#listen i know canon says he has a blue saber

[magicalplaylist]

#calkestisweek2024 #star wars fanart #cal kestis #jedi fallen order #jedi fanart #i love my archeologist son #playlist art #POV: You're fighting a highschooler #an actual baby #listen i know canon says he has a blue saber #but yellow saber staff girlie for life #prompt: lightsaber

[mylifeisactuallyamess]

A/N: So. I wrote Anakin. Honestly the man has been living rent free in my mind for so long and we all know what I’m like for an angry angsty Star Wars boy. I am suffering with Imposter Syndrome massively with this because I don’t think I got his character down 100%. And well, I am a perfectionist. Anyway, here have this dumpster fire of a one shot.

Anakin Skywalker x Sith!Reader

Warnings: Canon violence, character death, lots of a Jedi hate talk. Damn fucking Jedi. Oh and a shit ton of angst.

Word Count: 1909

Your black robes fluttered around your legs as you peered over the ledge, a Jedi ship had come into land and you let a sly smile creep across your face. It was the Jedi you wanted, you could feel the ripples of his power through the force, the anger and darkness always with him even if he didn’t use them. You moved away and headed deeper into the compound, he was coming to stop you, take you back to the Jedi Council. You felt the presence of the 501st as they spread out looking for you but their force signatures were dulled by the brightness of him. Already the anticipation of battle thrummed through your body, the hilts of your sabers melded perfectly to the curve of your palms. Pulling down the visor on your mask you paced feeling him coming closer and closer until finally the door opened and there he stood in his black Jedi robes.

“I assumed you’d got lost,” you shot at him.

“I could sense your loathsome presence as soon as I landed,” he replied haughtily. You carried on pacing, seeing his saber still attached to his belt, the sure arrogance he had in his abilities made you proud. He was always such a cocky bastard but he had every right to be.

“What happens now, Skywalker? You think I will go quietly so you can hand me over to the traitors of the Galaxy?”

“The Jedi are not the traitors here!” He roared.

“Yes they are! And you know it!” His eyes followed you, across the floor, his expression darkening. “How can you not see their narrow minded ideas are strangling the Galaxy? They sit in their temple, allowing this war to continue all the while saying they don’t advocate it. They are apparently keepers of the peace and yet shattering it time and time again!”

“No! I will not listen to your lies!” You lifted your chin in defiance.

“Then come and shut me up,” your voice sneered through the vocoder. He moved quickly and your sabers came alive in your hands, the loud clash of the beams sent sparks over your heads. “The Jedi are a lie, their only legacy is failure…” you continued.

“No!” The force push hit you in the chest and a laugh burst from your chest as you slammed into the wall.

“Yes! Use that rage on me, Anakin.”

“You don’t want me to fight you,” he threatened, making you grin behind the mask.

“Oh baby, I’m counting on it.” You ducked as his blue lightsaber pierced the wall, you took the opening, punching him in the stomach making him grunt in surprise and retreat, before coming at you again. The sabers danced in a pattern that was all too familiar. You met each other move for move, nothing survived the brightness of your blades as you both cleaved a path of destruction. You spun out of his reach, putting some debris between you knowing it wasn’t much of a barrier, not when it came to you and Anakin. “They are oppressing you Anakin! They will never set you free to accomplish your true potential! They do not see the power you possess.”

“And you do?” He asked aggressively, pointing his saber at your chest as he roamed across the floor.

“I have always seen you.” He frowned and you sensed his confusion at your words. Retracting your blades you removed your mask letting it fall to the floor with a thud. “They told you I was dead didn't they?” You asked softly. The brightness of his own blade diminished followed by the ripples of surprise and crushing sadness but he stayed where he was. “More lies,” you pointed out.

“I don’t understand, Obi-Wan…”

“Obi-Wan misled you. He didn’t want to tell you the truth in case you came looking for me,” you spread your arms. “But the force guided you back to me anyway.” He whispered your name like it physically pained him, taking a step back as you stepped forward. “Change is coming, the end of an era giving way to the dawn of the Empire.”

“No, stop!” He cried.

“Join me Anakin….we can make the Galaxy a better place.” You backed him against the wall, his blue eyes closing as though he could stop himself from seeing you. “I know the pain you bear,” you whispered leaning into him. “I can help you face it, use it.”

“It is not the Jedi way, I will not fall for this!” You turned away from him growling with frustration.

“Stop being so blind! How do you refuse to see through the veil of deceit they have draped over us?” You screamed.

“How do you refuse to see the good! Has the touch of the light left you that much in the dark?” It hurt you, seeing him like this, sensing his pain and torment but it was necessary. If you could get Anakin onside the war would be won and you would be Darth Sidious’ prize apprentice. Turning the Chosen one was a task only you could accomplish, because out of all the people in the Galaxy, you were the one Anakin would not bring himself to destroy.

“Where do we go from here?” You asked him, watching as his chest heaved in distress.

“You will come with me, maybe the Jedi can help you…” you tutted in annoyance at his words.

“What a ridiculous notion! The Jedi can’t even help themselves let alone anyone else. Look at Ahsoka…” his blade roared to life in his hands as he flew at you, clashing against your red blades.

“You will leave Ahsoka out of this!” He snarled.

“But she is a part of this, we are all a part of this story that the Jedi have written,” you shouted over the crackling of your blades as he forced you back. The blades scissored out and his face grew close enough so you could feel his breath on your face. “You know I speak the truth Anakin, it’s why it upsets you so much.”

“No!” The air was pushed from your body and you fell backwards, your sabers falling from your grasp and skitting across the floor. You looked up into the light of the blue blade, seeing him standing over you with that twisted look on his face. The light of it shone in his tear filled eyes and you waited with bated breath. “I trusted you! Why didn’t you come and find me?” He shouted.

“What good would it have done? Would you have helped me like you helped her?” His saber lowered, but it didn’t go out and you chose a different tactic. “They asked you to spy on the Chancellor didn’t they?” He frowned, not hiding the shock he felt at your words. “I have my sources,” you spoke before he could question where you got the information. “Did that feel right to you? Is that a Just course of action for the Jedi to take?”

“I don’t…” you stood up slowly keeping eye contact.

“Use your brain Anakin!”

“I am!” He yelled turning away, his hand held out to you as though he wanted to stop you advancing.

“Anakin,” you whispered. “Just embrace the darkness.” His body slumped and you felt the streams rushing past you as he accepted the pain and anger inside him. You laughed, opening your arms at the vortex created by the force, it swirled around him, welcoming him. “You will not regret this Anakin! He will reward you beyond your wildest dreams!” You retrieved your sabers off the floor, snapping them to your belt before picking up your mask. When you turned Anakin was right behind you, his piercing eyes staring straight through you.

“What do we do now?” He asked and you hesitated slightly, sensing something still had to be unlocked within him but you didn’t know what. It wasn’t your place, you weren’t his master. You were his equal.

“I will take you to my master. He will know what to do.” You began to walk off but his hand snatched at your arm.

“What did he tell you about the rules of the Sith?”

“Enough,” you responded. “We could overthrow him,” you suggested with a smirk. Anakin released your arm and you relaxed slightly. “We were always such a team, unbeatable even on the side of the light, imagine what we could accomplish with an entire Galaxy at our fingertips?”

“I missed you,” he whispered and you took a step towards him. You leaned your forehead against his temple finally allowing your feelings to come to the forefront. Anakin had been everything to you, it had killed you to leave him behind but Sidious had promised you happiness in the end and now here you are achieving that. Your hand sought his own out, his fingers clammy as he gripped you tightly.

“And I missed you,” you breathed against his skin. His face shifted, his nose pressing against your cheek and your heart pounded at finally being reunited with the one person you wanted in the entire Galaxy. “The Clones are coming,” you murmured.

“I can sense them,” he replied, still not moving away from you. His expression was one of torture and you swept a strand of hair gently off his brow.

“What’s wrong?” You asked softly.

“There is….something I need to do.”

“Can I help?” You whispered, brushing your lips against his cheek.

“Yes.” He shifted, your chests pressing together as he finally kissed you. His lips were soft and lingering making you melt into him so you were unprepared for the burning sensation in your side. Your mouth opened against his in a loud gasp of surprise, his tears glinted in the glowing blue light of his saber as it protruded from your body. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. You couldn’t speak, your body refused to take a breath and you could see the darkside emitting from his irises as he gazed mournfully at you. “My master sent me to find you.” He sobbed when you slumped against him, not able to hold your weight anymore, the smell of your own burning flesh making you feel sick. His blade retracted but still the pain remained, the sting of betrayal coupled with the hurt of your life ending by the hand you trusted the most.

He followed you to the ground, your legs folding like they had no bones left in them as numbness spread through your body. “I will see peace and justice reign in the new Empire.” Your eyes widened, the only response you were able to give as the life slowly ebbed away from you. “I will never forget you.” You wanted to ask why, he had been genuinely surprised to see you under the mask and then you realised you’d both been played. Only the strongest would come out of this room alive, but you had been blinded. Tricked by your own feelings that maybe, just maybe he would have joined you rather than burying you in his quest for power. His hand cradled your head, his tears pattering onto your skin, mingling with the lone tear that ran from the corner of your own eye. We could have done this together, Anakin….

