Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
…On Kashyyyk, Luke and Akira went into the dungeons of the Silver City, and found Han and Leia in separate cells. Han’s wounds grieved Akira, but the sight of Leia angered and sickened Luke. Once again she lay unconscious and bloody, but now even worse, for one of her eyes was blinded, and her beautiful hair had been cut off. Luke awoke her with a kiss, and she clung to him, and cried from mingled pain and joy.
And, as the Clone King and Chewbacca helped Han and C-3PO toward the landing pad of the Millennium Falcon, Akira Valorum wondered why Luke tarried.
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Though her friends escaped in the Falcon, thanks to the aid of Akira Valorum (whom she had to forgive, grudgingly), Leia remained behind to slay Jabba the Hutt, which she did with venomous relish. She had borrowed Luke’s lightsaber and Kiber Crystal. At her first touch of the Crystal, the Force leaped within her to heights she had never before attained.
Now, lightsaber in hand, she went to avenge herself upon Darth Vader.
The climactic duel no doubt took place in some sort of dangerous environment, as in the final film—perhaps the edge of a balcony opening out into empty sky.
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Of course, Leia had been trained to use a lightsaber, as all children of noble families of the Old Republic were. Even in 1977, GL said that anyone could use a lightsaber—Leia just happened to prefer blasters.
In fact, there was likely a good reason for this. No doubt she had a secret phobia of lightsabers.
Why?
Leia used to be left-handed, you see.
(“I am not left-handed!”)
Not now, at any rate.
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Just as with Tenel Ka in the Young Jedi Knights book series, there had been a training mishap one day on Organa Major, and young Leia had lost her left arm at the elbow.
Few knew this, because she had always been fitted with the finest prostheses money could buy, covered in perfectly matching synth-flesh. But, with Organa Major destroyed and the Rebels on the run, that time was over. And synth-flesh wears out eventually… and sixteen-year-old girls (as Leia was in the 1975 third draft) are not done growing.
But the time for that fear was over. The time for vengeance, she judged, was at hand.
Now, fighting like a woman possessed, Leia opened herself to the Dark Side, using her pain and shame as fuel to fight Vader, hoping to defeat evil with evil. She almost won—but she stabbed Vader in the shoulder, and Vader groaned in a great outcry of pain. And Leia hesitated to finish him off.
But Vader rallied, and cut off Leia’s right arm at the elbow, and Annikin’s lightsaber went along with it.
Vader took off his mask, revealing his own face: that of a fair-haired, pale-skinned mustachioed man, with purple droid-facsimile eyes, and the brand of the Sith upon his forehead.
He told Leia the truth: he was her real father. Lando had cuckolded Carl Rieekan years ago, by coming to Alana in Annikin’s shape on the eve of the Battle of Condawn.
Leia, her mind flashing back to the dungeons of Alderaan, screamed.
But Vader did not stop at that revelation.
He said further that, in his youthful hatred of his father, he had determined to deny him any vestige of memory in the waking world—even in flesh and blood. And so, he confessed, he was Luke Starkiller’s father as well.
This last revelation horrified Leia even more, though she did not show it—for she now knew she had, of her own will, committed incest. (I don’t think that would actually have been mentioned on screen, except via implication. But of course Siegfried does the same thing with his aunt, the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, in Richard Wagner’s operas.)
But what horrified her most was that deep down, like Wagner’s Sieglinde or an Olympian goddess, she did not really regret it.
Vader extended an invitation to Leia to join the Sith, and jointly rule the galaxy… but Leia jumped off the balcony.
She was rescued by a passing flying creature, a winged steed of the Wookiees—ridden by Luke and Han, who had come to rescue her at her subconscious call. The Millennium Falcon escaped, as in the final film, with Vader left to ponder why Leia did not accept her father’s generous offer of half the Empire.
Leia, in turn, wondered something herself: why had Vader not seized Luke’s Kiber Crystal?
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But Vader did make one more stop before he left Kashyyyk: to the forest floor, far below the balcony where he and Leia had dueled.
There, after long searching, he found the thing he had been looking for: Annikin Starkiller’s lightsaber, clutched in his own daughter’s lifeless, partially decayed hand.
Darth Vader was not one to give up easily.
And, before he left Kashyyyk, he gave the severed arm a proper burial. It was the right thing to do, after all.
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At the new Rebel base—quite likely on a grass planet, an idea considered for a Rebel headquarters in ROTJ—Leia and Han both received medical treatment. Han opted for illegal clone parts, grown by Akira Valorum, to replace his losses.
Leia, whose lost hair was just beginning to grow back, once again opted for well-crafted false teeth, indistinguishable from real ones. But she replaced her missing right hand with a crystalline prosthetic, crafted by grateful Dwarves liberated from Imperial slavery by the Rebels. She did, after all, want a visible war wound—if only to remind herself of her own desire for revenge.
And she replaced her blind eye with a droid prosthesis of a distinctive bronze color. It would, she knew, make a good effect on the Rebel propaganda posters.
Luke, to whom alone she disclosed Vader's words, forgave Leia for losing his grandfather’s lightsaber; after all, she had suffered far more on Kashyyyk than anything he had ever borne.
C-3PO, who lost his legs on Kashyyyk, was offered replacements, of the wrong metal—silver. The Rebels’ resources were not limitless. He protested about the mismatch, but accepted one of them, thinking it a great honor. Though, for his other missing limb, he preferred to use a carved wooden leg instead. He said that it was a fitting memento for a brave droid like himself, even though it had to be replaced frequently.
In the finale, the Rebels received a coded message from Han Solo's stepfather, the powerful trade baron Bail Whitsun. He refused for the moment to talk of an alliance, or even to deal with the Rebels at all. With that, Han decided to depart, since he feared that their cause would ultimately be lost without Bail’s aid.