She's a frustration at first - an exquisite frustration, but a frustration nevertheless. (She's a frustration still. Sometimes.)
It isn't that he minds her position. It's not…jealousy. Commander-in-Chief? Chief-of-State? Let her have it. He already made a name for himself in the Clone Wars, and everyone on base knows General Draven, knows him by name and by sight – but he's just as satisfied working in the shadows, doing shadowy work that will and should never be known; to redact reports and fill memos with half-truths, to shepherd the Alliance with an invisible hand. Let Mothma be the figurehead, the orator. She is, after all, the politician. He's a military man. He doesn't need to be standing in the front, as long as he is being heard. (And it would be Cracken or Dodonna before him, anyway, if it wasn't her. Maybe the list is even longer. Maybe he's even further down on it than he wants to admit.)
She used to be worlds away, and the frustration was easier then, but she departed the senate – or what's left of it - in an admirable blaze of sedition. It's still technically called the senate but when you don't have power you're just…what? A gathering of squabbling malcontents? Children, playing a game? The base has to be her permanent home now: she's a wanted woman. (And she confessed to him - maybe to others, but privately to him - that it feels like a prison. No escape for her…and no escape for him.) She still wants them to call her "Senator", and she still wears those ethereal white robes of office. This is exactly what he means – frustration. There's no Galactic Senate, not anymore. There's not even an Imperial Senate in anything more than name. There's an emperor, and there's his smokescreen. Senator Mothma… It's either humility, or pride. He's still not sure which. Probably both, somehow. She's full of contradictions without being full of compromise. (There's a little compromise in her, though. Perhaps just enough.)
It's Bail Organa who introduces them, in the last days of the Republic. "The Senate can't fix this. We all know that now," Organa says, to the small group he had secretly assembled at his Coruscanti estate. It's not the first meeting like it, nor the last. She has probably been to all of them but this was Draven's first, though he already knew what was going to be said. "It's time for something else."
Organa pulled Draven aside afterwards, and ushered him over to the honorable senator from Chandrila. "There's no one in the senate that I respect or trust more," he said, putting his hand on Mothma's shoulder.
She didn't look like much to him then. She had become a senator at a remarkably young age, but youth didn't impress Draven, and she wasn't remarkably young anymore. (In fact, she seemed to be no younger – or older – than he was.) She was pretty, but not remarkably so, a little willowy for his tastes. But Organa's words were remarkable. And Draven had noticed, in the meeting, her attentive eyes, her economy of words, her penetrating questions and her clarity of thought. He had looked her over with appraising eyes that she tolerated but slightly resented.
"You'll need men like Davits Draven," Organa said to Mothma. She had nodded, and at the reminder her resentment had evaporated away so quickly and so subtly that Draven wasn't sure it had ever been there. She was probably thinking that she knew how to handle men like him. But she was smart enough to know whom to rely upon – whom she would need to rely upon – regardless of what she thought about them otherwise.
And she relies on him.
She's got generals and admirals in spades. Dodonna, Merrick, Raddus, Ackbar. Men to fly ships, men to lead ships. There's nothing to talk about except how many ships there are and how many pilots and where and when they are needed. Draven's work is more important – it's vital. Without intelligence, you're just throwing pebbles - if pebbles were your lifeblood and in too short supply. You have to shoot down the right ships, kill the right men, strike when the iron is hot and run when they are coming for you. He's the one who knows these things. He's the one who brings these things to her.
She appreciates their value, even as she grasps desperately for better ways. Diplomacy. It's her theater. Her pleasant little fiction. Convince the senate, convince the senate, convince the senate. It's her song. The one she must embrace. She knows the look on his face when she sings it. The restrained roll of his eyes. The heavy sigh. She gives him a dry smile in return. "You're a cynic."
"Just another word for 'realist'," he replies.
He doesn't call her an idealist. She's a realist too. A realist with an optimistic checklist of optimistic options that aren't quite exhausted yet, at least not to her estimation. Convince the senate.
"Kill the Emperor," he replies.
Mon Mothma would secretly like to see the Emperor vomiting blood at her feet and he likes that about her.
The Emperor's death would win the war. Not right away, but eventually. She's still trying to avoid that war, but he knows that if all-out war doesn't happen, it'll be because they acted too late, not because they achieved her mythic "political solution". It may be too late already. His aim in joining the rebellion had been to stop the Empire before it had become all-powerful – but the sun has already set on an all-powerful Empire. It no longer looms on the horizon: it is here. He has only one aim now: to protect the Rebel Alliance. It's why he lies, why he kills, why he has to be the skeptic. It is such a fragile little thing.
