I feel home, and that's just what I feel....

[motherofresistance]

Who: Leai and Gray!Ben
Where: Leia's quarters
When: A little while after this thread
What: Leia has a special gift for Ben
Warnings: Probably none other than family feels

It wasn't often Leia specifically asked Ben to come to her quarters. Mostly because it was rarely necessary; it was easy enough for them to find each other on the base if they needed or wanted to. Sometimes Ben would come to her, sometimes she to him, but it was seldom in either of their own rooms. The request hadn't been anything especially urgent; just 'if he had time' that evening, and if not, she'd said that was fine. They could always find another night.

But the unusual nature of the request would likely make it stand out. As would the emotions drifting through the Force when it was made. Warmth, love, hints of excitement and an odd sort of nostalgia... What exactly was Leia planning? There was only one way to find out...

Comments

[greyorder]

Ben's first thought was that it was somehow some kind of Force-related business. He was tired of discussing the Force with most people, but he was getting used to it being inescapable. At least with Rey and Poe he could get snarky about it. Then, as he reached out through the Force, he didn't sense the usual emotions his mother had regarding the Jedi, training or other such topics, and that was a relief in and of itself.

He arrived late in the evening, after Rey and Poe had demanded he sit down and actually eat. It would be a stretch to say he enjoyed trying to force down meals more regularly, but he managed, with their help. He looked better these days; better rested, better fed, and less angry, even if he arrived wearing one of Poe's jackets because they were starting to swap clothes at this point due to sheer carelessness.

He knocked on the door to his mother's quarters, confused and intrigued. "Mother? You wished to see me?"

[motherofresistance]

Leia was sitting on the room's small sofa when Ben knocked, reading over some reports on a datapad. She looked up and smiled, though when she heard Ben's voice, quickly saving her place and turning off the pad. "Come in, Ben," he said, standing to greet him as he did so. "Yes I did. I've got something I want to show you."

She gestured for him to follow her as she moved to the corner of the room where her desk was. Right next to the desk, a safe was set into the wall, and it was this that Leia headed for, proceeding to unlock the safe as she continued. "I've actually been meaning to show you for awhile, but this is the first time I've had a chance to do so when I was reasonably sure we wouldn't be interrupted by some kind of crisis," she said. "Since I couldn't just leave these sitting out if I had to leave on a moments notice."

She opened the safe and pulled out three briefcase sized metal cases, each with their own locking mechanisms, sitting them on the desk one by one. Still in the safe, Ben would be able to see two ordinary carved wooden boxes, but Leia didn't bring those out yet. "As you can see, getting these out is a bit of a production, but the security is necessary," she said as she undid the locking mechanisms on the cases.

"We spend so much time talking about the history of our biological family, that any discussion of the other side of your heritage tends to fall by the wayside, and I think it's time we changed that," she said. "That's why I wanted to show you this." She opened the cases and stepped aside, allowing Ben to get a good look at the glittering contents. "What's left of the crown jewels of Alderaan."

[greyorder]

He followed her as she asked, familiar tension building up at her initial words. In his defense, his family rarely shared something from the past that wasn't somehow a bombshell. The way she was acting, though, kept him from being too tense, and instead he found himself puzzled and confused, especially since she seemed, in the Force, so serene and warm. His first thought was that maybe they were holos of him as a child or an infant, something mundane like that, and then the suitcases came out and he immediately ditched that train of thought, since that wouldn't require so much heavy protection.

For a moment, he just stared at her, blankly, then his gaze dropped to the jewels. He was half expecting to feel some sort of Force lashback from the pain of whoever owned them last before Leia, but they were quiet in the Force, almost muted, and lay there not as yet another Jedi-related piece in the neverending puzzle that was his life, but as normal relics of an era he never knew.

"...I didn't know these even existed," he said after a stunned pause. "I suppose I assumed, like everyone else, that they were all lost when Alderaan was destroyed."

[motherofresistance]

"Most were," Leia said, her expression becoming more solemn. "These few survived the same way a relatively small number of Alderaanians did; by not being on planet at the time. Mostly as part of a rotating display at Alderaanian embassies on several planets. A few of them were actually in my senatorial quarters on Coruscant."

"Naturally, they all disappeared from public knowledge shortly after... everything," she said. "It's thanks in large part to your father and his smuggling contacts that they were recovered. Most of them were in the hands of the glitterstim cartels, but a few had found their way into the hands of other unscrupulous private collectors." She smiled fondly, remembering. "He called it a 'several years late wedding gift' when he gave them to me. Shortly after that, there was a private exhibition for the Alderaanian Diaspora, but since then, they've been with me."

