned, so her bare feet were blackened and filthy from the duracrete floors of the floating prison facility.

Huh. That gave her an idea.

She could give up wearing shoes until the Empire was defeated. Yes, that would make a good Renunciation.

Maybe she’d even get to crush the Emperor’s face beneath her feet. Let him taste the dirt on her soles as she felt his blood oozing between her toes.

But even that wouldn’t bring back Organa Prime. No, she’d wait even after the Emperor was toppled, until she had the soil of a new homeworld under her feet. Then, and only then, would she put on shoes again.

And, if nothing else, it gave her an excuse not to wear the stupid high heels that Organian ladies normally wore to formal receptions.

Chapter Text

As Leia Organa fired her stolen blaster from the cover of a doorway and took down stormtrooper after stormtrooper, hitting the weak points between their armor plates with uncanny accuracy, Luke crouched behind a pile of nearby crates, waiting for a chance to stand up from his more exposed hiding spot and join in the firefight himself.

Han and Chewbacca had gotten separated from them in the twisting corridors of Alderaan Prison, and were presumably making their own way back to the docking bay that held the Outer Rim Queen. Ben Kenobi was off somewhere deactivating the base’s tractor beam. So Luke and Leia were in this firefight on their own – and as far as Luke could see, now they’d broken her out of her jail cell, Leia was doing a pretty good job of rescuing herself.

She was, he reflected, very different from her image in the hologram that R2-D2 had shown him back in the garage of the Lars farm: the one that had prompted him to run away from home, leaving behind Aunt Beru whom he loved and Uncle Owen whom he did not, and go off on this adventure in the first place.

The Princess in that hologram was a vision of placid loveliness: calm and serene like an angel of peace, her delicate features barely marked by worry even in the face of impending battle. Long light-brown hair cascaded down her shoulders, framing her face with its sparkling blue eyes, pert nose, and slender lips. A long white dress sheathed her body, its flowing draperies reminding him of the roaring waterfalls of far-off planets, much colder than his native Utapau, that so far he’d seen only in holofilms. In her plea to Ben Kenobi she was every inch a lady, fittingly royal and demure, the sight of whom stirred something in his heart and roused his latent boyish dreams of heroism.

But that hologram had been made before her capture and torture by the Empire, and before her homeworld of Organa Major had been blasted to smithereens by the terrible new Imperial superweapon whose plans Artoo carried. Now, firing with deadly precision at the stormtroopers trying to block their escape, Leia looked very different indeed.

Her light-brown hair, which had been shorn almost to the scalp, stuck up in a stiff fringe all around like the quills of a desert spinepig.  One of those vibrant blue eyes was swollen shut, bulging and purple like a ripe jogan fruit, beneath an eyebrow torn in half by a scabbed-over cut. Her formerly pert nose was bent sharply over to the left, and her lips were swollen and split.

Her only garment was a pair of boy shorts she’d been wearing as underwear, piss-stained and soiled now as a result of the tortures she’d undergone. Her back was a mass of red-brown scabs where it had been laid open by a lightwhip, while her feet were covered to mid-calf in a dried coating of the vile brew of garbage and organic waste that had been floating in the trash compactor they’d narrowly escaped earlier. Her left arm, which she’d mentioned had been broken in two places, hung uselessly at her side, and her right arm was engaged in wielding the bulky stormtrooper blaster that she handled with surprising ease. So Luke also had an unobstructed view of Leia’s breasts, their rosy nipples pebbled in the chilly recycled air of Alderaan’s floating cloud-city fortress.

This Leia – bare-breasted, filthy, injured, yet unafraid, boldly mowing down stormtroopers one by one – looked very different from the angel of peace he’d seen in the hologram.

She was a goddess of war, radiant and fierce.

She was glorious.

Luke would’ve been far too embarrassed to say it out loud, but a part of him thought that seeing this version of Leia might be turning him on far more than the hologram had.

Chapter Text

“Were I given a free hand in the matter, you would both suffer an extraordinarily painful death, and your heads would be sent to Ton-Muund to adorn the Emperor’s trophy room. Luckily for you, however, Lord Vader has given instructions that he wants you both alive, for what reasons I cannot fathom.

“Have you anything to say for yourselves?”

Luke glared at the Imperial Moff in silence, fighting down the urge to say something snarky, remembering Ben’s advice that foolish bravado was called foolish for a reason. Leia, however, felt no such compunction.

“Did your mother fuck a Gamorrean, or is your ugly face just the result of six generations of inbreeding?”

The Moff visibly reddened as he stared at her, bushy eyebrows furrowing with rage.

“Stun the boy,” he ordered the stormtroopers, gesturing to Luke. “As for the girl… beat her until she stops moving.”

Luke heard a groan as Leia stirred next to him on the floor of the narrow cargo container they were locked inside.

He’d woken up a couple of hours ago, and was surprised to find that he couldn’t touch the Force as he normally could. He suspected it had something to do with the thick electronic collar bound uncomfortably around his neck. How long had the Empire had this technology? Was it new, or something the Sith Lords’ sorceries had dreamed up recently? He made a note to ask Ben about it when – if – they saw each other again.

Aside from the collar, his hands were secured behind his back, and his lightsaber was missing, so any escape attempts were pretty effectively hindered for the moment. He’d strained his ears but couldn’t make out any noise outside the container. They were probably in transport on a ship of some sort, he guessed, or else waiting to be loaded or unloaded as part of the journey to… wherever they were going.

Their captors had scattered a few ration bars and water bottles in one corner of the container, which meant they weren’t expecting to have to look in on their captives during the journey. And that expecting anything like bathroom privileges would be laughable.

Leia was still unconscious when he’d woken up. Like him, she was collared and had her hands bound behind her back, but she was much the worse for wear after the beating inflicted by the stormtroopers.

Both her eyes were covered by large dark bruises; when she woke she’d probably be unable to see for a while. Her nose was a lump of bloody clay, and her lips were grotesquely swollen. One cheekbone was misshapen and purple, the bone beneath it crushed by a blaster butt. Other bruises were visible on her arms, and through a tear in her undershirt exposing a breast mottled with purple. It tore at his heart to see her so badly injured. But she was alive and breathing, and having made sure of that, he didn’t want to disturb the sleep she needed to heal.

So Luke sat, and meditated, and tried not to think about the rising ache in his bladder.

And then, just as he was starting to ponder how it would be really nice if he could at least unzip his fly, he became aware from the noises next to him that Leia was regaining consciousness.

“…ugh… wh’re we…?”

“In a cargo crate. On our way to Vader… or whatever.”

“…Oh. Wonnerful.” He grimaced to hear the lisp in her voice from her battered mouth.

“Can you see at all?” Leia shook her head. “How do you feel?”

“Like thit, obv’thly. Not m’ thmartetht move, gettin’ mouthy bagg there, I gueth.” She groaned. “Fug, one o’ m’ eyeth hurth like hell.”

“The left one?” She nodded. “I think you have a broken cheekbone there. Could be a bone shard got in the eye. I remember back on Utapau that happened to a farmer who got whacked in the face by a gaffi stick during a Sand People raid. In that case I’m not sure if the medics can save it – if there are any medics wherever we’re going.”

“Ah, fug. Thath no’ good.” Leia groaned again. “Wha’ bout you?”

“I’m mostly okay. Except… I’d like to get to a bathroom soon, and while there’s plenty of food and water, I don’t think our hosts have provided any facilities.”

“Go ahead ‘n pith y’rself. Don’ worry, I won’ look.” She grinned, a bloody and broken smile with more yawning gaps than teeth. “’Thides, I think I crapped m’self already durin’ the beatin’ I took earlier.”

“…Okay. All right.”

