Work Text:
But I do know how to love
Oh, isn’t that enough?
Seems to work for us
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My sister was my life.
My life was always with her, and full of her.
My life was….
Inconsequential.
That’s what they want me to think, anyway. Just a pair of girls, cowering in barns, cowering in shadows, cowering behind useless hope for someone who never comes. We hold hands, and we look after our own. Our parents were gone before we can remember, shadows of the past that we cannot hide behind. Our inheritance was this captivity, a childhood of bitterness and blood in your mouth. They- they do not care about us, they only care for how we benefit them. And oh, how we do benefit them.
We raise the horses from birth. Every child gets one, every time there’s another birth, and you protect that horse for the rest of your captivity, or until the horse crumbles to the ground and slumps over as they all do. As we all do.
We will not be like that. My sister whispers hope to me in in-between moments, under tables and behind doors. And she whispers to me, when you look up, look for the red star at night. The people there- they would free us, if we could reach them. And I nod, because she’s my sister, and she’s right.
And when I look up, I can almost see their faces.
The people that will save us, someday-
They come too late.
Paige gets out before me, when she’s seventeen and aflame with single-minded passion. She works for me, and I….
I just survive. She says, And that’s enough.
And this is what my sister does for me:
A flower, on my windowsill.
A blanket, on my bed.
Her kiss, on my forehead.
And someday, freedom, like a dream so distant, but still a call forever on my lips. Freedom, like a dream that won’t let you go, no matter how far away you are. Freedom, that is what she gave me.
I couldn’t do anything for her. But she was my life, anyway. She was my family, my friend, my savior. She was my life.
Everywhere I look, there is her.
Here she is, at a windowsill, smiling at something.
Here she is, lying on my bed, teasing me, throwing paper at me so I’ll pay attention to her.
Here she is, holding onto me like I’m all she’s got. You are, though, she insists.
I whisper to her, before I’m free, when we’re both still foolish children who don’t know their place.
Don’t let go of me.
I will never. And Paige’s face shines, like Paige’s face always shines. Even in the dark, she can see where she’s going.
Paige runs fast, fast, fast, always on a trajectory to land exactly where she wants to be. My sister can outrun the world with her eyes closed. She can end up wherever she wants to, wherever she sets her gaze. Fate will never catch her- she’s far too fast.
She sets her gaze on the Resistance. It is a whisper, a phantom on our lips, on the lips of all children who come from the shadows. These faraway stars who could take us far away, these faraway faces who could give us a reason to believe in hope.
She wants them.
And Paige gets what she wants.
I will follow her into the dark, and beyond. To the dust and dunes of far-off worlds, through uncertainty and strife. I will be with Paige, no matter what.
She is the best of me, she is my family, she is my best friend.
We cannot be heroes, but we join those who will become so.
So we search for them, in the stars, two girls who don’t know much about anything except how to survive. At first, there are only whispers in the street- someday, the Resistance will return in a blaze of its former glory, just you wait- and then there are shouts in the square- they ABANDONED us! They’re hiding, those cowards!- and then there is a real human, alive, speaking to us.
He is a tall, brash man, laughing in our faces in a bar. Two girls?! Join the Resistance? What could a girl possibly do for us. I hang my head, feeling like I’ve been thrown back and spit out, but when I look down I see Paige’s hand clench.
But when she speaks again, her voice is as easy and breezy as ever. Isn’t your leader a woman? she asks him, and he sets his glass down none too carefully, too drunk to care about how much noise he made but too sober to reply straight away. When he does, his voice is a slow drawl.
Well…..yes, she is. But she’s educated by the best, and she’s been through a lot. Paige suddenly stretches her arms outwards. Haven’t we all?! Look at me. Look at my sister. Do we look like children who know how to let our hands go without calluses? Do we look like we’ve ever eaten enough? Do you think that for even a second, we’ve ever been carefree? I think that is the first time he looks at us, blinking. His voice is a slow drawl again, but more hushed. In the noisy bar, she and I both have to lean forward to hear him.
Every child deserves to have at least one moment of happiness to hold onto. He says it, almost like a whisper, almost like a prayer. All reverence and hush. That’s what our leader says to us. Suddenly, he leans down to look me in the eye. Slaves, huh? Well, where you’ve come from you’ve probably learned to work yourselves to the bone. He pauses to throw back his drink, and motions for us to follow him with a flick of his fingers. And trust me, you will learn if you haven’t yet.
