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Not embroidery, not politics, not reblogs, not memes or cats or artifacts from the queue… No, it’s time for…
A snippets post! Yes, I’m still writing things!! Slowly, and to no particular end, but I am!
1) A lovely spate of commenters and some discussions about Sled Dog Guy and Found Cat made me revisit the ties-them-together sequel I’d been considering.
2) Continuing my cozy epic of the DamFam’s founding years, Kes Dameron joins the Pathfinders, and is unhappily really good at it. (mild tw: wartime-appropriate violence, specifically knife violence)
hmm, what else am I working on? Oh yes.
3) the Home out in the Wind post-quel: reunion on Yavin IV.
Snippets below, so this doesn’t get so long:
1) Found Cat/Sled Dog sequel:
“I won’t eat you, child,” Kes said, smiling gently at her as he stood and went into the kitchen. Poe and Finn had gone to pick up the pizza they’d called ahead to order, and Rey hadn’t anticipated being so uneasy at being left alone with this stranger. “It’s all right.”
“I’m not– afraid of you,” Rey said fiercely.
“Nor should you be, dear,” Kes said. “Do you want a beer or a glass of water?”
She hesitated. “A beer,” she said. “Whatever kind.”
He came back out after a moment with two beers and the bottle opener, and passed her the unopened bottle and opener. She popped the cap off, and handed him back the opener in some bemusement, and then realized that he’d been making a point of bringing her the beer with the seal intact. But he took the opener back as if it were no big deal, opened his own, and sat down on the couch, picking up Artoo to make room for himself.
He deposited the cat into his lap and petted him. “Don’t grumble at me, gato,” he said. Artoo complained briefly, but settled down and deigned to be caressed.
She pulled her feet up into her seat, getting comfortable and bracing herself all at the same time, and watched his hands moving on the cat’s fur. “Are you,” she said, but trailed off.
He let that silence spin out a brief moment, then glanced over at her, corners of his eyes crinkling in a manner like Poe’s. “What am I?” he asked. “Is that what you want to know?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She fidgeted with her beer bottle. “I never knew anyone’s dad before.”
He smiled at her, and it was a nice kind of smile, amused but not at her expense she thought maybe, though she wasn’t sure. “Well,” he said, “dads are really like regular people, mostly. Motherhood causes more biological changes, but fatherhood causes a few too. Mostly we become scientifically fifty percent more embarrassing, on average.”
“Embarrassing,” Rey said, unwittingly fascinated: she knew it was a joke but she just wasn’t used to those.
“It’s mostly only detectable to one’s own offspring,” Kes said, closing one eye in what she thought must be a conspiratorial gesture.
2) Kes Dameron: Slightly Squeamish Commando:
“Are you sure?” Pankhel [OC, Pathfinder] asked.
“No,” Kes said, smudging mud down the bridge of his nose, “but what do we have to lose?”
“You’re nuts,” she said.
“Count thirty then throw the rock,” he said.
“They’ll be on us before that,” she argued.
He shook his head. “Count fast then, if you really think so. I just gotta get behind ‘em.”
The Imperial patrol was Stormtroopers, following the same deployment pattern as they all did. Kes got that the uniformity thing was their system and it worked for them but it was also the same shit his people had been studying how to resist since the Separatist conflict so it was kind of easy to predict what they’d do. He drew on one of the childhood stories he’d been told, mentally filtered out the embroidered embellishments, and drew the absolutely non-standard-issue belt knife he’d managed to wheedle out of Andor, who’d clearly grown up on the same stories.
Blasters made noise. Knives didn’t. And Stormtrooper armor was all made the same. Kes had never killed a man before, had never seriously contemplated it, but he was very good at cutting exactly what he aimed at with a knife. He slipped into the footsteps of the Trooper flanking the man carrying the sensor they were using to look for the Pathfinders, waited for Pankhel’s (well-thrown) rock to clatter down the other side of the canyon and both Stormtroopers to turn to look at it. As they did, he slid the knife into the throat gap of the Trooper’s armor, pushed past the resistance and whipped it out again, then prepared to die.
But the Stormtrooper didn’t scream; he made an awful little shrill noise, and twisted down, flailing helplessly. Improbably enough, the sensor man paused, turning his head, but there was no peripheral vision in those helmets; he was clearly not really paying attention to his surroundings. “Sevens,” the sensor man said, maybe impatiently; his voice was flattened by the helmet. “Will you quit tripping on tree roots.”
Kes didn’t wait for the realization; he was already on the man, knife hammered into that same throat gap, and the sensor man didn’t have time to make any more noise than his companion.
Kes ripped the sensor man’s helmet off, not looking at his dead face, and bashed it open to pry out the comm unit. He could hear that the patrols were checking in in sequence. “– fours, no change,” said a voice. Then there was an awkward silence.
“GK-1949, report,” a voice said after a moment, impatiently.
Kes shook the thing, and found the trigger to transmit. “– sorry,” he said, purposely flattening his voice and trying his damnedest not to have any kind of accent, “Sevens tripped. No change otherwise.”
He held his breath. He probably sounded like a moron. He’d never learned how to get rid of his accent, not really. Then a bored-sounding voice said, “Four seven three zero, no change. Are we changing up the pattern once we hit that canyon?”
“Negative,” the impatient voice said, “just point the sensors down. Four-nine, you take the west edge, Twenty-two hug the east edge.”
Nothing for it; Kes went back and pried the transmitter out of Sevens’ helmet, and lifted the sensor from 1949’s limp hand, and followed the path closest to what he figured the patrol had been planning to take. He went back toward the northward gun emplacement, and carefully kept the sensor pointed the wrong direction, waving the comm unit at Pankhel as he came close.
“What did you,” she said, astonished.
“Killed them both,” Kes said.
3) Yavin IV Reunion Post-HomeWind Epic:
Norasol looked up, and was not entirely surprised to see that it was Leia Organa. “Oh, good, you’ve come,” she said, and held out her hand. “I suppose Kes can stand to hear your name spoken, now.”
Leia came forward and pressed her cheek to Norasol’s, Alderaanian-style. “Yes,” she said, “Kes is even speaking directly to me now.”
Norasol held Leia by the shoulders, and really looked at her, really truly. She knew that the woman bore no blood relation to Bail, or Breha; she knew the woman’s mother really had been Padmé Naberrie, but she’d never known her. She’d never known that Anakin Skywalker either, which she considered a spot of good luck. But she’d known Breha, and Bail. “You know,” she said, as it struck her, “you have a resemblance to your father now– your real father, who raised you, whose name you still bear. There’s something in your face that recalls him.”
Leia smiled indulgently, but a little sadly, and it was so clearly a Bail expression that it was unmistakable. “That’s impossible,” she said.
“No,” Norasol said. “If you have a strong enough impression of someone’s spirit with you, it can change your appearance. I can see in your face that he’s still with you.”
Tears started to Leia’s eyes, at that. “Norasol,” she said, and Norasol pulled her in close again, for a real embrace, chest to chest, shoulder to shoulder, Leia’s chin tucked over her shoulder. Leia was so slight, and even as diminished as Norasol was now with age, Leia was still smaller. “You know,” Leia whispered, “I’m older now than he ever was.”
“I’m the oldest any of my people has lived to be in generations,” Norasol told her. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.”
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