At the end of all things, there is a waiting room.
It's fairly typical, as these things go. Thin, scratchy carpet. Fish tank with still fish. Old gossip magazines. Incredibly uncomfortable chairs. The low buzz of a television or radio or something somewhere else, words indistinguishable. No windows, no clock, no door, and the receptionist's desk is shuttered.
This one's a bit special, though.
Uh huh.
She wants to keep poking holes in this, because she knows that the Emperor is evil, but she is five and does not know all the places to poke holes.
How did Anakin Skywalker die?
On planet, yes. Off planet - once she's older, certainly. If her parents are traveling somewhere for work, they can also take her along.
Tatootine is an Outer Rim planet, and not part of the Empire! Probably a Senator wouldn't go there.
That's pretty disappointing!
When will she be old enough to go off planet places?
She will sit through the rest of her history lessons and then ask her parents afterwards.
Her parents think it depends on a lot of things! If she's very good at working alongside her guards and her parents can trust her, she can go places under supervision much earlier. 'Twelve years old' is traditional for getting some independence.
Okay then she will do that!!!
If she can't go off planet yet could she have Jedi training instead. It doesn't have to be called Jedi training! They can be sneaky! It just seems pretty useful to know how to fight, in general, and also if she concentrates she can shuffle a box around across the room so there's probably something useful that can be done with that?
- She should absolutely not reveal to people that she can shuffle a box around the room. That's very dangerous information. The Emperor takes children with special powers like that, and her parents don't want to lose her.
She can have combat training, of course, but neither of her parents know what Jedi training looks like.
That's okay, combat training works.
She will package the box shuffling away into her collection of secrets, along with her brother and her mother and her knowing-that-this-is-star-wars.
What is combat training like?
As a child - falling safely, how to break people's grips on her, how to get to safety, how to evaluate an area to hide in, how to call for emergency aid, basic first aid, some marksmanship training with a toy blaster that's pretty much just a fancy laser pointer... She can work up to martial arts forms traditional to Alderaan pretty quickly, though, and is placed in a martial arts class with several other children her age, from a wide variety of backgrounds.
She will work really, really hard on her martial arts forms. She practices in her room at night and when she wakes up in the morning. Leia knows that she isn't learning anything very impressive yet, but it's important to her to learn anything she can as fast as possible. She wants to be formidable by the time she's big and allowed to travel.
(It's important to be ready to protect her brother once she finds him, that feels like a pretty natural responsibility. She had to do that a lot when she was Ayra, and she knows that Luke isn't Destian but it still doesn't occur to her to question the assumption that Brothers Are Idiots Who Need Protection. This is just the way that having a brother works.)
She asks her martial arts instructor if they ever met any Jedi.
This is pretty disappointing but makes sense. She won't ask any questions about using the Force in combination with these martial arts techniques, then.
When she turns ten, she remembers that her planet is going to explode. Darth Vader blows up Alderaan. That's her mother. And that's going to be her here-parents dying, along with all of the other people she's ever met.
It might not happen; the Star Wars movies have already been wrong about some things, but. That's not a risk she can take. That's not a failure she can allow.
She tells her parents that she had a vision of their planet exploding, that she keeps dreaming about it. Is there anything that could do that? That can destroy planets?
Her parents don't know of anything that can do that! It sounds like a really bad nightmare, though.
The nightmare felt really really real. Despite it's adorably primitive special effects.
Can they please keep an eye out for things that might do that to planets.
Better than nothing, she hopes.
By the time Leia turns twelve, she has gotten very good at martial arts techniques. She still practices with most of her time. She often wonders how her brother has been spending his twelve years. Leia knows at the very least that he's still alive and that nothing catastrophic seems to have happened; she's sure she would feel it.
They're still just kids, really, and it should feel like she has a lot of time before everything blows up but it does not feel that way at all.
.....so, can she go to Tatooine now?
Because the politics of the Outer Rim are really interesting and complex and she thinks she would be better at knowing how to navigate them if she got to observe firsthand!
Also she's never seen a desert before.
Also the pictures she saw of it looked very pretty. (They did not).
Are these good explanations?
Tatooine isn't actually the center of any Outer Rim politics. Also there are deserts on Alderaan, and on many, many other planets.
Also her parents seem to recognize she's hiding something.
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