look
Let’s say you are a General. You were a great number of things before, but you are a General now and it suits you better than all the rest put together, it fits you like a second skin and fills the hollows where people/planet/father/mother/husband/son/brother/republic should be. And let’s add that you are a good General; decisive, even-handed, capable of managing the day-to-day operational work as much as engineering strokes of tactical genius. Some of your advisers wish you would cry more public, show a softer, more maternal side, but you are fresh out of softness. It’s scar tissue now.
More importantly, your soldiers love you. (Well, not you, very few of them know you, you have lost most of the people who knew you—but they love the princess or the senator or the general, and that’s close enough.) They love you even though you use them, use them like starfighter parts, like numbers on a datapad, and smash them against the bulwark of the Darkness. They love you for it. This is called loyalty. You wish you did not elicit so very much of it.
But still, you are a General, and you recognize your like when he walks onto a Resistance base.
He is young, and his world is narrow, still—a jedi, a flyboy, a ship, a whole mess of intangible loss and an inviolable sense of what is Right. But Generals have come from less. (You would know.) The first week he is out of the medbay, you stick him in Intelligence, just to see what he can do without a blaster in his hand. Generals generally only carry one at their hip. (You do not carry a blaster at all.)
It only takes him fourteen months to work his way up to a seat at the leadership briefing. The only other person to climb the chain of command that quickly was Luke Skywalker, and that was largely honorary; between the Death Star and the lightsaber, Luke had been the recipient of a lot of honor.
You make a mental note to have your moofmilker brother check Finn for Force sensitivity if—when—he returns.
“Lieutenant Finn,” you greet the other general on his first day in the command center. He salutes like a wet dream, all grace and pinpoint precision. You wonder if he had to readjust his automatic responses with the biotech spine; you can’t tell. “Tell me, what on earth took you so long?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” he says, falling back into ‘at ease’ with that same terrible grace. His smile is like a blaster-shot. “Had to prove myself first.”
