Popular with the troops.
DARTH VADER DEATH CULT DARTH VADER DEATH CULT DARTH VADER DEATH CULT DARTH VADER DEATH CULT
meanwhile the officers are like “who is this enormous spooky fucker and WHY DOES HE KEEP STRANGLING US TO DEATH.”
Imagine stormtroopers painting Vader’s helmet on ships or on armour, wherever they can get away with it.
Imagine stormtroopers praying to Vader as He-Who-Brings-Death and entreating him to pass them by; at first in jest, but who knows what’s serious any more when half your unit is dead and you only barely survived.
Imagine stormtroopers swearing “May Vader take your soul!”
Imagine stormtroopers hearing of Vader, then seeing him in person, and being held back by their fellows, from kneeling in front of him.
Seriously, I am 100% here for “stormtroopers worshipping Vader as a god of death”.
Well that would definitely also serve as some extra psychological warfare if that idea ever leaks over to the Alliance with the defectors.
Which would make Luke’s fight at Bespin like four extra levels of nerve-wracking. I mean, he doesn’t know if Vader is human. As far as he knows, he’s an eldritch death deity straight out of Tatooine nightmare folktales. Of course, then Luke has to Learn Some Things, and everything is confusing and terrible for a couple days and then like probably a week later when the “he survived a fight with a god of death” whispers start circulating he might start actually thinking about it.
Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight, and Darth Vader, death-dealing deity of the stormtroopers and it hits him wait, what does that make me?
That just makes it even better.
There’s got to be a weird mishmash of beliefs among the Alliance anyways; vague memories of the Jedi Force tradition overlaying it, used in expressions, but everything combines with all the traditions and beliefs from all the different worlds and cultures the Rebels hail from.
I am now imagining someone trying to comfort Luke, from what they believe he believes is a close encounter with the god of death. They tell him “no that wasn’t the god of death, the real god of death doesn’t bother to fight because everyone comes to Them in the end, that was just an incredibly dangerous maybe-human maybe-droid”.
Someone else tells him to sprinkle pure water in every corner of the room he sleeps in, and to wear his socks inside-out, so that the hounds of Death will lose the scent if they come to track him down, on their master’s bidding. He asks if he needs to be worried about a security breach; no, he’s answered, mortal security can do nothing against the hounds, not when they have his scent after a close brush with Death, so he needs to remember, water and inside-out socks.
A third person believes Vader holds a fragment of divinity in him, even if it’s a hostile force, and thus every respect must be shown to him and in mentions of him, lest the other divinities grow angered. They speak in euphemisms about Luke’s encounter with “the red-bladed power”.
Oh my gosh now I’m imagining superstitious Rogue Squadron pilots all wearing their socks inside out every time they go into battle or something. So then, one wonders, unless they figure out whose son Luke is what do the stormtroopers think of Skywalker?
Just an upstart? A rival? A Trickster who can’t run forever? Or perhaps a demigod with a story they’re certain they’ll learn one day if they’re patient enough?
Skywalker is clearly some kind of malevolent trickster. He came out of nowhere, tricked his way off the Death Star with the Princess, tricked his way back in past its defenses to destroy it, and continues to evade and enrage He Who Brings Death.
Stormtroopers carefully avoid saying Skywalker’s name, because seriously you don’t want to risk catching the attention of a malevolent trickster.
HOWEVER. If you are really truly desperate because you have kriffed up so bad and blown your mission all to hell and you are absolutely literally dead if this screw-up EVER comes to the brass’s attention. Very cautiously make a little Skywalker effigy with a bright orange come-and-get-me flightsuit, and sneak it onto a cargo shuttle headed very far away in the complete opposite direction from you. It’s a slim chance, but he just might find your trick amusing enough to go along with it and fool everyone into looking in that direction.
ooohhh I like this, I like this very much
and like many trickster characters, he can be equally likely to help or to harm. Which is why some stormtroopers would probably be less than particularly surprised if they ever saw him working in tandem with He-Who-Brings-Death. But tricksters can also come to harm when they bite off more than they can chew, which might be their explanation for Luke losing his hand at Cloud City.
Of course, should said troopers discover that the Trickster (snrrk because Mark Hamill) is the son of He-Who-Brings-Death, they might be like “ah. so much makes sense now.”
Consider: Leia gets deified.
She just mysteriously knows things, and whenever you’re around, even when she’s screaming at you, she makes you feel like you can fight anything.
