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Bail Organa wondered often about the little girl who had trailed so dutifully beside Senator Chuchi that day in lower Coruscant.
Riyo was young, and ambitious, and - much like himself - an optimist of perhaps the worst breed; Riyo believed that she could fix things. She believed that she could defy the new Imperial regime, bring about change under Palpatine’s totalitarian rule, steer the newborn Empire towards a brighter Galactic future while still clinging to what was left of the civil law she was tasked, as a Senator, with upholding. She was gentle and she was kind, and she was persistent. She shook hands, she smiled at children and she meant it, she held doors open for strangers as though her guards weren’t there to do it for her. And Bail, gods bless his soul, for all of his hypocrisies and sameness in past, knew that it made her something of a fool, in the beginning. Kindness would never ‘thrive’ under the Empire. But she was too sweet, too polite, for him to ever consider TELLING her that.
Her investigation into the Tipoca City tragedy had been the exception. As soon as he had recognized that she was REALLY digging around, getting her hands dirty, his intrigue had been too potent to ignore. He had recognized a long time before then, well before it had even been properly brought to the attention of the Imperial Senate, that it was too timely of a loss to have been a natural disaster. Not with the increase in contracted soldiers before and since, not with the strange and sudden disappearance of clone troopers who had been stationed on the same routes for well over three years, and certainly not how it took almost every Kaminoan life with it; no, if it had really been a storm like Admiral Rampart initially reported, there would have been SOME effort made to evacuate. There would have been survivors.
It was simply too convenient that seemly nobody ‘lived to tell the tale’, as it were.
So he had supported Riyo’s pursuit of the truth, if only to fuel his own budding Rebellion with the affirmation that they could expose the Empire for SOMETHING, after he had spent nearly a year trying to do just that, only to make the target on his back larger than it already had been since the Delegation of Two Thousand shot him in the foot. Rampart is young, an almost easy target, for all the impressive effort that he tried to put into covering up the fact that he had given the order to bomb Tipoca City clean. It went deeper than that, they all knew (Riyo, Rampart, Palpatine), but it was better than coming away from the whole affair with nothing to show for it. It was a step in the right direction, if nothing else.
And sure, it kept him awake at night, knowing that Palpatine had escaped the blame with a carefully-placed patsy and twelve steps between him and the executioner. He lost sleep over the ruling for how it had only served to further damn the clone troopers to hell for being named complacent. He would drag his feet for years to come, weighed down by the blood on his hands, all of the noble men who would find themselves victims of the decommissioning order that would wipe most of them out before that year was over. For all Riyo had been careful, she had been several steps behind, as he was finding became usual when their opponent was the Supreme Chancellor.
But he would never lose as much sleep over any of those things, as he did that mysterious child.
She was short, tan, her face round still with baby fat. No older than ten, he could guess. A mop of tousled blonde hair covered her forehead, the tips of her ears. A too-big shawl - borrowed, he’d assume - was wrapped around her shoulders, whether for disguise or for warmth, he could never decide. It all would have been endearing, were it not for the circumstances of their meeting. Bail found it odd, that a little girl of that age, hardly up to his waist, was marching around with Senator Chuchi asking questions about the Kaminoan genocide as though it was normal. She stuck close enough to Riyo that he knew she was trusted, but he couldn’t help but feel put off by it all, back then.
What bothered him most, perhaps, was that she’d never given a name.
She had been polite, when she greeted him in the alley where they met, but she had otherwise left most of the talking as well as the formalities to Riyo. They didn’t have much time, as it was, nor were they truly safe so long as they were poking around in Rampart’s business. He had gotten Riyo’s tip killed, after all. Pressed for time would have been an understatement.
He acknowledged her, of course, said hello, answered what few questions she raised, - things like ‘who’ and ‘where’ and ‘what’s that’ that are oh-so typical of children - and… well, that was about it. He was otherwise too busy making sure he covered his bases, filled Riyo in like he’d set out to do, that he’d hardly had time to dwell on her in the moment.
Bail only ever saw her again when she delivered Rampart’s command log directly to his hands mid-trial, and there was even LESS time to stop and say hello. When the Senate proceedings concluded, - with Rampart arrested, and the clone army vanquished in one breath - she had already disappeared without so much as a word or a prayer or a message left behind with Riyo’s guards. If not for the fact that they had spoken face-to-face, he would have wondered if she wasn’t some figment of his exhausting imagination.
Riyo never mentioned her again, and that certainly didn’t help any. All the same, he assumed the child had come from her ‘associates’ that had handled the evidence, but for all of what he assumed are the obvious reasons, she never spoke of them again, either. It shouldn’t have been a big deal; he’s no stranger to underhand dealings, secret second lives, investigations in the dark. Even before the Empire, before the Clone War, before Palpatine, thus was life in the political sphere. For as kosher as he tried to be, not all of his colleagues, not even Padmé, walked Senate halls with clean hands and bare records. Riyo was entering that world in earnest. Bail knew better than to push for more than he was given.
Looking back since, however, he’s never been able to shake the feeling that she was familiar.
The oddity of such a young kid getting so deeply involved in something as dangerous as exposing murderers would have been enough to leave an impression. How she got wrapped up with Riyo or Rampart in the first place, he was too afraid to guess. But there was more to that little girl than he would ever understand, that much he knew.