“It never would have worked. I’m saving you.” He replied as your world grew darker. “You were the one war I could never win….until now.”

#please don’t hate me #star wars #anakin skywalker #anakin skywalker x sith!reader #sith!reader #angst #I’m sorry #don’t come at me #this is my first time writing Anakin

[kiwikipedia]

Hello again! Glad to see someone remember Cin Drallig exists! The poor Battlemaster could use some more content in the fandom :D Anyway what made you interesting in using him for your incorrect quotes and stuff and do you have any headcanons for him? Also will his Padawan Serra Keto from the old Revenge of the Sith video game be making any appearances in your work with Cin?

I LOVE CIN? HE’S JUST??? A CHARM??? ONE GRUFF, ANGY BOY FOR ME?? Cin easily makes my top 10 list of Jedi. Serra actually has shown up briefly in my Wolffepack Against Child Abuse Modern Star Wars AU in the second installment alongside Bene! 

ANYWAYS YOU ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE HEADCANONS:

• Cin never got along with Qui-Gon Jinn, despite having an OK relationship with Dooku. The two of them clashed over a lot of things, and Cin specifically warned Yoda about Qui-Gon when he was pushing for Obi-wan to be his padawan. The two’s fights escalated to blows during and after Melida/Daan.

• Cin practically raised Kit, and as such, Kit looks up to him like an older brother-slash-father. Kit often comes to him still if he needs advice. Cin called him a clown when he came searching for courting advice.

• He also helped out with Bant and Nahdar when he could, and was the one who finished up Nahdar’s padawanship when Kit was called to the front lines.

• Despite the stories the Padawans tell the Initiates , though, Cin’s only strict and gruff when the kids have sabers in hand. Afterwards, he’s always willing to listen to their problems. Though he’s a bit shit at giving them good advice. It’s the thought that counts.

• Cin isn’t a master at all Saber Forms  in the same sense as those who master one form— such as Mace with Vaapad or Kit with Shii-Cho— but he is insanely dangerous since he can easily slip in and out of saber forms mid combat. Repeatedly.

• Not to say that he’s not a master in every form, because he is. but those who specialize in one form only take it a step up.

• Kit Fisto, Plo Koon, Agen Kolar, and Shaak Ti are his usual duel-mates, the five of them absolutely going feral when they’re out of sight of younglings and padawans because it gets dangerous. Cin throws lightsabers. It always freaks Kit out, though he should be used to it.

• Speaking of which, Cin’s a fantastic marksman and has a crazy throwing arm. Someone once asked him what kind of Saber Style it was and he just flatly responded “the Keeping Master Fisto Out Of Trouble” style.

• But yeah, the duels between Cin and any of those four get intense. Most duels between him and any of the masters get intense, though. It’s a good way to test one’s skills.

• He’s literally so indifferent to the nickname “the Troll” that the Order has given him, it’s hilarious. Some Initiate tried to use it as an insult to him and he basically just went “Okay, and?”

• Cin always carries more than one lightsaber on his body at one time. His usual, green one, two yellow shoto, and a blue saber-staff.

• He’s one of the best to go to if you have questions about lightsabers, since he works with them so much. He’s the one who builds all of the training ones, after all.

• He casually refers to the Temple Guards as his “kids”, which is why he’s friends with Plo. 

• During the Clone Wars the two would just go “how are your kids” “doing fine, and yours?” “Also well” 

• He also loves Bene and Serra as his own daughters , along with Whie as a son, as well, despite the boy not being his Padawan

• very much the type of dry-wit humor person. Deadpan snarker. It’s hard to tell if he’s joking if you don’t know him.

• He states that he’ll never get used to the strength of non-humans, as he’s been quite literally thrown by Shaak Ti, Eeth Koth, and Agen Kolar both in duels and on the few missions outside the Temple he’s done.

• Cin suggested that the clones should be trained in saber-work and offered to do it himself. It was put on the back burner, though the few times he’s not in the Temple and down in the Barracks, he’s offered to train the troopers there. Some, like the Commanders and a few ARCs took him up on the offer. And then realized the reason why some Jedi grimaced when his name was mentioned.

• Fives will forever say that ARC training was easier than Saber training with Cin. Battlemaster was a name well earned. Cin then told them the reason he was so hard on them was because he was cut for time, the Clones didn’t have years between leave to learn Saber Forms, so tuck your damn elbows in and adjust your feet, Hardcase.

• Surprising no one, the 104th and 91th troops picked it up faster than the others. Because of course the two would teach their men saberskills on the field. So Cin stepped up the difficulty level. It was fun— for him at least. 

• On that note, Cin suggests that maybe Wolffe should learn Vaapad from Mace and Shii-Cho from Kit when the war’s over. No risk of falling to the dark but he’d have all the unpredictability and speed from both forms.

• He considers the Coruscant Guard to be like his “nephews” in arms, since their job is similar to that of the Temple Guard— and he knows that when both groups can, the two Guard groups get to gether down at 79s for drinks and fun.

• Debated giving Fox and the CG shotos for protection, but eventually decided against it. (Which is a shame.)

• He’s very easy to fluster under that hard exerior and when he’s not teaching or fighting, something that— and here’s where my own personal ships come in and I apologize if this isn’t your cup of tea— Shaak Ti and Saesee Tiin take full advantage of. Shaak teases him relentlessly when she can. Calls him cute and just? He’s CG paint red. “I’m what” “You hard me” “hhhhhhhhh” 

• Saesee just. Picks him up from time to time? Easiest way to fluster him, just pick him up and he shuts up. Cin.exe has stopped working.

• A personal headcanon of mine that disregards canon, from what I know, is that the reason Cin couldn’t beat Vader was because he could quite literally feel the deaths of everyone in the Temple, and outside of it. With so many of his students, friends, and family dying, he was off kilter and easier to kill.

#I love the grumpy battlemaster #Cin Drallig #penguinkiwi headcanons #penguinkiwi analysis #heacanons #penguinkiwi answers stuff #TiAllig #TiAlliIn #SaeCin #Templarhalo tag #star wars

[dokoni-mo]

Far Away, Together || Darth Vader x Reader (Chapter 7)

(A/N: this was origninally supposed to go up tomorrow, but it was another one of those cases where i was writing at night and this bad boy basically completed itself. Im very proud of this chapter and I hope yall like it just as much as I do!! It was really fun imagining all of the things and writing them down :))) as always, feel free to ask to be added to the taglist :)) and feel free to send me any asks of anything you wanna say/know. All previous chapters have been liked below :)) )

(P.S: i got kinda misty-eyed while writing this so be warned)

Chapter One: [x]

Chapter Two: [x]

Chapter Three: [x] 

Chapter Four: [x]

Chapter Five: [x]

Chapter Five and a Half: [x]

Chapter Six: [x]

WARNINGS: canon typical voilence, usage of weapons, cursing, mentions of being in the hospital, some angst, mentions of death, otherwise none!!

Key: (F/N) = first name, (L/N) = last name. 

