Lucy commentary
I'm too distracted for anything more coherent, so here's my looong commentary on the next chapter of The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker (previous chapters are here, here, and here).
The Adventures of Lucy Skywalker
Chapter Three
Ben - Obi-Wan - gave her a kind smile.
In regards to what to call to him, I thought of using Ben the way Luke does, and in the script, continues to-he doesn't start calling him Obi-Wan until ROTJ, actually. But I think most of the fandom sees him as “Obi-Wan,” so I thought it would just be more straightforward to have her correct herself just this once and go with it.
"I haven't gone by the name Obi-Wan since - " he paused, apparently struggling to remember - "oh, since before you were born."
This was another sort of minor fanwank in that, of course, it turned out in the prequels that he was using Obi-Wan well after she was born; especially if Qui-Gon was visiting him, he would have heard that name quite a lot. So I have that pause - like, I intended it to be: this is his first lie of many.
So Owen had lied to her. Maybe about other things; maybe Beru had too. That stung a little more, but somehow, Lucy wasn't surprised. She'd always felt that they were keeping things from her-
That is mostly from-when Obi-Wan tells Luke, in ANH, tells him … I don't want to say the truth, the not-quite-as-much-of-a-lie-as-what-Owen-told-him, Luke's expression is kind of hilariously unsurprised. He's just like 'oh. Tell me more.' And so I sort of ran with it-she kind of half expected they were lying to her anyway.
not the ordinary things that adults kept from children, important things. Owen didn't like her asking about her father. Beru's silences were so . . . loud. Obviously, there was something suspicious going on, something they weren't telling her. Now it turned out that she should have questioned the things they had told her, too. Lucy scowled. She lied to her uncle all the time, but that was different.
She has a little bit of a double standard for her conduct vs how she expects people to behave to her. But I think in this case she kind of has a point, that a teenager lying to cover up an escapade with a skyhopper is quite a bit different than an adult lying [cough] to their foster-child about the child's entire background and heritage.
Somehow. She didn't care that they'd just fought. She was going to demand an explanation as soon as she got the droids home.
The thought reminded her of Artoo, his strange fidelity and obstinacy, and the hologram he carried.
"Then the droid does belong to you!" she cried.
"I don't seem to recall owning a droid." Obi-Wan shot an incomprehensible look at him.
Most of Obi-Wan's looks, and tones, are completely enigmatic. And of course, I suppose one could technically say he's correct-if I remember correctly that-yeah, Jedi, can't have possessions, strictly speaking, so technically he didn't have a droid. And of course this particular one was never his.
Artoo gave a low beep.
"Very interesting," Obi-Wan said, more enigmatic than ever.
Which is really enigmatic.
Apparently the raiders had hit her harder than she thought, because nothing seemed to make any sense at all. Lucy didn't even try to understand. However, when Obi-Wan suggested that her attackers would soon return, in greater numbers, Lucy gladly agreed to take shelter in his home. Her aunt and uncle would be worried, of course, but they'd understand when she explained about the Sand People.
Yeah... and this was one of the times where there was the whole canon passage and I started to do it, but NOTHING CHANGED at all, and so I finally just summarized.
The three of them went to recover Threepio, Artoo beeping hysterically all the while, and found him half-buried in the sand. He'd obviously suffered in his fall, and one of his arms had been torn completely off. Lucy ran forward and turned him on.
"Can you stand? We've got to get out of here before the Sand People return."
"I don't think I can make it." In a martyred tone, he added, "You go on, Mistress Lucy. There's no sense in you risking yourself on my account. I'm done for."
Artoo's screeching beep required no translation.
"No, you're not!" said Lucy indignantly. "What kind of talk is that?"
Obi-Wan had been peering around the mesa, apparently listening to something that none of the rest of them could hear. Without a moment's hesitation, however, he helped her lift the droid into the air.
"Quickly," he said. "They're on the move."
What I kind of loved here is that Threepio is-he's what TV Tropes calls the Load, he's just there and he doesn't do anything really useful for them, certainly not for Obi-Wan, so there's no practical reason for him to rescue Threepio, he's just...kind.
They rushed to the landspeeder, which thankfully hadn't been too damaged by the Sand People, and raced away. Obi-Wan either couldn't fly or didn't care to, but his instructions were easy enough to follow. Lucy chattered idly and he glanced at her face, alight with pleasure. He stared ahead for the rest of their brief journey.
That was a bit of a POV break. I actually-I'd forgotten, but there actually-there is a bit of Obi-Wan's POV throughout the next part. And yeah, I think for the audience, it's pretty obvious when he has these moments, he looks at her and she's just...happy and flying and everything's fabulous, what he's reminded of there.
Obi-Wan's house was more like a hut, small and bare. Nevertheless, it seemed to radiate an air of comfort and security. He helped her carry Threepio to one corner, then looked at him in some dismay.
"I'm afraid I can't be of much help," he said.
I honestly don't remember how good or not Obi-Wan was with mechanical things. For this story I assumed that he's kind of inept, and he's-his life in the desert is perhaps harder than it would be otherwise. I imagine he leaned on Anakin a bit for that. Who knows, maybe that's why he aged so fast.
"That's all right - I shouldn't need any," Lucy told him. "I have my tools and I'm good with machines."
"Yes," murmured Obi-Wan, eyes distant. "I thought you might be."
So yeah, it's-he doesn't know her that well, but he kind of works on the assumption that obviously she takes after Anakin, and of course she does.
Lucy worked in silence for a few minutes. Then she said: "Uncle Owen says you knew my father."
"That's true," Obi-Wan said. "We were friends for a very long time. I knew him even before he ever went to war."
This was-since so much of this conversation is going to be the same, I wanted at least something different, so I started a little bit before the canon one does, to show it-what leads to what we get there. And of course Obi-Wan is ... eliding quite a lot, right there.
She looked up, startled, then laughed. "Oh, my father didn't fight in the wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter."
Obi-Wan's neutral expression was replaced by something very like horror.
I kind of found it endearing that even after everything he's, like, so horrified at the idea that Anakin was anything but a Jedi Knight.
Belatedly, Lucy remembered that everything she knew was wrong.
"That's what your uncle told you," he said, his voice cooling.
Lucy suppressed a wince. It did look bad, but-Owen must have meant well. He always did, in his way. As annoying as it was to discover that he'd been lying to her for her entire life, she felt sure he'd have an explanation. Not one she liked or agreed with, but an explanation.
Yeah, that's kind of trying to deal with the Problem of Owen a little bit, and, you know, to show that their relationship, while a difficult one, and a partially adversarial one, there was genuine affection between them. She understood that he cared for her. She understands that...even if she doesn't always understand his logic, she understands that what he does is coming from concern.
Meanwhile, Obi-Wan seemed willing to talk to her about her father.
My father, she thought, excitement bubbling in her chest. The man who had fearlessly marched into the desert to find his mother, who had been a pilot, who had spent his short life longing for more, who had left so much of himself in her that, for as long as she could remember, she'd felt like a chunk of her soul was missing.
Of course, the irony there, I guess, is that while there is this-she's built herself around ... Anakin, and she's certainly right about-that he, he did have that longing for more that she shares with him, I think she actually-you know, there's a lot of talk in the fandom about how much Leia is like him. But I think in the sense of being driven by this ambitiousness and this, this, this longing, this sort of Ariel-esque “I want more!” that that's something where Luke in canon and here Lucy is quite more similar to him than Leia is. I don't think she has that quite as much as they do.
But of course this bit where she's always felt like there's something in her, integral to her, that is just not there, and there's this, she has, part of her longing, even beyond Anakin's, is, she feels like there's something that should be there, but it's not, she's missing part of herself. And of course, that's not Anakin at all, that's Leia. And I think she-she conflates the-she's got this sort of psychic bond with her sister, she has a sort of psychic bond with her father, and because in both cases there's this sense of emptiness and loss, that are fairly similar feelings, she just sort of combines it into this, this aching that she has.
She'd never known him, but still, she loved and idolized him. She liked to think he was still there, sometimes almost convinced herself that she could feel him looking out for her, somewhere in the distant reaches of the galaxy.
That's another one where it just amused me where she can be so close and so far away, from the truth. I've been thinking vaguely that it may be she is sorta kinda sensing his...being alive...ness, though of course he's neither looking for her nor looking out for her. Though I'm sure he would be doing both if he knew about her existence.
But she never quite managed it; her practical side knew it was impossible. Her father was gone. Instead, she clung to the few scraps of information that her uncle and aunt doled out.
"He didn't hold with your father's ideals," Obi-Wan continued. "Thought he should have stayed here, and not - gotten involved."
That...that's [sigh] odd to me. Of course it's a direct quote from the movie. I can't be sure-given that I don't live inside George Lucas's head, but in the original conception, I think that Anakin and Owen and Beru, that there was a much stronger connection in terms of family. I know some people didn't care for him being from Tatooine and thought it didn't make sense, but I honestly, because of this line, I don't think it would have made sense if he weren't. I'm not sure why Owen would think he should have stayed on Tatooine if he weren't already there.
But-but it's kind of bizarre, in light of the prequels, why on earth Owen would think that Anakin should stay on Tatooine. He's very nearly a Jedi Knight, and his only connection to the family is dead-horribly-and he, he's, it seems weird to even expect that Anakin would give up everything to live off of a stepfather and stepbrother he's barely met and then mostly just at his mother's funeral.
It doesn't... I can think of a way it sort of could happen, and-I mentioned before that I had to assume that Anakin and Beru hit it off-not in a romantic way, but a family way-hit it off behind the scenes to account for how affectionate she sounds when she talks about him, and I'm kind of assuming that the same thing must have happened with Owen, and that Owen offered him a place on the farm, or something, and honestly thought he should have stayed. Anakin was already involved, but I think there must have been something to account for this.
"You fought in the Clone Wars?" she said, surprised. Of course, it was twenty years ago now. He'd have been younger then. A lot younger, apparently.
That was just - of all of my - there are certainly discrepancies between the sort of canon that was provided by the original trilogy and what turned out to be the case in the prequels, and they annoy me. This is one where I just find it vaguely amusing: that Obi-Wan's like thirty-five in ROTS and eighteen years later he's, you know, “I'm too old for this...” When he fights he's just so slow. I'm assuming that something took its toll on him. This is just a reference, though, to a thing a lot of people have either very-seriously business...ly, or just sort of jokingly, pointed out, that he aged a lot more than eighteen years in the desert.
"Yes," Obi-Wan said, chuckling. "I was a Jedi Knight, the same as your father."
Her father, her own father, had been a knight? - a hero?
One of the things that I think is interesting is that it's clear that-Jedi Knight does not actually mean anything to Luke in ANH, and here it doesn't mean anything to Lucy. The thing that she latches on to is the knight part and not the Jedi part. She kind of links it up with her own hero complex. In a way, that's not really terribly different from what Anakin does in TPM, where it's about being able to rescue the undertrodden and make things right where they're wrong, and guard truth and justice and less about the minutia of being the armed forces of a galactic government. Of course she's older but in that case I don't think there would be too much of a difference between-she's a lot more sheltered than he was.
It was just like a story, she thought: knights, adventures, wars, and dead parents.
Yeah, that last one is sort of One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others. Dead parents are a common theme-of course in this case, it's not accurate. It, honestly, it reminds me of something I just saw the other day, where someone was complaining about how the heroes of all these traditional fantasies are always orphans. And the specific example that was given was Luke, which I thought was quite possibly the most hilariously wrong example of this, since it's only kinda of a little bit famous that … he's not an orphan? You know, “I am your father”? So I just think that was a really weird example.
So-yes, a lot of those stories, of course, do have dead parents, but not hers! She just doesn't know it yet.
She sobered. "I wish I'd known him," she said wistfully.
"He was the best starpilot in the galaxy," Obi-Wan said, "and a cunning warrior."
Lucy's eyes rounded. So she had gotten her love of flying from him, but he was beyond anything Owen and Beru had ever told her. Not just a pilot. The best pilot in the entire galaxy.
Yeah, that's a bit of a leap from-I think she would have, and Luke in canon too, that she gravitated towards flying and starships and machines, that she has that natural, more than that, affinity for them, and naturally gifted pilot and all that-she assumes that she got it from her father. She knew, Owen and Beru's story, was that he was a pilot. And so that was always part of her image of her father. But there is a very significant difference-oh, I'm naturally really good at flying, I probably got it from my dad, he was a pilot too, and my dad was the best starpilot in the ENTIRE GALAXY, and you know, maybe I could be too.
No wonder she'd always been drawn to ships; no wonder everything had come so easily to her.
"I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself," he added, as if he'd been reading her mind.
Lucy flushed and smiled a bit hesitantly. She was good, she knew that. But she was a long, long way from the best starpilot in the galaxy.
That's-one of the things with both Luke and Lucy that I just find interesting, I think I mentioned it in the first chapter, that they're, Luke is perfectly happy to present his creds, and to acknowledge his own merits as a person. I think, in a lot of fic, that he's treated as a lot more insecure than he really is. But at the same time, if you get anybody else pointing them out, it's suddenly all this sort of “aw, shucks,” almost blushing embarrassment. Which I just find a really interesting bit of characterization. I tried to carry that over with Lucy.
She is-and I think with Luke that it's not-it's not perfectly clear right away, but that when he says things like I'm not such a bad pilot, I could fly this thing, we take it as a sort of empty bragging, no, of course he couldn't, he's a sort of callow young kid, and it's clear by the end that he totally could have. He's never apparently left Tatooine, never been out of gravity, and yet he manages to fly that X-Wing like nobody's business-so yeah, he probably could have. He wasn't bragging, he was actually giving a perfectly accurate version of his abilities. And so I actually tend to trust his own estimation of himself.
I think he's, there are certainly areas in which he's either too modest or...he has a fatalism about him that also think tends to get overlooked because of the focus on the hope and...sunshine and bunnies, and that he's got this fatalism, I'm never going to get off, I'm never going to get out of here, I'm never going to lift the ship out of the swamp, whatever, but even-accepting that, however, I think that in general his own opinion of himself is actually fairly trustworthy and he's fairly self-aware.
So I wanted to have that with her, where she's got this, there is this sort of fatalism with almost a sort of bragging but it's accurate but that it's sort of basically where she's not loathe to say that she's good, but she knows she isn't, she's not Anakin Skywalker, she's not what Luke was by Empire or certainly by Jedi. She's good, she's just not as good as she might be.
If he'd lived, she wouldn't have had to fumble for competence and then skill, untaught and unable to understand what she was doing, or how she was managing it.
I think one of the things with them is, I think it goes well beyond merely being talented in the way that people are talented, that these sort of Force-driven prodigies that they are, it's-it'd be something, I imagine, sort of uncanny, where, when you do something and you can do it and you don't understand how or why, it's almost disconcerting.
And I think that's kind of what happened with her, she was probably drawn to machines and to, especially, flying machines, proabbly very early on, she had a very strong knack for them, and just had this, like, understanding of them without any sort of real world knowledge to prop it up, and so it was very disconcerting. And so she's just had to almost work around her own skill, to try and find a way to make the, on the one hand, she has this impression of how it's going to work before it even does it, and has to make that match up with the real world of ordinary physics, and so there was a lot of fumbling and there was a lot of, probably, near-death experiences, and she did have to do it on her own. I think she did a lot of it, in fact, lied through her teeth to her uncle and did a lot of it. I think in a way it was very odd-just an odd situation. Not in an ordinary, where you-if you're a math prodigy, you don't have to sneak off to do problems on your own, and have to hide it from your parents.
Her father wouldn't have just encouraged her to follow his footsteps, he'd have taught her personally. She might even have grown up on a ship.
Yeah, this was one where I was actually cackling at my own character as I wrote it. While … it's true, he would have gone well beyond merely encouraging her to follow his footsteps. Yes, he absolutely would have taught her personally. Yes, she would have grown up on a ship, and it would have been a STAR DESTROYER.
And he'd been cunning. Rash and restless and idealistic, but maybe a little sneaky, too. Ambitious. Like me, like me, like me.
The cunning thing I always find an interesting twist in both of their characters. I don't think you see quite as much of it with Leia, but with Anakin and Luke, you have this sort of manipulative edge to their characters. It's like they're these Gryffindors, all three of them are raging Gryffindor types, but Luke and Anakin have-in some bizarre crossover, I'm sure that the Hat would consider Slytherin for a moment.
They have this edge of ambition and cunning and ruthlessness to them. And I think Leia has some of that ruthlessness but she's much more direct, I think. In that, like, in the original trilogy, just about all the imperial plots-nearly all of them are Vader's, because all the people around him are, like ... stupid. And their ideas of how to get things done are just ridiculously over the top or just completely incompetent. And you're not really surprised that he's constantly enraged. And with Luke, it's almost funny, when he's manipulating Han-into something completely heroic, but he's like this little devil on his shoulder while he's convincing him to do it.
And yeah, the tactic that he uses, basically to appeal to Han's money-grubbing nature, is I think pretty interesting because it's something that's so completely foreign to his own. It's not a motivation that would ever make sense to him. He doesn't even seem to really get it. He's perpetually surprised that Han is as mercenary as he is. Yet even while not really understanding it, and not being able to process it, he can exploit it in this sort of manipulative way. I just find it interesting, he's the one that blows out the cameras, he's the one that thinks of the cameras, he comes up with that elaborate plot in Jedi, that actually works quite well. He is-there's this cunning to them.
And I think that having that rashness and restlessness and idealism, and being bold and daring and totally unable to ever give up, ever, but just this edge makes them a lot more interesting.
Lucy turned back to Threepio and sighed. Her father, at any rate, would never have been shut up like she was, stuck with repairing machinery and putting droids back together.
Yeah, yet another one of those … just poking fun at her, because at this point, it's impossible not to.
"And," Obi-Wan added, with an affectionate, wistful look, "he was a good friend."
Lucy's eyes burned. She kept her head turned away from him, working on Threepio with renewed vigour.
Later on, I think I go into it in more depth, but on one hand, she's a very sensitive person, but on the other, she has this horror of crying, especially in front of anybody, she completely refuses to cry. She sees it as this weakness, I think. She's at once this very feminine person who's also a sort of raging tomboy, that one of the ways the two sides of her nature come into conflict is when her idea of herself as somebody who is one of the boys, and she sees herself as strong and daring and just an unrealized hero, but she also has things that are in her inclination that conflict with this that she does have this loathing of, around clothes and around I suspect around sexuality, but very very much around anything that could be construed as feminine.
Nobody spoke for a moment, the silence thick and heavy. Then Obi-Wan cleared his throat.
"Which reminds me -"
He got up and shuffled across the room, poking around in a small wooden chest while Lucy started to fit Threepio's restraining bolt back on. The droid gave a small start, though - uncharacteristically enough - he said nothing.
Lucy bit her lip. She'd never much cared for restraining bolts, either in theory or reality, and this one felt somehow repulsive. Yes, droids were machines, made to serve - but then, they shouldn't need them. And if not, then - well, Artoo clearly had a mind of his own, and even Threepio was as much beyond the usual soulless machines as she was beyond . . . womp-rats, or something.
The bolt in her hand was heavy and dirty. Lucy put it back on the table and Threepio's yellow eyes gave a confused flash. She ignored him, wiping her greasy hands on her pants.
This interlude is actually something that I thought was itneresting-I mean, I didn't make it up! Not exactly. It's not really in the movie, as such, it's certainly not given any emphasis there, but it does show up in the script. Usually I was, as I was writing this, I was reading the script and watching the scene from the movie side-by-side. And I thought it was interesting that there was this in passing thing in the script that, I think, is an interesting light on the character.
Of course the script is not going to tell us that much of the interiority of the characters, but I thought it was pretty clearly showing Luke-I don't even know if compassion is the right word here. But that he-Threepio reacts negatively to having his restraining bolt put on him, and for all that Luke has grown up in what is essentially a culture where droids are just considered things, and wiping a droid's memory is treated like wiping a computer's, even though it's basically killing them, that all these things are normal in their society, but Luke is able to see past that, and he just has this moment where he-I don't even know if he grows-I do think it's a moment of growth, where he goes from not even thinking about these things, but just the instant he sees Threepio's fear and antipathy of this, that's enough for him to just not do it.
And with Lucy I wanted to explore how she felt about that, a little bit more. So I thought this was a good scene to include because of the bit of characterization and the not nearly-rehashing-the-movies aspect, to have her thinking about-show why she makes this choice, and have her actually be thinking about it as, I guess, a social issue.
"I have something here for you," said Obi-Wan, turning back towards her. He had retrieved whatever he'd been looking for - a slim metal cylinder of some kind, with three or four buttons running up one side. It looked rather like a severed handle to . . . something.
Lucy tried to look less unimpressed than she felt.
This is kind of-because we don't-Luke a lot of times has these reactions, just, not so much later on, but here, no matter what Obi-Wan says, he's just like mildly intrigued. It seems pretty clear that he's never heard of any of these things that Obi-Wan is talking about and they have no meaning for him. So I took that ignorance of everything, and because lightsabers have become these emblems of cool in our actual reality-it's just this totally awesome weapon-even if you talk to people who hate the prequels, if there's anything cool about the prequels, what would it be? Most of them are going to say “lightsabers! The duels!”
And so for me I thought it would be both funny and a little bit interesting, I guess, to have a conflict between how we react to the scene in the movie or even in this fic, with how it is for the actual character. It's “oh, it's a lightsaber!” and she's just thinking it's some broken thing, it's a handle of some thing that doesn't work. So she just thinks it's trash.
"Your father wanted you to have this, when you were old enough," Obi-Wan added, and Lucy's head instantly snapped up. "But your uncle wouldn't allow it."
I thought this was interesting because of the implication that Luke, at eighteen, was well past the age where he'd have received a lightsaber. I remember when I was watching, I thought it was a bit creepy-it doesn't sound like he's talking six months ago, it sounds like it was quite possibly several years back that he should have had that lightsaber at twelve or thirteen, and I was just thinking, No? A sword that can cut through anything, including limbs and...houses? Not a good thing to hand a twelve-year-old boy! And then, of course, it became actively creepy in the prequels, when it's like five-year-olds and holy crap.
