A Green Place | Luke & Leia

01 | A Green Place

His eyes opened. The same dusky brown ceiling he saw every day greeted him, reminding him that he really was on Tatooine and not a place with hills that curved off into the distance like a green reflection of the sand dunes he saw every day. He could still feel the tickle of grass between his toes. He'd never known that it could be soft. Luke squeezed his eyes shut and pushed his balled fists into them, trying to save the image of the blades of grass in his mind while he hoped he wouldn't forget the shine of chestnut hair coiled on either side of the girl's head or her loud laugh.

But the feeling of the cool green was already fading and as he came out of the silence and serenity of his sleeping state, he knew the images would fade, too.

And too soon it was time for him to mind the farm. The memories of the green place faded into a dull ache in his chest as the suns rose, pulling at him until he went to bed again that night, long after the light of the two suns had extinguished at the horizon line.

___

The dreams were different every night. Sometimes she saw that woman who looked like her, the one that her father had shown her holograms of. She stroked her forehead and let Leia's hair down. The cool fingers that ran through her waves lulled her into a state between waking and dreaming and the woman's voice would echo in the distance, her words lost and warbled as if they were underwater. It felt like she said sweet things to her, using the same tone of voice Leia's own mother did.

Sometimes she saw the figure of a tall man with shaggy hair. Maybe scruffy, if she really thought about it but it was only ever a silhouette. She never saw his face and his figure wavered, like a bad hologram transmission. If she squinted, light would glint off of a metal hand. It was familiar but she couldn't understand why.

Most of the time she played with the boy. His blond hair and blue eyes the opposite of her own but somehow, she could still trace the faintest similarities between the two of them. She could see the same curve of her nose in his, the dimpling smile of the nice woman who visited her dreams, the shaggy hair of the tall man. It was almost like looking into a distorted reflection; the familiarity and similarity of her features could be found in an unfamiliar face with unfamiliar coloring.

Her dreams faded by the time the sun had risen over the Alderaanian horizon but the feelings never did. Their presence was felt but not remembered. Every once in a while, the sunlight glinted off of something and it brought back the shade of a dream that was there and gone just as quick.

___

They grew older. Both of them out of the joy and wonder of childhood and into the awkward adolescence that they felt plagued by. But Leia wore her skin like she belonged in it and Luke wore it like an oversized hand-me-down. His hair was just as long and just as unkempt. There were strands in the front that sprung up no matter how many times he flattened it with his fingers. Leia's hair was still shining and neat, not a strand out of place, even in the soft breeze coming off of the water.

She turned to him, her eyes softening and searching for an answer she already knew.

"Do you see her sometimes?"

Luke glanced at her before they both turned to stare off into an unfamiliar sunrise, their feet laying on the edge of a lake that neither of them had ever seen with sand so white and soft that it didn't seem like sand at all. So unlike Tatootine, Luke could hardly believe it really was sand.

Luke shrugged but he knew who she was talking about. The woman with brown hair and soft eyes who looked so much like Leia it was uncanny. Her gentle hands always carded through his hair like Aunt Beru's did. The kind of touch he thought a mother would have.

"Sometimes I do."

___

They never talked much. They never needed to. They found familiarity in each other's faces and gestures that they had never known before; they knew what the other would say before they said it, what move they would make before they made it. They had been meant to find each other in the green haze of their dreams.

The same, kind woman came to them in their dreams. She used the same gesture to push their hair away from their faces, her fingers curled around that similar curve of their cheeks. They never saw her together. She never pulled the both of them to her. They were never folded into the warmth of her clothing together. She never intruded on their time together but sometimes they felt her in the warmth of the sun on their faces or heard snatches of her voice in a breeze.

Only Leia saw the wavering man with the metal hand. It seemed that Luke's gentler nature didn't open itself up to the image. She never asked if he had seen him. She didn't need to ask to know that the man was absent from the boy's dreams and Leia wanted to keep this secret to herself. It felt like the kind of things secrets were made of; shadowy figures and dark details obscured by the larger feeling of anxiety that affected her when she saw him. Luke didn't need to know about that.

___

They both had nightmares but only Leia's included the heat of a fire and the distant yells of a man who had lost everything. Sometimes it was a hand around a woman's throat. Sometimes it was the kind woman, glittering tears perched on the edge of her eyelashes just poised to fall.

She knew who the woman was now. As she had grown older, her father had trusted her with everything about Padme Amidala that he could remember; he had a few, flickering holograms left over from the Republic of her. Anything more was hard to come by. The Emperor's people erased what was deemed dangerous and the memories of a better time and better people were the most dangerous. They gave hope.

Bail had always taught her to be careful. The Empire was always watching, always looking for a slip up. Their lives were always in danger in the world the Emperor had created but being caught with contraband data would put them in a position that would be hard to navigate out of. No matter how much she wanted to learn about them, Leia wouldn't risk her parents' lives for a scrap of data about Padme Amidala and her family. It was said she was pregnant when she died, an old holo of her funeral procession had confirmed it and displayed the swell of a full belly.

Leia wondered, then, why the woman would come to her if she had never had her children. The stories she had entertained when she was younger, that she was the daughter of not only the queen of Alderaan but of a past queen of Naboo and one of the best politicians to have lived during the time of the Republic, had vanished from her heart for a time. Leia understood that she had been adopted. She knew she had come from somewhere else and she had hoped that it had been Padme Amidala but she doubted it when the holo showed her a truth that she couldn't refute.

And yet, when she saw the woman, her heart clenched like she knew her. Really knew her like she knew her own mother, Breha. Padme's eyes soothed Leia's questions. Everything she needed to know was in them. And with that, the nightmares of fire and anguish stopped. She only ever saw the sad, tall man after that, his flickering silhouette and glittering hand the only thing she knew of him.