i haz genderswap
May. 15th, 2011 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineSo, a ways back, I mentioned that there are two crucial steps to genderswapping for me: paper dolls of the alt!character, and Ten Facts fic. I had already done three paper dolls for my present au_bb genderswap (girl!Luke), so that's pretty well covered though I'm not ruling out more, 'cause procrastination is fun -- therefore, on to the next!
Warning: canonical quasi-incest at #8! Blissfully ignoring anything that doesn't appear in the movies! (Yes, I do know that the Skywalker twins are officially nineteen. I chose to average out their ages in the script, instead.)
Ten Facts AboutEveryone Except Lucy Skywalker
(1) Anakin Skywalker
Anakin knows his child is a girl.
He hasn’t felt her life in the Force yet – she’s too young for that – but still, he knows. He can almost see her: a girl standing in the wind, her blue eyes wide, her hair bleached golden by a sun somewhere. Not suns, like it was for him. His daughter will never set foot on the burning desolation that held and tormented his mother. She will be free.
He doesn’t know this – not in the way that he knows she’ll be a girl with his chin and hands and eyes and hair. But he wants it fiercely enough to make it so.
(2) Padmé Amidala
Padmé doesn’t know if the baby’s a boy or a girl. She’d like a daughter, but she doesn’t know for sure, and she’ll be happy either way. Besides, she wants to be surprised.
By the time her two daughters are born, Padmé isn’t happy. But she’s certainly surprised.
(3) Beru Lars
Beru realises right away that the baby could become her daughter. There’s a vague resemblance, and it’s not as if Lucy will be able to remember the woman who bore her. They could give her their name and call her their daughter and make her their own.
They don’t. Instead, Lucy stays Lucy Skywalker, their orphaned, offwolder niece, and never even thinks of herself as anything else. Neither do they. But Beru still loves her.
She’s a good aunt. As Lucy grows up, asking questions, poking at their lies, building herself around the Anakin-shaped hole in her world, Beru can only hope that it’s enough.
(4) Owen Lars
Sometimes, Owen is afraid of his niece.
You must be so proud of Lucy, the neighbours say, such a sweet girl - and yes, she is, but there’s more. They don’t see the dissatisfaction and sudden blind rages, the ferocity and ambition, even the way her sunny simplicity can edge towards cruelty. She hasn’t got a malicious bone in her body, but she’ll set her mind on something and the gods help anyone who gets in her way.
More often, though, he’s afraid for her.
Lucy may chafe at the constraints she lives under, but she lives. It’s more than her father or mother can say. More than her grandmother. The galaxy is a cold, black place for the young - she’s far better off here, safely shut up in the house, than running off like Anakin and getting herself killed or worse.
(5) Biggs Darklighter
Biggs is sorry for Lucy.
She’s the youngest and smallest of them all, so of course she’s come in for more than her share of teasing. Apart from Camie, she’s the only girl, too, and - she’s not like Camie. Lucy is petulant, gentle, impulsive, as fanciful as Camie is down-to-earth. She wears skirts half the time, keeps her hair long and never quite fits in, even when she starts tinkering with machinery and hurtling across Beggars’ Canyon. That makes it worse, in a way; it’s one thing to be shown up by a tomboy like Camie, quite another by dreamy, girlish Lucy Skywalker.
Lucy herself doesn’t seem to care, or even notice. She rarely pays attention to anything happening nearer than a few parsecs, anyway. But when Biggs sees her watching the sky, alone but for the occasional droid, he still can’t help but feel sorry for her.
(6) Obi-Wan Kenobi
Obi-Wan regrets lying to Lucy.
He’s not really lying, of course. He can’t tell her everything; the enormity of the truth would crush anyone, let alone a seventeen-year-old girl with too much of her father in her. He tells her what he can.
Anakin was a Jedi Knight.
(He would never have given his daughters to the Order.)
He wanted her to have his lightsaber.
(Well, he’d have wanted one of them to have it. Probably. He said something about giving it to Padmé if anything happened to him. Did he know by then? He must have. Obi-Wan did.)
He was a good friend.
(In Obi-Wan’s mind, Anakin is always young and vibrant. It’s strange to think that he’d be forty if -- if he’d lived.)
He was destroyed by Darth Vader.