She stepped back up to the desk and directed her attention to the first case, and the jewels that sat there, secure in custom fitted padding. The case contained an elaborate gold broach set with multicolored gems and several necklaces, one showy and ceremonial, and two others that were more delicate. Also in the case was a heavy looking string of pearls. Leia ran her fingers over them lightly, feeling the numerous minute scratches in the surface. They obviously hadn't been treated well by the person who'd had them before they were retrieved; Leia could sympathize.

She carefully extracted the pearls and held them for Ben to get a closer look at. "You know, I never liked wearing these," she said. "I can't tell you how many functions and dinner parties I had to sit through with them around my neck, and they seemed to get heavier and more uncomfortable by the hour." But she was smiling in fond remembrance as she said it, time having turned annoyances into parts of cherished memories.

[greyorder]

"Intriguing that, for all he brags about his exploits, Father never mentioned these to me," Ben noted quietly. Han never spoke of Alderaan's destruction, although he had mentioned giving Alderaanian smugglers that he ran into, few as they were, much more fair deals than one would expect of Han Solo. He always rationalized it away as being good business, but deep down, it was more than that. There was nothing anyone could do to bring Alderaan back. The Alderaanian native language was almost entirely gone, from what research Ben had done. The only ways left to honor Alderaan were to treat those from there with kindness.

He hadn't realized his father would go this far to do that for his mother, but then again, Han always did try to downplay how kind and compassionate he really was in a pinch. Gingerly, Ben reached out and touched the pearls, watching them catch the light. They were spectacular even in this state. He could not fathom them in their prime.

"I cannot imagine wearing anything so grand. Or what I would wear with any such thing. I confess, I had a small collection of Alderaanian artifacts in my quarters in the First Order - mostly books, but some music - and I never truly could picture the sort of world or time these belonged to."

[motherofresistance]

"It's unlikely he would," Leia said. "Quite apart from simple respect to the Alderaanian people, I'm not sure those who he retrieved them from ever knew for sure who did it. Probably best for everyone not to call too much attention to the fact that it was him."

And despite the valiant efforts of linguistic scholars, Old Alderaanian would indeed soon be joining the ranks of the galaxy's dead languages. Leia herself had done what she could to help, but she was only conversational in the language, having learned enough of it for various royal ceremonies and speaking formally to certain elders who still used it as their primary language. The shift from trying to save it to trying to preserve it for future generations had been another blow among many. It was better off than High-Galactic, due to being far more recent, but soon there would be no one left who had learned it from birth.

She smiled as Ben reached out to touch the pearls. "Well, as far as I know, very few Alderaanian men wore pearl necklaces," Leia said. "Though men's jewelry could get pretty ostentatious as well." She put the pearls back in their case and picked up the broach. "My father had a cloak broach similar to this that he wore when he felt he needed to impress someone. I always thought it looked a bit gaudy myself, but it seemed to be effective."

"I hope I can help you fill in that picture," Leia said. "And that we can perhaps retrieve the artifacts you had to leave behind, assuming they wouldn't simply be destroyed with you no longer there."

[greyorder]

"Uncle Chewie mentioned that Father had sought things out for you on trips before, but neither of them ever indicated any of it was Alderaanian. Even well-made counterfeit items go for high prices on the black market to this day. He must have put in so much work just to get one genuine item, let alone all this..." Ben snorted, despite himself. "And he claims he 'doesn't kriffing care about relics'."

Ben was good with languages. Many who had the Force were. But Alderaanian was too scarce, its' vocabulary too lost. For people like Ben, Alderaanian names were somewhat identifiable if only because the survivors had clung to traditional names so fiercely in an attempt to preserve the past. But that was all they had. Names, some old fashioned ways of making food, and songs, the one form of art that could be passed down easily and orally.

His fingers just barely skirted the surface of the pearls for a moment, before shifting to feel their weight in his fingers. They were deceptively heavy, likely contributing to how hard they were to replicate. He let her put them away without a word, watching his mother's movements curiously. The broach was... he didn't have polite words for it, but he could not bring himself to mock it. "In its' own way, it is beautiful," he conceded.

He didn't sigh so much as exhale sadly, quietly. "Relics of Alderaan are highly valued in the First Order as trophies. They have been turned into things meant to showcase how little was left after Vader did his work. I assure you, while I cannot say for certain who has them, nothing was destroyed. The status they denote is too high for that. Two high-ranking officers once got into a blaster fight over a tiara with a paliirinite gem in it. A child's tiara; compared to all this, nothing more than metal with a stone." After a pause, he admitted, "I confiscated it. Officially. I tried to use the Force to pull some kind of memory from it, because I thought perhaps it could have been yours, at some point, but it had been passed through the hands of countless traders and merchants. And for all my searching, I never did find out what the seven-pointed star shape of the gem was supposed to mean, either. It was not in any database."

