#also fuck you palpatine

[reislesbian]

[unfinishedslurs]

The boy stops in his tracks. “I know you,” he says, tilting his head curiously. He’s not tall, but he’s regal nonetheless, dressed all in white. Something about him makes Leia’s hair stand on end, and although she hides it she feels a stirring in her own chest. I know you like I know my own soul, she thinks wildly, and wonders where it came from. Has she gone insane?

“That’s nice,” she says, and shoots him anyway.

He deflects it in a flash of light, a glowing blue laser sword appearing in his hand like magic. She’s only seen one of those before, and it’s Vader’s. If this boy is anything like Vader, she realizes, she’s in deep shit.

She’s smart enough to know when she’s outmatched. Leia makes the tactical decision to run for her life.

Later, as she’s getting the hell out of there, she wonders why he didn’t try to stop her.

She remembers being young and tugging on her mothers skirts, demanding to know why their guest was so sad. “Does he not like it here?” She’d asked, and then, trembling, because Kenobi always seemed saddest around her. “Is it…because of me?”

“Oh, Leia,” her mother sighed, lifting her into her arms. “It’s not that, I promise.”

“Then what is it?”

“Master Kenobi lost a child under his care, years ago.” Breha’s eyes grew deeper, darker. “It was not his fault, but he blames himself. You remind him of that child, that’s all.”

Leia had quieted at that, contemplative.

The next time she’d seen Master Kenobi, she had given him a hug. He didn’t seem to know what to do with that, so she resolved to give him more of them. “He’s lonely,” she’d told her mother. “No one should be lonely.”

Looking at Obi-Wan Kenobi now, the memory seemed so far away. He’d aged thirty years in the ten it had been.

He looks, Leia thinks with a small twinge of regret, very lonely.

“Leia,” he greets. “It’s been a long time.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Leia sees a glint of white.

Kenobi freezes in his tracks. “Luke?” He whispers, and through the distance Leia can hear it as if he’d been speaking directly into her ear.

Master Kenobi lost a child under his care, her mother whispers in her head. He blames himself.

In an instant, Leia understands everything.

Kenobi is still staring at the boy he’d lost so long ago when Vader cuts him down.

Later, as she’s pacing around on the Falcon to Han muttering darkly about Princesses and supernatural abilities, she rememberers the way the boy collapsed, as if all his strings had been cut. Vader was too occupied with him to even look at her as she shot at him desperately.

Luke. She hates him more than she hates herself.

“They know where you are,” he hisses frantically. “They’re coming for you. You have to run.”

“Wait!” Leia quickly pulls up their sonar. Nothing yet, but it would explain the distant queasiness she’d felt since they’d landed. She tended to trust her gut. “How do you know? How much time do we have?”

“Not important, and not enough,” he says. “I have to go, and so do you. You need to leave yesterday.”

“How do I know I can trust you? I don’t even know who you are.”

He pauses. “Call me Skywalker.”

“That’s not an answer, Skywalker.”

“Yes it is.”

She opens her mouth to argue, but there are faint voices on the other end, drawing nearer.

“Shit,” Skywalker mutters. “I have to go. I’ll be in contact, okay? Don’t ever tell me where you are, or where you’re heading. Vader and Palpatine aren’t shy about reading minds. Just leave as soon as you can, and figure out the rest.”

“But—“

It’s too late. The comm has disconnected.

She stares down at it, disbelieving. How would the Empire know they’re here? Why should she trust a stranger who somehow got her personal comm code?

Gut feeling or not, on paper this was a perfect location. Supplied, armored, and most importantly, extremely well hidden. There was no real reason to think it would possibly be found out.

It’s probably a trap. Almost definitely a trap.

Han sticks his head in the door, a sour look on his face. “Hey Princess, can you tell these idiots—“

She makes a decision then and there.

“We’re leaving.”

“What?”

“We’re evacuating, effective immediately.” She pushes past him, and he follows so close he’s nearly stepping on her heel.

“Why? I think it’s pretty cozy here. Actual sunlight doesn’t hurt, either.”