Word Count: ~7900

~~~

The force that surrounded the room had told him that something here was undeniably wrong. It frustrated him that he couldn’t yet piece it together, and frustrated him further that the force wouldn’t tell him the answer. 

The look in your eyes when he accepted the king’s offer only fueled his sense of self-doubt and second-guessing. Even if you didn’t know it, your eyes told him that you had felt a sense of unease in the room as well, but weren’t able to pick up on it's source. Perhaps it was just your nerves. Perhaps it was just the nerves that he had left. 

Watching you be whisked away by those guards was one of the hardest sights he had to bear, but he had no idea as to why. He had wanted very desperately for you to stay by his side during that meeting, but the sense of your boredom was plaguing his mind, distracting him. He hated that he had put you in such a situation, and thought that it might be nice for you to be entertained for a short while. 

But, the force told a much different story. 

He pretended that the last glance you gave him over his shoulder didn’t shake him to his core and made his fists ball. His thoughts of worry were consuming him whole. He would never admit it to anyone, let alone himself, but deep down inside of him, he was scared. Scared that look was the last one he would ever get from you. Scared that look you gave him was the last time he would ever be able to see the life in your eyes. His fists were shaking in the sheer amount of strength he gripped them with. Self-loathing and worry filled his mind. 

He had lost so many in his life. 

Yet, for some odd reason that he could not place… 

He did not want to lose you too. 

In fact, deep, deep down inside of him… 

He knew that losing you would finally destroy him. 

It would shatter any semblance of humanity he had within him. 

Despite feeling this so strongly, he still had no idea why. 

You were just a mechanic from Endor… 

Why did he feel the need to see you every day? To speak to you every day? To keep you by his side? To protect you? 

He couldn’t begin to know. 

Once you were ushered out of the room and the doors closed behind you, the only noise that filled the space was the sound of his respirator, working to a T just like it always did. Almost too quickly, he reached out with the force, searching for the feeling of you. 

Sure enough, you were still there. Still alive and unharmed. Big shocker, since you had literally just left, but… 

He was… relieved. 

“Now, my Lord,” the King spoke, that idiotic smirk plasterd on his face, “where were we?” 

“We were discussing the terms of agreement to join the Empire.” Lord Vader spoke flatly, his mind still somewhere else. 

“Ah! Yes, of course!” the king responded. His voice was cheery. 

Too cheery. 

It was disgusting. Revolting. Yet Lord Vader had to push on, by order of his master.

Lord Vader sensed more guards enter the room without even having to turn his head. The muscles of his shoulders tensed as he felt their presence, causing his adrenaline to stir. 

Something was definitely off. But, he decided to ignore it. Surely they wouldn’t try anything. These creatures didn’t seem that idiotic as to try and go toe-to-toe with him. Yet still… his mind seemed to wander again and again to the thought of you. The thought of you somehow being in some sort of danger. Trying his best to attend to the matter at hand, he told himself that you were in good hands with the guards. But, why did it feel like a lie? Why did it feel wrong? He decided to explain these questions with only his nerves acting up, and nothing more. 

“So what exactly will be the, erm… benefits that my planet receives from the Empire, my Lord?” The king asked. Lord Vader barely even realized that he had said anything. 

“Your planet will become a base of empirical troops. They will replace your guards and police systems if you wish. Otherwise, they will be serving there strictly for the Empire. You will also be financially compensated for all the resources you give the Empire.” 

Maker, did Lord Vader hate conversing with potential allies like this. 

“Splendid!” the king exclaimed, clapping his clammy, wrinkled hands together. If Lord Vader hadn’t been wearing a mask, he would have rolled his eyes. 

The king then started to babble on and on about how he was so pleased with Lord Vader’s visit to his planet and how honored he was to be joining the Empire and blah blah blah blah blah. A wash of anger overcame Lord Vader as he was forced to listen to the old man blubber on and on and on. This is the part that he especially hated when mingling with potential Empire recruits. They always felt the need to suck up to him and to the Empire. Lord Vader wished that they would just cut to the chase and tell him how they really felt. 

Just like you did. All the time. 

Zoning out from the king’s still-ongoing rambles, Lord Vader’s mind began to drift again. His sense of worry was overtaking him once more, swallowing him whole. If he were not in that infernal, hellish suit that kept him alive, everyone would be able to see clear as day that he was not okay; that he was worried sick, that he was scared. However, the hard shell of his exterior, coupled with his large frame and tough aura made everyone think that there was no human within those layers of buttons, leather, and metal. There was no one capable of emotion or feeling within the depths of steel that covered the thing within. Granted, he was to appear this way to everyone by order of his master, and Lord Vader did obey his master’s command. However, deep down inside of him, for a very long amount of time, he hoped that someone could look at him and see a person, and not just the Empire’s most feared weapon. 

You had done that. 

And fuck was he worried about you. 

He couldn’t bear it any longer. He had to know that you were okay. That you were safe. 

Droning out the king’s still ongoing blubbering, Lord Vader focused all his attention on manipulating and bending the force around him. Focusing on your life force, he felt his shoulders tense as every fluid in his metal-clad body that was still left run cold. 

Your life force had diminished significantly. And, you were fading still.

His breathing hitched in his respirator. His fists were shaking in a flurry of passionate emotion.

No. 

No. 

No.

He would not allow this. 

Not caring at all about what the king had to say, Lord Vader cut him off mid-speech. 

“I wish for my mechanic to return to me at once.”

The king looked at Lord Vader like the sith had grown a second head as his majesty was silenced. The king swallowed thickly as he leaned his body to the other end of his hair, his hand wrapping around his chin as he rubbed it gingerly. 

There was no mistaking the emotion that glossed over his blue eyes. Lord Vader had seen it countless times before. 

Fear. 

Lord Vader’s anger was reaching a boiling point. 

“M-My Lord! But she has only just left! Surely you could allow her more time to-” the king tried to reason, only to be cut off again.

“I want her here now. Do not make me ask again.” 

No one made even the slightest movement after Lord Vader spoke. The air was silent except for the mechanical breathing coming from Lord Vader’s person. The aura that emanated from the room was crisp, full of anticipation. If one were to listen hard enough, one would potentially be able to hear the sweat dripping down the guard’s foreheads as they gripped their blasters tighter. A thick, yet undetectable to the untrained scent filled the air. Lord Vader knew the scent all too well. He had smelled it so often throughout the years. There was no mistaking it. 

Fear. 

Lord Vader’s anger filled every atom within his person. 

The king was the one to break the tension, clearing his throat. 

His tone was much lower than normal. Serious. 

“I’m… I’m afraid I can not do that-” 

Everything that happened next was so fast that everyone present had barely had any time to process it. Faster than lightning, Lord Vader had risen from his seated position, his chair launching back faster than a speeding blaster shot. Sensing the rage coming off of him, the guards in the room pointed their blasters at the sith lord and fired, the blue streaks of light illuminating the room in quick, pulsive flashes. Using the force to deflect away the bolts, Lord Vader took his saber off of his belt, igniting it in his grip.

Lord Vader deflected the bolts off of his lightsaber that continued to barrage him, sending them off in wild directions, striking a few guards and making them drop dead to the floor. White-hot, passionate rage burning inside him, Lord Vader swung his saber faster and stronger than he ever had before, the muscles in his arms rippling beneath his suit. A few other guards were caught in this flurry of anger and the brilliant crimson to match, their pieces now scattered on the floor. 

Sensing one last guard left alive, Lord Vader hurled his saber to the other side of the room, cutting the guard clean in half as well as a few decorations in its path. Watching the guard’s body fall dead to the ground, he sensed one last man trying to escape his fury. 

The king. 

His saber returning to his right hand, Lord Vader reached out his left hand to the king who was halfway out the door, beckoning the force to do the same. Bending to Lord Vader’s will, the force wrapped an invisible, large, strong hand around the king’s throat, immediately making him gasp for air. Feeling his feet leave the ground, the king was quickly and violently pulled by the force into Lord Vader’s grasp, his robotic hand wrapping tightly around his majesty’s royal throat. Darth Vader loomed oh so ominously above the king as he was held tightly in his grasp, the dark lord’s saber humming forebodingly in his other hand. The king was gasping and choking for air at this point, his eyes wide and filled to the brim with fear.

The king had thought he was staring death right in the face. 

And, he was. 

Desperately trying to get away, the king tried fruitlessly to kick at the sith, the soles of his boots leaving skids on the metal that adorned the dark lord’s body. Lord Vader didn’t care in the slightest. The only reason why he didn’t immediately kill that old man because only he knew the answer to what Lord Vader did care to know. 

The only thing that pumped through Lord Vader’s body at this point was burning, boiling, white-hot fury as he spoke to the king in his choke-hold, his voice oh so much more deep and constricting. 

“Where is she?” 

~~~

When you finally came-to, you instantly realized three things. 

One: your wrists were tied together, and there was a chain around your ankle.

Opening your eyes and feeling your body again, you had barely been able to feel these restraints at first. But as you began to stir, they became far more apparent. Grogginess lacing your mind, you were confused at first on why you weren’t able to rub your eyes. Looking down at your hands, you finally noticed the pair of metal restraints that were bound around your wrists, making you unable to move your hands freely. You were terribly puzzled at first, but quickly remembered that the guards had assaulted you, locking you in this room. Trying to move your feet, you felt a pull at your right ankle as you shifted and twisted. Looking down, you noticed a similar restraint to the one on your wrist keeping you chained to the floor, the chain only about one and a half foot long. 

Two: there was a pounding in your head. 

You were less challenged by coming up with an explanation to this one. Remembering the events prior to you blacking out, you figured that your pounding head was from when the guard struck you with the butt of his rifle. The aching feeling was in the same spot. Honing in on the sensation a moment longer, you noticed that it felt as if something was caked onto that side of your head. Your lips tightened into a line as you deduced what it was. 

Blood. 

Great. 

Three: you weren’t alone in that room anymore. 

Focusing your eyes to train on what was in front of your vision, you noticed three pairs of feet standing about five feet away from you, all adorned with pairs of boots. Recognizing them as no where near empirical standards, your brow furrowed. The symbol of the rebellion you saw… 

These were rebels. 

Not wanting to lie down on the cold ground any longer, you shifted your body so that you could roll onto your butt, and eventually sit on your knees. Your body sore from lying on that cold, hard ground for an unknown amount of time, you shot a glare upwards, hoping that it landed upon your rebel captors. 

Sure enough, it did, and you were greeted with two familiar faces, and one unknown one. The two you recognized were the guards who had brought you to this room. The one you didn’t know was smirking devilishly down at you, her hands on her hips as she looked at you like you were living filth. You were almost offended, but you remembered who exactly you worked for. You supposed that made her opinion more justifiable, since she was indeed a rebel. However, this did not stop you from glaring daggers right into her eyes, your lips in a slight scowl. 