And it's symptomatic of a bigger problem, of how deep and wide the gaps in his knowledge are. It could have meant anything at all or nothing whatsoever and Ben was, despite having an Alderaanian mother, basically as uninformed as the Stormtrooper outside his door on the matter.

[motherofresistance]

"He doesn't," she said. "Not for himself, at least. But he does care about me, and has always been far better with gestures than words. You know that glass ornament that sits on the desk in my office? That's actually a piece of Braaken glass; your father got it for me after I mentioned once that my mother had had a collection of them." She smiled fondly. "I never had the heart to tell him that both father and I found the collection hideous." Braaken glass, while not nearly as rare or valuable as Alderaanian artifacts, were still very expensive due to the amount of craft that went into their creation. While Leia could appreciate that, it didn't make them any more pleasant to look at, as far as she was concerned. But the piece Han had given her had become oddly endearing, especially during the time he'd been gone.

The pearls themselves were from a species of freshwater shellfish native to Alderaan. Both the particular minerals in the water that contributed to the pearl's coloration and the sheer size of some of them made them close to impossible to recreate. Which was just as well, as it made exposing frauds that much easier.

Leia smiled in amusement at Ben's reaction to the broach. "There's really no other polite way to put it, is there?", she said. "Now that I'm older I can appreciate the artistry that it must have taken to create something like this a great deal more, but when I was younger all I saw was the excess of it. Money that I thought could have been better spent elsewhere, where it was really needed. And not just on jewels like this. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest when I tell you that you could have bought a small ship for the price of some of the outfits I wore back then. Especially before I got old enough to start really putting my foot down on my aunts' more extravagant tastes."

She carefully returned the broach to its case as Ben talked about the incident surrounding a particular Alderaanian tiara, looking thoughtful. "I don't recall ever having a tiara like that," she said. "And since House Organa never used a seven pointed star in any of our symbolism, it's unlikely it was mine and I was just too young to remember. More likely it was from House Panteer; they were fond of starbursts, and a stylized, four pointed star was on their house banner. If it can be retrieved, there are a few people still living from that house and their close servants who might be able to identify it."

"House Panteer actually produced more Kings and Queens than any of Alderaans other noble houses," she said. "Even the Organas. In fact, there was some question over whether my grandfather would even be able to claim the title of Viceroy. House Antilles contested his right to rule, and it was so hotly debated that an outside mediator had to be called in. I think that might have been the start of my father's good relations with the Jedi, since one of the mediators sent, a Jedi knight named Everen Ettene, championed House Organa's cause and the two of them became acquainted during that time."

"Eventually, the tribunal ruled in favor of my grandfather, and any ruffled feelings on the Antilles' side were soothed by my father's marriage to my mother." Leia smiled fondly though there was a bit of sadness to it too. "You'd never have known there was anything arranged about their marriage from interacting with them though; they were both very much in love. She would call him 'hotshot' or just 'B', and he would call her 'my dove'."

[greyorder]

"It's strange to think of him going out and retrieving such things. He wears the mask of indifference very well, sometimes. But it's stranger," Ben admitted, feeling vaguely ashamed that he had given the matter such limited thought, "To hear you speak of your adopted parents. I don't really recall you speaking much about them. Alderaan, sometimes, yes, but not them... I suppose I always assumed it was too painful and didn't want to make it worse by asking."

Exposing fraudulent Alderaanian artifacts was something that some smugglers had down to a science. In the First Order, where they were things to be collected and bandied about as a tribute to how rare they were and how thoroughly Vader had wiped out a people, everything was examined intensely, so much so Ben was willing to bet some legitimate artifacts had been passed over for not meeting ridiculously high standards of authenticity. Bold traders would sometimes make claims they couldn't back up, but most everyone knew by now not to pretend to have anything of note from Alderaan, not in Republic territory, anyway. Respect for the Alderaanian massacre and Leia made such things too bad in taste to jest about. Fights had started more than once over such things.

The idea of wearing so much that was so expensive made Ben cringe. No disrespect to his mother's home was meant, but even as Kylo Ren he wouldn't have felt entirely comfortable wearing such things. "I see the wealth disparity on Alderaan was not an exaggeration, then," he noted wryly. "I am glad to hear you disliked it from the outset, or else I would see you in a new and unpleasant light."

