Edges of the World

Chapter 12

She hoped Luke was in the room she had left him in, trying to meditate.

Her head was swimming from all the facts about this timeline she had learned, as well as those she had not.

The Sith had truly won.

Darth Sidious was the Emperor.

The Jedi Order was long dead.

After sharing this absurdly distressing news with her, these rebels working to restore the Republic had not only tasked her with training Luke the best she could but had asked her for her opinion on a whole host of rather dire seeming tactics.

Everyone around that table had looked at her with absolute faith, and seemed to expect her to know what to do.

She wasn't used to that.

Her insistence that she was not a soldier but a Jedi did nothing to lessen their faith in her as some sort of military leader. Their last memory of The Jedi was of their role in The Clone Wars, and they truly seemed to believe she would be able to lead them to victory.

At one point one of them had made a comment about having the intellect and tactical genius of Princess Leia combined with the legendary military prowess of the Jedi, and it became clear that there was nothing she could say to convince the rebels that she was out of her element. She was a peacekeeper, not a warrior.

She had fumbled her way through the conversation, absolutely terrified that she'd say something wrong and doom soldiers to their deaths. Everything they asked of her seemed like so much responsibility.

It all felt like so much more than she was capable of doing. Even training Luke felt like it would be far beyond her teachings. She wasn't ready to take on a Sith herself, how was she supposed to train this version of her brother to be?

How was she supposed to direct troops into combat?

There was so much on the line in this reality, and she wanted none of it.

She just wanted to go home.

The longer that meeting had gone on, the surer Leia was that she had not actually been ready for any of this. If what she experienced here in this dimension was to be her Trial, she no longer thought that she would be able to pass. Worse yet, she was beginning to think that she would never get home. She'd be stuck here, without any of the people she loved for the rest of her life.

Well, the versions of them that she knew.

She was wandering through the base as she thought, completely lost.

Looking up to try and figure out if she recognized where she was at all, Leia discovered she was in a ship hangar. It was as makeshift as the rest of the base, yet far more crowded.

She took the time to admire the ships around her. While the Grand Army of the Republic had been significantly downsized since the end of the Clone Wars, and the Jedi Order no longer was affiliated with their military structure, the GAR had not ceased to exist entirely.

The military vessels created for their purposes tended towards sleek and approachable, and more importantly, Leia had never been allowed near them during any of the official tours of military sites she had to be a part of thanks to her mother's political career. The ships in this hangar were very different from the ones she would see on those tours, and more closely resembled a museum dedicated to the Clone Wars.

Old beat up ships, ones that at first glance did not look like they'd have much life left in them, were everywhere. Some of the single manned fighters, actual Clone War era Y-wings Leia realized, even lacked proper plating on their shells, leaving their internal mechanics exposed.