how long do you think it’s been since cassian last held someone, or was held? few months? years? over a decade maybe? this man’s family was killed when he was six and his only friend was a droid, i think it’s pretty safe to say it’s been awhile. there is so much bullshit here: like the way his eyes close slowly, savoring the feel of her, the weight and warmth. he breathes out, grips her tighter. the way she pulls him closer in response, the way they just ease together, like holding this person is the most natural thing they’ve ever done. GOD!!! what the fuck!!!!!!! this is bullshit. fuck diego luna and fuck lucasfilm
Okay, I have a lot of emotions about this.
I know all the rebelcaptain shippers like me love to tell our stories of Jyn and Cassian falling in love, making out in corners, etc, and in particular we love all our AUs where they survive Scarif and have a relationship, and make their way towards some kind of happiness together - & clearly we are a bunch of the most hopeless soppy ha’porths imaginable - but in allowing ourselves to wallow in all that we are half-forgetting how immensely subtle the canonical relationship is, how well scripted and how brilliantly acted.
Don’t get me wrong, I want as much as anyone to believe this could/should/would have been a love to sway the sun and the other stars! And I’m one of those who went into the film the first time really hoping that the script was not going to push another slightly-forced “we-only-just-met-but” romance on me. The love story crept up on me unawares, and tore my heart out; because incredibly, and largely by resolutely focussing on not telling it as a love story, they made it a completely believeable one.
Yet what we actually get to see is almost entirely platonic; two people who discover a kindredness of spirit, and who help one another to recover a sense of belonging; who become comrades, and are edging towards being friends, and who may be just beginning to wonder if they could be more; and then in the end they don’t have time. And yet, they manage to say everything that has gone unsaid, including all the might-have-beens, without a single word, in those two last scenes; the elevator, just looking at one another without speaking, and finaly on the beach by this simple act of holding one another in the face of death, being there
for one another
right through to the very last - which is an ultimate act of love.
Words, confessions of love, kisses, would snarl up the clear and unabashed emotion of this moment and burden it with too much thought, too much consciousness. It all stays interior, instead, and is shown only through their body language; through the things the OP here remarks on, they way they hold one another, so close and yet so gently, they way they fit together so tightly and find so much comfort in that closeness. All their awareness of the future they’ve laid down in order to complete their mission, all their awareness that they have come to like one another, that they would have been glad of the time to know one another better; their awareness that their chances have finally run out, but they won, is all carried just in the way they embrace. It’s that simplicity, that acceptance of the fact everything else must be left unsaid, as these two really quite ordinary, and very damaged, people - who in the end have found it in themselves to be consumately brave and honourable - accept their fate and roll with it, and pack all the years of comradeship, friendship, love, hope, that they could have known, into giving one another the last blessing of not dying alone.
And because we have two very good actors here, they don’t need any lines to do it. They just show it.
The result is almost a Sci-Fi equivalent to Hamlet’s “If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be
not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all… Let be.”
I love the headcanon that Ben Organa Kylo Ren is really only a good-to-middling Force-user in his own right. He doesn’t wield the raw power of Anakin Skywalker, or have Luke’s familiarity with and awareness of the Force as a living entity; the dreams and intuitive knowledge that characterize Leia’s relationship with the Force are mostly the intervention of Snoke, or Ben’s own luck. He’s good, but not remarkable, and especially considering he’s a Skywalker.
(He’s just the only game in town and has worked hard to keep it that way, hence his shock at discovering Rey can kick his ass with both hands tied and absolutely no training whatsoever.)
But you know what Kylo Ren is excellent at? Sparking Force-sensitivity in others.
It’s not even a conscious ability. But all he had to do was stare searchingly at Finn across the ruins of Tuanul and suddenly—There has been an awakening, have you felt it? He rummages around in Rey’s skull and then she’s pushing back. He’s holed up with the remainder of the First Order armies in the wake of Starkiller, and Elevens is having dreams about an old man and the desert, and Howler can make things levitate and Lieutenant Crimmons almost choked out General Hux that one time.
(”By accident!” Crimmons exclaims from between bloodless lips. “It was an accident, I’m not even sure how I—please don’t space me, sir.”
Hux wheezes. Ren wheezes too, but that’s the noise the vocoder always makes when he laughs.)
It gets worse when he’s captured by the Resistance after the Battle of Dalujj, because for whatever reason—you know the reason, don’t be an idiot, Rey snaps as she snaps the binders around his wrists—there are far more latent Force-users affiliated with the Resistance than the First Order. With Kylo Ren in a cell, Luke is suddenly barraged by pilots and ops and intel officers who don’t understand why they can suddenly hear each other thinking, or communicate wordlessly across the base.