He raised an eyebrow, surprised that something so vaguely described could pull so many memories and such information out. Truthfully, Ben did not know the ranks of various Houses or even the names of most. He knew that he didn't like it when Poe called him a prince as a child and he really, truly disliked it when Rey asked him if he was one as an adult. He knew his mother was royalty on some strange technicality, but to what degree, he had never really pried into. There was a lot of hurt in her when Alderaan came up when he was a child, and he learned not to ask, not when big looming nightmares like Vader were in the past and so much more important.

Ben hopes the little girl the tiara belonged to was an adult or offworld when it was removed from her possession. He hopes that it wasn't in her parents' keeping while they were offworld on a business trip and she was killed in the explosion. He hopes that she was an adult merely hanging onto it to give to a child of her own when Alderaan went up in that grand explosion. But he knows that's likely not the truth. Every Alderaanian artifact came with tragedies, with dead bodies, with despairing survivors selling their last possessions for safety or a place to stay. And that makes his gut twist. No one, noble or common or anything inbetween, should be reduced to selling the last remnants of their homeworld just to keep going. Yes, it was the reality of the diaspora - but until this moment, it hadn't ever quite seemed real.

"It was a pale blue star," Ben supplies softly, recalling it with new eyes. "A bit worn, clearly old as opposed to merely damaged. I would hazard a guess that it was the oldest Alderaanian thing I had ever held. The metalwork was very old-fashioned and employed a lot of etching of spikes and small stars into the metalwork, so that when it caught the light, stars glimmered. Even dulled, it was a thing of beauty."

Wait. He squinted at her, confused. "Alderaan had arranged marriages?"

[motherofresistance]

"It often was, at the time," Leia said solemnly. "Sometimes it still is. But while mourning Alderaan's fate was and is necessary, it would be a disservice to both Alderaan and my family to stay there constantly. Still, I should have told you more about them before now."

She paused, smiling reminiscently . "I know Mother would have adored you. Would have probably spoiled you rotten if given half a chance too; she wanted to be a mother so badly, and probably would have loved being a grandmother just as much. And Father.... I'd have liked to have seen his face the the first time you brought home some random animal as a pet. It would have been me and the tree snake all over again." The smile became a bit more amused. "And I know my aunts would have fussed over you endlessly. Hopefully, being a boy, you'd escape their attempts to treat royal children like dress-up dolls, but they certainly wouldn't have let you get away without learning to serve a proper tea." Their reactions to Ben's father, on the other hand, would have likely been very different, but she didn't mention that for now.

She nodded as she returned the broach to its place. "When you're royalty, appearances matter a great deal," she said. "Especially so for us under the Empire, when appearances had to cover a great deal more than it did for most. But while I came to understand that, I never like how much emphasis was placed on wealth and rank. And I wasn't shy about showing that displeasure either." Leia smirked. "One of the advantages of being a teenage princess is that you can do things like throw your drink all over a spoiled prima-donna who was laughing with her friends about the audacity of one of her servants wanting to try on her dress and have it be brushed off."

Leia listened to the description of the tiara thoughtfully. "If the metal was yellow gold, then I'm almost certain it was from House Panteer," she said. "Their house colors were azure blue and gold. Anything that old with those colors and a motif of stars is bound to have some connection to them."

Leia's smile when Ben commented on her words about her parents' marriage was a bit wry. "Not officially," she said. "But unofficially, you'll find that marriage among noble families- Alderaanian and otherwise- is almost always at least as much about forming a political alliance as it is about love. It was just understood that I'd eventually marry someone from another of Alderaan's noble houses, or someone of similar standing from another of the Core Worlds in order to help maintain or enhance Alderaan's position in galactic politics. Everyone involved was always willing, and at least on Alderaan, most of those involved did already have feelings for each other. But there are always other considerations too when that much money and influence are involved."

She sighed in remembered exasperation, but again, there was a fondness to it. "I know my aunts certainly thought that my primary goal in life from approximately my 16th birthday onward should be to find myself a suitably princely husband and settle down," she said. "They pestered me with referrals of potential matches that they'd deemed 'suitable' so often that I was seriously considering lying to them and saying that I didn't like men just to get them to stop. I didn't but only because I was worried they'd start trying to set me up with women from those same noble houses; I tended to like them even less than the men, and the few I really did like I didn't want to potentially lead on."

She paused. "I'm fairly certain my aunts wold have fainted from shock if they heard I married your father," she said. "Mother and Father would have taken it better- they were never quite as strictly traditional as my aunts-, but still if Alderaan still existed, the princess running off and marrying a Corellian smuggler would have been quite a scandal."