“Apparently too cozy.” She grabs the first person she sees, a pilot who stares at her with wide eyes. “Emergency evacuation. Spread the word to pack everything you can and leave, I’ll let you know where we’re headed when we’re in orbit.”

He salutes and scurries off.

“Woah, hey now.” Han snatches at her elbow until she turns around to face him. “What’s going on?”

“There’s a new informant. He told me the Empire knows we’re here. They’re coming for us.”

“And you trust this person because…”

“I don’t have a choice,” she snaps. Someone runs past them, holding three packs filled to the brim with rations. “It’s either he’s lying and we’re not in danger, or he’s telling the truth and we’re going to die if we don’t listen. It’s not exactly hard math.”

It could be a trap of course, but he hadn’t suggested any sort of direction or destination to follow, and Leia wasn’t inclined to share. Especially not after his tidbit about Vader and Palpatine reading minds.

He squints at her. “That’s not it.”

“What?”

“I don’t believe you,” he insists. He’s so infuriating. Leia doesn’t know why she hasn’t kicked him out yet.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do, and you’re either gonna tell me why, or find a different transport when we head out of here.”

“Who said I was riding on your hunk of junk?” She demands. She actually was planning on going with them, since the Falcon has more than enough room for all the supplies that can’t fit in the other ships and none of the trustworthiness of the other pilots, but Han doesn’t need to know that.

“Well?”

Damn him. Damn him for knowing how to read her. She doesn’t know when she let that happen.

“I feel it,” she admits, defeated. “Something tells me he’s trustworthy. We’ll wait and see if it’s right.”

He studies her. She holds her head high, but inside she’s jittery at the scrutiny. They don’t have time for this.

“Yeah, all right,” Han finally says.

“Really?”

“Yes, really.” He rolls his eyes, like she’s not acting absolutely insane by putting all her trust in a random man she’s never even met. “Now come on, Princess, weren’t you the one who said we had to hurry?”

What is it about this man that makes it impossible to tell whether she wants to punch him or drag him into the nearest supply closet? They don’t have time to find out.

“So there’s good news and bad news.”

“Bad news first,” she demands.

“They know there’s a mole.”

“Shit.” Of course they know, how could they not? She should have been more careful, less obvious about the correlation of their movements with the Empire’s plans. “The good news?”

“They’ve tasked me with hunting down this ‘pathetic rebel spy,’” Skywalker says, humor in his voice. “That should buy me some time.”

Leia can’t quite stop the snort she lets out. “Seriously?”

“Yep. You’re speaking to a professional mole-hunter, here.”

“Well congratulations on the promotion, Skywalker.”

“Thank you,” he says grandly. Then, quieter, “It won’t last, Princess. They’ll find out eventually.”

“I know. Just hang in there, it will be over soon.”

“Will it?” He asks, suddenly sounding very young. She realizes that she has no idea how old he is. She doesn’t know anything about the man who has saved them more times than she cared to admit, and the idea rattles her until they sign off.

Later, she looks up the name Skywalker in their archives. There are a few results, but only one sticks out.

Anakin Skywalker, Jedi Knight and hero of the Clone Wars. Killed at the hands of Darth Vader. There are gossip articles too, speculations on his relationship with the pregnant Senator Padmé Amidala, who died around the same time Skywalker did. The baby, it seems, died with her.

Unless he didn’t.

It’s ridiculous. It’s impossible. The idea is so ludicrous that Leia almost rejects it entirely.

But it makes sense. By the Maker, it makes sense.

The child of Anakin Skywalker, it seems, would be a powerful Force user indeed. Powerful enough for Kenobi to take the baby and run. Powerful enough for the Emperor to want him for his own gain. Powerful enough to send Vader after Kenobi and take the boy himself.

Maybe even powerful enough to shield his mind from Vader and Palpatine’s intrusions.

Powerful enough to hide the fact that he’s a spy.

Leia sinks into her chair, covering her face as she laughs.

Maybe Luke isn’t so bad after all.

“No, no, no,” she mutters, digging through the smoking wreckage of the TIE fighter. “Don’t be dead, please don’t be dead.”

“Princess…” Han lays a hand on her shoulder that she immediately shrugs off.

