Work Text:
Leia Organa, newly appointed Imperial Senator for Alderaan, had been quite thoroughly briefed before her arrival on Coruscant.
There’d been the private meeting with the Queen (which was really just a chat over breakfast – it was hard to maintain formality when the Queen was also your mother). There’d been the official briefing with the Queen’s Council, and the extensive reading she’d been given on the history of her position, her role and responsibilities as a representative of Alderaan, and a good deal of background material on the history of the Imperial Senate and its various members. There’d been the official welcome packet from Coruscant (which she found much less useful, but which she read through anyway).
And there had been the other briefing. This one was conducted secretly, in a room swept three times for bugs, and no records of the meeting were ever made. She left it with codes, names, and numbers committed to memory, and the knowledge that she held a world’s fate in her hands.
None of those briefings had prepared her for meeting Darth Vader.
She’d bowed to the Emperor, made the proper obeisance and observed all the pleasantries, and she thought she’d done an admirable job of keeping her revulsion from showing on her face. He hadn’t even seemed especially interested in her: there were four other new senators being received as well, and the overall impression she had of Palpatine was of someone just barely tolerating tedium. She wondered why he bothered. He was the Emperor, after all.
“This is Lord Vader,” the Emperor had said, waving an almost careless hand. “He will continue the introductions.” And that had been the end of the audience.
Leia was underwhelmed. She’d prepared herself for an immediate test of her acting skills, for keeping a blank face and steely eyes in the face of supreme evil, and he’d barely even looked at her.
“This way,” Vader rumbled abruptly, and he swept off without a backward glance at any of them. Leia exchanged a look with her colleagues, but Vader showed no signs of slowing, and she had to half-run to catch up to him.
He was utterly inscrutable. His voice was a carefully enunciated baritone, nearly toneless for all that, and she spent the first half of their whirlwind tour around the Senate Hall trying to decide if it was robotic or a sarcasm so finely honed as to be nearing performance art. By the time they reached the Senate rotunda, she still hadn’t made up her mind.
“The Emperor is pleased that you will all be joining him in his efforts to improve our great Empire,” Vader said. His voice was rich with resonance and still, somehow, managed to sound perfectly flat.
Leia blinked. She glanced rapidly at the other senators, but they all looked merely attentive and vaguely nervous, though some were better at hiding it than others.
They all mumbled some appropriately meaningless response, and Leia thought she must have said something too, but her attention was caught on Vader. There was nothing in his posture or his tone that indicated anything other than perfect sincerity, with perhaps a touch of annoyance. She’d watched him bow to the Emperor on his knees. She knew what he was. Her father had even warned her against him specially, though he hadn’t given her much in the way of specifics. And she’d heard more than enough stories about him.
But she couldn’t shake the sudden feeling that there was something off about him. That he was hiding something. That he knew something.
And that thought should have terrified her. It should have, but it didn’t. She stared at his impenetrable mask and imagined that if she only looked hard enough, she could read the thoughts and intentions behind it.
Vader took a sudden step forward, and Leia started, snapping her gaze away and staring at the floor as her pulse thundered against her ribs.
But all he said was, “You are dismissed,” as though he’d forgotten he was addressing Imperial Senators and not his troops. None of them were brave enough to correct him. They scattered, making vague noises of thanks so as not to look too eager to escape. Leia turned to go herself.
“Senator Organa,” Vader rumbled, and she froze.
He stepped around to face her. The mask was as blankly serene as always, but she could feel his eyes on her, cutting through her with all the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. Too late, she remembered the many rumors about him and his strange powers of observation.
If he read her now, everything might be up before she’d even begun.
Leia held herself still and straight. She imagined that her mind was a mountain stream, flowing clear and musical over tumbled stones. She told herself she was not afraid.
She was a bit surprised to realize that it was true.
At last she felt his eyes leave hers. “I look forward to working with you, Your Highness,” he said. And then with a sweep of his cloak he was gone.
*
Leia took her time returning to Alderaan’s Senatorial offices. Her father’s aides – well, her aides now – were all in a frenzy, worried that she’d gotten lost or been attacked (or been discovered, they didn’t say), and she did her best to reassure them. She didn’t mention anything about Darth Vader.
The rest of the day was spent in more briefings and meetings and a painfully tedious Senate gala ostensibly meant to welcome the newest Senators, but in fact, as far as Leia could tell, really only meant as an excuse for expensive alcohol and inane chatter and the proper showing of arm candy.
Darth Vader wasn’t there. She didn’t know why she’d looked for him, exactly. She had no real reason to believe that he would be as disgusted as she was.
