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“Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa: Never to Willfully, Knowingly Do Harm . . . ”
0 reviewsSUMMARY: This is fifteen random but essentially chronological moments from the life of Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa, the third and final wife of Prestid Organa. There is an actual story here – o...
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Author’s Notes: 1). For anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is compatible with my SW AU series /You Became to Me/, including the trilogy/ Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith/, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa’s eyes. 2). Although this is technically modelled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, exactly, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info and a link to the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Alessya. 3). Readers should please keep in mind that Alessya is fairly strong in the Force and that, while she certainly hasn’t been raised as a Jedi, she has had instruction in the use of her sensitivity (from her mother’s people among the Ankindematha/) and is therefore quite adept at channeling her power/talents into her work as a surgeon and medical professor. 4). Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Alessya should /please consult the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ!/For clarity’s sake, though, please know that I specifically picture Alessya as Alex Kingston and everybody else in the Organa family or their immediate scope as previously explained in the character sketch/study story for Celly, Alaina, etc.!/ /Please note/ that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of EU or original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and that readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! 5). Again, in order to more easily keep track of Bail’s family, readers might want to keep the following in mind: in my AU, Bail is born practically in 68 BBY, near the end of what would have been 69 BBY (if events had fallen out as they do in canon, that is), or roughly 954ish years After the Ruusan Reformations and 46ish years Before the Battle of Geonosis (which, remember, occurs in my AU series on Holiday 2 or Productivity Day of the Galactic Standard Calendar, the day that falls in between month five, Nelona, and month six, Helona, in year 25,000 After Founding [of the Galactic Republic] or 1,000 After Ruusan Reformations), with Alaina being born in what would have been ~46 BBY. (Their mother, Zamille dies late in 44 BBY, and their father, Prestid, remarries in 40 BBY, wedding Mazicia and then losing her late in 38 BBY. [I’ve interpreted the EU notation that Mazicia was Queen of Alderaan in the time leading up to the Clone Wars as meaning the time around the Stark Hyperspace War, which in the EU is sometimes lumped in with the galactic civil war leading up to the establishment of the Empire, due to Palpatine’s tendency to rewrite history.] Prestid then remarries again in 35 BBY, to Alessya Retrac, who has Celly, Rouge, and Tia in ~32, 30, and 28 BBY.) Bail and Alaina’s deceased brothers, Declin and Valyn, would have been born in roughly 50 BBY and 48 BBY and died (with their father) late in 28 BBY (not long after Tia was born), and their deceased sister, Merisol, would have been born in roughly 67 BBY and killed in 52 BBY. Moreover, Prestid Organa was born ~95 BBY, while Alessya Retrac was born in ~70 BBY (and before readers freak out about that, please remember that humans live a lot longer in the GFFA and that they also tend to age a lot more slowly, given their level of technology and medical advances, okay?), marrying Prestid when she about 35. 6). The second half of the title for this piece is a slantwise reference to both part of the Hippocratic Oath and the Wiccan Rede, and, in Alessya’s case, functions as a part of both her vows not only as a Healer/surgeon and medical teacher, but a member of the Ankindematha organization, a secret movement within the Jedi Order to return to the old, pre-Ruusan Reformations ways of teaching, gathering recruits, organizing the Order, and etc.
“Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa: Never to Willfully, Knowingly Do Harm . . . ”
01.) Askance: Alessya knows that some people look a bit askance at her, not only for marrying Prestid (a man twenty-five years her elder) but for doing so less than three full years after the violent death of his second wife; she doesn’t worry about such things, thought, for she knows that those people are simply betraying both their ignorance of Prestid and his enormous heart and the very strong love that so unexpectedly (for both of them) bound them together (a love so strong that, nearly a decade after his death, she still has no desire of her own to ever remarry or even to attempt to engage in any kind of romantic relationship or liaison with another being).
02.) Boy: She loves her three little girls with all of her heart and soul, no doubt about it, but one of her (surprisingly few) regrets is that she never really got a chance to try for a boy of her own, never got to give Prestid another son, never got to know just how different it is to truly raise a boy, compared to raising girls.
