Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

lastkodachrome asked: AU: Luke's gone dark and Leia and Han are on the run together.

notbecauseofvictories:

He doesn’t cut the string between them. That’s the cruelest part, Leia thinks—that she can still feel that cord of golden light tied around the struts of her ribs, knotted somewhere in her cardiac muscle, tying her to him. He plucks at it sometimes, and she can feel the vibrations in her throat, her back teeth. (That’s how her brother loves her, bile choking her and a blinding agony, like her heart is trying to squeeze itself through her ribs. I miss you, he whispers through the Force, through her dreams, a lover’s voice. We are all we have, Leia, why won’t you see that?)

It’s cruel, it’s cruel, she doesn’t want to feel the black mold and ice spreading out from his hands, calcifying and creeping closer, ever closer, to her. He should have cut it. He should have finished it, this, them. 

But then, Leia hasn’t cut it either. She’s not sure what her reason is.

.

The hardest part is the walk.

She can choke down the greasy slop that they serve at various dodgy cantinas throughout the galaxy. She can sleep on the itchy pallet on the narrow bunk in the Falcon. She can wrinkle her nose at Han cleaning his teeth and trying to talk at the same time—both too early in the morning when she really needs the refresher—and go without a hot sanisteam for weeks. She can lie and haggle and handle a blaster, speak Huttese like an Outer Rim rube or Basic with a thick Corellian drawl that never fails to make Han laugh.

And she can do it all while quietly slipping transmissions for the Rebellion into the right hands, praying that there is someone to read them on the other end. (It’s gone quiet in the wake of Endor, even though the Emperor had mysteriously retreated and all but handed them the victory. Leia doesn’t know what to make of that)

But when she’s not thinking about it, she reverts to the princess, the general—she’s always been someone who commands attention, and it’s written in the way she holds herself, the way she walks. It’s a dead giveaway, Han sighs, exchanging a look with Chewbacca. They’ve been watching her walk up and down the hold for what feels like most of the day, and nothing seems to be working.

We could shoot her in the foot, Chewie grumbles. Or you in the mouth, it’d have the same effect.

There isn’t truly ‘night’ when you spend most of your time in hyperspace, flitting from planet to planet, each with their own orbital period. Once, Leia had been able to shut her eyes and simply know what hour it was in Aldera, night or day, wherever in the galaxy she was. Even after Alderaan was destroyed, she had been able to breathe deeply and know, absolutely know, just before dawn, the oldawu blooms will be opening, or, third night watch, the streets quiet. 

These days, she can barely track her own internal chrono. They stumble from morning to midnight to afternoon to dawn and then back, into the timeless suspension of hyperspace. It’s disorienting. She think it’s making her sick.

Still, sometimes, Leia lays beside Han in the artificial dim of the cabin, and she is grateful. She is grateful. It’s easy to pretend in the no-time and nowhereness that they are just two unimportant humans, a man and a woman, hurtling silently through space as humans do. That they have not lost anyone or anything, they are not running. They are not waiting. They are not bleeding out internally, and they are not afraid.

They are just where they are supposed to be.

.

a dream: there is a boy with sand in his mouth, his lips stitched shut by cruel hands. he is heavy, he is so heavy, all the desert in his lungs and belly, burned sere and dry as bones in the sun.

there is another boy, and he is water. he is the flood. he lifts his hand and tears open the boy with sand in his mouth-lungs-belly—washes him away. it is a kind of terrible mercy to drown, the boy thinks. 

right then, he is not sure which boy he is.

in this dream, there is a girl who watches them, and screams thunder when the flood runs red.

.

in another world, the boy is still a flood, but he says drink instead of drown. but that is another world. it has no bearing on this one. it’s probably best if you don’t think of it any more.

.

Is he okay? Han asks her once. Leia is sitting in the empty co-pilot seat, her feet tucked under her. She’s fidgeting with her hair—she’d cut it short, terribly short, after some smuggler in a cantina recognized her braids as Alderaanian and nearly blasted her through. (The bounty on her specifies ‘alive’, not ‘well’.) Her head feels impossibly light now, bare and hollowed-out and full of loss.

It’s a kind of vicious equivalence to it, she thinks. Everything about her is full of loss.

I mean—Han starts, but she cuts him off.

I know who you mean.

(If she began spooling that golden thread around her fingers and followed it, to where her brother stands waiting for her in the dark, she knows Han would follow. He would. And he would love the thing she became, however terrible, just as he would love whatever monstrous remnant of Luke they found. She’s not sure he’d even see the ice and black mold growing in the cracks of the people he once knew—she and Luke could blind him with a sharp needle and kiss him after, pet his hair, and Han would be secretly glad, grateful to be wanted, to be allowed.