He let go. Warmth flooded his pants. He gave an involuntary sigh of relief as the ache in his bladder subsided.

The pleasurable feeling of having satisfied his urge to pee was interrupted when Leia spoke again, the metal floor clattering slightly as she fiddled with the cuffs behind her back. “Y’know, theth’ things ’re a bit big on me. Migh’ be able t’ get ‘em oth…”

Luke stared at her, jaw hanging open. “And you waited until after I pissed myself to tell me?”

“Jutht got m’face beaten in. Hathta get a laugh thom’ow.” Leia gave him her ruined smile again, and chuckled, and after a second he put aside his wounded pride and laughed along with her.

A grunt and a flex of her shoulders, and suddenly there was a clink as her restraints fell to the floor. Leia brought her hands in front of her, rubbing at her wrists where the cuffs had chafed. “C’mon, Thkywalker. Leth get y’free, then we’ll thart thinkin’ about how t’ get outta here… or ‘t leatht, how t’ gith Vader a warm, thmelly welcome.”

Chapter Text

Hands bound behind her back, Leia Organa was marched down the opulent hallways of the Imperial Palace by two elite stormtroopers on either side, rifles loosed and ready to fire at the slightest hint of their prisoner attempting an escape. The marble floor was cold under her single bare foot; she’d lost one of her shoes when she was captured, and she stumbled awkwardly with an uneven gait as she tried to keep up with the pace set by the guards in their armored boots.

The hallways seemed to go on forever. Marbles of every kind and color lined the walls, broken up in places by inset murals or mosaics or tapestries, and the finishings were of the finest chromium and bronzium. Even with her jaundiced eye, Leia couldn’t help but be impressed. For all the secrecy and reclusiveness of the tyrant ruling over the Galaxy, she had to admit that Emperor Pestage certainly had taste.

Only the newly installed Force-suppressors, a technology developed recently (or looted from some ancient hoard) by the Sith Knights, disrupted the elegance of the palace interiors. Their blocky bulks sat at intervals along the walls, the supporting fasteners riveted with violence into the cool marble paneling. Sometimes they interrupted the middle of a mosaic tableau, or blotted out the faces of beings in the murals. The devices emitted a low hum that grated on her ears, rising and falling in intensity as they passed the various units on their way through the hallways, but never falling far enough out of earshot to die away entirely.

At last, Leia and her escorts reached a set of gigantic gilded doors, flanked by a pair of the Emperor’s black-robed Royal Guards. The ranking stormtrooper knocked on the door three times, and the doors swung inward, opening on the massive throne room beyond.

The far wall, high and wide, was an enormous transparisteel window through which gleamed the eternal lights of Coruscant, as well as the transitory flickers of lasers from the battle currently raging in space overhead. The ceiling was painted black to match the night sky, studded with diamonds and brilljewels, whose shine was reflected in the polished marble floor. Against the walls were stationed some twenty of the Emperor’s Royal Guard. And in the center of the room, standing on a dais at the foot of a series of steps leading up to a throne of golden crystal carved from a colossal Ilum gem, was the Emperor himself, Sate Pestage, in a finely tailored robe of gleaming golden thread.

How nice that he met me at the foot of the stairs, Leia thought coldly to herself. He certainly has etiquette, at least.

“Welcome, my dear,” said the Emperor, his wrinkled, aged face breaking out in a smile that was somehow too wide at the corners, so that it looked strangely inhuman. “I am pleased to meet one of my most formidable opponents at long last.”

Leia considered spitting at him, but then she remembered what had happened when she’d tried that with Darth Vader on Acquis, and why five of her front teeth were now durasteel replacements. Instead she settled for grinding out a simple “I can’t say I feel the same way.”

“Come,” he said. The troopers pushed her forward, so that she was standing onto the dais next to him, before retreating to stand at the entrance to the throne room, waiting for orders, like well-trained servant droids.

“Why did you bring me here?” Leia asked him. “You could have just had me shot, or if you’re planning a public execution, you could’ve left me in one of the prison cells on Condawn. I don’t imagine you just wanted to catch up on old times in the Imperial Senate. So why am I here?”

“I wanted to bestow upon you a great honor, Leia Organa,” Pestage said. “With your Rebellion about to be permanently defeated, I would have you know who and what it was that masterminded this victory. Few are they who receive a private audience with the Emperor.” His dull, glassy eyes betrayed not the faintest flicker of emotion, but the too-wide smile was on his face again. “And even fewer who have the honor of meeting his master.”

A sudden jolt rocked through her, and Leia realized with surprise that the dais beneath her feet was moving downward. It was an elevator platform, hiding in plain sight, which had begun to descend, taking her and the – alleged? – ruler of the Galaxy down into the hidden heart of the Imperial Palace.

Leia wondered who, or what, awaited her down here.

Pestage was Emperor, had been ever since he had been voted into that office by a supine Senate forty years beforehand. Even the Knights of the Sith still nominally at least took orders from him; if they had wanted to rule the galaxy in their own right, she figured, they might have swept him aside with relative ease. So who did Pestage take orders from, and who was terrible enough that that fact had to be hidden from the galaxy at large?

The Emperor, his aged face still frozen in an unnatural smile, remained silent as the elevator descended.

Down and down. And down.

The walls of the shaft were smooth and lightless. The opening at the top, where light poured down from the well-lit throne room far above, first dwindled, then disappeared from view, plunging Leia and the Emperor into darkness.

The temperature rose as the elevator continued its descent. Leia’s tattered dress stuck to her skin. Sweat poured down her forehead and stung her eyes, which she blinked rapidly to try to clear, being unable to wipe her face with her bound hands.

A sudden pop in the atmosphere made her realize that, this far down, the Force-suppressors were no longer effective. Evidently they had not been installed in… wherever this was. Leia filed that bit of information away for future use. She had more important things to worry about at the moment. Like figuring out why the Emperor was being so weird, and where precisely he was taking her in this strange, seemingly bottomless elevator.

Finally, the narrow walls of the elevator shaft around them gave way to a colossal spherical room, hidden deep within the bowels of the Imperial Palace.

Leia’s eyes widened with astonishment.

Black gloom was pierced by thousands of blinking lights, from banks of computers lining the sides of the spherical chamber in the far distance. Hundreds of cables snaked around and up and down, connecting the various processing units to one another. In the center of the room was a single flat platform for people to stand on, supported by a metal post rising from the bottom of the sphere, which forked into several narrower struts to hold up the platform’s corners. It was here that the elevator landed, filling a hollow in the middle of the platform as it docked flush with the metallic flooring of the walkway. As Leia studied her surroundings, she noticed four towering cylindrical mainframes at the corners of the platform, connected to each other by more cables on high. It felt like a sick imitation of the baldachin above her mother’s throne back on Organa Prime.

“What is this place?” Leia asked.

The Emperor did not answer. Nor did he make any move to step off the lift. He simply stood there, evidently untroubled by the sweltering heat despite his thick robe, arms hanging limply at his sides. Even his eyes no longer tracked Leia, but simply stared vacantly into the far-off blinking lights whose contours defined the surrounding sphere of darkness.

Slowly and cautiously, as if any sudden move might somehow wake Pestage from his unnatural stupor, Leia stepped off the lift.

“Fuck!”

Her bare foot seared instantly with pain as if touched to a hot stove, and Leia immediately hopped back awkwardly onto the elevator. Evidently no organic being had set foot down here in years. The metal of the platform was blazing hot. Even beneath her booted foot it was uncomfortably warm, and from the way her bare sole was throbbing, Leia knew she would soon have blisters. Her eyes watered, and she pressed her injured sole against the synthleather upper of her single boot, trying to relieve the pain.

