Holy shit, I’m alive. Chapter 15 of Footnotes should post tomorrow, and I’ve posted the first bit below. Have no idea what this is and want to get caught up? Here’s the link to chapter 1, and a title card I made. I figured - dammit, I’m an art teacher, this is just embarrassing that I haven’t made some sort of cover image.
Post TLJ. Rey is having an incredibly difficult time deciphering the Jedi texts, much less actually gaining any meaning from them. In a moment of frustration, she knocks over the final, unopened volume, discovering that someone has left some very insightful commentary - and poetry.
General Leia Organa was not a woman one would accuse of being anything less than forward and direct.
That, combined with her frightening reputation of being incredibly intuitive, meant that she was not someone one wanted to encounter off-guard. Certainly not a person to approach anything less than full preparation, and with nothing to hide.
So when Rey, deep in a hazy, sleep-deprived daydream, practically walked over the diminutive General Organa on her way off the docks on Dantooine, her clouded mind was jarred into awareness, like touching an exposed circuit. There was no escape here. She had so much to hide. The Bluntness was coming. Her thoughts were rapidfire, and increasingly horrifying.
Supreme Leader Kylo Ren’s… mother.
Ben Solo, who you just… kissed.
Kriff, you did a hell of a lot more than kiss him - you can practically still taste him.
Maybe she doesn’t know he was even there - no, Poe told her. But she has no idea what we...
“Rey. Aside from all the excitement with the assassination attempts, I trust you had a pleasurable journey?”
Leia’s smile was genuine, reaching her sparkling eyes - but Rey couldn’t help but cower before the tiny woman. ‘Pleasurable journey’ repeated through Rey’s head over and over, accompanied by positively debauched images of exactly the sort of journey she had been taking with Ben. In this moment, she was incredibly glad that Leia didn’t have the full-on mind-reading powers of her son-
Leia reached toward Rey’s presumably panicked face, gently cupping her chin as she tucked an errant strand of hair back behind her ear, and into her braids. “I would love for the two of us to sit down and have a nice, long chat over the next few days. But... I’m getting the impression that time is on neither of our sides.” Her hand lingered, trailing down Rey’s intricately twined hair. “What was his offer?”
“Two days, then I meet him on Scipio - wait, what?”
An eerily familiar smirk of triumph spread across Leia’s face, her eyes alight. Rey didn’t know how she did it, but the damning words just spilled out of her - kriff, this woman truly was Kylo Ren’s mother, the daughter of Darth Vader, after all.
“Uh - I meant to say - what it really-”
With a sympathetic smile, Leia patted Rey’s shoulder, not-so-subtly guiding her forward. “I know. Come on, this is no place to discuss this. Too many ears.”
Rey staggered forward, mind racing as she was led toward the main building of the Dantooine enclave.
Just how much does this woman know??
