[FFML] Star Wars AU: Memory Saved in Light

[John Biles]

Memory Saved in Light

A Star Wars AU Fanfic



By John Biles



***********************



        “I want to go!” Little Han said, tugging on his mother’s leg.



        “You’ll stay with Daddy; you’re not old enough; it would only make
you sad or just bore you,” his mother said; it was hard for him to tell
which she thought was worse.  “There’s lessons to be learned but not for
you, not yet; you don’t need them yet.”  She stared off across the room at
a picture of her awarding medals to his father and Uncle Luke and Uncle
Chewie and others; it was from the Rebellion, which he only vaguely
understood.  His parents and friends had defeated bad people.  That was all
he had to know.



        But if his sister was going, he wanted to go.



        “I’m sorry,” Amidala said; she had long black hair plaited into a
braid wrapped around her head and now she wore the red robes of a novice at
the Academy where she trained with Uncle Luke and other Jedi.



        Little Han would never be a Jedi, but they tended to be boring,
anyway; he was going to be a great pilot like his dad.



        Amidala smiled her bright smile and kissed him on the forehead.  “I’ll
see you soon, little brother.  Don’t cause Uncle Luke too much trouble.”



        He would, but his uncle and aunt loved him.  Though he got on
better with his aunt Mara than with his Uncle, who was too staid and didn’t
understand *fun*, for all he would insist he did.



        Okay, riding on a landspeeder with his Uncle or in his X-wing was
kind of fun but basically, his Uncle would meditate and read all the time
without Little Han and Mara and Dad around to *force* him to have fun.



        Little Han giggled at his own pun.



        “Don’t worry, I’ll keep Uncle Luke in line,” Little Han said,
smiling at his mother and his sister.



        His dad now ran in and ruffled his hair.  “You have fun with Luke;
he *needs* to relax a little.”



        “I will!  We’re gonna go to the zoo!,” Little Han said. “Have fun
in space!”



        His father sighed.  “Loads.”  But then he picked up Little Han.  “We’ve
got time for one more wrestling match before we go, though!”



        “Dad, if you get him worked up, he’ll be impossible for Uncle Luke
to keep him from running wild!” Amidala protested.



        “I guess we’ll see if the Force is really as powerful as he says,”
Little Han’s father said, grinning, as his mother laughed ruefully.  “Now,
come on, son, show me what you’ve got!”



**********************



        Han had a bad feeling about this trip, but he knew it was important
to his wife, so he’d caved in.  They’d done this before, if not in the same
place, but he didn’t like it.



        The Nav Computer had figured out where they were going; all he had
to do was be handy in case of an emergency.  They were cruising through
hyperspace.  Which meant a lot of sitting around.



        Chewie was off pretending to do maintenance work; he’d hide through
the whole thing; Han didn’t like to fly the Falcon without him, but he
didn’t like seeing what they would soon see, and Han didn’t blame him.



        So he sat and watched hyperspace go by, while his wife talked to
Amidala and did… Force stuff.  It was real, but he preferred technology,
good, solid, reliable technology.



        Not a lot of ‘trust your feelings’ and trying to pretend you
weren’t freaking out on the inside all the time.



        But he was used to it.



        Two hours until they hit their target, three hours until the light
wave hit it.



        The destruction of Alderaan had happened twenty years ago.  Twenty
years.  He felt old… he was old.  Leia was aging slower than him and their
daughter would outlive them both.  Probably by centuries.  Yoda had lasted
for centuries according to Luke, close to a thousand years.



        But when she died, the destruction of Alderaan wouldn’t have
reached every world in the galaxy; it was huge and hyperspace travel let
you move much faster than light.  The image of its destruction spread
through space in a sphere at the speed of light; until then, you could gaze
into its past, see it as it had been in its long history, until its
destruction reached you.



        He would be long dead before it reached Coruscant, which is why he
was now out in the middle of nowhere, waiting for light waves.



        When he would rather be playing with his son or shuffling
papers.  There
was still adventure to be had, but not for him.  That part of his life was
over.



        It wasn’t a bad trade; most of the time he was happier now and a
lot less desperate. The Republic was flourishing and at least in his
lifetime, all was good.



        But sometimes, he missed the old days.



        I am an old man, he thought, laughing ruefully.  Nothing was going
to happen on this trip but depression and maybe Amidala going stir crazy
from being cooped up in this ship.  But he was here for them, just in case.



***************************



        Leia flopped to the ground, exhausted; Amidala seemed to hardly
feel the workout but she was getting old.  Older, anyway, as she was in
very good shape for her age and she wasn’t *that* old.



        She was only forty, a good decade younger than her husband.  And he
was in good shape for his age.



