fine feathers

The early sun peeks through the slats at the window, and the girl considers her wardrobe.

She surveys the rows of dresses, the thick velvets and voluminous silks. She glances across the lines of dainty, decorative shoes. She even takes into account the trays and trays of jewellery before making her selection. It takes the combined efforts of both her and her single handmaiden to get her into the gown, burdened as it is with a fitted bodice and silver needlepoint and jewels, and the second its padded shoulders settle in place she can feel their weight bearing down on her.

Padme forces herself to straighten, breathes all the way down to her stomach, and gives Eila a brave smile. As heavy as the gown is, she can already feel it bracing her, transforming her, reminding her that she is no longer the girl struck with awe at the capital city of Naboo, she is a senator who barters with planets.

In the slanting sun, Eila does Padme's hair, smoothing in veda pearls that catch the rays in sudden bursts. She does her makeup; the Senator fastens her own jewellery, today a band of black and white around the throat. Then the handmaiden pulls over a full-length mirror so Padme can make a final inspection.

The transformation, Padme can see, is complete. Eila has completely hidden the circles under her eyes and the dryness in her skin bred by long hours and sleepless nights. The gown, dark, full, and sculptural, emphasizes her, making her presence commanding, full of power and ethos. Padme, the tired young woman carrying a burden too heavy for her, is gone, and Senator Amidala, the beautiful and intelligent champion of democracy whom Padme hopes to really be someday, stands in her place. 

(Deep in the recesses of her wardrobe Padme still keeps a gown from when she was Queen. The rest are gone--made into simpler dresses, cut up to be resold, or given to charities--because she could not in her new position justify owning such opulence. But she keeps one. It reminds her that the people chose her, and the people loved her, and that, by all accounts, they still do.)

The sun is rising higher as Padme travels to the Senate, her long train creating a wake behind her, like the waves of change she leaves in the sky.

-

The sun is beginning to sink when the girl considers her wardrobe.

She has to force herself not to slump, not to let the sweat and dirt and blood all over the sheets or fall asleep right there and then. Instead she opens the large metal trunk she stores her clothes in and eyes them dubiously, rooting through the pants, the vests, the white dresses and silver jewellery stark against the browns and greens. She has nothing coordinated or particularly suitable for an emergency meeting in lieu of dinner--laundry can be slow on an overtaxed Rebellion base--but she sighs, hits the shower, and throws on a shirt and pants that vaguely match.

Leia could try to scrape up something to eat in the five minutes she has left, but instead she gives herself time to braid her hair, coiling the finished braid around her head and pinning it in place. The routine forces her to slow down, soothes her, stills her nerves. Her mother used to braid her hair, sometimes to keep her quiet, sometimes for a special occasion. In the familiar action Leia can still feel her mother's hands.

She ducks into her bunk to look into the small mirror kept there. Her face looks very small and pale and tired against the shadows filling the room, but Leia lifts her chin and sets her jaw, hard. She has seen her father do this before he leaves for the Senate. She has seen her mother do this before she makes difficult decisions. The mask hides the frightened girl who has lost her home planet and turns her into the lion-hearted leader of the Rebellion. One day Leia hopes to be able to drop the mask and lead regardless, but for now, it has to do.

(Leia still keeps the few gowns, silver-white and shining, she has left. True, they do not belong in this age of war and tears, but before she was a rebel she was a Princess. The time may come when she has to be a princess again, free and clean and beautiful. She does quite not realize her men love her the better for dressing like them.)

The sun has nearly set when Leia marches out to the Rebellion, the sound of her boots loud and certain against the tiles, like the shakers of entire worlds.

-

The night is breathing its last, gusting over the sands, and the girl considers her wardrobe.

One of the lenses from her goggles has fallen out, and just poking it back in isn't going to work; she's tried. Which means she's going to have to find some glue, which means she's going to have to buy it, which means she's going to go hungry again--but no one in their right mind would try to scavenge without goggles. And her belt has once again become too loose. That she can fix now, so she stitches it tighter with a big needle and a scrap of rawhide thread. Sitting upright, she rocks her hammock with one foot on the sandy ground, listening to the soft animal sounds of the desert.