“Well, look who finally decided to join the party!” the rebel woman said, crossing her arms over her chest. She was a bit of a more mature woman (about early to mid thirties), and had the medals on her coat to match her experience. You had no idea what rank she was. It was almost impossible to tell with rebel uniforms, since, well, they didn’t really have uniforms. You envied them for that. 

“It's not like I wanted to be here in the first place…” you mumbled out, your gaze dropping to the floor for a moment. 

Your quip must have angered the female rebel. She spoke through her teeth as she responded to you, her brow furrowing in frustration. 

“What did you say to me, empirical scum?” 

It was your turn to make your brow furrow, your wrists straining against the restraints. 

“What does it matter to you?! Let me go!” you bellowed, although you were almost certain that your demands were not going to be met. 

Your confirmation came seconds later after the woman let out a laugh. 

“No way, missy! We are nowhere near done with you yet.” 

You sighed quickly to yourself at this, your brow still furrowed in anger and frustration. 

“I don’t know how many times you’ve heard this before, but I won't tell you anything.” you retorted back, a smirk tugging at your lips at your not-so-subtle teasing. Although you didn’t exactly classify yourself as loyal to the Empire, you were still no fool as to get you on it's bad side. Furthermore, it was moreso him you were loyal to… 

Him. 

Lord Vader. 

The thought of his name made your mind start to spiral. Did he know you were there? Where was he? Would he come for you? Would he even bother to even ask where you were? Would he care if you were captured by this lady and held as a prisoner for the rest of your years? The times you remembered sharing with him on that damned planet said yes… But you were still worried nonetheless. Still scared. Perhaps it was just you being scared of being taken prisoner, but your mind started to feel with fears and doubts the longer you sat there on the floor. Unable to hide your worry, your eyes kept darting to and from the door, hoping to see a familiar sith-lord standing in it's frame. 

Noticing your wandering eyes, the rebel woman reached out and gripped the back of your hair, forcing you to look up at her as you winced. 

“What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice feigning concern, “Hoping that monster will come and save you? Don’t be fucking ridiculous.” The woman spat at you, violently letting go of your hair as she re-crossed her arms. 

“He’s… y-you’ll never get away with this.” you panted out, your voice stammering. Your mind still racing, you could barely hide any of your fear. 

The rebel woman tsked as she rolled her eyes. 

“Psh. Please. We’ve already got half the job done. We got Vader alone with our finest, and there’s no way he could take them all on at once-” 

You breathed out a laugh before she could finish. 

“Maker, you really are that dumb…” 

Scowling down at you, the woman cleared her throat as she continued. 

“We didn’t expect Vader to bring someone like you along with him. We expected some pilot or officer that we could just kill off. That was the original plan for you, missy…” 

You kept your gaze trained straight in front of you as the woman started to pace around you. 

“And by all accounts, it still is. Unless, you give us what we want.” 

You pursed your lips before speaking, “Which is?” 

“Information,” the woman hissed, leaning down to get in your ear, “We know who you are, (F/N) (L/N). You’re his mechanic. You know things.” 

You let out a scoff, “Look, as you said, I’m just a mechanic, lady. It’s not like I’m going to know valuable secrets to the Empire. You’re embarrassing yourself.” 

The woman looked up at the guards and nodded to them at your answer. Quickly, the same guard who had knocked you unconscious moved his arms, revealing to you a long, silver stick with a ring of electricity around one end, filing the room with it's sound. You licked your lips at the sight of this, your eyes darting to the door again. 

Please… don’t leave me behind, you thought to yourself as sweat started to form on your brow. 

“Does that jog your memory, mechanic?” the woman hissed. 

“No, not really. Because I don’t know-” 

You were cut off by your own loud groan of pain as the guard pressed the electrical end of the stick to your shoulder, sending volts of electricity through your veins and nerves. It was agony. You now understood why stormtroopers who patrolled the prison blocks said they still heard the screams at night. 

Removing the stick from your shoulder, you let your head dangle down as you closed your eyes, your brow still furrowed. You refused to show these people just how terrified you were. 

“How about now? How about you try telling us the plans for that super-weapon we’ve been hearing rumors about, hm?” the rebel woman asked, staring down at you with unforgiving eyes.

“I already told you no.” you hissed back at her. Passionate rage flooding through you, you glared back up at the woman, daggers in your eyes as you spoke with your teeth bared. How dare they do this to you. How dare they chain you up like some animal. How dare they knock you out then shock you. How dare they speak to you in such a way. 

But, most of all… 

How dare they trick you into leaving his side. 

Your voice cracked as your words flew from your lips, your eyes threading to spill over in tears of frustration. 

You were done. 

You didn’t realize how crazy you were going from your worrisome thoughts and anxieties of no one coming to save you as the words spewed from your mouth with absolutely no filter. 

“Is this how you expect to get anything out of anyone? Shock me to death?! Yeah, sure, that’ll make ANYONE wanna talk. Look, I’m not lying to you. I really don’t know any fucking secrets that the Empire has. I just fucking work there. You really think that all of this is gonna work? Think again, bitch. You put all your “finest” in that room with Lord Vader to DIE. They’re all going to DIE. And for what? For you to die too? To bully around some mechanic for a few minutes? You’re rebels, right? Is this really the example you wanna set? Chaining up some fucking mechanic who’s just here on this NOWHERE planet as a representative? GROW THE FUCK UP! All of you are so stupid- DO YOU NOT SEE WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN?! LORD VADER WILL COME HERE ANY MINUTE NOW AND KILL YOU ALL. HE WILL, I KNOW HE WILL. H-HE’S GOING TO COME FOR ME! I KNOW HE WILL! I-” 

You didn’t even feel the hot tears running down your furiously contorted face as you screamed at the woman. You didn’t even realize how crazy you must have sounded. You didn’t even realize that they were telling you to shut up until you felt the electricity shoot though your veins again, making you yelp in agony. 

You didn’t even realize you were blacked out again until you hit the floor. 

~~~

As much as Lord Vader detested the king of that damn planet, he did have to give him credit for his resilience. 

No matter how much the dark lord demanded that the king fork over the information of your whereabouts, he wouldn’t do it. In fact, he didn’t really say anything. Lord Vader would choke the king in his grasp until his majesty was almost dead. Then, releasing the force around the king, Lord Vader would allow his majesty to drop to the floor for a brief moment to cough and choke at the dark lord’s feet, the king’s old, wrinkled hand clutching his throat. Once Lord Vader decided that he took in enough air, the sith would lift up the king and choke him once more. This continued on for a large amount of time. Lord Vader only grew more and more violent with each new choke hold. Every succeeding choke would be more tight and constricting than the last, and each succeeding throw to the ground would be rougher and rougher than the last. 

Throwing the king to the ground for what felt like the millionth time, Lord Vader was unable to hide his anger as he spoke, his voice as deep and menacing as the devil’s. 

“Your suffering could end very quickly, your majesty,” the dark lord rumbled, his grip upon his ignited saber growing tighter and tighter, “If you tell me the information I wish to know.” 

The king was coughing and wheezing at Lord Vader’s feet, his hand trying to massage his aching throat. His majesty could barely keep himself up upon his hand and knees as he looked up at the sith lord, his body weak and desperate for air. The king’s face was significantly reddened and his eyes were full of tears as he gazed upon the sith. 

He felt as if he were looking at the devil himself. 

“N…” the King began to rasp out, his throat dry and aching with the fury of the sith, “Over… my dead… body..!” 

Lord Vader tilted his head to the side inquisitively at this. The sith could definitely see that this cretin was willing to die for his worthless cause. 

Pitiful. 

Disgusting. 

Repulsive. 

It only added flame to the fire of Lord Vader’s fury. 

How dare this thing keep him from you. 

Lord Vader would not allow it. 

“Fortuneatly, your majesty…” Lord Vader began to say.

A bright flash of crimson filled the king’s gaze, followed by an excruciating pain. The king tried to scream, but his throat was so hoarse and broken that all that left it was a loud, strong rasp as he fell to the floor, rolling on his back to present himself to the heavens above, begging his maker above to save him. 

But no one came. 

Not even the maker himself would dare to oppose Lord Vader in that moment. 

After a moment of the king groaning in pain, Lord Vader finished his sentence. 

“You do not need all of your limbs to survive.” 

Opening his eyes and looking to the floor, the king confirmed his suspicions. There lied the king’s severed hand, cut off right in the middle of his forearm. 

It was horrific. 

But he had to endure. 

“I...I am-” the king stammered out, interrupted by his own coughs, “I am the king of this planet. I am king Chad Lothario Junichiro The Fifth. I will not be slighted by these attempts to-” 

The king was cut off again, but this time by another brilliant flash of crimson. With another twirl of his saber, Lord Vader severed the rest of his majesty’s arm, just below the dip of his shoulder. This earned another rasp of pain from the king, his face contorting as he saw the pieces of his arm littering the floor.

“Does that change your mind?” Lord Vader asked, feigning a sense of calm in his tone, masking out the boiling amount of rage that pounded through his body, making the sith lord see red. 

The king panted and gasped for a long moment before wheezing out his answer. 

“I… Y-Yes… just… no more, please…” 

Lord Vader felt a twang of satisfaction course through him, interrupting the currents of fury that crashed inside him. Deigniting his saber, he continued to bore his gaze down upon the king, unfazed by the pain he was in. 

He deserved it. 

He put you in harms way. 

Lord Vader would not allow it. 

“Good.” Lord Vader rumbled out with feigned pleasure, “Now speak. If you tell the truth, I will contemplate allowing you to keep the rest of your limbs.” 

The king nodded his head at a feverish pace, swallowing his saliva before speaking.

“I-I had my guards take her down the hallway… the last room at the end…” 

Lord Vader looked at the king for a long while. He could not sense any form of deceit coming from the king, so he trusted his intuition that the creature must be telling the truth. The dark’s lords fists balled once more as he thought of you in that room. Reaching out with the force, he honed in on your life force again. You were still alive, but not in good shape. Lord Vader’s breathing hitched as he pictured what could possibly be happening to you. 

You were alone. 

Scared. 

Helpless.

In pain. 

Everything Lord Vader wanted to shield you from. 

He was failing to do so. 

Lord Vader would not fail. 

Clipping his saber back onto his belt, the sith lord quickly turned on his heel and began to exit the room, his cape fluttering behind him from the speed. Reaching out with the force, Lord Vader hurled the doors open, startling the stormtroopers that were waiting outside. Poor boys. 

Reaching out once more with the force, Lord Vader manipulated it to latch an invisible hand upon the king’s ankle, the dark lord dragging his majesty behind him as he marched. 

Rumbling out a quick follow me, Lord Vader commanded the group of stromtroopers to follow beind him. Obeying his order, the men in white marched behind the sith, their blasters clutched tightly in their gloves. A few of them began to whisper amongst themselves, their blasters and helmets motioning to Lord Vader and the man he was dragging behind him. Ordinarily, the dark lord would have warned them off the consequences of not maintaining proper contact. 

But in that moment, he couldn’t care in the slightest. 

The only thing in the galaxy that Lord Vader cared about… 

The only thing in the universe that Lord Vader wished to pursue…

Was to get you safe. 

To return your small, fragile body to his side. To take you away from this awful place. To make sure you were safe. To take you back to his Star Destroyer. To return you to your station where you would never be harmed again. Where he could see you every day. Where he could speak to you every day. Where he could constantly know that you were safe. Where he could see you smile. Where he could hear you laugh. Where he could hold you in his arms without prying eyes… 

How he longed to deliver you to this fate. 

Looking at the door that obscured the sight of you from him, he was filled with an unprecedented, uncanny, unfathomable amount of rage, anger, and hate.

How dare they keep you from him. 

They would be destroyed, just like every person who tried to stop him. 