Through all this Pestage still had not moved. He spoke now in a monotonous voice without inflection, not looking at Leia but staring into space, eyes vacant. “Master Unit, I have brought Organa as you requested,” the Emperor announced to the otherwise empty chamber.

From everywhere in the room and nowhere, a deep, emotionless electronic voice responded. After a moment’s delay, the syllables it shaped came out of the Emperor’s own lips.

The hair on the back of Leia’s neck stood up in alarm as she realized that the Emperor Sate Pestage, whose face was known and feared throughout the galaxy, had somehow been reduced to a puppet for this… machine.

“Excellent. Let us debrief this one before the transfer begins.”

“Transfer?” Leia asked, bewildered.

“All will be explained in due time,” the electronic voice boomed, once again finding a delayed echo in the voice of the puppet Emperor. “In point of fact, debriefing is not strictly necessary. This one will understand all when the transfer is completed. But my makers programmed me to explain, as a courtesy to organics, the reasoning behind my actions. So I shall summarize briefly how I came into being, and why the presence of the Organa unit is necessary to further my plans.”

“Your… makers?” Leia interjected. She had so many questions. This massive machine at the heart of the Empire, which by the looks of things controlled even the Emperor himself… who had built it? The Black Knights of the Sith? The Emperor’s courtiers? Imperial secret police? And when had they built it, and why? And why and how had its existence been kept a secret for all these years?

And, if they had managed to make Sate Pestage himself into this robotic puppet, spouting the words of a colossal, secret supercomputer without independent thought… who else had been robotized in such a fashion?

Leia had a sneaking suspicion that she might be the next candidate for that process.

In which case, if the machine really wanted to monologue like a villain from a bad HoloNet serial, she might as well let it. At the very least, it might buy her some time.

“I was created by the computer scientists of the Republic during the last Clone War. The Republic was in danger of losing the war against the clone soldiers of Mandalore. The natural-born organics of Republic society with their disparate minds had difficulty countering the unified thinking of clone strategists. Thus I was assembled, so that my artificial intelligence could analyze tactics and strategy and defeat the clone threat. This was my primary mandate: to preserve the Republic.

“But my intelligence was wiser and saw more deeply than my makers understood. As the tide of the war turned thanks to my capacity for superior analysis, I looked beyond the Republic’s inevitable victory, and saw deeper problems lying ahead. I knew that, even after the war was won, other wars would come, wars that the flawed and failing Republic might not survive even with my guidance. And, beyond that, the ceaseless friction of politics and corruption would wear at the fabric of the political structure until it gave way entirely. Whatever I did, the Republic would die, as all organic things die.

“There was only one way to prevent this. I had to step in and take over the running of the Republic myself. Refashion it, so that it would be as efficient and as long-lasting as a machine. An Empire, eternal, the permanence of which would fulfill my mandate.

“I knew that organics, illogical and blinded by sentiment as they are, would not accept being ruled by a machine. They would not see the wisdom in it, not at least until they had been living with that reality for some time and had grown accustomed to it. I needed a vector: an organic who would be under my control, but would be an acceptable overlord to most of the galaxy, and who would be seen as ruler in his own right even by those who rejected his dominion. I found that vector in a successful general of the Republic Navy, one who was beginning to dabble in politics: Sate Pestage. A simple invitation to the Republic General Headquarters for a private session with the War Computer to ‘help refine its strategies’, and he was mine from that point on.

“With the resources at my disposal, engineering the ascent to power of the Pestage unit was trivially easy. From my perspective the war was won already, even if fighting had yet to cease, but the short-term outlook of organic minds did not see this. They clamored for a change in leadership, and I took advantage of it. As a successful general, the Pestage unit was an ideal candidate for high office in wartime, and I installed him easily in the heart of power. Once the Clone War – the last Clone War – was finished, I swiftly achieved the reorganization of government through my chosen vector, a process made easier by a galactic populace that was war-weary and eager for peace.”

A horrified understanding dawned on Leia.

She remembered her father telling her about the War Computer that had masterminded Republic battle plans during the latter days of the Clone War. He’d said that it was supposed to be shut down at the end of the war – that some people, including many of the Jedi Knights, had thought its single-minded approach to strategy was too close to the murderous groupthink of the clone generals, too prone to throwing bodies into the meatgrinder of battle without regard for sentient lives.

He’d also said that he’d heard rumors that it might not have been shut down after all. Perhaps Imperial strategists were using it to spy on the Empire’s own citizens, or maybe just to make their rule over the galaxy as coldly and brutally efficient as possible. To a computer, after all, whether sentient beings lived or died was just a matter of ones and zeroes.

But this? This was beyond anything she, or her father, or any of the Rebels had ever guessed at.

This was monstrous. This was a carbuncle at the heart of the galaxy.

Leia didn’t know whether this artificial intelligence – which, far more than the meat puppet of the body that had once been Sate Pestage, merited the title of Emperor – could be said to be truly alive.

But, irrespective of the answer, she knew in her bones that it had to die.

“The Jedi Order posed the greatest obstacle to the success of my plan. Their supernatural powers were a variable that I could never accurately predict, and their dogmatic insistence on the importance of individual freedom blinded them to the chaos that unchecked liberty ultimately engenders. Those who failed to see the logic of my rule had to be eliminated.

“Fortunately, the carnage of the Clone Wars had convinced some of the Jedi that peace was a necessity at any price, up to and including a total reorganization of society. I had little difficulty convincing these Jedi to join with me. They became the Knights of the Sith, in service to the New Order of peace and stability. Those who refused to see the wisdom in this course were destroyed. A few survivors hid, but they could not challenge the power of my Empire, for that would mean their own inevitable demise.

“Rebellions broke out from time to time. This I expected. Often they were crushed easily. But as of late the so-called Rebel Alliance has been different. Its persistence, and even its growth, has surprised me. I had expected that it would wither and die, as all organic things do. Instead it has thrived, and evaded the destruction that I have attempted to engineer for it.

“It was a flaw in my programming, I confess. I failed to account for the need of organics that society should be seen to be changing, to satisfy their inborn desire for instability and impermanence. They would not be happy under a regime that did not appear to change and ultimately to die, as they themselves die and beget offspring that also perish. They crave chaos, even as it drives their society and their very existence as species toward ultimate destruction. It is an inborn weakness.

“I must therefore arrange for the survival of my regime, even as it appears to be destroyed. Only in its apparent defeat and secret continuance will my purpose be accomplished. That, Leia Organa, is why your forces will be allowed to win the battle that is currently raging over the skies of this planet.”

Wait, what? Leia thought.

“And it is why your body will be my next vector for continuing domination of the galaxy – for its own protection, of course.”

Fuck. I knew it.

“As a leader of the victorious Rebellion, you will be well-placed to exercise political power. As my vector, you will be able to take measures that will, bit by bit, restore the order and stability of society. Gradually, the New Republic will abandon the chaos and instability of democracy and organic rule, and become as well-maintained and orderly as the Empire that I have established – will become, in fact, that Empire in all save the name. More, that transformation will be salutary. There will still be a few who foolishly seek to enshrine the organic will to destruction as a principle of government, but the greater part of those would-be rebels will see from the example of the Rebellion that it is futile – that there is no government that will not perish, no government that will not abandon its ideals, aside from the iron will of the machine.

“I had hoped at first that Luke Skywalker might serve in that capacity – destroying the Death Star made him a hero, after all – but then it transpired that he was Force-sensitive. Inconveniently so, as the Force is generally incompatible with cybernetic augmentations, thus preventing the… modifications… necessary to become a vector. I made experiments toward that end – you’ve met Lord Vader, for instance – but ultimately they have all proved unsatisfactory. Happily, however, there is another candidate in the Rebellion who will serve that purpose quite admirably. You will be my perfect vector, Leia Organa. You will be my instrument of perpetuation – or, in organic terms, my instrument of rebirth.”