He saw it in the way she squared her shoulders, held her chin up high, kept her gaze forward and ready. He noticed how she exchanged looks with Riyo, here and there, as though processing the information he was giving them in sync. She was dutiful in the way she asked her questions, purposeful in the way she anticipated answers. It was almost calculating, the way she took everything in with a great deal of serious consideration etched into her features that was well beyond her years. Her accent cracked when she punctuated her sentences, adolescent through and through, yet the sobriety, the acceptance, in her confirmations made him wonder if she was expecting his responses, grave as they were. Names and places and ideas, tied to accomplices in a slaughter. He noticed how her brow furrowed, when he mentioned Halle Burtoni by occupation as though she KNEW, by some strange association, who that was, not for her name, but for her former responsibility.
The child was not quite guarded, not enough for him to assess that she was ‘cold’, but she was careful. Intentional. Had she been taller and older, he would have mistaken her for another one of Riyo’s aides. She peered around corners when they came in the alleys, she checked back over her shoulder once or twice, the way a crooning nuna scans the land for threats from treetops. She would lean, here and there, into Riyo’s side where she stood on her left and check around the right. When she wasn’t taking in their surroundings, - dim lights, dim doors, walls on either side, garbage strewn about the ground waiting to be swept up by the tailwind of a speeder - she was staring directly in front of her, keeping a perfectly timed pace with both of her feet, and had she been holding a blaster, she would have been the spitting image of a soldier marching into battle.
It was equal parts impressive and unnerving, and Bail had to fight with his conscience to keep it from showing on his face whenever she addressed him.
He would never know, in spite of how the curiosity ate away at him, who she really was, or what brought her there. It must have been some tragedy, some REAL force of nature that had tied her to the interest of sniffing out the first of what would prove to be thousands of Imperial genocide agendas in the years to come. In the muted alleys of lower Coruscant, he would never perfectly commit her face to memory well enough to recognize her if he saw her again, nor could he place her to a larger people. And as time passed, so too did his memory of what she had reminded him of at the time, a fleeting thought he had had when they met, that had gotten swept up in the chaos of the coup.
But Bail would never forget HER.
Bail had grown up in comfort. He went to a good school. His parents treated him well. Alderaan was prosperous, wealthy, and well-regarded. He had married a Queen. He lived in a palace. He became a politician before he was old enough to order at a bar. He was respected for his family name, for his spouse, for his social standing, one after the next. He was chauffeured to and from Coruscant in the comfort of private shuttles and cushioned back seats of hover taxis fit with cup holders for flute glasses.
To say that he had never experienced hardship wouldn’t have been fair. He had seen famine, death, poverty and war, both on other worlds, as well as his own. As a boy, he had lost his mother. As a Senator, he had made decisions of life or death for his people, and chosen incorrectly. He had seen mangled corpses of women and children and soldiers, innocents, desperate for little more than the basic satisfaction of a warm meal and a good night’s rest. He had gotten caught in skirmishes on the ground and in the air, been wounded as a casualty of misunderstanding, scorned and scolded for choices that he made, that families of the fallen blamed on him. He had been arrested for the Delegation, in his attempt to make change, withheld from his family, locked up and ignored and interrogated because he had TRIED to do better.
But Bail was privileged, and he knew it.
Others have had it harder, lost worse, and he knew it.
At ten years old, he never would have been able to survive it, whatever tragedy it was that pulled her into his bubble on Coruscant that day, for the plain and simple sake of bringing the corruption of the rich to justice.
He never would have risked his young life to bring peace to the dead.
And so he could never forget her.
Rebellion often felt impossible. The Empire was stronger, better, faster. And they were watching; Palpatine was always watching. Organizing resistance was signing a death warrant. Hunting a paper trail of the Emperor’s affairs was following bread crumbs to the business end of a blaster. As the loyalist, empathetic clone troopers began to fade out into little more than memory, and ruthless, blood-hungry conscripts started pouring in eager to take a shot at a civilian riot for the fun of it, speaking out against injustice became a futile plea for change. Caskets lined the paths of pioneers. Old Separatist worlds were massacred, or occupied, or both, whether they agreed to the new Regime or not. Rebellion became as simple and incomplex as disagreement, and Bail watched the Imperial entourage kill their own officers for it.
That little girl was playing with fire, baring herself to a Galaxy that surely wanted to kill her, no matter how young, no matter how kind, no matter how well-intentioned, for the simple fact that she was willing to ask the hard questions. What’s worse, is that she seemed to understand that. How could she not, if she had gotten so far as to wind up beside Senator Chuchi right as the eye of the storm found her caught up in its winds? Not once did he watch her shrink back or wonder ‘why?’. The Empire, still so new, younger even than she, rash and bold and determined to set a violent precedent for any wary outliers that might emerge with time, meant nothing to her for all of its size and its power. No, that little girl was not afraid of anything, and he could see it in the way she carried herself as though she were the only thing standing between Palpatine, and total Galactic annihilation.
Meanwhile, even in his old age, Bail Organa can’t help but keep his affairs strictly to the shadows, terrified that he might find himself next up on the ever-growing list of barely qualified insurgents crucified for speaking their minds.
He felt arrogant, in comparison. Stupid.
So, for all of the oddity of it, for all that it gets lost in the obscurity of importance - economic crisis and relief efforts and political turnover and Senatorial debate and Imperial growth and military power - that follows, he never forgets her.
What it was that motivated her, is just another mystery. Bravery, defiance, duty. Or perhaps it was all she had. Perhaps it was purpose.
It never matters.
All he can hope, really, as he rocks his infant daughter to sleep at night, - tucks her into bed when she’s older, kisses the top of her head and promises to see her in the morning - is that Leia will grow up to be as bold and indomitable as the little girl on Coruscant who dared to light the spark of the Rebellion so many years ago.