#rea's romance is dialogue wheel hell

[hydrospanners]

8 AND 18 FOR NIREA

thank u 4 askin and also makin this meme u r gr8. i got a little carried away but not as much as with the recruitment mission. putting stuff under a cut because long. i don’t think i even really answered #18 but honestly it would take twenty years to answer that completely so..... [shrug emoji]

8. Are they romanceable? Why/why not?Rea’s romance is available to characters of every class/gender/race/social standing/background/political affiliation/etc, but it’s a tricky one. She’s the ideal partner if your character is looking for a one night stand or a friend with benefits or even just a casual, uncommitted thing. If you’re looking for feelings and actual romance and partnership, you’d better be ready to work for it.

A physical relationship with Rea is very easy. You can board the bang train to bone town almost immediately after recruiting her provided you aren’t too high on the Darkness scale, keeping slaves, or doing unquestionably evil shit right in front of her. Slavery, cruelty, and unmitigated bloodlust are big turn offs for her. Basically the only turn offs. Outside of that, Rea loves the pleasures of the flesh and will quickly make it clear that she’d love to pleasure yours.

If you refuse, she will never bring it up again. She’ll still flirt--that’s just who she is--but she will never proposition you again. If you change your mind down the road, she’ll absolutely be receptive to anything you initiate but you will have to be the one to initiate and keep initiating for a long time. If you accept, you can have a friends with benefits arrangement for as long as you want. She won’t care if you have another romance happening so long as you never try to be deceptive about what’s going on, with her or your other partner. If they’re cool with it, she may suggest a threesome. She’ll also have other partners of her own and she won’t try to hide that or be subtle about looking for them. She will probably try to bone some of your other companions. She may succeed.

The tricky part, when romancing Rea, is taking the sex and the friendship and making it romance. She isn’t looking for that and is very clear about it and frankly it terrifies her. You’ll have to be close friends (have high approval) before she catches feelings and if you push her for a relationship or a commitment too fast after she realizes she’s caught them she will run. She will straight up just leave your crew. If you push her too hard to trust you or stop seeing other people or, honestly, if you do anything that makes her feel at all like you want to restrict her, she’s leaving. She says she’s not much of a Jedi but she resorts to extreme measures real quick when she thinks she’s at risk of having a feeling.

It’s a careful dance on a very thin line of pushing too much and not pushing enough. She won’t pursue a deeper relationship without urging and interest from you, but if you demand too much she’ll pull back so fast your head will spin.

But if you manage it, if you’re the poor bastard whose heart is set on wooing this disaster of a woman, prepare yourself to be lavished in attention and compliments and anonymous gifts. Most importantly, prepare yourself for a great deal of unwavering faith. She will believe in you hard enough to put the very best mom to shame and you will know she how much she believes in you by the trust she gives to you. There is no part of her that Rea guards more jealously than her trust, but if you walk that line between too much and not enough, if you convince her that it is safe to let herself love you, one day you will wake up to the most suspicious woman in the galaxy unflinchingly giving you every part of herself, no matter how fragile or how sharp. When you say you can handle something, she’ll trust in your judgment and your honesty and she’ll let you. She won’t try to protect you or go around you and she won’t make plans for what happens if you can’t.

It won’t change who she is or how she lives. Rea’s not a woman meant to stay still or live her life on someone else’s schedule. She will be away from you sometimes, following her own path. She’ll want you to follow yours. But you can be sure that a Rea in love is coming back to you just as soon as she can, and she’s doing everything she can to make you feel how loved you are even from 1000 lightyears away. A successful romance with Rea, rocky as it is getting there, is a stable and equal partnership full of respect and trust and laughter and support and sex and fun.

18. If they are recruitable in vanilla story, where are they during KOTFE/TET? What are/were they doing?Where is Rea ever? You certainly don’t know. She never really made a habit, no matter how high your approval or how successful your romance, of telling you what she was planning to do or if she was planning to leave. She never seemed to know herself. Some days you would just wake up to a shift in the air, to a ship that’s too quiet and a ‘back later’ scrawled in lipstick across your droid’s forehead. Sometimes you’d find the smeared outline of her lips on its cheek. Maybe you wondered if that kiss was for you or the droid. Maybe you worried if this would be the time she didn’t come back. Maybe you hoped for it. Maybe, if you were cruel enough to the powerless and the innocent, if you revelled enough in violence and destruction and darkness--Maybe one day you were right. Maybe she stopped coming back.

You wonder about her, when you rise from your carbonite grave. Maybe you ask around. Maybe you miss her, or maybe you worry. Maybe you just need someone you know is on your side.

She isn’t hard to track. Rea has a habit of making an impression wherever she goes and from what you can tell she’s been everywhere in the last five years. That doesn’t make it any easier to find her now. But you shouldn’t have worried about that. You should have remembered: she always turns up eventually. She’s like a bad penny that way.

It happens just like it always does. You wake in your quarters on Odessen, knowing that something has changed. Something has shifted in the air. Then your comm starts screaming and you hear the echo of shouts and the clang of metal from down the hall. Maybe it’s the Force; maybe it’s intuition. Maybe it’s the wisdom gained from experience. But you know it’s her. You’ve barely had time to finish reading all those messages and she’s already blowing open the gates of your secret base.

Or maybe you have finished them. Maybe you’ve just finished reading them for the fifth, sixth time; maybe you’ve missed her like you’d miss your own limbs (it’s only been a few weeks in your mind but still) and you haven’t been able to put down those stupid nudes since you opened them; she’s such a starsdamned idiot but she’s yours and she’s here--

The point is, whether you wanted it or not, she finds you before you can ever think of finding her. She’s been looking. Waiting in the way that she waits, which doesn’t look like waiting at all. If you ask where she’s been the answer is everywhere. If you ask what she’s been doing, the answer is fighting. It’s the same as it always was. Time hasn’t really changed her life, even if you can look into the cool blue of her eyes and see that it has changed her.

You stop asking questions eventually. If she wants to tell you, she’ll do it on her own time. That’s just how Rea is. Maybe you don’t like it, but you’ve known her long enough to know you can’t change it. She doesn’t ask where you’ve been either. Doesn’t question or accuse. If you know her well, you can guess that she’s figured it out on her own. She always seems to know things you never told her.

Or maybe she doesn’t show up on Odessen, a storm of chaos and confusion and a few brief volleys of blaster fire. Maybe a bleeding heart like hers, no matter how tough she pretended it was, couldn’t keep pace with a life like yours. Maybe you didn’t want it to. Maybe she left before all this happened, before everything went to new levels of shit. Maybe all you have from her when you wake from your sleeping is a threat that leaves you staring a little too deep into shadows. Maybe you keep one eye over your shoulder and maybe you lie awake sometimes, listening for feet in the night. Maybe you can feel her eyes on your back when you have the time to think of anything but magic and possession and war.

You don’t see her, but you do see shadows. Hints. You don’t have the time to wonder if it’s her or your imagination or if she’s just fucking with you somehow. If she has people on Odessen playing on your paranoia. Rea always had a talent for making friends; if she is coming for you, you know she won’t be coming alone. But you haven’t seen her since she jumped ship all those years ago, and you don’t see her now. You know her well enough to know that if she has it her way, you never will. Not if she sees you first.