03.) Small: She’s seen the way people look at her, sometimes, when she’s with Bail, and the puerile small minds of such individuals makes her skin want to crawl right off her body (Bail is her husband’s /son/, for pity’s sake! She may not be that much older than he is, but she still helped to raise him, and she was extremely happily married to his father for the better part of eight years – and would still quite happily be married to him, if not for that damned manufactured plague! – plus, since Bail had already met, fallen for /hard/, and basically given his heart away to Obi-Wan Kenobi long before she ever met him, she has had him fixed in her mind since the very beginning as someone essentially unavailable to anyone else, for any reason) not only because she would literally rather die than to so violate her own sense of ethics and moral turpitude as to be with Bail in the manner such individuals imagine her to be, but because she’s quite certain that Bail would be so completely horrified to discover that the possibility has ever even crossed someone’s mind that he would never be able to look at her quite the same again, and she truly is quite fond of Bail and would suffer if he were to deliberately attempt to be even less present in her life than he already is, because of his work.
04.) Medicine: Alessya has always been unabashedly glad that it wasn’t her husband who inherited the right to the throne, for she much prefers being able to continue to practice and teach medicine (as she’s always wanted to do), as the mere wife/widow of a noble and noted diplomat, rather than having to essentially drop her life’s work to mess with everything that would have been expected of her, as the wife of the Crown Prince of Alderaan.
05.) Trip: A part of her is desperately glad that the sickness took Prestid before it could claim the lives of his two youngest boys, Declin and Valyn, for the trip to Galidraan had been his idea and she’d tried to talk him out of going (so near to the birth of Adrastia) or at least out of taking both boys along, so they could get a chance to know their newest half-sibling a little bit better: if ever Jenna Zan Arbor is truly brought to justice for the many horrors she’s committed, Alessya fully intends to get roaring drunk and to dance triumphantly on the bitch’s grave (which, since she won’t be harming anyone alive except for herself, technically isn’t a violation of her oath as a Healer or her vows to her mother’s people, as even former Jedi Master and Healer Kylea Santeri would admit, if asked).
06.) Blame: Obi-Wan Kenobi is quite possibly the strongest and yet gentlest, most modest and yet most gifted and intelligent man she knows, and, though she also knows that nothing like what Bail must dream of can ever actually come of such a desperate, unswerving affection, she really cannot find it within herself to blame Bail, for loving the young Jedi so very much.
07.) Situation: The chiming of the comm unit startles Alessya out of a light doze after a long shift at the surgeons’ ward, and perhaps it’s because she’s still half asleep (or perhaps it just is that Bail really is that close to true incoherency), but it takes her nearly twenty minutes before she understands that Bail is ranting furiously about some ancient prophecy about a Chosen One and Qui-Gon being an insensitive ass and a former slave from Tatooine named Anakin Skywalker, and it takes nearly an hour of questioning before she finally manages to piece together what Qui-Gon did and what kind of situation he left behind when he got himself killed, on Naboo: though Qui-Gon Jinn has always made her skin crawl horribly (no one should ever treat one who is, for all intents and purposes, an adopted son as coldly – and sometimes as cruelly – and dismissively as she has so often that supposedly wise and kind Jedi Master treat Obi-Wan), she certainly die not and would not have ever wanted him to meet an end as messy as the one that he has, on Naboo; thus, she finds her heart not only going out to the young man who’s so suddenly lost the father-figure in his life (and become not only both a full-fledged Jedi Knight and the lone conqueror – and slayer – of a Sith Lord in living memory, but Master to an apprentice he didn’t even get to choose for himself), but her temper also flaring at the sheer unfairness and wrongness of the whole situation, to the point where she becomes incensed enough to suggest that Bail try to get Obi-Wan and this Anakin to agree to come to Alderaan, and to hell with the Jedi Order and that damned High Council!
