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“Ruaighne ‘Rouge’ Macanna Retrac Organa: Using Fashion as a Shield/Weapon Since 6 BNA!”
0 ReviewsSUMMARY: This is fifteen random but essentially chronological moments from the life of Ruaighne ‘Rouge’ Macanna Retrac Organa, the middle child of the three half-sisters of Bail Prestor Organa....
Author’s Notes: 1). For anyone interested, this not-quite-a-story is compatible with my SW AU series /You Became to Me/, including the trilogy/ Thwarting the Revenge of the Sith/, if you squint at a couple of things sideways and view a few others solely through the lens of Ruaighne ‘Rouge’ Macanna Retrac Organa’s eyes. 2). Although this is technically modelled on a prompt set that I borrowed from somewhere or another on the LJ (I really don’t recall from where anymore, exactly, though if someone would like to set the record straight, I’ll add the info and a link to the community in question here in my notes), it’s not really meant to function as a response to whatever the challenge actually is that’s associated with said LJ prompt set. I just used the specific prompts to give me a reason to string together a backstory of sorts for Rouge. 3). Readers should know that the “6 BNA” in the title for this piece refers (seriously yet humorously) to a date six years previous to the new calendar that will be put into place in the year following the death of Sidious, the creation of the New Jedi Bendu Order out of the old Jedi Order, and the establishment of the New Alliance of the Republic out from the ashes of the old Galactic Republic (when Rouge would’ve been about three-ish years old). 4). Readers should please keep in mind that Rouge is fairly strong in the Force – specifically, her empathy is extremely powerful for a non-Jedi – and that, while she certainly hasn’t been raised as a Jedi, she has still received quite a bit of training (some of it quite specialized) at the hands of an Alderaanian former (i.e., retired) Jedi Healer and Master, Kylea Santeri, with occasional help/input from both Obi-Wan and Anakin. 5). Readers interested in knowing who the physical models are for EU characters like Rouge should /please consult/ the latest versions of my posted lists of cast original and EU characters and for handmaid(en)s and other important Nabooian characters, which are available on my LJ! For clarity’s sake, though, please know that I specifically picture the following, when it comes to Rouge’s family and such: Celly when grown as Alexa Davalos (with nearly black hair and deeply tanned skin); Rouge when grown as Julia Roberts (with red/cinnamon hair and a very good tan); Tia when grown as a somewhat golden-skinned Catherine Zeta Jones; and everybody else in the Organa family or their immediate scope as previously explained in the character sketch/study story for Celly! /Please note/ that characters who may be alluded to but not referenced by name (certain family members of EU or original characters, for example) are considered too minor to be cast at this time, and that readers should feel free to imagine them howsoever they wish! 6). Again, in order to more easily keep track of Bail’s family, readers might want to keep the following in mind: in my AU, Bail is born practically in 68 BBY, near the end of what would have been 69 BBY (if events had fallen out as they do in canon, that is), or roughly 954ish years After the Ruusan Reformations and 46ish years Before the Battle of Geonosis (which, remember, occurs in my AU series on Holiday 2 or Productivity Day of the Galactic Standard Calendar, the day that falls in between month five, Nelona, and month six, Helona, in year 25,000 After Founding [of the Galactic Republic] or 1,000 After Ruusan Reformations), with Alaina being born in what would have been ~46 BBY. (Their mother, Zamille dies late in 44 BBY, and their father, Prestid, remarries in 40 BBY, wedding Mazicia and then losing her late in 38 BBY. [I’ve interpreted the EU notation that Mazicia was Queen of Alderaan in the time leading up to the Clone Wars as meaning the time around the Stark Hyperspace War, which in the EU is sometimes lumped in with the galactic civil war leading up to the establishment of the Empire, due to Palpatine’s tendency to rewrite history.] Prestid then remarries again in 35 BBY, to Alessya Retrac, who has Celly, Rouge, and Tia in ~32, 30, and 28 BBY.) Bail and Alaina’s deceased brothers, Declin and Valyn, would have been born in roughly 50 BBY and 48 BBY and died (with their father) late in 28 BBY (not long after Tia was born), and their deceased sister, Merisol, would have been born in roughly 67 BBY and killed in 52 BBY. 7). “Demi” (as in “demi-family”) is used in this story not in the regular sense of meaning “half” but rather of meaning “partial” and/or “similar” (as in, semi-related). It’s a designation in fashion on worlds like Alderaan (and Chandrila, and Grizmallt, and Naboo, etc.), where a long history of intermarriage among certain noble families has led to a somewhat higher than normal general degree of blood-relation among those families.