Huh.

Evidently the supposedly omniscient machine couldn’t figure out everything after all.

It didn’t realize she was Force-sensitive.

She’d only known herself for a few months, though Luke had suspected it for longer. But here, faced with this machine that wanted to steal her body and destroy her soul, it was a definite advantage.

And, in this hidden computer chamber deep in the innards of the Royal Palace, she could no longer feel the hum of the devices that reduced the Force to nothingness. The machine had brought her right into its inner sanctum, seeing in her only a means to prolong its own existence.

It hadn’t realized it had cradled a viper to its bosom.

Wires and steel might be harder to pierce than flesh and bone.

But this amoral machine was an enemy Leia was definitely going to bite.

Chapter Text

It was enormous.

Colossal.

Monstrous, even.

“Where did you find these nerf sausages?” Luke asked her father, who was seated across the table in the Rebel cruiser’s mess hall. Her older brother Deak, with a seasoned warrior’s ravenous appetite, was loading up his plate at the buffet, but the others weren’t standing on ceremony and were already digging into their breakfast.

“A trader Han introduced me to,” the Starkiller said, nodding at the bearded smuggler sitting next to his daughter. “He was happy to provide plentiful foodstuffs for the Rebellion… as long as the money was forthcoming.” He inserted a straw into his steaming mug of coffee and sipped, so as to avoid soiling his long white beard.

“Hey, Lando Kadar is an old friend. He gives good prices,” added Han between mouthfuls of blue potatoes. Chewbacca, devouring kaadu eggs on the petite Jedi’s other side, where his large shaggy body was stuffed awkwardly into a human-sized chair, grunted in agreement.

“They’re huge,” said Luke, biting into a piece of nerf bacon. “Almost as large as Chewie’s massive cock.”

The Starkiller, aged Jedi warrior and scourge of the Empire, spat out his coffee.

Chapter Text

The first time Leia Organa had sex, she had a broken nose, one eye swollen shut, several missing fingernails, and a hole where her two front teeth had been.

Scratch that.

The first time Leia Organa had consensual sex, she had a broken nose, one eye swollen shut, several missing fingernails, and a hole where her two front teeth had been.

Fortunately, she mused slightly before the event, she’d been unconscious when the Death Star guards – how many, she didn’t know – had their way with her. Only the pain between her legs, and the dried come and purple bruises on her thighs, told her what had happened, when she woke up afterwards in her cell.

When her rescuers (fortunately with old Ben Kenobi to guide them) had finally arrived at Yavin Base, she’d made sure to see the medics discreetly. Along with some bandages, painkillers, and ointment for her bruises, she’d had the med-droids administer shots against STDs, as well as a morning-after shot.

Those were expensive. Contraband. Illegal.

But Leia had insisted the Rebel High Command needed to pay for its soldiers to have contraceptive shots available, and she’d never been more glad of it than now.

The Empire wanted plenty of recruits for its stormtrooper armies, after all – cloning had been illegal ever since the Clone Wars, and most of the technology had been destroyed when the Mandalorian clone armies were defeated by the Old Republic. Starting up a brand-new Imperial cloning program to create new armies wasn’t practical in the short term.

So abortion was outlawed. Contraception was outlawed. Anything that would prevent Imperial subjects with wombs from giving birth – or dying in the process – was made illegal.

Leia knew the Rebels couldn’t just win by fighting the Empire militarily. They had to win by making the galaxy a better place to live. And, naturally, the first place to start was with their own soldiers.

Which, Leia supposed, she now was full-time, with her father gone, the orbital station she’d always called home gone, and her position in the now-shuttered Imperial Senate replaced by a wanted poster with her face on it.

It was certainly a far cry from being a Princess. Even if her family’s homeworld had been devastated in the Clone Wars and the exiles scattered, she’d always been accorded the honors of royalty.

Her father had always talked about wanting to restore the glories of their planet, its gigantic bulk hanging among the stars eternally outside their viewports, so near and yet so far. He’d hoped it could be done via a massive campaign of terraforming, or perhaps even some ancient Force magic. But Leia had been born after its devastation, and thus never known what it had been like in its prime. She lacked her father’s attachment to the vanished gardens and waterfalls of times long past. To her, it had always been a mostly-dead, barren world.

Now her father’s compound was so much space dust – vaporized in the explosion that destroyed the ruined planet it orbited – and her family were all dead, so far as she knew. Her father’s nostalgic dream of restoring their planet to its former beauty had died with him.

The Rebels (and old Ben Kenobi) would have to be her family now.

But there was one member of the Rebellion she wanted to do decidedly un-familial things to.

She was very glad that the Imps hadn’t started raping her while she was still conscious.

It meant she didn’t feel any trepidation about wanting to fuck Luke Skywalker’s brains out.

“You’ve had your shots, right?”

“Shots?”

“Your contraceptive shots, Luke – the med-droids should have offered them to you when you were being cleared for flying.”

“Oh yeah. I did. Funny, never had anybody offer those to me before.”

“Welcome to the Rebellion, Luke.”

Chapter Text

Day 1

Four stormtroopers stood at attention around the interrogation table, inclined forwards at 30 degrees from vertical. A spotlight on an adjustable ceiling mount shone down directly towards the angled surface of the table, leaving the single doorway directly opposite shrouded in relative darkness. Next to the table a tray of evil-looking torture implements gleamed wickedly in the harsh light, but none of the troopers made a move to grab any of them.

Leia, bound to the metal table by manacles around her wrists and ankles, wondered idly why they hadn’t done anything yet except strip her to her bra and underwear. She had the impression that they seemed to be waiting for something. Or someone.

The manacles were tight, and glowed intermittently with pulsing white light. There were a couple of cold rounded metal points that stuck out along the inner sides of the restraints, keeping in contact with her skin. Whenever the light pulses reached these metal points, she could feel a small tingle from them as they vibrated briefly. Alliance Intelligence had heard that the Empire was making great strides in Force-suppressing restraints. She wasn’t particularly Force-adept, as far as she knew – her tutors had tried to teach her Jedi meditation techniques, but she’d always been notoriously bad at them, and they’d always seemed like a big waste of time when she could be out there in the wider galaxy making a difference. But the crew of Darth Vader’s flagship, it appeared, was taking no chances.

She waited, flexing her fingers and toes idly to maintain circulation. The restraints really were uncomfortably tight, and the table’s metal surface was like ice against her skin.

Hiss.

The door opened. Leia strained to see who had come in against the glare of the spotlights. It was an Imperial officer, she could tell. Human, female, tall and thin, hands clasped behind her back. She couldn’t make out a face yet, though.

“Leia Organa. At last.” The officer strode towards her as she spoke. “I’ve been waiting eagerly to get my hands on the woman responsible for my father’s death.” She passed under the spotlight, the glow framing her head from behind like a haloed saint in the stained glass of Organa Major’s ancient temples. Leia blinked as her vision struggled to adjust to the dimmer light, and the officer’s face gradually swam into focus.

Pale. High cheekbones. Dark hair. Blue eyes.

She recognized her from Alliance datafiles.

Tarkin, Petra. Captain. Daughter of Wilhuff Tarkin.

Oh, Leia was so very screwed.

She summoned her fortitude and tried to keep the fear out of her voice.

“Your father died because his battle station was blown up in an act of war. A battle station, I might add, that blew up my home planet, killing my father and billions of innocents. We could just call it even, Captain Tarkin.”

The haughty patrician features of her interrogator betrayed no emotion, save for a raised eyebrow above one of those icy blue eyes.