But the best part is how much this twists Kylo Ren up inside because he’s so godsdamn proud of all his new padawans (I am not your student, what the fuck, Finn says, looking deeply disturbed) but also……if they could stop being better than him in all things?
Prompt from @littlestartopaz: Max and Lessa role reversal? (Reminder that Max and Lessa are the main characters of my novel Polaris, explained in more detail here.)
Okay so, in this world, Max grows up Margaret Stone, with long hair and makeup and heels and money. She wants to strip off her skin. Lessa, full name unknown, on the other hand, is on the street at eleven and picked up by Sebastian McCoy, MD, on his way to Polaris’ newest base. She’s a little too timid to be a revolutionary, at first, but she takes to it like a duck to water after a little bit of an adjustment period.
Lessa never joins Mercury squad, she’s not cut out for life as a spy and she has no talent for hacking. Instead, when she’s fifteen she joins Mars squad, the strike team, and starts taking point on their operations, throwing bolts of electricity rather than bullets. She’s promoted to Mars Prime at nineteen, and she has a reputation for being the gentlest professional soldier anyone’s ever met.
There’s also a couple of stories about her blowing the power for whole city grids, or turning on the sprinklers in a building and using the water as a conductor to kill everyone on the floor.
Under Lessa, Ursa Major’s Mars squad gets a new nickname. Blitzkrieg. It means lightning war.
On the one hand, Polaris does a lot worse in this universe. Having a technopath to network a continent-spanning rebellion is invaluable, and without such an advantage, they lose lives, they lose bases, more than once they almost lose everything. There is no secure intranet linking their family of thousands, there is no safe way to smuggle those who don’t want to fight out of the country. Fight or die is the unspoken option given to every new recruit, and those few who are desperate enough to attempt to leave the country on their own learn how true it is. Polaris is harder, every base dependent on only itself, with no safe way to reach out for help, and its people are angrier, with an ever-growing ‘missing’ list of those who can neither be contacted nor confirmed dead.
On the other, Polaris does a lot better in this universe, because when Margaret is nine, she discovers that she can make any computer do anything she tells it to, just by touching it. When she’s twelve, and Lessa is still years from getting kicked out, Margaret starts funneling information from her father’s system onto a private hard drive so encrypted the NSA couldn’t crack it with their best men. She does research, lots of research, and hunts down a boy at her school whose family is on one of the lists. She tells him, warns him, and says, “Polaris. Go to Polaris. Take them this.” The moment the hard drive is connected to a Polaris system, their database is flooded with more national secrets than they’ve been able to get in a decade, every block of code signed with a simple MAX. Marshal North has to sit down, and she laughs and laughs until she’s breathless.
Margaret is twenty-two and ferocious with being trapped like an animal in a cage when she’s caught up in a Polaris operation. She gets taken hostage by a girl with long blonde hair and a grim look in her eye, one hand wrapped around her throat as the girl says, “Sorry, Miss Stone, but it is what it is. Tell your bodyguards to drop their guns, or I’ll put so much electricity through you you’ll wish you’d just been struck by lightning.”
Margaret bares her teeth and looks as wild as any of the rebels when she says, “If you take me with you, I can get you another load of my father’s data before we leave, and more that I’ve hidden around the city. it’ll make the hard drive look like nothing.”
The blonde girl is so startled she almost drops her hostage in a pile on the ground. “How did you–”
“I sent the first one.”
“Max,” Lessa breathes, and gives a feral grin of her own. “You’ve got a deal.”
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
Goddamn it, it’s back.
If it stays back, I might manage to finish a third story this year. Jesus.
I swear, this is now my only writing motivation.
BACK AGAIN??? Sigh.
Okay, sorry if anyone gets sick of this, but it’s the best way for me to get myself to write.
“Here’s an even better idea,” said Grantaire. “How about I take on eight of your hellish host? For each one of you I outdrink, you release a name on my list back into the land of the living.”
“You have yourself a wager,” said the Devil. “Who will we be starting with? This– Enjolras?”
“Let’s save him for last,” said Grantaire. “I’ll get to him.”
Or: Grantaire survives the barricades and marches down into the underworld to bring all of Les Amis back to life. They are all in hell because they are Deist heathens, the lot of them.
I‘m showing my parents Hamilton (well…the soundtrack…because who has money these days) and my mom was crying by the start of Satisfied and I’m just like…can I in good conscience show her It’s Quiet Uptown? I’m gonna have guilt at the end of this.
BUT HAMILTON IS IMPORTANT SO I’M GONNA DO IT ANYWAY.
Update: my mom, like me, is a Gryffindor to the bone. My mom, like me, basically burst into tears during Yorktown (I mean, I burst into tears for me, which was…like…two tears total, but whatever). Why do Gryffindors all cry during Yorktown? is it because we’re all combative victory-loving people? Because that’s my explanation.
