"You seem pretty collected, all things considered. What's your secret?"

"Once you've spent a few years on the senate floor, you learn to weather scandal." Leia tucks a hairpin into the corner of her mouth. Luke stops pacing and watches her.

It's hard for Luke to shake the sense that there's another scandal waiting in the wings, as soon as this one starts to seem manageable. They can be seen to be inseparable -- that part is only to be expected. It looks like circling up, conferring, comparing notes in the face of an onslaught of scrutiny. Whether people ever wonder about their previous encounters, Luke doesn't know. Those nights on Endor, bundled up in the same bed. These nights now, locked in their adjoining room...

"You'd think they'd know better. People knew your father -- they knew Bail Organa. They know what he stood for."

"And now they know he was fostering Darth Vader's only daughter for him. This could bring his whole legacy down,

"Nothing our father can do can undo what Bail Organa fought for."

"Right. Only I can do that." Leia's hair hangs down unbraided now, still crimped into fine waves; she tugs them apart with angry hands. "With all due respect, Luke, you wouldn't know."

It's very difficult to be tranquil and removed when the memory of Vader is in his mind.

"My aunt and uncle were nobodies. They did their best with me, but they were frightened of him, too -- what they knew about him, anyway."

"I didn't mean that like it came out. It's just eating at me, that's all.

"No offense taken."

"We need to make a statement. I'll start drafting one in the morning."

"Right."

Her voice gets more insistent, more senatorial. The shift in Leia's emotional direction is palpable as a shift in temperature. "But I won't apologize for him. I know how you feel about our father, but I feel -- oh, I feel something, all right. He tortured me. He and Tarkin -- blast it, Luke, am I supposed to forget about it?"

What can he say to that? How can he make that any easier to bear? He can't say let it pass away from you, or let it fall away from your mind, or do this or do that or anything. He's not a teacher. Sometimes he doesn't even feel like a Jedi -- not like he's finished, not like he's half the master he should be.

But Leia wasn't there. She might have felt it, but Luke hasn't gotten around to asking yet.

The fingertips of Luke's mechanical hand flex and unflex, meeting and parting. "It wasn't like that for him, at the end."

That won't excuse it, or rub out the indelible mark, but maybe it'll balance something out.

"I know, Luke. I know."

She felt it -- he knows she felt it, just as he knows how she feels right now. He can feel her in the Force, the way he used to feel the vaporators thrumming through his bedroom wall at night -- even if he were on the other side of a planet, in another star system entirely, in another galaxy, he'd feel her presence. From the moment he'd first seen her -- and when had she known?

"So do you want to tell them, or should I do it?"

They both know who's better qualified to do the talking. [Luke will stand back and look somber and pretty with his hands folded and his lightsaber at his belt, and Leia will extemporize something very eloquent and serious and borderline heartbreaking.

Tomorrow they'll both go out dressed in black. In black Leia looks less austere and more glamorous in ways Luke has never needed to know descriptive terms for on a desert farming planet. Sleek and magisterial.

Leia kisses him on the lips, full and open and astonishing -- her small hands are on his face, bracketing him on both sides, and the soft dry slink of her hair against his cheek gives him a muddled thrill. It's hard to be sober and diplomatic when he wants nothing more than to pull her into his lap and down onto the little recessed bunk, to have her arms around him.

"I wish we'd done this sooner."

Before. It's some new kind of tragedy the Skywalkers are inventing. Leia rests her hand on the back of his neck, and Luke watches her.

"I wish I'd known a lot of things. Come to bed now."