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In the first year, she stood alone in front of an endless crowd.
Leia Organa was chosen to give the inaugural speech in front of the newly erected Alderaanian Memorial in Coruscant. She thought, in long nights where she couldn"t sleep, about refusing the invitation. But if not her, who else could do it? Who would be better to talk about Alderaan than its princess, alone in her reign over dust strewn across the interstellar space?
(dust shaped like houses and rivers and people that she watched, at her privileged position inside the death star, as they went from being to nothing in the blink of an eye, in the green light reflected on the surface of a sith’s helmet.)
She fled as soon the portal opened, as everyone elbowed each other trying to get inside, to observe the objects stored into the archives as if they were proof of the existence of some long-lost civilization, just now brought to light.
As if her father had not reread the letter stored in the first viewing box, the one where he told Breha about the baby girl he was taking home from Polis Massa, just a few hours before he died.
In the second year, she went alone.
Han offered to make her company, but Leia refused. She did not want him to her cry and scream and bawl like a baby inside an empty corridor, her hand spread open against the transparisteel that separated her from the yellow stone that sat in the forefront of her mother"s crown, the single piece of her that had survived in the field of asteroids baptized Alderaanian Graveyard.
In the third year, and all the next ones, Leia visited the memorial on the anniversary of Alderaan’s demise with Ben’s small hand clasped in hers.
He was young, and yet the Force had already pooled around him; talking to him and nursing him in the same way it did with Leia and Luke. In the same way it did with her father.
So Leia told Ben the story of Alderaan, and the Death Star, and the man with his cape and helmet and his suit of black; the man with the voice of a machine who had once been human before darkness warped him into a monster. She told him so he would know that the Force was dangerous as much as it was a blessing, and that falling was much, much easier than rising up again.
She hoped he could understand what darkness was; what darkness brought. She hoped it would make him stay away from it.
(years later, she would think to herself how have i fucked up things so tremendously that they turned out like this?)