Edges of the World

Chapter 1

There are many different universes out there.

There are universes where you could meet your counterpart and find their life is fully identical to your own, the divergence between your universes having happened in the life of a person you have never met and who had no impact on you. Then there are the universes where your closest counterpart is your diametric opposite or even those where you may find you never existed at all. For every possibility a life could take, there is a world where those choices played out, where different narratives took hold, and all the would-haves, could-haves and should-haves are been-theres and done-thats.

There is a universe where Leia Solo neé Organa became the Chief of State for the New Republic. Her youngest child, a boy named Anakin, died when the fighter he was piloting exploded. Her daughter Jaina carries a heavy destiny and the even heavier memory of striking down her twin brother Jacen after he joined the Sith.

There is also a universe where Leia Organa's election to the position of First Senator in the New Republic failed. She was shoved out of politics outright in the scandal surrounding the revelation of her biological parentage, and to deal with the mounting tensions and the coming danger of the First Order she formed an organization known as the Resistance.

She too had a son who fell, but where Jacen Solo became a Sith in the true sense, Ben Solo was not a Sith - instead, he joined the Knights of Ren. In the strange way of ripples and echoes that thread through the universes, Ben, like Jacen, tortured a young Force-sensitive who could have used his guidance, and where Jacen murdered his aunt, Ben murdered his father.

There are universes where a thousand different things took place. Worlds where Jyn Erso made it off that beach on Scarif and was there in Hana City on the day Mon Mothma signed the Galactic Concordance; worlds where Sinjir Rath Velus never drank alcohol; where Greer Sonnel lived a long life in perfect health and took the racing world by storm; where Ciena Ree defected and Thane Kyrell remained an Imperial; where Doctor Chelli Aphra was a law-abiding academic who respected the field of archaeology too much to steal and make a profit off of artifacts; where Ezra Bridger never became an orphan.

Which is why it stands to reason that there are even worlds out there, countless worlds, where Anakin Skywalker did not fall.

Worlds where Padmé Amidala's life was not drained by Palpatine to fuel Vader's recovery, where she got to live to a merry old age in a democracy she believed in and had always been ready to fight for.

Worlds where Palpatine's evil was stopped before he could establish the full horror of his Imperial regime.

Worlds which, from the perspective of those who lived through the Empire's terror, would appear to be nothing less than realizations of their most treasured and unhoped-for dreams.

The thing about this wealth of possible worlds is, of course, that they are supposed to remain separate. You are never supposed to meet that other you, the you who made different choices, or had different circumstances thrust upon them. Nobody is ever supposed to learn the answer to the age-old question of 'What if this had happened instead?'.

Yet in the Force all things are possible.

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Leia Organa was turning twenty years old. It had been a full two decades since her Name Day, but rather than any joy one might expect that fact to inspire, she felt nothing but an engulfing sense of pain and loneliness.

Twenty should have felt like an incredibly young age to be.

Leia did not feel young.

Less than a year earlier she had stood on Yavin IV with her father as he told her where to find General Kenobi on Tatooine. Less than one year earlier her ship, in need of minor repairs, had docked with the Profundity, which was to be their escort to the backwater Outer Rim world Kenobi had chosen as his hiding place. Less than one year ago they had been diverted to Scarif, to the battle and then to that frantic rush to escape.