oh look, I caved
Cue appropriate gasps and shocked expressions. I ran across the Fifty Themes; One Character thing, and it seemed just perfect for the EU-ignoring, canon-compliant OT fic I've been wanting to write. So I grabbed a set and wasted the whole day on it instead of working on the au_bigbang. Uh, either of them.
-----------------------
Title: Daughter of Time
Fanverse: haven't named it yet! just a general EU-ignoring, canon-compliant... thing
Blurb: er -- Princess Leia for Supreme Lord of Everything?
Pairings/warnings: Leia/Han, Leia and Luke, Leia and Anakin, Leia and various Naberries; general Skywalker stanning; character death; total lack of any coherent chronology, though some themes follow from the previous ones and you should be able to guess at the general order of events; drama!; mommy, daddy and extended-relative issues; widespread abuse of/cheating with the semi-colon.
Length: one-shot (2001 words)
----------------------
1: Air
Nothing could make Leia regret the knowledge that her blood flowed in Luke's veins, but when he left to find his father, Vader's son became Vader's daughter and she felt as if the very breath were being crushed out of her lungs.
2: Apples
Banai offered her an unfamiliar fruit, and after a long day in the desert she was glad to accept, her teeth tearing through the bright red skin and white flesh.
3: Beginning
She was restless in those last days, kicking with her brother; still, it was better than after, when the familiar thump against her ear, the sense of him always, always with her, were ripped away and there was nothing but strange voices and her own screams.
4: Bugs
Leia may not have been a particularly skittish girl, but she hated everything that crept or crawled -- especially when they were humans.
5: Coffee
Han sometimes made caf for her, when he was struck by one of his considerate fits, and Leia didn’t have the heart to tell him how much she hated it.
6: Dark
Leia never let herself forget Calobrin, because she mostly couldn't remember it: just the haze of rage, receding only when the children's attackers fell beneath her lightsaber, and the distant thought that she understood her father much better, now.
7: Despair
The closest Leia ever came to giving up was the moment when Jabba's collar closed around her neck; instead, she promised herself, As soon as Luke gets here, we're going to make them all pay.
8: Doors
It was only a few months after Luke's official resignation that Leia found herself at the ruins of the old Jedi Temple, planning repairs even as she stepped through the great vacant doorway.
9: Drink
Leia couldn't help but wonder how sipping wine with Pooja (our cousin) seemed more charged and anxious than their days in the Imperial Senate had ever been.
10: Duty
Through all the years of the war, Leia upheld her responsibility to the Alliance, but afterwards, as the scrambling Rebellion transformed into a proper, ponderous, government, she imagined spending the rest of her life discussing policy with Mon Mothma and General Madine and just couldn’t.
11: Earth
Leia knelt before the graves, wondering vaguely when Luke had put up (Vader’s) the last, and let her fingers trail through the sand, unsure what she’d expected to find here.
12: End
She forced herself to look at the names of her . . . relatives, to commit them to her memory with the other dead, and recoiled from the dates: all these people’s lives were over by fifty, and the last was youngest of them all - fearsome, ageless Darth Vader had been a month short of forty-five when he died.
13: Fall
Leia’s hands shook as she tucked Lyra in, stroking her blonde hair, but they tightened into fists when a chillingly familiar voice said, “If you intend to turn into me, you’ve made an excellent start.”
14: Fire
Obi-Wan began to appear to her almost as soon as she showed up in the Jedi Temple, encouraging her to feel the Force flowing through her, like a stream: but her brother and, much later, her father, said it didn’t flow in them so much as burn, and that made everything easy.
15: Flexible
Leia spent hours in the library, poring over the records Vader had saved for his own inscrutable reasons, and afterwards informed her brother that while they might be able to salvage something from the old ways, she had no intention of swearing a vow of celibacy.
16: Flying
When Leia remembered racing through the Endor forest with Luke, exhilaration pounding in their veins, she thought of Vader decimating their forces in the attack on the Death Star, and knew why her instinctive gift for flying had always upset her father so much.
17: Food
In the Temple, the three of them divided up their responsibilities neatly: Leia managed most of the administrative concerns, Luke handled everything that required his greater mastery of the Force, and Han kept them fed.