She knows. She understands its fragility, she comprehends some of the ulterior things he has done to safeguard it, from threats without and within. It's why she lets him do things she doesn't agree with – or, in any case, it's why she forgives him. It's why she looks the other way when he oversteps the parameters he has been given. It's why she continues to rely on him and shuts down the complaints of his peers. He doesn't mind their complaints. He does what is necessary.
He overhears the tail end of a conversation once, between Mothma and Dodonna. Voices travel, in the ziggurat. There aren't any doors.
"I know you're not questioning General Draven's commitment to the cause?"
"Certainly not," Dodonna protests. He begins to speak again but she gently cuts him off, in that gracefully gentle way she has.
"And you trust my judgment?"
"Yes, of course."
"Then there's nothing more to say," she finishes, though not brusquely. Dodonna makes a respectful utterance of concession, and passes by Draven in the corridor outside of her office doorway as he leaves with a scowl.
"I suppose he made a special trip here to tell you how much he respects and admires me," Draven jokes grimly as he enters.
"No, only your subordinates do that." She means it. It's enough for him.
It seems like he's in her office every day for Operation Fracture. Mysterious cargo shipments, rumors of a mysterious super weapon. It has them scurrying. Then Captain Andor brings them back word of a planet killer. Draven will investigate until he knows all there is to know but he's not ready to believe it yet, not without proof. But Mothma believes it. She says it to him before she shares it with the meeting: "A weapon that murders worlds is the natural culmination of everything the Emperor has done." He agrees but he won't go off logic alone: he wants evidence.
If it's true, then the Empire wasn't all-powerful before, but it is now. And it will surely be the end of the Alliance if nothing is done about it. Perhaps it will be the end of the Alliance no matter what.
They disagree as often – perhaps more often – than ever, but he's in her confidence in a way he never has been before. They disagree about Jyn Erso, about Galen Erso, about the oversight committee and about the council. They argue in the morning, they argue in the evening, taking turns pacing and piling on counterpoints and his hands gripping his belt in impatience as he listens. They argue in writing, and on rare occasion, over the comm. They argue more than they need to. He's in her office more often than he needs to be.
Everyone can see that he's in her confidence. They look to each other in meetings. Exchange nods, exchange somber looks. An entire private conversation in front of everyone, full of references to previous private conversations from which the others had been excluded entirely. The others think that maybe it will pass, once the crisis has passed.
But this is no ordinary crisis: Weapon Confirmed. Jedha City destroyed.
She doesn't lambaste him for the decision he made concerning the Imperial installation on Eadu, but she's not pleased. She smooths out her robes. Once, no, three times. She's beginning to suspect, quite rightly, that he had intended to assassinate Galen Erso all along. It would have spared her this farce of attempting to get the senate on her side with Erso's testimony, but she's not grateful, not even as she admits it is – at least for now – a lost cause. He's prepared to defend every decision, every mistake that he has made, but...her quiet censure rattles him more than he's comfortable with.
The conversation, however, ends with the affirmation of her support as she leaves it to him to coordinate the security of the Alliance council meeting and the arrivals and departures of the councilors. He doesn't much care for these meetings. The risk is enormous – high profile visitors from all over the galaxy – including the Core - complete with unvetted entourages…It's supposed to be a secret base, of trusted personnel. He wouldn't trust most of the people that were coming with the codes to the base armory let alone the base itself and the future of the Alliance.
Draven organizes fighter escorts for the visitors with Merrick, and for once they don't butt heads. There's a respect between them – perhaps more than between Draven and most of his peers in Alliance high command - but Merrick cares too much about his pilots and thinks that Draven doesn't care enough – (ridiculous, of course) - so they frequently clash over minutiae that Merrick doesn't realize is minutiae.
Draven might be in Mothma's confidence but she's friendlier with Merrick. More smiles. More small talk. There was a time when Draven wondered if they were together; he had wanted to congratulate them on finding something amidst all the chaos and hardship of the rebellion, but the words caught in his throat. He made a harmless innuendo about their relationship to Mothma, careful to keep any curiosity out of his tone. She took his meaning both right and wrong, since she seemed to assume he was implying she was favoring Merrick or putting her love life before the needs of the Alliance.
"Your concerns are quite unfounded," she declared, uncharacteristically flustered. "I have always chosen governance over my personal life. And as for General Merrick…we are nothing more than colleagues." She added, stammering a little: "I would be hard pressed to even call usfriends."
