#yeah hi i was coming up with parallels while watching star wars w my roommate

[queenlucythevaliant]

My hand is ungentle

When she woke to the sharp scent of Kingsfoil, Eowyn realized that she would have to watch the darkness fall. It was Aragorn’s fault, she decided. He had called her back, and insodoing he had forced her to face this.

If she had died on the Fields of Pelennor beside her uncle the king, Eowyn would have fallen in the dry grass. It would have grown over her bones and left her numb to the fact that the darkness could not be stopped. Not by a sword, not by a heroine. Not by anything.

Yet Eowyn did not die; her bones were here and the flesh around them was living. Eowyn woke in the Houses of Healing to the sight of Aragorn and Eomer standing over her with their shoulders touching. There were sounds filtering in from the hallway: heavy footsteps and the tinkle of instruments. Something like a jar being opened. Voices, high and low.

Why was Eowyn alive? Perhaps it was because she was a shieldmaiden, sword-sharp and stubborn as an ornery mule. Perhaps her will to fight had overridden her will to be a martyr. That would be very like her.

Or maybe it was just her doom to survive. The thought didn’t frighten her. She had faced down her doom before. She had done it in her uncle's halls. She had done it in armor.

Leia Organa did not die either.

Leia watched as her planet was gouged out of the sky. She grabbed her rescuer's blaster, fired blind at Stormtroopers, and escaped to Yavin with the plans to the Death Star. She was the last one out of the base on Hoth.

Now, limping to Bespin at sublight, she almost resented it. It wasn’t that she wanted to die, not really. It was only that most mornings, she woke up feeling like she might be halfway there.

They were running low on caf and were diluting it to make it stretch. After she got up, Leia would sip a cup of murky caf-water and imagine that her skin was flaking away, then her muscle, then her bones, all of it flaking away like old paint and floating through space to intermingle with what remained of her family.

If she'd ended with Alderaan, Leia wouldn't have to learn to live this way. If she'd been buried in the crumbling base on Hoth, she wouldn't be facing down the might of the Empire alone with only Han, Chewie, and her own grief for company.

Grief was the one burden that could never be put down. Sometimes, the bravest thing in the world was just to sit still in the cold of a new morning.

"I do not desire healing," Eowyn spat. "I wish to ride to war."

She couldn't, no matter how she wanted to. They had left without her. Aragorn had instructed them to leave without her, and that knowledge made her even more furious at him than the fact that he had called her back to life.

Give me my sword back, she wanted to scream and scream. When she’d fallen from her horse in the battle and risen with her sword in hand, she’d been bouncing on the balls of her feet for the joy of it.

"I am a shieldmaiden," she told Faramir, "and my hand is ungentle."

Eowyn waited for his look of reproach, but it never came. Faramir only studied her, an expression on his face that felt utterly foreign. His eyes were wide and crinkled at the edges, his mouth a little crooked and the lines of his brow smooth. He looked at her like singing, soft and melodious.

"You are beautiful," he had said. He didn’t take it back.

Funny, to be called beautiful now. She wasn't beautiful; she was at war. Eowyn had bound her yellow hair beneath her helm and only released it once, when her enemy was before her. Leia plaited hers like her dead mother had taught her, in tight Alderaanian styles that were practical for action.

When Han cornered Leia in the bowels of the Falcon, she was still thinking about Star Destroyers. She was never not thinking about Star Destroyers these days, or TIE fighters, or AT-ATs. Leia was sharp and mouthy and she never took off her blaster, even to sleep. She itched for it when she showered and left it sitting on the 'fresher counter.

"Stop that, my hands are dirty," she said when Han touched her.

"My hands are dirty too. What are you afraid of?"

Leia looked up, right into his eyes, and there weren't any Star Destroyers there, just kindness and a challenge and something almost like love.

In Bespin, desperate and out of time, Leia finally allowed herself to name it. "I love you," she said, and there was a soldier’s certainty in her voice.

"I know," answered Han. He tossed his head back and vanished into the cold.

On the city walls of Minas Tirith, with darkness billowing in the East, winter passed away and the sun shone down on Eowyn. "No longer do I desire to be a queen."

Faramir tossed his head back and laughed. "That is well," he said, "for I am not a king."

It was Eucatastrophe: the darkness was passing. Everything sad was coming untrue. A lot of things seemed possible now. She could be sharp as a scalpel, stubborn as a garden weed.

Faramir kissed her then, in sight of the whole city. He kissed her, and she knew that she loved him, and then both of her hands were on his face. Their hair intermingled like dancing and Eowyn tried to imagine a world in which she was a healer and a gardener. With this man, in this world, maybe it was possible.

Eucatastrophe: Leia's family was not all dead. She had a brother. Luke was her brother, and somehow in all the great wide universe they had met and become friends before they even knew.

In all the systems and all the planets in the galaxy, Luke and Han had met in a lousy Tatooine cantina, and then they'd come to find Leia. They'd become friends: Leia and her brother and the man she was going to marry.

It wouldn't have made sense to her if she'd been told it two years ago, but Han was gentle. She was learning to be gentle too.

Han had his arms around Leia now, and her head was on his chest. With the wreckage of the Empire falling down around their heads, she imagined a future where she could put her blaster down and train herself to use weapons of peace.

A sword, a lightsaber. When she was finally ready to heal, Eowyn put it down. Leia picked it up. The Jedi academy on Yavin IV was very green and in Ithilien, flowers bloomed.