She made her excuses as early as possible. The Senator from Kashyyyk (the human senator, she noted) joked that it was only to be expected: the Republic’s capital world was very different from Alderaan’s rural mountain ranges, and she was still very young of course. Leia bit her tongue and let him have the jibe – it got her what she wanted, after all.
Her apartment was cold and sterile and she very nearly fell into bed fully dressed, but of course Fiura wouldn’t let her.
“Let’s at least get you out of this gown, Your Highness,” she tutted, and Leia sighed and allowed herself to be maneuvered out of the voluminous gown and into a simple nightdress. She flopped back on the bed almost immediately, and Fiura laughed, bustling around the room tidying up her clothing and chattering lightly without expecting any response.
Leia smiled to herself and had nearly drifted off to sleep when Fiura shook her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Your Highness,” she said. “But you left this in your pocket, and I doubt you want to lose it.”
Leia blinked her eyes open. Fiura was holding a small datastick made of sleek, dark, unmarked metal. She was certain she’d never seen it before.
Suddenly she wasn’t tired at all. But she was a good actress.
Fiura left the datastick on her night table and slipped out, murmuring “Sleep well, Leia,” as she flicked off the light. Leia lay in the dark, counting her breaths, until she heard the other woman’s door open and then close again. Then she sprang up.
The datastick was encrypted, of course. She hadn’t really expected anything else. But she hadn’t expected the encryption to be so hard to break.
She ran it through several standard programs. She tried codes. There were the Alderaanian Embassy codes, and the Palace codes, and even the private Organa codes.
When nothing worked, Leia took a deep breath, ran a thorough secondary check for bugs in the room, and tried the Rebel codes.
The first six she tried were no more effective than any of the others. But the seventh gave her access.
Leia sucked in a sharp breath. There was only one person in the galaxy who used that code. And she wasn’t supposed to know about them at all.
There were two files on the datastick. One was under further encryption, and no codes she tried could get her access. But the other was a simple document, easily accessible.
Give this to your father, it said.
*
The Senate met in session for the first time on Leia’s third day in Imperial Center.
She woke early and in a foul mood. She was due at a meeting with Senator Orn Free Taa of Ryloth, a man she’d met only once and already despised, and whose odious presence she would have to endure for an entire hour. And to make matters worse, her father was being unusually tight-lipped with her.
She’d transferred the encrypted data to him last night, sent it over a channel secured seven ways and on a frequency she’d never used before. Bail wouldn’t tell her why. He wouldn’t say anything about what was on the datastick, or who had given it to her, or why. He’d looked almost frightened when she told him about it, and then he’d simply said, “Be careful, Leia. Please. Your mother and I worry.”
It must have been important, whatever it was. Certainly more important than this pointless meeting with Orn Free Taa.
Leia scowled to herself and stabbed viciously at her breakfast. Across from her, the Twi’lek senator prattled on, talking about the many amenities of Coruscant life and the perks of being an Imperial senator. Behind him, his three “aides” huddled together, eyes cast on the floor. Leia’s stomach churned, and she gave up any attempt at eating.
She knew her father had contact with someone on the inside. Someone high up. Important. Maybe even part of the Emperor’s inner circle. And she knew it wasn’t common knowledge in the Rebellion. Even she wasn’t supposed to know.
But Leia was a better spy than her father gave her credit for. She’d always had a knack for hacking systems, and Bail had always encouraged her; it was, after all, a skill she would need. But she didn’t think he’d realized just how much she had learned.
He certainly knew now. The message she’d sent on last night had been encrypted in a code used by only one person.
Ekkreth. Leia knew the name, though she wasn’t supposed to. No one else in the Rebellion knew even that much, she was sure.
And that meant Ekkreth was someone she’d met. Someone at the gala. It had to be. She’d considered the possibility that the datastick had been delivered by a proxy, but Leia herself was already a go-between, and Ekkreth was a top level operative. They wouldn’t risk involving too many people.
But Ekkreth had involved Leia. And not just as an unknowing carrier of information. The message, Give this to your father, had been intended for her. And it had been encrypted.
Ekkreth had expected Leia to be able to crack the code.
Her spine stiffened at the thought, and she only remembered where she was when Senator Taa took enough of a break from his extended monologue to ask if she was quite well.
“Oh, yes, pardon me,” she said sweetly, and he went right on discussing the economic advantages of the Empire’s clever use of sentient resources.
Leia ground her teeth. Slavery. He was talking about slavery.