        But having her daughter outperform her so thoroughly when she was
only fourteen…



        It was good no one was filming this.  And good to get away from
being filmed.  She was used to the limelight, but every so often she needed
to get out of it.



        Amidala helped her up; her braid had come loose and now she sat
with her daughter on the floor, kneeling behind her and carefully plaiting
the braid back into shape.  Amidala was proud of her long hair but it was a
target in combat.



        One day, her daughter would fight people for real. With good reason
but sooner or later, she would be hurt.  She remembered Luke, handless in
the bacta tank, the agony of knowing he’d gotten so hurt when he had come
back from Dagobah, abandoning his training, to save her and the others.  One
day, Amidala would face dangers like that.



        She’d faced dangers like that, but she had no choice; their
parents’ generation had broken the world but now hers could pass a better
one on to their kids.



        But Amidala felt the call of the Force and Leia could feel it
calling her; a new age was beginning and Amadala would help to lead it, as
her grandmother had over the end of the last and her mother over the
beginning of this era.



        One day, her children would fly free across the stars, and part of
her was glad of that, and part worried that they would get hurt.  That was
being a mother.



        She hoped her mother had felt this way too; she had always been so
kind but there was always sadness behind her eyes too; Leia understood why
now.



        The intercom buzzed and Amidala hit the speak button with the
Force; Leia felt it and smiled and Amidala smiled too. “I have important
news to report,” Han said to them.



        “What is it, honey?” Leia asked.



        “I’ve gone over 24 hours without reading a report or signing
something I don’t have time to read.  HELL YEAH,” Han shouted triumphantly.



        Amidala buried her face in her hands and Leia laughed loudly.  “I
can write something for you if you miss it.”



        “I changed my mind, this was the best possible thing.  I might
actually finally finish that book Luke gave me,” Han said, then laughed
again, a torrent of good cheer.



        He’d been saying that for five years or so, but Luke just laughed
when it came up; he knew Han.  Leia had read it herself by now and knew Han
would probably never quite plow through it.  Too philosophical.



        But she needed someone pragmatic to balance her own idealism.  Han
never felt discouraged at political setbacks because he never set his
expectations too high.  And she never gave up because she still believed in
the system.  In Democracy for all its flaws, for all her own origins as a
princess, the daughter of a Queen.  Between them, they kept each other on
an even keel.



        “Don’t worry, Papa, I don’t sense any danger,” Amidala said to the
intercom.  She looked relaxed and happy; this experience would damage that,
but not too much.  She knew her daughter would get curious one day and it
was best to show her it herself.



        She’d seen pictures of course, and Leia had taught her of Alderaan
since she was little, but it wasn’t the same as seeing.



        Seeing was believing.



**********************



        Alderaan was beautiful; Amidala was amazed you could see so much
detail with the spacescope; her father had gotten one normally used for
scientific work to get the level of detail her mother wanted, though at
this range, detail meant ‘make out large land masses and terrain features’.




        But the Force guided her to more, the great forests and mountains
lived on in the memory of the Force and so she saw what no normal eye could
see, down to the people and the animals and she felt them in their final
hours, oblivious to what was coming.



        It was disturbing, but she repeated the Creed; control, she had to
keep control.  Yet with the Force, control came by surrendering to it,
flowing with it.  That worried her sometimes; Sith thought of themselves as
dominating the Force, and yet from what she’d seen in her studies, they let
themselves be ridden like horses by their own emotions.  They controlled by
surrendering to passion.



        And passion too was part of the Force.



        But if both sides were guided by the Force, the things which had
happened to her family… what did the Force really want?  Had humans screwed
up a benevolent plan or did it use people as pawns?



        Strange thoughts for a Jedi, but she’d inherited her father’s
skeptical mind and her mother’s idealism and struggled to reconcile the
two; she admired her Uncle Luke so much; he was wise and kind and gentle
and strong at once and she wanted, needed that.



        She could feel a faint echo of Alderaan’s doom; the sense of it had
gone through the Force long before she was born, but such a massive amount
of death, it sent ripples which might last for centuries.



        The ripples were building; she could feel its doom coming, even as
life went on; she could sense it; and yet, for inside her mind, she was
*on* Alderaan, standing in a great grassy field as people rode horses and a
city gleamed in the far distance, white against the green.



        There was wind in her hair and a smell of flowers on the slopes of
the hills to the north; the Force was strong in this world, for it was full
of life.  She swept her hand through the high grass, untrimmed and wild,
coming up to her waist.



        Two billion humans but trillions of animals and insects and the
plants… for a moment, she was one with all the life on Alderaan, feeling
its rhythms and pulse, the cycles of its existence in this summer day.