(Anakin was gone from the moment Vader knelt before the Emperor. They had to protect the girls from him; Lucy isn’t Vader’s daughter, she’s Anakin’s and Vader would cut her down without remorse, without a thought. Just like the other children. It wouldn’t matter that she’s his -- that his blood flows in her veins -- because she’s Anakin’s daughter and he’s not Anakin and they all know it.)
They’re partial truths, not lies. But he regrets the necessity nonetheless.
(7) Han Solo
When Han invites Lucy to stay with him, he’s not imagining her as his lover.
It just all comes out wrong. And then Chewie roars with laughter and Lucy looks like she’s -- well, like she’s a sheltered teenage girl who just got propositioned by a thirty-year-old smuggler. But that’s not what he means. One glance around and he can tell that these are the kind of people who wouldn’t dream of putting women in fighters. Nice people. What’ll they do with Lucy, let her give rousing speeches to the men? No, they've got Leia for that. Lucy'll probably end up a glorified secretary, if they’re feeling generous - she’s not royalty.
Han saw her fight. He knows she’s a good shot and a hell of a pilot and he thinks he could probably put up with her fits of heroism and it’s a damn waste and he likes her. Doesn’t hurt that she’s good-looking, of course. If she showed up in his quarters, he wouldn't exactly say no. But it's not what he's asking.
Then she does end up in a flight suit, after all, and she's babbling something about Biggs and Leia, and he heads off to repay Jabba and the expression on her face makes him feel more like he's kicking a puppy than just doing his job.
He can't stop thinking of them, Lucy-and-Leia, worlds apart and somehow the same as they look at him, small and defiant and disappointed. And he keeps hearing Lucy's outraged cry - they're going to kill her! - only the girl in the cell isn't Leia alone, but both of them. They're going to die now, as Chewie so helpfully reminds him, Leia blasted away with Yavin, like Alderaan all over again, Lucy shot down somewhere up there.
He's turning back before he even knows what he's doing, and praying he's not too late and he's not and for once doing the right thing works and the Imp spins away and Lucy blows up the Death Star and they've won. Han and Lucy and Leia are laughing and hugging each other and this time when he walks off, it's with one arm slung around each girl's shoulders, and then Leia's putting a medal around his neck and she and Lucy are practically giggling and he doesn't even know who to wink at first.
(8) Leia Organa
Leia only kisses Lucy to wipe that smirk off Han's face.
She's never kissed a girl before, and she doesn't even know what she expected it would be like. Stranger than it is, she thinks, feeling Lucy's brief gasp of astonishment. It's not really that different from kissing a man. Lucy's lips are softer, maybe.
Something about it does feel peculiar, though. Not just her fingers digging into hairless skin, her arm brushing Lucy's breasts as she bends over her, the long heavy hair falling over her hands, not even Han gaping at them. It's -- it's familiar, all of it: the two of them in comforting darkness, their eyes closed and bodies close, the oddly soothing thud of Lucy's heartbeat. They've been like this before, but also not like this, it shouldn't be like this, and she only met Lucy last year but it all seems so long ago, and for some reason she's seeing her mother's face again.
Leia steps back, relieved that her cheeks aren't hot, and that Lucy doesn't seem angry. Lucy, she feels obscurely, is safe. Her best friend, and --
Han still hasn't picked up his jaw. Lucy and Leia can't resist grinning at each other, unable to feel the rivalry that ought to lie between them, and with one satisfied look at Han, Leia sails off.
(Much, much later, Lucy admits that she'd have liked her first kiss to be about her, not Han. Then she laughs. "It was worth it, though, just to see the look on his face.")
(Han, who values his life, never tells them what he was thinking.)
(9) Yoda
Yoda doesn't want either of the Skywalker girls to be trained.
He's watched them all their lives. Watched their guardians try to cool their father's blood in them, and fail. Watched them rush heedlessly into the wider galaxy, never mindful of the more fragile lives around them. Heard their wild laughter as the Force guides Leia's aim, Lucy's flight. Felt them swinging between rage and fear and joy, never serene, never content. Always ready to draw on anger. Always longing for more.
Just like their father, and not only as he was: their father now.
Obi-Wan, perhaps, cannot face that truth. He has a heavy burden to shoulder, and he finds what peace he can. And it is true enough that there is nothing of Skywalker left in Darth Vader. But there is much of Darth Vader in the Skywalker twins.
