Better Via Worse

【Hades】

 I will come back…I promise…!

Leia, I have to leave for a while.

“I know what you’re going to say …  I changed my hair.”

Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill behind the scenes on Star Wars

↪The Double Blind Job

I really like the Hinterlands quests, as much as they are frustrating and boring to do. The ones where someone is distressed and needs help. They just make me think of the personal toll the war has taken on the people who live there. I did the Strange Bedfellows quest and it made me really sad. So I wrote a thingie for it.

Just a nice picnic on top of the hill overlooking the pass below. A lovely day with the sun shining and birds chirping. Hardly any smoke or ash in the air. Nothing untoward, nothing to raise the hair on the back of the neck.

“Going out on my patrol.” Patrol, yes, but with a knapsack filled with bread and apples and cheeses and wine? Addis didn’t notice and didn’t ask, just waved goodbye and wished Ritts a good day and not to report in late this time.

Just a nice picnic on top of the hill. Just the two of them, her and Eldredda. They kissed like they hadn’t only seen each other yesterday. They hadn’t been alone yesterday. Eldredda had tried to brush her hair but it was all matted and getting worse. She’d have to cut it all off if she wasn’t careful. But she was careful. That’s how she’d lasted this long living in the Hinterlands wilds.

As they kissed and collapsed onto the blanket, easing fingers between clothes and loosening buttons and buckles, Ritts wanted to ask Eldredda to come back with her to the Inquisition camp. They wouldn’t care that she was a mage and apostate. The Inquisition looks after everyone who needs looking after. She need not live in a cave like an animal. But Ritts didn’t ask. She didn’t want to have that argument again. She just wanted to be with Eldredda, to feel her skin against her own, to kiss her and laugh with her.

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It would be easy for a single ship to get lost up there, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, it would.

To find someplace very far away where you could spend the rest of your life in peace, and happiness.

This moment breaks my heart, and feel free to delete my bullshit commentary if all you want is the gifset, but I just have to talk about this. Furiosa, who never balks from giving an order, who never speaks without intention and in fact asks permission before wasting her words on deaf ears, cannot bear to answer the Ace’s question. She can only look at him. She’s not being obtuse, a commander is only as good as her commands, and she knows clear communication is critical to keeping a group alive. 

Ace knows it too. He leans in to clarify when she doesn’t answer his first guess: “Bullet Farm?” Furiosa would never make someone guess where they were going, it’s impractical and dangerous and stupid. Even worse than her silence, she opens her mouth to answer and then closes it again. She was a single breath away from telling him. She wants so badly to share her plan with her second-in-command: her throat is tight and you can see the shine of tears beginning in her eyes (far from the only time we see this sort of emotion from Furiosa).

Ace notices all of this too, and leans even further to check her expression because she refuses to face him. She knows he can read her, so only then does she answer, and she tells him a half-truth. “We’re heading East.” But that “we” doesn’t include Ace and Furiosa knows it, even as she flicks through every possible scenario one last time. In none of them can he come with them. 

Ace looks ahead. With or without clarification or context, he’s there for the ride. He thinks he’s going with her. 

Furiosa’s expression closes and she shifts gears. She’s already moving forward, and she’s already left him behind. 

Charr and Ereba, inspired by The Lovers

so i was wondering where rey learned to understand binary (the language of astromech droids) because she’s a lone scavenger living on a desert planet and i was thinking that maybe sometime in the course of her star destroyer spelunking adventures, let’s say she’s 14 years old; she finds part of an astromech droid that’s still functioning just enough to talk. so she decides not to trade it to unkar plutt for portions and takes it home instead, cleans it up. hooks it up to an old comm screen so she can see what it’s saying while she’s still learning all its beeps and whistles. and then at the end of a long day, when she gets home, she scrubs the sand off her face, pours the sand out of her boots, and just sits and talks to her barely-functioning astromech droid, whose knowledge is thirty years old: coruscant, the seat of the empire (what empire?) updates on the construction of the death star. bounty notices for han solo, smuggler. the imperial senate, disbanded (but what about the new senate?) 

the hot, dry air of jakku, making mirages of old memories just outside the shell of her AT-AT. the desert so quiet that you can hear sand sliding down the dunes, in soft silky layers. rey, scraping crumbs off her plate with her fingertips, pressing her droid with more questions. what’s naboo? what’s a forest? how big is a forest? what’s a tree? how many trees are there? (no one else tells her about these things. no one else talks to her.) the droids go everywhere, she realizes. they see everything and keep everything, scavengers of memory and information, of events and people and ideas. she learns binary until she gets good enough to detach the comm screen and just listen; during the day she quietly practices binary to herself, whistling each beep and tone as she hikes the dunes to the star destroyers, her calves aching. when she gets home, the droid greets her with a happy beep. for a few months, it feels nice, strange, hopeful. it feels odd to have someone waiting for her. refreshing, almost. 

and then one day rey comes home and the astromech droid doesn’t beep, no whistle of greeting. the light in its glassy round eye is dark. the fuel cells are dead. her heart sinks. she searches the star destroyer endlessly for another working fuel cell, tries to trade for them at niima outpost, but to no avail: the model is too old, and any fuel cells that could work are all being used for other things. that night she wears her x-wing helmet and sniffs, watching the stars, wrestling with hope and despair in equal measure; in the morning she drags the droid to unkar plutt and trades its parts for twelve portions. the first portion is bitter and tasteless, more so than usual, but it’s alright, rey thinks. her friend even fed her.

 and now she talks to all the astromech droids that pass through niima outpost. they don’t mind talking to her. they’re happy to tell her how hyperdrives work, what a compressor does, how to fix an acceleration compensator. and every time she hopes that maybe, the droid will end up on a distant planet somewhere else, and it’ll mention a girl on jakku, a girl who polished its casing and oiled its hinges, a girl who’s been waiting for a long time, and someone will look up with a twinge of recognition and realize it’s time to go back. it’s time for her to come home… it never happens. but rey tries anyway, because the droids go everywhere, see everything, meet everyone… so she stays, and waits. 

Idk if anyone’s already done this but this is the first thing that came to my mind when I saw Chewie shooting (but not killing) Ren in that certain scene.

For @servantofclio, who asked for Eylis/Solas, and Horseshoe Crab: Been around a long, long time.

********** 

This is not the real story. The world was smashed, all hearts were broken, and Pride was left with nothing but his lies for comfort.

It was a fitting end. It was the only end. He was too old to change, no matter how much he wanted to – but what if he had? What if –

– what if he had said yes, when she asked him to stay?

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