thisavrou_log | openish | to describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane

openish | to describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane

Who: Leia Organa

straightouttacarbonite, and YOU. If you want. ♥
When: May 18
Where: The open prompt is at the bar. The closed ones are in navigation and at the Falcon.
What: Fallout from the holo Leia received in the mail today. Two closed prompts and an open one.
Warnings: Spoilers for The Force Awakens.

for Kylo Benben
She knows what's going on before the little boy in the holo says more than Hi, mom, it's Ben. Perhaps she's always known. His interest in her, in her ability to use the Force, and his disdain for Han have never seemed in proportion. There's something personal in both of them, the strange, coy way he approached conversation as much as the biting frost of his anger.

This might be someone else's, she tells herself nonetheless as she watches. She wants that feeling of recognition to be wrong--she hopes it is--but the details only keep stacking up. An uncle called Luke. Jedi training. The meditation tricks Leia's brother employs for himself. And those dark eyes that seem to come straight from her face. The nose, unquestionably Han's.

(She has no explanation for the ears, but she can't help but feel an affection for them that seems borrowed from a stranger.)

If this isn't their son, she'll eat her blaster, piece by piece. And that leaves her shaken, staring at the space the holographic image was long after it flicked off. Her apparent adversary, the unhinged bane of Han Solo's existence, is their child. Whatever it is that's brought him to this point, they must have had a hand in it.

To lie to her, though--a lie of omission counts, in her book--and to speak to her as a stranger when she's his mother...to call it anger is to miss the empty ache, the insult, the amorphous sense of betrayal. She's a panoply of hurt.

She finds him in navigation, and they're both fortunate there's no one there to hear her snap, "Ben!"

for Han Solo

"Meet me at the Falcon." Leia spits the words into the MID, insistent and clipped. "It's important."

In a better mood, she might not order him around quite so remorselessly--but in a better mood, she wouldn't have to. She stalks through the corridors of the Moira until she comes to the cargo bay. The speed of her footsteps picks up as she nears the Falcon. That bucket of bolts is a more welcome sight than just about any she can think of just then.

OPEN - ambiguously set throughout the weekend as needed

Leia hasn't needed a drink so badly in a long, long time. The bar on the Moira isn't exactly ideal--it's public, for one thing--but she's not convinced she wants to use her small store of Alderaanian wine on family problems. (And, if she's completely honest with herself, she's also not convinced she wants to be alone right now, anyway.)

If someone should happen to sit down beside her, she'll give them a humorless nod of acknowledgment. No real smile, but there's no animosity to the way she asks, "What're you drinking?"

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He whirls to look at her, the chart in front of him already forgotten. The chair he lurches from wobbling back and forth like an officer with bad news to deliver. His lightsaber clipped to his side. He strides to her, his features clenching and then snarling.

He grabs her by the arm, yanks her to him.

“Who told you that name?” Kylo Ren demands, his face next to hers. Almost touching. He'll kill them.

Leia knows going into this confrontation that that's exactly what it will be--but though she digs in her heels, she's a wisp of white linen and sinew compared to him. He has his father's height.

It's an unsettling thought to consider when his fingers press roughly into her arm. For a moment, her eyes are wide as she stares up at that wild-eyed face, but she's not going to be intimidated by her own son. Stamping down that brief stab of fear, she glares up at him, her voice hard and brittle.

"You did." The holo is in her pocket, but she's not about to draw it out and show him. He'll destroy it, surely, if this is his response simply to hearing his name. "Ben Solo, isn't it? Is that why you've been after him?"

He twitches at the name, or his face does, his mouth crumpling. “No,” he says, the word turning to deadweight on his tongue. His hand clamps down on her arm and his eyes lock onto hers. She's not lying—he's tormented with a thought, an image of her emerging from the ingress to a boy whose most ardent wish has been granted.

Had she liked him?

“No.” He discards her arm, steps back. He has some faint, foolish hope of explaining it to her, of going on as he has been. “My name is Kylo Ren.”

Leia swallows hard at the way his grip tightens to something painful, her determination not to be browbeaten into submission by her own child wavering. A thought occurs to her, for the first time: There is no reason to believe he won't hurt her. Only her own stubborn assumption that he wouldn't brought her this far, and with his hand on her, she can't keep hold of that easy belief.

The idea that she could raise a boy who grows up into this strange, violent man spreads a chill through her gut. Without the proof before her, she wouldn't believe it.

She's on the verge of slamming her free hand down on his thumb in hopes of breaking his grip when he lets her go. She takes a step back as well, resisting the desire to rub at her arm, and pulls together every scrap of defiance within her.

"You call yourself Kylo Ren." It's a small distinction, but one she thinks is worth making. "But that's not what we called you, is it?"