“No, he’s not dead. He’s not. Luke!”

A faint cough answers her, and she’s so relieved to hear it she could cry. Behind her, Han starts bellowing for a medic and, “Some damn help here, do you expect us to move all this ourselves?”

“Luke, it’s me,” she sobs. “It’s Leia. You’re at the Rebel Base. You’re safe.”

More coughing, and there’s a worrying rasp to his voice when he says, “You know…my name?”

“I figured it out.”

“Smart.” This time, the coughing is so bad Leia and Han both wince.

“Shit, kid,” Han says, moving another piece of rubble. “Don’t talk. We’re gonna get you out of here, all right?”

“Stand back,” Luke chokes out.

“What?”

“Stand back. Please.”

Han protests, but something in Leia knows they should listen to him. She drags him back, and motions everyone else to fall back with them. They do, albeit reluctantly.

“Clear,” she calls, hoping Luke can hear her.

The TIE explodes.

“Fuck!” Han goes back in, Leia on his heels with the terrifying feeling that she’d just allowed Luke to die, before they both stop in their tracks. Around them, the broken pieces of the TIE are floating.

And curled up in the middle is a man dressed all in white.

“Luke!” She pushes past Han to start dragging him out, and after another moment of staring around them, he helps her.

As soon as they get clear, the pieces fall to the ground with a clatter. Luke falls limp with them.

Han is still looking at the TIE. “Can you do that?” He asks quietly.

Leia pauses her examination of the unconscious man in front of her to glare at him. “Is that what you’re most concerned with right now? Really?”

“Excuse me for asking, Princess!”

“It’s white,” Luke grumbles, pulling at his hospital gown bitterly. “I hate wearing white.”

“Should I be offended?”

He rolls his eyes. “Don’t even. You look great and you know it. I just feel like I never left.”

“Well,” she says gingerly. “I guess it’s a good thing you got sick of it. If we went around in matching outfits all the time, people might think we’re twins.”

He snorts. “Yeah, right.”

[stinkythehutt]

also. something about palpatine being so adept at seeing into the future that all of his successes feel completely joyless by the time he achieves them because he’s just going through the motions… how fucked up and nihilistic and brutal that would make you…

[syn0vial]

funniest part about the bounty hunter wars by K.W jeter is how palpatine thinks he's screwing boba fett over by hiring him to take down the bounty hunters' guild, completely ignorant to the fact that boba is a sicko who thinks making himself public enemy #1 of every bounty hunter in the galaxy sounds like the most fun he's had in ages.

it's literally like,

palpatine: that fool boba fett doesn't know that he is but a pawn in my nefarious plot to sow desperation and discord among the bounty hunters of the galaxy. he will be completely unprepared for the torrent of violence and retribution he is about to unleash upon himself. how wonderful it is to make a creature complicit in the workings of its own destruction! >:) boba, like 2 pages later: i can't wait to sow desperation and discord among the bounty hunters of the galaxy 😊 it's going to be sooo fun when my actions unleash a torrent of violence and retribution against me 😃 can't wait!

[purgetrooperfox]

not to foxpost on the foxblog but I think we should all talk more about the cognitive dissonance that the GAR, and the Guard specifically, would have to deal with on an ongoing basis. they're brought up and had it drilled into them for a decade straight that the Republic is worth fighting and dying for, that it stands for justice and freedom and [insert patriotic buzzwords here]. they get deployed directly into a slaughter on Geonosis. they get assigned to Jedi who intentionally get them killed. they get assigned to the Guard and listen to Senators treat the war like an abstract, distant concept and the clones like equipment to be manufactured/replaced/disposed of. they're treated as subhuman by civilians. they're slaves in this system that was built up to be a shining star, a perfect example of democracy, the thing they're born to die for.

so what do you get. indoctrinated beliefs versus lived experience. sure, some of them turn (Slick) or desert (Cut), but most of them have to reconcile that conflict without walking away from the army altogether. Dogma is one end of the spectrum, going the route of "my indoctrinated beliefs must be true, so I'll selectively validate parts of my lived experience to align with them and seek out proof of them". Fives is, on Umbara at least, the opposite end, going the route of "my lived experience must be true, so I'll recontextualize my indoctrinated beliefs to match it". the Republic is still worth everything, but maybe we can't trust the Jedi, or the Kaminoans, or the Chancellor.