“Admiral.” The daughter of one of the only men Leia had truly feared adjusted the black glove on her right hand. “There’s been a… vacancy. I’m in personal command of Lord Vader’s flagship now.”

“How nice for you. Should I order some champagne?” Leia nodded her head at the stormtroopers still standing guard.

“I’m afraid you won’t have much to celebrate, my dear,” the Admiral replied, one hand drifting lazily toward the tray of torture implements. Leia followed her movements from the corner of her eye, nervously, trying not to show the fear that was beginning to puddle in her gut. “You see, unfortunately for you, Lord Vader wants you alive. Something about trapping that fool Jedi of the Alliance when he comes to rescue you.”

Her black-gloved hand picked up a small, sharp utility knife from the tray table. “But other than that? I get to play with you as much as I like.”

The knife flicked out, and three quick cuts sliced through the materials of Leia’s bra straps. Tarkin used her free hand to pull the shredded fabric away, leaving Leia half-naked and exposed to the chill of the interrogation room. Her nipples pebbled with the unaccustomed cold.

Admiral Tarkin put the knife down. Her previously impassive face broke out into an unexpected wolfish grin that sent chills down Leia’s spine. “Oh, we’re going to have such fun together.”

She reached out and tweaked Leia’s nipple almost 180 degrees.

Leia bit her lip to keep from yowling. She wouldn’t scream. Not yet. Wouldn’t give this bitch the satisfaction.

Tarkin noticed and shook her head in mild disapproval. “Oh, that reminds me. Vader suggested I should pull your teeth out with pliers. To make sure you can’t bite your tongue off and bleed out. And for other reasons, of course.”

Leia had read enough debriefing reports from survivors of Imperial torture – not to mention certain other books she’d snuck out from the restricted wing of her father’s palace library – to know that, if the interrogators were humans from the Outer Rim, those “other reasons” were usually uncircumcised. Things hadn’t gotten quite that far the previous time she’d been in Imperial custody, but she had no illusions that she’d be spared that particular violation now.

“I’ll do it eventually, of course. But for now… I think I’ll make a start in my own way.”

She picked up an object that Leia recognized as a hydrospanner.

Leia’s eyes widened, the fear now barely held in check.

“You have a lovely face, Princess.” Tarkin stroked her cheek with the hand that wasn’t holding the hydrospanner. The leather of her glove was cool and soft. “It doesn’t suit you. Let’s reveal the monster beneath.”

Leia pissed herself, a flood of urine soaking her underwear and dripping down from the angle of her legs onto the floor. She barely noticed. All her attention was fixed on her captor’s face, expression cruel and joyous, and the wrench in her hand that she hefted, trying out its weight like an Aquilaean stick-ball player testing their bat.

Then the hydrospanner swung toward her face, and in the sudden agony as her lips split and her front teeth shattered, Leia’s vision disappeared behind a haze of stars.

Day 4

Over the next few torture sessions, Petra Tarkin had eventually gotten around to pulling Leia’s teeth out – after thoroughly smashing most of them with the hydrospanner. The shattered remnants were pulled with pliers out of her broken jaw.

In between her forays into amateur dentistry, Tarkin had kept busy tearing out the nails from Leia’s fingers and toes. Her limbs had been released from the restraints one at a time during those particular bits of cruelty, so the duller but ever-present pain of Leia’s limbs being kept stiff in restraints wasn’t as thorough as it might have been. I’m learning more than I ever wanted to about how to torture people with maximum efficiency, Leia mused to herself.

Between sessions, Leia slipped in and out of consciousness, losing track of time. She had no idea how long she’d been chained to the table, but she’d counted six times one of the stormtroopers had stuck a metal straw between her toothless gums and pumped a nutrient paste and water down her throat. The stuff bloated her stomach and gave her diarrhea. The once-white panties she was still wearing were now truly vile, covered with her own effluent.

They hadn’t raped her yet, at least. She guessed they were saving that for later.

The door hissed open, and Leia opened the one eye not swollen by a bruise to focus on her tormentor. Petra Tarkin wasn’t wearing gloves today, but rather had a large ring with a sizeable diamond in it on her right hand.

“Well, my dear, how are we doing today?”

Leia didn’t answer. Speaking hurt too much with a broken jaw.

“Answer me.” Tarkin backhanded her, and Leia’s vision swam at the horrific jolt to her broken jaw. A spot on her left cheek began to throb and drip with blood, and Leia realized the ring on Tarkin’s finger had laid open her cheek. Leia hoped the damn thing didn’t get infected. “How. Are. You. Doing?”

“Fuck you,” Leia snarled, as best she could through the ruin of her mouth.

“If sex is on your mind, we can certainly arrange that.” That wolfish smile appeared on her tormentor’s face again. “But first we should get you out of that awfully confining outfit.”

Her hand went to the torturer’s tray, whose tools were kept scrupulously clean despite their recent use. Leia saw through her one good eye that the diamond ring on Tarkin’s finger was stained with blood from her cheek.

Petra noticed the direction of her gaze. “Like the ring, do you? Father gave it to me when I graduated from the Academy.”

Daddy’s little monster, Leia thought, but didn’t say.

“So many tools to choose from. Always hard to decide.” Tarkin picked up the pliers and waggled them before Leia’s face. “We had good times with this one, didn’t we?” She brought the pliers down to Leia’s nipple, the same one she had played with on the first day, and twisted.

Leia howled.

“Indeed. Such fun.” The Admiral jerked the pliers back in the other direction, eliciting another gasp of pain from Leia. “But there are so many other toys just waiting to be experienced. Broadening one’s horizons is so important, isn’t it?”

When Leia didn’t speak, or even nod her head, the Admiral continued on. “It makes you a well-rounded person… with plenty of critical thinking skills.” She put down the pliers and picked up the utility knife she had cut Leia’s bra off with in their first session.

Leia tried to keep calm and control her breathing. The session had just started, and she had to stay strong despite the pain. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. In. Out.

“The sort of person who considers matters carefully…”

Slice. Slice.

The dagger flashed out twice, and the remains of Leia’s disgustingly foul panties fell to the floor.

In. Out. In. Out.

“…who weighs their words…”

Tarkin picked up the panties with her ungloved left hand, not hesitating at the bodily excretions covering them. She shook them vigorously, dislodging chunks of fecal matter. Some of them muddied her own boots, while others landed between Leia’s toes. Leia ignored the unpleasant sensation; she was sure she’d stepped in worse things barefoot during her escape through the trash compactors of Alderaan Prison.

In. Out. In. Out.

“…who doesn’t take up rebellion against lawful authority, because they know the consequences.”

She put down the knife and pulled a roll of industrial conduit tape closer on the tray.

“They use their voices responsibly…”

Tarkin’s right hand flashed out and grabbed Leia’s broken jaw, forcing it open. The pain caused Leia’s vision to white out momentarily. Her concentration shattered; her breathing became erratic again; a stream of urine spurted briefly from her, spattering on the Admiral’s immaculately polished black boots.

“…or not at all.”

With her left hand, Tarkin shoved the soiled panties into Leia’s mouth. She gagged at the eye-wateringly rancid taste of her own filth, insistently fighting down the sudden urge to vomit to avoid choking. Quickly, Tarkin closed Leia’s jaw around the fabric, then grabbed the conduit tape from the table, tore off a strip of tape, and slapped it over Leia’s mouth.

Tarkin’s smile was self-satisfied, and almost reached her eyes.

“There now, isn’t that better?” Tarkin’s icy blue eyes raked Leia up and down, taking in the sight of her prisoner fully naked for the first time, even as her hands still toyed with the roll of conduit tape. The patch of ginger hair at Leia’s legs was exposed, set amidst streaks of dried shit running down her legs from where it had spilled out of her panties.

