Work Text:
Leia's Vigil
by Anne Higgins
Her eyes flew open with alarm, but Leia Organa Calrissian had woke up in such a manner often enough that she did not make a sudden move and disturb her sleeping husband. She tried to go back to sleep. She really did. An exhausted Senator had limited use, and her pregnancy made her feel all the more drained.
Fnally, as she knew she would, Leia gave up and slipped out of Lando’s arms, then their bed. She drew a robe around her and went out onto the balcony to study the stars. The Haikan system could not be seen from this side of Coruscant, so she settled for any star. Somewhere out there, her brother and a man she loved like a brother were in turmoil.
More than once she’d thought she’d sensed actual pain, but her Force abilities were untrained, so she couldn’t quite separate the real from troubled dreams. “You see, Luke?” she asked the glittering night sky. “This is why you must come back. If not to be with those who love you, then to train me and my children.” Her hand moved to her belly and she lightly rubbed the flesh covering the two Jedi’s growing within her. “We need you.”
Leia let out a long breath, desperate to relieve the fear gnawing at her. She would never see her brother again. Or Han. Her wonderful, stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder. She smiled briefly, remembering Han had taken offense only at the scruffy-looking part of that description. Her Han.
*“It wasn’t supposed to be this way. You were supposed to marry him. The twins you carry should have been his.”* Luke’s words in the medical center came back to Leia. She knew her brother could see glimpses of other futures, had known he’d spoken of another reality where it was true. But was that the reality that should be? Or was it this one? And did it even matter except in the mind of a young Jedi too willing to take the burdens of the galaxy on his slim shoulders?
She’d been so close to falling in love with Han on Hoth, but a wall of ice and snow had buried the time love felt for a friend might have become something more. During the long trip to Bespin, she’d mourned the loss of that as well as the man. But she’d moved on. To Lando, and she did love him. With all of her heart. It made it difficult to even give serious thought to a life spent as Han’s wife.
More an intellectual puzzle to pass the time between Senate debates than a serious consideration. She spent far more time thinking of what would have happened if the love she’d felt for Luke hadn’t changed. When he’d told her on Endor he was her brother, she’d answered she’d known, somehow had always known.
Not quite the truth. After the destruction of the first Death Star, she had felt torn between the two men, wanting and loving them both with equal fervor. Luke was safer than Han, who would never commit to the Alliance beyond the next battle, yet never managed to leave. The thought Han stayed because of her occurred to more than one rebel, so Leia did not think it exceedingly vain it had also come to root in her own mind.
She shook her head at her own stupidity. How could she have missed that the sun rose and set for Han in Luke’s eyes. The Corellian had not come back to join the battle over the Death Star for her. Nor had he remained safe and secure on the Hoth base with her when Luke had been lost in freezing wastelands. No, it was never her. But her blindness was a family trait, for Luke had not seen the truth either.
In any case, Luke’s quiet affection for everyone with no one seemingly more important than any other had led Leia and Han to look towards each other and away from Luke. It was then that she’d developed a sisterly attitude towards him, but before that, oh, how easy it would have been to have ended up in Luke’s arms instead of dreaming of Han’s. How could they have coped with the truth had need made them lovers?
It always gave her a cold chill to imagine a man who could have been her husband telling her he was her twin brother. But that too had no basis in reality. She’d honestly not suspected for an instant Luke loved Han until he’d demanded Leia perform their marriage ceremony. She’d been shocked, but a part of her had rejoiced. Luke was in love. And by then she had figured out Han had loved Luke, not her. Luke -- the suitor she’d not turned to when she’d lost Han -- need not be alone. That had been her only real thought on the matter. No anger, no sense Luke was claiming what should have been hers. Just joy. So much greater the sorrow when it all fell apart the next morning.
She regretted her doubts about Han. She regretted them every time she had them, but she, too, had been a brief guest of Darth Vader’s and well knew the grueling punishment that entailed. How had Han survived at all, let alone in one piece? Her instincts said she could trust him, but her logic and the suspicion any rebel needed to survive had kept her uncertain.
*I was an Imperial officer -- the youngest man to ever command a Corellian star destroyer. Do you think I walked around the bridge of my ship speaking like some backwater spacer?*
“No, I don’t,” she told the stars. “I simply never thought about it. You see it was the backwater spacer I knew and loved all those years. I’d never noticed the ex-officer behind him. I should have. Come back, and I will. I promise.”
*Oh, please Gods, let them come back.* She'd spent so many hours with her brother�in�law, telling Han everything she'd learned about Luke's life after Han's ‘death.’ Much of it she'd had to learn second hand herself, for Luke's grief had kept him far from his friends for most of that horrible year. How ironic that after Endor she'd thought she would finally have Luke around as he had been in the days before Hoth, only to have him steal away in the night without even his infrequent post Hoth visits to reassure her he was alive and well.
No, Fate had stolen Luke from her even as it had given her back Han. And as she consoled him and was consoled over Luke’s absence, their friendship had deepened into something she had come to cherish beyond all others. But somehow it had happened without her really seeing or trusting him. She knew she didn’t deserve a second chance, but she ached for it. And she’d never, ever mistrusted him on a personal level. Not when only she was at risk, but duty to the New Republic had made her cautious on a professional level, and she’d done little to help Captain Solo deal with his new dubious position among his former friends and allies.
A tear slipped from her right eye and rolled down her cheek. Why hadn’t she listened to Lando or Chewie? For that matter, why hadn’t she listened to her own heart? “I want my children to know you. I want to rage at you for teaching them some damned fool smuggler’s stunt and laugh along while you tell them your stories,” she pleaded with a man who couldn’t hear her. “But most of all, I want to see you and Luke laughing together, being happy and knowing you have what I have found.”
What she had once thought she might find with each of them in turn. Her Han. Her Luke. Her world would never shine as brightly without them in it. They had to come back. Please.
Arms slipped around her waist, and she leaned back against her husband’s chest. “You should be asleep,” Lando told her. “But it seems I’ve said that every night since they left.”
“If I sleep, I dream. And I don’t like what I see.” Han her consort instead of Luke’s, three beautiful children to love and raise, but her brother crushed beneath the weight of unrequited love. “I don’t like it at all.”
She turned in his arms and looked up at them. “I need to be able to tell them that. To tell Han I love him whether he’s a backwater spacer or the ex-pride of the Empire. To tell them both that I want them here and part of our lives for as long as we live.”
Lando looked down at her, and she suddenly feared that he would take her words wrong, but he smiled. “Can’t say that I want a life that doesn’t include them either. It would be much too boring.”
She managed a smile. “I love you.” Her Luke. Her Han, but most of all her Lando. “I’ve never been in love with anyone else.” Her past had held gentle whatifs and the love of one friend for another. Only with Lando had she found romance and the love of her life.
He kissed her. An emptier life without her brother and Han, but never an empty life. “They’ll come back,” he told her when their lips parted.
Something stirred inside her, something that felt like a Force touch and she saw the briefest glimpse of Luke and Han moving together in the clearing of a swamp. She blushed slightly, then smiled. "Yes, I know.”
End