Work Text:
The halogen lights in the sign hanging in the front window of this tiny restaurant on the wrong side of town have long ago fizzled out, leaving just three out of 5 to work, meaning that it says ‘P zz ,’ instead of the original‘Pizza’. Too, the front door, glass spidered with age and with the mostly-forgotten name of the place barely legible, creaks so badly, sometimes, Leia isn’t sure it isn’t going to fall off its hinges imminently.
It is more than likely it will, but that’s a problem for another day.
That alone is not the only way in which it is clear that the place has seen better days. The hand-printed sign advertising the hours has faded so badly from the sun that it is well-nigh illegible, the television fritzes more often than it works, all but shutters and moans when you turn it on (which is why no one ever turns it off) and she can’t remember the last time they had someone in to clean the air vents in the ‘dining’ area.
Not that any of that matters, the only people who come here know exactly what they are coming for, just as they know for whom.
Since she’s here, though, certain standards are maintained.
The bathrooms may be in the basement, down the steep stairs coated with the original linoleum from 1946 when this place was first built, but they are cleaned regularly – and kept that way. The ingredients she orders for the kitchen are top-notch (at her quiet insistence, the Family spares no expense when it comes to feeding its people), everything is cleaned regularly, the floors are mopped twice a day, and the equipment she uses daily is both of the highest quality and properly maintained. The furniture may be original to the pizza parlour they’d bought in 1996, but it is cared for – rips and tears are not to be accepted, and the boys know better than to mistreat the tables or chairs as they linger under her watchful eye.
“Mom,” she hears her son’s voice call, and as she turns to look up at her beautiful boy as he approaches, she smiles.
The light of her life, he’s as precious to her now as he has been since they first placed him in her arms thirty-three years ago in that bed in the hospital down the street after a labour the doctors had apparently taken to referring to as ‘complicated’.
“How’s my baby?” she asks softly and with the slightest of winks as she reaches up to cup his face with her hand, small on his broad face, their pale skin a match except for the fact that her skin is now increasingly spotted with the marks of age, her hands mottled with them, though they remain as strong.
Her son shrugs off her coddling, along with the touch of her hand, as he pulls his face from her grasp, but she catches the small smile he gives in return.
He's all in black, as usual; as usual, he towers over her as he has for decades; as usual, that matters little.
“There’s a girl out front,” – there’s something there in his voice, she thinks, a hesitation, maybe, or a shakiness, an awakening, maybe? It takes a moment to realize he's smiling – “She wants to order a pizza.”
Hardly surprising, they are listed in the phonebook as a pizza parlour – Gino’s Pizzeria – and the sign on the door, faded as it may be, does promise the possibility of being able to exchange cold, hard cash for a delicacy of bread, tomato sauce enhanced by spices and herbs, and cheese.
Still. Everyone in the neighbourhood knows what this place really is – it sells nothing, contributes nothing, produces nothing - well, almost everyone, apparently.
“A girl,” Leia asks, playing for time even as she moves to the fridge to pull out some of the prepared dough she’d put aside to make a margherita pizza for her and Ben for lunch tomorrow.
Trouble?
The question hangs in the air, and they both hear it. The organization, the Family, headquartered here, the one whose mark bears, tattooed on the inside of the left wrist of Leia's son, a mark befitting his status as a made man, may not be well known outside the whispers that linger among those in the know – and, as Leia knows all too well, all too many members of the local law enforcement agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation – but nonetheless, it’s a powerful player in the local organized crime circuit.
For a stranger to come here, to walk brazenly in via the front door – it’s a concern.
It’s either a completely random event (just a strange girl, unknowing of what she’s stumbled into) or, equally likely, it could be something else entirely, something with consequences dangerous to them both (an emissary from another family, an uncover agent, an outside agitator looking to disrupt their hold on the territory the Family has held since the time Leia’s earliest forebearers had made their way across the sea).
“A girl,” Ben confirms. “She’s … not from around here, I don’t think. Bright-eyed. Young. Tall, mid-twenties, brown hair in three sorts of buns or something. A student, maybe, from overseas, I would guess, from the accent, English from what I can tell.”
Leia nods.
A student, an international one, probably. Likely not a threat, though one could never be too careful.
“Well, Ben, maybe you should ask this girl what she wants on her pizza.”
Again, the direction – ‘keep an eye on her, make sure she’s not asking too many questions, stop the boys sitting in the dining room from either intimidating her or spilling their guts as they are likely all too easily to do,’ – lingers unspoken in her voice. The last thing they need is for some strange girl to ask questions no one wants answered – or to be inclined to spread rumours the likes of which will draw unwanted attention back to them.
And no one wants that less than Leia.