        She felt her mother’s breath catch; her mother could feel some of
this as well; she wasn’t sure how much.  Her father, on the other hand,
could see nothing; he was part of the Force, but he was blind to it; it was
with him, guiding him, empowering him, as it did everyone, but he couldn’t
see or feel it clearly.  His mind-eye was blind.



        She wished she could share this with him; the joy of this
experience had to be felt.



        And then, it came, the shadow of growing doom; animals felt it and
panicked, but the humans didn’t know what was coming. Or anyone else, but
this was a mostly human world.



        And then she felt it die, only a shadow of its death, but even that
shadow was enough to overwhelm her with fear and terror and death and her
mother shouted, “Amidala!”



        “Dammit, I had a bad feeling about this,” her father said and he
was there and… wham, it was gone, the Force pulled back and let go as he
held her tightly as she cried.



        There was a hole in the Force there, where Alderaan had once been;
no one had noticed for the Jedi were still few and there was nothing to go
back to, unless you needed ash and dust.



        That was why the Force had guided her mother to bring her here, she
felt; one day, she would have to heal it.  Not today; she was just a child;
it frustrated her that all her training had just evaporated in the face of
all that.  But it was too much; she didn’t think even Master Luke could
have handled it.



        “I’m sorry, it was never so bad for me,” her mother said
frantically, turning to stare at the spacescope and then resting a hand on
it.  “I come to the edge of the light wave, every so often, to look back
and sometimes to remind myself of my failure.”



        Amidala’s father grunted and turned to his wife, her mother. “It
was not your failure.  There was *nothing* you could have done about it.”



        “I know,” she said softly.  “But it’s also a lesson in why some
means are never acceptable.  I’m a politician and it can be frustrating;
you never get all of what you want and sometimes only a few slivers of
it.  It’s
tempting to look for the easy road to more power.  But this is where that
road goes.  At the end of the quest for power as an end in itself lies
death.  Not just Alderaan, but many deaths.  But it’s another reminder as
well.”  She fell silent, though, and did not explain further.



        But Amidala’s father did.  One arm still around his daughter, he
said, “Some people show up with a big sign on them saying ‘I am evil’.”  His
voice was weary. “Like the Sith.  But most evils don’t look that way and
they don’t start that way.  And they don’t have to have any connection to
the Force; the Death Star was purely normal technology, just a horrible
one.”  He sighed and pulled his wife back over to them.  “And in the end,
just a bigger version of weapons I’ve used myself.”



        “You’re close to my age when I first got involved helping Papa with
the Rebellion,” Amidala’s mother said to her.  “You’ll be a Jedi and have
to make all sorts of complicated decisions.  You’ll be an adult and it’s
hard.  It’s not easy and… I was so sure everything I was doing was right,
but in the end, Alderaan was destroyed to spite me.”  She slumped on the
widget, which looked strange where Chewie had put it in place in this room
so they could observe the light wave now passing them by.



        “Leia, don’t wallow,” her father said. “You know better than that.”



        “I do, but I lived where they died,” Amidala’s mother said, but she
now came back to them. “But I also wanted to show you the good, to let you
see it.  I’m sorry it felt so bad to you.”



        “I was meant to see this, it’s okay,” Amidala said, now feeling
burned out and empty.  “But I think maybe we should watch a comedy or
something while the Nav Computer plots out our return.”



        “Raaaawr,” Chewie said from the doorway.



        “I don’t think she speaks enough Wookie to understand that one,
Chewie,” Amidala’s father said.



        “The force will guide me,” Amidala said; she was curious to see
what Wookie comedy was like.



*********************



        Little Han ran over and hugged his mother, who clearly needed it,
because she looked frazzled; they all look frazzled, except for Uncle
Chewie, who now picked up Little Han and threw him in the air and they both
laughed; so did his father shortly thereafter, while Amidala said
frantically, “That’s dangerous!”



        But Little Han liked danger and he knew Uncle Chewie wouldn’t drop
him.  “Did you have a good time?” he asked them.



        “I don’t think I could call it that,” his father muttered. “He
didn’t cause you too much trouble, did he, Luke?”



        “He kept figuring out my plans in advance,” Little Han said,
frustrated.



        Uncle Luke laughed.  “Jedi training does make you a good
babysitter.” But then he turned more somber and he and Little Han’s mom and
Amidala all stared at each other silently and Little Han stared, trying to
join in, never quite understanding this family custom.



However, he soon got too distracted by Uncle Chewie ‘wrestling’ with him
and forgot about it all.



        But they would not forget the memory saved in light.
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