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csevet replied to your post “In the back of my mind I’m sort of bracing for The Last Jedi to just…”
GIVE US POE’S BABY HOLOPICS, B. DO IT.
If I had any skill at drawing, you know I would literally do that. But it’ll have to be with words.
The apparently-ritual Showing Of Poe’s Baby Holos To His Coworkers was turning out considerably less-painful than Poe had anticipated, and not just because of how much drink was being taken, and the fact that Poe was sitting close enough that Kes kept leaning his shoulder against Poe’s when he sat back.
Kes had a very carefully-curated little display of photos on the nice holoviewer he had in his house, and had made a very pleasant showing of family holos– starting with the grandmother Poe didn’t remember, in a holo he’d never seen before– his grandmother looked tired and worn and was sitting next to Queen Breha of Alderaan, holding Poe as a newborn. The two women were, by their body language, clearly friends, and Breha was dressed informally by Alderaanian royal standards, her hair impeccably styled but her ornate robe unstructured and her posture natural.
There were a few more holos of Poe with his mother, who was beautiful, of course; Poe had seen most of these before. Especially of the one that was billed as Poe’s First Flying Lesson, featuring a very tiny Poe cradled in a sling against his mother’s chest as she piloted what appeared to be a pretty standard courier vessel, looking amused and stylish. Poe had used that one a few times in projects; it was his favorite baby photo of himself.
But it wasn’t until the first holo that included Kes appeared that Poe realized these were in order. Poe himself was still very tiny in this photo, and Kes looked like shit, gaunt and exhausted and unshaven, sitting on the floor of an unfamiliar spacecraft or something, with Shara next to him, both of them extremely distracted and not looking at the holocam. Shara was visibly crying, in the holo, and Kes wasn’t in much better shape.
“That’s an awful pic of me,” Kes said. “Never say I’m not fair about this.”
“You do look like shit there, Pa,” Poe said.
“Give me some credit,” Kes said, “things were pretty intense just then.” He skipped to the next holopic, which was a much better pic of Kes himself, in a Pathfinder uniform but not so gaunt or exhausted, holding a sleeping tiny Poe against his shoulder. Several people made awww noises, and he waved a hand. “I’m getting to the good stuff. Hang on.”
The very next photo, as promised, was of a nude Poe, maybe six months old, partly wrapped in a towel, wet hair standing straight up, in his mother’s arms, reaching for the holocam with a wide toothless grin.
There was general amusement and uproar, and Kes said, “I promised you all nudes. There you go.”
The rest of the show was mostly holos of Poe covered in dirt, posting with his mother, dressed up for recitals, holding his guitar, standing next to various farm equipment looking awkward or amused– unobjectionable photos really, though oddly light on pics including spacecraft given Poe’s own memories of his upbringing. He might have been embarrassed by some of them when he was younger, especially the ones featuring livestock or farm equipment, but by this point in his life, he could appreciate that everyone had holos like this of themselves, and at least to everyone here, the cat was out of the bag about Poe really being a farm kid.
To Poe’s mild chagrin, the photo of him from the Naval Academy, drunk at a party with his suspenders slipping off his shoulders, was in there. “Why, Papa?” he asked, over the general furor. “Why this one?”
Everyone went quiet when Kes didn’t answer immediately. He wasn’t laughing. Poe had a moment of dread before Kes finally answered.
“Because you look like your mother in it,” he said, “and it was a blessed relief to see you smiling for real in a holo. All the other ones they sent of you didn’t really look like you.”
There was a moment of quiet at that, and Poe said, “Way to get heavy, there, Dad.”
“You asked,” Kes said. “Anyway I didn’t put this collection together for everyone’s amusement, these are the holos I like. I don’t have to answer anyone’s questions if I don’t want to.”
“We wanted embarrassing ones,” Iolo said.
Kes smiled mysteriously. “You didn’t say that,” he said. “I don’t know that I can help you, I don’t think much of Poe’s childhood was intrinsically that embarrassing and I’m not up enough on his current views to know what he’d retroactively be embarrassed by.”
“I mean, this, for example,” Poe said, gesturing at the still-current holo. But he was still hung up on the realization that this wasn’t a slideshow made for the party, these were the holos Kes himself looked at when he wanted to look at holos.
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