“Ruaighne ‘Rouge’ Macanna Retrac Organa: Using Fashion as a Shield/Weapon Since 6 BNA!”
01.) Mask: She knows that Celly sometimes thinks her shallow and Tia often believes that she’s self-absorbed, but the truth is that it discomfits Ruaighne to have so much attention focused on her just because of her family (and the weight of all the expectations behind that mass focus is even more uncomfortable), and so she counters that as best she can, by armoring herself in a carefully constructed mask, hiding herself away behind an endless wealth of distractions for the eyes and mind and emotions, taking a page out of Padmé Amidala’s book and subsuming herself in endlessly elaborate gowns and costumes, fancy jewelry and makeup and elaborate hairstyles that keep others too busy marveling at the richness of her clothes and trying to count up all of her sparklies to ever really see the true her underneath all of that flashy, distracting finery.
02.) Noble: She thinks, sometimes, that the children of noble families like hers would probably benefit as much if not more from courses of instruction on acting than they would from more traditional schooling in history and politics and diplomacy, and she doesn’t stop smiling for weeks when she learns that this is an opinion that Lady Amidala and her two closest friends among her handmaidens (Sabé and Dormé) all seem to share.
03.) Actor: Of all of her half-brother’s friends and allies, Rouge loves those three remarkable young women from Naboo the best (excepting Obi-Wan, of course. Master Kenobi is practically family, after all!), and she often thinks that she would die happy if she could just know for sure that she might one day be half the actor and leader that Padmé and Sabé and Dormé all are.
04.) Transparent: For the sake of her half-brother and of the wonderfully engaging young man himself, she loves Obi-Wan Kenobi without reservation; yet, that unabashed love cannot keep her from sometimes being happier when he is not in her company, for she always feels peculiarly vulnerable in his presence, as if she were transparent and he could see her so clearly that he knew the most intimate movements of her mind and heart, and it is a less than comfortable feeling, that sensation of being stripped bare and of there being no mask in the universe quite good enough to ever really hide her from him.
05.) Idiot: Of all the members of her Antilles demi-family, she likes Breha the very least, and so of course she’s the one her idiot half-brother decides to marry and bring in to their household!
06.) Disguise: She likes Anakin Skywalker – he wears masks of his own quite often and never begrudges anyone (save his Master) the wearing of such a shielding, protective disguise, and he is moreover, funny and interesting and helpful and shockingly blunt, for a Jedi, with a seemingly endless trove of stories to share – and so she cannot, for the life of her, understand why her half-brother almost always seems so wary and reserved around the cheerful youth from Tatooine.
07.) Passion: She loves her half-brother and his friends, but in a very real way she also hates politicians (especially mindless bureaucrats!) with a passion that knows no end, blaming them and the mysterious Sith for most all of the ills currently plaguing the galaxy and swamping the Republic, especially the rampant greed of the corporations and lobbyists that seem determined to rip the fraying fabric of the Republic in two.
08.) Overlook: Adults have a bad habit of ignoring, dismissing, or otherwise thinking far too little of those who are smaller and younger than they are, even those who are raised in such environments as to not ever really have any kind of chance to have properly naive and carefree childhoods, and it constantly amazes her how often even her half-brother – who, by all means, should clearly know better, given how close he is to Padmé Amidala and her handmaidens and how aware he is of the stupendous feats that those young women have accomplished while little more than girls – tends to overlook her and her sisters, as though unable to really believe that they could truly comprehend the enormity of the events that are happening in the galaxy, much less have anything useful to say about them or to suggest in response to the fomenting unrest troubling more and more of the Republic seemingly with every day that passes.