Perhaps it is best that the Jedi fade away entirely. Better that than what Vader and his daughters could unleash upon the galaxy. But if one of them is to be trained, it must be Lucy. Flighty as she may be, she is stronger in the Force, slower to anger, less prone to cling to resentment and hatred. Yes, it must be her.
Yoda's vision has become clearer with time. He sees, now, that Anakin Skywalker's fall was not an inevitable certainty, as he has so long believed, or preferred to believe. Hundreds of choices -- Skywalker's, Obi-Wan's, Yoda's own -- led to that final, irrevocable choice. That it happened that way does not mean that it could only happen that way. For him or for his daughter.
Always in motion, the future is.
(10) Darth Vader
Vader is mildly surprised to discover that the pilot who destroyed the Death Star is a woman. He's so shocked to hear her identification that he accidentally kills his prisoner.
Lieutenant Skywalker.
There could be other Skywalkers in the galaxy, of course. His mother rarely talked about - before - but he knows she came of a large family. There's no reason to assume a nearer connection between them. No reason except the girl blazing in the Force as she spun through the trench.
But it can't be. Padmé was pregnant when she died. He saw her himself. He killed her himself, her and their child. Unless -- no, it's not possible. It's not. Who's to say the Force wasn't already strong in his family? His mother never said. This girl is undoubtedly some remote cousin, or --
Nevertheless, he sends his best agent to uncover every scrap of information about her. When the report arrives, he even hesitates a moment before dismissing whatever remnants of sentimental weakness he still possesses. The pilot is simply a Rebel terrorist whose abilities make her a threat, if a small one; Vader's pursuit of her is his duty to the Empire, and no more. He flips the datapad open, and looks at the girl's name.
Skywalker, Lucy Amidala.
The room is silent but for his respirator: it hitches, then cycles one, three, seven times as he reads. Lucy Skywalker turned eighteen with the Empire, which removes any lingering doubts. The coincidence is too great. His wife almost certainly died that day, but not on Mustafar. Not by his hand. She lived to bear their child. This child, this girl who destroyed the Death Star in a single stroke.
He never liked it anyway.
There isn't much more than that. His daughter grew up on Tatooine, just like him - hidden, he thinks, stolen - and joined the Rebellion at seventeen. She's been involved in a number of minor skirmishes since then, and occasionally appears with Princess Leia, talking earnestly of restoring peace and order. She is misguided, of course, but no worse. And she's his daughter.
His daughter.
Warning: canonical quasi-incest at #8! Blissfully ignoring anything that doesn't appear in the movies! (Yes, I do know that the Skywalker twins are officially nineteen. I chose to average out their ages in the script, instead.)
Ten Facts About
(1) Anakin Skywalker
Anakin knows his child is a girl.
He hasn’t felt her life in the Force yet – she’s too young for that – but still, he knows. He can almost see her: a girl standing in the wind, her blue eyes wide, her hair bleached golden by a sun somewhere. Not suns, like it was for him. His daughter will never set foot on the burning desolation that held and tormented his mother. She will be free.
He doesn’t know this – not in the way that he knows she’ll be a girl with his chin and hands and eyes and hair. But he wants it fiercely enough to make it so.
(2) Padmé Amidala
Padmé doesn’t know if the baby’s a boy or a girl. She’d like a daughter, but she doesn’t know for sure, and she’ll be happy either way. Besides, she wants to be surprised.
By the time her two daughters are born, Padmé isn’t happy. But she’s certainly surprised.
(3) Beru Lars
Beru realises right away that the baby could become her daughter. There’s a vague resemblance, and it’s not as if Lucy will be able to remember the woman who bore her. They could give her their name and call her their daughter and make her their own.
They don’t. Instead, Lucy stays Lucy Skywalker, their orphaned, offwolder niece, and never even thinks of herself as anything else. Neither do they. But Beru still loves her.
She’s a good aunt. As Lucy grows up, asking questions, poking at their lies, building herself around the Anakin-shaped hole in her world, Beru can only hope that it’s enough.
(4) Owen Lars
Sometimes, Owen is afraid of his niece.
You must be so proud of Lucy, the neighbours say, such a sweet girl - and yes, she is, but there’s more. They don’t see the dissatisfaction and sudden blind rages, the ferocity and ambition, even the way her sunny simplicity can edge towards cruelty. She hasn’t got a malicious bone in her body, but she’ll set her mind on something and the gods help anyone who gets in her way.