Glancing at the big, old-fashioned clock on the wall, caged behind a metal screen as it has always been, she gets to work, all the while running angles in her brain and calculating the ways she needs to play agendas off against each other. As the figurative Head of the Family, Snoke has been increasingly paranoid of late; he knows someone on the inside is talking to the Feds, spilling all sorts of damaging, insider secrets – he just doesn’t know who it is, or, for that matter, how they are doing so.
He never, ever, suspects it might be Leia, she knows, the thought never comes close to crossing his mind – but then, neither do the other members of the Family, up to and including Ben.
She’s never, ever, tempted to confide in him.
That boy, Leia thinks as she kneads dough expertly on a pre-floured counter, leaving the red sauce to simmer on the stove, sending out pleasant aromatic steam, has enough on his mind. He overthinks things, that boy. He’d deny it, or maybe he wouldn’t, but he’s very much like her.
Anyway, she had long ago decided not to burden him any more than he already is. As the unofficial but unanimously acknowledged second to Snoke, he’s been under a great deal of strain of late, and of scrutiny, so much so that she’d been tempted to step in. If it weren’t for how useful Snoke’s presence is (it is very convenient that everyone, both within the Family and without, thinks he’s the head of the family, for it allows Leia just that one more additional layer of protection), she would have disposed of him already. (Ben knows the truth, of course, for he acts as second to both Snoke and Leia, but that hardly raises an eyebrow, for everyone knows he’s always been extra deferential to his mother.)
Once again, she wishes she had never had to enter this life; once again, her role as the true head of Coruscant’s branch of the Cosa Nostra family weighs heavily on her, no matter that it had been a role she’d taken on herself.
What choice had she really? she asks herself again, for the thousandth time. After Anakin.
For the thousandth time, she curses her biological father, curses more the anchor of the legacy he had left her. Then again, what choice had she had? This life had never been what she had wanted, for her or for her son, but when her (unreliable and supposedly long-dead) father had returned, after he had led Ben too far down the garden path for him to be able walk away, after Anakin had corrupted him so badly she’d known he’d never be able to escape the Family’s clutches the way she had (with much effort) been able to, well, she had known what she had to do
She’d had the strength to do it.
The cost had been heavy, both in the life she leads and the secrets she’d disposed of with the bodies (Anakin’s being the first among many), and the regrets she carries yet linger in the sleepless nights of a decade (the loss of her marriage being key among them, she still wakes all too often expecting to see Han’s now-greying head laying on the pillow next to hers).
Still, she’s always known that given the choice, she’d yet choose the same again.
For she’d long ago decided that she’ll burn all her days for a sunrise she’ll never see as long as her son has a chance at a better life.
Ben is all that matters – as he always has been.
And the thing is, Leia has been underestimated by both strangers and familars her entire life – it’s not her diminutive size alone that has people underestimating her; it’s also her age, her gender, it’s how soft her voice sounds as she issues her orders. It’s how the steel of her commands comes wrapped in the softest velvet. Her entire life, she’s been underestimated; her entire life, those doing so have had cause to regret it. Despite how little her opponents trust to her resolve, she prevails more often than not. Perception matters, Leia had learned young, but it doesn’t determine everything. For she’s always been laser-focused on her goals; let those who wish underestimate her, she’ll have her way in the end.
One way or another.
She'll have her way in this, too, she tells herself, again, for the thousandth time. Maybe she hadn’t been able to keep her only child, her son, from falling into this life; what she can do is keep him from ending up ultimately lost to it.
If she must take down the entire organization to keep him from that fate, so be it.
No matter the cost – to them, to her, to him, even.
From her preliminary discussions with the agents assigned to her case, she knows her actions since taking over the Family can’t be fully swept aside; it’s more than likely she’ll do significant prison time, more than likely she would have had to end her life behind bars in recompense for Anakin's life alone. But, still, while she can’t get immunity for herself, she can for Ben; whatever it takes, it matters little, for she’s making sure he will walk free, he will be able to leave this all behind, he will be free to seek out the brighter future she’s always dreamt for him.
So, as it had been with a hum on her lips that she had set in motion the actions that will take them all down, it’s with a smile lingering that she greets him as he walks back into the kitchen as the echo of the laugh of this apparently innocent English girl who had ‘accidentally’ walked into the ‘restaurant’ drifts in from the front of house.
“She, uh, Rey, the girl, she says to tell you she always trusts to chef’s discretion when it comes to pizza,” Ben tells her as he approaches, bearing a rare smile of his own, one Leia doesn’t see enough, the expression curving his lips – suddenly, he looks softer, happier, and at least ten years younger.
With a little laugh and a lightness to her heart, she feels far from often, Leia nods before she bows her head again to her work, planning all along her moves as she’d been taught, forecasting her steps seven steps ahead even as she prepares the humble dish her son loves.
There’s to be no rest for the wicked, it seems, she thinks, at least not today.
But then, she’d have it no other way.
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Inspired by the following prompt by Reylo_Prompts on Twitter, because this is the most Ben Solo of Ben Solo things I've ever seen:
