Beyond - Legends Elegy

[Story removed.]

 

That was great. I loved this extra 'missing scene', and this:

BAHAHAHA! Such a classical sibling moment.

 

Wonderful sibling moments in this. Love Leia's ability to both empathize and sympathize with Luke despite her feelings regarding their father. Her respect of Luke's grief is touching.

Well done.

 

Leia was fed up with Luke being an annoying little twit. He's already taking full advantage of the fact that they're related to be as obnoxious as possible, LOL. It's a sibling's duty!

Yes yes yes - that's the thing. Leia has her own conflicted feelings that deserve to be addressed, but I'm of the mind that she'd always try her best to be considerate of Luke at the same time; they may have different reactions and disagree on a subject, but she's aware that he's suffering just as much as she is, and Luke is certainly neither ignorant or insensitive to what their father did to her and Han. It's a tough thing for them, but I prefer the idea that it doesn't drive a huge wedge between them and they're both mature enough - the majority of the time - to handle each other carefully with it. While her temper is legendary, Leia is also a very selfless and compassionate person, and she's always been instinctively willing to comfort her brother even before they knew they were related. Luke returns the favor by being silly and trying to lighten the dour mood.

I disagree strongly with author Matt Stover's description of Luke (by way of Lando) that he'd be a person who rarely joked or smiled because of all the horrible things he'd experienced, and rather side with fanon that he'd be someone who'd always be cracking terrible puns and making adorable trying-not-to-laugh-at-you faces in the background because the proof is right there in ROTJ. He's hilarious. It makes sense that his gentle levity and wryness would only be brought out more by the trauma he's gone through, precisely because it helps him and everyone else around him focus on optimism. He and Leia have been through hell, but in the end seemingly naive and foolhardy "love and peace" did win out after all.

 

Very enjoyable read! Good work.

 

LET ME GUSH ALL OVER THIS SOME MORE.

I love the way you've characterised Luke and Leia in this - thier bond and friendship, but both testing the edges of it with the newfound knowledge that they're twins. The way you've described Leia's sense of Luke through the Force is just so wonderful.

Leia's musings on her heritage is just so agonisingly, beautifully realised, and then Luke with his injuries and Leia remembering her torture and burying the suit and Chewie to the rescue and IT WAS SHEEV'S PERSONAL SHUTTLE OF COURSE IT WAS - nice touch with him not having pain meds on board to feed the dark side *shiver*

Girl, if this is unpolished, what can we expect from fully-baked fic?

 

Echoing this comment/observation with a total got that right!

Girl, if this is unpolished, what can we expect from fully-baked fic?

Fully baked with cream cheese icing!

I unabashedly adore!!!!!!! anything touching upon bonds of family, couplehood, etc. And this is gorgeous! The introspection and characterization is excellent and the humor and affection - awww! Thanks for sharing!

 

Beautiful. Just absolutely how that moment should have been.

I really like the idea of them burying Vader together (though they didn't actually do it here, I now imagine them doing so later) - Leia wouldn't have wanted to join in giving him a warriors pyre, but helping Luke bury the past would have been symbolically appropriate.

I also agree with you on disliking Stover's interpretation of Luke - in fact I think you may have put the finger on why Shadows of Mindor somehow just didn't 'do it for me', despite in many ways being a good book.

 

Thanks, glad you enjoyed!

I dunno, chocolate chips?

It might seem like jumping the gun a bit for Leia to be that Force-sensitive already within 2 days and without a lick of training, BUT. She and Luke are literally grandchildren of the Force (if you go by that interpretation), children of the Chosen One - they're just as powerful as their father. They're also connected by blood. She was already able to hear him calling out to her at Cloud City. I think I can fudge their ability to understand one another just based on sheer raw power and instinct. I'm going on the idea that now that she's fully aware of their relation, that instinctive pull between them has increased greatly, enabling her to sense him while still being inexperienced with the Force. I also view their communication as being less "hearing" articulate words and sentences in each others' heads and more receiving general understanding directly into their minds - just knowing what the other person means.

Leia is unaware of the sequence of events surrounding her and Luke's birth; she doesn't know exactly how Bail and Breha came to adopt her. Since Bail was a founding member of the Alliance she has a suspicion that he knew all along she was the daughter of Darth Vader, but she's unsure, and it's both unnerving and awe-inspiring for her. This makes her parents even more amazing to her, that they'd put aside the terror of being discovered for their "theft" someday, or of potentially raising another Force-user who could one day betray them just as her biological father did.

I made it Sheev's shuttle this time because I think some old EU sources back in the day said it was, so I rolled with it. Naturally Teh Sheevmeister is a sadist. And we all know we can count on Julie Andrews With A Bowcaster!

I'm happy to see I met your squee quota!

There's a Tumblr meme that someone used for Leia that goes along the lines of, "Do whatever you want to me, but DON'T TOUCH HIM." What Vader and Tarkin did to Leia was utterly awful and will affect her for the rest of her life, but she's the kind of person who's more willing to absorb massive amounts of punishment and lock it all away inside than to see it inflicted on others. Hearing and watching Han be tortured, frozen, and seized like a trophy was almost more than she could bear. Now the fact that the Emperor did something terrible to her brother (on top of him being deeply affected by Bespin) just eats her up inside, as she has no idea yet what happened and she knows he may never want to talk about it - which is exactly what she did.

Luke is candid with her about what he went through in the DS throne room precisely because he knows what a trashy human disaster their father was, in spite of turning to good in the end. I'm convinced that a significant part of the reason he just unraveled in pure rage after Vader discovered Leia's identity wasn't just because she was "the last hope," but because he saw the aftermath of her suffering at Vader's hands, and in that moment he thought, how dare he put her through any more hell than she's already been through. Luke was willing to look past getting personally hunted down, beaten and maimed, but touch another hair on Leia's head, and it's chaos. And all that pain and anguish she carried bottled up inside would be perfect dry tinder for the Dark Side.

Ahh, yes, don't you love that irony of Leia caring for Luke using some of Sheev's own instruments and in his own ship? The old fart would've had kittens, LOL.

The "oceans of sand" line is something I can't take credit for, though. It comes from an Aurebesh caption that accompanies this artwork in the book Star Wars Visions:



"She continues to speak of the dreams that haunt her. Alone and scared, surrounded by oceans of sand. I fear these dreams may one day lead to questions–questions that we may one day have to answer… She remains safe in our charge."

In that case, it wouldn't be farfetched for young Luke to have seen the snow-capped mountains of Aldera in his own dreams, and wondered what it meant.

I want kick and slap myself now that I've realized where I think some of the feels for this fic came from - I've recalled with regret that there's another beautiful fic with nearly the same title based on this point in time, Fragments of Elegy by Fialleril. (No wonder the word "elegy" popped into my head so easily. ) In there Leia actually joins Luke in gathering Anakin's ashes. I honestly didn't mean to plagiarize; it's been a long while since I read that, but I guess it imprinted on my mind enough that I drew on it without realizing right away where it originated. Oy.

I love Shadows of Mindor overall - especially the painful running joke of "This isn't my best trick" and Leia being symbolically represented as a brilliant supergiant star - but it was just a couple of minor quibbles I had with Stover. I still think he did a fabulous job of characterization considering the low quality of the majority of the EU.

 

This is perfect. I love the touch of it being Sheev's private shuttle, and of course he would have no pain meds. The interaction between the siblings is amazing. I love your characterizations of both Luke and Leia, and agree that Stover got it wrong.

Oh, and the only thing half-baked here is Vader's helmet and suit.

 

BA-DUM-CHING! I should have seen that coming.

I did base the description of Vader's melted helmet on the TFA trailer.

 

Sweet and touching. I liked how Luke jacked the emperor's own shuttle. Nice move.

The thing I liked best is the way the twins have always been vaguely aware of each other, even so far as to literally see though the other's eyes. A really sweet look at the reuniting of people who have always, on some level, been together.

 

Thus is the magic of a movie series that started off ambiguously enough with just the right coincidental details to retcon in the siblinghood. Going back after the fact, Luke and Leia's actions beginning in ANH line up perfectly with Force-strong secret twins - Leia is a person who doesn't wear her heart on her sleeve or let her guard down easily, yet she runs around the Death Star holding hands with Luke like they're a couple of kids, and freely gives him chaste little kisses and comforting gestures. They're still virtually strangers and yet she acts so familiar and trusting around him. The retrospective clues were all there. It's quite easy and possible to imagine that if they were subconsciously drawn to one another, they had to have been in one another's thoughts during their childhoods.

