Fire Meet Gasoline | Poe Dameron

Two

Leia

Poe leaves, more than a little deflated he doesn't get to go and try to find her. He's a brilliant asset and usually pretty sharp, so while the fact my own daughter's left him void of common sense is unexpected, I can't blame that alone for him not putting two and two together.

I'd only recruited him a few months ago, half a year after I'd begun telling people Hope had returned to university to finish her education in order to take up politics full time. I'd encouraged her at several points to return to school considering she'd gotten herself expelled when she was sixteen, believing it would be useful to redirect her away from the path she was spiralling down but her commitment to the cause may just be greater than my own, or rather her obsession with hunting down Snoke.

I had always admired her keen sense of justice and the passion that came with it, that was until seeing it in action and learning just how brutally efficient she can be. Certainly the product of two generations of generals and senators, unfortunately with Han's impatience for both war and politics. She's always given as good as she's gotten, certainly a stark reminder of how I was at the same age. Except she's always taken things too far, never truly letting go of a slight and always evening the score, and that was before she began seeing herself as the sole harbinger of divine justice upon the First Order.

It should have been a simple mission, reconnaissance, but it was my error in believing she could physically walk away from an injustice, it's not in her nature, especially not the kidnapping of children by the First Order when Lando's own daughter had been victim of it.

Cutting down the storm troopers to free them and help them escape was one thing, I wouldn't have expected her to do any different even if the sight had jarred me deeply, but it was when she got her hands on their captain it all went wrong. I'd seen her use the force to inflict pain on different occasions, always on impulse and without thought, out of desperation to protect, but this was torture.

She didn't ask where the children were to be taken, didn't ask anything that could have mitigated what she'd done or gather the intel we needed but continued on her own vendetta. Somewhere in her demanding to know Snoke's location, something a mid-rank officer certainly didn't have, the captain made the mistake of mentioning the name Kylo Ren and in her own words, she snapped.

And I had to once again cover up my children's crimes.

It only seemed fitting that she should re-educate herself on the fragile state of galactic politics and what the repurcussions of such an act could be through returning to university and serving the galaxy rather than blindly attacking it. I had to pull every favour I still had to keep it from reaching the ears of the senate. Her return to Naboo seemed to satisfy the rest of command and my few contacts in the navy such as Ematt who were aware of the incident.

Even if it was utter bullshit.

I've known very well she's been flying about the outer rims working for pirates and the like, assumably to try to get a rise out of her father.

Han and I's separation was mutual, amicable as it could be considering the circumstances, but it was never that way in Hope's eyes. I understood Han physically couldn't stay in the home we'd shared with our children, and I struggled to look at him without seeing Ben, but he never wanted to leave Hope. He'd asked her to go with him in the Falcon but she wouldn't leave me. She was too focused on fighting a war that hadn't even begun to see that her father was all but pleading with her to go with him away from the cold war that was forming.

Except in her eyes war was declared the moment a suspected First Order agent exposed the truth about Darth Vader to the galaxy, Ben finally turning was the final blow.