She sat in seething silence for the rest of their so-called meeting, and escaped to her office as quickly as possible. She didn’t really need to prepare for the day’s Senate session. The only thing on the agenda was a proposed amendment to Coruscant’s traffic laws. But it was as good an excuse as any to get away.
“What kind of civilized government legalizes slavery?” she hissed under her breath, scowling at the mechanism on her office door, which seemed to be taking longer than usual to read her ID.
“You might be surprised, Your Highness,” said a deep voice directly behind her. It was only then that she registered the sound of mechanized breathing.
Leia spun around, her own breath quickening as she tried to keep the terror from showing on her face. “Lord Vader!” she gasped. “I didn’t realize – ”
“That,” said Vader, “is obvious.” He was standing just there, his hands clasped behind his back, that expressionless mask regarding her levelly. There was nothing at all to indicate emotion in his stance or bearing.
And yet, Leia couldn’t shake the feeling that he was laughing at her.
“You are unwise to be so free with your opinions, Your Highness,” he said, and nothing about his posture changed in the least.
It was a threat. It had to be a threat. It certainly sounded like one, and he was Darth Vader. She couldn’t imagine he was in the habit of giving advice to careless green senators.
So why did it feel like he was doing just that?
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Leia snapped, and Vader inclined his head – it wasn’t mocking, and there was absolutely no reason for her to think it was – and left without another word.
Finally, the reader on her door chimed, and Leia slipped as quickly as possible into her office, all but collapsing into her chair. She breathed in slow, measured breaths, just the way she’d been taught, and told herself that her mind didn’t feel as though it were buzzing with a nameless energy.
She hadn’t ruined anything, she told herself. It was perfectly acceptable to hold an anti-slavery position in the Empire.
Even if it did run counter to the Emperor’s own position.
The door buzzed again, and Fiura entered, a stack of datapads in her arms. “Good morning, Your Highness!” she said brightly, depositing them in a messy spread across Leia’s desk. “How was your meeting with Senator Taa?”
“Very strange,” muttered Leia, though she wasn’t really talking about the senator at all. She had just realized she didn’t know why Vader had been there in the first place, or what he could have wanted from her. Whatever it was, she hoped he’d left without it.
*
Vader was present for that Senate session. He stood silently looming on the observation deck above the Senate rotunda, supposedly unobtrusive, and certainly not participating. But his presence cast a pall across the chamber. The atmosphere was thick with a nervous energy, and Leia’s colleagues were unusually reticent and in some cases even almost twitchy.
She watched them all with interest, but mostly she watched him.
She should have been frightened, Leia knew. She’d certainly been unnerved earlier that day, when he overheard her so vocally disagreeing with their illustrious Emperor. And he was obviously here as a show of force. He probably even enjoyed it. Everyone here was intimidated by him, and none of them were doing a very good job of hiding it.
So there was absolutely no reason why she should imagine that he was annoyed by the whole spectacle. Or that he might actually be bored behind that black death mask.
But she was imagining it, and really, Leia had to admit, it was a pretty good image. She could even sympathize with him, this imaginary Vader: the Emperor had already been speaking for nearly forty minutes, and Leia had tuned out his droning long ago. And he had a pretty good set up, didn’t he, behind that mask? If she was Vader, she’d probably be napping right now. Who would know?
Leia bit her lip to stifle a wholly inappropriate giggle. The Emperor was still speaking.
The speech went on for some twenty minutes more, and then they were finally allowed to vote on the traffic bill. Vader slipped out immediately after the vote was announced (passing, of course), and she didn’t see him again that day.
*
That night, Leia found another datastick in her pocket.
Although she knew what she would find, she ran all the decryptions again. There was only one accessible document.
It said, Give this to your father.
*
Leia hadn’t realized, when she decided to become a Rebel spy, just how tedious it would be.
She’d imagined – well, even with her parents’ briefings, to be honest she’d imagined clandestine meetings late at night in abandoned facilities, creeping through air vents and hacking into systems for information, maybe even desperate speeder chases through the lower levels of Coruscant or last minute escapes from certain death.
What she hadn’t imagined was paperwork. She hadn’t imagined dry-as-dust meetings with stodgy old bureaucrats, or the utter inanity of the vast majority of her daily tasks. She hadn’t imagined that even audiences with the Emperor would be mundane and largely pointless.
Leia felt like she wasn’t really doing anything. The machinery of the Empire ground on, unchanged and utterly banal. She hadn’t discovered any secrets of great importance, or rescued anyone from persecution at the hands of the Empire, or even managed to pass on any real information to the Rebellion.
