#i wish the psychometry went somewhere

[kcrabb88]

Narrative backflips I’ve been doing to make Ahsoka’s psychometry make sense:

1. It’s latent in more Jedi than we know and some sort of traumatic brain injury triggered it in Ahsoka

2. She killed Quinlan and absorbed his power (dun dun DUNNNNN)

3. Ahsoka always had it but after seeing the trauma it put Quinlan through at times, Obi-Wan went out of his way to cover it up. Always fun to give the man some more stress.

4. She always had it but kept it to herself bc she didn’t realize it was weird. Like a kid who needs glasses but doesn’t KNOW they need glasses until someone sees them walk into a wall

5. Some nightsister bullshit.

6. She’s been dead now two (three?) times so something something connected to the past or ghosts of feelings/experiences or some sort of fit idk man I’m trying to do backflips in a sand pit

OMG anon you thought about this more that Dave Filoni did! I'm partial to 3 for the angst of it all, I admit! Given Ahsoka has died like, three times though, 6 is also feasible :D

(Not 2 though noooooo Quin is alive somewhere, I hope! What happened to him after 10 BBY and the OWK show? I sure wish someone would say!! Let him help Luke train new Jedi or something).

[phoenixkaptain]

Can’t stop thinking about Star Wars…

The Original Trilogy is about forgiveness and love. How love can help people who everyone thinks are too far gone. How you can choose to be good at any point, even if you’ve done terrible things. You can make the choice to change your behaviour and become maybe not a good person and definitely not a perfect person, but a better person than you were just a moment ago.

Thinking about how the Prequel Trilogy feeds into this. Anakin makes choices throughout, and he feels unmoored. He feels like he has to hide. He does hide. He hides from the people who can help him, the Jedi, because he can only see how he’s imperfect and they’re perfect, he can’t see their flaws. He loves Padme and Obi-Wan but that love tears him apart and he stops feeling safe anywhere. He loses everything he loved, from his home to his mother to his Master to his wife, and that makes his final choice in the Original Trilogy, his choice to do something good, all the more meaningful because we know him. We know he isn’t perfect and we know he’s capable of committing atrocities, but he chose not to. He chose to sacrifice himself for someone, instead of wishing someone would sacrifice themself for him.

The Sequel Trilogy had so much potential. But, there was no plan. And that’s the most diappointing part. The original and prequel trilogies have flow, they make sense, they connect intrinsically to each other and they only strengthen each other. The sequels just don’t flow, they don’t connect, they feel disjointed.

If Rey had to be Palpatine’s granddaughter, I think it would have made more sense for her to be the Vader mirror instead of Ben Solo. If Rey had been raised and groomed as Palpatine’s next apprentice, if she had been taught that Jedi = bad and democracy = bad, but Palpatine ruling everything = good, if she was a Sith from the beginning, but she chose not to be? That would tie in to the first trilogy a lot better.

Especially because they could have used the psychometry they gave her. She could have found Anakin’s lightsaber and felt heart break. She could have seen all the terrible things that happened because of Anakin, because of Darth Vader, and she could have had a moment of realization that she can choose to be good. Especially if she didn’t find Anakin’s lightsaber, but Luke’s.

Rey could have been powerful because she was trained her whole life to be powerful. She could have been masculine because she was trained her whole life to be masculine. She could have been such a better antagonist than Kylo Ren was. And it’s all because of the choices the characters would make and the intention behind them.

When Ben Solo leaves everything behind, he lost everything, but it was his choice to do so. If Rey was in a situation where she was raised by Palpatine but decided to give up that life, her fear of losing everything hits a bit harder.

They could even have made the same story! Like, Rey leaves as a teenager and goes to Jakku to hide because nobody will look for her there, only to stumble on a droid from the Resistance and realize that this is her chance to do good. She could seek out Luke Skywalker, hoping that he’ll teach her how to be good instead of bad. She could kill Palpatine by throwing him down another reactor core.