Sometimes, Leia cannot breathe with how much faith Han has in her, in them. She doesn’t know what she’s done to deserve it.)

Well? Han asks. His voice is soft. Is he okay?

I don’t know how to answer that, Leia says.

.

There was talk of a rescue, in the wake of Endor—Lando and Han in particular, still tired-eyed from the battle but upright, warming their hands over the ewoks’ fire. They talked about storming the Emperor’s star destroyer like it was Jabba’s palace, like Luke was trapped in carbonite somewhere and all they had to do was—

Leia had bitten her tongue until it bled. She was in too much pain, her connection to Luke howling, the whole Force digging its claws into her skin, her skull, that the blood in her mouth offered some relief.

At least it was real. She was still real, here, human, and not dissolved into light.

Leia! Han said, when she spat onto the grass. (She had still felt it, the red staining her lips, the corners of her mouth. Every atom in her body was screaming for Luke, her heart pulled against her ribcage like the string might snap if he went any further—)

We can’t rescue someone who doesn’t want to be saved, she’d said, and that was the end of it.

.

another dream:

why? the girl who is a storm asks the flood. tell me why and maybe then I will understand, maybe I will come.

I am so tired, the flood says. aren’t you tired?

they are standing in a charnel-house. she is not the reason for all the bones that lie here, but more of them are at her feet than his. (‘skywalker’ is scored into all of them with an uneven hand.)

that’s not a reason, the storm says. that’s an excuse.

.

They’re in some nameless place that serves nameless food, smoke-filled and seedy, when the grav-ball match cuts out. There’s a collective groan from the assembled criminals and riffraff when the Imperial sigil fills the viewscreen—Han’s good at finding planets, places, where there’s no love lost for the Empire. Leia shoots him an amused look; he shrugs, grinning.

Her humor vanishes when a soft-spoken voice says, My name is Luke Skywalker.

The viewscreen is old and grainy, marred by a spiderweb crack at one corner, but Leia can still see that his eyes are bloodshot, orange-red and unsettling. They seem to find her in the crowd, piercing her through and pinning her to the grimy wall. The nameless food roils in her stomach.

His smile is the same, she thinks. A crooked, farmboy smile, undimmed; almost a smirk but meaning-well.

He smiles as he recites the death toll from some ‘uprising’ the Empire ‘cleansed’. Leia barely makes it to the refresher before she’s sick over her boots.

.

can you come back? the storm who is also a girl asks. if there’s a chance, any chance—

you cannot stopper a flood, the boy says, and turns away.

.

Han finds her in the refresher, sobbing, blood in her ears, her nose. I’m sorry, she chokes out. She gets blood on his cheek but she can’t seem to stop pulling him closer and then struggling away, clawing at his shirt. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to. I’m sorry.

It’s okay, Han says, gathering her up, holding her close. After a minute of struggling, she goes still, like a bird with a snapped neck. (He wishes he had a different metaphor.) Hey, hey, talk to me, Han breathes, stroking her shoulder with his thumb. Tell me what’s wrong, maybe I can help. I can help.

I cut it, Leia whispers. I cut the string out. I didn’t have a reason, I just had an excuse, so I cut it out of me. I think I’m bleeding, Han. I don’t think I’ll stop bleeding.

Han exhales. Okay, let me get the medkit, it’s just—

I’m so tired, Leia says, her voice barely louder than a whisper. She’s clinging to him weakly, and there’s blood in hair. I’m so tired.

Red and White

notbecauseofvictories:

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.

Keep reading

augustasands:

everybody should reblog this with the only personality assessment that matters: your favorite disney princess, fav color, fav super hero, fav season

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

lullabyknell:

The Empire told stories about Leia Organa.

They started off simple: calling her a simple-minded fool. Leia Organa was a silly little princess throwing a tantrum over her planet being punished for its treachery. Pretty but petty, and ever so vain, Leia Organa was just a spoiled little twit spitting rage for not being given the power she wanted and having a fit over being caught at a crime.

Those stories didn’t work very well.

The repeated success of such a tiny and ragtag group of rebels proved that there were clever and cunning folk behind the Rebellion. For a silly twit, Leia Organa slipped out of too many traps, stole too much information and too many supplies, shot down too many Imperial forces, and succeeded in her command again and again.

It didn’t reflect well against the Empire that a spoiled princess kept foiling them over and over again, even if sometimes by the thinnest of hairs.

And everyone who’d ever met Leia Organa could never believe them, and Leia Organa had met many people as she negotiated and coerced more and more allies for the Rebellion, and many people before when she pretended to exist under the Empire’s rule. I met Leia Organa once, traders and governors and senators many others across the galaxy would say, and she’s nothing like they say she is.