We joined the Resistance, and it was no dream.
Paige is quick to find her, quick to see that she was meant to soar in the sky with the people she draws to her like moths to a lantern. She joins the pilot system and trains in the bomber program, and with that smile on her face and her jacket in hand, and I think- she was born for this. She was always meant to do this, from before she was born.
I, on the other hand, have a harder time. Everyone has a talent, Paige laughs. Yours is just hidden somewhere, and you have to wake it up. I grumble back to her, but I’m smiling too by then. I wish I could grab my talent by the shoulders and shake it awake!
I have no memories of my mother, but I have a single, treasured one of my father. When I could barely be but four years old, I’m sitting on his workbench as he fixes something. I picked up the right tool to hand to him without being asked, and his smile seems to fill up the room with light. I can’t remember his voice, but in my childhood shape of him, his voice is warm and commanding and full. You see how things fit together, Rose.
Finally, finally, my talent awakens. One day, I help Paige and her friends figure out why their ship failed them out on the field, just this once, and suddenly I’m swept away by the engineering department. We need people like you, they say. We need people who can help us patch up what is broken. Paige just grins, and teases me that I’m a healer. I swat at her, and insist I’m no healer. I just like when everything turns out right. I can see it coming.
Don’t they call that an optimist?
I look at her smile, filling up the room, wider than the sky and the stars together. My sister is the brightest thing in the world.
I guess so, Paige. I think so, at least.
I learn the names of her squad, of the people who are in charge of us. I learn the names of the two tinkerers who are on call with me, Jayna, Mayra. The lunch lady who likes to yell at us and give us too much- Etta. The girls who share our room, the brothers across the hall. Slowly, slowly, their faces become not just the stars at night, but real people, people with names and stories and faces.
None of it is easy. Nothing is ever easy- not for me. But it is worth it, anyhow. Paige and I work and work, and laugh until our faces hurt, and we cry with every new victory and every feared loss. We sing terrible songs with our squadrons, we sneak food onto the roof, and sometimes I lie on the roof with her and try to find the stars we grew up with.
The stars are friends, no matter where you end up. They might be different, in strange shapes and constellations, but they are still old friends that watch over you when you sleep.
The Resistance grows on me overnight, almost without my noticing it. They are my old friends, the stars, winking down at me from the roof of the place that is my home now. And they are my new family, the people that surround me on all sides, all these people who call out my name when I pass by, who go into that darkness so that the world may remain free. Their stories intertwine in my mind, until I have a forest of them living in my mind, my heart, my soul. The stars have faces now, and they all love something enough to give up life for it.
I always believe, somehow, in some part of my heart that turns towards the light constantly, constantly, that death will spare us. I do not know how I believe it, or even why I do. Perhaps that is the truth of all of us fighting a righteous war- we do not think that we, us, those who are blameless, could be ever touched by the shadow. We think, surely we at least can escape fate. Fate never cared about us, anyway. It will never touch us, now.
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When my sister dies, my life falls apart.
No, I fall apart.
Can your life be stitched together by a single person?
If the person raised you, loved you, filled you with light and stories and hope?
The world is too bright, for a while. Too clear-cut around the edges.
There is a hole now, a hole that will never be filled. Like if there was a pair of scissors taken to the scrapbook of my memory, and every image of my sister was cut out. The scraps of her left to me seem to flitter from my fingers, too stretched out and far between.
I have always felt too much, far too much for a slave, far too much for a girl, far too much for a human. I love too much, too quickly, for too few things. Without my sister, I’m knocked off balance- I’m a ship without a dock, a vine without a house to clamber. Without my sister, my windowsill is empty, and my world becomes-
No longer shaped around two, but shaped around one.
All at once, I feel myself coming undone.
I’m not numb- I can’t be numb. I’m just holding off of feeling anything until the war is won!
Parts of me louder than the rest want to throw it all away-
They call for me to recklessly forget what Paige sacrificed so I could stay.
The singing metal in my core knows I will live, and live and live-
And as for Paige, well,
Everyone tells me how she is missed.
I don’t miss her. It’s like I’ve had my arm ripped away from me, and I keep trying to reach with it.
What is it like to be human? I’m just going through the motions at this point, without knowing why.
But I keep going anyway, and I suppose that is the whole point.
The spaces where my sister used to be seem to haunt me at every corner, almost filling me up more than her presence did, once.
What do you do, when your very reason for life has passed forever from this side of the veil?