but the majority of them are going to fall closer to Dogma, otherwise the GAR would stop functioning or try to collectively rebel, right? it's easy to skirt around how deep brainwashing runs and how far people will go to resolve dissonance, but fmngmfng

so you take Fox in the context of Commander of the Guard, and you get "the Republic must still be worth it, so these rules and regs are in place for a reason, and even if they're not then they do work to protect us, and the Senate is doing its best with a bad situation, and the Chancellor wouldn't commit xyz atrocity because he is the Republic" and on and on and on to try to reconcile it all in his poor fucked up brain. how would he carry on with the slog of his job? how could he possibly have the space to wrestle with the contradiction? then the longer you lean into one justification, the deeper it sinks in and reinforces itself

anyway this has been needless over-analysis hour

[tennessoui]

I enjoy any reverse age fic that keeps Anakin realistically dark (and dramatic - I am an eViL SItH!!!) while also letting twink Obi-Wan be like, nope, Jedi live and Palpatine dies, those are the rules for fucking me <3

its very important to me that anakin thinks and acts like he's the most powerful person in the whole galaxy but then his soaking wet pathetic chihuahua of a padawan actually holds both of their leashes yeah

padawan obi-wan is like kill your master for me it would make me happy for a millisecond and anakin does the math and is like. perfect ok will do immediately. is there anyone i can kill for you that would make you happy for a whole minute? maybe thirty whole seconds? just let me know. i'll do it. i'll do it so fast.

[other-peoples-coats]

still thinking about palaptine's phone tree of doom/The Chip Lag Issue, and have come up with a third, even fucking funnier option for how order 66 rolls out:

Ol' mate sheev manually corrected for lag. Like sure, you have to squash the lag time down from like, millions of years to like. a reasonable but still funny time frame, but consider it.

Skeevy sheevy, the great wrinkled raisin of evil himself, sitting at his desk, looking at the Great Big Space Spreadsheet listing where every goddamn clone commander in the GAR is, along with the current lag time in communication, and sitting down to schedule out Enacting His Evil Plot.

Target roll out time is 5 pm CSC (coruscant standard time), because that's when it's Most Dramatic and also maybe most jedi are in temple to avoid peak hour coruscant traffic (but mostly the drama). The furthest flung CC+Jedi pair is on the ass end of the outer rim (lag time 13 hrs 54 min). Therefore, he has to send that message at........ass o'clock in the fucking morning, in order for it to reach where it's gotta go at the same time as everyone else gets theirs.

fine. no pain without gain, it's one day of getting up at 2 fucking AM and dialing a clone to tell them to murder a jedi. loathing feeds sith powers, getting up at 2 am to make a fifteen second holocall is peak fucking loathing, all is evil in the world.

Sitting down with his evil!space-appointment-calendar* (different from his personal calendar, his work calendar [delegated], his work calendar [not meant to be delegated but delegated to fox anyway], his work calendar [actually not delegated], his CIS war calendar, and his not evil-space-appointment-calendar), along with space!world-time-buddy.com and his spreadsheets of 'where the fuck are the murder targets and their murder weapons now'.

Planning out every fucking phone call - ok, kenobi is on utapau, 8hr 13min delay, that means the call to cody has to be at ....space world time buddy says 8:47 sharp! in goes the appointment to the evil space appointment calendar, "8:47 AM, Kenobi🔫🔫🔫🎉🎉🎉".

"9:13 am, Koon 🔫🎉"

"10:02 am, MULTI CALL COMMANDER ONLY, hy'rt, kleei, janso...[click to expand]"

"10:30 am, Tapal+ brat"

etc etc.

And then. Having to reschedule meetings around these totally fucking arbitary points in time. He's gotta keep it normal until go live! (or, well, go dead.) nothing to see here, pay no attention to the chancellor ducking out to make 15 second holocalls every eight minutes, it's fine.