She has a kind of presence like Darth Vader’s but in the opposite sense. Vader’s like a force of demonic force of nature, but Leia is more like a barely restrained mother wolf, primal, protective, and carrying a legacy of something old.
Defectors getting grilled by Leia for the first time freeze up and have to keep from shitting a brick because she might be a head shorter than you and weigh less than an Artoo unit, but when she talks, you listen, like Vader himself came down from the heaven to growl at your incompetence.
Eventually, the alliance starts treating Leia as almost as a mythic figure in it of herself. But not like Vader’s death cult.
The stormtroopers start realizing this when they first see these insignias here and there, a hastily scrawled “Leia Organa blesses us” in aurabesh on the inside of a crashed X Wing. A decorative woman with a blaster painstakingly painted onto what what used to be a Nebulon B.
But they almost never see Luke’s insignia’s anywhere in these piles of rubble. Or any other form of deity.
Soon, the stormtroopers realize that all of Leia’s insignias are on the dead. And they scoff.
“Our deity keeps us alive, and blesses our fighting skills! Why pray to something that doesn’t bring you glory?”
But the insignias keep showing up. And in fact, it looks like more of them are showing up every day. Still showing up on dead frigates and destroyed X Wings.
Until, one day, a particularly naive and superstitious stormtrooper and a particularly hardy prisoner of war were stuck in a prison block together.
“Out of curiosity, why do you paint that woman on your ship?”
The prisoner of war laughed, and laughed long.
“To get you to shoot at us, boy!”
It wasn’t until that particular prisoner of war died in a breakout saving thirty fellow rebels that the stormtrooper took his meaning, and word spread like wildfire.
The stormtrooper corps, so superstitious, and so wary, began to realize why they see her image so much.
The ones who invoked her name weren’t unlucky, they just chose to die more often than the rest.
When they’re fighting in the trenches, and they have them cornered, the rebel who pulls a grenade on himself to slow them down has “Leia Organa” stitched into the inside of his jacket.
When they’re chasing a supply convoy, the Nebulons that run headfirst into Star Destroyers to buy time for the rest have Leia’s image sprayed onto their hulls.
When the rebels are bullied in the empire’s many prisons, it’s Leia’s name that rebels whisper prayers to before standing in front of the lead guard and saying “It’s my fault, take me instead”.
And still the stormtrooper corps and the Empire scoffs.
“So, this woman is a goddess, is she? But you still die. How will that win a war?”
But…deep in the ranks of the stormtrooper corps. Among the innumerable privates who will always be forgotten, some begin scribbling “Leia Organa” on the insides of helmets, and chest pieces.
Eventually, the rebels begin to win.
And at some point, the rebels begin to realize that some of the stormtroopers have begun to scribble “Leia Organa” onto the inside of their helmets.
They’re confused, and wary. It’s not written anywhere people can see it, so it’s not like they’re defectors. The writing is usually in some easily removable ink, something that can be wiped into obscurity with the quickest of finger rubs. So it’s not any permanent political statement. And it’s very clearly Leia’s name on it. Usually with a second name right beside it.
Once they know what to look for, the rebels begin to see it scribbled more and more. Where once it was only one or two stormtroopers a battle, the farther they push against the Empire, they begin finding whole squads with “Leia Organa” scribbled in the creases and margins of their armor, always followed by a completely different name, or set of names.
It’s not until a particularly brave and naive Rebel guarding Imperial POW’s asks them directly that they get an answer.
He cautiously holds out a helmet, asking the assembled prisoners why his general’s name is scrawled on the inside. In a shaky and uncertain voice, he speaks to the confused group.
“It says ‘Leia Organa, please save’” and he lists off the number written beside it. CT-and some several digit numerical code.
In response, a hardened stormtrooper, with scars gained years before anyone in the group had been born, breaks into tears.
The rebel asks if he knew who this belonged to, and the man nodded.
He tells the rebel that he begged his brother not to do it. They were the last two clones either of them had ever seen. For all they knew, they were the last clones in the entire galaxy.
They had talked before the battle, he had talked about how they were going to bring victory to the Empire together, one last time, and how nothing else mattered to them.
But then, his brother went quiet, and just responded:
“You are the only victory I ever cared about.”
And he scribbled “Leia Organa, please save…” on the inside of his helmet, with his brother’s ID number.
The rebel tells him his brother fought bravely, and the clone thanked him through his tears while the rest of his squad consoles him.
From then on, the quiet, the superstitious, and the grieving would comb the battlefield. Checking the inside of helmets and the edges of pauldrons looking for those telltale aurabesh symbols.