 

I mentioned this briefly to you before, but I'll say it again: lovely work. Leia's introspection and fear is just right, and the bit about Luke stealing Palpy's shuttle was an unexpected delight.

 

Thankiiiiiiiieeeeees. And thanks for indulging me; I know I'm getting sidetracked from ICWY.

TBH, I'd figure that based on how Luke couldn't afford to waste any more time once his father died, he probably wouldn't even realize whose shuttle it was right away, LOL. It'd be rather hilarious that after he's escaped the DS he'd kind of look around and go, "...Huh. Welp. Heh."

 

what a great one shot.

well done

 

Thank you!

I...I'm actually not quite as done with this time period yet as I thought, heh...except the next part won't feature Leia. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but we'll see how it goes...

 

THIS is half-baked? You have clearly never seen my attempts at making savoury pizza strudel type of a thing.

I love the idea of this "missing scene" and all the little unresolved things you resolved in this fic. While the ending of ROTJ, especially the original version, is one of my favourite bits in the saga, the idea of the moment being so happy was always driven by the sheer horrors the next morning would have presented. What were the scattered Imps to do? What about Leia's realisation that Vader is her father, too? What if she wants to see the pyre? What about all the casualities, corpses on the battle field and whatnot?

The sylvan serenity of everything around Leia as opposed to her concern works very well and the idea of the "big three" sort of blending into the tribal ways after the celebration and sleeping on the same hammock (they're hammocks in the cartoon, so that is what I visualised) is something I never thought about before. A niiice way of avoiding anything that would be expected, including that horrifying cartoon where Luke wakes up next to a particularly busty Ewok female.

And then it all falls into place - the shuttle Luke left the Death Star on was the one owned by the sheevy sheev himself, somebody was to interrogate about this at some point and the funeral would've been better if kept secret. Given how many tyrrants were buried in secret locations and how the man who threw the atomic bombs wanted an unmarked grave, this absolutely makes sense. Why would anybody subject the innocent primitives to possible revenge just because the helmet happens to be there? While I sense that this is precisely what will happen in TFA, I still kinda hope that it won't; so err...Luke would better go back there and take it someplace else.

The idea of sheevy sheev's medkit not containing pain meds is bizarre and hilarious at the same time. Yikes.

Another thing that is interesting is that, regardless of how similar Luke and Leia are, his idealism and her slight cynicism still show - she thinks the adoptive parents knew, he thinks they didn't. Hmmm...

Her vision wavered as her throat closed. “I used to dream of oceans of sand as a girl,” she breathed.

Tears welled and trickled down past Luke’s temples. “Good. I once asked Aunt Beru what place could have mountains that were white. I’d never seen snow before.”

This is...just...beautiful. Not only as a sign of their twin bond, but also a sign that we all dream of something else.

And the spoken lines from the second TFA trailer and the half-melted helmet making an early appearance = super cool!

 

Wouldn't that be a calzone?

Yep, the day after...the messy, mundane, and sometimes terrible stuff that isn't frequently shown. Naturally we're going to get the "fairytale ending" in the movie because stark reality isn't what we're going for (and the happy ending is what leaves us feeling satisfied in the theater, of course, and there's nothing wrong with that). But there's plenty of profound baggage left to deal with once the party and well-deserved break is over.

LOL, awkward. It's a popular headcanon over in the corner of Tumblr I've wedged myself into that the OT3 became almost inseparably close for a while after the events of the films, to the point of wanting to live together, because they needed that reassurance after all the insanity they'd been through. Sleeping together and invading one another's personal space - sometimes in hilarious and inadvertent ways - would become something totally blasé to them. Until Luke learned his lesson about how randy his sister and best friend are.

Offpage, this is what would have happened next: neither Luke nor Leia were planning on him suddenly needing urgent medical attention; she was unaware of the extent of his injuries as he concealed them, and he was just sort of being a dude thinking that it wasn't that bad since he'd survived it, so it could wait. He just wanted some time to himself to process what had happened instead of being whisked off to debriefing with High Command and then being sent off to sick bay. Leia understands his desire for privacy and agrees that having people snooping around wondering why someone torched Darth Vader on the moon is something neither of them needs right now. So as soon as she gets the "all clear" that Luke will be okay and stabilized, she wants to go take care of business back there. It's an ugly thing for her to deal with, though, and Chewie can see that, so he urges Han to go keep tabs on Luke - because, frankly, although he can see how much Han loves her, he can tell this is something she really doesn't want to talk about and just wants to get over with, and Han isn't exactly known for being eloquent - and Chewie himself stays behind with Leia to help her bury Vader's remains. He's much stronger and can dig a deep hole much faster, and she appreciates that so much. For his part, Chewie's a little puzzled and ambivalent about it, but it's what Luke wanted, so he doesn't argue. Luke is a Jedi now, and he can understand the mentality of honor and respect even for an enemy, since it's the compassionate thing to do, and that's the essence of a Jedi. Chewie's quite proud of The Cub becoming a Knight. He remembers the night Yoda took off from Kashyyyk and is glad to know that the old Master's efforts and hopes were not in vain.