I’m a shell, hardly a person, wandering through the halls I used to fill with wonder and awe, and now they’re just- halls.
I’m idealistic. I know I am- I always want people to be more than they are, and I end up disappointed with empty hands when it turns out that they’re just humans, after all.
His name is Finn. He helped save the Resistance. He’ll do it again, for someone he loves.
He’s no angel, no war hero, no sort of god for me to stake my hopes and dreams onto. He is foolish, and follows his heart carelessly into danger and pitfalls. He doesn’t overthink things, but he’s careful all the same. He’s there, leaning over the balcony, smiling with the glitter of the city’s lights in his eyes. He’s leaning on the doorway of a shuttle, lying through his teeth. He’s here, looking at me straight on, like someone who does not know how to turn away.
I set my jaw and I force myself look at him right back. I grind my teeth and shatter his sparkling-eyed idealism with a wave of my hand. I wish he was shorter, so I could glare at him more easily, without having to admit that he is taller than I am. I challenge his views at every turn, because they’re wrong. I understand wanting to love the world, and everything seems brighter than the prison you’ve always known- I get it. I do.
But I love the Resistance too, and it is something worth loving. Not just- for my sister’s shape, for her victory over life and death and everything in between. Not just because it’s the right thing to do, because it’s what every child dreams of. I love the Resistance for itself, for the faces it wears, the cause it lives on for. The people who fight for us are not all just, but the reasons they stay are just, and when we stay together I can hear our hearts beat in unison, and we are the shore that the waves vainly beat against.
This boy has never had that. He has never had a reason to stay- instead he has every reason to leave. He has no anchor, no harbor. He drifts as his heart tells him to, seeking this pleasure and that source of light. He’s idealistic, but he has nothing to idealize in the first place- it almost hurts my heart to watch that. He has nothing to tie himself to, no cause to die for. Love is all he has, whispers my sister, or at least the shape of her that stays with me. Doesn’t that remind you of anyone, Rose?
Finn leans over the balcony, grinning easily at the races. Finn leans on the doorway, trying to convince me that he’s right this time around. He doesn’t burst into my life; there are no explosions, no fireworks, nothing to announce his arrival. But all the same, he inserts himself into my life, and I cannot forget him. He sits by my windowsill, and asks me where I’m from. He follows me to lunch, and wonders what my favorite day of the week is. He keeps high company, but he somehow escaped becoming full of himself. I can’t forget him, and I can’t look away from him.
Is this how you fall in love, Rose? I want to shake myself, tear my heart out and fling it over the edge so it could stop betraying me when I least need it. He’s too young, he’s too inexperienced, he’s not from the Resistance, he’s too loud, he’s too brash, he’s too much of anything I can twist around to make it all wrong for me. But still, but still.
I feel like I’m continually pulled downstream, rolling down a hill, being flung through the air in a constant trajectory towards him. Always him, in the end.
He doesn’t understand home. He doesn’t have the concept of family….not yet. He still thinks that courage is faceless death, that bravery is all about jumping without looking and letting the consequences fall as they will. So much of him is so antithetical to my values, and yet, and yet.
Finn says, “Rose.”- just that, naught else, and my heart seems to grow larger than the room. Finn says, “Don’t talk to her like that!” and it’s like I’ve suddenly sipped a goblet of sunshine and golden light. My heart betrays me when he says my name, and he defends me without having to think twice about it. And I-I….don’t know what I’m supposed to do when someone hands you the world, just like that.
He chose you, you know.
What is it that people love to say? Love is all about choices?
Perhaps he chose me, in all my numbness, tears all over my face as I was in my most vulnerable state.
Perhaps it really took longer than that, it took shared bravado and mistaken choices.
Perhaps…..he hasn’t chosen me yet. Not really, at least.
Does it really matter? Because-
I chose him first.
This is the Finn that I know, now.
He is kind. Oh, how he is kind. He’s messily kind, and he tries too hard for it. He values life, and he values safety and security. He says things without thinking,
The sun shines when he smiles. He trips and stumbles over everything he tries to do. Nothing seems to come easily to him, but he doesn’t let that deter him. He has had to fail, and fail, and falter, but in the end, all those heartbreaks and failures brought him here- here, to home, friends, a worthy cause. He loves people too fast, too soon, he lets himself drown in the memory of them. He disappoints me, but then he does something that makes him- makes him astonishing, all over again.
His heart rings true, true through all the ashes of his past, ringing through every hallway he walks through.