18: Foot
It was almost a year before Leia could hear the 501st marching around the Temple without reaching for her blaster.
19: Grave
Every year, Leia paid her respects to her family: she went to the Graveyard of Alderaan to mourn her parents and her people, then to Naboo, where her mother was entombed, and finally to the line of graves beside a charred homestead, even if she couldn’t say anything more meaningful than “this feels stupid, we were just screaming at each other last week.”
20: Green
The new planet was smaller than Alderaan, but it was lush and varied, and the few million Alderaanians left didn’t need that much space, anyway.
21: Head
Leia saw no reason why her position in the Order should prevent her from taking up her duty to her people, and though she was crowned as Queen Leia of New Alderaan, most Alderaanians remembered her as the Jedi Queen.
22: Hollow
Leia was never consumed by grief over anything - there was always a new battle to oversee, a new strategy to devise, a new decision to make, but even so, she sometimes felt something must be missing in her.
23: Honour
When Leia thought of family, she thought of her father in his Senatorial robes, her dimly-remembered mothers, her brother, never more than a thought away, and she wanted to acknowledge them all.
24: Hope
For the first time, she signed her full name - Leia Skywalker Organa - and hoped nobody would ever guess all it meant.
25: Light
Sunshine poured through the ruins of the great hall, warming her skin and hair, and Leia decided that their new design would provide for more of it.
26: Lost
Leia had always rather idolized Senator Amidala, and her dead mother had been held up to her as a pillar of virtue; now it turned out that the real woman had been both of those, and neither.
27: Metal
The first time Princess Leia met Lord Vader, she was grimy and angry and her toe hurt from kicking the speeder and if she hadn’t crashed into the bushes first, she might have run him over.
28: New
Her father hurried out, horrified to be late, and even more horrified when he found Leia holding forth on the failings of her vehicle to a clearly amused Vader.
29: Old
Of all the times that Leia had cursed her blood, she never meant it more than when Han died in comfortable old age, and her own life stretched out further than even Luke could see.
30: Peace
The war ended with the Battle of Endor: not officially, but dozens of systems threw their support behind the Alliance as soon as they got word, the Imperial warlords began fighting amongst themselves, those under Vader’s direct command defected, and within five years Leia was personally welcoming Mon Mothma to Coruscant.
31: Poison
Leia understood the power of the Dark Side now, and could imagine how it had twisted her father, but it was years before she could do more than pity her mother, and perhaps consider that Palpatine had poisoned her life, too.
32: Pretty
Leia couldn’t keep herself from going back to the holos, wondering what had gone on behind her mother’s beautiful face, what could lead an otherwise principled, clear-sighted senator to close her eyes to murder, what weakness she might have passed down to her.
33: Rain
The sound of water pattering against the windows came as a relief; Leia made determined conversation about the weather on every planet but Alderaan, and their relatives stopped looking at her as if Padmé’s daughter were carved into her skin.
34: Regret
Leia wasn’t one for apologies; it was probably one of the less objectionable qualities she had from her father, from whom an admission of regret was comparable to other people gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair out.
35: Roses
It was Ryoo who took her to see the great gardens of Maren, and told her that Padmé had always wanted to see them; “it wasn’t safe,” she added after a moment’s thought, “so I don’t think she ever did.”
36: Secret
Leia didn’t want to keep her relationship to Luke hidden, as if he were an illicit lover rather than her brother, but she knew he’d insist on acknowledging Vader’s sacrifice, and maybe he could be Vader’s son but he didn’t answer to anyone; she couldn’t be Vader’s daughter - it’d been bad enough just to be his occasional ally in the Senate.
37: Snakes
Leia had no more fear of snakes than she did of most animals - namely, none - but Han was terrified of them.
38: Snow
Leia had gotten used to thinking of Luke as her opposite, but as they watched Artoo’s final recordings and her own blank incomprehension stared out of his face, she remembered how often they’d felt naturally, uncannily aligned; if Padmé had been one of the flowing streams that Obi-Wan was always yammering on about, Luke and Leia were blizzards.