That went a little too far. Maybe she went too far on purpose, in an effort to reassure him. "I have no concerns," Draven clarified stiffly, studying her. But maybe there had been concerns of a kind, since he was decidedly pleased to learn that Merrick was little more to her than any other man on Yavin IV.
Merrick is on Mothma's side in the council meeting, but Draven is not. They're backing the Erso girl's gambit to go after the so-called Death Star's schematics in the Imperial data vault on Scarif. "Send the whole rebel fleet if you have to," Jyn Erso says.
But the whole rebel fleet is all that they have. If it's a trap, if they're overwhelmed by Imperial forces, if the schematics aren't there or if they don't contain the information needed, then that's it. The Alliance blown out like a candle. He can't advocate that. He can't engage with that kind of risk.
But Draven is the least of Mothma's problems in the meeting. His presentation to the council is not editorialized – it is factual and succint. The councilors don't need to be told to be afraid of what might happen - it's the one thing they're good at. And Mothma doesn't blame him for being conservative – the Death Star might not be capable of blowing up planets as advertised, Galen Erso might not be trustworthy, it might not be a good idea to risk their entire navy on a fundamentally unsound last-minute plan. Everything he says is true, if loaded. And she courts disagreement, because it's no longer allowed in the Empire.
But the battle still happens. In spite of him. In spite of the council. He warns Mothma not to join in (after imagining her rallying the men inspirationally aboard one of the ships and then getting vaporized in a Star Destroyer discharge), but he doesn't need to: she's got her practical side too. They listen to the fighting together in the comm center – reports mainly from Raddus and the Profundity, but occasionally from some of the other capital ships. Merrick dies. Many other pilots are lost. And then the entire surface team – the Erso girl, Captain Andor, countless other good men and women - heroes – are blown to bits by the Empire's super weapon. There are conflicting accounts about the Death Star plans. Raddus thinks they were transmitted and received, but they weren't received by the Profundity. No one knows anything for sure, except that they don't have them.
It's a dark night for her. She fades away from group mourning and retires to her office. He brings some brandy up. "It's not from Corellia, but it will have to do," he tells her, pouring her a glass and setting it down in front of her on her desk.
She downs it in a single go, but without zeal. "It was all for nothing."
"We don't know that," he counters. "We haven't heard back from the Princess' ship."
"Are you being optimistic, General?" she teases solemnly.
"Never," he replies.
His thoughts are inward – on Cassian Andor, Antoc Merrick, and the others that were lost – when he is startled by her discerning gaze, crossing the space that separates her from him and burrowing in. "You respect me more than you let on," she remarks. "I was expecting your reproaches."
It might be true.
There are no reproaches or recriminations between them that night. Would the mission have gone better with full support from Alliance command? Was it doomed from the start? Had Draven been right? Or Jyn Erso? They don't worry or even care about any of that right then. They take the moment to just be…sad. He gives her another two fingers of brandy and they toast to the fallen.
The risks of the council meeting still have him uneasy - not just that someone might have been followed, but that fear of the Death Star will turn friends into knowledgeable enemies. Mothma shares his anxiety and had given him permission to begin scouting for a new headquarters, but he doesn't want to leave right then. There is too much uncertainty on the base and despite her ever-stoic countenance, he can tell she is disheartened, perhaps even suffering from self-doubt. So he sends out others, in his stead, and he stays.
They share a drink in the evenings. Wine, usually. To decompress and debrief. He's sick of this dank, muggy jungle moon, but the sunset from Mothma's window makes it almost tolerable. After a few days, they have more bad news – confirmation of the full annihilative powers of the Death Star super weapon. Alderaan, destroyed. Destroyed completely. And Bail Organa gone with it. The fact that the Emperor has also disbanded the senate hardly registers.
She cries. He comes upon her crying silently at her desk and tries to surreptitiously back out, but she lifts her head and sees him through a veil of tears. "I'm sorry," she apologizes, straightening up in her chair and hastily wiping away tears only for them to be immediately replaced.
"For what?" he says, as softly as he can. His eyes sting too.
She nods gratefully and holds nothing back.
It pleases him to see behind the curtain of dignity and restraint, almost as much as it pains him to see how much she is suffering. He prays that today is not the day that breaks her. But behind the curtain there is only more strength and more grace. There is even dignity in the sobs that rack her body. It is beautiful, how much she cares. Her heart is beautiful.
Notes: Thanks for reading! I wrote a commentary on Draven and Mothma's relationship that might possibly maybe? be of interest to some of you. There is a link to it on my profile page. I included a lot of relevant quotes from the novelization and a break down of their interactions in the movie.