~~~

You didn’t stay blacked out for very long before you awoke again, the pain in your shoulder still throbbing. 

You slowly began to sit back up again as you heard the rebel woman’s voice again, causing you to frown. 

“Done with your nap, scum?” 

You scoffed, “Yes. Very refreshing.” 

The woman scowled and crossed her arms again, meeting your gaze as she looked down upon you. 

“Shut up. Now, are you gonna talk? Or do we have to encourage you some more?” 

You sighed, your brow furrowing, “I already told you, lady, I don’t-”

“LIAR.” the woman bellowed, cutting you off. She nodded to the guard with the shocker stick again, “Give her some more motivation.” 

You bit your lip and closed your eyes as you saw him draw closer, not wanting to give the rebels any satisfaction of seeing the fear on your face again. You felt your shoulders tense and your wrists strain against the bindings as you heard the shocker ignite. 

Was this it? 

Is this the final curtain? Your finishing bow. 

You didn’t know.

You didn’t want it to be. It was funny for you to admit it now, but there was still so much you wanted to do. You had never thought that you would think such a thing after joining the Empire, but so much had changed. You were happy. You were excited to greet each day. You were thrilled to fix things. You were overjoyed to repair broken TIE Advanced x1s. You were over the moon that you put on your uniform each day. Such a stark contrast to what life had been like before. 

He had changed that. 

You were oh so happy when it was you and him. You were finally able to truly connect with another soul. You were finally able to admit your deepest and darkest regrets and tell your oldest stories. You were finally able to converse with another human. You were finally happy. You were finally able to smile. You were finally able to laugh. 

All because of him. 

And now… you were scared. 

You were oh so frightened that you would never be able to experience anything with him ever gain. That you would never speak to him again. That you would never look at him again. That you would never be able to laugh with him again. That you would never be able to share a dance with him again. That you would never be able to tell stories with him again. 

That you would never be able to tell him… 

You felt a lump in your throat as the guard’s boots stomped closer to you, making you tighten your lips into a line. 

Your mind filled with images of him and nothing but him. 

Vader… you thought to yourself. 

You could feel the electricity emanating off of the stick. 

I hope… 

You think of me… 

When you fly again. 

I’ll be one of the stars. 

Please… 

Wave hi if you see me. 

A hot tear ran down your cheek, dampening the surface. 

I’m sure you’ll know which one I am. 

Bracing for impact, you tensed your shoulders as you squinted your eyes shut. 

Instead of being greeted with the sound of electricity being forced into your body, you were greeted by a much more startling one; one that made you shoot your eyes open and whip your head up to look at the door. 

Or, what used to be the door. It was now in wadded clumps on the floor. 

In the door’s place was a large plume of smoke. The smoke was quickly illuminated with thin streams of red. 

Blaster bolts. 

Were you dreaming?

The bolts scattered themselves across the room, ending their path in the walls around it. A few lucky bolts met their end in the chests of the two guards that had locked you in that room, making them drop dead to the floor. 

If they hadn’t taken you against your will, you would have been horrified. 

As the smoke settled, you were able to make out what was behind it. 

A quite large battalion of stromtroopers, their blasters aimed and hot from their recent barrage. 

And in the middle of them all, looming oh so much taller than the rest. 

Lord Vader. 

Your savior. 

You felt your heart swell with every emotion known to man as your eyes widened. 

You flexed your muscles as you began the motion to call to him and run to his side, forgetting you were chained to the floor. Thinking it over a moment longer, you decided to stay put. The symbol of the rebellion was now plastered so that Lord Vader could see it. 

You thought it best to let him deal with them on his own. At least for now. 

Somehow, the rebel woman had survived the onterouge of blaster bolts with only a hit to her shoulder, her hand now clutching the wound as she extended her free one to Lord Vader, a pistol within her grip and finger laced around the trigger. She glared right into Lord Vader’s mask as she tried to put on a brave face, but the panting in her breath revealed her true emotions. 

It was her who broke the tension. 

“Give me…” she said in between pants, “one good reason… as to not pull the trigger.” 

Lord Vader tilted his head to the side at this, saying nothing. He must have been amused. 

“I believe I have someone of importance to you, rebel.” Lord Vader eventually said, the sound of his voice like music to your ears. You could almost cry. You were so relieved that you were able to hear it again. 

The woman raised a brow in confusion. As if it were on cue, a stormtrooper with something in his grip stepped forward. Without any sense of care, he threw the object in his grasp down at the floor to the woman’s feet. Following it's path, your eyes widened as you were able to process what exactly it was. 

A severed hand, along with about half a forearm. 

Looking back up at the woman, you noticed how her glare had fallen off of her face, one of fear replacing it as her brown eyes widened. 

“Th… that’s…” 

“His majesty’s hand.” Lord Vader finished for the rebel woman, his voice flat. “If you wish for the rest of him to return to you, I suggest you return my mechanic to me at once. I assure you that your king is still alive.” 

The woman’s face contorted into a glare again, her pistol still pointed at the dark lord. 

“How do I know this isn’t a trick? How do I know?” 

Lord Vader paused a moment before speaking again. 

“You don’t.” 

The woman’s lips pursed as she contimplarted the deal, her pistol now shaking in her grasp. The tension in that room was so thick you could cut it with a knife. It was almost suffocating. You could barely breathe. 

After a long pause, the woman lowered her blaster as she spoke.

“Okay… I accept.” 

Lord Vader tilted his head again at this. 

“Good. Now, give her back to me. Now.” 

The woman’s face contorting into a scowl and your cheeks staining pink, she kept her eyes on Lord Vader as long as possible as she knelt down to you, breaking you out of your bonds. Instantly, a pair of stormtroopers stepped forward and helped you to your feet, your body weak from the shocks. Wrapping your arms around the men’s shoulders, you looked to Lord Vader as they helped you limp over to their side. Flashing him a warm smile of thank you, I knew you would come, you noticed as his gaze followed you until he saw that you were right next to him again. 

Where you should always be. 

“Now, give me back Jun- I-I mean- give me back his majesty…” the woman demanded, pointing her blaster back to the dark lord. 