He feels it, the way he used to. The familiar overlap in the Force, her heart in his chest, quickening with fear. He's hurting her.

When she steps back, he regrets it with an intensity that borders on fatigue. His shoulders go slack. Maybe that's what this will be, a slow backing-away. The distance between them growing ever wider. “It's my name,” he says, so insistently it rings false. Kylo Ren is the name he made for himself, a name he deserves to take pride in, a name steeped in blood. It has brought troops into formation and Jedi to their knees. If she could see its effect, she wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

“There's no”—his mouth works uselessly, soundlessly, until he takes a breath—“Ben Solo. Not in your time. Not in mine.” He looks at her, knowing that should be the end of it.

“Don't you understand?” he asks.

If that connection existed for both of them, Leia hasn't yet developed the sensitivity necessary to notice it--or perhaps she'll have to wait until she carries him herself. That he is her son feels purely theoretical; he's still a stranger, one who's maddeningly inscrutable even when she suspects she should be able to read his body language more clearly than she can. He's demonstrative, but the idiosyncrasies of his face mean nothing to her.

"Why don't you explain it?" she asks, her voice sharp. She's well past I'm pretending to be patient with you and deep into I'm not being patient at all because I know it doesn't matter as she stares up at him, crossing her arms. "Since I clearly don't."

“I'm giving you what you wanted,” he practically shouts, his voice loosed like a wave. Hating her for all she's done, all she hasn't, for standing with her arms folded and forcing him to introduce her to her own indifference.

He blinks. His gaze drops to the Moira's scuffed floor, and he swallows. He speaks slowly, stiffly. “You have no son. Go. Leave.”

"Why would I want this?" A man older than her, styling himself Kylo Ren and appearing in visions granted by the Force--visions that offer nothing but the promise of darkness. A man whose reaction to the sight of his own father is inexplicable violence. No one could possibly long for that from their child, least of all Leia.

For a moment, she grits her teeth, wondering what she can possibly say that might--well, what does she want her words to do? Convince Ben of Han's worth, draw him out of this fit of pique and into a conversation, goad him into an explanation that actually explains. (A small part of her doesn't care what her words do, so long as they strike him with enough force to leave a mark. That's the part she ignores--the part she's going to have to start thinking about more in the future. It seems like it must be a form of darkness in itself.)

"I've seen my son." The words come out easily enough, but behind that straightforward tone lies a nest of uncertainty. This might be the one person Leia can't fool with a diplomat's poise. "I've heard him tell me he missed me. If you think I'm going to go without some kind of an explanation--adversaries, Ben? Adversaries?"

This. He hears you. No pain is unbearable, Snoke has taught him. It should be judged not in terms of strength, but novelty.

He's never hurt like this before.

It's as if he's been ground to dust. He shuts his eyes, opens them almost immediately. Later, he'll will himself to be satisfied: he was right.

“I killed him.” It's a confession. How many times has he pictured the violent twist of her features, the surrender of her prized composure, and now he can't face her as he speaks. His voice is thick, clotted. He doesn't clear his throat. “I killed Han Solo.”

If she could see what was going on behind that angular face, maybe she wouldn't have come in here raring for a fight. If she'd thought, if she hadn't given into her rashest, most reckless instincts, she could have approached this differently. But the realization that she had a son, one who'd lied to her for months, had been a slap in the face.

When she sees the strain in his face, his eyes shutting against her demands--adversaries, Ben--she realizes that all she's done here is swing back. And at her son. At a man who once so longed for her presence that he sent messages asking her to come to him. How far apart we are.

It shouldn't be a surprise that he answers with a blow of his own, nor that it should hit her squarely in the chest. He knows her far better than she knows him, must realize the breath will die in her chest when he tells her this.

Her mouth opens, but the words are tangled at the top of her throat, cut through with a mix of pain and disbelief. (He isn't lying--she's sure of that, somehow--but accepting his truth is a step further than she can bear.) She stares up at him; whatever grotesque world he lives in, it's her doing. I raised you. When her voice does come, it's rough. "Why?"

He doesn't need to remember. It's in his thoughts, the way power is in his blood—ineradicable, undeniable. Alive. The last moment he felt his father in the Force, the terrible calm to follow.

I thought it would make me stronger. Kylo chokes back the answer. Information is all he has to offer her, all he has to deny her.

“You want to prevent it,” he says. Speaking cleanly, deliberately, as though translating her anguish. It's the only reason she'd ask such a question. “You can't.”

(If, for an instant, he joins her in her futile yearning, if he too knows the turns and walls of that labyrinth of ruined possibility, it doesn't reach his voice.)