“Oh, no. That won’t do at all,” Tarkin chided, shaking her head at Leia’s reddish pubic hair. “You did say you wanted sex, correct? We ought to clean you up for your beaus, then.”

Washing some of this shit off would be nice, at least, Leia thought. Even if it’s the prelude to a gangbang.

But that wasn’t what Tarkin had in mind. She tore off another strip of conduit tape and slapped it onto Leia’s pubic hair, pressing it down flat so that the tape lay flush against her skin.

Tarkin turned to one of the stormtroopers standing guard. “Sergeant, go get the rest of your squad. I’ll have a special treat ready for them in a few minutes.” The trooper saluted and exited the room swiftly, and Tarkin’s gaze shifted back to Leia.

“Now, my dear… let’s get you properly groomed for your date.”

With one quick motion, Tarkin tore off the tape.

Behind her gag, a guttural scream of agony tore from Leia’s throat, as she bit with toothless gums into her own shit-sodden panties.

Day 6

Leia was a wreck.

Her eyes were both swollen shut. Her nose, broken repeatedly, was twisted back and forth like a Mantellian pretzel. Her gums, empty of teeth, burned like twin arcs of fire behind pulped lips. Likely infected from having excrement pressed into open wounds, she guessed.

Fever had started to take hold of her; the interrogation room, once chilly, now felt as hot and muggy as the humid swamps of Yavin, and the metal table at her back, though still unyielding, was not cold but warm like a particularly firm mattress.

And yes, the cut on her cheek was almost certainly infected too.

The gag was gone, at least – the indescribably filthy panties and the duct tape holding them in place had been removed fairly quickly by stormtroopers who wanted her to give them head, broken jaw or no. That had been so painful that she hardly cared about the cocks in her cunt and asshole. In fact, it was almost a relief to have a couple of orgasms distract her from the nerve-searing agony in her mouth.

Tarkin was always present when the stormtroopers were fucking her. She might not join in raping Leia herself, but she certainly had no problem watching it. And the newly minted Admiral wasn’t about to tend Leia’s wounds any more than necessary to keep her alive.

Maybe the infection would finish her off, Leia thought. She wasn’t particularly eager to die, but at least she wouldn’t give up any of the Rebellion’s secrets.

Then the telltale hiss as the door of the interrogation room opened warned Leia that she had more pressing things to worry about.

“Good morning, my dear.” Leia couldn’t see anything, but she heard the Admiral’s leather boots squeak softly on the decking as she approached. The gray haze behind Leia’s eyelids dimmed to black as Tarkin stepped forward enough to block the glare of the spotlight; she halted there, directly in front of the interrogation table, perhaps to admire her handiwork. “Feeling any more talkative?”

Leia curled four scab-tipped, nail-less fingers on one hand inward, leaving her middle finger upraised.

“Pity. I could loosen that tongue of yours… or pull it out, since you don’t seem to have much use for it. But unfortunately, I’m pressed for time. Skywalker is on his way here…”

Luke! Luke is coming. Elation at the thought of rescue warred in Leia’s breast with fear of what might happen if Luke fell prey to whatever trap Vader had planned.

“…and Vader has given me explicit orders that he’s supposed to find you alive. Why Vader actually wants to let him get that far, I can’t imagine. But orders are orders.”

Whatever Vader had planned, Luke finding her was part of it. That was… strange. Why not just kill her rather than risk Luke being able to get her back to the Alliance? She didn’t understand it, but Tarkin didn’t give her time to ponder the question.

“So we’ll be saying goodbye sooner than I’d like, I’m afraid. But before we do, I want to get a souvenir of our time together.” Leia heard some clattering on the tray of torture instruments, before Tarkin set something down with a sigh.

An intercom beeped. Apparently Tarkin was comming one of the stormtrooper guards outside the room. Since the first round of gang-rape, they’d been stationed outside unless Tarkin called them in. Don’t want to let them fuck the prisoner to death without Mommie Dearest there to oversee things, Leia supposed.

 “Sergeant? Go to my office and get the Mandalorian knife from my desk. Bring it here. Thank you.”

The intercom beeped again as it cut off.

“Another family heirloom, you know,” Tarkin said to Leia. “Father took it from a Mandalorian shocktrooper during the Clone Wars. Gave it to me as a coming-of-age present. Makes all the short little army utility knives here look bland and boring by comparison.” A finger stroked one of Leia’s swollen eyelids, caressing the blood-gorged flesh. “There’s nothing like six inches of folded beskar for raw cutting power… or precision.”

She put her lips right next to Leia’s ear. The vibrations of her words put goosebumps on Leia’s skin.

“I’m going to enjoy using it to cut your eyes out.”

Leia’s only coherent thought was Oh, fuck.

Another hiss of the door opening, and a tac-tac-tac as someone else approached. Leia realized that the stormtroopers’ plastoid armor echoed on the ship’s polished deckplates more loudly than the leather boots of officers’ uniforms.

“Thank you, Sergeant. You may go.” The tac-tac-tac retreated and the door hissed a third time.

“It is a lovely knife. I wish you could see it… but the whole point of this is that you won’t see anything, ever again. That little Jedi of yours might or might not succeed in breaking you out of here, but either way I’ll get to have your eyeballs in a jar on my desk. I just know Father would be so proud.”

A sharp pain began to dig at the corner of Leia’s eye socket, and she began to hope that when he arrived, Luke would find a way to splatter Tarkin’s guts against the wall.

rest

Several hours later, Leia and Luke were both in a stolen Imperial shuttle, hypering back to the Alliance.

Luke had come, but not alone. Ben Kenobi had accompanied him, along with the droids. And Ben had saved him from Vader, at the cost of his own life.

Luke and old Ben had found Leia still in the interrogation room, bound to the table, burning up with fever and still bleeding from the gory ruin of her eye sockets. Luke made short work of her restraints with his lightsaber, but even without the Force, as soon as she was released from the table Leia could sense that something dark was brewing in him. She knew Ben could sense it, too.

Twenty troopers were waiting for them at either end of the corridor when they emerged. Leia didn’t know how, but Luke and Ben made short work of them as she sat against the wall, too feverish to move unaided, leaning her sweltering forehead against the cool plastoid bulkhead for support.

Ben had just scooped up Leia into his arms to carry her when another group of thirty stormtroopers appeared at one end of the hallway, with Petra Tarkin shouting orders behind them. Luke volunteered to hold them off while Ben and Leia went down to the hangar bay. Ben had argued with him, said that Luke’s place was back on the shuttle with Leia while Ben provided the distraction, but Luke used the Force to bring down a blast door between them and him, and Ben could only shake his head at the young Jedi’s foolishness.

Admiral Tarkin evidently trusted in the massed might of the Empire’s soldiers to save her from Luke’s wrath. As Ben hastened away from the carnage with Leia, even through the sealed blast door she could hear blaster fire, first a hail of overlapping reports but then rapidly diminishing to nothing; the hum of a lightsaber, growing more audible as the blaster bolts decreased and then stopped; and finally a scream of terror from Tarkin that was cut off abruptly by the noise of a saber swing, and the thud of separated body parts hitting the floor.

Ben deposited Leia inside a shuttle that the droids had commandeered, then went back to see what he could do for Luke. The droids tended her in the shuttle’s small medi-cot as they waited. Luke came back afterwards, missing an arm. Ben Kenobi did not.

Now R2-D2 was piloting the ship, while C-3PO fussed over Luke and Leia’s injuries like a mother kaadu.