09.) Movement: She and her sisters have quietly mapped the whole elaborate warren of the Alderaanian Palace (just in case) and set aside caches of emergency supplies that they regularly update and/or replace, aided Kylea, their supposed nanny – actually one of the heads of a secret organization within the Jedi Order dedicated to the notion of reverting to the old (largely pre-Ruusan Reformations) ways and rules (of multiple teachers and students, a more family-based overall structure for the Order with a strong support system for individual members, and far more open and less rigidly rule-bound style of learning how to embrace the Force and act according to its will) – in quietly spreading the word about the movement to revert to those old ways and in gathering recruits from amongst the population of untrained Alderaanian Force-sensitives, and even helped their mother put together a sort of emergency method of communication (only half-jokingly referred to among the family as battle code) based half on movement and half on various inane observations about the weather and clothes and other such seemingly innocuous things, in case their planet should ever be overrun as Naboo once was and they need to be able to talk about important things (like resistance and escape) without anyone else being the wiser, and yet still Bail insists on treating them like children and telling them to mind their elders and even to do as Breha says!
10.) Sword: Their bamáuhme does not dare teach them how to construct and use lightsabers, but there is a certain similarity to using a ’saber and using a sword, and so she and her sisters are taught the ancient yet dynamic tradition of sword dance and /úimma /Kylea quietly combines those lessons with instruction that allows them to consistently call on the Force to heighten their speed and agility and dexterity, essentially making all three of them quite potentially deadly with their mere metal blades.
11.) Lightning: She feels sometimes as if she’s leading three different lives all at once – that of the glittering young darling of Alderaan (safely hidden behind her costumes and jewelry), that of the loving sister and daughter and niece and cousin and etc., and that of the secret sword dancer, spinning and twirling and leaping with joy, the blades shining like leashed lightning in her hands – but rather than feeling harried or confused by her different roles, she feels happy, challenged, fulfilled, even, as if the shuffling of masks were a kind of dance, too, and her success in keeping all of her various roles straight another sign of her prowess with weapons.
12.) Machine: Rouge is almost positive that, without their droid armies, there would be no civil war, for the bulk of the Separatists are far too lazy and/or cowardly to ever risk their own hides in pitched battle, and so there are days when she thinks back to the aftermath of the failed Droid Rebellion and the backlash against thinking machines with the utmost sympathy for those who so furiously declared it anathema to make a machine in the likeness of a sentient being’s mind.
13.) Hell: Sometimes Rouge wonders if they shouldn’t just say the hell with it all and let the scientists unleash their doomsday weapons on the Separatists, so they can end this interminable awful war and just start all over again, with a clean slate, but then she remembers how few of the supposed Separatist worlds and/or species are actually responsible for the war (given the virtual dictatorships of the corporations) and she feels guilty for even thinking about supporting such wholesale slaughter of virtual victims.
14.) Mob: The problem with democracy, Rouge thinks, is that not all supposedly sentient beings are truly sentient, and she’s fairly certain that this is why it’s so frightfully easy for large crowds to revert back to mob rule, but she’s not sure that there’s a way around that, short of forcing true sentiency on everyone, so she keeps her peace when the topic of other forms of government come up at the dinner table.
15.) Honesty: She is of course saddened by her half-brother’s wife’s untimely death, but she’s afraid that she won’t really miss Breha too terribly much – not nearly as much as she is going to miss Bail, who will likely be spending even less time at home than ever before, now that he’s been accepted into the New Jedi Bendu Order as it’s first real recruit and made the shared Padawan learner of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker – especially not now that she and her sisters can finally openly pursue mastery of real lightsabers, and maybe that means she truly is selfish, self-absorbed, and shallow, but Rouge decides to take it a sign that she knows her own mind and isn’t willing to compromise her sense of honesty, even to herself, no matter how bad it might potentially make her look, to others, instead, and she’s frankly satisfied enough with that explanation not to spend any of her precious time worrying about it.