The task finished, Rey lets out a frustrated little sigh, stretching out to full length. Her empty stomach makes sleep impossible. Absently, she winds and rewinds her gauzy arm bindings and scatters the loose sand. Soon the sun will rise, and she will set out again to the junkyards of Jakku, hopefully to find enough scrap to buy her dinner and glue. She jumps up at the first sign, the barely perceptible rose glow on the horizon, grabbing her quarterstaff as she goes. Before she steps out of the shadow of her walker, she draws herself up to her full height, grips her quarterstaff a little tighter, makes herself seem like a difficult target so that any lowlifes looking for an easy victim will decide she isn't worth it. 

(Rey gathers her hair every morning into three little knots at the back of her neck. It's extra trouble, and time is food on Jakku, but she has to allow herself the indulgence. There is someone out there who will remember her real name, her past, her family. In the meantime this is all she has to remember, and she will keep doing her hair so, because someone who loved her once did it for her.)

The sun is gaining strength when Rey sets off to the scavenge, and she leaves footprints in the sand, like the path she will trace out in the stars.

Where's Rey?

"What is he saying?"

The faces come into focus one by one. First a woman he doesn't recognise, wearing the uniform of medical staff. Then the ruddy face of Poe, tinged with an anxiety bizarre on him. And finally that of the General. Leia Organa, leader of the Resistance, is looking at him with a mother's anxiety, but her face is well acquainted with the expression, falling easily into thin, worn lines.

Staring up at them, Finn tries to speak around the dryness in his throat, forcing his lips to form around the words. "Where's Rey?"

The three exchange glances. General Organa's expression is unreadable.

"She isn't here right now. I'll tell you later. For now, you should get some more rest." 

Discreetly, she ushers Poe out of the room and follows, her small shoulders still strong, poised from a lifetime of fighting. Finn wants to protest--he feels like he's slept for a week already, and maybe he has--but starts to cough violently instead.

The medic holds a cup to his lips. He's expecting water, or something beige and chalky like the all-purpose medicine the First Order used to give him, but instead the liquid is a sunshiny orange, and smooth and sweet, and that makes him oddly happy. Rey would love this, Finn thinks, and then thinks once again that unanswered, unsettling question: where's Rey?

-

Leia waits until he can stand, until he's stopped feeling the chill in his bones, to tell him.

"With Luke Skywalker," Finn says, dumbly. "To be a Jedi."

His face openly says what Leia has secretly felt, so many times: an awestruck tremble at knowing your greatest friend is or will be the greatest of the Jedi, that ancient race of warriors. It is strange, to realize half your soul inhabits a world so distant from your own. Graciously, she gives him a few minutes to collect his thoughts, but he doesn't need them, because everything falls into place, perfect. Of course (the way the world bends for her, the blue of her lightsaber in the snow). Of course she is a Jedi.

"Where is she?"

Leia shakes her head and points to the map. "She is going to Ahch-To," she says, "but communication is hard on some of these planets. We lost contact a while ago. We have no way of knowing how near or far she is. And when she does get to Ahch-To, we do not know how long she will stay there."

"There's a lot you don't know," Finn remarks. He doesn't want to be rude, but he doesn't like it. Not knowing. 

"There is one thing." The General smiles, turning her grimness into softness, as if by magic. "I know she's safe."

"Because she's with your brother?"

Despite everything on her shoulders, Leia laughs, actually laughs. "No," she says, and her eyes look beyond. "Because the Force is with her."

Finn tries to see what she is seeing, feel what she is feeling. For a moment he does--he does know--but it is gone too quickly.

It is not enough.

-

In time Finn gets used to the not knowing. He gets used to life on the base, sort of--having people who smile at him and food that doesn't taste like wet sand and easy laughter and unshameful tears and music. (He never quite drops the feeling of quiet wonder that this, this is his now.)

And he never quite stops wondering, either. In the early hours of the morning he rises early to watch the sun. On late nights he leaves the brightness and noise of the canteen to stand beneath the stars. 

Looking out at them, he pictures his friend, the galaxy's champion, journeying uncharted planets and discovering new and beautiful things every day. He feels a twinge of loss, because he should be there, with Chewbacca and the Falcon and her, but he also feels, unequivocally, that this is her time, not his.

