A Destiny Rewritten

chapter v: alderaan's fate.

During their interrogation session, Vader ripped apart Leia's mind--or tried to. He's been brooding ever since he visited the princess in her cell; nothing was achieved by torturing her. But he does not think it's because he did not physically harm her--physical pain is meaningless compared to the psychological torture he inflicts on his prisoners. Princess Leia is the single most resistant person he has ever encountered. It was frustratingly difficult to morph her senses and thoughts the way he wanted, and she displayed a dangerously strong opposition to the mind probe. Not only could she resist advanced technology, but also his Force powers.

If they were in another time period, he is sure Leia would have been scouted out by the Jedi Order.

He was unsuccessful in extracting the location of the rebel base from her, as it was kept locked away in a deep part of her mind that she would not allow him to access. Every time he tried, it was like pounding on a steel door with a bare fist. But he did learn quite a bit about the princess.

Her mother, Breha Organa, was killed by Imperials. She had been holding onto memories of her mother to comfort herself during the interrogation, and Vader was able to look into the surface of her mind. So he took that information and Leia's warm, loving memories of her mother and turned them into a nightmare.

Using the mind probe and his Force influence, he made Leia hallucinate several different scenarios of Breha Organa dying. Over and over again, the princess watched her mother be killed by Imperial assassins. Sometimes Vader had them stab her to death, shoot her, burn her alive, suffocate her, drown her, decapitate her. It was heinously violent, vicious, but Vader relished every moment of it. He couldn't hurt the princess, but he was still giving her everything she deserved for defying the Empire.

It does unsettle him more than he would like to admit that part of him feels ashamed of himself. After he walked away from Leia's cell, he imagined Padmé's face in his mind, shaking her head and frowning at him in disgust. She hates and fears the darkness in him, and he knows it.

Padmé was another thought that Vader was able to see in the princess's mind. As he forced her to hallucinate that she was drowning, the princess focused on her happy memories with Padmé. He dwelled on them for several moments, just as she did. And unlike Breha, he did not turn the memories against the princess; it would be more of a punishment to him than to Leia if he created images of horrible things happening to Padmé.

He saw her holding hands with Padmé when she was a child as they walked down a beautifully decorated hallway, likely in the Alderaan Royal Palace. He saw Padmé braiding Leia's hair in a pair of braids in a pink bedroom, one made for a little girl. They both seemed to be filled with joy when they were around each other, always smiling and making gestures of affection.

It was painful to watch--it reminded Vader of the child he had always thought he had lost. (Vader has not yet confronted Padmé about the possibility of their child being alive, but it was a conversation for a different day.) He tried to push that thought away, but it nagged at him, and he wondered to himself for a moment whether their child would have been a boy or a girl. It had also occurred to him that perhaps to Padmé, the princess is a replacement for the child she lost, and that is why she was so desperate to save her. Even if their child still lived, Vader doubts that Padmé would have had contact with them; they would have been separated. She had been living with the princess and Bail for so long, and he saw nothing in Leia's mind that suggested another child lived with them.

Padmé was the strongest tether Leia had to her sanity while Vader relentlessly tortured her. She was the only thing that kept the panic from setting in too deep. He allowed her that one solace, but only because it was his wife.

When the princess was hallucinating that she was submerged in an ocean, the sensations and images had become so strong that she actually began to suffocate. Her body did not believe she was dying, but her mind did. He stood there and watched, arms crossed, as Leia fell to her knees, gasping desperately for air and cough up water that did not exist. There was no physical pain involved, but Vader figures that the memory will follow the princess into her nightmares.