“Ruaighne ‘Rouge’ Macanna Retrac Organa: Using Fashion as a Shield/Weapon Since 6 BNA!”
01.) Mask: She knows that Celly sometimes thinks her shallow and Tia often believes that she’s self-absorbed, but the truth is that it discomfits Ruaighne to have so much attention focused on her just because of her family (and the weight of all the expectations behind that mass focus is even more uncomfortable), and so she counters that as best she can, by armoring herself in a carefully constructed mask, hiding herself away behind an endless wealth of distractions for the eyes and mind and emotions, taking a page out of Padmé Amidala’s book and subsuming herself in endlessly elaborate gowns and costumes, fancy jewelry and makeup and elaborate hairstyles that keep others too busy marveling at the richness of her clothes and trying to count up all of her sparklies to ever really see the true her underneath all of that flashy, distracting finery.
02.) Noble: She thinks, sometimes, that the children of noble families like hers would probably benefit as much if not more from courses of instruction on acting than they would from more traditional schooling in history and politics and diplomacy, and she doesn’t stop smiling for weeks when she learns that this is an opinion that Lady Amidala and her two closest friends among her handmaidens (Sabé and Dormé) all seem to share.
03.) Actor: Of all of her half-brother’s friends and allies, Rouge loves those three remarkable young women from Naboo the best (excepting Obi-Wan, of course. Master Kenobi is practically family, after all!), and she often thinks that she would die happy if she could just know for sure that she might one day be half the actor and leader that Padmé and Sabé and Dormé all are.
04.) Transparent: For the sake of her half-brother and of the wonderfully engaging young man himself, she loves Obi-Wan Kenobi without reservation; yet, that unabashed love cannot keep her from sometimes being happier when he is not in her company, for she always feels peculiarly vulnerable in his presence, as if she were transparent and he could see her so clearly that he knew the most intimate movements of her mind and heart, and it is a less than comfortable feeling, that sensation of being stripped bare and of there being no mask in the universe quite good enough to ever really hide her from him.
05.) Idiot: Of all the members of her Antilles demi-family, she likes Breha the very least, and so of course she’s the one her idiot half-brother decides to marry and bring in to their household!
06.) Disguise: She likes Anakin Skywalker – he wears masks of his own quite often and never begrudges anyone (save his Master) the wearing of such a shielding, protective disguise, and he is moreover, funny and interesting and helpful and shockingly blunt, for a Jedi, with a seemingly endless trove of stories to share – and so she cannot, for the life of her, understand why her half-brother almost always seems so wary and reserved around the cheerful youth from Tatooine.
07.) Passion: She loves her half-brother and his friends, but in a very real way she also hates politicians (especially mindless bureaucrats!) with a passion that knows no end, blaming them and the mysterious Sith for most all of the ills currently plaguing the galaxy and swamping the Republic, especially the rampant greed of the corporations and lobbyists that seem determined to rip the fraying fabric of the Republic in two.
08.) Overlook: Adults have a bad habit of ignoring, dismissing, or otherwise thinking far too little of those who are smaller and younger than they are, even those who are raised in such environments as to not ever really have any kind of chance to have properly naive and carefree childhoods, and it constantly amazes her how often even her half-brother – who, by all means, should clearly know better, given how close he is to Padmé Amidala and her handmaidens and how aware he is of the stupendous feats that those young women have accomplished while little more than girls – tends to overlook her and her sisters, as though unable to really believe that they could truly comprehend the enormity of the events that are happening in the galaxy, much less have anything useful to say about them or to suggest in response to the fomenting unrest troubling more and more of the Republic seemingly with every day that passes.