Then he asks the question, the one that's always at the back of his mind: 

where's Rey?

Child of the Resistance

Poe can barely remember a time before Ben.

In fact, he thinks, one of his earliest memories--maybe his earliest memory--is of his mother talking with Leia Organa, both bright-eyed and laughing, and of the tiny, black-haired child cradled in the princess' arms.

(What a legacy to be carried on the shoulders of an infant.)

-

Ben is four, and Poe is six, and both are stuck outdoors, thrumming feet on the dirt-packed ground, while their mothers both do important Alliance things. 

"You wanna play?" Poe asks, trying to coax the four-year-old away from the window where he is glued watching the mothers work. "They're busy. We can do something fun until they're done."

Ben simply shakes his head, not even bothering to look at Poe. So the older boy plonks himself down in the dirt to examine the soles of his shoes. "Okay, then."

Already people say with affectionate certainty that Poe is really his mother's son, both born pilots with big hearts and a love for the skies. Nobody says the same thing about Ben. With Princess Leia, senator and rebel, for his mother, and Han Solo, smuggler and scoundrel, for his father, one would expect him to be like them--hard edges, loud words, fire and light, anger and laughter in rapid succession. After all, their arguments shake the whole base, and their smiles illuminate it just as quickly.

But instead, Ben is solemn, subdued, already hiding secrets in his four-year-old eyes. Perhaps it is because he is named for a dead Jedi; perhaps he is what the grownups call a biological sport. Whatever it is, Poe has yet to figure it out. He's the General's son, though, and that's more than good enough for Poe. He tries to strike up the conversation again.

"Hey, Ben, how about we--"

Just then, the door swings open, and Ben slips past, noiseless as a cat, and ducks behind his mother's skirt. With a sigh, Poe picks himself up. He greets his mother and the General, the latter with unbridled enthusiasm and hero-worship in his upturned face. But the grownups are busy, and brush past, still talking. Ben clings tightly to his mother's skirt, then looks back, and for the briefest instant he meets Poe's gaze.

(This is what Poe is thinking about, when Kylo Ren swaggers down the ramp, loose-limbed and dangerous as a feral animal--about the small boy with big sad eyes.)

-

Ben is six, and Poe is eight, and both are sitting in a circle with all the other children on the base, restless and impatient. 

It's Ben's birthday, but the familiar games are starting to get a bit old. Finally the grownups start to trickle away, and the children follow, gathering in their own little groups of play and chatter. Poe notices a laughing cluster of them crouched around the base of a hill, and bounds towards the spot.

His curiosity is rewarded by about five or six hill-mice, small dusty brown creatures with shrill, distinctive squeaks. Grinning, Poe joins the other children in petting them and chasing them around the ups and downs in the grassy hill. He's just caught one, and is tickling its stomach, which it seems to enjoy, when a particularly piercing squeak startles him.

Poe looks up to see Takk, a thin, weedy boy, grasping one of the hill-mice far too tightly in his hands. The creature squirms and squeals, eyes rolling and tail thrashing, but Takk has a strong grip. "That's a cool sound," one of the other kids says, moving in closer. "Do it again!"

Takk does so, sending the group into convulsions of laughter, and suddenly they're all scrabbling over the hill, trying to capture their own hill-mice to see if they can elicit the same reaction. As the shrills of the beleaguered mice ring out over the hillside, Poe cradles the one he found close to his jacket. "Stop that," he says, and then, louder, "Stop that!"

No one pays him any attention, until Neena, an imposing girl of twelve with thick, whiplike boxer braids, notices the hill-mouse he's still holding. "Hey," she says, "I don't have one. Give me that."

"No!" Poe's heard so much about the cruelty, the irrational sadism of the Empire and its underlings--and yet he'd never thought he'd see it here, not on D'Qar, not in the heart of the Alliance. "I said stop." He tries to snatch the mouse out of Takk's hands, but fails, and the older boy collides heavily into him, making him stumble and drop the one he's already holding. Quickly, Neena grabs it up, leering. Poe's eyes flash with either anger or tears. The squeals go on and on and on, throbbing in his head, and finally he's about to dash away and get an adult, even if it makes him look cowardly, when Ben, newly six, pale and regal, drifts in among them.

He doesn't even have to say a word. Something fearsome and condemning in his glare makes the crazed children drop the mice and turn deadly silent.Watching his friend, Poe feels a proud burst of warmth. But then Ben looks straight at him, as the other children run away, and the warmth is replaced by a sudden chill, because there's something unreadable behind Ben's eyes. 

"You were awesome," Poe manages.

Ben shakes his head slightly, as if trying to shake off a shadow. "They shouldn't do things like that."

"Definitely not," Poe begins, in agreement, but Ben isn't finished.

"Every time they do it, the darkness gets bigger." Profound words, yet Ben's lip trembles. He is still very much a child. "They shouldn't--I shouldn't--"

"Hey," Poe says, feeling odd about taking charge again. "Let's get these hill-mice back to their burrows."

So, two dark heads together, they guide the hill-mice back into their holes with surprisingly gentle hands, both avoiding the feeling they have: that the shadow remains, and it watches.

(This is what Poe is thinking about, hot in the fires of destruction and cold in the desert night, as he listens to the dying cries of the creatures Kylo Ren has slaughtered--about the boy who helped him save a hill-mouse from a childish bully.)

-

Ben is eight, and Poe is ten, and both are standing on the airstrip, the wind ruffling through their hair. 

"I don't want to," Ben protests, with vehemence. "You can't really fly a fighter."

Poe is careful when with Ben. Less boisterous, less reckless, instinctively sensing the crushing difference that sets Ben apart from the other children. But this skepticism, coming from the General's son, severely wounds his pride.

"I can, too," Poe insists. "I learned when I was six." He clambers up the side of X-wing and steps, lightly, into the cockpit. "If you're not coming, you can stay on the ground. Just watch me."

Unsurprisingly, Ben falls silent. Surprisingly, he does stay, moving to the side of the airstrip as the fighter sputters noisily and starts up. There's a strange sort of trepidation and distaste in his eyes. Poe only catches it for an instant before he's up and away, his gleeful shouts accompanying the roar of the engine.

He's been doing this for four years, but Poe doesn't think he'll ever get tired of the feeling: rushing and dipping and soaring and flipping, free as air. When he thumps back down to earth, his back is wet with sweat and his hair hangs messily in his eyes, and yet he is, in that moment, supremely happy.

Then he sees Ben's face.

"What is it? What?" He drops his helmet, slides over to his friend, who is wrapping his arms around himself as if freezing, although the day is scorching. "Ben! Talk to me."

"Something's wrong," Ben gasps, his eyes wild, unfocused, and impossibly dark, staring not at Poe but through him. And Poe realises with an involuntary shudder that Ben is seeing something Poe can't see, something so terrible it causes the son of the galaxy's greatest heroes to cry like a child. "I don't like it," Ben bursts out, heartrending, and Poe is left to scare himself wondering what "it" could be.

"You don't like my flying? I can--" Poe hesitates, because he'd do almost anything to help the General, just not that, because asking him to stop flying is like asking him to stop breathing. He's about to offer not to fly when Ben's around, since Ben, what with his important Jedi training and stuff, isn't around a lot, but he's too late. Ben is running back towards the base, and the door clangs behind him, jarring and hollow in the wind.

(This is what Poe is thinking about, when the door closes irreversibly on him, a prisoner in Kylo Ren's ship--about the boy who could not bear to watch him fly.)

-

Ben is fourteen, and Poe is sixteen, and the two are more starkly aware of the differences between them than ever. Poe grew up well: still, to himself, unsatisfactorily short, but strong and ruddy and black-haired and white-toothed, the charmer of the entire base, the poster boy product of revolution. The kind of pilot who flies circles around everyone else, but finds such pure delight in the sport that no one can resent him for it. The kind of boy who attracts his peers' admiration and his elders' proud, indulgent smiles. There glows a youthful light around Poe no one else can quite seem to touch, but he willingly shares it, because he's...that kind.

And Ben? Ben, back with his family for a short week from training with his uncle, standing quietly by as the base welcomes the returning Jedi and celebrates the newly official pilot who follows in his late mother's footsteps? He's just at that awkward phase, all sharp angles of elbows and two left feet, too tall for his weight, too old for his age. Ben skulks around the base, eyeing his childhood haunts as if they are unfamiliar to him, pretending not to notice when adults whisper and children skitter out of his way.

Someone once told Poe, offhandedly, that he should be the General's son. The memory surfaces as Poe greets Ben for the first time in months, along with a pang of guilt. Perhaps Poe would have found by himself the right words to say to his boyhood acquaintance. Perhaps not. At any rate, the two are thrown together from necessity, to watch the multitudes of children running amok while the grownups discuss matters of consequence. Poe thinks himself already on the cusp of adulthood, but he doesn't really mind. Anything for the General. 

Even sitting next to her gloomy teenage son, trying to find something to break the silence that exists nowhere on the base but in the space between them.

After half a dozen failed attempts at conversation, Poe sighs and gets up, leaving Ben still huddled in his own personal dark cloud. He gathers the children for a game, a variant on cops and robbers, mostly filled with a lot of running and screaming. "No hurting anyone," he cautions, "or you're out!" 

Still, he lets a bunch of five madly giggling kids tie him up, sloppily and dump him in a hollow under a tree. Wriggling his fingers over the ropes, he wonders how long to wait before escaping. Would five minutes be too long? Would ten?

While he is still pondering this question, Ben suddenly appears in front of him, an expression on his face that is both disturbing and disturbed. "What is this?" he inquires sharply, and his manner is too charged for something so trifling.

"It's a game I'm playing with the kids," Poe says, his good-humoured laugh broken off as Ben ignites his lightsaber, the blue blade transforming the scene into a study in shadows. "Hey, Ben, wait, it's all for fun, I can get out by myself, easy--"

Swiftly, decisively, irrationally, Ben slices through the ropes, a flash of rage and light. As he turns off his lightsaber, shoulders heaving, a strand of dark hair drips sweat into his eyes. "Get up," he says, through his teeth.

Perplexed, Poe does so, his hand fumbling as he pushes himself off the ground, unable to fully meet the younger boy in the eye. "I don't understand, Ben. It was just a game."

"It wasn't funny," Ben says coldly, white-faced, his sensitive mouth set into a thin line. "Don't do that again." He offers no further explanation, and departs, standing straight as a snapped twig, leaving Poe free and inexplicably afraid. In the sloping evening sun, his shadow is far too big for his frame.

(This is what Poe is thinking about, as he struggles against his bonds, and as the white face he once knew looms over him with an artist's hubris--about the boy who did not understand a game.)

Then the force of the galaxy is pulling at him, wringing his brain for the information in needs, and he cannot think about anything for a long time.

-

Even when he is broken out of his cell by a breathless stormtrooper he has no time to think. Even when they escape the First Order on a hope and a prayer he has no time to think. Especially when they crash on a forsaken desert planet and he wanders the sands looking for his friend, he has no time to think.

But when Poe finally finds himself back on D'Qar, bone-tired and forever in the debt of a couple of random space merchants who pick up hitchhikers, he also finds himself with an overabundance of time to think. His comrades give him all the space he needs. The General--

Oh, the General.

She steps away from the control station to ask, "Did you see him?"

"Yes," Poe says. "I did."

"And he was..." She trails off, hoping against hope, waiting for an answer he cannot give.

He is different, he is evil, he is ruthless and cruel and completely given over to the dark, and Poe knows one thing, just one, for sure--he is Kylo Ren, and Kylo Ren is not the General's son. Now he has lost a mother, she a child, yet for the sake of the galaxy--everything, in the end, is about the galaxy--they cannot allow themselves anything more than a moment's grief. Poe coughs. "He is...changed," he says, slowly. And then, "General Organa, I need rest. May I be dismissed?"

It is the first time he has ever lied, no matter how indirectly, to his hero. Let her think he is too shaken by his capture and the loss of his fellow escapee to talk. Let her sit alone in the control station to mourn her son.

Poe walks, alone, back to his bunk. On the way he sees the sunset, the last shards of light slipping below the horizon. He stops and stands and watches and aches. And he buries Ben Solo forever, deep where he cannot be found.