He is so bright, and I want to hold his hand. He is so kind, and I want to look at him forever.
I love him like I’ve always known him, like he has been in my heart forever, waiting for me to wake up and look to him.
I love him like he’s always been with me, like a song that I know I've never heard, but the melody of it is so familiar, so loving, that I want to weep when I hear it.
He makes the pain in my life fade like stains coming apart from thread, he makes my loneliness less present or perhaps, just more like an old friend.
He is so young, he is so young. He still sees the glitter of a world that's not really there. He looks at people once and chooses them on the spot.
I loved him before I knew it, and I knew quickly.
I don’t believe that love is here to save me, that it will shield me from all pain and sorrow in the world. I don’t believe that love is a ship I can row away in, a strange escape from the mundane world we live in. I love him, and I am the same, but somehow I am different, too. Love changes us, its fingers slipping into the pages of our lives to turn a chapter from one to the next. Love changes us, but I am still Rose Tico.
Love changed me, changed the Resistance into something I could love, changed a runaway rebel into the Person I Chose. Love was what I survived for, what guided me, even if it was only enough for me to keep hold of my sister’s hand. And love to me, well, it was always there, always something that was awake enough for me to grasp when I needed it.
But to love Finn- well, it seems so simple. He doesn’t change everything; but he does change what I see in it. Everything is the same as it always was, same look and feel and order, but now it is heightened, brighter. Somehow he makes everything more of itself and yet more familiar, like it was always that way all along and I never noticed.
The world is just the world- it is no longer the world that Paige lives in and loves, not anymore. It’s a mundane, usual world, with meals and plans and machines that always need fixing, but it’s occasionally, so very occasionally beautiful, all the same.
I think that is my gift, after all. To be able to seek out beauty and find it in the unlikeliest of places. That is why I like order, why I can see how things fit together. I can always find something to love- you just have to give me enough to time to seek it out.
I’m still unraveled, still like pieces of yarn unspooling from a scarf that’s coming undone. It takes a long time, but it stops hurting in the same way, eventually.
No one can fill in the spaces where Paige used to be, no one can make seem like life is always worth living through, like she always could. I can gather as many loves as I like in my life, but it will always hurt me when she’s not there to laugh at me, to hold my hand and look after me. My love for my sister is always present, and it doesn’t fade with the washing of time.
And to love Finn- it doesn’t save me from that. It doesn’t change it, not really. He softens the edges of my pain, makes it a less bitter pill to swallow when I have someone to come home to. But can’t make my love disappear, and I wouldn’t want him to. I can love him, and he can love me back, and he can make me happy, gloriously happy, richer in happiness than a king or the sun or the flowers in springtime. I love him, and it always exists, somewhere in the back of my soul, even when I don’t remember that it’s there.
I go through the acts of my life, and somehow, someday, they are not just acts, but I’m alive- not just surviving because of someone else. It’s not overnight, or even in a year’s time. It’s barely even discernable to anyone other than myself, and even I can barely make it out. All of a sudden, it dawns on me that I love living, and I love being alive, I love being able to live the life I live. I’m no shell- I am a human, part of the greatest cause in the universe. I am a human, with a heart that beats out of my chest. I’m….I’m Rose Tico. And I am here.
I love Finn.
I love him as it rains and as it shines, as something that is always there, but just….fades out a little, sometimes. My love for him is a quiet house in the hills of my heart, a refuge I can return to and keep as a fire, burning through the darkness of nighttime. My love for him doesn’t redeem me, doesn’t save me, and it doesn’t have to.
I watch as he blurs the cutouts of my sister, slowly but surely. My sister is never gone from me, but the bitter edges of her absence, the black hole in my heart that eats up all new and good things that come my way- well, he helps that fade away. She is no longer something to haunt my steps, taunting my lack of self. She’s not someone who reminds me of all the ways I failed her, and failed all my life. Finn softens the pain of her, and as I make myself keep on living, the bitterness of it passes me by eventually. All the while, I can feel the shape of where my sister used to be, smiling.
I smile back.
I watch as I, myself, willingly pick up the threads, and stitch myself back together.
Love doesn’t heal you.
I heal me.
But he was a good reason to heal, in the end.
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your eyes all aglitter, so lost in a dream
oh darling, I wish the world was what you think
it’s like I’m on the outside, looking in
but you pull me by the hand, and it’s not pretend
this is the real thing, this is the beginning and the end
so I feel the tears in my fabric beginning to mend
who knew love was always an old friend?