Leia gets to take out a bit of her anger by physically burying Vader's armor, but it's slightly cleansing too; at least he's gone and she doesn't have to face him anymore, especially with her now more complicated emotions. Little does she know he can come back as a Force ghost...

Of course Luke is deeply moved when he finds out later what they did for him.

 

Yikes, so I loved this and didn’t leave an actual comment, apparently. So here goes.

Totally amazing Skywalker family feels, as usual. Reading these missing moments is like rediscovering the Saga. You have this knack for spotting the underlying things and points of immense importance that I’ve never noticed before.

Leia’s reactions to the aftermath of ROTJ are rendered so well here; I really liked how she has this moment of struggling to make the recent past concrete, and that lingering worry about letting Luke or Han out of her sight. After all that, who wouldn’t?

Adorable! And I’d just bet that a lot of people had the hangover of the century that morning. Not every day that a Sheev kicks the bucket.

It’s neat to get an insight into Leia’s growing awareness of the twin Force connection she has to Luke, and how she visualizes that. Cool!

Wow. Really liked that description -- and it ties into the look of that unsettling scene in the new trailers too. Anakin may be redeemed and vanished, but the past is a fearsome thing. Leia’s mixed reaction to finding Luke with this burial is just pitch perfect. Of course she would think of all those who never got their proper rites.

This was another part that was really a standout.

And I was so glad that Luke shared those harrowing moments from the Death Star with Leia; in a way, she may be the only person who can come anywhere near to understanding. And even though he is a sweet and forgiving cinnamon roll, that duel had to have left a mark. In its way it was just as brutal as the one on Bespin -- just differently so.

Leia may explain this in various ways, but it certainly is a chills moment. And Luke pretty much falling over is just the icing on the angstcake. None of these people know how to quit.

Like everyone else, I love that you picked out the fact that Luke swiped the Emperor’s shuttle. I have no memory of whether that’s canon, but if it’s not then it should be.

And aww, that ending!

 

Had Father and Mother known? Had they known who - what - they were raising? Had they ever feared her? Leia shivered, resisting the urge to wrap her arms around herself and curl up, recoiling at the horror of it all.

It's only natural that she'd wonder this, and I love the physical reaction here.

And... oh! Medical details! Love those!

 

I didn't think it was possible to win a FanFic Award in absentia, but apparently I was wrong and there's a first time for everything?

oH MY BEANS, PEEPS. Y'ALL. I haven't been here in an eon and a half, and this still happens? There aren't enough cookies or e-baklava in the world to hand out to thank y'all.

There's really no non-awkward way to say, well...stuff happened since last summer and my writing's never really been the same since then and I've only had time for one major social media site at a time. I feel torn because I want time to do ALL THE THINGS. I want to read and absorb meta and flail and squee with peeps AND churn out fic on a regular basis and have perfect skin lol but...it's kind of an utter fail for me and other than a few spurts here and there my writing has really stagnated. It's been easier for me to crawl under the bed and avoid interaction instead of, y'know, doing it the polite and sensible way and just being truthful that I'm terrible at time and task management. It's plain rude that I vanished from here with no real explanation just because I feel like I can't maintain a decent posting schedule.

But enough about the downer stuff - I'm genuinely amazed that this little fic wound up as loved as it did, and, uh, thanks? A lot? A bazillion? I don't deserve y'all.

 

Aww. This is one of my fave fics from last year, so it doesn't matter if you've posted recently, you know? The story is stil awesome and deserved a reward.

Also I think many of us know that feeling when the writing isn't coming for whatever reason. You don't owe us anything and we understand, and just love it when you DO post, 'cos you're stories are ace

 

*muffled weepy noises*