Chapter Text
Leia watches the debris of Alderaan drift through the vacuum of space and compares it, in a morbid sort of imagery, to her heart. She feels traces of pain, guilt, anger, grief each more fleeting than the last. Finally, she feels nothing, and she wonders if maybe that’s worse than feeling it all at once.
She doesn’t have time to ponder her shock or trauma, so she turns away from her heart and toward the rebellion. Gives every bit of herself to the mission.
Months later, when she has a moment to sit and breathe and examine the holes in her heart, she reads the report. Others had tried to—not hide it from her, but they made sure it never crossed her desk. But, well, she has access to every report, and someone once told her grief requires closure.
The report is clinical in the way they always are, but she quickly finds herself unable to remain detached. Here it is, at her fingertips, the report that confirms Alderaan is gone. As if she needs the verification. She watched its destruction with her own eyes, but then her throat wasn’t closing up, and her eyes weren’t stinging.
She continues through the brief. Statistics on the explosion. The Death Star's power output. No known survivors. The names of rebels on planet at the time.
Her parents' names.
She knew her parents were gone, but the familiar shape of their names on her datapad takes the scattered pieces of her heart and wrenches them back together, forcing her to feel and hurt.
And as warm tears finally drip down her cheeks, she remembers the face of a boy not much younger than her. She remembers the way his kind smile wilted and his face twisted into that complex expression of sorrow, resignation, and guilt. She remembers what he bitterly told her much later, how he’d known they were as good as dead since he was seven-years-old. How he knew that, but he was still foolish enough to hope and get hurt. She never asked him about the guilt, but she was smart enough to put the pieces together: the Bridger Transmissions old and new, the prison break, and the names of dead prisoners.
It isn’t until she reads the report confirming her parents were on that planet when it blew up that she remembers Ezra’s face that day and understands exactly how he felt.