08.) Culprit: She finds it ridiculous, that the Jedi Order should cling so tightly to a set of dehumanizing rules (made up and enforced on the Order by a fearful group of politicians who took criminal advantage of the Order’s exhaustion and low numbers, after Ruusan, to manipulate its leaders into agreeing to strip the Order of much of its autonomy and essentially brainwash its new members into not only accepting such ludicrous restraints on their ability to follow the will of the Force but into policing themselves into becoming what has amounted to lapdogs of the politicians, as well) that is known to be the chief culprit in keeping the populations of well over two dozen worlds populated by humans and near-humans alone (plus the Force alone only knows how many other planets populated by nonhuman sentient species!) from sending their children to the Order to train as Jedi, not only because she has been secretly instructed by individuals who believe in the paramount importance of repealing those terrible rules and customs and returning to the old, pre-Ruusan Reformations traditions, but because the times are so very dark that it strikes her as willfully irresponsible for the Order to embrace ways that all but guarantee the dangerously low overall active membership of the Order.
09.) Silence: She likes Anakin Skywalker (is a little bit surprised that she likes him as much as she does, given how hesitant Bail has been to share his thoughts and feelings about the boy), and it only takes one visit for her to conclude that this young boy loves Obi-Wan at least as fiercely as Bail does (which, she acknowledges, in all likelihood accounts for Bail’s relative silence on the subject of the boy, for Bail is often quite troubled when he feels himself prey to emotions that are illogical, such as jealousy or envy, and will respond with silence and inaction rather than risk saying or doing something irrational).
10.) Right: Alessya desperately wishes that it were within her power to somehow explain to Obi-Wan and Anakin the reality behind their way of life, in the Jedi Order, and the dangerous destructiveness of the Jedi Code, compared to the basic goodness and inherent workability of the old ways the Order had of doing things, before Ruusan, before the many Jedi/Sith wars, and to convince the two to leave the Coruscanti Temple for Alderaan and the organization that espouses (and quietly lives their lives in secret support of) those old ways, but she has no right to expose the Ankindematha to such a potentially dangerous situation (after all, what if she should fail in her attempt, and Obi-Wan take any sensitive information she might share with him to the High Council?), and so instead she must bite her tongue and watch those two fine young Jedi suffer needless agonies, all the while hoping that the will of the Force might somehow intervene in such a way as to bring them to the light of truth of its own accord . . . or that Bail’s attachment to Obi-Wan might somehow, some day, prove strong enough to lure him and his young Padawan away from that Temple to Alderaan, to stay.
11.) Staff: She’s rested much easier in her thoughts ever since Bail’s cousin, Sheltay, has joined her husband’s son’s staff, not only because she knows that Sheltay is one of the few people able to make Bail take adequate care of himself (no matter how busy he might feel he is) but because she knows that Sheltay is intelligent and hard-working and devoted enough to the ideals that Bail believes in to easily be able to quietly and unobtrusively shoulder quite a bit of the day-to-day duties of Bail’s increasingly time-consuming job.
12.) Match: Alessya isn’t at all sure that this semi-politically arranged marriage between Bail and Breha is at all a good idea: it isn’t that she disapproves of Breha Antilles, precisely – the girl is intelligent, capable, loyal, sweet, warm-hearted, and extremely lovely and accomplished – but she fears that the young lady’s apparent focus on the importance of Bail in her life bodes ill for any lasting match between the two (in her opinion, Bail is simply far too busy a man, with a heart already full of devotions to others, to easily make room for another in his life, much less one who might attempt to insist upon her preeminence over all others, attempting to claim a role of central importance in Bail’s life), especially when so much of Bail’s focus is devoted to his duties . . . and to a certain charismatic young Jedi Master; unfortunately, though, her husband’s son seems determined to follow through on Master C’baoth’s (rather strongly given) advice to combine the Organa and Antilles families by wedding Breha, and so, unfortunately, there’s surprisingly little she can do about it, aside from making sure that he knows she has reservations about his chosen course of action.
