Warning: This thing is going to get pretty dark. You've been warned.
Onto the author's note: I just wanted to finally publish this fic already, it's been like a year since I started at this point and I wanted to get it out well before the next movie inevitably does it differently. Not a RWBY fic, sorry, but I'm a huge Star Wars fan, so...whatever. Anyway, this is my take on what'll happen after The Force Awakens.
Leia Organa-Solo slowly walked down the gangplank of the Millennium Falcon and advanced across a barren rocky wasteland towards her wayward son. Kylo recalled how his father had done something similar back on Starkiller base. He supposed she was going to try to talk him out of it like he did, but that didn't matter to him. He had killed Han Solo, and Ben Solo's mother would share the same fate.
He didn't realize how wrong he was.
Finn was in the ship's cockpit when he had realized how many First Order forces were swarming the area, and he didn't realize that the general he was ostensibly supposed to protect had left until he saw Leia coming out of the ship. He generally had good instincts for how confrontations could turn out, Luke and Rey had always claimed he was Force-sensitive, but he couldn't feel anything as he first realized that General Organa was walking towards the massive group of stormtroopers. He ran to the ramp that Leia walked out of, getting a good look from behind her, and drew his blaster to shoot anyone who came near her, but something stopped him from pulling the trigger. He still couldn't feel anything, which worried him more than it should, and he looked at Leia to get some visual indication of what she was thinking.
That was when he realized that she was armed. Hanging from her left side was what looked suspiciously like a lightsaber. That in itself was jarring enough to Finn, as he was unaware that General Organa was force sensitive, though he supposed it made sense, given who was in their crazy family. Then he realized what her other weapon on her right side was, and memories flooded back into him. Everything that happened at Starkiller Base came back in a flash, and he remembered a form falling into an abyss with tears streaming his eyes. Hanging from Leia's left was Han Solo's holster, with his signature weapon, the DL-44.
He kept staring at it until Leia turned sideways and gave a small gesture to stand down before continuing. Finn holstered his blaster. He wouldn't need it.
He went back inside to watch from within the cockpit, he wasn't sure why, but he had finally gotten a feeling, and it was telling him that despite the fact that the squadron of stormtroopers and the AT-T variants standing behind Ren were all just itching for an excuse to blow the Falcon to smithereens, this was the safest place to be. Still, the hull deadened the sound, so he wouldn't be able to hear what was said. In fact, he still couldn't hear anything at all.
Leia should've stopped several meters away, out of Ben's range of attack with his lightsaber. Failing that, she should've gotten up in his face to get too close for him to easily strike at her. It may have also had the added benefit of mimicking what Han, adding to the psychological warfare aspect, throwing him off balance. But she's not Han Solo. She wasn't there in a tactical sense. There had already been time for tactics and strategy, and they were now passed. This wasn't going to be a fight. So she walked up to her son and stopped at the perfect distance for him to strike her down.
He asked her "Any last words?"
She responded "Yes. But you will not hear them"
He lifted his lightsaber hilt. His lightsaber, with a broken and unstable quality to the blade that made most wary of him, crackled to life. He raised his blade of energy to strike her down, and the blade cut through the air towards her neck.
Finn almost flinched. Almost looked away. But he trusted his instincts. And every instinct in his body screamed that no matter what happened, he would need to see this. So he didn't look away. So he heard the lightsaber drawn and saw it stop, an inch from Leia's neck.
Kylo couldn't understand, he was pushing, with every ounce of anger he had, trying to decapitate the old woman who stood before him, but he couldn't move. He felt like something had frozen him in place. That was when he finally got a real look at his mother, who stood there with a colder expression than he had ever seen before in his entire life.
Leia was a lot of things. A princess. A diplomat. A warrior. A general. A sister. A wife. A mother. But the thing is, before all of that, at the very core of her being, at the very center of her heart, she was something different. Something that always was at the edge of her consciousness, something she had to fight back against every day lest it consume her. Before everything else, before Alderaan, before Tatooine, before the Death Star, that was her identity. She hated this part of her with a vengeance, and she tried to bury it, but it was always a part of her, even when she didn't even know what she was.
Before she became who she was, before she was Leia Organa, before she was General Organa, before she was Leia Organa-Solo, she was Leia Skywalker. The Daughter of Darth Vader. She was the second most powerful force-sensitive in the galaxy only after her brother, and leagues beyond the likes of Ben Solo or Kylo Ren. And she was pissed.
She could feel the dawning comprehension fall upon her wayward son as he began to call for his men to shoot her. Their silence stretched on for endless seconds before he realized exactly how bad of a situation he was in.
Finn had heard the legends of course. Darth Vader was the greatest warrior in the galaxy, who hadn't heard of them? They were standard reading when he was being indoctrinated into the First Order.
On another day, after he was assigned with General Organa on a trip, he asked if she had ever met Darth Vader in person. She had frozen, and only slowly nodded. When they got back and asked about it, Luke told him that he and Leia were siblings, and told Finn the truth about their parentage, how their mother was a senator of Naboo, and how their father was a brave young Jedi from Tatooine. He also told of the horrors of war, and how a good man like Anakin Skywalker became the agent of vengeance known as Darth Vader, and how their mother, broken with grief, died giving birth to them. The last thing Luke told him was of the man, old and broken, who, after a lifetime of pain and suffering, decided to save his son and the galaxy.