Leia Organa is pretty and a princess, but her eyes are sharp and her words are sharper still, and she is made of kindness and cleverness and grief and rage. She has little patience for anyone who believes the Empire’s stories about her. Anyone who can look into her eyes and think her shallow must be blind to miss the death and hopes and dreams of an entire planet; there is nothing simple about any of the last children of Alderaan and everyone knows it - as deep down as the scream that echoed through the galaxy.

The Empire switches tactics - took them long enough - and calls the simple-minded fool and silly little princess a masterful illusion. She’s a lie, they say, and a liar. Leia Organa is a beautiful temptress, a demoness feeding on the chaos of war, a front for the Rebel cause, hungry for power and revenge and the deaths of all she can lure to her weak, pointless, useless cause. This princess who should have died is only a campaign strategy hiding under a pretty woman’s face.

Some stories say that Leia Organa is dead. She died with Alderaan; her silly support of the rebels killed her. What exists now is a sick, twisted figurehead invention of the Rebellion to gain support - a lying lie. A ghost, a demon, an undead enchantress and seductress who weaves pretty and terrible falsehoods and deceptions.

Leia Organa hears these rumors and instead of scoffing like she did at those that proclaimed her a brainless twit, she laughs. Then she scoffs. And then she goes back to work. The Empire can say what it wants, that won’t make it true that the Rebellion isn’t gaining ground. (It hurts when people believe the stories, but Leia’s scale for pain is fairly skewed now, against the hole where her heart used to be.)

A similar reaction goes through most of the Rebellion, those who don’t scoff with disgust burst into laughter and laugh until they cry. Oh yeah, Red Squadron agrees, wiping actual tears off their cheeks, that’s the princess, alright, seducing men left and right. Yep, there she is now, standing on a box and yelling like a howleroo in General Solo’s face again as he yells back. Hair frizzy from working all night and wearing Skywalker’s ugly yellow jacket again, that’s the true picture of temptation and enchantment.

Luke laughs so hard that he falls to the floor and can’t get up for fifteen minutes. (Anyone who so must as suggests it might be true in front of him quickly learns the true meaning of fear, but otherwise) Luke nearly dies because he keeping cracking up and almost hits his head on stuff, and Wedge has had to repeatedly drag him off to Medical to check if there’s something wrong with him.

(The tests keep coming up negative but Wedge doesn’t understand how anyone can find their own intragalatic Imperial reputation as a dangerous religious lunatic absolutely hilarious. There’s something in the sand on Tatooine, you mark Wedge’s words.)

Han Solo can’t believe what he’s hearing when he hears the rumors, and doesn’t even laugh. He teases Princess Leia about it, of course, but everybody quickly learns not to joke about it in his presence because suddenly the smuggler’s all you wanna repeat that, buddy? And nobody wants to have their arms torn off by a Wookie.

The Empire can tell all the stories it wants, it still loses in the end.

About twenty years later, the First Order tells stories about Leia Organa, and it’s the same old story all over again. (A son of Skywalker has fallen, the Jedi have fallen with stragglers scattered across the stars, someone building another giant super-weapon, and the Organas are fighting back against an Empire.) Demonize and dehumanize.

The only difference is that they acknowledge the existence of the Force again, saying she uses it to twist minds and hearts and souls, and they don’t call her beautiful anymore.

Leia Organa pretends to be a kindly old woman, but she’s really a cunning old crone. She’s a bitter old hag who can’t let go of rebellion, who wants to tear the galaxy apart because she wants everything but her wrinkled hands can’t handle it all. A small and sickly, but deadly and devious and dangerous and ugly witch.

And that’s not even getting started on what they say about Luke

Leia Organa just laughs, then scoffs. (There’s a pain in her chest, but it’s not important.) And then she gets back to work. She remembers when she used to be beautiful, you know.

(“Used to be,” Han says with loyal disdain, then insists, “Still.”)

These little men can talk all they want to prove what big boys they are, but she’s gone from a pretty-petty princess to a villainous temptress and fabrication to an old and terrible witch, and she’s still kicking.

Those stories didn’t work very well. 

(At least, she thinks they didn’t. She hopes so. It hurts when people believe the stories, but Leia’s scale for pain is fairly skewed now, against the hole where her heart used to be. Oh, to think that she could find them both, in the dark and distant places they’ve gone to, and bring them home.)

They’ll prove them wrong again.

JUST FUCK ME UP.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

Anonymous asked: have you done poe for the headcanon meme yet?

notbecauseofvictories:

                      …two truths and a lie.

one. If you cut Poe Dameron open (and they have, a few times, because shrapnel is a kung-fucker, and he’s gotten sort of attached to not having alusteel in his bloodstream) you’d find the Republic there, scored into the underside of his ribs. Mama used to say that nursed them together, Poe and his little sister, Revuelta, born screaming in the cockpit of her x-wing.

but I’m your favorite! Poe had always giggled, finishing the story for her, and mama always had said, never doubt it, ishoco, because that was simpler than, it was easier to bring you into the world. there was less blood.