13.) Pity: In all honesty, she finds it a great pity that the former Nabooian Queen (now Senator) Amidala and her companions are all so very young: in her opinion, either Padmé or Sabé would have made a fine Queen of Alderaan and a much better match for Bail than Breha (especially since both of them seem to be just as much in love with Obi-Wan as Bail is himself, and all three of them seem to understand each other so very well).
14.) Care: She takes great care in impressing the importance of pursuing one’s loves on her children, of not compromising when it comes to the strongest desires of their hearts and not settling for less than what they most want out of life (be it in terms of a career or a relationship, be it a short fling or a life-long marriage of hearts and souls), and she only hopes that they will find something they love to do (as she loves practicing medicine and teaching it to others) and individuals worthy of their hearts (as Prestid was, for her) and not feel constrained by politics or what others might expect or want of them to ever trap themselves in political marriages or pursue careers based on duty rather than desire (as she fears Bail has done).
15.) Thrill: In the wake of the war, the changes being made to both the Order and the Republic frankly thrill her (at last, there’s no more need to hide her beliefs about the Force or the way that any organized society of Force-sensitives should be run!), and, when a teaching chapterhouse is established on Alderaan, she not only fully plans on seeing to it that she and her daughters are either at or near the very top of the list for new recruits, but is proud to know that the leaders of the Ankindematha have pledged to come forth, with their lists of names and teaching circles, and volunteer to help organize and lead not only the Alderaanian chapterhouse outside Aldera, but to go off-world wherever they might be needed and lend their expertise to chapterhouses being established on other planets, too.
“Alessya Lustena Retrac Organa: Never to Willfully, Knowingly Do Harm . . . ”
01.) Askance: Alessya knows that some people look a bit askance at her, not only for marrying Prestid (a man twenty-five years her elder) but for doing so less than three full years after the violent death of his second wife; she doesn’t worry about such things, thought, for she knows that those people are simply betraying both their ignorance of Prestid and his enormous heart and the very strong love that so unexpectedly (for both of them) bound them together (a love so strong that, nearly a decade after his death, she still has no desire of her own to ever remarry or even to attempt to engage in any kind of romantic relationship or liaison with another being).
02.) Boy: She loves her three little girls with all of her heart and soul, no doubt about it, but one of her (surprisingly few) regrets is that she never really got a chance to try for a boy of her own, never got to give Prestid another son, never got to know just how different it is to truly raise a boy, compared to raising girls.
03.) Small: She’s seen the way people look at her, sometimes, when she’s with Bail, and the puerile small minds of such individuals makes her skin want to crawl right off her body (Bail is her husband’s /son/, for pity’s sake! She may not be that much older than he is, but she still helped to raise him, and she was extremely happily married to his father for the better part of eight years – and would still quite happily be married to him, if not for that damned manufactured plague! – plus, since Bail had already met, fallen for /hard/, and basically given his heart away to Obi-Wan Kenobi long before she ever met him, she has had him fixed in her mind since the very beginning as someone essentially unavailable to anyone else, for any reason) not only because she would literally rather die than to so violate her own sense of ethics and moral turpitude as to be with Bail in the manner such individuals imagine her to be, but because she’s quite certain that Bail would be so completely horrified to discover that the possibility has ever even crossed someone’s mind that he would never be able to look at her quite the same again, and she truly is quite fond of Bail and would suffer if he were to deliberately attempt to be even less present in her life than he already is, because of his work.
04.) Medicine: Alessya has always been unabashedly glad that it wasn’t her husband who inherited the right to the throne, for she much prefers being able to continue to practice and teach medicine (as she’s always wanted to do), as the mere wife/widow of a noble and noted diplomat, rather than having to essentially drop her life’s work to mess with everything that would have been expected of her, as the wife of the Crown Prince of Alderaan.