39: Solid
Leia sat frozen in place, her muscles tense, as if their aunt’s tears might be as dangerous as blaster-fire; instead, Sola’s hands closed around theirs, warm and real.
40: Spring
If not for Han’s garden, she wouldn’t even know what season it was, but it seemed fitting that the baby would be born in springtime - or what passed for spring here.
41: Stable
No less than six governments tried to unseat them from the refurbished Temple, without success, and Leia was as pleased to see more and more students trickling in as she was to hear that the Alliance was about to take Coruscant.
42: Strange
Belatedly, Leia realized that it’d be easier to forgive her mother if she’d hero-worshipped Senator Amidala a little less, or hadn’t heard herself compared to her quite so constantly, and it struck her that this must be a tiny fraction of what Luke went through after Bespin.
43: Summer
New Alderaan could be warm in the summer, but Leia steadfastly kept to her royal gowns and Jedi robes.
44: Taboo
After a few bitter arguments, Leia agreed to stop insisting that Luke had been adopted, and he agreed to stop using the word “real” to refer to any of their family members.
45: Ugly
The truth, Leia came to realize, was anything but beautiful: it was ugly, ferocious, more than most people could bear, and now she thought she could forgive her mother for being one of those people, for being unwilling to let it crush her when the Republic needed her whole.
46: War
All of the children were too young to remember the war, but Han and Leia’s twins were born two weeks after the signing of the treaty; Bail was all the more suitable for their son and Han wanted Leia for a girl, but she took one look at her newborn daughter and announced, “Her name is Padmé.”
47: Water
Padmé’s hair grew into wild dark curls, and her blue eyes stayed blue - like the sea, strangers and relatives said, but Leia thought of her brother and father, and the blazing Tatooine skies, and knew better.
48: Welcome
Leia was generally the one to welcome new students to the Academy; she was stern enough to keep them in line, and her voice didn’t scare them like Luke’s did.
49: Winter
“Luke told me about the time you were snowed in at Dlath,” Leia said tartly, making everyone laugh except for Luke himself, and then she realized - he’d done nothing of the kind; she just knew.
50: Wood
Han’s rough chair flew across the room with a flick of her mind, and Leia knew she would never forget this moment, the Force moving through her, its power nestled in her hands, ready to do - anything.
-----------------------
Title: Daughter of Time
Fanverse: haven't named it yet! just a general EU-ignoring, canon-compliant... thing
Blurb: er -- Princess Leia for Supreme Lord of Everything?
Pairings/warnings: Leia/Han, Leia and Luke, Leia and Anakin, Leia and various Naberries; general Skywalker stanning; character death; total lack of any coherent chronology, though some themes follow from the previous ones and you should be able to guess at the general order of events; drama!; mommy, daddy and extended-relative issues; widespread abuse of/cheating with the semi-colon.
Length: one-shot (2001 words)
----------------------
1: Air
Nothing could make Leia regret the knowledge that her blood flowed in Luke's veins, but when he left to find his father, Vader's son became Vader's daughter and she felt as if the very breath were being crushed out of her lungs.
2: Apples
Banai offered her an unfamiliar fruit, and after a long day in the desert she was glad to accept, her teeth tearing through the bright red skin and white flesh.
3: Beginning
She was restless in those last days, kicking with her brother; still, it was better than after, when the familiar thump against her ear, the sense of him always, always with her, were ripped away and there was nothing but strange voices and her own screams.
4: Bugs
Leia may not have been a particularly skittish girl, but she hated everything that crept or crawled -- especially when they were humans.
5: Coffee
Han sometimes made caf for her, when he was struck by one of his considerate fits, and Leia didn’t have the heart to tell him how much she hated it.
6: Dark
Leia never let herself forget Calobrin, because she mostly couldn't remember it: just the haze of rage, receding only when the children's attackers fell beneath her lightsaber, and the distant thought that she understood her father much better, now.
7: Despair
The closest Leia ever came to giving up was the moment when Jabba's collar closed around her neck; instead, she promised herself, As soon as Luke gets here, we're going to make them all pay.
8: Doors
It was only a few months after Luke's official resignation that Leia found herself at the ruins of the old Jedi Temple, planning repairs even as she stepped through the great vacant doorway.