Or at least, she wouldn’t have, if not for Ekkreth.
The datasticks continued appearing regularly in her pockets. There was no set frequency to their appearance: sometimes she’d go as much as a week between datasticks, and sometimes there would be a new one nearly every day. And she still hadn’t managed to get anything out of them other than the one message. Give this to your father, they said, every time.
Bail certainly knew what that meant, and he certainly knew who Ekkreth really was. She hadn’t been sure at first – sometimes, their agents’ true identities were entirely unknown. But Leia was quite sure now. Her father was far too worried about her involvement, even more so than could be explained by the high level nature of the contact.
He wouldn’t tell her anything, though.
She knew this was mostly a matter of security. The Rebellion functioned at least as much on what its operatives didn’t know as on what they did. And certainly things would become much more dangerous for her if she knew Ekkreth’s identity.
That didn’t stop her wanting to know. Leia was involved in something big, something important. And she wanted to know what.
*
Vader didn’t attend every Senate session. And there was very little rhyme or reason to those he did attend.
Sometimes he seemed almost omnipresent in the senatorial complex, so much so that Leia actually did a bit of snooping to see if he had an office there, but he didn’t.
He didn’t have an official space anywhere, as far as she could tell.
Everyone addressed him as Lord Vader, which must have been a title, but Leia couldn’t determine what it was in relation to. He didn’t hold a position within the Imperial hierarchy. He certainly wasn’t Lord of any planet or system. And he didn’t hold a military rank, either.
In fact, the more digging she did, the more Leia began to realize she had no idea what it was that Darth Vader actually did.
There were the rumors, of course. Each of them seemed worse than the last. Assassin. Torturer. Spy. The Emperor’s iron fist. Jedi. Jedi killer.
Leia’s parents had told her, in whispers, the truth about the Jedi. That they had been keepers of the peace and defenders of justice in the old Republic, and that the Emperor had brought about their destruction because they were a threat to him. She couldn’t imagine someone like that siding with the Emperor, so of course Vader couldn’t be a Jedi.
Though he did carry a lightsaber. And some of the darker rumors whispered that he could read emotions or even thoughts, and that he could pull the answers to his questions directly out of his victims’ minds.
But Leia hadn’t actually caught a glimpse of Vader in nearly two weeks now. No one knew where he was, though she could tell her fellow senators were relieved by his absence. The bills they debated in session were no more substantial than usual, but they seemed less concerned about that.
Leia sighed, glancing down at her datapad, which was covered in doodles. One of them showed the Emperor frolicking in a field of butterflies. She should probably erase that one.
On the Senate floor, the representative from Malastare was presenting a proposal for a new state holiday in celebration of Palpatine’s birthday.
Leia erased her doodles and stared down at the blank screen. She hadn’t received any datasticks in two weeks, either. The whispers about Vader buzzed in her mind. Assassin. Torturer.
She hoped Ekkreth was safe.
*
It was a whole week more before she received another datastick. As she ran the decryptions, Leia made a mental inventory of every place she’d been that day and every person she’d interacted with. It was a surprisingly short list.
She’d had breakfast in her apartments that morning, and spent most of the day either in her office or in session. The only people she’d spoken with in anything like close quarters were Fiura, Senator Pooja Naberrie of Naboo, the members of the Regional Governors Oversight Committee (a joke of a committee with no real power to speak of, she thought viciously), and Darth Vader.
She knew Ekkreth wasn’t Fiura. Her aide was already in her confidence when it came to Rebel activity – there would have been no reason for the deception. And she couldn’t imagine her parents being terrified at the idea of her interacting with Fiura, either.
For a time, she seriously considered Pooja Naberrie. The other woman hadn’t said anything at all that would indicate she was sympathetic to the cause, and she hailed from the Emperor’s home planet. But Leia had a – well, a feeling about her. It wasn’t something she could explain, exactly, but she’d always been able to read people well, and she felt certain that Pooja was not nearly as loyal a citizen of the Empire as she appeared.
However true that was, though, the plain fact was that she’d only really had any interaction with Pooja in the last five weeks. And she’d been receiving messages from Ekkreth for months now.
The members of the committee… Leia had always thought the majority of them were boot licking toadies, but now she allowed for the possibility that for one of them, at least, it might be an act. If so, they were a very good actor. Leia snorted to herself.
But she’d received some of the datasticks on days when she hadn’t met with the committee. And while she occasionally interacted with some of the members outside of committee meetings, there wasn’t a single one of them she’d seen on every day that she received one of Ekkreth’s messages.