So I don't think I actually went into it that much here, but I did have her like-how any time her father is even vaguely referenced, she has this instant-she comes to attention. I think that Luke is obviously the same way, that so much of what he is revolves around his father and what he thinks his father did. When he thought his father was a pilot, he wanted to be a pilot, he wanted to go to the Academy, and be a fighter pilot. When it turned out his father was a Jedi, he wanted to be a Jedi. Then his father turned out to be Darth Vader, and he came pretty damn near to that one, too.
So much of what he is, is shaped- his whole concept of himself is shaped by his concept of his father. It's pretty clear in the movies, it doesn't need to be laid out, but with Lucy, I did-I think because of the gender thing, it's right in her face, her father is just so much to her.
The broken-down thing instantly became a precious relic. She'd never had anything that belonged to her father, never even seen anything.
I can't imagine Owen and Beru would have anything of Anakin's, so.
Lucy just kept herself from snatching it right out of Obi-Wan's hand.
Obi-Wan looked at the handle thoughtfully, grief flickering over his face again. "He feared that you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade," he said, "like your father did."
This was one of those things that I think the easiest assumption is that Obi-Wan is not lying but-his description of events is phrased in a way that intended to give a different impression of things than what really happened, while still being, strictly speaking, accurate. I don't think one can consider the Clone Wars an idealistic crusade by really any stretch of the imagination, but Owen may have thought they were. Or Obi-Wan thought Owen thought they were. And Obi-Wan was certainly not “old Obi-Wan” when Anakin followed him, but...
He handed it to her, and Lucy reverently closed her fingers around it. She didn't care that it was probably garbage now. It had been her father's; that was enough.
I wanted her to have this attachment to this before she realizes that it's the coolest thing ever. It's simply the fact that it was a possession of Anakin's, this overwhelming thing.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Your father's lightsaber - the weapon of a Jedi Knight."
Lucy's breath caught. This wasn't a broken handle in her hands, it was a hilt. It was - it was -
My idea there is that while she has never heard of the Force or Jedi, the one thing that even in the furthest reachest of the galaxy, just about everybody has heard of a lightsaber. But in a sufficiently vague way that she wouldn't actually recognize one, it's just the sort of thing one does hear about, an exceptionally awesome weapon that isn't around any more.
"Not as clumsy or random as a blaster -"
She pressed one of the buttons and four feet of blue light shot out. She swung it gently, trying to keep her hands from shaking, and watched in fascination as the blade hummed back and forth.
Obi-Wan was saying something, but Lucy couldn't bring herself to pay attention.
That was another way I tried to avoid rehashing.
She was holding a lightsaber.
This is one of the things where it's so enormous that it's difficult to even imagine how enormous it would actually be. Even without the extra layer of-for somebody in the real world, it has the whole Star Wars, that was so cool, thing attached to it, but even in-universe it would be this overwhelming thing, this is something out of legend, and she has one, and it's in her hands, and it's hers by right-that's a big deal.
Her father's lightsaber. He had held it in his own hands. He'd thought of her, wanted this given to her, to his daughter. And now it had been, just like he wanted. It was hers.
Yes, this a combination of the sheer coolness of lightsabers, her many, many issues surrounding her father and the tie between them, and of course simply her own personality. As somebody who is personally ambitious and a little bit power-hungry-which is not a word I usually hear used to describe Luke, but I actually tend to think he is, in a very well-meaning way.
For a moment, Lucy's heart pounded so fiercely that she could hear it in her head. Her chest burned and her throat dried and she couldn't breathe or hear or speak or do anything except think that she had a lightsaber.
Then she thought: Anakin had had this, and he'd still died. What could kill a Jedi Knight?
For me, that was a sort of connection up with Anakin in TPM, of course, thinking nothing can kill a Jedi Knight. She's older and I think, intellectually if not emotionally more mature, so it's not that it's conceivable for her, but she's trying to-how did work? how could you kill somebody who had a lightsaber?--though she's not as set in her conviction that it just couldn't happen.
This is also a way to-in the movie, there's a pretty sharp change of subject. He gives Luke the lightsaber and Luke swings it around a little bit, carefully not lopping off any limbs, and then he de-activates it and asks how his father died. It comes a little out of nowhere. And I think the fairly clear implication is that he's-is what's here. His father had this. How then was he able to be killed? It's hard to imagine that a freak accident could take out a Jedi Knight.
She'd asked her aunt and uncle, of course. They said he was killed by a hyperdrive malfunction - that was why there wasn't a body.
That's the-of course we never see the graves that are by the homestead, that are there in AOTC, for obvious meta-reasons, it hadn't happened yet. But we actually see so little of the property that I find it quite easy to imagine that there were graves somewhere, but nevertheless, that if Owen and Beru did know, then obviously they wouldn't put up a grave for him out of sheer-how incredibly disrespectful that would be, the very idea. And if they didn't know what happened, and were just simply told that he was dead, it still seems that there isn't any memorial for him. And that Luke might have found it odd. It might be one of the reasons that he's so thoroughly unsurprised when he found out that everything he knew is a lie.
But even then, Lucy hadn't believed it.
Right, going with that.
She ran her thumb back over the button she'd pressed, and the blade disappeared. Lucy lifted her eyes to Obi-Wan's.
"How did my father die?"
He drew a harsh breath and glanced away, apparently unable to even meet her eyes.
This is-something I find personally just sort of interesting is how shifty Obi-Wan is in that scene, even though when Alec Guiness played it, nobody knew that Anakin hadn't been killed by Darth Vader. That was what was the functioning canon when ANH was done. And so in a Doylist way, there's no way that Alec Guinness could have known to play Obi-Wan as lying, but nevertheless, he does seem shifty, and you know, he doesn't seem able to look directly at Luke, which I assume it's because he's so reminded of Luke's father that it's painful or whatever, but it actually works quite well with, that he's lying, but he actually feels at least some degree of remorse for just how comprehensive this lie he's telling is going to be, and can't actually bring himself to look at Luke.
"A young Jedi named Darth Vader," he said evenly, "who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights." He stared straight ahead, then his gaze skittered back to Lucy. "He betrayed and murdered your father."
Lucy recoiled. She'd known it must be bigger than an accident with a hyperdrive, but she'd never dreamed of anything like this. Not murder.
"Now the Jedi are all but extinct," Obi-Wan said. "Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force."
"The Force?" she echoed.
I think it's interesting that as prevalent as things like the greeting is, especially later on, but even in these movies, even in ANH, that there are at least places in the galaxy where it is completely unheard-of, where-when Obi-Wan tells Luke, “the Force will be with you,” for Luke, that's not a generic SW version of God be with you, or just a sort of good luck, even, it carries a lot of weight because it's not a generic thing, he's never even heard the phrase before. So it isn't something that's universally known.
"The Force is what gives a Jedi his power." He turned a sharp, considering look on her, rather as if he were weighing her on some invisible scale, then smiled. "Or hers.
That was-Obi-Wan pretty much always uses masculine pronouns when talking about Jedi. Before the prequels, not before they came out, before I'd seen the last two, I remember I was watching ANH, when I was 14 or 15, and I actually wondered if there were female Jedi back in the day, because it does seem to have been this very boys' club type of organization. Since this story is meant to be prequel-compliant, obviously there were, but there does seem to still be this preference in that a lot of them are men, the galaxy is obviously an incredibly sexist place by and large.
Even accepting, especially accepting the prequels, the fact that Luke is just automatically chosen to be the one who will inherit the legacy is never explained. In Empire, Obi-Wan who was there when Leia was born, has completely forgotten that she even exists because, I presume, he's just so focused on Luke.
You can justify this, come up with some reason that it isn't pure sexism, but that frankly is the simplest explanation and given that this story is in a lot of ways confronting that, then that's what I was going with, the default for a Jedi is male. And of course the fact that he's interacting with a young woman, with a girl, forces him to actually think and to rephrase it a little bit, so at least these things will apply to her.
It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together."
Lucy's eyes widened, but before she could ask more, Artoo gave an insistent beep. Obi-Wan walked over to him.
"Now let's see if we can't figure out what you are, my little friend, and where you come from."
Lucy said, "I saw part of - "
The girl in the hologram appeared once more, projected from Artoo's databanks. She was in a different position now; this wasn't just the fragment Lucy had seen.
"I seem to have found it," Obi-Wan said. She narrowed her eyes at the droid and he beeped a bit sheepishly.
"General Kenobi," said the girl, her voice low and commanding,
Because of the way that Lucy sort of idealizes Leia as this damsel in distress, somebody who needs to be rescued-she's so helpless, and delicate! And everything-it was amusing to have her immediately confronted with the reality, even if just by voice.
"years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my father's request to you in person, but my ship has fallen under attack and I'm afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed."
Lucy gasped, but the girl didn't even hesitate,
Leia is a lot more hardcore than Lucy is at this point.
and continued without a tremor:
"I have placed information vital to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father will know how to retrieve it. You must see this droid safely delivered to him on Alderaan. This is our most desperate hour." The pleading look Lucy had already seen came over her face; she spread her hands once more. "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
With a buzz of static, the transmission ended.
Obi-Wan leaned back, rubbing his beard, and Lucy eyed him. Of course he was going to help her. He had to. But why hadn't he been helping already? What was a general and a Jedi Knight doing here, anyway?
He smiled. "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you are to come with me to Alderaan."
Lucy's mouth dropped open.
"Alderaan?" She gave an incredulous laugh. "I'm not going to Alderaan! I've got to get home. It's late - I'm in for it as it is!"
"I need your help, Lucy." Obi-Wan nodded at the hologram. "She needs your help. I'm getting too old for this kind of thing."
I think this is marginally less creepy than canon. This whole section is basically just a novelization/recap of what's in the movies because there was no reason for any of it to change. But that in the original, it rather looks like Obi-Wan-Obi-Wan emphasizing just how much Leia needs him sounds like, it almost sounds like he's shipping them together. Because he's one of the only people who knows they're actually twins, it comes off as kind of skeevy. Like, their inbred babies would be really strong in the Force! And so here it seems-I think because, a woman reacting strongly to another woman, is not automatically going to be read as sexual interest. So Lucy doesn't frame it that way automatically, his capitalizing on her interest doesn't quite seem as...as weird as canon did, in retrospect.
Lucy bit her lip. She'd wanted to help the strange girl from the first. And she wanted nothing more than to leave this rock. Only yesterday, she'd been despairing at the impossibility of ever getting out, of her life ever amounting to anything. Now, opportunity wasn't so much knocking at the door as crashing through the windows.
She could go with Obi-Wan, as her father had done. Get off Tatooine, do something important, become a hero. A knight. Every chance she'd ever been denied was at her fingertips. She could have it all, and not in some distant future. Not even soon. At this very moment.
I think we get a strong sense in the original scene of how powerful a temptation this is for Luke, because quite aside of his, whatever attraction he may or may not feel for his sister, it's the Call, he's been offered the chance to be a hero, to be a knight, this is-I think we can safely say that this is like every fantasy he's ever had, it's just tailor-made to him. And for Lucy it's also the same in that I think that being a hero, a knight...ithis is what, f it had ever occurred to her, this is what she would have asked the universe to give her. And then it's just like, “here!” So it is probably the strongest temptation that Luke or Lucy could experience.
It wasn't as if there were anything for her to do at home, either. Her uncle and aunt didn't need her, not really.
This is really where we get our first major divergence. It's that, where Luke is useful and needed, at the farm, and he has a clear duty to it, and so even in the face of this tailor-made wish-fulfillment, he still sticks to his duty. He'll try to talk his way out of it, but when push comes to shove, he sticks with it. And it's not that I think Lucy would be less dutiful than Luke would. I don't think she would. In fact, I think that's extremely unlikely in terms of-I think how a socialization of a young girl would work.
But the fact is that because, between the Sand People and because she's not expected to do the labour that Luke was, and there's simply not that much for her to do, it's part of why, as I said before, she's so frustrated, she doesn't even have the labour that Luke had. She's stuck there with very little to do except the small ways in which she can help Beru, which are even worse suited to her than the farm labour was to Luke. And so this is the first major change is that she doesn't fall back on duty here, there's no, “oh, but my uncle and aunt need me”-no, they don't need her! She's not going to give up this opportunity for a duty that doesn't exist.
In fact, I honestly considered having the story be completely divergent from ANH from far earlier than this, because given that she doesn't have that being-needed thing at the farm, I think it's actually perhaps more probable that she would have left well before this point, tried to get in the Academy. Even if they don't generally accept women, I think that whatever test scores she's likely to have would be off the charts, simply because she's Force-sensitive, just like Anakin, he could do pod-racing, things like that, even without being trained. I think you get the same thing with Luke, with Lucy.
So what I actually thought would be the most probable storyline, just in terms of being truest to the AU, what would really happen if Luke were a woman, I think what would most likely happen is that probably around fifteen, she would...be sort of festering at home and without a duty to tie her there, she would probably run off and join the Imperial Academy as Luke was intending to do. She'd do it younger, with anything tying her to home, try to pass herself off as older than she was.
Obviously, an impossibly gifted pilot named Skywalker would likely come to Vader's attention, given that he's an impossibly gifted pilot by the name of Skywalker, that he'd find her very early, and probably start training her as a Sith, as his daughter, and from there-obviously, this would be very very AU.
That's why I didn't do it, there's too many places where it could go, and have no-it wouldn't have a real relationship with canon, it wouldn't comment on canon as closely, so I did have her stay up to this point, have the thing with the Sand People as a sort of explanation that it wasn't always like this, at least to this degree, there was at least some degree of labour she was expected to do until the Sand People started acting up, but it is a bit of an excuse for not going there just to keep it on the rails of the plot.
But -
"It's not that I like the Empire," she said carefully. "Or that I want to stay. But my uncle and aunt have done everything for me. I can't just leave them without a word. I have to talk to them."
There I just wanted-Lucy is, I guess so...angry at so much, and a fairly aggressive personality, especially in most of the added things, the things that are different from the canon, are things where she reacts very negatively to something or someone. But I did have this idea that she is, for all that she is someone who's short-tempered and aggressive in her way, she's really a very sweet girl. And I think I mentioned it...I didn't want it to be an Informed Attribute. I did want to show her as someone who's kind and considerate as well as everything else. So there's this bit where she's “no, I'll do it, but I can't just leave them.” She has a very strong sense of what she owes them, of gratitude.
"Your uncle won't let you go," Obi-Wan warned.
He didn't have to mention Anakin's lightsaber; Lucy thought of it anyway. This was her rightful inheritance, and Owen hadn't even let him pass that much on to her. He'd never agree to this. He'd be angry.
Lucy's chin firmed. "I'm seventeen. He can't stop me!"
Yeah, she's so grown up.
But I can't leave them to wonder what happened to me, either. I'll explain things. I'll make them understand, somehow. And even if I can't, I'm strong enough to defy them. I just can't disappear and let them think I've been killed or worse when I'm safe on Alderaan."
This is, you know, on the one hand, she is this, she has this adolescence sense of being invulnerable, though I think in the event, she's-she is fairly self-aware, she very likely would stick to her guns, though it would probably involve a lot of storming out, and at the same time she would also, she does need them to know, she's not going to disappear into nowhere. And it's also a bit of, why she hasn't gone off at some earlier point, though again, it feels like of an excuse.
"But you will learn about the Force," Obi-Wan said. It wasn't exactly a question.
"Yes." Her hand seemed, of its own volition, to settle on the lightsaber. "I want to learn its ways and become a Jedi, like my father."
"Good," he said, seeming less triumphant than weary. "Good."
I think we all know why this is not, this doesn't spur him to shouts of joy.
Lucy felt a flicker of discomfort. "Yes, well, after I've talked to them, where should I meet you? Here? Anchorhead? I can take you that far now, if you want. We should be able to get a transport there to Mos Eisley or - wherever we're going."
"Yes, I think that would be best," Obi-Wan said. "Thank you."
She flushed, her eyes dropping to the floor. All things considered, Lucy should be thanking him, but she thought she might burst into tears if she tried, and she'd rather die.
Lucy is very intense, and-you know, I think Luke is too, and that tends to be a little underrated in fandom. But I think he actually feels things very powerfully, and all the more because he's eighteen, nineteen, however old, and it does feel overpowering but at the same tim,e Lucy has this horror of being, of being seen as weak, and particularly weak in a feminine way, all the more because she presents as feminine to such a degree. So her major hang-up in regard to this is crying. She has this horror of crying in front of anybody.
Obi-Wan reactivated Threepio and gathered his few belongings while Lucy went out to the landspeeder, trailed by a suspiciously meek Artoo. She settled behind the wheel, more reassured than ever by the machinery beneath her fingers and feet, and within five minutes, they were on their way to Anchorhead.
It was Threepio, always ready to be alarmed, who first espied the column of smoke.
"What's that?" Lucy said aloud, estimating the distance. It couldn't be that far from home, but nobody would have started a fire at this time of year.
"Nothing natural. If you can spare the time, we should do what we can to help."
I like the idea of Obi-Wan as a Jedi that, if you're a good Jedi and you run across a problem, it is your obligation to help. Helping people of whatever stature is their reason for existence in the galaxy, and Obi-Wan in his way, as one person who aged very rapidly, is still trying to stay true to that as well as he can, even in situations like this where it's actively dangerous.
Lucy hesitated, then nodded. "I can't think it makes any difference now," she said, and veered towards the smoke.
As they approached, she easily made out the remains of the enormous Jawa sandcrawler. She could smell something sweet and acrid on the air, which turned her stomach and tightened her grip on the wheel. She didn't recognize the scent, but her instincts were screaming that it meant something awful.
Yeah, her instincts are extremely reliable.
Lucy stopped the landspeeder and they all scrambled out. She was in the lead, so she was the first to see the Jawa body sprawled at her feet, its yellow eyes staring sightlessly out of the black mask.
It wasn't the first dead body she'd seen, but this wasn't like Fixer's grandmother dying. It wasn't even like the Darklighter cousin who'd been killed in a raid. There must be dozens of dead Jawas here. This was a massacre.
I didn't-you occasionally get the impression, I guess, just from the sort of discussions, that Luke is enormously sheltered living in a total hellhole of a place with Sand People marauding and occasionally kidnapping people and torturing them to death. So I don't get the idea, exactly, that he is sheltered from things like people dying, often in horrible ways, but that things like politics, certainly. There are ways in which his life is easier than Leia's, in that the dangers in his life are clearly marked as dangers, he doesn't have to worry that something he says can be carried to somebody, that could lead to somebody he cares about being executed. It's, his, the dangers in his life are straightforward. His world is a lot more black and white than Leia's is.
Which is interesting because I think he's a less black and white person than she is, though still very much so. But at the same time Leia has a life where she always has enough, where the dangers are going to be from politicians, she doesn't have to worry what happens when she lives the house-the manor. She has things like Alderaan getting blown to pieces, but it's all within the system, it's not-there's nobody marauding around. She's never going to be hungry, so she does live a life of privilege in some ways that Luke doesn't. But I do want to emphasize that she, Lucy here, has certainly experience of a certain kind of harshness, she has seen death, she's seen these kinds of things, but that's a very different kind of death than what happens when she runs into the Empire.
Shock and horror wouldn't accomplish anything now, she reminded herself. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, forcing herself into something approximating calm, then opened them again.
Another thing is simply how Luke responds and how I have Lucy responding here, is less overwhelmed than I think would be expected of someone who's never seen anyone die before, who's basically-that sheltered. And so I thought it would make more sense.
"It looks like Sand People," she said, gazing around. It did look like them. But it didn't seem right.
"Look, here are gaffi sticks, bantha tracks. It's just - I've never heard of them hitting anything so large before."
Obi-Wan crouched in the sand, studying the tracks. "They didn't - but we are meant to think they did," he announced. "These tracks are side-by-side. Sand People always ride single-file, to hide their numbers."
"These are the same Jawas that sold us Artoo and Threepio," Lucy said slowly. Something was niggling at her brain.
He gestured at the sandcrawler. "And these bullet points, too accurate for Sand People. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise."
I really wanted to add some snide comment there, but I did manage to fight the temptation when I was writing it.
"Why would Imperial troops want to slaughter Jawas?" she asked blankly. She glanced around, from the bullet-riddled crawler, to the bodies, to the droids.
The droids. Artoo gave a low, distressed beep and Threepio lifted his head, bewildered. Lucy stared at them in gathering horror. Her sharpening suspicions tumbled ahead of her, faster than she could follow.
I really like this scene in the movie, you can really actually see Luke's mind racing, and sort of drawing the line from A to B to C, and everything adding up. That he-he gets there in this very logical way. You don't actually hear very much, it's actually shown visually, and it's, you see him seeing the droids and leaping to the correct conclusion. You get the impression of somebody who, unlike a lot of heroic types, is bright, he gets to these conclusions very quickly, he doesn't wander around forever going, “huh, the droids, that's weird.” So I carried that over to Lucy.
"If they traced the robots here, they may have learned who they sold them to," she said, voice shaking even as her brain relentlessly shoved the pieces together. "And that would lead them - home!"
Home. Owen and Beru. No, she thought, no, no -
She raced back to the speeder, throwing herself inside even as Obi-Wan shouted after her. She didn't bother listening.
They'd be all right. They had to be. Owen could hold them off. Her aunt would know how to placate them, they'd - they'd - it would be fine. She just had to check. Had to make sure.
Lucy sped across the wasteland. Flying didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except -
The homestead was burning. She could see the smoke, the holes and damage. It looked like a battle had taken place, not just . . . no. They must have fled when they saw the stormtroopers coming. That would have been sensible, and Owen and Beru Lars were nothing if not sensible.
She jumped out of the speeder. "Uncle Owen!" she screamed. "Aunt Beru! Uncle Owen!"
Half-dazed, Lucy wandered around the homestead, searching for her aunt and uncle. They had to be gone. They wouldn't ignore her like this. They'd have answered, if they were here.
Lucy's eyes dropped to the ground. Amidst all the debris, two skeletons lay smouldering.
That is a really fun place to stop.
Click to viewThe Adventures of Lucy Skywalker
Chapter Three
Ben - Obi-Wan - gave her a kind smile.