9: Drink
Leia couldn't help but wonder how sipping wine with Pooja (our cousin) seemed more charged and anxious than their days in the Imperial Senate had ever been.
10: Duty
Through all the years of the war, Leia upheld her responsibility to the Alliance, but afterwards, as the scrambling Rebellion transformed into a proper, ponderous, government, she imagined spending the rest of her life discussing policy with Mon Mothma and General Madine and just couldn’t.
11: Earth
Leia knelt before the graves, wondering vaguely when Luke had put up (Vader’s) the last, and let her fingers trail through the sand, unsure what she’d expected to find here.
12: End
She forced herself to look at the names of her . . . relatives, to commit them to her memory with the other dead, and recoiled from the dates: all these people’s lives were over by fifty, and the last was youngest of them all - fearsome, ageless Darth Vader had been a month short of forty-five when he died.
13: Fall
Leia’s hands shook as she tucked Lyra in, stroking her blonde hair, but they tightened into fists when a chillingly familiar voice said, “If you intend to turn into me, you’ve made an excellent start.”
14: Fire
Obi-Wan began to appear to her almost as soon as she showed up in the Jedi Temple, encouraging her to feel the Force flowing through her, like a stream: but her brother and, much later, her father, said it didn’t flow in them so much as burn, and that made everything easy.
15: Flexible
Leia spent hours in the library, poring over the records Vader had saved for his own inscrutable reasons, and afterwards informed her brother that while they might be able to salvage something from the old ways, she had no intention of swearing a vow of celibacy.
16: Flying
When Leia remembered racing through the Endor forest with Luke, exhilaration pounding in their veins, she thought of Vader decimating their forces in the attack on the Death Star, and knew why her instinctive gift for flying had always upset her father so much.
17: Food
In the Temple, the three of them divided up their responsibilities neatly: Leia managed most of the administrative concerns, Luke handled everything that required his greater mastery of the Force, and Han kept them fed.
18: Foot
It was almost a year before Leia could hear the 501st marching around the Temple without reaching for her blaster.
19: Grave
Every year, Leia paid her respects to her family: she went to the Graveyard of Alderaan to mourn her parents and her people, then to Naboo, where her mother was entombed, and finally to the line of graves beside a charred homestead, even if she couldn’t say anything more meaningful than “this feels stupid, we were just screaming at each other last week.”
20: Green
The new planet was smaller than Alderaan, but it was lush and varied, and the few million Alderaanians left didn’t need that much space, anyway.
21: Head
Leia saw no reason why her position in the Order should prevent her from taking up her duty to her people, and though she was crowned as Queen Leia of New Alderaan, most Alderaanians remembered her as the Jedi Queen.
22: Hollow
Leia was never consumed by grief over anything - there was always a new battle to oversee, a new strategy to devise, a new decision to make, but even so, she sometimes felt something must be missing in her.
23: Honour
When Leia thought of family, she thought of her father in his Senatorial robes, her dimly-remembered mothers, her brother, never more than a thought away, and she wanted to acknowledge them all.
24: Hope
For the first time, she signed her full name - Leia Skywalker Organa - and hoped nobody would ever guess all it meant.
25: Light
Sunshine poured through the ruins of the great hall, warming her skin and hair, and Leia decided that their new design would provide for more of it.
26: Lost
Leia had always rather idolized Senator Amidala, and her dead mother had been held up to her as a pillar of virtue; now it turned out that the real woman had been both of those, and neither.
27: Metal
The first time Princess Leia met Lord Vader, she was grimy and angry and her toe hurt from kicking the speeder and if she hadn’t crashed into the bushes first, she might have run him over.
28: New
Her father hurried out, horrified to be late, and even more horrified when he found Leia holding forth on the failings of her vehicle to a clearly amused Vader.
29: Old
Of all the times that Leia had cursed her blood, she never meant it more than when Han died in comfortable old age, and her own life stretched out further than even Luke could see.
30: Peace
The war ended with the Battle of Endor: not officially, but dozens of systems threw their support behind the Alliance as soon as they got word, the Imperial warlords began fighting amongst themselves, those under Vader’s direct command defected, and within five years Leia was personally welcoming Mon Mothma to Coruscant.
