(takes place after a ficblurt that I don't feel like combing my old Tumblr to find; in it, Leia goes Dark and kills Tarkin after witnessing Alderaan's destruction, and Vader goes 'mine now yoink' and carts her off to go teach her Dark Side stuff so they can overthrow the Emperor together. Neither of them know they're blood relatives yet, at least not consciously.)

Darth Vader was constantly moving in and out of her life, his time split between training her and continuing to act as the Emperor's enforcer. Leia, too, was constantly on the move - her cover as Senator had definitively been blown, and she was both inconvenienced and freed by that fact. (She was also freed by a certain shift in perspective, resorting to tactics she would have shunned before. Let her allies worry about her mental state - they hadn't seen what she'd seen.)

But somehow, no matter where she was in the galaxy, Vader always caught up with her when he wanted to. It never got easier, to turn a corner or enter a safehouse to find Him standing there. The hate rushed up into her head every time.

Vader approved. He would teach her, he promised, to turn that hate into power.

In turn, Leia promised that she'd become more powerful than him, and destroy him when she was; but still, in her more sane moments she wondered what had been done to Vader that his power was still superior to hers - what world had disintegrated before his eyes.