[greyorder]

"Alderaan, its' royalty, the grandparents I could have had - when I was growing up, I could never truly make any of it real in my mind. Uncle Luke was concerned I lacked empathy." Which had stung, deeply, far more than Luke could have intended. "Such things were too vaguely described and poorly defined for me to picture. I think I have something of a better grasp now, between my own personal studies and your talking to me, but... to my generation, all that is Alderaanian is as a ghost."

His smile was small, sad, one he rarely shows. Nostalgia and what-could-be were things he wasn't fond of. The taste was bittersweet as ever. "I always envied those with grandparents, growing up. Doubtless I would have enlisted your mother in helping me smuggle in animals if I could have. Your father would have liked Tom-Tom, though; that tauntaun has always been friendly to every other living creature, and it wins people over, more often than not." He looked at his mother, brow furrowing. He knew that some cultures took meals seriously, but- "There's a proper and improper way to serve tea?" he asked, before he could censor himself.

"Appearances being important as they are to some, I think I would have 'accidentally' ruined that woman's dress had she been in my presence, as well. Having wealth is one thing, but to revel in it is nothing I would want to be associated with. Your aunts could dress me up to the nines and try to do something with my hair to make my huge ears less apparent, and I would undo it all with my mouth and my actions." Ben did grin a bit more genuinely at that, though. There was a playful side to him, mostly buried these days, that enjoyed seeing people react to things he did. It was a dangerous thing to like given the company he'd been keeping in the First Order, but something within him chafed under too many rules and regulations. "You need not worry about their reactions to Father. They would be too busy with whoever I had offended that week to remember he existed."

He swallowed thickly, pushing back the desire to ask what became of House Panteer. Likely they were gone or worse. Some things were not meant to be pried into even when someone was offering the information up freely. "I take back everything I have ever thought about my parentage making romance complicated. The level of politics it sounds like went into such marriages is worse, and nothing I would have been able to stomach. Though I saw glimpses of that amongst Outer Rim worlds' nobility, I was blessedly free of participation. The only time anyone mentioned marriage to me was when they were discussing their own. Or when Father would visit, he would tease Master Luke about having found the perfect woman for him." Ben wasn't the only one who did things just to get a reaction, after all. Han had gone as far as introducing Master Luke to a very lovely young female Wookie and watching the ensuing awkwardness had made a young Ben glad, at the time, that Jedi weren't supposed to have romantic attachments.

"I'm fairly sure you would not have cared if they fainted, so long as you well and truly loved him. There is nothing in existence that could get between you and who you love, and for all Father's flaws, he is very much the same. And neither of you are the kind to bend to public opinion, so eventually, they would have had to get used to it."

A million years late, but just wanted to round these out.

[motherofresistance]

Now that was a kind of smile that Leia knew very well, even if it was unfamiliar on Ben. She returned one of her own. "I'm sure she would have, as her duties permitted," she said. "And Tom-Tom would likely end up having his own, specially cooled stable in one of the gardens; few places on Alderaan could really have been called balmy, but summers in Alderaa City still got warm enough that it'd be uncomfortable for a tauntaun."

"And a tea, in this case, doesn't refer to the drink," she said. "It refers to a light meal served about midway between lunch and dinner. It features tea, obviously, but also things like pastries, finger sandwiches, scones, seasonal fruits and nuts, or sometimes small servings of things like soup or quiche. Teas were typically smaller gatherings for friends and were considered less formal than something like a dinner party, but there was still an etiquette to them. They often had a theme, and a lot of planning could go into setting up the menu if you were hosting one; choosing what foods would go best with the tea you planned to serve, what was appropriate for the setting, the guests you were inviting, the time of year, and a dozen other factors. And of course if someone was invited to tea at the palace, it had to be a cut above, so my aunts made sure I knew how to be a good hostess."

The smile became a bit more mischievous for a moment. "Oh I'm sure they'd find time to be worried about both," she said. "Though one big scandal would likely keep them more occupied than a dozen small ones, and would probably have more interesting results."

She nodded her understanding of Ben's opinion on politically motivated marriages. "It's something I grew up around, so I understood the necessity of it," she said. "It's not entirely about politics and appearances though. Whoever would have married me would have become the next Viceroy of Alderaan; that was no small job even when one wasn't also trying to organize a rebellion. My choice wouldn't have been mine alone; I'd be choosing for all of Alderaan, and I'd have had to choose someone I thought was capable of ruling beside me. My people deserved that."

"But yes, I'm sure that they'd all have eventually come around," she said. "We might have disagreed on any number of things, but we all loved each other. Once they'd seen that I love your father just as much, they would have relented. It just might have taken some time for them to understand that."

((OOC: You don't have to feel the need to reply to this or the other PSL; I just wanted to clear this and the other tag out. :3))