In regards to what to call to him, I thought of using Ben the way Luke does, and in the script, continues to-he doesn't start calling him Obi-Wan until ROTJ, actually. But I think most of the fandom sees him as “Obi-Wan,” so I thought it would just be more straightforward to have her correct herself just this once and go with it.
"I haven't gone by the name Obi-Wan since - " he paused, apparently struggling to remember - "oh, since before you were born."
This was another sort of minor fanwank in that, of course, it turned out in the prequels that he was using Obi-Wan well after she was born; especially if Qui-Gon was visiting him, he would have heard that name quite a lot. So I have that pause - like, I intended it to be: this is his first lie of many.
So Owen had lied to her. Maybe about other things; maybe Beru had too. That stung a little more, but somehow, Lucy wasn't surprised. She'd always felt that they were keeping things from her-
That is mostly from-when Obi-Wan tells Luke, in ANH, tells him … I don't want to say the truth, the not-quite-as-much-of-a-lie-as-what-Owen-told-him, Luke's expression is kind of hilariously unsurprised. He's just like 'oh. Tell me more.' And so I sort of ran with it-she kind of half expected they were lying to her anyway.
not the ordinary things that adults kept from children, important things. Owen didn't like her asking about her father. Beru's silences were so . . . loud. Obviously, there was something suspicious going on, something they weren't telling her. Now it turned out that she should have questioned the things they had told her, too. Lucy scowled. She lied to her uncle all the time, but that was different.
She has a little bit of a double standard for her conduct vs how she expects people to behave to her. But I think in this case she kind of has a point, that a teenager lying to cover up an escapade with a skyhopper is quite a bit different than an adult lying [cough] to their foster-child about the child's entire background and heritage.
Somehow. She didn't care that they'd just fought. She was going to demand an explanation as soon as she got the droids home.
The thought reminded her of Artoo, his strange fidelity and obstinacy, and the hologram he carried.
"Then the droid does belong to you!" she cried.
"I don't seem to recall owning a droid." Obi-Wan shot an incomprehensible look at him.
Most of Obi-Wan's looks, and tones, are completely enigmatic. And of course, I suppose one could technically say he's correct-if I remember correctly that-yeah, Jedi, can't have possessions, strictly speaking, so technically he didn't have a droid. And of course this particular one was never his.
Artoo gave a low beep.
"Very interesting," Obi-Wan said, more enigmatic than ever.
Which is really enigmatic.
Apparently the raiders had hit her harder than she thought, because nothing seemed to make any sense at all. Lucy didn't even try to understand. However, when Obi-Wan suggested that her attackers would soon return, in greater numbers, Lucy gladly agreed to take shelter in his home. Her aunt and uncle would be worried, of course, but they'd understand when she explained about the Sand People.
Yeah... and this was one of the times where there was the whole canon passage and I started to do it, but NOTHING CHANGED at all, and so I finally just summarized.
The three of them went to recover Threepio, Artoo beeping hysterically all the while, and found him half-buried in the sand. He'd obviously suffered in his fall, and one of his arms had been torn completely off. Lucy ran forward and turned him on.
"Can you stand? We've got to get out of here before the Sand People return."
"I don't think I can make it." In a martyred tone, he added, "You go on, Mistress Lucy. There's no sense in you risking yourself on my account. I'm done for."
Artoo's screeching beep required no translation.
"No, you're not!" said Lucy indignantly. "What kind of talk is that?"
Obi-Wan had been peering around the mesa, apparently listening to something that none of the rest of them could hear. Without a moment's hesitation, however, he helped her lift the droid into the air.
"Quickly," he said. "They're on the move."
What I kind of loved here is that Threepio is-he's what TV Tropes calls the Load, he's just there and he doesn't do anything really useful for them, certainly not for Obi-Wan, so there's no practical reason for him to rescue Threepio, he's just...kind.
They rushed to the landspeeder, which thankfully hadn't been too damaged by the Sand People, and raced away. Obi-Wan either couldn't fly or didn't care to, but his instructions were easy enough to follow. Lucy chattered idly and he glanced at her face, alight with pleasure. He stared ahead for the rest of their brief journey.
That was a bit of a POV break. I actually-I'd forgotten, but there actually-there is a bit of Obi-Wan's POV throughout the next part. And yeah, I think for the audience, it's pretty obvious when he has these moments, he looks at her and she's just...happy and flying and everything's fabulous, what he's reminded of there.
Obi-Wan's house was more like a hut, small and bare. Nevertheless, it seemed to radiate an air of comfort and security. He helped her carry Threepio to one corner, then looked at him in some dismay.
"I'm afraid I can't be of much help," he said.
I honestly don't remember how good or not Obi-Wan was with mechanical things. For this story I assumed that he's kind of inept, and he's-his life in the desert is perhaps harder than it would be otherwise. I imagine he leaned on Anakin a bit for that. Who knows, maybe that's why he aged so fast.
"That's all right - I shouldn't need any," Lucy told him. "I have my tools and I'm good with machines."
"Yes," murmured Obi-Wan, eyes distant. "I thought you might be."
So yeah, it's-he doesn't know her that well, but he kind of works on the assumption that obviously she takes after Anakin, and of course she does.
Lucy worked in silence for a few minutes. Then she said: "Uncle Owen says you knew my father."
"That's true," Obi-Wan said. "We were friends for a very long time. I knew him even before he ever went to war."
This was-since so much of this conversation is going to be the same, I wanted at least something different, so I started a little bit before the canon one does, to show it-what leads to what we get there. And of course Obi-Wan is ... eliding quite a lot, right there.
She looked up, startled, then laughed. "Oh, my father didn't fight in the wars. He was a navigator on a spice freighter."
Obi-Wan's neutral expression was replaced by something very like horror.
I kind of found it endearing that even after everything he's, like, so horrified at the idea that Anakin was anything but a Jedi Knight.
Belatedly, Lucy remembered that everything she knew was wrong.
"That's what your uncle told you," he said, his voice cooling.
Lucy suppressed a wince. It did look bad, but-Owen must have meant well. He always did, in his way. As annoying as it was to discover that he'd been lying to her for her entire life, she felt sure he'd have an explanation. Not one she liked or agreed with, but an explanation.
Yeah, that's kind of trying to deal with the Problem of Owen a little bit, and, you know, to show that their relationship, while a difficult one, and a partially adversarial one, there was genuine affection between them. She understood that he cared for her. She understands that...even if she doesn't always understand his logic, she understands that what he does is coming from concern.
Meanwhile, Obi-Wan seemed willing to talk to her about her father.
My father, she thought, excitement bubbling in her chest. The man who had fearlessly marched into the desert to find his mother, who had been a pilot, who had spent his short life longing for more, who had left so much of himself in her that, for as long as she could remember, she'd felt like a chunk of her soul was missing.
Of course, the irony there, I guess, is that while there is this-she's built herself around ... Anakin, and she's certainly right about-that he, he did have that longing for more that she shares with him, I think she actually-you know, there's a lot of talk in the fandom about how much Leia is like him. But I think in the sense of being driven by this ambitiousness and this, this, this longing, this sort of Ariel-esque “I want more!” that that's something where Luke in canon and here Lucy is quite more similar to him than Leia is. I don't think she has that quite as much as they do.
But of course this bit where she's always felt like there's something in her, integral to her, that is just not there, and there's this, she has, part of her longing, even beyond Anakin's, is, she feels like there's something that should be there, but it's not, she's missing part of herself. And of course, that's not Anakin at all, that's Leia. And I think she-she conflates the-she's got this sort of psychic bond with her sister, she has a sort of psychic bond with her father, and because in both cases there's this sense of emptiness and loss, that are fairly similar feelings, she just sort of combines it into this, this aching that she has.
She'd never known him, but still, she loved and idolized him. She liked to think he was still there, sometimes almost convinced herself that she could feel him looking out for her, somewhere in the distant reaches of the galaxy.
That's another one where it just amused me where she can be so close and so far away, from the truth. I've been thinking vaguely that it may be she is sorta kinda sensing his...being alive...ness, though of course he's neither looking for her nor looking out for her. Though I'm sure he would be doing both if he knew about her existence.
But she never quite managed it; her practical side knew it was impossible. Her father was gone. Instead, she clung to the few scraps of information that her uncle and aunt doled out.
"He didn't hold with your father's ideals," Obi-Wan continued. "Thought he should have stayed here, and not - gotten involved."
That...that's [sigh] odd to me. Of course it's a direct quote from the movie. I can't be sure-given that I don't live inside George Lucas's head, but in the original conception, I think that Anakin and Owen and Beru, that there was a much stronger connection in terms of family. I know some people didn't care for him being from Tatooine and thought it didn't make sense, but I honestly, because of this line, I don't think it would have made sense if he weren't. I'm not sure why Owen would think he should have stayed on Tatooine if he weren't already there.
But-but it's kind of bizarre, in light of the prequels, why on earth Owen would think that Anakin should stay on Tatooine. He's very nearly a Jedi Knight, and his only connection to the family is dead-horribly-and he, he's, it seems weird to even expect that Anakin would give up everything to live off of a stepfather and stepbrother he's barely met and then mostly just at his mother's funeral.
It doesn't... I can think of a way it sort of could happen, and-I mentioned before that I had to assume that Anakin and Beru hit it off-not in a romantic way, but a family way-hit it off behind the scenes to account for how affectionate she sounds when she talks about him, and I'm kind of assuming that the same thing must have happened with Owen, and that Owen offered him a place on the farm, or something, and honestly thought he should have stayed. Anakin was already involved, but I think there must have been something to account for this.
"You fought in the Clone Wars?" she said, surprised. Of course, it was twenty years ago now. He'd have been younger then. A lot younger, apparently.
That was just - of all of my - there are certainly discrepancies between the sort of canon that was provided by the original trilogy and what turned out to be the case in the prequels, and they annoy me. This is one where I just find it vaguely amusing: that Obi-Wan's like thirty-five in ROTS and eighteen years later he's, you know, “I'm too old for this...” When he fights he's just so slow. I'm assuming that something took its toll on him. This is just a reference, though, to a thing a lot of people have either very-seriously business...ly, or just sort of jokingly, pointed out, that he aged a lot more than eighteen years in the desert.
"Yes," Obi-Wan said, chuckling. "I was a Jedi Knight, the same as your father."
Her father, her own father, had been a knight? - a hero?
One of the things that I think is interesting is that it's clear that-Jedi Knight does not actually mean anything to Luke in ANH, and here it doesn't mean anything to Lucy. The thing that she latches on to is the knight part and not the Jedi part. She kind of links it up with her own hero complex. In a way, that's not really terribly different from what Anakin does in TPM, where it's about being able to rescue the undertrodden and make things right where they're wrong, and guard truth and justice and less about the minutia of being the armed forces of a galactic government. Of course she's older but in that case I don't think there would be too much of a difference between-she's a lot more sheltered than he was.
It was just like a story, she thought: knights, adventures, wars, and dead parents.