After a momentary pause of gazing at you, Lord Vader turned to another trooper, giving the nod of approval. The trooper nodding back, he signaled his other troops the okay. Within moments, a pair of other troopers drug in a barely conscious king into the room by his collar, throwing him down to the woman’s feet. Instantly, she knelt down and cradled the king in her arms, mumbling to him how she was sorry and such. 

“We are done here now, rebel.” Lord Vader spoke after a moment, forcing the reunion to a halt. Turning on his heel, Lord Vader walked close to the two stormtroopers who were helping you to stand as he exited the room. 

He did so, however, not before giving his troops one last command. 

“Kill them.” 

The sound of the barrage of blaster bullets that filled the room behind you was oddly comforting. 

~~~

His return to the Super Star Destroyer was not at all what he had imagined it to be. Nor was it what he wanted it to be. 

The shock stick that those filthy rebels used on you must have been extra strength. It was taking you a much longer time to recover as compared to other shock victims. You were barely able to stand on your own without wobbling and getting off balance. This was all not to mention the deep gash that had carved itself into your forehead. 

Lord Vader made the executive decision for you to spend at least two nights in the medical bay.

I just need to sleep it off, you had tried to protest, I’m fine. 

He would not have it. 

It was odd to see Lord Vader inside of the normal medical bay used for troopers and officers. Of course, he had his own medical bay that he would waltz in to and out of as he pleased. This was mostly due to the sheer complexity and amount of medical procedures that he needed to maintain homeostasis with his suit.

It was also due to him keeping his pride in tact by only letting as few people as possible know he was even capable of being injured. 

So, it was no shock that the nurse Lord Vader talked to was practically shaking in her boots. 

“I wish to see Miss (F/N) (L/N).” he said flatly to the nurse, paying no mind to how close she looked to shitting a brick right then and right there for everyone to see. 

“Y...Y-Yes, my Lord. R-Right this way…” she stammered out, gulping silently as she led the Dark Lord down the halls of the medical bay. She only stopped her scurrying once she led him to a door marked (L/N), (F/N). Pleased with her, Lord Vader dismissed her to carry on with her work, to which she practically ran back to her station. If he were anyone else in the galaxy, Lord Vader would have been offended. 

Reaching out his large hand to the panel adjacent to the doorframe, he pressed the glowing white button in the center. The door to your room then slid into the wall that encompassed it, allowing him in.

The sound of his respirator was much louder inside of the tiny room, the noise able to echo off the walls much faster. The room was very plain, with only the necessary equipment inside of it. The only other noise that emanated in the room was the occasional beep of the machine that was hooked up to you, signalling that you, indeed, still had a heartbeat. 

Lord Vader had hoped to converse with you upon his arrival. He was almost saddened to find out that he couldn’t. You were currently asleep upon the small bed in the center of the room, your lips parted slightly and your eyes closed. There was a bachata patch secured around the spot on your head where the gash had lain itself, as well as one on your shoulder where the shock stick had been pressed into you. Additionally, there were a plethora of sensors strapped to the flesh that ran up and down your arms. 

Lord Vader wanted to wake you. He wanted to coax you out of your sleep so that he could see your eyes, so that he could hear you talk. But, he knew better. He was to let you rest if you were to return to proper health. 

Yet, he was… disheartened. A phantom pain clenched his heart for a brief moment. 

Overtaken by the feeling, Lord Vader stepped closer to your bedside, his mask pointed right at your face as he watched you in your sleep. You looked so peaceful. He was grateful you had finally been able to rest. Reaching out his leather-bound hand, Lord Vader brushed a lock of hair out of your face as gently as he could, careful with the amount of force he used. Continuing the motion, the dark lord brushed the back of his mid-finger knuckles against the surface of your cheek, taking his time with trailing them down the surface. 

Maker above… 

You were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. 

But yet… 

Seeing you there in that cold, hard bed, with all the patches and wires coming off of your frame.... Hearing the beep of the machine behind him signal your heartbeat… Feeling how small your life force had been… 

It allowed an old friend to visit Lord Vader. 

Regret. 

If only he hadn’t brought you to that planet, none of this would’ve happened. Sure, you would be by yourself for a few days, but you would still be healthy. You would still be able to work. You would still be able to talk to him. You would still be able to smile. But no. He made you go on this trip. He made you attend those meetings and gatherings. He was the one who allowed you to slip into the hands of those rebels. 

Clenching his fist, another friend came to visit Lord Vader. 

Self-loathing. 

What in the galaxy was he thinking? He should have never taken you to that planet. All he wanted to do was to bring you someplace just as beautiful as you were. He wanted to see the look in your eyes and your smile as you got to see green for the first time in who-knows-how-long.

That’s all he wanted.

But not at all what he got. 

Lord Vader was speechless. He wanted to say something to your sleeping form, but couldn’t even begin to formulate the words of what he wanted to say. There were so many things he wanted to say to you, but every attempt he made to string them together seemed more idiotic than the last. So many feelings were bubbling inside of the sith lord, many of which he coudln’t describe. 

He didn’t know how to tell you about any of them. 

Yet… 

Watching your chest rise and fall… 

Watching your eyelashes flutter in your sleep… 

Watching your fingertips twitch…

He knew one thing. 

And oh how it pained him. 

He knew what he must do… 

To keep you safe. 

~~~

The nurses had said that you were asleep for about 18 hours when you finally woke up.

You were surprised, you didn’t think that it was possible to sleep that long of a time. Yet, there you were, doing the impossible. If it were under different circumstances, you would have almost been impressed. 

The nurses had removed the sensors from your arms as you sat up that afternoon, allowing you to move more freely as you ate the meal they gave you. Of course, it was rations. But, after being on that damned planet for so long and eating their food, rations had suddenly seemed to be the finest cuisine in the galaxy. 

You were watching a holovid of a news briefing when a knock came to your door, your cheeks puffed from your freshly taken bite. Hearing the door woosh open, you quickly chewed and swallowed the food so that you could talk to whoever had just entered without being rude. 

To say the absolute least, you were surprised to see a familiar face standing before you, datapad in hand just like before. 

The officer who gave you the assignment of Lord Vader’s mechanic. 

Was he a messenger for Lord Vader now? You were puzzled. 

“I am glad to see that you are finally awake, Miss (L/N).” the officer spoke, his eyes darting between you and the datapad. 

“Thank you, sir…” you mumbled back out in response. 

You paused a moment in contemplation before you continued on. 

“Sir,” you said, “If you don’t mind… could you please tell Lord Vader of my condition? I will be able to return to my station very soon, and-” 

“I’m afraid that will not be necessary, Miss (L/N).” the officer said, cutting you off. 

Your brow furrowed in confusion. 

“What? Sir, I… I don’t understand.” 

The old officer poked his datapad a few times before folding his hands behind his back, speaking out his response to you. 

You had thought that you were dreaming or hallucinating at the officer’s explanation. Your blood was cold, and your heart had felt like it stopped beating. 

It had to be a lie. 