You wouldn’t even have to change the other characters all that much, honestly. You could still have Kylo Ren, his bond with Rey would just be a bit different. Maybe they were groomed together for a period, maybe he was to be her replacement, either way, you could still have that, if you really wanted to.

You could have anything you want, because the sequel trilogy is the way it is and it’s not going to change just because I have opinions. I wish it was different. I wish the people who made it were allowed to care about it, to see it through to the end, all three movies, to make a plan at the start then follow it through to the end. I wish they’d been allowed time to revise and edit and do things better. I wish, I wish, I wish, but it’s not that way. And I just have to make my peace with that.

[undeadcourier]

cesario makes a deal wc: 1567

Cesario tapped the tarot deck against the tabletop to straighten it. Their fingers tingled where they touched the cards with the faint pins-and-needles sensation of blood rushing back into a limb that had fallen asleep. 

The feeling was as familiar to Cesario now as was the design on the backs of the cards. They traced a fingertip over the wings of the eagle painted in cerulean and turquoise over a golden sun and sighed.

Before the ache in their chest that always bloomed when they thought of home could grow to distraction, the bell on the door tinkled to announce the arrival of a customer and Cesario set the deck down.

The man who entered was surprisingly tall -- almost as tall as Cesario themself, though they shared little else in common. The stranger’s worn leather jacket and the layer of Mojave dust on his sturdy boots were a far cry from the flowing shawl and hand-tooled huaraches that Cesario wore. 

The man didn’t acknowledge Cesario right away but instead browsed the selection of candles, charms, oils, and other items that they had displayed for sale. He didn’t appear particularly interested in anything until he came to Cesario’s crystal ball, set on a stand by a selection of dried herbs. 

“I would appreciate if you didn’t touch that,” Cesario said. 

Apparently, that was precisely the wrong thing to say, because the man cocked his head slightly before he lifted the ball off its stand and held it up in one gloved hand. He turned it in the light and examined it in a detached sort of way, and Cesario knew at once that he wasn’t so much interested in the ball as in being contrary. They pursed their lips.

“Is there something I can help you with?” they prompted. 

“You have to ask?” he teased. His roguish grin was warped by the crystal ball as he held it up between them and looked through it at Cesario. “You didn’t foresee that I’d come?” 

Cesario resisted the impulse to roll their eyes. “It doesn’t work like that,” they explained. They kept their eyes on the ball, perched precariously in the man’s hand, and wished he’d just set it down already. “Perhaps you’d like a reading?”

The man scoffed. “I don’t need a witch to tell me my future,” he responded. “I intend to shape it.”

“Curious that you should choose to come here, then,” Cesario pointed out. When the man didn’t take that as his invitation to leave, they swallowed a sigh. “As it happens, I’m not in the position to entertain guests at the moment, so if you don’t intend to buy anything, I suggest that you be on your way.”

“I’m looking for someone who came in here,” the man said. “A friend of yours, I’m told.” His tone was casual enough, but there was something about the way he spoke that made the hairs on the back of Cesario’s neck stand up.

“I have many friends,” they replied. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

The corner of the man’s mouth twitched up at that.

 “The man I’m looking for is one of the Chairmen over at the Tops,” he said. As he spoke, he picked up one of the devotional candles with la Virgen de Guadalupe on it and his grin twisted down. “Es un pinche cabrón se llama Benny.”

When he said the name, his gold eyes flicked up to meet Cesario’s. It was a calculating stare, the look of a poker master sizing up the other players at the table, looking for a bluff.

He needn’t have bothered, really. Cesario never liked lying, nor had they ever been good at it.

“I wouldn’t call him a friend,” they answered. “He left the Strip a few days ago, I suppose he’s somewhere in the desert.” Ordinarily, they might have tried to get a few caps for that information, but at the moment, they were more preoccupied with getting this man to leave before he dropped that ball. He still hadn’t set it down, and it was beginning to make Cesario anxious. It wasn’t as though genuine crystal balls were easy to come by…

Only then did it occur to Cesario that the man had not taken it simply out of spite, but as a kind of hostage, to ensure that they answered his questions about Benny. They set their jaw and made a mental note to keep such valuables out of reach in the future, but the man was still turning the ball idly in his hands.