More often, though, he’s afraid for her.
Lucy may chafe at the constraints she lives under, but she lives. It’s more than her father or mother can say. More than her grandmother. The galaxy is a cold, black place for the young - she’s far better off here, safely shut up in the house, than running off like Anakin and getting herself killed or worse.
(5) Biggs Darklighter
Biggs is sorry for Lucy.
She’s the youngest and smallest of them all, so of course she’s come in for more than her share of teasing. Apart from Camie, she’s the only girl, too, and - she’s not like Camie. Lucy is petulant, gentle, impulsive, as fanciful as Camie is down-to-earth. She wears skirts half the time, keeps her hair long and never quite fits in, even when she starts tinkering with machinery and hurtling across Beggars’ Canyon. That makes it worse, in a way; it’s one thing to be shown up by a tomboy like Camie, quite another by dreamy, girlish Lucy Skywalker.
Lucy herself doesn’t seem to care, or even notice. She rarely pays attention to anything happening nearer than a few parsecs, anyway. But when Biggs sees her watching the sky, alone but for the occasional droid, he still can’t help but feel sorry for her.
(6) Obi-Wan Kenobi
Obi-Wan regrets lying to Lucy.
He’s not really lying, of course. He can’t tell her everything; the enormity of the truth would crush anyone, let alone a seventeen-year-old girl with too much of her father in her. He tells her what he can.
Anakin was a Jedi Knight.
(He would never have given his daughters to the Order.)
He wanted her to have his lightsaber.
(Well, he’d have wanted one of them to have it. Probably. He said something about giving it to Padmé if anything happened to him. Did he know by then? He must have. Obi-Wan did.)
He was a good friend.
(In Obi-Wan’s mind, Anakin is always young and vibrant. It’s strange to think that he’d be forty if -- if he’d lived.)
He was destroyed by Darth Vader.
(Anakin was gone from the moment Vader knelt before the Emperor. They had to protect the girls from him; Lucy isn’t Vader’s daughter, she’s Anakin’s and Vader would cut her down without remorse, without a thought. Just like the other children. It wouldn’t matter that she’s his -- that his blood flows in her veins -- because she’s Anakin’s daughter and he’s not Anakin and they all know it.)
They’re partial truths, not lies. But he regrets the necessity nonetheless.
(7) Han Solo
When Han invites Lucy to stay with him, he’s not imagining her as his lover.
It just all comes out wrong. And then Chewie roars with laughter and Lucy looks like she’s -- well, like she’s a sheltered teenage girl who just got propositioned by a thirty-year-old smuggler. But that’s not what he means. One glance around and he can tell that these are the kind of people who wouldn’t dream of putting women in fighters. Nice people. What’ll they do with Lucy, let her give rousing speeches to the men? No, they've got Leia for that. Lucy'll probably end up a glorified secretary, if they’re feeling generous - she’s not royalty.
Han saw her fight. He knows she’s a good shot and a hell of a pilot and he thinks he could probably put up with her fits of heroism and it’s a damn waste and he likes her. Doesn’t hurt that she’s good-looking, of course. If she showed up in his quarters, he wouldn't exactly say no. But it's not what he's asking.
Then she does end up in a flight suit, after all, and she's babbling something about Biggs and Leia, and he heads off to repay Jabba and the expression on her face makes him feel more like he's kicking a puppy than just doing his job.
He can't stop thinking of them, Lucy-and-Leia, worlds apart and somehow the same as they look at him, small and defiant and disappointed. And he keeps hearing Lucy's outraged cry - they're going to kill her! - only the girl in the cell isn't Leia alone, but both of them. They're going to die now, as Chewie so helpfully reminds him, Leia blasted away with Yavin, like Alderaan all over again, Lucy shot down somewhere up there.
He's turning back before he even knows what he's doing, and praying he's not too late and he's not and for once doing the right thing works and the Imp spins away and Lucy blows up the Death Star and they've won. Han and Lucy and Leia are laughing and hugging each other and this time when he walks off, it's with one arm slung around each girl's shoulders, and then Leia's putting a medal around his neck and she and Lucy are practically giggling and he doesn't even know who to wink at first.
(8) Leia Organa
Leia only kisses Lucy to wipe that smirk off Han's face.
