Chapter Text
It’s a party, and everyone’s coming. BB’s graduated high school, BB’s going off to college in Massachusetts next week, it’s so far away. Everyone come say goodbye to BB, it’s a party, and everyone is invited.
And it’s not like BB’s particularly opposed. She’s a friendly girl, but Mama and Daddy and Pops have a lot of friends, and she has a lot of friends, and as it is they don’t really have enough room for everyone at the party to fit into their apartment. People are spilling down the stairs, standing in the late June heat, out on the little parking lot in front of the building. People are everywhere, and everyone is saying goodbye to her, and it’s just a lot. It’s just a lot, and sometimes, between all the cheek pinching and well-wishing she wishes everyone would just leave. Everyone would just leave and she and Mama and Daddy and Papa could be home, just them, just the most important people.
No one’s leaving though, because the party’s just begun, and she lost track of all three of her parents as soon as it started. She can’t go to her room for privacy, partly because she’s the star of this all, but mostly because she’s in the middle of packing and she just can’t deal with that sight right now.
She takes a deep breath in and out, nabs a beer, and while no one is looking, climbs out the kitchen window and onto the fire escape. It’s tiny, and right above the dumpster, but there’s no one on it.
Or, at least, there should be no one on it, but there is, and he’s taking up a lot of the space. He’s six feet tall at least, wearing all black, smoke rising up as he exhales around a cigarette. He’s mostly facing away from her, but she knows who he is. His hair is still beautiful, and BB still hates Ben Organa-Solo just a little bit.
It’s nice to know some things never change.
He’s grown up since she last saw him. He has a beard, now, and it suits him, even though his face is still a little dopey, just like it was at 13. He’s in a band now, she’s heard, in New York. He sings. He’s good at it too, apparently, because he makes enough dough that he’s never had to come crawling back to his mother for money.
“Guess they really invited everybody, huh?”
He turns around to look at her, and smiles, a little ruefully. There’s a bit of a blush staining his upper cheekbones, and she remembers that about him, from years and years of bickering, how red he always got, right at the drop of a hat. This looks like embarrassment though, and maybe a bit of a nicotine high, not anger.
“I’m back visiting my mom,” he says. “I really didn’t have a choice in the matter.”
“Ooh, you don’t want to mess with Mama Organa when she tells you to do something,” says BB, cracking open her beer on the edge of the railing. He looks at her, and looks at the beer, and opens his mouth like he’s going to say something, and then closes it again. She’s glad he does. It’s not that she particularly enjoys punching that mouth, it’s just that sometimes he opens it and certain things have to happen.
“I hear a congratulations are in order,” he says, instead. “Full-ride to MIT.” He whistles, a long, sloping note.
She shrugs, faux-modest. “Full-ride except room and board.”
“Still,” he says. “Good work. Want to go into engineering, like your daddy?”
“I don’t know,” she says, even though she does. She’s proud of her dad, thinks that what he does is important, but it’s too applied for her. She wants to go back to fundamentals, back to mathematics. Ever since she first learned algebra in fifth grade she’s loved it, the purity of the numbers, the calm she achieves once she works through a problem. She hasn’t told anyone yet, but she knows. “How’s the band?” she asks, instead.
“Good,” he says. “We’re actually going on a European tour soon, so I came to visit Ma before I was gone for five months.”
He inhales and exhales again, long. She wonders about his voice, if he should be smoking. She twitches her fingers, and he hands the cigarette over to her without complaint. She takes a drag, then hands it back to him, exhales. Maybe it’s the quiet, cut off from the buzz of the party, or maybe it’s the sunset. Maybe it’s achieving a conversation with Ben Organa-Solo that didn’t immediately descend into a shouting match that makes her open her mouth.
“You know what started all this,” she says, motioning a hand in between them, like that can encompass what the are, years of sniped comments and hurt feelings, lashing out and ruined family gatherings. It piles on and it piles on and it piles on, and twelve years later BB feels like having a civilized conversation shouldn’t be such an achievement, but it is. It really is.
“I pushed you off a swing,” he says, staring out into the sunset.
“I always wanted to ask you why. I could never think of a good way to do it. But why did you?"
“You can blame your parents, really,” he says, huffing a laugh.
“What?” she asks.
“I’d lost my dad. I lost a parent, at the same time that you gained two. How was that fair? And I know you were a baby, and I know I shouldn’t have done it, but we didn’t usually have recess together, remember? But for some reason, on that day we did, and I was staring at you, staring at your back as you swang, your little legs pumping away and I hated you, I hated you so much because you were up there flying, and I felt like I was sinking into mud, every day, deeper and deeper. I was digging myself there, really. Trying to get back to my dad. “
“You cared about him that much?”
“We never got along, actually. Even when I was little, like a little kid. It kills me, because I think we would have gotten along, now. I think- I think he would like me, now. Maybe. I don’t know. But I cared about him. I always did.”
BB decides, with that, that she is a little too drunk for this white boy Dad-angst and stands up.
“Well, that fucking sucks,” she says, and burps.
“Eloquent as always,” he says. “Stick to math, it’s more your thing.”
“You noticed?” she asks, staring down at him.
“Of course,” he says. “Finn always posted your math tests up on the fridge. Perfect hundreds, every one. I was always so jealous, even after I graduated.”
“Yeah, well, I listened to one or two of your songs. They don’t suck."
“High flattery.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She climbs back into the kitchen, setting the empty beer bottle down on the counter.
“Hey,” he says, and she turns around, leans out the window.
“What’s up?” she asks.
“I’m going to be touring, like I said, for the next few months,” he says, hesitantly, looking down at his almost smoked out cigarette. “But you’ll be in Boston, I’ll be in New York. I don’t know. Maybe we could see each other.”
He looks so boyish, then, even though he’s six years older than her, with a beard and everything. She gets swept up in it all, for a moment, the parties and the goodbyes, the sunset and the shared cigarette. Then she comes back down from it because, BB, just like her Mama, is practicality at her very core.
“Probably not,” she says, as kindly as she’s able.
“But maybe,” he says, catching her eye.
“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe.”