“He didn’t tell me where he was going,” Cesario said, “so if that was all you came to ask, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“No?” The man sounded amused. “I would have thought a private investigator would be precisely the person who could help me.”

A knot of unease twisted in Cesario’s stomach at that. They no longer advertised as an investigator. They hadn’t in years, not since the conflict between the NCR and the Legion had escalated to all-out war. It was too dangerous, and besides, with the troopers on the Strip, they got more than enough business with their tarot and palm readings to live comfortably behind the walls of New Vegas and avoid all that legwork. 

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“You haven’t even heard my offer yet,” the man argued, and he finally set down the crystal ball so that he could take something from an inner pocket on his jacket. “I went out of my way to get this for you, too.”

Cesario watched as he unwrapped several layers of crinkled crepe paper. Some cheap trinket, no doubt. Did he think wrapping it up like that would be enough to fool them? 

When the man folded back the last layer of paper, however, Cesario couldn’t help the soft gasp that escaped their throat.

They were gloves, and they were exquisite. Crafted of rich cobalt leather with pique stitching and embroidered with an intricate celestial design in silver thread. Cesario noticed, too, that they appeared to be exactly the right size to fit them.

“Do you like them?”

Cesario looked back at the man’s face and saw a glint of pride in his golden eyes. He already knew the answer to that question. He’d known before he’d even pulled out the gloves, no doubt.

“Found them in a department store in Utah,” he went on. “They’re brand new.”

The skin on Cesario’s arms prickled. There was too much weight to the man’s tone for that final statement to have been anything but a hint. He obviously knew why Cesario had a preference for items that were new, and why gloves, in particular, would be a tempting offer in exchange for their services.

Due to the nature of their work and their various gifts, they usually knew far more about their clients than any of them would ever know about Cesario, but clearly, this man had done some research.

The tension Cesario had felt when the man was waving the crystal ball around was nothing compared to the acute unease they felt then. As uncomfortable as it often was to learn what they did about the people who came into the shop, Cesario found it was even worse to be on the other end, to have someone digging up their past. 

Maybe it wasn’t so strange that this man would have learned about their former P.I. work, but they were far more careful to keep their talent for psychometry a secret. They had done a few such readings long ago, out of desperation during much leaner times, and they’d done everything they could since then to keep word getting around about it. They still would wake up drenched in sweat from nightmares wherein they relived the things they had seen from those readings. 

As Cesario met those gold eyes again, fear prickled in their limbs. Who was this man? How had he come to find out what he had about them? They couldn’t begin to guess, but they knew one thing for certain. This person would be nothing but trouble, and the less they had to do with him, the better off they would be.

Still, they hesitated, and their gaze flicked back to the gloves. They needed those. It wasn’t just that they were gorgeous, though they were. Gloves like that, new gloves, would be a reprieve Cesario couldn’t afford to pass up. They could hardly leave their rooms here at the Ultra-Luxe without accidentally touching something that would inevitably dredge up some horror or another. Everything here, even on the Strip, was tainted by the Great War, infused with tragedy. 

Gloves meant freedom from the constant assault of information that occurred whenever Cesario had to touch something that didn’t belong to them. They’d had a pair, once, when they’d first crossed into the New California Republic from Mexico, but years of use had worn holes in them until they could no longer serve their intended purpose. These cobalt gloves would last the rest of Cesario’s life, and since they were new, they wouldn’t come with memories already attached.

They were wrenched from their reverie when the man began to wrap up the gloves again, and Cesario flung out a hand to stop him.

“I’ll do it,” they said quickly. “I’ll help you find Benny.”

The man grinned. “Then it’s a deal.”