Yeah, that last one is sort of One Of These Things Is Not Like The Others. Dead parents are a common theme-of course in this case, it's not accurate. It, honestly, it reminds me of something I just saw the other day, where someone was complaining about how the heroes of all these traditional fantasies are always orphans. And the specific example that was given was Luke, which I thought was quite possibly the most hilariously wrong example of this, since it's only kinda of a little bit famous that … he's not an orphan? You know, “I am your father”? So I just think that was a really weird example.
So-yes, a lot of those stories, of course, do have dead parents, but not hers! She just doesn't know it yet.
She sobered. "I wish I'd known him," she said wistfully.
"He was the best starpilot in the galaxy," Obi-Wan said, "and a cunning warrior."
Lucy's eyes rounded. So she had gotten her love of flying from him, but he was beyond anything Owen and Beru had ever told her. Not just a pilot. The best pilot in the entire galaxy.
Yeah, that's a bit of a leap from-I think she would have, and Luke in canon too, that she gravitated towards flying and starships and machines, that she has that natural, more than that, affinity for them, and naturally gifted pilot and all that-she assumes that she got it from her father. She knew, Owen and Beru's story, was that he was a pilot. And so that was always part of her image of her father. But there is a very significant difference-oh, I'm naturally really good at flying, I probably got it from my dad, he was a pilot too, and my dad was the best starpilot in the ENTIRE GALAXY, and you know, maybe I could be too.
No wonder she'd always been drawn to ships; no wonder everything had come so easily to her.
"I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself," he added, as if he'd been reading her mind.
Lucy flushed and smiled a bit hesitantly. She was good, she knew that. But she was a long, long way from the best starpilot in the galaxy.
That's-one of the things with both Luke and Lucy that I just find interesting, I think I mentioned it in the first chapter, that they're, Luke is perfectly happy to present his creds, and to acknowledge his own merits as a person. I think, in a lot of fic, that he's treated as a lot more insecure than he really is. But at the same time, if you get anybody else pointing them out, it's suddenly all this sort of “aw, shucks,” almost blushing embarrassment. Which I just find a really interesting bit of characterization. I tried to carry that over with Lucy.
She is-and I think with Luke that it's not-it's not perfectly clear right away, but that when he says things like I'm not such a bad pilot, I could fly this thing, we take it as a sort of empty bragging, no, of course he couldn't, he's a sort of callow young kid, and it's clear by the end that he totally could have. He's never apparently left Tatooine, never been out of gravity, and yet he manages to fly that X-Wing like nobody's business-so yeah, he probably could have. He wasn't bragging, he was actually giving a perfectly accurate version of his abilities. And so I actually tend to trust his own estimation of himself.
I think he's, there are certainly areas in which he's either too modest or...he has a fatalism about him that also think tends to get overlooked because of the focus on the hope and...sunshine and bunnies, and that he's got this fatalism, I'm never going to get off, I'm never going to get out of here, I'm never going to lift the ship out of the swamp, whatever, but even-accepting that, however, I think that in general his own opinion of himself is actually fairly trustworthy and he's fairly self-aware.
So I wanted to have that with her, where she's got this, there is this sort of fatalism with almost a sort of bragging but it's accurate but that it's sort of basically where she's not loathe to say that she's good, but she knows she isn't, she's not Anakin Skywalker, she's not what Luke was by Empire or certainly by Jedi. She's good, she's just not as good as she might be.
If he'd lived, she wouldn't have had to fumble for competence and then skill, untaught and unable to understand what she was doing, or how she was managing it.
I think one of the things with them is, I think it goes well beyond merely being talented in the way that people are talented, that these sort of Force-driven prodigies that they are, it's-it'd be something, I imagine, sort of uncanny, where, when you do something and you can do it and you don't understand how or why, it's almost disconcerting.
And I think that's kind of what happened with her, she was probably drawn to machines and to, especially, flying machines, proabbly very early on, she had a very strong knack for them, and just had this, like, understanding of them without any sort of real world knowledge to prop it up, and so it was very disconcerting. And so she's just had to almost work around her own skill, to try and find a way to make the, on the one hand, she has this impression of how it's going to work before it even does it, and has to make that match up with the real world of ordinary physics, and so there was a lot of fumbling and there was a lot of, probably, near-death experiences, and she did have to do it on her own. I think she did a lot of it, in fact, lied through her teeth to her uncle and did a lot of it. I think in a way it was very odd-just an odd situation. Not in an ordinary, where you-if you're a math prodigy, you don't have to sneak off to do problems on your own, and have to hide it from your parents.
Her father wouldn't have just encouraged her to follow his footsteps, he'd have taught her personally. She might even have grown up on a ship.
Yeah, this was one where I was actually cackling at my own character as I wrote it. While … it's true, he would have gone well beyond merely encouraging her to follow his footsteps. Yes, he absolutely would have taught her personally. Yes, she would have grown up on a ship, and it would have been a STAR DESTROYER.
And he'd been cunning. Rash and restless and idealistic, but maybe a little sneaky, too. Ambitious. Like me, like me, like me.
The cunning thing I always find an interesting twist in both of their characters. I don't think you see quite as much of it with Leia, but with Anakin and Luke, you have this sort of manipulative edge to their characters. It's like they're these Gryffindors, all three of them are raging Gryffindor types, but Luke and Anakin have-in some bizarre crossover, I'm sure that the Hat would consider Slytherin for a moment.
They have this edge of ambition and cunning and ruthlessness to them. And I think Leia has some of that ruthlessness but she's much more direct, I think. In that, like, in the original trilogy, just about all the imperial plots-nearly all of them are Vader's, because all the people around him are, like ... stupid. And their ideas of how to get things done are just ridiculously over the top or just completely incompetent. And you're not really surprised that he's constantly enraged. And with Luke, it's almost funny, when he's manipulating Han-into something completely heroic, but he's like this little devil on his shoulder while he's convincing him to do it.
And yeah, the tactic that he uses, basically to appeal to Han's money-grubbing nature, is I think pretty interesting because it's something that's so completely foreign to his own. It's not a motivation that would ever make sense to him. He doesn't even seem to really get it. He's perpetually surprised that Han is as mercenary as he is. Yet even while not really understanding it, and not being able to process it, he can exploit it in this sort of manipulative way. I just find it interesting, he's the one that blows out the cameras, he's the one that thinks of the cameras, he comes up with that elaborate plot in Jedi, that actually works quite well. He is-there's this cunning to them.
And I think that having that rashness and restlessness and idealism, and being bold and daring and totally unable to ever give up, ever, but just this edge makes them a lot more interesting.
Lucy turned back to Threepio and sighed. Her father, at any rate, would never have been shut up like she was, stuck with repairing machinery and putting droids back together.
Yeah, yet another one of those … just poking fun at her, because at this point, it's impossible not to.
"And," Obi-Wan added, with an affectionate, wistful look, "he was a good friend."
Lucy's eyes burned. She kept her head turned away from him, working on Threepio with renewed vigour.
Later on, I think I go into it in more depth, but on one hand, she's a very sensitive person, but on the other, she has this horror of crying, especially in front of anybody, she completely refuses to cry. She sees it as this weakness, I think. She's at once this very feminine person who's also a sort of raging tomboy, that one of the ways the two sides of her nature come into conflict is when her idea of herself as somebody who is one of the boys, and she sees herself as strong and daring and just an unrealized hero, but she also has things that are in her inclination that conflict with this that she does have this loathing of, around clothes and around I suspect around sexuality, but very very much around anything that could be construed as feminine.
Nobody spoke for a moment, the silence thick and heavy. Then Obi-Wan cleared his throat.
"Which reminds me -"
He got up and shuffled across the room, poking around in a small wooden chest while Lucy started to fit Threepio's restraining bolt back on. The droid gave a small start, though - uncharacteristically enough - he said nothing.
Lucy bit her lip. She'd never much cared for restraining bolts, either in theory or reality, and this one felt somehow repulsive. Yes, droids were machines, made to serve - but then, they shouldn't need them. And if not, then - well, Artoo clearly had a mind of his own, and even Threepio was as much beyond the usual soulless machines as she was beyond . . . womp-rats, or something.
The bolt in her hand was heavy and dirty. Lucy put it back on the table and Threepio's yellow eyes gave a confused flash. She ignored him, wiping her greasy hands on her pants.
This interlude is actually something that I thought was itneresting-I mean, I didn't make it up! Not exactly. It's not really in the movie, as such, it's certainly not given any emphasis there, but it does show up in the script. Usually I was, as I was writing this, I was reading the script and watching the scene from the movie side-by-side. And I thought it was interesting that there was this in passing thing in the script that, I think, is an interesting light on the character.
Of course the script is not going to tell us that much of the interiority of the characters, but I thought it was pretty clearly showing Luke-I don't even know if compassion is the right word here. But that he-Threepio reacts negatively to having his restraining bolt put on him, and for all that Luke has grown up in what is essentially a culture where droids are just considered things, and wiping a droid's memory is treated like wiping a computer's, even though it's basically killing them, that all these things are normal in their society, but Luke is able to see past that, and he just has this moment where he-I don't even know if he grows-I do think it's a moment of growth, where he goes from not even thinking about these things, but just the instant he sees Threepio's fear and antipathy of this, that's enough for him to just not do it.
And with Lucy I wanted to explore how she felt about that, a little bit more. So I thought this was a good scene to include because of the bit of characterization and the not nearly-rehashing-the-movies aspect, to have her thinking about-show why she makes this choice, and have her actually be thinking about it as, I guess, a social issue.
"I have something here for you," said Obi-Wan, turning back towards her. He had retrieved whatever he'd been looking for - a slim metal cylinder of some kind, with three or four buttons running up one side. It looked rather like a severed handle to . . . something.
Lucy tried to look less unimpressed than she felt.
This is kind of-because we don't-Luke a lot of times has these reactions, just, not so much later on, but here, no matter what Obi-Wan says, he's just like mildly intrigued. It seems pretty clear that he's never heard of any of these things that Obi-Wan is talking about and they have no meaning for him. So I took that ignorance of everything, and because lightsabers have become these emblems of cool in our actual reality-it's just this totally awesome weapon-even if you talk to people who hate the prequels, if there's anything cool about the prequels, what would it be? Most of them are going to say “lightsabers! The duels!”
And so for me I thought it would be both funny and a little bit interesting, I guess, to have a conflict between how we react to the scene in the movie or even in this fic, with how it is for the actual character. It's “oh, it's a lightsaber!” and she's just thinking it's some broken thing, it's a handle of some thing that doesn't work. So she just thinks it's trash.
"Your father wanted you to have this, when you were old enough," Obi-Wan added, and Lucy's head instantly snapped up. "But your uncle wouldn't allow it."
I thought this was interesting because of the implication that Luke, at eighteen, was well past the age where he'd have received a lightsaber. I remember when I was watching, I thought it was a bit creepy-it doesn't sound like he's talking six months ago, it sounds like it was quite possibly several years back that he should have had that lightsaber at twelve or thirteen, and I was just thinking, No? A sword that can cut through anything, including limbs and...houses? Not a good thing to hand a twelve-year-old boy! And then, of course, it became actively creepy in the prequels, when it's like five-year-olds and holy crap.
