Star Wars short fic -- Denouement
Contains spoilers for The Last Jedi, kind of.
My very first published Star Wars fanfic was in a print zine when I was just short of fourteen. It was about Leia, and it was called Denouement. So is this one.
It wasn’t hard to give the order. “Fire.” Her voice was even and the cruiser’s guns spoke. There was an explosion in the silence of space and it was over. Perhaps it was that she’d given the order so many times before. Perhaps it was use and time. Or focus. It might have been singular focus. But Leia did not hesitate, not half a second, not ever.
In the days after, she saw in their faces the questions they didn’t dare to ask, even as they celebrated their victory and mourned their dead. Han would have asked. Luke wouldn’t have needed to. In the end, it was Rey who asked, “Do you ever wonder why he did it?”
“No.” Rey could hear perfectly well the rest of her thought. It didn’t matter. Why he did it paled next to what he did. Thousands - no, tens of thousands - of children would grow up without their parents, and tens of thousands of parents would mourn the children they lost. The old who should have known peace who had been too slow to run or too frail to escape, the poor who couldn’t buy their way out of war zones, the people who had done nothing but happen to live in the wrong place - the toll of misery was so high that all else paled beside it. It didn’t matter why he had done it. Compared to the results of his choices, his feelings didn’t matter at all. But then they’d never mattered as much as he thought they did.
She had borne him and she killed him and there were thirty-one years between. “It was mine to do,” she said, and Rey nodded slowly.
“I understand,” she said.
My very first published Star Wars fanfic was in a print zine when I was just short of fourteen. It was about Leia, and it was called Denouement. So is this one.
It wasn’t hard to give the order. “Fire.” Her voice was even and the cruiser’s guns spoke. There was an explosion in the silence of space and it was over. Perhaps it was that she’d given the order so many times before. Perhaps it was use and time. Or focus. It might have been singular focus. But Leia did not hesitate, not half a second, not ever.
In the days after, she saw in their faces the questions they didn’t dare to ask, even as they celebrated their victory and mourned their dead. Han would have asked. Luke wouldn’t have needed to. In the end, it was Rey who asked, “Do you ever wonder why he did it?”
“No.” Rey could hear perfectly well the rest of her thought. It didn’t matter. Why he did it paled next to what he did. Thousands - no, tens of thousands - of children would grow up without their parents, and tens of thousands of parents would mourn the children they lost. The old who should have known peace who had been too slow to run or too frail to escape, the poor who couldn’t buy their way out of war zones, the people who had done nothing but happen to live in the wrong place - the toll of misery was so high that all else paled beside it. It didn’t matter why he had done it. Compared to the results of his choices, his feelings didn’t matter at all. But then they’d never mattered as much as he thought they did.
She had borne him and she killed him and there were thirty-one years between. “It was mine to do,” she said, and Rey nodded slowly.
“I understand,” she said.