I’m trying not to think about the upcoming trainwreck now that we just finished Say No to This, SO. It occurs to me that, in Hamilton, basically every female character who appears except Peggy (who…doesn’t really appear) is in love with Alexander Hamilton. AND YET. They still pass the Bechdel test with the very first appearance of the Schuyler sisters.
BURN.
OW OW OW OW.
Well, we just started Blow Us All Away.
It’s been my pleasure to know y’all; I like red flowers, especially roses, so bring those to the funeral.
It’s Quiet Uptown.
In case you were curious.
You have not known guilt until you make your parents cry with a musical you talked them into watching.
YOUR OBEDIENT SERVANT.
First off, I love how passive aggressive this song is, I PASSIONATELY love this song.
But now we’re starting Best of Wives and Best of Women and all bets are right the fuck off.
Anonymous asked: Through plot device of your choice, Kylo Ren has a child. Given the history of relations between the generations in his family, he decides infanticide is a great option. Unfortunately for Kylo, this goes about as well as infanticide usually goes in stories. So, if you'd like, tell us this kid's story!
….anon, I love me some dark shit. you know that, I know that. however, the first thing that my brain offered up upon hearing this beautifully fucked up scenario you presented me with was this:
The mission went south with Finn still inside the temple and a bomb about to detonate. “We’ve got six minutes before this whole island is space dust,” Poe yells down the comms, powering the ship back on, sensors be damned. “Get back here.”
“Shit!” Finn yelps into his ear, followed by the sound of blaster fire. “I’ve got the plans, but–shit!”
“Finn?” Poe demands. “Finn!”
“Poe,” Finn’s voice says, a little dazed. “You’ve got to come to me.”
There are five big guns and two walls between Poe and Finn, and five minutes to get away from the impact zone. “I’m on my way,” Poe says grimly.
Four absolutely insane minutes later Finn runs up the gangplank, curled defensively around something in his arms, and Poe guns them straight up, miles into the sky, the island exploding into light and heat beneath them. Poe lets out a whoop of exhilaration and sails them directly into hyperspace, laughing with relief.
He stops laughing when he hears the baby crying.
He turns around, and there is Finn, looking vaguely stunned, holding a baby.
“That’s a baby,” Poe manages, his mind utterly blank.
“They were gonna kill her,” Finn says in a soft voice, adjusting her carefully in his arms. “They left her on the altar, like some kind of–they were just going to leave her, Poe. I couldn’t leave her.”
“No,” Poe says faintly. “Of course not.”
There are three days between them and base. The baby is Human, blue-eyed, black-haired, toothless, and horrifically prone to wailing, which makes Poe want to weep with sympathy.
“I don’t get how you’re so bad at this,” Finn comments, rescuing Poe from a shaky attempt at bottle-feeding, one day into it. “It’s like you’ve never seen a baby before.”
“Only child,” Poe explains, wiping spit-up off his shoulder with a wince. “All my cousins are older. How are you so good at this?”
Finn smiles. “We all had creche duty, before final conditioning. I was the best at it,” he says, a little pride creeping into his voice.
“Clearly you have a gift,” Poe comments, because the baby is dozing against Finn’s shoulder now.
“We can’t just keep calling her baby,” Finn says, ignoring that. “You should name her.”
Poe laughs, a little unsteady. “I don’t know if I’m up for the honor.”
“You named me,” Finn says reasonably.
“I had something to go on, that time,” Poe says. “Besides. She might already have a name. Maybe they’ll be able to find her parents, or her home planet, back at base.”
Finn seems to take that seriously, giving the baby a searching look. About three months old, head full of curly hair, abandoned in the ruins of a Sith temple by the First Order. Not much to go on. “Who are you, little girl,” Finn says softly, and Poe rubs a hand over his mouth to distract himself from the abrupt ache in his chest.
“Let’s call her niña for now,” Poe suggests. “That’s ‘little girl’, on Yavin 4.”
Finn smiles at him, and the ache intensifies. “Niña,” he tries. “I like that.”
It takes six hours for “niña” to become “Nina”, and apparently that’s what’s sticking.
–
The General comes running as soon as they land, blaster on her hip, her eyes wild. “Where is he,” she rasps, looking past Poe to Finn.
“Sir?” Poe says, and she shakes her head abruptly.
“I thought I felt–” she breaks off with an indrawn breath, her eyes falling on Nina.
“Lieutenant Dameron rescued her, sir,” Poe says, his hand falling automatically on Finn’s shoulder to offer support. “I’ve got the full details in my report.”
The General swallows. Twice. Her eyes are full of tears, and Finn’s shoulder tenses under Poe’s hand. “You’d better take her to the medic tent,” she says in a hoarse voice, and then nods once. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Commander. You’ll report to me directly, once she’s safe.”