31: Poison
Leia understood the power of the Dark Side now, and could imagine how it had twisted her father, but it was years before she could do more than pity her mother, and perhaps consider that Palpatine had poisoned her life, too.
32: Pretty
Leia couldn’t keep herself from going back to the holos, wondering what had gone on behind her mother’s beautiful face, what could lead an otherwise principled, clear-sighted senator to close her eyes to murder, what weakness she might have passed down to her.
33: Rain
The sound of water pattering against the windows came as a relief; Leia made determined conversation about the weather on every planet but Alderaan, and their relatives stopped looking at her as if Padmé’s daughter were carved into her skin.
34: Regret
Leia wasn’t one for apologies; it was probably one of the less objectionable qualities she had from her father, from whom an admission of regret was comparable to other people gnashing their teeth and pulling their hair out.
35: Roses
It was Ryoo who took her to see the great gardens of Maren, and told her that Padmé had always wanted to see them; “it wasn’t safe,” she added after a moment’s thought, “so I don’t think she ever did.”
36: Secret
Leia didn’t want to keep her relationship to Luke hidden, as if he were an illicit lover rather than her brother, but she knew he’d insist on acknowledging Vader’s sacrifice, and maybe he could be Vader’s son but he didn’t answer to anyone; she couldn’t be Vader’s daughter - it’d been bad enough just to be his occasional ally in the Senate.
37: Snakes
Leia had no more fear of snakes than she did of most animals - namely, none - but Han was terrified of them.
38: Snow
Leia had gotten used to thinking of Luke as her opposite, but as they watched Artoo’s final recordings and her own blank incomprehension stared out of his face, she remembered how often they’d felt naturally, uncannily aligned; if Padmé had been one of the flowing streams that Obi-Wan was always yammering on about, Luke and Leia were blizzards.
39: Solid
Leia sat frozen in place, her muscles tense, as if their aunt’s tears might be as dangerous as blaster-fire; instead, Sola’s hands closed around theirs, warm and real.
40: Spring
If not for Han’s garden, she wouldn’t even know what season it was, but it seemed fitting that the baby would be born in springtime - or what passed for spring here.
41: Stable
No less than six governments tried to unseat them from the refurbished Temple, without success, and Leia was as pleased to see more and more students trickling in as she was to hear that the Alliance was about to take Coruscant.
42: Strange
Belatedly, Leia realized that it’d be easier to forgive her mother if she’d hero-worshipped Senator Amidala a little less, or hadn’t heard herself compared to her quite so constantly, and it struck her that this must be a tiny fraction of what Luke went through after Bespin.
43: Summer
New Alderaan could be warm in the summer, but Leia steadfastly kept to her royal gowns and Jedi robes.
44: Taboo
After a few bitter arguments, Leia agreed to stop insisting that Luke had been adopted, and he agreed to stop using the word “real” to refer to any of their family members.
45: Ugly
The truth, Leia came to realize, was anything but beautiful: it was ugly, ferocious, more than most people could bear, and now she thought she could forgive her mother for being one of those people, for being unwilling to let it crush her when the Republic needed her whole.
46: War
All of the children were too young to remember the war, but Han and Leia’s twins were born two weeks after the signing of the treaty; Bail was all the more suitable for their son and Han wanted Leia for a girl, but she took one look at her newborn daughter and announced, “Her name is Padmé.”
47: Water
Padmé’s hair grew into wild dark curls, and her blue eyes stayed blue - like the sea, strangers and relatives said, but Leia thought of her brother and father, and the blazing Tatooine skies, and knew better.
48: Welcome
Leia was generally the one to welcome new students to the Academy; she was stern enough to keep them in line, and her voice didn’t scare them like Luke’s did.
49: Winter
“Luke told me about the time you were snowed in at Dlath,” Leia said tartly, making everyone laugh except for Luke himself, and then she realized - he’d done nothing of the kind; she just knew.
50: Wood
Han’s rough chair flew across the room with a flick of her mind, and Leia knew she would never forget this moment, the Force moving through her, its power nestled in her hands, ready to do - anything.