09.) Movement: She and her sisters have quietly mapped the whole elaborate warren of the Alderaanian Palace (just in case) and set aside caches of emergency supplies that they regularly update and/or replace, aided Kylea, their supposed nanny – actually one of the heads of a secret organization within the Jedi Order dedicated to the notion of reverting to the old (largely pre-Ruusan Reformations) ways and rules (of multiple teachers and students, a more family-based overall structure for the Order with a strong support system for individual members, and far more open and less rigidly rule-bound style of learning how to embrace the Force and act according to its will) – in quietly spreading the word about the movement to revert to those old ways and in gathering recruits from amongst the population of untrained Alderaanian Force-sensitives, and even helped their mother put together a sort of emergency method of communication (only half-jokingly referred to among the family as battle code) based half on movement and half on various inane observations about the weather and clothes and other such seemingly innocuous things, in case their planet should ever be overrun as Naboo once was and they need to be able to talk about important things (like resistance and escape) without anyone else being the wiser, and yet still Bail insists on treating them like children and telling them to mind their elders and even to do as Breha says!
10.) Sword: Their bamáuhme does not dare teach them how to construct and use lightsabers, but there is a certain similarity to using a ’saber and using a sword, and so she and her sisters are taught the ancient yet dynamic tradition of sword dance and /úimma /Kylea quietly combines those lessons with instruction that allows them to consistently call on the Force to heighten their speed and agility and dexterity, essentially making all three of them quite potentially deadly with their mere metal blades.
11.) Lightning: She feels sometimes as if she’s leading three different lives all at once – that of the glittering young darling of Alderaan (safely hidden behind her costumes and jewelry), that of the loving sister and daughter and niece and cousin and etc., and that of the secret sword dancer, spinning and twirling and leaping with joy, the blades shining like leashed lightning in her hands – but rather than feeling harried or confused by her different roles, she feels happy, challenged, fulfilled, even, as if the shuffling of masks were a kind of dance, too, and her success in keeping all of her various roles straight another sign of her prowess with weapons.
12.) Machine: Rouge is almost positive that, without their droid armies, there would be no civil war, for the bulk of the Separatists are far too lazy and/or cowardly to ever risk their own hides in pitched battle, and so there are days when she thinks back to the aftermath of the failed Droid Rebellion and the backlash against thinking machines with the utmost sympathy for those who so furiously declared it anathema to make a machine in the likeness of a sentient being’s mind.
13.) Hell: Sometimes Rouge wonders if they shouldn’t just say the hell with it all and let the scientists unleash their doomsday weapons on the Separatists, so they can end this interminable awful war and just start all over again, with a clean slate, but then she remembers how few of the supposed Separatist worlds and/or species are actually responsible for the war (given the virtual dictatorships of the corporations) and she feels guilty for even thinking about supporting such wholesale slaughter of virtual victims.
14.) Mob: The problem with democracy, Rouge thinks, is that not all supposedly sentient beings are truly sentient, and she’s fairly certain that this is why it’s so frightfully easy for large crowds to revert back to mob rule, but she’s not sure that there’s a way around that, short of forcing true sentiency on everyone, so she keeps her peace when the topic of other forms of government come up at the dinner table.
15.) Honesty: She is of course saddened by her half-brother’s wife’s untimely death, but she’s afraid that she won’t really miss Breha too terribly much – not nearly as much as she is going to miss Bail, who will likely be spending even less time at home than ever before, now that he’s been accepted into the New Jedi Bendu Order as it’s first real recruit and made the shared Padawan learner of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker – especially not now that she and her sisters can finally openly pursue mastery of real lightsabers, and maybe that means she truly is selfish, self-absorbed, and shallow, but Rouge decides to take it a sign that she knows her own mind and isn’t willing to compromise her sense of honesty, even to herself, no matter how bad it might potentially make her look, to others, instead, and she’s frankly satisfied enough with that explanation not to spend any of her precious time worrying about it.
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