sporkmetender replied to your post: Prompt me
Phasma meets Leia somehow and is unmasked during the meeting.
It was a strange quirk of stormtroopers, Leia thought—bury them under flat, white plasticine and all those human tics and weaknesses turned inward, were trapped under the skin; right up until the moment you removed the armor, when it came roiling to the surface, pressurized. She’d noticed it in Finn, a tendency to emote with his whole body and stare too long; drum his fingers on datapads and the edges of tables, move like a blaster shot. The crew of the captured Domitia did it too—she’d been watching them on the monitors for fifteen minutes, and she’d lost count of how many times they stalked the width and length of the cells, restless as animals.
If she had been another sort of woman, Leia might have taken heart that humanity persisted, even in the midst of profound darkness.
Instead, she was wondering whether their meager supplies would feed an extra fifty mouths, and what she was going to do when they wouldn’t.
(There was a voice at the back of her head whispering, do what is necessary do what will keep yours safe, eliminate them—
Leia had a great deal of practice ignoring that voice.)
Leia’s gaze wandered back to Captain Phasma as the woman made another circuit around her cell. There was something different about her—the particular way she held herself, maybe, or the washed-out light on her hair—and it stirred the deep recesses of Leia’s memory. “Buzz me through,” she said suddenly to Lieutenant Luo, who jerked upright in his seat.
“Um,” he answered eloquently. He looked at the door to the cell block as though expecting it to open under its own power. “Ma’am? Shouldn’t we wait for…”
Leia waited, curious as to how he was planning to finish that sentence. No one was coming, except whoever drew the short straw from Intel, and maybe Luke or Rey, when the stormtroopers (inevitably) refused to talk. The Resistance didn’t have interrogators, it barely had prison guards—she hadn’t thought there was a need for them, among her guerrilla hit-and-run pilots and ex-smuggler logisticians. First Order personnel didn’t walk away from a Resistance attack, as a rule; not even into prison cells.
”….someone,” Luo finished in a small voice.
“Buzz me through, Lieutenant,” Leia repeated, not unkindly. She liked Luo. It wasn’t his fault she hadn’t anticipated this, that the sight of all that white armor piled up on the duracrete had made her blood run hot and too-loud in her ears. It had taken Luke quietly nudging a memory at her (aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper) to remember she could breathe at all.
The red rage was still there, of course, thrumming through her blood, whispering eliminate them as it moved in her veins.
Leia breathed.
“Yes, General,” Luo said, and buzzed the door open.
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