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

[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))