"Of course I want to prevent it." The weight of this conversation is finally coming down on her shoulders. Her voice is no longer arching full of indignation; she's solemn, a little weary, and the fire in her voice is banked to embers. "And I want to understand you."

He's an aberration from everything she might have imagined of a child, and yet she can see so much of his father in him. And so much of myself. It's easier to look for what's Han, especially knowing that the fury required to murder his father might have (no, must have, she thinks) come from her.

"Am I next?" she asks, and there's a bitter humor to the question despite the humorless tone she asks it in. He could cut her down right here if he wanted to, though it wouldn't do him much good in the long run.

His face contorts with that ugliness exclusive to pain, disbelief slamming up against anger. His lip trembling. “Understand me?” He takes a gasping breath. The worst of it is—he remembers a time they understood each other perfectly. “You won't even use my name.”

He glares at her, not trusting his features, giving them no alternative. The question threatens to break him open. No, would spill out. Never.

In the long silence, he strips, feeling by feeling, the emotion from his voice. “I'd prefer it not come to that,” he says in a humiliating whisper. Kylo lifts his chin and holds her gaze, regarding her as if from behind a mask. She doesn't know him. She doesn't care.

“But if it does, I'll save you for last.”

"Fine. Kylo Ren, if it makes such a difference." And it does. It's a rejection of the family that created him and raised him, a particular insult to Han Solo in the rejection of his surname. How Ben can hate his father so insistently, she doesn't understand.

(He's Ben to her now, even if he insists on being called Kylo. She's seen him giddy and laughing, his features pulling easily into a familiar grin, and she couldn't forget it if she wanted to. He's her son, and she called him Ben; it's Ben he'll be to her.)

(But if she really must call him Kylo, she will. To his face.)

He's not only Han's son, though, not with the ability to hold others' attention as he does. What he says is part of it--Leia's mouth turns dry at the thought of dying at her son's hand--but there's an intensity in him that could be turned to charisma with only a little effort.

(She'll wonder later if she tried.)

"It doesn't have to be this way." Her own voice has grown soft, in answer to his. She takes a step forward, tentative. Whatever happens next, he's not going to kill her at this moment--not if he's telling the truth. Of course, he might be willing to see just how close he can come to that line (and for that reason, she regrets leaving her blaster behind), but that's a risk she'll have to take. "If you tell me what happened, we can make this right."

He's on the brink of something, the Force awhirl like the wind around a spire. She moves toward him and he's seized with competing impulses: to shrink back, to meet her. He's bewildered by her, her gentle tone. Where's her anger? Evaporated, erased, refined into a dangerous subtlety?

She's telling him what he wants to hear. That's her genius.

But he so desperately longs to hear it.

“You got rid of me,” he says. His voice cracks, and he jerks away.

"I got rid of...B-Kylo." As a rule, Princess Leia Organa does not stutter. Even at the worst of Han's teasing, even with Tarkin staring her down, Alderaan's continued existence hanging in the balance before her, her words kept their crisp edges and their pointed meanings. But here, before the broken man she'll bring into the world, she stumbles.

She'll be angry again later, no doubt. At him, and at herself, at a self she doesn't yet know and--from his dark references to her--doesn't recognize. Right now, she knows the truth of what he says in his wounded-bird stance and the sudden creak in his voice, and she can't feel anything but regret for a time she hasn't even seen.

How could she possibly abandon her own child? Whether she intended to do so or not--surely she couldn't--got rid of is the truth as he sees it, and that's caused damage enough. He's shot through with it, running along him like the veins under his skin.

I did this to him. Somehow, I'm going to do this.

"Help me understand," she says, holding out a hand as though he might take it. She doubts he will at this point, but the offer is one she has to make regardless. If happy, homesick Ben Solo lives inside him still, she has to reach out. "You're my son. I want to know you."

Her hand is so small. He's unable to break out of the thought. He could hurt her a thousand ways, witnesses them in his mind's eye.

Then: his father's parting touch, his hand shaping the face Kylo Ren turned away from the universe and enclosed in a mask.

His tenderness.

His body is numb, a spill of pins and needles. His voice vapor. He gathers his hands into fists, squeezes lightly, as if about to relinquish something. “You'll hate me.”

It's wrong, all wrong. A plea, rather than a promise.

"No," Leia tells him. "I might be angry at times, but I could never hate my son."

She reminds herself not to think of the meaning behind all this right now, the possibility that, in the future, she might hate her own child. If she doesn't, she's still managed to give the impression of hatred. Isn't that equally bad? Ben still looks upon her with anger and pain.

Her hand drops. The desire to touch his arm, or possibly his hair, does not.

"If you are my son, I love you. No matter what you do." Even if he murders his own father. Even if he stands against everything she believes in. She must love him yet, however painfully. If she doesn't, she's not sure she wants to become that woman.

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