The Sky Walkers
By Rey
(Beta-read by Malicean)

Bail Organa confessed. And from that moment on, everything changed.

Story Notes:
1. This story is almost totally AU; too much has changed with just one thing. Plus, there are also facts and character relationships that I tweak for various purposes and reasons.
2. Thank you very much for Malicean for beta-reading this story. But all mistakes that you see here are my own, not hers.
3. Further warnings: major character death in the first chapter, maybe one or two or three more much later on, and touchy, controversial themes like slavery, empire vs republic, right and wrong, Jedi and Sith and the one in between, mind rape, and a few other things in the rest of the story. I felt it would be prudent too to warn readers that this author knows only a puny amount of Star Wars and not so much of English, despite the patient help of her patient beta-reader…
4. Critiques, ideas, flames, comments: All are welcome; ideas, especially, as this is a rather loose story once we get nearer to the middle, and the owner(s) of those ideas will certainly get a mention here, or even more. I'm relying on you all to rant and rave at me for the bumps. And again, all mistakes are mine, not my beta-reader's! So, here we go…

Story Tags: Childfic, Character Study, Family Drama, Family Fluff, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery, Sensitive Topics, Grey Areas

Chapter Warning: Major character death.

1. Uprooted

The royal bedchamber smelled of illness.

It was nothing new to Leia Organa, ever since somebody had slipped a poison into her father's wine in the evening three days ago, to which a part of her had shrieked at her in warning but too late. It was sheer luck that had saved her from the same fate; or rather, it had been her father's unshakable rule about never allowing her alcohol before the age of fifteen that had spared her life in that rare private dinner of father and daughter.

Ever since that fateful evening, she had rarely left her father's bedside.

But since yesterday evening, she had been finding it hard to look upon her father.

Because the best doctors, discreetly drawn from all over Alderaan and even off the system altogether, had at last proclaimed her father as a lost cause yesterday evening.

The poison was a rare type from one of the outer-rim worlds, they had said. The poison had no known antidote and concocting one was impossible within the timeframe, they had said. Her father only had a further twenty-four hours to live, they had said.

Leia could only stand silently before them for a long time.

And then she had fled right to her rooms, to her bed, locking the door behind her and ordering Threepio, her friend and personal protocol droid, to prop her writing desk up against it to boot.

That night, her pillow had been soaked with bitter tears. That night, she had kept vigil alone in her own rooms, too terrified to face her father, to face the truth. And in the end of that night, she had fallen into the same nightmare that had often plagued her in her early childhood, and even sometimes afterwards, one that she could never properly describe to anybody, nor ignore entirely.

There had been four presences: two stronger and two weaker, interlinked in a most intimate manner, always, in that dream that she was never sure wasn't a memory. One stronger presence turned muddy, withdrawn but never gone, forsaken and then forsaking, but the others…

She and one other had been with the other stronger presence for the longest while, always interlocked, even through the near-separation with the now-muddy one. But then the link to the now-muddy one was yanked and severed, quickly followed by the other stronger presence, and the other.

Four had howled in agony.

And then she was alone, terrifyingly alone, while there had been three others with her, always three, however faint, however muddy.

And now, she was going to be left alone again, undeniably for real this time, as her mother had passed away while she had only been three years old, as she had never been close to her other relatives, and as Winter, her best friend, had been more inclined, more comfortable to serving her as a secretary or a maid or a friend than a sister.

But she could not avoid it, fight against it, just like she had never managed to keep all the links that had sustained her existence in all repetitions of the nightmare, just like she had never managed to fully suppressed any reoccurrences of the said nightmare, nor the part of her it had originated from.

She could not avoid seeing her father for the last time too, and partly she indeed did not wish so.

Bail Organa had been a robust man, quick with a sunny smile, more apt to frowning in thought than anger. Bail Organa had been a great charismatic leader, quite a doting father, a strong person with hopes for a better future for the galaxy.

But now, Bail Organa was only a thin frail man laid near the edge of a too-large bed, aged decades in three days.

"Papa," she whispered, but he didn't look at her.

"Papa." She didn't know what else to say. But she couldn't just say nothing. Maybe her father would find a new purpose to fight for his life if she continued speaking? Twelve was a far-too-young age to lose everyone!

"Papa." Her voice warbled with tears now, but she couldn't prevent it.

She didn't want to.

"Don't go." The words escaped her lips at last, soft and fragile. She felt five, she felt fifty, all at once.

And their eyes met, at last.

His smile was just as fragile as her words had been, no longer sunny, and she could see no hope in his eyes, nothing of the fire that had made him secretly supplying things and information for the rebellion for years, or so she had suspected.

And then at last, for the first time since he had fallen to the wooden floor of their dining balcony with violent spasms three days ago, he spoke to her, in a voice weak and scratchy with disuse and pain.

"Leia, I… have something to tell you."

Invisible, brutal hands squeezed at her heart.

"Tell what, Papa?" she croaked, falling to her knees at the bedside at last, staring into the dim, clouded brown eyes, so alike yet so unlike her own, from only centimetres away.

The fragile smile was back. "Everything," he whispered, and now there was a mixture between peace and pain in his half-focused gaze, one bizarre blending that she had never thought possible.

"You never kept a secret from me," she insisted, baffled and distressed, even more than before. It wasn't quite true in some respects, but she wasn't about to let her father expend his breaths for story-telling!

The fragile smile turned bitter, as bitter as her tears had been yesterday night.

"Too many, Leia," came the whisper, and now the peace in those familiar eyes was completely chased away by pain, pain and regrets from years long gone.

But before she could insist otherwise, he spoke again.

And her world collapsed all round her, just as something clicked in her mind, and a strange current of energy, warm and cool and rushing and soaking, numbed every particle of her being.

She had been adopted through illegal means hours after she had been born, he told her. A friend of his had brought her to Alderaan in haste, in secrecy, and there had been another baby with her, a boy, her twin brother. He had offered – no, insisted – to adopt both of them, as her birth mother had been a dear friend also and he had felt that separating a pair of twins was wrong, but the friend had refused adamantly, and he had never found out where the friend and her brother had vanished to afterwards. The friend had used public transport, leaving the *(1)Nubian starship he had arrived in stowed away in the palace's hangar, and also the sad news that the twins' mother had died shortly after childbirth.

He never told her who "the friend" was, though he did tell her who her mother was, Padmé Naberrie, and warned her not to share the name lightly with anyone, as he suspected that one of her many political rivals had murdered her, in spite of what the friend had said.

The necklace with a wooden carved pendant that he had given her at her twelfth birthday months ago, it was a keepsake left from her birth mother, he said, entrusted to him alongside her. It was her inheritance, aside from the very blood humming in her veins, the knack for politics, her features, her smile and the determination in her eyes, See-Threepio, Artoo-Deetoo, the Nubian ship, and her name alongside that of her brother's – Leia and Luke.

But still, she didn't even know who her father was. Her father – her adoptive father – didn't know either, he said.

Worse, she knew that he was telling the truth, with nothing else hidden away, save the name of his baby-bringing, baby-separating friend.

And then, exhausted by the confession but in peace once more, with a last – entirely truthful and fervent – declaration of love to her, Bail Organa closed his eyes for the last time.

There was not even a brief mention – let alone a demand – that she be the queen of Alderaan, to bind the star system together as it had always been done, as her adoptive mother had done till her untimely death years ago.

Bail Organa, the only father that she knew, had freed her from all entanglements for reasons he alone knew. It was a prospect far more fearsome than combing the galaxy in search of an unknown brother while being the child-queen to a star-system in the core of the said galaxy.

She feared it, because it uprooted her completely, made her meaningless in her own eyes, made her entire short life a huge lie.

But indeed, what – and whom – did she have now?

Numb with the realisation and stifled by the unnamed fear, in body and mind, and buoyed and laden with the strange new sensation that had just been released in her no less, she fled, again.

End Notes:
Footnote: *(1) "Naboo" feels and sounds too weird as the adjective, despite it featuring on canon. I would prefer "Nubian" to describe "of/from Naboo."
Credits: A nod to Kungfu Jedi's story, The Pendant, for the reference of the japor snippet given to Leia on her twelfth birthday. The bit about Breha Organa passing away when Leia was three, and also that of "the friend" bringing the twins to Alderaan, were inspired by yet another story (or maybe two separate stories), but I've forgotten the title(s) and author(s). Please inform me if you are the author(s) or know about the aforementioned story(ies).
AU points: I'm going against the films here by having the droids in Leia's possession and without the memory wipe, and that Leia never knew that she was adopted, and the sequence of events leading to Leia's adoption. Bail was a little more sentimental here, and a little more cautious in that he didn't let Leia be a figurehead in her childhood. I always suspect it's her, not her adoptive father or mother, that persisted with stubborn determination to be a senator …
Argument: I know that Bail wasn't supposed to regret his actions those years ago, feeling that Leia was safer not knowing that she was adopted, that she had a twin brother even. But in this, as his life was cut out so suddenly and somewhat unexpectedly, leaving her so young and orphaned and possibly threatened from a similar death (or worse), he changed his mind, especially since in this story Winter Retrac didn't act as Leia's adopted sister, just a very good friend.