She's never kissed a girl before, and she doesn't even know what she expected it would be like. Stranger than it is, she thinks, feeling Lucy's brief gasp of astonishment. It's not really that different from kissing a man. Lucy's lips are softer, maybe.
Something about it does feel peculiar, though. Not just her fingers digging into hairless skin, her arm brushing Lucy's breasts as she bends over her, the long heavy hair falling over her hands, not even Han gaping at them. It's -- it's familiar, all of it: the two of them in comforting darkness, their eyes closed and bodies close, the oddly soothing thud of Lucy's heartbeat. They've been like this before, but also not like this, it shouldn't be like this, and she only met Lucy last year but it all seems so long ago, and for some reason she's seeing her mother's face again.
Leia steps back, relieved that her cheeks aren't hot, and that Lucy doesn't seem angry. Lucy, she feels obscurely, is safe. Her best friend, and --
Han still hasn't picked up his jaw. Lucy and Leia can't resist grinning at each other, unable to feel the rivalry that ought to lie between them, and with one satisfied look at Han, Leia sails off.
(Much, much later, Lucy admits that she'd have liked her first kiss to be about her, not Han. Then she laughs. "It was worth it, though, just to see the look on his face.")
(Han, who values his life, never tells them what he was thinking.)
(9) Yoda
Yoda doesn't want either of the Skywalker girls to be trained.
He's watched them all their lives. Watched their guardians try to cool their father's blood in them, and fail. Watched them rush heedlessly into the wider galaxy, never mindful of the more fragile lives around them. Heard their wild laughter as the Force guides Leia's aim, Lucy's flight. Felt them swinging between rage and fear and joy, never serene, never content. Always ready to draw on anger. Always longing for more.
Just like their father, and not only as he was: their father now.
Obi-Wan, perhaps, cannot face that truth. He has a heavy burden to shoulder, and he finds what peace he can. And it is true enough that there is nothing of Skywalker left in Darth Vader. But there is much of Darth Vader in the Skywalker twins.
Perhaps it is best that the Jedi fade away entirely. Better that than what Vader and his daughters could unleash upon the galaxy. But if one of them is to be trained, it must be Lucy. Flighty as she may be, she is stronger in the Force, slower to anger, less prone to cling to resentment and hatred. Yes, it must be her.
Yoda's vision has become clearer with time. He sees, now, that Anakin Skywalker's fall was not an inevitable certainty, as he has so long believed, or preferred to believe. Hundreds of choices -- Skywalker's, Obi-Wan's, Yoda's own -- led to that final, irrevocable choice. That it happened that way does not mean that it could only happen that way. For him or for his daughter.
Always in motion, the future is.
(10) Darth Vader
Vader is mildly surprised to discover that the pilot who destroyed the Death Star is a woman. He's so shocked to hear her identification that he accidentally kills his prisoner.
Lieutenant Skywalker.
There could be other Skywalkers in the galaxy, of course. His mother rarely talked about - before - but he knows she came of a large family. There's no reason to assume a nearer connection between them. No reason except the girl blazing in the Force as she spun through the trench.
But it can't be. Padmé was pregnant when she died. He saw her himself. He killed her himself, her and their child. Unless -- no, it's not possible. It's not. Who's to say the Force wasn't already strong in his family? His mother never said. This girl is undoubtedly some remote cousin, or --
Nevertheless, he sends his best agent to uncover every scrap of information about her. When the report arrives, he even hesitates a moment before dismissing whatever remnants of sentimental weakness he still possesses. The pilot is simply a Rebel terrorist whose abilities make her a threat, if a small one; Vader's pursuit of her is his duty to the Empire, and no more. He flips the datapad open, and looks at the girl's name.
Skywalker, Lucy Amidala.
The room is silent but for his respirator: it hitches, then cycles one, three, seven times as he reads. Lucy Skywalker turned eighteen with the Empire, which removes any lingering doubts. The coincidence is too great. His wife almost certainly died that day, but not on Mustafar. Not by his hand. She lived to bear their child. This child, this girl who destroyed the Death Star in a single stroke.
He never liked it anyway.
There isn't much more than that. His daughter grew up on Tatooine, just like him - hidden, he thinks, stolen - and joined the Rebellion at seventeen. She's been involved in a number of minor skirmishes since then, and occasionally appears with Princess Leia, talking earnestly of restoring peace and order. She is misguided, of course, but no worse. And she's his daughter.
His daughter.