“I’m afraid your time serving as Lord Vader’s mechanic is over, Miss (L/N). He has reassigned you. He has stated that you have completed your work on his TIE, and is no longer in need of your service. You are to return to Endor to your original station the day after tomorrow. I must say that I am impressed, Miss (L/N). I have never heard of someone completing such a task in such a short amount of time. I am certain that Endor will be quite pleased to have you return. You will be granted a small amount of severance for your time here, and will be respected immensely upon your arrival to Endor. I am certain your life there will be far better than the one you have experienced here on the Super Star Destroyer.” 

~~~

TAGS: @spaghetti-666 , @soullesstaco , @arsonistvoyager , @robin-obsessed , @glitter-rian , @captainrexstan , @easterncryptid , @deviatedwinter , @roseangel013bf , @danicalifxrnia , @dartheldur , @finest-trashbag , @yeah-boiiiiiiiiiii , @elongatedmusk-rat​ , @shads121 , @muffinbeliever , @sakuramadae​ , @padme-parker , @khapikat222  , @the-official-memester , @rens-angel , @obiwankenobiness , @yvette1703 , @breakfastpizzagalaxy , @missmannequin​ , @clearnostolgia​ , @scarletsinsandsnowwithetragedies​ 

#darth vader #darth vader x reader #fanfiction #anakin x you #anakin skywalker #anakin x reader #star wars fanfiction #star wars #star wars x reader #star wars x you #star wars fanfic

[grumpyhedgehogs]

what comes next

Summary:  CC-2224, an old robe, and a blaster. Cody, a love he never admitted, and dead memories. Obi-Wan used to tell him hope was the most powerful tool a person had. AO3. Part 1 of the Scraps series. Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.

Warnings: suicidal ideation, canonical major character death. Post-Order 66.

Tagging @juitoverride and @star-temeraire, who seemed interested in my fic! (If you would like me to remove tags please let me know.)

“I think I love you,” Cody whispers. The words don’t hurt the way he expects them to, don’t burn or scrape against his vocal cords. They simply leave an age-old ache, as familiar as the embrace of a friend. The robe twists in his hands, scrunched into a ball in his fists. He can’t let go; the comforting, rough weave digs into his palms, imprinting its crosshatched pattern there. Cody savors it. It’s all he has left now.

Vader has the lightsaber. Cody’s not sure what the Sith will do with it. He doesn’t want to know--if it’s destroyed, if the one thing that for years stood between death and the one man Cody has ever loved is destroyed by that man’s student, brother, child--

Well. It’s not like Cody hasn’t already thought about what he’ll do. It’s not like Cody doesn’t already have a plan. There’s a blaster, non-regulation issue, barcode scraped off, hidden under his bunk. The other troopers leave clones be most of the time, too unsettled by whatever haunts his and his brothers’ eyes. It’s easy to sneak contraband. He’s thought of turning it on Vader before finishing the job, but he knows it wouldn’t work. If Vader was too much for--for him , there’s no way Cody is enough to stop the Sith. He’s thought about it anyway, if only because he knows the end result will be the same, enacted by his hand or Vader's. But this Force osik has screwed up Cody’s life since before it began; he doesn’t want to give the Sith any more satisfaction. It’s time Cody actually takes charge of his life.

It’s just that he can’t seem to rise from his bunk. The robe dropped to the floor in that corridor before Vader’s downswing struck. Cody knows. Cody saw . Cody waited until the rebels fled, until Vader swept away with the ‘saber, until someone in a grey uniform told him to clean up the mess Vader left behind. Then he took the robe and--left. He just left. He’s been sitting here, hands draped in fabric long thought lost, for some indeterminable length of time. He’s tired. Cody hadn’t realized how tired he is until now. It’s the type of fatigue sleep won’t fix. He can’t move, he's so damn tired; his bones are too heavy. His head is full to bursting, with regret and fear and hope and tears and a damn chip rusting away in his brain. He wishes it had never worked. He wishes it never stopped working. It was like that bright flash of blue lightsaber, that clashing sound, that old, worn smile, was so familiar that a switch flipped inside and he wasn’t CC-2224 any longer. He hates him for it. He loves him for it. Cody can’t think straight.

There’s only a few things Cody knows now, that he can keep right side up in his head. They are these: He used to be Cody, and he became CC-2224, and then he was Cody again circa a few hours ago. The man he loves is dead and Cody helped kill him and his entire family. Vader has the lightsaber. Cody has the robe and a blaster and Cody is still in love.

Cody has never said the words aloud until now. The robe isn’t comforting as much as it is damning. He clutches it close anyway. “I love you.”

“Oh no,” says a voice he won’t ever hear again. Cody clenches his eyes shut against a sob. He can see him now as if he is in the room with Cody. He’s sitting across from Cody, leaning forward in a perfect mirror of his former commander with his elbow on his knees. He reaches forward and clasps Cody’s hands in his; Cody thinks he wouldn’t hold as tight as Cody would like him to. He was always so careful with the clones, with everyone he met. He never wanted to hurt anyone. He was the best warrior Cody's ever known. His fingers would be dry and soft and calm and heavy on Cody’s fists. He can almost feel it as if it is real. “No, Cody, no.” Obi-Wan repeats quietly. “Don’t do that. Anything but that.”

“But I do. ” He’s crying like a youngling. If he gets too much salt water on the robe it won’t smell like Obi-Wan anymore. “I love you.”

“Don't love me if you can help it. It won’t do either of us any good now,” Obi-Wan answers, insufferably reasonable. “You have to stop Cody. Oh, darling, you simply must stop hurting yourself like this. You know my heart couldn’t bear it.”

“I killed you.”

“You tried . You'll find you didn’t quite succeed. I’m quite infuriating that way, I’m afraid.”

“I loved you and I helped kill you. I shot at you.”

“I do have that effect on people,” Obi-Wan says airily. “I tend to be a very divisive person. Inspire strong feelings and all that. Can’t be helped.”

“You’re dead.”

“Well, yes,” Obi-Wan agrees, still sounding arch and amused. Cody wishes he could open his eyes to see the familiar, infuriating expression, but he can’t. He knows he’ll be alone when he looks up. He can’t swallow it yet. “But that doesn’t mean we both have to be dead, dear heart.”

“I can’t go on without you. I don’t think I have the strength for it.”

“You’re not alone Cody. I might be gone, but I didn’t take everyone you love with me.”

Rex disappeared right after Cody turned into CC-2224. Ahsoka Tano is still at large. There have been rumblings of a growing rebellion. The blaster under his bunk calls to him again but Cody’s too busy listening to the one voice he wishes he could have back and never will.

“You’ve been on leave long enough, Cody,” Obi-Wan tells him, the sound of his voice fading as he does. Cody knows he is smiling without looking. “It’s time to get back to work.”

Cody opens his eyes. He is alone. It hurts so much he can’t breathe. He does it anyway, if only because Obi-Wan would want him to. Ahsoka. Rex. The rebellion. The trio that ran--Obi-Wan had died to protect them. A boy, barely a man, with blond hair, screaming for Ben as he was dragged away. The princess of a dead planet shooting like she had been born with a blaster in her hands. A man and a Wookie, piloting a ship like Cody hasn’t seen a person do in decades. This is the rebellion? This is what is left of everything they had fought for? This is what Obi-Wan would have him live for?

So be it.

Cody takes the blaster and the robe with him when he goes.

#commander cody #cody sw #codywan #darth vader #obi-wan #obi wan #obi-wan kenobi #obi-wan fanfiction #star wars #sw #star wars fanfiction #star wars the clone wars #star wars the original trilogy #star wars fic #my writing

[restingdomface]

MDZS lightsaber colours for my crossover AU

Lan Wangji: pure white handle and clear crystal for a blindingly bright fire stick. Light holder indeed. We. Do. Not. Ask. Where. The. Handle. Has. Been.

Lan Xichen: They shade a twin crystal in this AU so his is the same blade, but his handle is baby blue with pretty silver inlay. The last time he actually used the thing for anything other that sparing (before the clone wars starts cause he got sent to Coruscant to help protect the kiddos, so that thing did get used on a few clankers) was for cutting down a tree that was gonna fall over and into Jingyi’s window when lightning hit it in the middle of the night. The fact that he didn’t grow up in the Jedi temple makes all the Jedi masters wonder why he has the twin to LWJ’s saber...

Wei Wuxian: Black handle, red blade. He got a wild side eye from the Jedi masters from that back when him and LWJ were in the temple, and he still thinks it had something to do with why they refused to knight him, but he knew they never would anyways, so he shrugged and moved onto his own path anyways. The crystal is shockingly well maintained for something that’s over a thousand years old. Through most of the clone wars he’s actually not on the front lines. He’s tending to the zombie clones and creating new weapons at their encampment. He uses LSZ to heat metals instead of a furnace cause fire magic is more useful than a stupidly hot tent that he’s probably just gonna blow up anyways. He misses his hubby and plays really bad trap music through the camp loudspeakers that both annoys Dooku and also blows up clankers if they get too close. He tried to rehabilitate him and Ventress once. It worked for Ventress but Dooku tried to get in his head and WWX got annoyed and punched him before leaving him to General Kenobi to deal with. He won’t stop arguing with Qui-Gon’s force ghost about how to cook soup (can you hear Kenobi crying in the background cauee both their cooking is poison and everyones shitting to death instead of dying in the war lol) and helps Obi-Wan see him earlier than in canon.

Lan Jingyi: baby blue blade, shares a twin crystal with A-Yuan. They found it on a camping trip with WWX when they were like five. Handle is white with a baby blue band around the top. His main weapon tho, is just crying at the enemy until they get uncomfortable. One time Hondo Okana kidnapped him and he wouldn’t stop pestering him so he actually tried to sell him back to WWX who was all ‘no thanks, youre his father now, take responsibility’ and now Hondo is actually on their side cause he’s finally met someone more annoying than him.