Leia was nicer to him after that. Apparently, she didn't have the stomach to tell the whole story anymore, it reminded her too much of good memories of bad people. But after she and Finn became friends, she opened up about herself, and was willing to fill in the gaps of the story that Luke had left out. She was willing to talk about anything of that time, the politics, the planets, the people, anything. Well, everything but one person. It was easy to figure it out, Darth Vader played a very large role in the events that she retold, and her refusal to talk about him was very telling.
Finally, his curiosity got the better of him, and he asked if her could ask one question about the Dark Lord, and he would never speak of it again. She agreed, and Finn asked if the legends were true, if Vader once faced a dozen rebels in combat and obliterated them, if the Emperor's hand had really destroyed an entire squadron of X-wings on his own, if he had really been one of the dozen survivors of the Death Star's destruction. They sounded fantastical, but after all, Luke was real, so was the galaxy's greatest villain really as fearsome as the First Order propaganda made him out to be? All Leia did was look down silently before muttering four words to him.
"No. He was worse."
Another day he worked up the courage to fact check the First Order's propaganda with Rebel data logs. She was right. So terrifyingly right.
Official rebel counts had a hundred soldiers facing the man, if you could call him that, three squadrons destroyed by his tie fighter in one engagement, and contrary to what was heard in the cantinas around the Outer Rim, Vader was the only survivor of the first Death Star's destruction. He didn't know why the First Order underplayed him. Perhaps they thought their soldiers would never believe such carnage could be caused by one man, maybe they went off of rumors instead of reports, maybe they were just too scared to tell their recruits of the raw anger their idol possessed.
In any event, Finn thinks the Dark Lord of the Sith would be proud of his daughter now.
The entire battlefield, dozens of stormtroopers, at least three AT-T variants, and even a tie fighter were frozen in place. Some were in the process of moving when they stopped, and had frozen halfway through their stride in a way that defied the laws of physics, and the tie fighter was in the middle of an attack run. All were silent. Finn had seen Kylo stop a blaster bolt, but Leia was clearly on another level when it came to the power of Force. He wanted to say something, anything to show how awestruck he was, but all he could think of was that he was damn glad that he left the First Order. That's when he heard the noise
Kylo, frozen in place, heard a groaning sound behind him, the sound one would make if a thousand tons of metal were being pulled in a way it wasn't supposed to.
Finn wondered where the noise was coming from before his eyes were drawn to the front legs of the AT-T variants. The behemoth's front legs began to bend forward and the back legs bent to a lesser degree. The massive four legged monstrosities now kneeled, and the stormtroopers began to fall forward onto their knees and bow like the vehicles to the two figures in front. Finn could hear the pained grunts of the men and the machines as they tried to resist this inexorable force, but it was too much for any of them. Soon, all of the people behind Kylo had been forced into bowing towards him and and his mother.
Leia, with the lightsaber still an inch from her neck, glared at the glowing red blade, until it and the hand attached to it began to move. Slowly, it rotated 180 degrees to a painful angle near his own neck, in a mirror image of the position his mother had been in. Leia stared, for a good few seconds, until she spoke "You know, Han was wrong. He said you had too much of your grandfather in you. You didn't. You had to much of me in you. You were too headstrong, too set in your ways. The only damn good things you got were from Han. Your father gave you the best parts of yourself. His charm, his honor, his compassion. And you killed him for that." She was quiet again. "Han wouldn't have wanted us to fight. He was looking for the good in you, even to the end. He was an optimist, hard as that was to believe, he always had more in common with Luke than me if I was really honest" His lightsaber turned off of it's own volition, and his trembling hand was forced to his side slowly as his lightsaber floated in place, then drifted to Leia. Then his knees began to be pushed, slowly and methodically into kneeling in front of the older woman.
Leia strapped it to her side, next to her own lightsaber and started to walk away a few paces. "I'm so sorry Han" she said softly. In one smooth motion she pulled out her DL-44 with practiced ease and fired a single shot into her son's head. She walked back to the Millennium Falcon with tears on her face. Finn already had started takeoff procedures and was in the air before she had even closed the gangplank. As soon as they left, the Stormtroopers and everything else unfroze. The tie fighter crashed into the ground, its twin ion engines sending it on the exact direction it was on originally before it had been caught. The AT-T variants made more creaking noises and the Stormtroopers were covered in dust as their machines of war collapsed under their own weight, their pistons and muscles destroyed from trying to stay upright. Most of the stormtroopers gradually tried to get up once the force pushing them down was lifted, but even the hardened veterans were having trouble shaking off the physical and psychological effects of what just happened. But one figure didn't move. Kylo Ren stayed upright, frozen in place for minutes, until the Millennium Falcon went into hyperspace, upon which he collapsed in a heap with a smoking forehead. Never to get up.