Pacific Rim wild west AU (or Star Wars The Force Awakens wild west AU)
Oh boy so uh- the thing about the Wild West is that it was super genocidal and colonial and racist, and it continues to be the most treasured setting in the American cultural ethos and I refuse to back away from that part of it, to acknowledge hat these lands were empty for the taking, so this might be way darker than you expected, um-
1: Rey’s first memory is this: it is cold and she is walking. Someone, somewhere is crying, and there are men on horseback (she remembers their legs, how huge they were, how they penned them in on all sides) but mostly there are just people in one long chain of misery from here to the horizon. She is clutching to her mothers skirt, shivering in a leather dress, and she is terrified. Her mother is stroking her hair, singing the sorts of nonsense things that mothers say to frightened children. When they stop for the night, her mother pulls her hair from her face, carefully, and puts it in one of those buns that she sees white women wearing, doesn’t leave it loose around her shoulders, or in her braids.
“At least,” her mother says, “you look like your father. I want you to run to that town and stay there, until one of us can come and get you. You must stay there, you can’t follow us, do you understand?”
Rey is crying, crying, and she nods. She runs, at her mother’s direction, in the middle of the night, and never sees her again.
2. Her name is not Rey. It is longer, and more beautiful, but she stuttered the first time she introduced herself, and the man at the saloon had laughed, and no one could pronounce it and she was six and alone and terrified and didn’t protest the abbreviation.
She can’t remember what it is, any more, and hopes her mother will tell her when she comes back. She will come back.
3. There was, and this is true, a winter so cold it froze most of the cows where the stood in the fields. The next spring it stank to high heaven, and by the summer, the bones were bleached white in the fields.
There are, and this is true, big city folk who ride the railroad, and shoot herds of Buffalo put the window, to say they have done it, and leave the corpses to rot. Within a season, the heat and the bugs pick them dry, and Rey, with a solemnity that the other bone pickers don’t match, picks them up and puts them to use.
The skulls are worth the most, but other bones get turned into dice and buttons and fertilizer, and this way, she thinks, at least they are going to use and not to waste.
4. The civil war is half a generation over, and slavery never really ended. Finn knows, technically, that he isn’t a slave, but working in a chain gang for the railroad doesn’t feel much different. Chained beside him is a cow theif, who claims to be from actual Mexico.
“It ain’t as far south as you think it is,” he says “‘sides, it ain’t stealing if it’s on your land and they stole your cows in the first place, now is it?”
He grins, straight white teeth unmarked by chewing tobacco or sugar, and he claims to know every trail from railroad to cow trail between here and California, if only he had a horse to ride.
He is put in charge, one night, of tending the horses, and he seizes his chance with both hands.
5. Maz Kanata seems impossibly old. She is, Han tells them in an undertone, nearly ninety. She has lived in three continents, and bears five different brands upon her skin, and she’s been a runaway and a freedman for sixty years. Her hair, wildly curly and white, is pulled back behind a colourful wrap, and she’s been running this saloon since before the civil war. Her hands are arthritic, she has a shotgun in her belt, and she has stacked two pairs of sunglasses on her nose to see them clearly.
She sees Rey, and with her wrinkled hands gently touches her face. Touches the bridge of her nose, and her cheekbones. She has always looked sun kissed, although she wraps her face in linen in some half-remembered advice whenever she works in the sun.
Maz traces her face, squints at her, as if she can see the bones through the skin and says “ah, child. You already know, don’t you. Whomever you are waiting for, they are never coming back.”
jbbartram-illu
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snowghoul
stormborns
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
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vaporwave
