Chapter Text
The birth announcement appeared on the Holonet a few weeks after the defeat of the Galactic Empire at Jakku: Son born to heroes of Rebellion, declared honorary Prince of Alderaan. The article’s breathless tone recapped the legacy of the boy’s parents - Leia Organa, Princess of Alderaan and twin sister of the last Jedi Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo, smuggler turned war hero - and provided optimistic speculation on who the new Organa heir might become in their new, remade galaxy. Would he wield the force as his uncle did? Would he be a pilot like his father? A master diplomat, like his mother?
Beside the announcement was a recipe for a jogan fruit parfait - a fashionable dessert to serve at dinner parties at the time, and of more interest to most citizens of the new Republic than the hatches, matches and dispatches of old Rebellion heroes.
The child was named Ben, after a Jedi hero of the Clone Wars, and demonstrated no notable connection to the force as the years went by. He went to a normal Chandrilan school alongside normal Chandrilan children, where the report holos that were sent home noted that he was bright but unmotivated. He did not have many friends, and only participated in one extracurricular, which was hallikset lessons. His teachers noticed an interest in galactic history that was probably more to do with the quite solitude of the school’s library than anything else. These report holos stacked up in his mother’s home office, unread, because she was seldom home, preoccupied as she was with her work in the foundering New Republic Senate.
At the age of sixteen Ben went to the New Republic Naval Academy on Hosnian Prime. It was what everyone expected him to do. He was an Organa; it was his duty to serve the galaxy. He gave up playing the hallikset, because it wasn’t appreciated in his new shared dorm, and coasted through with average grades in every subject except marksmanship, which he excelled at because his favourite pastime as a child was shooting down flimsi targets in the back garden with the pistol his uncle Lando had gifted him.
His time at the Academy was not notable. He did not win any prizes and was not selected for officer training. He was never chosen to represent the institution at events, not even the time his mother visited to open a new simulator facility on behalf of the Senate. The Academy brought out their star pupil for that, a boy called Poe Dameron, who could literally fly circles around his instructors and had a smile that looked good in holos. Ben flew like he was operating a machine press in a factory and looked surly even when he wasn’t trying to.
He was on track for a steady life. A steady job operating a railgun on some New Republic Naval frigate out in the Mid Rim. Not what he wanted, not quite, but it would do. It kept everyone else happy.
But then the news about his grandfather broke a month before graduation, and it all fell apart before he even had it.
The Holonet ran with it as their top story for days. There were calls for his mother to resign, reporters sent to camp outside his uncle’s temple. A full dissection of his father’s Imperial criminal record, which was supposed to have been wiped clean. The Academy quietly removed the plaque with his mother’s signature from the simulator facility and sent Ben home to Chandrila to keep his head down, lie low until it all blew over. He watched the Holonet obsessively when he got back because there was nothing else to do in the big, empty house, where the only other voices he heard were those of droids. The house had always been full of droids; it wasn’t like anyone was ever home.
In the absence of answers, the Holonet feeds ran with old documentaries, interviews, recapping a history that was still fresh in the minds of most of the Galaxy. There was footage of the destruction of Alderaan, secured from the Death Star by a rebel slicer, that was aired multiple times an hour. The scale of it was impossible - an entire planet, vaporised, rendered as a flickering blue field of debris only a couple of inches across, a ghost of a tragedy too big to comprehend. And yet it was the signature image of the Empire’s rule. Perhaps it was the easiest image to digest precisely because it was so impossible to understand.
The feed would then circle back to an anchor sitting in a studio on Hosnian Prime, always asking the same question: did they know?
Then there was the press conference his mother held, where she looked small and somehow older behind her desk in the Senate building. Yes, she had known, she said, and so had Han Solo, and so had Luke Skywalker. The intent was not to deceive. It was a private family matter. She would not respond to calls for her resignation.
Ben was curled up in bed watching the feed on a portable display surface when the Academy called. The reporter on screen had just finished interviewing a woman who’d sent her child to Luke’s temple. I mean, we trusted our kids with this man, she had said. I trusted him with my son. There’s nobody overseeing what he’s doing. What has he been teaching them?
The Academy official at the other end of the line was brusque, emotionless, all the static on the line giving their voice the intonation of a droid. They were sending Ben’s dismissal papers and leftover belongings by priority freighter. They would write him recommendation letters, of course, if he wished to transfer to one of the Core Universities. But unfortunately there was no longer a place for him in the New Republic Navy. They’d found a heart defect, you see, during his last physical. Ruled him out of flight. An irregular rhythm, nothing to really worry about, but an automatic disqualification from service. It was a shame it hadn’t been noticed before. He’d receive all the documentation. And they wished him all the best for his future.
He lay in bed, one hand on his chest feeling the steady beat of his heart, which was as unremarkable as the rest of him.
The Holonet reporter had moved on to a new interviewee. I voted for Senator Organa and honestly, I feel sick about it. What other secrets has she been keeping?
If anyone had taken the time to interview him, Ben would have asked the same questions, because nobody had told him he was the grandson of Darth Vader either.
His comm unit rang for days, unread messages piling up. He left the house on Chandrila and took off in the ship that had been his sixteenth birthday present, the Grimtaash, not really knowing where to go, following the galaxy’s spiral arm from port to port. Almost all of the messages were from his mother, begging for him to come to Hosnian Prime. She would explain everything when they were together. She would make things right.
His father didn’t call, but he’d never been good at calling.
The last message from his mother was a week before his twentieth birthday. The pleading tone had gone, now, and she was businesslike as she repeated that he just needed to come to Hosnian Prime, she had a bedroom ready for him, she would pay his port fees, she would send out a shuttle if he wasn’t able to fly in himself, she would come out personally if he just told her where he was, but it had to be his choice, he had to be the one to make the move.
He almost keyed in a course, but stopped himself. What was the point? What explanation would be enough? The revelation itself had explained almost everything. He’d spent his whole life trying to contort himself into a mould that he could never quite fit, one that had been chosen for him because of his family’s legacy. Yet the core of that legacy had been rotten from the start.
He disconnected the comm unit by force, wires spilling out of the bulkhead like entrails. The ship was drifting in space somewhere outside of the Dantooine sector. He could only see a handful of stars through the cockpit window, distant and cold. The sight of them was a strange comfort. He’d always been lonely, but this was at least a loneliness he’d chosen.
Ben powered up the ship’s nav unit and restarted his course calculations. Niamos was close by. He’d heard nothing good about it. It was the sort of place he felt he should be. He’d go to Niamos, he decided, drink away as many of his credits as he could, and let the galaxy forget all about him. It seemed like the right thing to do.
Nobody should have expected anything else.