But she had seen Vader.
Leia’s mind nearly stalled at the thought. It was ridiculous. It was impossible. He was Darth Vader.
But…
Vader had been there in the Senate session that morning, looming above the rotunda as casually as if he’d never been away, as silent as always. Leia had spent the entirety of the session listening with half an ear and watching him surreptitiously in the mirrored surface of her pod’s console. He’d looked no different than he ever did. She’d had no reason at all for imagining that he was tired, maybe even half asleep on his feet.
But she had imagined it.
And she’d nearly run into him at the session’s end. That should have been nearly impossible – Vader was huge, and the measured breathing of his respirator was quite distinctive. But Leia was starting to think he had some way of silencing it when he wished, because this was the second time she hadn’t heard him coming at all.
“Your Highness,” he’d said, as inflectionless as always. But she’d felt him watching her.
Leia still didn’t know what had possessed her to say it. Perhaps it was her ridiculous image from earlier, of Vader exhausted and aching, waiting out the Senate session. Whatever it was, she’d looked him straight in the mask and said, “Welcome back, Lord Vader.”
For a long moment, he hadn’t said anything, but his breath had quickened for the barest instant, and Leia was certain, though she had no evidence to support her certainty, that she’d surprised him. Then he said, “Thank you, Your Highness.”
And that was it. They went their separate ways.
And a few short hours later, when she put her hand in her pocket, there was a datastick.
The decryption programs were still running, but Leia wasn’t paying any attention to them now. She was staring out her window at the long lines of traffic streaming through Coruscant’s night.
Ekkreth was someone with access to the highest levels of Imperial government. Maybe even someone in the Emperor’s inner circle. Her father knew Ekkreth’s identity, but no one else did. Her father was apparently terrified of her interacting with Ekkreth, and wouldn’t tell her anything about them. Her father trusted Ekkreth, but maybe not completely.
She’d interacted with Vader at least once on every single day she’d received a datastick. Vader had been gone from Coruscant for three weeks, and for three weeks there had been no messages from Ekkreth.
Her console beeped, signaling that the decryptions were complete. The only accessible document said the same thing it always did. Give this to your father.
Leia did. She set up the now-familiar seven-way encrypted channel, and passed the unknown information on to Bail and Breha on Alderaan.
And when it was done, she collected the datastick, erased all record of her activity, and went to sleep.
*
The real problem with her plan, Leia quickly realized, was that no one sought out Darth Vader. She couldn’t exactly request a meeting with him under some pretense, as she would have done with some of her Senate contacts. They had to run into each other naturally, and it would have to happen in public.
Finally, in desperation, Leia resorted to the age old tactic of bumping into him in a corridor. She didn’t even have to fake her cringing in the aftermath. As spy techniques went, it was almost pathetic.
But it did the trick. Her message was delivered, and now all she had to do was wait. And hope she hadn’t made a horrible mistake.
*
She’d chosen an old abandoned hangar bay in the Works for their meeting place. Leia could admit, if only to herself, that part of her reasoning had been the atmospheric look of the place. But it was also centrally located and infrequently patrolled, and she’d chosen a spot where she could easily see everything happening, both within the hangar and in the surrounding district. She fingered the blaster at her side, clicked the safety off, and waited.
She’d been there nearly an hour already when she felt the eyes on her. She hadn’t seen him arrive, and she hadn’t heard his distinctive breathing, either, but she knew he was there. She could feel it.
Leia stood slowly and came around the pile of dilapidated crates she’d been using as cover. Vader’s breathing was suddenly audible just to her right, and she turned to find him, a darker black against the darkness of the hangar.
“Your Highness,” he said.
Leia sucked in a breath of her own. This was it, she thought with a morbid internal chuckle. Either she was right, or she was dead.
“Lord Vader,” she said, and held out the datastick between them. “If you’re going to involve me in this, I think I deserve to know what’s going on.”
For a long moment, there was no sound but his breathing. Leia could feel his eyes on her, searching. And then she felt something else, strange and yet oddly familiar, like a brush across her mind.
“Your name is – Leia,” said Vader.
She might have made some sarcastic comment: of course that was her name – it was hardly a secret. But something in his voice stopped her. It was the first real inflection she’d ever heard there, and for once, it fit perfectly with the emotion she couldn’t seem to stop herself from imagining in him. He sounded almost…wistful.
“Yes,” Leia said into the strange fragility of the moment.
His breathing filled the stillness of the hangar.
“My name,” said Vader, “is Ekkreth.”