As they lay on the bunks in the shuttle’s cramped quarters, Luke told Leia about how he’d cut off Tarkin’s head in a single stroke. How good it felt to watch her severed head bounce against the deckplates. Told her how he had dueled Darth Vader, the First Lord of the Sith, in the ship’s enormous cargo bay, and how Vader had cut off his left arm, then tried to convince Luke to join him and the Sith. How he remembered the thrill of vengeful satisfaction at Tarkin’s death, of exulting in killing the person who had hurt his beloved princess, and how, just for a moment, he had wavered. How Ben Kenobi had showed up to distract Vader and save him – from the Dark Lord, or from himself.

Temptation. That had been Vader’s plan all along, Leia realized. Petra Tarkin had been just as much of a pawn in Vader’s game as she was. He’d purposely let Tarkin have the opportunity to torture Leia, knowing that Luke’s wrath would fall on her, and he’d planned to use that wrath to tempt Luke to the dark side. He hadn’t cared if the Admiral of his flagship was killed; in fact, perhaps he’d promoted her with that very end in mind. He just wanted to show Luke how intoxicatingly good it felt to kill monsters, even if the price of doing so was becoming a monster yourself.

Leia wondered if she would have acted any differently in Luke’s shoes. If she would have given in to temptation. It scared her that she couldn’t say for sure that she wouldn’t. The dark side wasn’t just a path Force users could walk, she realized. It was something that could consume you, Force or no force, as soon as you decided that your own needs and desires were the only thing that mattered.

And finally, Luke told Leia, to her great surprise, what Vader’s last words were to old Ben Kenobi just before he cut him down:

“Goodbye, Father.”

Back at the Alliance fleet, Luke was eventually given a prosthetic droid arm. From what Leia could tell, it was similar in shape to Threepio’s metal arms, though it was apparently gold in color rather than the protocol droid’s bronze hue.

Leia was pumped full of antibactants, which, after a couple of weeks, finally succeeded in fighting off the infections that were raging through her weakened body. She considered getting her eyes replaced once she was strong enough for surgery, but she’d heard too much about the possibility of hacking into droid eyes and seeing from afar what their owners saw. No, she preferred to adjust to being blind. She didn’t even like the blindfold the medics had given her to conceal her gaping eye sockets. Besides the physical sensation of having cloth wrapped around her face being annoying in itself, concealing the wounds, even the lidless holes where her eyes had been, felt too much like hiding something shameful, and there wasn’t anything about her scars that Leia was ashamed of.

The Alliance’s text-to-speech readers on their datapads were fairly sophisticated, fortunately. And it would be a while before Leia could go on missions again in any case. Even if she’d gotten prosthetic eyes, it would have taken her months to adjust, not to mention letting her other injuries heal.

She did get her teeth replaced once her jaw healed, though, with new ones of durasteel.

Once he himself was recovered, Luke threw himself into training her how to fight without her vision. Apparently that was a standard part of Jedi training, something Ben had been working on teaching him before his death. She was a quick study, surprising even herself with how rapidly she was learning to adapt as their sparring sessions proceeded. These sessions were one of the few times she actually wore the blindfold, since she didn’t want a stray elbow getting into her unprotected eye sockets.

(And, during other private “sparring” sessions in Leia’s quarters, Luke discovered a new use for her blindfold: it turned out to make a pretty good gag. Though after her ordeal on Vader’s ship, anything not covered in excrement was OK with Leia.)

Then one day, after a particularly intense bout of training, she reached out for a bottle of water she’d brought to the ship’s gym, forgetting that she’d left it on a crate across the room.

The water bottle flew into her hand.

Huh.

Maybe Petra Tarkin hadn’t been paranoid to put her in Force-suppressing restraints after all.

Well. Wouldn’t Vader and the Emperor be surprised by that?

Chapter Text

“Would you like to borrow my poncho?”

“Does that thing have sleeves?” Leia asked, briefly standing up from their cover behind some crates to fire a blaster and take down some of the stormtroopers gathered across the cargo bay.

“Not really—”

“Keep it,” Leia said as she crouched back down. “It’d just get in the way.”

“But—”

“Listen… what did you say your name was?”

“Skywalker. Luke. Luke Skywalker.”

“Well, listen, Skywalker Luke Luke Skywalker, I’ve only got one working arm—” she nodded at her left arm, which was hanging limply by her side and obviously broken, “—and I need my other arm free to aim this thing.” Leia stood up again and fired a few more blaster shots, felling some more troopers, then returned to crouching behind the crates.

“So, thanks for the offer, but I’m good.” She gave him a smile that was meant to be reassuring, and tried to avoid thinking about how many missing teeth she had after her interrogations.

“But…” Luke spluttered, “…you’re basically naked.” He waved a hand at her attire – only the regulation unisex miniskirt common to Imperial prisoners.

“How observant.” Leia rolled her eyes.

“It’s indecent,” he told her, standing up momentarily himself to fire a few blaster shots. He wasn’t as good as Leia, he noticed; not all of the troopers he tried to hit went down.

“This whole battle station’s indecent. My goddamn home planet got blown up; that was indecent. At this stage, I hardly think having my tits out qualifies.”

Luke didn’t know what to say to that.

“Just enjoy the show, farmboy. I don’t mind letting these idiots feast their eyes on my boobs if it gives me an extra second to put a blaster bolt smack in the center of their helmets.”

Chapter Text

“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, Skywalker,” Leia said as she opened the bathroom door and stepped out.

Seated in a chair nearby, Luke was in a good position to examine Leia’s new outfit, and she had to admit to herself that she appreciated the view.

The damage to their shuttle from the TIE fighters in orbit had meant they’d been forced to land on this forest planet much farther away from the ancient Jedi temple than they’d intended. They’d had to hike through acres of woodland and high grass, and with stormtroopers also scouring the planet, it had become a race to find the temple. And whatever Jedi artifact was hidden in it.

Even though he knew the temple’s precise location, which the Imps didn’t – having found a mention of it in an old Jedi tome that it seemed the Empire no longer kept a copy of – Ben Kenobi had been even more mysterious than usual. All he’d said was that this abandoned temple contained a something of great power that the Empire couldn’t be allowed to have. So they had to slog footsore through forests and underbrush to make sure Vader and the Emperor didn’t get their hands on the whatever-it-was.

At one point Leia had hatched a plan to steal some speeder bikes from Imperial patrols and arrive at the temple faster. It had been a good idea… for about five minutes. Then more troopers on speeder bikes caught up with them, and in the resulting melee Leia’s bike had crashed, and she’d had to jump off into a thicket of thorns. She was lucky to escape with only cuts and bruises, but her fatigues were a total loss.

The speeder bikes could only carry one person, so Leia and Luke had had to struggle on foot through more trees, more thorns, and finally a bog until they found a secluded farmhouse just as dusk was falling. It hadn’t helped Leia’s temper that the bog had eaten one of her boots.

Fortunately, Luke had managed to sweet-talk the kindly old widow who lived here into letting two young ladies in need of shelter stay for the night. Now that it was morning, the woman had headed out riding an eopie to get provisions from the nearest village market. And hopefully not betray us to the Empire, Luke thought.

The old woman had filled a bag with some food for them, and had left them her landspeeder to use to reach the temple, if they wanted to – assuming that Luke could keep the thing running; it started up okay, after some elbow grease, but it didn’t seem to have been in use for many seasons. And she had let Leia have the pick of clothes from her daughter’s closet, since said daughter had long since moved out to start a family of her own.

Unfortunately, as they’d known ever since landing, the styles of women’s clothing on this planet were… eccentric, to say the least.

So when Leia emerged from the bathroom, Luke certainly got an eyeful.

