For @littlestartopaz: What would have happened if Leia was sent to Tatooine and Luke to Alderaan?

This sounds like an excuse for my very favorite thing: blatantly strong-in-the-Force Jedi Leia. I was gonna do headcanons but instead HERE is the first scene of Leia Skywalker of Tatooine finding some old asshole in a brown robe.  *backflips out*

Leia scowled at the old man—Ben Kenobi, her ass—and the droid at her knee warbled happily.

“You lied,” Leia said.  The sweet-faced boy draped in white robes on the recording had asked for an Obi-wan, but Kenobi’s aren’t exactly a dime a dozen since the old homestead was annihilated by the Tuskens.  She can do the math.

“From a certain point of view,” Kenobi said with a shrug, smiling down at the droid.

“The boy on the recording–”

[Prince Luke Organa of Alderaan] the droid offered.

“—very helpful, thanks, Prince Luke said you were his only hope,” Leia said, prowling forward.  “What exactly qualifies you for that, old man?”

Kenobi looked up at her with a start at that, blinking pale blue eyes at her, and gave a brittle half-laugh.  “You’re very much like your father, when I knew him,” he said distantly.  And then he launched into an epic tale about Jedi and her father and Leia stood, feeling shock shiver through her.  She had known that her father was a general, but a Jedi?

“You’re…telling the truth,” she whispered at last, and felt that intangible something around her hum with satisfaction.  The Force, if the old man was telling the truth, but that seemed like a great and mystical name for the thing that Leia had always been able to feel, the thing that had always warmed her on cold nights and brought dreams of a beautiful woman with heavy hair and sad eyes, the thing that seemed to listen so attentively when she raged against the Empire’s hard hand.

“I am,” Kenobi said, and held something out to her.  A silver shaft with a black grip, and when she touched it, it sang.  Numbly, Leia thumbed the switch, and watched blue light leap from one end.  Leia normally made it an absolute rule not to do awe, but damn if this wasn’t challenging that endeavor.  “It was your father’s, once.”

[Careful waving that shit around] R2-D2 beeped as she gave it an experimental twist.  It felt good in her hand, the blade moving smoothly and the core of it humming against her palm, and he wheeled back a bit as if concerned she might lose control of it.

“Language, Artoo,” Kenobi said, exasperated, and Leia snorted.

“I’ve heard worse.”  She thumbed off the lightsaber and gave Artoo a nudge with one knee.  “Did you have a message, or were you just going to wheel around like a lost nerf?”

[You’re a little shit] Artoo warbled, clearly delighted, and drew up the recording.

Leia watched the sweet-faced boy—Prince Luke, according to R2-D2—and frowned.  He looked afraid, his eyes wide and his hair wild above the collar of his white robes, and there was a sharp tug in her gut, something drawing her toward him.  Leia’s hand tightened around the hilt of the lightsaber, an overwhelming urge to protect him bursting into life in her chest.

“I’m coming with you,” Leia said before Kenobi could say a word.  

“Leia…”

“I don’t care.  He’s scared, he needs help.  I’m coming.”

Kenobi smiled at her.  “I wasn’t going to stop you.  I was going to ask if you had a ship or if we needed to rent one.”

“A ship? This is Tatooine, old man, all we’ve got here is sand, Jawas, and more sand.”  Leia smiled back, thin and sharp, and shook her head, feeling the careful twist of her braided hair tickle the back of her neck.  Aunt Beru had never understood where Leia dreamed up her hairstyles, but then Leia had never explained that she tried to mimic the twining dark hair of the woman in her dreams.  “I’ll make sure someone takes us off-world.  Let me pack a bag and tell my aunt and uncle I’m not dead.”

They returned to Leia’s home just in time to find the fires flickering out.

Leia Skywalker stood on the Tatooine sand, her hand so tight around the lightsaber—her lightsaber—that the grip was cutting into her palm, and didn’t cry.  The Force was ringing in her ears and prickling under her skin like the air after a thunderclap, like heat lightning building under her ribcage and seeking ground. Owen and Beru, who had raised her and tended her so lovingly.  Her bed, where she had wept after nightmares and screamed into her pillow when the Empire’s grip tightened on the galaxy.  Her contraband holos of the old Republic leaders, generals and Senators, her favorite speech of proud Queen Amidala, white and red paint hiding her young face.  All of it was gone.

The lightning burst out in a wave, a wash of sand exploding up from her feet to wash over the last of the fires and smother them.  Leia shuddered, feeling a tear escape the corner of her eye, and didn’t look at Kenobi when he stepped up beside her.

“I’m going to see the Empire broken,” she said, hollow.  

“Leia, anger is a poison, it leads to nothing but anger and darkness,” Kenobi began, and she cut him off with a sharp gesture.

“Hate leads to hate,” she snarled. “I am angry because the Empire burns and hurts and kills without so much as a thought for the lives they destroy, and I’ll stay that way until they find a way to take that from me too.  If what you said is true, they took my mother, and my father, and now they’ve taken all the family I knew.  Don’t tell me not to be angry, old man.” 

She turned her back on what was left of her home and started for the speeder.  “Let’s find a ship.”