05.) Trip: A part of her is desperately glad that the sickness took Prestid before it could claim the lives of his two youngest boys, Declin and Valyn, for the trip to Galidraan had been his idea and she’d tried to talk him out of going (so near to the birth of Adrastia) or at least out of taking both boys along, so they could get a chance to know their newest half-sibling a little bit better: if ever Jenna Zan Arbor is truly brought to justice for the many horrors she’s committed, Alessya fully intends to get roaring drunk and to dance triumphantly on the bitch’s grave (which, since she won’t be harming anyone alive except for herself, technically isn’t a violation of her oath as a Healer or her vows to her mother’s people, as even former Jedi Master and Healer Kylea Santeri would admit, if asked).
06.) Blame: Obi-Wan Kenobi is quite possibly the strongest and yet gentlest, most modest and yet most gifted and intelligent man she knows, and, though she also knows that nothing like what Bail must dream of can ever actually come of such a desperate, unswerving affection, she really cannot find it within herself to blame Bail, for loving the young Jedi so very much.
07.) Situation: The chiming of the comm unit startles Alessya out of a light doze after a long shift at the surgeons’ ward, and perhaps it’s because she’s still half asleep (or perhaps it just is that Bail really is that close to true incoherency), but it takes her nearly twenty minutes before she understands that Bail is ranting furiously about some ancient prophecy about a Chosen One and Qui-Gon being an insensitive ass and a former slave from Tatooine named Anakin Skywalker, and it takes nearly an hour of questioning before she finally manages to piece together what Qui-Gon did and what kind of situation he left behind when he got himself killed, on Naboo: though Qui-Gon Jinn has always made her skin crawl horribly (no one should ever treat one who is, for all intents and purposes, an adopted son as coldly – and sometimes as cruelly – and dismissively as she has so often that supposedly wise and kind Jedi Master treat Obi-Wan), she certainly die not and would not have ever wanted him to meet an end as messy as the one that he has, on Naboo; thus, she finds her heart not only going out to the young man who’s so suddenly lost the father-figure in his life (and become not only both a full-fledged Jedi Knight and the lone conqueror – and slayer – of a Sith Lord in living memory, but Master to an apprentice he didn’t even get to choose for himself), but her temper also flaring at the sheer unfairness and wrongness of the whole situation, to the point where she becomes incensed enough to suggest that Bail try to get Obi-Wan and this Anakin to agree to come to Alderaan, and to hell with the Jedi Order and that damned High Council!
08.) Culprit: She finds it ridiculous, that the Jedi Order should cling so tightly to a set of dehumanizing rules (made up and enforced on the Order by a fearful group of politicians who took criminal advantage of the Order’s exhaustion and low numbers, after Ruusan, to manipulate its leaders into agreeing to strip the Order of much of its autonomy and essentially brainwash its new members into not only accepting such ludicrous restraints on their ability to follow the will of the Force but into policing themselves into becoming what has amounted to lapdogs of the politicians, as well) that is known to be the chief culprit in keeping the populations of well over two dozen worlds populated by humans and near-humans alone (plus the Force alone only knows how many other planets populated by nonhuman sentient species!) from sending their children to the Order to train as Jedi, not only because she has been secretly instructed by individuals who believe in the paramount importance of repealing those terrible rules and customs and returning to the old, pre-Ruusan Reformations traditions, but because the times are so very dark that it strikes her as willfully irresponsible for the Order to embrace ways that all but guarantee the dangerously low overall active membership of the Order.
09.) Silence: She likes Anakin Skywalker (is a little bit surprised that she likes him as much as she does, given how hesitant Bail has been to share his thoughts and feelings about the boy), and it only takes one visit for her to conclude that this young boy loves Obi-Wan at least as fiercely as Bail does (which, she acknowledges, in all likelihood accounts for Bail’s relative silence on the subject of the boy, for Bail is often quite troubled when he feels himself prey to emotions that are illogical, such as jealousy or envy, and will respond with silence and inaction rather than risk saying or doing something irrational).
