Work Text:
It isn’t the Major’s place to second-guess her orders or to regret them.
She is, overall, wholly remarkable at keeping in her place. If she weren’t, she never would have gotten this far. And she’s known that this was coming for a long time; it’s the apotheosis of her long, long mission if anything is ever going to be. For two years she’s even been on effective standing orders of If and when necessary, Major, you may fire when ready.
But she has a timeline, now, and as it turns out: she’s not ready. She doesn’t think she was ever going to be. She doesn’t think she’s capable. But if there was going to be a time and place it’s neither here nor now.
There are those—more of them than not—among the First Order who would consider this self-evident treason. No reason to wait and see if she stays her hand: merely the fact that being told to get it over with flays her to the bone, for them, is proof enough. More than enough. She’s pretty sure they’re all wrong. She’s pretty sure she’s the one who would know.
This would be easier absent her grief, but absent her grief she’d be left without what makes her good for deep cover in the first place; the hypothetical is pointless. She’s not supposed to second-guess her orders but she is and she should be long-stripped of regret but she’s not.
So that doesn't get to matter to anyone, she thinks, if it can't be changed. Not when she can still get the job done.
She can. She will.
All it will cost is a little time, first. Time to steel herself but no real preparation otherwise. She's had more than enough practice being able and unready to not need to think.
Given this, once it's inevitable, the time she takes to do what she shouldn't—to walk through whether there are any loopholes through which she can come out unchanged, the regret already suffocating at the mere fact of receiving her final orders at all—isn't pertinent. It would matter only were it to somehow keep her from her duty.
So it’s a good thing no one’s watching her now, and that she doesn’t care about that particular rusting chain of command that would block her path for having paused on it besides. They will get the news when they get it, and even suffer awe; they don’t have to know about how long it takes to stop breathing like it’s the closest she’ll get to getting a knife in her own gut, or how she can’t even not be grateful when the Resistance’s true believers that surround her see grief’s inevitable and unpredictable aftershocks and offer only understanding. As long as she gets it right, no one who would judge her has to know anything but the fact that they’ve been blessed, and if she gets it wrong, the First Order whose fleet sits in orbits across the galaxy uneasily circling the fact that they are sitting ducks—that First Order doesn’t have to know.
She may be doing this for them—also, always—but that’s not where her real superior is.
And she knows that one will understand. She knows. She has to.
She is stalling. She knows she’s stalling. She also knows her trade, because that’s who she is, and it lets her stall her way all through the day and the early shades of night, into still and silent morning.
She thinks about treason, once or twice, as she does: treason, desertion, the short sharp shocks that are all they can earn. She checks over her weapons again, and again, and again, every time it’s only normal to; and she makes conversation with her friends, here, who see her misery and stand to offer warmth or stability or distance. It’s what they always do.
But this time she makes light of it, insistently, and over the course of the evening they accept. The Major needs room to work, soon enough, after all, and shortly thereafter they’re all going to need whatever advantages and ability to grieve they can get.
She’s going to be heartbroken, real and truly, the quiet dry-mouthed misery of today is barely a shadow cast ahead of it. How could she not? Her cover has no other option but neither does she herself. She’s wanted many things over the years, few abandoned and fewer acquired, and among them the desire for the war to end is bright and long-lived.
There’s no way that sentiment isn’t one she shares with the whole of the galaxy. Not if they could be forced to tell the truth about it. War scrapes away at those who profit from it and who convince themselves they wanted it to begin with. No one thrives. That’s the point. If anyone were meaningfully unscathed it wouldn’t really be war, only things that aren’t war just expand to fill the space they’re given until they are.
And wars only end—really end—if they’re ended right. The galaxy’s had over half a century to learn that lesson, after all. Even if not everyone knows that they know.
So she’ll do her duty, because she has to and because she can’t not. Because everything else can shift, and does, but still she will want the war to be over.
Everything can shift, and does, but: she has never wanted Leia Organa to die.
Even the idea is painful. Organa—General Leia—is a legend, better than a legend; she would see her as a goddess if she weren’t fairly certain General Leia wouldn’t like that. She deserves to be seen the way she wants to be. She deserves so much. The Major wishes she could die for her instead, sometimes.
There are people who deserve better on both sides. That's what war is. If they were all on one side it would be peace.
She knows this, but General Leia says her name, and when she does it still makes her want to cry. The General knows her now, naturally—she'd be hard pressed not to, there's all of three dozen of the Resistance really left—but she did even before, too. Leia made note of who she was when she was nothing to her because that's the manner of thing Leia did. Maybe not even in spite of the fact that after she knew people that way she lost them. Maybe because of it.
If she had the time she would cry. She wants to. She would dry her eyes on the edge of her sleeve, at least, with sharp rough affront, and pretend it was just at the cloth that had never been meant for it, or she'd blink the tears back and be seen trying to look through them without wavering. Not in spite of how little time there is left to her audience of one but because of it.
There isn't any time and there was never going to be, so even the barest hot press of misery behind her eyeballs is scarcely a theory.
But Leia calls out her name, still, at the last minute, which was always going to happen and never going to matter, and it burns all the same.
Before:
“Kid?” Leia says, muzzy with sleep but close to anger by what feels like a default and probably just as quick. That particular mannerism’s almost definitely from her husband, the Major thinks, and it takes hold of her heart for a moment and twists a bit.
In the half-light, her station not eliminated from the picture but made at least a little arcane, Leia looks younger than she is. She looks ageless. Dragged through time and sleep on a breath of annoyance turning to confusion as Leia looks for what to expect and the Major anticipates fear, though, her voice sounds so, so old.
“Kid,” she repeats, voice sharpening as she goes on, “what do you think you’re doing?”
She swallows. “I am sorry, General, ma’am. I really—I am. I’m so sorry.”
Then things start making sense.