Time for a woman to woman talk

[motherofresistance]

Who: Leia and Baridi Sangura (Star Wars OC)
When: At some point during the Leia and Gray!Ben PSL
Where: Leia's quarters and also THE FORCE
What: Leia needs to have a Serious Talk with her son's role model.
Warnings: Talk of eating disorders, self harm, mental illness, death, and possibly past violence

Leia sat on a cushion in her quarters focusing on deepening her meditation. The sapling of the Force-Sensitive tree from Poe's family's farm that he'd been kind enough to donate helped greatly to that end; she planned to give it to Ben later, but for now, it stayed with her. She needed the extra focus that trees tended to provide her for this; she was searching for something that might not even be there. Not every Force-user who died retained their consciousness after death. Indeed most didn't, simply dissolving into the ocean of cosmic energy that was the Unifying Force.

But if what, or rather who, she was searching for did exist, then no one stood a better chance of finding her than Leia. Because once Leia Organa set her mind to something there was very little that could stop her, and she had very good reason to set her mind to this task. Nonetheless she knew better than to push. She let the Force guide her, drifting from one thread of energy to the next, searching, but never pressing, searching for a single, long lost presence among the vastness of the stars and galaxies.

Until... there. A presence she'd never encountered before but knew instantly as the one she was seeking. Currently invisible, but clear as day in the Force. "Baridi Sangura," Leia said. "We need to talk."

Comments

/holds close

[someone_purer]

Legends were not kind in regards to influencing Baridi's feelings on fate. Fate had become something the Jedi and Sith alike were overly invested in, infested by, the idea outweighing common sense at points, and now here she was, thousands of years later, seeing the ugly end results of that focus manifest.

"The universe favors that view of wartime heroes, especially if they were desperate at the time. They project onto someone the image of perfection they need to believe exists so they have someone to strive to emulate. You can imagine how toxic that immediately became in my case. They didn't tell of my ragged appearance or my hours on the steps on the Jedi Temple calling out to those inside because I had convinced myself so completely that this was my only option at a future. They make my attempts to get the Force to be strong within me sound much more graceful than it was.

Before I was with the Jedi, even when I was with the Sith and at peak power and respect, my life was never fully mine," she began, as the start of an explanation that made her face look younger as she went on, less battle-hardened. "I was an experiment, in that so much Dark Side energy had never been channeled through a child at so young an age, even on Korriban. I met and exceeded expectations, but there were always expectations, never choices. At no point was I allowed to explore other things to be, other ways to be. I was particular about the precious few things I could control: my hair, my clothes, and my food. I had nothing else. I couldn't refuse anyone anything else. There wasn't anything else I had firmly in my own hands.

When I ran from the Sith, after meeting the Force Ghost of my mother, I suddenly went from having no choices to having every single one. I was..." Scared, terrified, alone in a giant universe? She opted for a better, more concise word instead, fiddling with her hair. "I was overwhelmed. I needed to pull on the Force for guidance more than ever, and my resources were fewer than ever. The Force will save one of its' own, but I didn't know that at the time. I didn't come up with some incredible strategy to coerce the Force into myself; it took me two months to locate and get to a Jedi Temple. I rarely had promise of when my next meal was coming, so I hoarded food rather than eat it, and in so doing, I accidentally stumbled into the realization starving enhanced my connection to the Force.

When the Jedi shut me out for being too old for training and too tainted by the remnants of the Dark Side, I couldn't take it, couldn't take thinking perhaps my fate truly was to be a Sith monster. So I found a way to bring up my Force connection to the point they had to let me in out of fear of what someone like myself would do in league with the Sith. I bent their will to mine not out of determination or valor or whatever other value they've assigned me this century.

I was backed into a corner and the only way out was through. At the time, I assumed it was something I'd stop once they let me in. This was never intended to be a permanent solution or a meditation."

She rubs at her temples, tired. Beyond tired, even; frustrated and exhausted with herself and the galaxy as well, because nothing ever seemed to end. Every time she had thought she had a good, solid grip on the world around her, she found out she didn't. All she could control in the end, Jedi or Sith, could be summed up in terms of physical, bodily attributes. Now, in the afterlife, she's lost that, too.

Getting this tagged after a million years. X3 No need to reply if you don't want to.

[motherofresistance]

Leia listened, and found herself understanding more than she expected. She'd grown up a princess, and though it wasn't to such an extreme degree as what Baridi had experienced, she knew all too well what it was like to be bound by a life of duty and expectations. A number of times in her life she had clung to duty at the expense of herself, her feelings, even common sense, because often, duty was all she had. Her appearance shifted as she thought about this, becoming younger, a figure in a shining white gown with her hair in an elaborate arrangement of braids. Princess Leia Organa.

She wondered if she had unwittingly passed this emphasis on duty over self to her son before he was old enough to really understand it. And at the same time she reached out to Baridi, offering her this understanding. Something a Jedi, whose understanding of selflessness was very different, probably wouldn't have been able to share. And also the tiredness that was as much of the soul as of the body. Tiredness that came from fighting for so long in so many ways and never quite seeing the end of it that you'd hoped for. For a moment the young Princess shimmered into the old General, before settling back.

"Things like that seldom are meant as permanent solutions," Leia said. "Just a fix for the problem at hand. But as they say, 'the best laid plans of sea-mice and men...'" She trailed off, leaving the saying open-ended and gesturing for Baridi to continue.