10.) Right: Alessya desperately wishes that it were within her power to somehow explain to Obi-Wan and Anakin the reality behind their way of life, in the Jedi Order, and the dangerous destructiveness of the Jedi Code, compared to the basic goodness and inherent workability of the old ways the Order had of doing things, before Ruusan, before the many Jedi/Sith wars, and to convince the two to leave the Coruscanti Temple for Alderaan and the organization that espouses (and quietly lives their lives in secret support of) those old ways, but she has no right to expose the Ankindematha to such a potentially dangerous situation (after all, what if she should fail in her attempt, and Obi-Wan take any sensitive information she might share with him to the High Council?), and so instead she must bite her tongue and watch those two fine young Jedi suffer needless agonies, all the while hoping that the will of the Force might somehow intervene in such a way as to bring them to the light of truth of its own accord . . . or that Bail’s attachment to Obi-Wan might somehow, some day, prove strong enough to lure him and his young Padawan away from that Temple to Alderaan, to stay.
11.) Staff: She’s rested much easier in her thoughts ever since Bail’s cousin, Sheltay, has joined her husband’s son’s staff, not only because she knows that Sheltay is one of the few people able to make Bail take adequate care of himself (no matter how busy he might feel he is) but because she knows that Sheltay is intelligent and hard-working and devoted enough to the ideals that Bail believes in to easily be able to quietly and unobtrusively shoulder quite a bit of the day-to-day duties of Bail’s increasingly time-consuming job.
12.) Match: Alessya isn’t at all sure that this semi-politically arranged marriage between Bail and Breha is at all a good idea: it isn’t that she disapproves of Breha Antilles, precisely – the girl is intelligent, capable, loyal, sweet, warm-hearted, and extremely lovely and accomplished – but she fears that the young lady’s apparent focus on the importance of Bail in her life bodes ill for any lasting match between the two (in her opinion, Bail is simply far too busy a man, with a heart already full of devotions to others, to easily make room for another in his life, much less one who might attempt to insist upon her preeminence over all others, attempting to claim a role of central importance in Bail’s life), especially when so much of Bail’s focus is devoted to his duties . . . and to a certain charismatic young Jedi Master; unfortunately, though, her husband’s son seems determined to follow through on Master C’baoth’s (rather strongly given) advice to combine the Organa and Antilles families by wedding Breha, and so, unfortunately, there’s surprisingly little she can do about it, aside from making sure that he knows she has reservations about his chosen course of action.
13.) Pity: In all honesty, she finds it a great pity that the former Nabooian Queen (now Senator) Amidala and her companions are all so very young: in her opinion, either Padmé or Sabé would have made a fine Queen of Alderaan and a much better match for Bail than Breha (especially since both of them seem to be just as much in love with Obi-Wan as Bail is himself, and all three of them seem to understand each other so very well).
14.) Care: She takes great care in impressing the importance of pursuing one’s loves on her children, of not compromising when it comes to the strongest desires of their hearts and not settling for less than what they most want out of life (be it in terms of a career or a relationship, be it a short fling or a life-long marriage of hearts and souls), and she only hopes that they will find something they love to do (as she loves practicing medicine and teaching it to others) and individuals worthy of their hearts (as Prestid was, for her) and not feel constrained by politics or what others might expect or want of them to ever trap themselves in political marriages or pursue careers based on duty rather than desire (as she fears Bail has done).
15.) Thrill: In the wake of the war, the changes being made to both the Order and the Republic frankly thrill her (at last, there’s no more need to hide her beliefs about the Force or the way that any organized society of Force-sensitives should be run!), and, when a teaching chapterhouse is established on Alderaan, she not only fully plans on seeing to it that she and her daughters are either at or near the very top of the list for new recruits, but is proud to know that the leaders of the Ankindematha have pledged to come forth, with their lists of names and teaching circles, and volunteer to help organize and lead not only the Alderaanian chapterhouse outside Aldera, but to go off-world wherever they might be needed and lend their expertise to chapterhouses being established on other planets, too.
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