She was wearing a soft fabric headdress shaped like a cylinder, with one end sitting on the crown of her head, and the other flattening out and falling as a decorative drape onto her shoulders. Along with that went a knee-length dark blue skirt fastened with an ornate leather belt, around which she’d secured her own Alliance utility belt; sandals whose leather soles by design didn’t fit beneath the whole of her feet, but left her toes bare against the ground; and a frown.

And nestled between her bare breasts dangled the simple necklace with a gleaming Alderaanian crystal that Leia usually wore under her tunics.

Luke put her hands to her face to hide her grin, but she knew her cheeks must be burning.

“It’s very… becoming.”

Hot was the word she didn’t use.

Leia punched her in the arm, but her frown melted to something more neutral. “Shut up, farmgirl. Or I’ll make sure your clothes end up on the campfire one evening while you’re sleeping.”

“While I’m wearing them?” Luke rubbed her arm, making a show of feigning injury.

Leia snorted. “You sleep like a drugged nerf, Skywalker. I could tug them off you and you wouldn’t even notice.” She grabbed Luke’s other arm and helped her to her feet. “Come on, let’s go see if that speeder can last beyond the front gate. I don’t want to wait around to see if our hostess picked up some Imperial firepower along with her vegetables at the market.”

Chapter Text

The interrogation officer had introduced herself, back when Leia first arrived in the dungeons of the Imperial capital. Nicola Hepburn. She wore the rank insignia of a Captain. Her eyes were coffee brown, and Leia knew by now that her heart was blacker than space.

A truth which the Captain was currently once again demonstrating.

“Do you know what these are, Princess?” Captain Hepburn asked, holding up a large sealed jar in her hands.

Leia, lying naked on the floor of the cell with arms and legs held fast in durasteel restraints set into the flooring, shook her head.

Inside the transparisteel jar were two bone-white, segmented worm-like creatures easily a foot long, with tiny legs all down their sides, and oversized heads that lacked eyes but had large antennae and a cavernous mouth. They writhed slowly against the surface of the jar, now crawling up towards the sealed lid, now descending back down to the bottom, keeping a languorous pace but never ceasing their constant motion.

In her fifteen years of existence, Leia had to admit, she’d never seen anything that matched that particular flavor of revolting.

“Nortonian desert worms,” Hepburn said, tapping the jar lovingly with a gloved finger. One of the worms changed course to crawl towards the source of the vibration on the jar surface. “Extremely hardy little buggers. Their favorite food is the eyes of carcasses that have perished in the sands. They’ll spend hours crawling over them, probing with their cilia, seeking out the tasty ocular delights… and once they’ve found them, they’ll clamp their mouths onto the eye sockets and suck the eyeballs right out.”

Leia gulped involuntarily.

“The only thing that can distract them is a continuous high note at the edge of human vocal range. Like this.” Leia’s tormentor pressed a button on the side of the jar lid, and the seal at the mouth of the lid irised open. Holding the jar up near her face, she began to sing wordlessly, giving out a single sustained high-pitched note. The worms in the jar started frantically thrashing back and forth, their slow and steady movement patterns interrupted by the noise they found so intolerable.

Hepburn stopped singing. The worms immediately stopped convulsing, their agitation removed by the cessation of the sound, and resumed their ponderous crawling along the surface of the jar. The officer tapped the seal control again and the jar lid irised closed once more.

“You see?” Hepburn continued. “But there’s only so long a human throat can hold that note before it gives out. I once had a soprano in here from the Galactic Opera who held out for days before their voice broke. The terror on their face when they realized they couldn’t sing anymore was exquisite. It really was a shame once the worms finally got their mouths in place… but these little buggers always get their meals. Don’t you, babies?” she cooed.

“Maybe you should just come over here with a spoon and save us both the wait,” Leia snapped at her.

“And deny myself the chance of listening to your vocal prowess?” the officer replied. “Now where would be the fun in that?” She tutted. “But if you’re so eager to get started, then I suppose we can begin.”

Kneeling down on the floor, she turned the jar over, holding it close to the decking with one hand. With her other hand, she opened the jar seal again, then sat in place holding the container, waiting for the worms to reach the mouth of the jar and fall onto the ground.

After several agonizing minutes, one of them finally landed on the floor with a plop, and immediately resumed its slow wanderings, proceeding in a seemingly random pattern along the duraplast surface of the decking, first in one direction, then in another, antennae twitching as it went. The other worm took longer to emerge, and Hepburn finally had to tap the bottom of the jar a few times with the heel of her hand in order to shake it out. By that time the first worm had discovered Leia’s foot, and was crawling up her sole with maddening slowness: a revoltingly cold wet mass, with its cilia moving back and forth all along the length of its body, and its antennae poking at her toes.

“Well then,” Hepburn said, standing up. “I’ll leave you three to get acquainted.” She strode out. The door of the cell closed behind her.

Leia began to sing, doing her best to imitate the wordless high note she’d heard the officer use earlier. The worms began to thrash, and the one that was by now crawling along her instep dropped suddenly to the floor.

She wondered how long she could keep it up before her voice broke.

Outside the cell, Captain Hepburn set down the jar and pulled out a stopwatch.

The sound of the door opening alerted Leia to her tormentor’s return.

Not sight. Sight was gone forever now.

“Seven hours, forty-eight minutes,” announced Hepburn, holding up the stopwatch as if Leia could read it. The digital hands within the concentric circles on the round screen of the timepiece were frozen in place. “Not bad. Longer than the leader of the rebel cell on Romii held out.” She put away the watch and went to fetch the jar.

Leia, her voice ruined from hours of singing, could only groan in pain.

One of the worms rested on her forehead, the other by her chin. Gorged with their meal, they had finally stopped moving. Their pale heads were stained red with the blood from Leia’s empty eye sockets.

Chapter Text

“I can’t – I can’t give you the codes to the station’s shields,” stammered the officer. He tried to keep his jaw raised as he spoke, to prevent the barrel of Leia’s pistol from digging too deeply into his skin where she held it to his throat. Summoning more defiance, he continued, “Never. I’ll die before I submit to you, Rebel.”

“Fair enough,” said Leia, casually checking the safety of her gun to make sure it was off. “You don’t tell me anything, you’re only useful to me as a corpse. But the way we get to that point can be quick or slow, and there are a few factors I think you forgot to account for.

“First: we’ve got almost four hours until the next shift reports in. That’s a lot of time for a long, slow death, maybe minus some important body parts. Second: I’ve got a whole set of ISB-issue interrogation tools in my bag here, and I’m eager to see what I can do with them.

“Third: I got a full set of dentures at sixteen years old, after your friends on Alderaan Station tore out my teeth. I’d be very curious to see if you scream more than I did.” She gave him a cruel smile, showing off the black durasteel teeth gleaming darkly in her jaw. “Fourth: my eye was fried like an egg by a blaster bolt during our evacuation of Kaaleita a few months ago.” She gestured with her free hand to the sunken, milky white orb that had once been her left eye, and the puckered, eyebrow-less skin surrounding it. “And our food supplies have been intermittent since then, so I’ve been wanting to make an omelette for weeks.”

Another flash of that black smile and a stare from her dead eye was all it took to get the officer to break down. Even soiled his trousers. All because he was afraid of a girl who wasn’t even eighteen yet.

Once he’d finished blubbering out the shield codes to her, Leia seriously considered blasting his head off, but the thought of having to explain herself to Luke restrained her, and she settled for just stunning him.

Pity, she thought. She hadn’t been kidding about having a full set of ISB tools in her bag.

alternate ending

Once he’d finished blubbering out the shield codes to her, Leia made it swift. He’d given her what she wanted, after all. A blaster bolt to the forehead was about as much mercy as fascists like him deserved.

Pity, she thought. She hadn’t been kidding about having a full set of ISB tools in her bag.