Like yes awful terrible etc but also: the idea of lord evil himself blearily opening his holocom after a day of making fifteen second phonecalls at random points to compensate for lag is hilarious to me. by the 400th call he's doing the call centre mangled script like 'commander order execute clone 66. How may I order you today. Thank you for calling I am clone how may I execute you?'

*at least sleazy sheevy's evil appointment calendar opened up some once dooku became a head shorter. Can you fucking imagine the mutual monologing. this nine hour meeting could have been an email.

[tragedy-for-sale]

Just thinking about how Palpatine requested Anakin's company once and didn't let Obi-Wan come. And when Anakin came back he told Obi-Wan he didn't want to be a Jedi anymore. Just thinking about how much of a failure Anakin indirectly made Obi-Wan feel like.

[stairset]

Love the idea here that the other rebels' problem with Saw is just that he blows shit up and not the whole "torturing prisoners and endangering civilians" thing

[radiosummons]

I really wish the Star Wars fandom would stop fighting over whether the Jedi deserved to be killed or whatever (correct answer: they didn't) or whatever other bullshit petty argument some people like to fling at particular characters for no other reason than that they think these characters are "to blame" for their favorite Star Wars blorbo going through shit.

I'm really tired of people pretending we don't already have an actual person who is directly responsible for every single major atrocity committed in the entirety of the Star Wars franchise: Darth fucking Sidiuous.

My boy Sheev didn't mansplain, manipulate and manslaughter his entire life into creating a galaxy wide war, committing multiple mass genocides, subjugating and torturing millions of lives just for you all to try to give the credit to some Jedi rando you randomly decided to blame for something they literally had nothing to do with it.

I'm literally begging you all to stop stealing credit from the most evil being in all of Star Wars. Let my man Palpatine be the shitty, fucked up evil mastermind he is and appreciate the fact that he pulled off the impossible so well that he plunged the galaxy into literal darkness for 20 odd, interrupted years. And please also laugh alongside me with the indisputable fact that it only took one tiny blond twink to convince his walking drama emo queen of an apprentice to finally dunk his ass into the trash where it belonged.

((Also cry and laugh with me at all the angst filled/comedy centric fix-it AU fics where Palpatine gets his ass beat into absolute oblivion over and over again. It's a great time, I promise!))

[umemiyan]

ROBIN YOUR TAGS DKEKSKEJD i can't lie is also thought that made it sound a little more interesting 💀 i've always assumed that got was just like. fantasy politics feat. dragons or smth LMAO but those warning labels raised my eyebrows a little (in a good way. an intrigued way 👀)

LMFAOOOO i am nothing if not a consumer of dead dove 😌 but no actually i’ve seen like 3 or 4 seasons of GOT and i really enjoyed it i just never picked it back after waiting so long for the next season to come out back in the day haha and i’ve also seen s1 of HOTD but have yet to start catching up with s2 as it’s airing rn. they are indeed rather heavy!! with lots of politics involved as well but still some other good plot stuff

[ghostmistdraws]

Ides of March and Star Wars on the same day?!?!?

[snappysprinkledog]

I know that everything was palapatine and shit but like, I cannot get over the insanity that rots opens with. The chancellor of the Republic has been taken by the separatists off planet, there is currently a separatist attack happening on the capitol of the Republic which means noone can try rescue the chancellor while he's put up into space on a major warship and away, it is a war winning move, near impossible to come back from, and then anakin skywalker and obi wan kenobi rock up 10 minutes late with blue milk having just sped across the galaxy from the battles they'd just been fighting, manage to rescue the chancellor, kill the major separatist leader, and then despite flying half a ship crash through the goddamn atmosphere on fire and still come out alive chancellor unharmed.

Insanity

[byfulcrums]

Anakin was incredibly sleep deprived, probably having skipped his meals for days, anxious, scared and desperate. And, on top of that, he had been groomed and physiologically abused for years by Palpatine, and he was manipulated into thinking everyone was against him — honestly, I'm just surprised he didn't break sooner

[anakinh]

shout out to star wars: brotherhood for single-handedly getting me back into star wars. also fuck you, eat shit, how dare you

[morgan-n-cheese-91]

star wars has too much heteronormative bullshit