And they would go to the nearest POW camp, holding cell, or brig, reading off “Leia Organa, Please Let Me Save…”
And in every camp, in every cell block, there was always at least one person.
Not always a stormtrooper. Sometimes a technician, sometimes a pilot, occasionally an officer. Some rebels would swear on their life they’d seen it happen to an Imperial Admiral.
But always, there was at least one person who cried when the names were read out.
Some were lovers, some were siblings, some were parents, some were squad mates, and some were friends. The rebels didn’t always find out who it was, they were at war after all, and the rebels were their enemy.
But…something about the tears often made people want to talk.
And it was always tears.
Because nobody in the Empire invokes Leia Organa’s name to win a campaign.
Nobody invokes Leia Organa’s name to survive a battle.
Nobody invokes Leia Organa’s name to bring glory, or victory, in any military sense.
No. In the stormtrooper corps, you invoke Leia Organa’s name for the only kind of victories that really matter.
Sending her prayers even a rebel goddess would heed.
You only invoke Leia Organa’s name when you have someone you care about more than life itself.
And you only invoke her name if you’re willing to pay the price for her protection.
And the part the rebels found most surprising, through the hundreds and hundreds of names they read out, was that more often than not, that person those invokers paid to protect only found out how much they cared, when a rebel read their own name out in front of a cell block.
Vader was a god of battle.
Luke was a god of cunning.
But Leia…
Leia was the goddess of sacrifice.
Sure, Vader, Luke, and Leia are the big three. But there are smaller deities that run in the Rebellion’s veins.
After Ahsoka goes to Malachor and doesn’t come back - as far as anybody knows, at least - the name Fulcrum means something more than it used to.
People remember her, especially the Spectres, the crew of the Ghost and those who knew them. They know her symbol, like a crown passed down from person to person. There are many Fulcrums after Ahsoka, after Kallus, but none of them are Fulcrum. There’s no measuring up to the original, who knew when death would come even before it did, who went to war so fiercely that the god of death had to come claim her soul himself.
(There’s a rumor among her devout, that she escaped his grasp in the end - they speak of convors and Force guides with the half-certain bumbling of those with no elders to guide them.)
Her symbol is sacred to the one who bears her name; it is not painted on ships or scribbled on armor. But in every Rebel base - every single once - there is a corner with a convor painted on the walls, wings spread, and offerings scattered beneath. A favorite blaster, a lucky coin, a hand-woven bracelet - mementos of the dead, affixed to notes asking Fulcrum to watch over the departed.
When your time comes, Fulcrum will guide you home.
Ahsoka Tano stopped on Malachor, but Captain Rex is a living legend.
Not that anyone remembers his name. No - Rex and Nik Santo are distinguished veterans, sure, but they’re mortal. They’re human. They died.
(Jaig finally bled them out, or so some whisper. Nobody can agree on the details, but everyone knows they were Jaig’s favorites. You could see it in their eyes after Fulcrum died, after Alderaan was lost.)
But Jaig? Jaig is a myth. He stalks through the halls when everyone else is asleep, sharpening your eyes, bettering your aim, honing your reflexes - but only if you ask. Only if you’re one of his.
His story is whispered throughout the Rebellion - a soldier born from the sea (which sea? Nobody can say) who once walked at the side of He-Who-Brings-Death. But he was betrayed (or was he the betrayer?) - and he slipped away, a shadow in the night, and embraced the terror with open arms. He became Jaig, terror of the Empire, the demon who killed demons.
(The Empire doesn’t know much about Fulcrum but the Stormtroopers hate and fear Jaig, the traitor god who bleeds his devotees dry.)
If you want to complete a mission, if you know your odds of success are next to nothing, if you hate the Empire with everything you are - draw a pair of jaig eyes on your wrist and he will see you as one of his.
People will come back from impossible missions with bloody mouths and wild eyes, the rest of their team obliterated. And more often than not, there will be a pair of jaig eyes on their wrist. The others avoid them, until the mark is gone - or forever, for some ink it onto their skin permanently.
The mark of Jaig is the mark of death - a symbol that nothing matters except winning. A mark of fury and grief and nothing left to lose. A promise that if you have something, it will be taken from you in the name of your mission.
Jaig’s mission.
You are one of his, now, and he will exact the price for his gifts in blood.
Fulcrum is a kind god, for all her fierceness. Fulcrum is a god of gentle hands and endings.
Jaig is not.
Jaig is bloody and cruel and razor-sharp.
Jaig is a god who lost everything.
Jaig is the god of vengeance.