(every child’s origins are the stuff of mythology, at least in the way you tell it—Ben Organa came too early, in the midst a magnetic storm that almost tore the Falcon to pieces; Rey breathed her first during starfall, on a planet whose name no one could quite remember. The boy who would one day be called Finn, meaning fair, slept in the circle of his mother’s arms that first night, because she never wanted to let him leave her skin.

Poe Dameron was born screaming into the cockpit of his mother’s x-wing, cradling alzamiento between his heart and his breastbone.)

two. Everyone gets it wrong, they say it must have been when and talk about control sticks and x-wings, punching through to the blue-white of hyperspace. Maybe for everyone else, it was. But to him, flying didn’t even register as something else, different than breathing, or internal organs, something that could be articulated in the subjunctive. Sitting in a cockpit is like tasting the inside of his mouth, there’s nothing there but more of him, more himness.

He couldn’t have fallen in love with a thing indistinguishable from the shape of his skin.

No, the first time Poe fell in love, it was with a hastily holo-copied piece of flimsi, handed out among T-14 class. Through the transparisteel was a bright, clear afternoon, so he caught only fragments of what his teacher was saying, perished with Alderaan, and best known poet of the civil war—

It’s chance that his eyes land on the single line of hand-scrawled poetry:when the multitudes run rioting against you and against everything unjust and inhuman, I will be in their midst with the torch in my hand

(Under his breastbone, Revuelta stirs. Poe falls in love—not with poetry but with the image, himself, all skinny adolescent elbows, standing against the unjust and holding the torch.)

After his mother’s funeral, he goes on a nerve burner of a bender, and wakes up three days later at the foot of the Force-tree. (It hasn’t flowered since the attack on the new Jedi temple, but Poe fights the strange urge to apologize.) His side aches sharply, and he cringes, stumbling inside to the refresher. 

He lifts his shirt to see ‘with the torch in my hand’, tattooed along the slant of his ribs.

three. He hasn’t slept more than four standard units for a week when the General finds him under his x-wing. BB-8 (that traitor) doesn’t warn him, and so suddenly she’s there, passing him the sonic wrench he had been vainly reaching for.

She’s shorter than he is, Poe realizes with a start. Standing in the command center, surrounded by people who need orders and answers, she’s always seemed to eat up space, towering above them—here she’s just a woman. He can see the places where the eumelanin regeneration has left her scalp blotchy.

general, he says.

you know my brother blew up the Death Star, the General replies idly, and it takes Poe a minute to remember that Luke Skywalker, Star-killer, is actually the same man as General Organa’s brother. (Poe mostly remembers the latter skipping stones across a pond with the Force, talking to a tree in Poe’s yard as though he expected it to answer back.)

he asked to be moved to planetside combat, after that, she adds after a moment.

Poe blinks. I didn’t know that, ma’am.

Luke said he had heard them, crying out, all the voices of the Death Star as they perished. he couldn’t do it again, he said—he said ’at least with a blaster, you can only kill one at a time.’

Poe stares. His fingers are numb around the sonic wrench.

war is ugly, lieutenant, the General says. There’s something carved-out about how she says it, like she’s had this conversation too many times before. anyone who tells you different is lying, or trying to recruit you. but you did good work on Eraski; it was necessary and you did it well, you did it cleanly. I wish that weren’t such a cold comfort.

I—is it worth it? he asks the General. He wants to ask Princess Leia Organa, whose planet was swallowed up by black and fire, everything she loved with it, but it’s not his place. Only mama had ever called her leia, with the artificial lung to prove she had earned the right.

(the kriffing bey legacy, Poe’s father had snarled, when Poe told him he was defecting to the Resistance. always happy to bleed for leia organa.)

For a long moment, the General is silent. When she reaches up and touches Poe’s face, he flinches—but she just traces his cheek with her fingertips before dropping her hand. go to bed, dameron, she says, very quietly. your mother would have killed me if she knew I’ve turned you into such a lich.

yes, ma’am, Poe says.

She’s very tall, walking away.

redandpointy:

shiksa-bitch:

so one skywalker twin took magic lessons from a frog, killed his dad, and fucked off to an abandoned island in his bathrobe.
the other skywalker twin gunned down space nazis, hooked up with han solo, and governed the free galaxy with snark and hair like a botticelli painting.
and you’re telling me *luke* is the one i should be inspired by?

Truth.

(Source: emargarete, via clockwork-mockingbird)