somethingwithturquoise | MHA #4; Tuesday Evening [09/13].

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MHA #4; Tuesday Evening [09/13].

Yes, Summer had been having a lot of sangria nights lately, but, apparently, there had been a lot of good reasons for them. And Rey being back after a pretty substantial event in her life definitely called for one, and so she got together all the necessary things and had several large pitcher waiting and ready to go, and they could start to really dish it out and explore all the no doubt complicated feelings she was going through, now that the aftermath had a little bit of time to just settle.

And then Summer would get started on focusing on Annie's bachelorette party. Really!

Also, the giant bowl of gummy sharks on the coffee table right now was probably not only excessive but also a terrible idea considering the amounts of alcohol that were likely to be consumed that evening, but, goddamn it, it was Rey, and Summer could never let a good running joke die.

So, with pizza cupcakes and beer far behind her, she was ready for a much more sophisticated sloppy drunkenness ahead of her.

[[ for the space bestie! although if anyone needs her before then, go for it! ]]

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"Thanks?" Rey tried. "I don't know how to feel about that."

Summer had a few more thoughts about how she felt about it, but, as she used some sangria sipping as some space to think about, she tried to think of how Rey actually might feel about it.

"What does it matter, anyway?" is what she came up with. "Who your wrinkly old dick of a grandfather might have been?"

...okay, actually, she just kind of wanted to squeeze Palpatine is a wrinkly old dick in there, just because she could. Sue her.

"It matters when I was having visions of ending up like him," Rey admitted. "I kept making stupid decisions out of fear of that and making it worse. And he thought I was nothing but a vessel for his power."

That last part was especially not okay.

"Well, he was wrong," Summer said, "and that's not true, your power is no one's but your own, and the only thing yoi're a vessel for is your own badassery.

"And," she added, with particular emphasis, which meant a dangerous gesture with the hand holding her cup, "you're too smart to be that stupid, anyway."

"For a moment there I thought I would have to take him up on it," Rey admitted, focusing on her drink. "If Ben hadn't shown up, I don't know what I would have done."

Summer squinted a little, not necessarily at Rey, but at the cadre of various people she'd come into contact with in Rey's universe over the years.

"You'd have kicked his ass, obviously," she stated, almost dismissively, as to get that point out there, first and foremost. "But, wait, who is Ben?"

It wasn't connecting, and she didn't feel that bad about it when your name was fucking Ben.

"Kylo Ren," she said. "He turned back to the light side. Came to help me."

She'd be lying if she said she wasn't interested in this reaction.

Well, the very first reaction was a bit of a stare. Followed by a blink. And then, that very useful, very succinct, "what the fuck, Rey?"

And it was followed, very swiftly, with an, "Ugh, Fuck Face Brain-Intrution McGee, sweeping in at the last minute with a redemption arc? What an asshole!"

"He's the only reason I'm alive right now," Rey pointed out gently.

"Yeah, well," Summer countered, not even nearly as gently, "maybe he wouldn't have had to have been if someone's friends didn't have to wait for a mass-text distress call from someone else to even know what was up."

Rey frowned, not expecting that.

"There wasn't time. I had enough time to tell Master Skywalker I was leaving and then it was chaos for days. I didn't even have a phone with me most of the time."

"Okay," said Summer, who sounded a little more willing to allow that now that she knew it, buuut...

"But," she said, "would you have even been in this situation to this magnitude if it weren't for all the shit he doing? Like, sorry, I'm not going to start swooning and calling the guy a hero for being a master of edging while fucking the Empire and managing to pull out at just the right moment."

Such a way with words, this one.

"Like, don't get me wrong, I'm super glad he did, but, you know, it would have been nice if he'd have done the whole Light Side thing before all the torture and galactic destruction."

"What happened wasn't his fault," Rey told her. "He was a pawn as much as I was. It would have been much easier if he'd turned back when I have him a chance before, or at least wasn't getting in our way."

That much she could allow. But a lot of the complaints she had about him when he was alive felt hollow to her now. It just hurt.

"See, now," said Summer, emphatically, "I don't think I believe that, Rey, that you were just pawns. I think that gives Palpatine way more power than he deserves, and it just feels like a bad excuse for shitty choices."

She gulped down what remained in her glass, and reached for the pitcher, pouring as she talked, after a big, heavy sigh.

"But of course you want to forgive him," she allowed. "Because you're compassionate and empathetic and a genuine good person. But me?"

Half of what she just poured was now gone, and she hadn't even set the pitcher aside, so she just replaced it.

"So not that person."

"You're allowed your opinion," Rey said with a half-hearted shrug. "I'm going to be stuck mourning Ben anyway."

And to her, Ben deserved that. Kylo didn't.

She was not drinking nearly enough for this.

"And you're allowed that," Summer offered back. "But it also really sucks, you know, to hear that, after everything, out of all the people who could have been there for you in that moment, it had to be..."

She swallowed the word she was going to use with a drink and left it at just, "....him."

It was, to Rey, fitting that it was him, but it involved a lot of explanation and more sympathy than Ben would likely get right now.

So she was willing to completely abandon that topic altogether. "I'm also not a genuinely good person. And I really need people to stop telling me I am."

Ohhhhh, that was going to earn you such a look, Rey, especially in light of the topic you were so deftly veering away from.

"How are you even remotely not a good person, Rey?"

Don't make the claim if you didn't have receipts to back it up, lady.

"Everyone keeps telling me how good I am. And I think," she said slowly, "that everyone has this idea of me in their head, that I'm the last hope, that I'll always do the right thing, that no one's been willing to consider what I'm capable of. Meanwhile I stabbed Kylo Ren with a cheap shot as his mother died. I spent time thinking I'd murdered one of my best friends out of anger and it doesn't make it better that I didn't, it just means I killed other people using the dark side."

Summer was quiet for a moment, just listening, and then thinking about what Rey had said as she drank and considered what to say back.

"I can't speak for other people," she finally said, "obviously, even though god knows I like to think I do. But I like to think that I absolutely understand what you're capable of, Rey, and I think you're a good person because you don't do those things. You're a good person, because you feel bad for stabbing Kylo Ren with a cheap shot, while I'm sitting here thinking, 'fuck, I wish she'd have stabbed him more.'

"Being a good person doesn't mean being perfect."

A sip. A faint reach toward levity.

"Unless you're Annie, in which case..."

"It's slightly different than not being perfect when you murder people," Rey pointed out. "I don't need to feel better."

"No," Summer allowed, "but you do need to cut yourself some slack. There's a lot of people out there who don't need to feel better about murdering people because they never felt bad about it in the first place.

"I've murdered people, Rey. Lots of them, actually. Do you think I'm a bad person?"

"No," she said, and asked, "You have?"

Did she know about this?

"Rey," Summer said, "I blew up a whole section of Courscant before I left. You don't get a bounty on your head just for setting off some fireworks.

"And that," she added, "is actually one of the better ones. And you're wrong, actually, I'm a horrible person, I just can be good, when I'm with good people. That's why I almost never go home anymore, because there, everyone is shitty, and I become pretty shitty, too. So I know bad people, and nothing you've told me point to you being one. You're a good person. Who sometimes does bad things."

"I think we're saying the same thing," Rey told her. "Except I don't feel like I'm allowed the bad things. Partly because the bad things can lead to me being like Kylo Ren."

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