So I don't think I actually went into it that much here, but I did have her like-how any time her father is even vaguely referenced, she has this instant-she comes to attention. I think that Luke is obviously the same way, that so much of what he is revolves around his father and what he thinks his father did. When he thought his father was a pilot, he wanted to be a pilot, he wanted to go to the Academy, and be a fighter pilot. When it turned out his father was a Jedi, he wanted to be a Jedi. Then his father turned out to be Darth Vader, and he came pretty damn near to that one, too.
So much of what he is, is shaped- his whole concept of himself is shaped by his concept of his father. It's pretty clear in the movies, it doesn't need to be laid out, but with Lucy, I did-I think because of the gender thing, it's right in her face, her father is just so much to her.
The broken-down thing instantly became a precious relic. She'd never had anything that belonged to her father, never even seen anything.
I can't imagine Owen and Beru would have anything of Anakin's, so.
Lucy just kept herself from snatching it right out of Obi-Wan's hand.
Obi-Wan looked at the handle thoughtfully, grief flickering over his face again. "He feared that you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade," he said, "like your father did."
This was one of those things that I think the easiest assumption is that Obi-Wan is not lying but-his description of events is phrased in a way that intended to give a different impression of things than what really happened, while still being, strictly speaking, accurate. I don't think one can consider the Clone Wars an idealistic crusade by really any stretch of the imagination, but Owen may have thought they were. Or Obi-Wan thought Owen thought they were. And Obi-Wan was certainly not “old Obi-Wan” when Anakin followed him, but...
He handed it to her, and Lucy reverently closed her fingers around it. She didn't care that it was probably garbage now. It had been her father's; that was enough.
I wanted her to have this attachment to this before she realizes that it's the coolest thing ever. It's simply the fact that it was a possession of Anakin's, this overwhelming thing.
"What is it?" she asked.
"Your father's lightsaber - the weapon of a Jedi Knight."
Lucy's breath caught. This wasn't a broken handle in her hands, it was a hilt. It was - it was -
My idea there is that while she has never heard of the Force or Jedi, the one thing that even in the furthest reachest of the galaxy, just about everybody has heard of a lightsaber. But in a sufficiently vague way that she wouldn't actually recognize one, it's just the sort of thing one does hear about, an exceptionally awesome weapon that isn't around any more.
"Not as clumsy or random as a blaster -"
She pressed one of the buttons and four feet of blue light shot out. She swung it gently, trying to keep her hands from shaking, and watched in fascination as the blade hummed back and forth.
Obi-Wan was saying something, but Lucy couldn't bring herself to pay attention.
That was another way I tried to avoid rehashing.
She was holding a lightsaber.
This is one of the things where it's so enormous that it's difficult to even imagine how enormous it would actually be. Even without the extra layer of-for somebody in the real world, it has the whole Star Wars, that was so cool, thing attached to it, but even in-universe it would be this overwhelming thing, this is something out of legend, and she has one, and it's in her hands, and it's hers by right-that's a big deal.
Her father's lightsaber. He had held it in his own hands. He'd thought of her, wanted this given to her, to his daughter. And now it had been, just like he wanted. It was hers.
Yes, this a combination of the sheer coolness of lightsabers, her many, many issues surrounding her father and the tie between them, and of course simply her own personality. As somebody who is personally ambitious and a little bit power-hungry-which is not a word I usually hear used to describe Luke, but I actually tend to think he is, in a very well-meaning way.
For a moment, Lucy's heart pounded so fiercely that she could hear it in her head. Her chest burned and her throat dried and she couldn't breathe or hear or speak or do anything except think that she had a lightsaber.
Then she thought: Anakin had had this, and he'd still died. What could kill a Jedi Knight?
For me, that was a sort of connection up with Anakin in TPM, of course, thinking nothing can kill a Jedi Knight. She's older and I think, intellectually if not emotionally more mature, so it's not that it's conceivable for her, but she's trying to-how did work? how could you kill somebody who had a lightsaber?--though she's not as set in her conviction that it just couldn't happen.
This is also a way to-in the movie, there's a pretty sharp change of subject. He gives Luke the lightsaber and Luke swings it around a little bit, carefully not lopping off any limbs, and then he de-activates it and asks how his father died. It comes a little out of nowhere. And I think the fairly clear implication is that he's-is what's here. His father had this. How then was he able to be killed? It's hard to imagine that a freak accident could take out a Jedi Knight.
She'd asked her aunt and uncle, of course. They said he was killed by a hyperdrive malfunction - that was why there wasn't a body.
That's the-of course we never see the graves that are by the homestead, that are there in AOTC, for obvious meta-reasons, it hadn't happened yet. But we actually see so little of the property that I find it quite easy to imagine that there were graves somewhere, but nevertheless, that if Owen and Beru did know, then obviously they wouldn't put up a grave for him out of sheer-how incredibly disrespectful that would be, the very idea. And if they didn't know what happened, and were just simply told that he was dead, it still seems that there isn't any memorial for him. And that Luke might have found it odd. It might be one of the reasons that he's so thoroughly unsurprised when he found out that everything he knew is a lie.
But even then, Lucy hadn't believed it.
Right, going with that.
She ran her thumb back over the button she'd pressed, and the blade disappeared. Lucy lifted her eyes to Obi-Wan's.
"How did my father die?"
He drew a harsh breath and glanced away, apparently unable to even meet her eyes.
This is-something I find personally just sort of interesting is how shifty Obi-Wan is in that scene, even though when Alec Guiness played it, nobody knew that Anakin hadn't been killed by Darth Vader. That was what was the functioning canon when ANH was done. And so in a Doylist way, there's no way that Alec Guinness could have known to play Obi-Wan as lying, but nevertheless, he does seem shifty, and you know, he doesn't seem able to look directly at Luke, which I assume it's because he's so reminded of Luke's father that it's painful or whatever, but it actually works quite well with, that he's lying, but he actually feels at least some degree of remorse for just how comprehensive this lie he's telling is going to be, and can't actually bring himself to look at Luke.
"A young Jedi named Darth Vader," he said evenly, "who was a pupil of mine until he turned to evil, helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi Knights." He stared straight ahead, then his gaze skittered back to Lucy. "He betrayed and murdered your father."
Lucy recoiled. She'd known it must be bigger than an accident with a hyperdrive, but she'd never dreamed of anything like this. Not murder.
"Now the Jedi are all but extinct," Obi-Wan said. "Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force."
"The Force?" she echoed.
I think it's interesting that as prevalent as things like the greeting is, especially later on, but even in these movies, even in ANH, that there are at least places in the galaxy where it is completely unheard-of, where-when Obi-Wan tells Luke, “the Force will be with you,” for Luke, that's not a generic SW version of God be with you, or just a sort of good luck, even, it carries a lot of weight because it's not a generic thing, he's never even heard the phrase before. So it isn't something that's universally known.
"The Force is what gives a Jedi his power." He turned a sharp, considering look on her, rather as if he were weighing her on some invisible scale, then smiled. "Or hers.
That was-Obi-Wan pretty much always uses masculine pronouns when talking about Jedi. Before the prequels, not before they came out, before I'd seen the last two, I remember I was watching ANH, when I was 14 or 15, and I actually wondered if there were female Jedi back in the day, because it does seem to have been this very boys' club type of organization. Since this story is meant to be prequel-compliant, obviously there were, but there does seem to still be this preference in that a lot of them are men, the galaxy is obviously an incredibly sexist place by and large.
Even accepting, especially accepting the prequels, the fact that Luke is just automatically chosen to be the one who will inherit the legacy is never explained. In Empire, Obi-Wan who was there when Leia was born, has completely forgotten that she even exists because, I presume, he's just so focused on Luke.
You can justify this, come up with some reason that it isn't pure sexism, but that frankly is the simplest explanation and given that this story is in a lot of ways confronting that, then that's what I was going with, the default for a Jedi is male. And of course the fact that he's interacting with a young woman, with a girl, forces him to actually think and to rephrase it a little bit, so at least these things will apply to her.
It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together."
Lucy's eyes widened, but before she could ask more, Artoo gave an insistent beep. Obi-Wan walked over to him.
"Now let's see if we can't figure out what you are, my little friend, and where you come from."
Lucy said, "I saw part of - "
The girl in the hologram appeared once more, projected from Artoo's databanks. She was in a different position now; this wasn't just the fragment Lucy had seen.
"I seem to have found it," Obi-Wan said. She narrowed her eyes at the droid and he beeped a bit sheepishly.
"General Kenobi," said the girl, her voice low and commanding,
Because of the way that Lucy sort of idealizes Leia as this damsel in distress, somebody who needs to be rescued-she's so helpless, and delicate! And everything-it was amusing to have her immediately confronted with the reality, even if just by voice.
"years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. Now he begs you to help him in his struggle against the Empire. I regret that I am unable to present my father's request to you in person, but my ship has fallen under attack and I'm afraid my mission to bring you to Alderaan has failed."
Lucy gasped, but the girl didn't even hesitate,
Leia is a lot more hardcore than Lucy is at this point.
and continued without a tremor:
"I have placed information vital to the survival of the Rebellion into the memory systems of this R2 unit. My father will know how to retrieve it. You must see this droid safely delivered to him on Alderaan. This is our most desperate hour." The pleading look Lucy had already seen came over her face; she spread her hands once more. "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."
With a buzz of static, the transmission ended.
Obi-Wan leaned back, rubbing his beard, and Lucy eyed him. Of course he was going to help her. He had to. But why hadn't he been helping already? What was a general and a Jedi Knight doing here, anyway?
He smiled. "You must learn the ways of the Force, if you are to come with me to Alderaan."
Lucy's mouth dropped open.
"Alderaan?" She gave an incredulous laugh. "I'm not going to Alderaan! I've got to get home. It's late - I'm in for it as it is!"
"I need your help, Lucy." Obi-Wan nodded at the hologram. "She needs your help. I'm getting too old for this kind of thing."
I think this is marginally less creepy than canon. This whole section is basically just a novelization/recap of what's in the movies because there was no reason for any of it to change. But that in the original, it rather looks like Obi-Wan-Obi-Wan emphasizing just how much Leia needs him sounds like, it almost sounds like he's shipping them together. Because he's one of the only people who knows they're actually twins, it comes off as kind of skeevy. Like, their inbred babies would be really strong in the Force! And so here it seems-I think because, a woman reacting strongly to another woman, is not automatically going to be read as sexual interest. So Lucy doesn't frame it that way automatically, his capitalizing on her interest doesn't quite seem as...as weird as canon did, in retrospect.
Lucy bit her lip. She'd wanted to help the strange girl from the first. And she wanted nothing more than to leave this rock. Only yesterday, she'd been despairing at the impossibility of ever getting out, of her life ever amounting to anything. Now, opportunity wasn't so much knocking at the door as crashing through the windows.
She could go with Obi-Wan, as her father had done. Get off Tatooine, do something important, become a hero. A knight. Every chance she'd ever been denied was at her fingertips. She could have it all, and not in some distant future. Not even soon. At this very moment.
I think we get a strong sense in the original scene of how powerful a temptation this is for Luke, because quite aside of his, whatever attraction he may or may not feel for his sister, it's the Call, he's been offered the chance to be a hero, to be a knight, this is-I think we can safely say that this is like every fantasy he's ever had, it's just tailor-made to him. And for Lucy it's also the same in that I think that being a hero, a knight...ithis is what, f it had ever occurred to her, this is what she would have asked the universe to give her. And then it's just like, “here!” So it is probably the strongest temptation that Luke or Lucy could experience.
It wasn't as if there were anything for her to do at home, either. Her uncle and aunt didn't need her, not really.
This is really where we get our first major divergence. It's that, where Luke is useful and needed, at the farm, and he has a clear duty to it, and so even in the face of this tailor-made wish-fulfillment, he still sticks to his duty. He'll try to talk his way out of it, but when push comes to shove, he sticks with it. And it's not that I think Lucy would be less dutiful than Luke would. I don't think she would. In fact, I think that's extremely unlikely in terms of-I think how a socialization of a young girl would work.
But the fact is that because, between the Sand People and because she's not expected to do the labour that Luke was, and there's simply not that much for her to do, it's part of why, as I said before, she's so frustrated, she doesn't even have the labour that Luke had. She's stuck there with very little to do except the small ways in which she can help Beru, which are even worse suited to her than the farm labour was to Luke. And so this is the first major change is that she doesn't fall back on duty here, there's no, “oh, but my uncle and aunt need me”-no, they don't need her! She's not going to give up this opportunity for a duty that doesn't exist.
In fact, I honestly considered having the story be completely divergent from ANH from far earlier than this, because given that she doesn't have that being-needed thing at the farm, I think it's actually perhaps more probable that she would have left well before this point, tried to get in the Academy. Even if they don't generally accept women, I think that whatever test scores she's likely to have would be off the charts, simply because she's Force-sensitive, just like Anakin, he could do pod-racing, things like that, even without being trained. I think you get the same thing with Luke, with Lucy.
So what I actually thought would be the most probable storyline, just in terms of being truest to the AU, what would really happen if Luke were a woman, I think what would most likely happen is that probably around fifteen, she would...be sort of festering at home and without a duty to tie her there, she would probably run off and join the Imperial Academy as Luke was intending to do. She'd do it younger, with anything tying her to home, try to pass herself off as older than she was.
Obviously, an impossibly gifted pilot named Skywalker would likely come to Vader's attention, given that he's an impossibly gifted pilot by the name of Skywalker, that he'd find her very early, and probably start training her as a Sith, as his daughter, and from there-obviously, this would be very very AU.
That's why I didn't do it, there's too many places where it could go, and have no-it wouldn't have a real relationship with canon, it wouldn't comment on canon as closely, so I did have her stay up to this point, have the thing with the Sand People as a sort of explanation that it wasn't always like this, at least to this degree, there was at least some degree of labour she was expected to do until the Sand People started acting up, but it is a bit of an excuse for not going there just to keep it on the rails of the plot.
But -
"It's not that I like the Empire," she said carefully. "Or that I want to stay. But my uncle and aunt have done everything for me. I can't just leave them without a word. I have to talk to them."
There I just wanted-Lucy is, I guess so...angry at so much, and a fairly aggressive personality, especially in most of the added things, the things that are different from the canon, are things where she reacts very negatively to something or someone. But I did have this idea that she is, for all that she is someone who's short-tempered and aggressive in her way, she's really a very sweet girl. And I think I mentioned it...I didn't want it to be an Informed Attribute. I did want to show her as someone who's kind and considerate as well as everything else. So there's this bit where she's “no, I'll do it, but I can't just leave them.” She has a very strong sense of what she owes them, of gratitude.
"Your uncle won't let you go," Obi-Wan warned.
He didn't have to mention Anakin's lightsaber; Lucy thought of it anyway. This was her rightful inheritance, and Owen hadn't even let him pass that much on to her. He'd never agree to this. He'd be angry.
Lucy's chin firmed. "I'm seventeen. He can't stop me!"
Yeah, she's so grown up.
But I can't leave them to wonder what happened to me, either. I'll explain things. I'll make them understand, somehow. And even if I can't, I'm strong enough to defy them. I just can't disappear and let them think I've been killed or worse when I'm safe on Alderaan."
This is, you know, on the one hand, she is this, she has this adolescence sense of being invulnerable, though I think in the event, she's-she is fairly self-aware, she very likely would stick to her guns, though it would probably involve a lot of storming out, and at the same time she would also, she does need them to know, she's not going to disappear into nowhere. And it's also a bit of, why she hasn't gone off at some earlier point, though again, it feels like of an excuse.
"But you will learn about the Force," Obi-Wan said. It wasn't exactly a question.
"Yes." Her hand seemed, of its own volition, to settle on the lightsaber. "I want to learn its ways and become a Jedi, like my father."
"Good," he said, seeming less triumphant than weary. "Good."
I think we all know why this is not, this doesn't spur him to shouts of joy.
Lucy felt a flicker of discomfort. "Yes, well, after I've talked to them, where should I meet you? Here? Anchorhead? I can take you that far now, if you want. We should be able to get a transport there to Mos Eisley or - wherever we're going."
"Yes, I think that would be best," Obi-Wan said. "Thank you."
She flushed, her eyes dropping to the floor. All things considered, Lucy should be thanking him, but she thought she might burst into tears if she tried, and she'd rather die.
Lucy is very intense, and-you know, I think Luke is too, and that tends to be a little underrated in fandom. But I think he actually feels things very powerfully, and all the more because he's eighteen, nineteen, however old, and it does feel overpowering but at the same tim,e Lucy has this horror of being, of being seen as weak, and particularly weak in a feminine way, all the more because she presents as feminine to such a degree. So her major hang-up in regard to this is crying. She has this horror of crying in front of anybody.
Obi-Wan reactivated Threepio and gathered his few belongings while Lucy went out to the landspeeder, trailed by a suspiciously meek Artoo. She settled behind the wheel, more reassured than ever by the machinery beneath her fingers and feet, and within five minutes, they were on their way to Anchorhead.
It was Threepio, always ready to be alarmed, who first espied the column of smoke.
"What's that?" Lucy said aloud, estimating the distance. It couldn't be that far from home, but nobody would have started a fire at this time of year.
"Nothing natural. If you can spare the time, we should do what we can to help."
I like the idea of Obi-Wan as a Jedi that, if you're a good Jedi and you run across a problem, it is your obligation to help. Helping people of whatever stature is their reason for existence in the galaxy, and Obi-Wan in his way, as one person who aged very rapidly, is still trying to stay true to that as well as he can, even in situations like this where it's actively dangerous.
Lucy hesitated, then nodded. "I can't think it makes any difference now," she said, and veered towards the smoke.
As they approached, she easily made out the remains of the enormous Jawa sandcrawler. She could smell something sweet and acrid on the air, which turned her stomach and tightened her grip on the wheel. She didn't recognize the scent, but her instincts were screaming that it meant something awful.
Yeah, her instincts are extremely reliable.
Lucy stopped the landspeeder and they all scrambled out. She was in the lead, so she was the first to see the Jawa body sprawled at her feet, its yellow eyes staring sightlessly out of the black mask.
It wasn't the first dead body she'd seen, but this wasn't like Fixer's grandmother dying. It wasn't even like the Darklighter cousin who'd been killed in a raid. There must be dozens of dead Jawas here. This was a massacre.
I didn't-you occasionally get the impression, I guess, just from the sort of discussions, that Luke is enormously sheltered living in a total hellhole of a place with Sand People marauding and occasionally kidnapping people and torturing them to death. So I don't get the idea, exactly, that he is sheltered from things like people dying, often in horrible ways, but that things like politics, certainly. There are ways in which his life is easier than Leia's, in that the dangers in his life are clearly marked as dangers, he doesn't have to worry that something he says can be carried to somebody, that could lead to somebody he cares about being executed. It's, his, the dangers in his life are straightforward. His world is a lot more black and white than Leia's is.
Which is interesting because I think he's a less black and white person than she is, though still very much so. But at the same time Leia has a life where she always has enough, where the dangers are going to be from politicians, she doesn't have to worry what happens when she lives the house-the manor. She has things like Alderaan getting blown to pieces, but it's all within the system, it's not-there's nobody marauding around. She's never going to be hungry, so she does live a life of privilege in some ways that Luke doesn't. But I do want to emphasize that she, Lucy here, has certainly experience of a certain kind of harshness, she has seen death, she's seen these kinds of things, but that's a very different kind of death than what happens when she runs into the Empire.
Shock and horror wouldn't accomplish anything now, she reminded herself. She closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, forcing herself into something approximating calm, then opened them again.
Another thing is simply how Luke responds and how I have Lucy responding here, is less overwhelmed than I think would be expected of someone who's never seen anyone die before, who's basically-that sheltered. And so I thought it would make more sense.
"It looks like Sand People," she said, gazing around. It did look like them. But it didn't seem right.
"Look, here are gaffi sticks, bantha tracks. It's just - I've never heard of them hitting anything so large before."
Obi-Wan crouched in the sand, studying the tracks. "They didn't - but we are meant to think they did," he announced. "These tracks are side-by-side. Sand People always ride single-file, to hide their numbers."
"These are the same Jawas that sold us Artoo and Threepio," Lucy said slowly. Something was niggling at her brain.
He gestured at the sandcrawler. "And these bullet points, too accurate for Sand People. Only Imperial stormtroopers are so precise."
I really wanted to add some snide comment there, but I did manage to fight the temptation when I was writing it.
"Why would Imperial troops want to slaughter Jawas?" she asked blankly. She glanced around, from the bullet-riddled crawler, to the bodies, to the droids.
The droids. Artoo gave a low, distressed beep and Threepio lifted his head, bewildered. Lucy stared at them in gathering horror. Her sharpening suspicions tumbled ahead of her, faster than she could follow.
I really like this scene in the movie, you can really actually see Luke's mind racing, and sort of drawing the line from A to B to C, and everything adding up. That he-he gets there in this very logical way. You don't actually hear very much, it's actually shown visually, and it's, you see him seeing the droids and leaping to the correct conclusion. You get the impression of somebody who, unlike a lot of heroic types, is bright, he gets to these conclusions very quickly, he doesn't wander around forever going, “huh, the droids, that's weird.” So I carried that over to Lucy.
"If they traced the robots here, they may have learned who they sold them to," she said, voice shaking even as her brain relentlessly shoved the pieces together. "And that would lead them - home!"
Home. Owen and Beru. No, she thought, no, no -
She raced back to the speeder, throwing herself inside even as Obi-Wan shouted after her. She didn't bother listening.
They'd be all right. They had to be. Owen could hold them off. Her aunt would know how to placate them, they'd - they'd - it would be fine. She just had to check. Had to make sure.
Lucy sped across the wasteland. Flying didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except -
The homestead was burning. She could see the smoke, the holes and damage. It looked like a battle had taken place, not just . . . no. They must have fled when they saw the stormtroopers coming. That would have been sensible, and Owen and Beru Lars were nothing if not sensible.
She jumped out of the speeder. "Uncle Owen!" she screamed. "Aunt Beru! Uncle Owen!"
Half-dazed, Lucy wandered around the homestead, searching for her aunt and uncle. They had to be gone. They wouldn't ignore her like this. They'd have answered, if they were here.
Lucy's eyes dropped to the ground. Amidst all the debris, two skeletons lay smouldering.
That is a really fun place to stop.