Lan Sizhui: same as Jingyi, but his handle is white and red, since he was nostalgic when he chose it and he misses uncle Ning, but A-Die says he’s still mentally connected to WN and they’re on their way from Earth but Earth has shitty intergalactic travel rn so it takes like 150 years to get to them. WN’s probably gonna do that nearly-crying thing that zombies do when they get emotional when he sees the saber. Except, he doesn’t use it very much since he found that flame thrower... when the clones first saw him with the flame thrower they nearly shit themselves. Someone gave him a jet pack and now they’re trying to steal him from the weird cultivator clan. I mean. Wens are sorta fireproof imo so it’s okay.

Jin Ling: gold on gold babey, but with a red band around the top. But he doesn’t really use it much cause JiuJiu gave him a bowcaster and so he’s. Like. Scary. Armed child. Did you know he’s like 153 in this AU???? But he looks like a 15 year old???? When the clones saw him with a bowcaster they nearly had heart attacks wtf. Plz child youll shoot your eye out.

Ouyang Zizhen: Red and blue!!! The handle is red lol. The clones are thankful some of these babies have normal weapons but that sentiment is short lived after they watched him yeet his weapon (unlit too) at the enemy and then cry for twenty minutes. One of the medics has adopted him and is teaching him how to do field work so they don’t have to Deal With That Again.

Jiang Cheng: Listen. He showed up after WWX and the kids got kidnapped. And he’s got. An electric whip. And just fucking whipped through pure durasteel to get them out of their cages. And then stopped to throw a bitch fit that WWX actually brought the kids to this (‘They’re over 150 years old JC!’ ‘Do they look like adults to you? How many times a week does one of them ask you for a bedtime story?’ ‘...listen I didn’t LET them come here, they’re stowaways, no one’s letting them stay they’re just. There.’) and the clones that got kidnapped with them are all ‘omfg do we have to listen to their family bullshit...’ and it’s beautiful. Hot uncle with a whip and one of these clones is all ‘I would climb that but he’s shorter than me’

Lan Qiren: He IS a weapon and his effect is to make children behave. They sent him to the main Jedi temple to teach their kids some manners. The kids love him to death till they encounter punishment in the form of doing handstands while copying the Jedi code over and over. Those lucky little shits don’t even have to suffer through using a traditional calligraphy brush to copy 5000 Lan sect rules why they complaining omfg. They gonna get strong.

Jiang Yanli: poison soup. She’s really good at fucking up cargo shipments to send the sith contaminated ingredients and making them too sick to do anything. Also her saber is pink and purple. The blade is pink, the handle is purple.

Jin Zixuan: goooooooold but the blade is actually green. He also has a bowcaster but it’s an antique and he doesn’t really use it in battle.

Meng Yao: they’ve all unanimously agreed that he isn’t allowed weapons anymore. He just whines really loud for DaGe and a giant man comes out of the shadows to either scare you into running away or beat your ass. It took them like four lifetimes to get back to being their dumb gay married selves, but now they’re clingy as WangXian and MY just has to pout to get what he wants. It’s really horrible. TBH no one knows what they’re doing during the clone wars, they just show up sometimes and help out/cause trouble and everyone is all ‘oh. Okay.’ But they Always have Huaisang with them and he always stands there looking pretty and untouchable and glaring at anyone who looks at his DaGe wrong. If someone tries to hurt MY tho he’s unlikely to help lol.

Nie Huaisang: Fan and gossip and also looking at you like you’re the scum he stepped in on the way here and also you’d beg him to step on you and spank you with that fan and Jesus Christ there is a line of clones willing to ask him to do exactly that-

Nie Mingjue: THAT IS THE BIGGEST LIGHTSABER ANYONE HAS EVER SEEN IN THEIR LIVES HOW THE FUCK DID-

#lan sizhui #nie huaisang #mdzs #nie mingjue #lan xichen #lan wangji #twin jades of lan #lan jingyi #juniors #ouyang zizhen #wei wuxian #lan qiren #the untamed #the grandmaster of demonic cultivation #jiang cheng #jiang yanli #jin zixuan #jin ling #meng yao #nieyao #star wars #clone wars #crossover

[dekko-61]

THE MULTI STAR#1

RECENT ATTACKS

By darkness-boy12 (toffee-12)

Introduction

Welcome everyone to the new Journey of the Whills Seekers. This is a new set of stories that will search towards the mysteries of the force and how they all connect with in the Universe we all love so much thanks to our Brilliant creator of this amazing universe George Lucas... we will continue with this later because now we must begin our first Story, and now I’m sure we are all familiar with the world with in A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... but this time we will view all the force’s greatest untold mysteries and how a long time ago in a galaxy far far away is one of many... behold this will be the tale of how two duel galaxies combine and a s a result the tale that we are all familiar with will be seen through a new light with these alternate versions of it ... BOOK ONE: To be a Jedi...

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away...

The Rebellion flies open high through the far reaches of Space... “father... , Son...” the memories ached through Luke’s mind as the young boy remembered the stinging pain of his father’s identity... why didn’t Ben tell him. Luke then looks down at the cold bloody stub that once was his hand. It hurt a lot before but now it only gave a slight stinging feeling when he moved it too much but not even Luke could deny that no matter what the medical droids did his arm was going to hurt for a very long time. He couldn’t even imagine how he could help the Rebellion without a hand. He blamed himself. “Useless”, the boy muttered to himself. He tried to leave the medical bed but the droids were always watching. He couldn’t leave when he pleased. He slumped down in sadness, tears barely leaving-his eyes. All of a sudden Leia walked into the room with a glad expression on her face. Leia:”Luke, your awake.” Luke:”you look happy...”, *Luke then scoffed in annoyance*

Leia:”Luke, this isn’t your fault, you came and fought Vader to save us, that is the heart of a true hero. The Rebellion will always thank you for your efforts.” Luke:”no Leia I failed... I wasn’t ready... and I put us in more danger....”

Luke looked down in sorrow and muttered to himself,”I should have stayed on dagobah.” Leia:”What? ... Luke if you didn’t step in all hope would be lost, the empire would have won! You can’t be hard on yourself like this.” Luke looked down at the floor,

Luke:”Leia, I’ve gotta go.”

Leia:”no not this again, Luke! You can’t keep leaving when you want because you feel like your not good enough! The Rebellion needs you...*soft tear sniffs*... I need you.”

Luke looked up with a surprised expression. Luke:”Leia what happened..”

Leia:”Han, he’s...*tears released*..gone.” Like:”Wait, you don’t mean...” Leia:”Vader gave him to a bounty hunter who sold him to Jabba on Tatooine.”

Luke:”Jabba the crime lord?” Leia:”Luke,he was sacrificed for you, they froze in carbonite as test for your capture and when they found it success-full they sent him to Tatooine as a trophy for...*gulp* Jabba.” Luke:”Wait this is bad Han could be in danger there! What if they unfreeze him just to kill him we gotta save him!”

Leia:”Luke!*sigh*We are not in a position to rescue anyone right now, the Rebellion is still looking for a new base with the empire on our tail, and our forces decreased since Hoth.” Luke:”what?” Leia:”we are on the run Luke.”

Luke:”It can’t be this bad.”

Leia:”it is, we will rescue Han when we are ready but right now especially in your condition we have to rest.”

Luke’s thoughts(Great, now Han’s been hurt because of me, Master Yoda, was right, I was not ready, and I don’t think I’ll ever be)....

To be a Jedi (T172)

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away... On the planet Corascant the Jedi temple lives in peace and harmony with the rest of the galaxy as a new celebration has begun the former Queen of Naboo Is tasked with attending this special event as it marks the day the evil Sith Lord Palpatine was defeated by the Chosen One of the Jedi Anakin Skywalker and saved the galaxy... Meanwhile, on the planet Naboo a boy was trying to focus on his rest but the nightmares of the darkside haunt him like a beast! “Agh!”, he screams in pain as he here’s the familiar voice of evil ring through his ears before flashing awake! Boy:”wha... just happened?”

Padme:”Jin are you alright?

Jin:”mother... um yes I am fine just a nightmare..” Padme:”It be nice if you talked to me about these things, your father had a lot of them and they almost put the Galaxy to risk.” Jin:”I feel a dark presence in the force I think it’s calling to me.”

Padme:”...relax, you train to hard, that’s why I wanted you to visit today, Naboo is a good place to rest.” Jin:”rest is good but a Jedi should always be in the moment mother I can forsake that, or my training will never be complete.Master Horhe feels the same.” Padme:*sigh*”fine, you can go back tomorrow but remember Naboo is always available for you.” The Next Day...

Within the Jedi temple grounds, Jin was practicing form two of his lightsaber skillset while his master watched him carefully. Horhe:”Jin Your gripping the Saber to tight be calm, don’t given to anger or frustration.” Jin slashes his green blade on to the ground by accident and falls in the air only to hit the ground full force. His body was flat on the ground as he winced in pain. The saber hilt slowly rolled out of his palm and on to the ground. The saber was then surprisingly floating in the air only to appear in the master’s hand. Master Horhe:”you lost control my apprentice, take this as a lesson, you must be calm and not given to your emotions or your thoughts will betray you and your training will be useless.” Jin looked up disappointed at his master only for his master to help him up and give him back his saber. Master Horhe:”Your dismissed, we will continue tomorrow.”

Jin walked away towards the temple in anger and the feeling of failure...

“Luke, you use the force Luke”, a mysterious voice said catching Jin off guard! Jin stopped in his tracks and looked toward the sky...

He must tell the council he thought... the voice was otherworldly, The Nether-world of the force perhaps he thought...

To be a Jedi(T-172)

The sun shines bright on the planet of Corasaunt.

We see Anakin Skywalker and Ashoka Tano walk up towards the Jedi temple. “So have you decided to come back?” Anakin looks down at his former apprentice. “I don’t think one can return after leaving the order Anakin.” Anakin:”Ashoka you belong here, your a Jedi..” Ashoka:”I wish that were still true Anakin.” Anakin:”Wha.. it is true Ashoka.” Ashoka looks down in a depressed state. “Go to the temple okay, I’m heading back to the outer rim.” Ashoka slowly walks away. Anakin watches as his student drifts away from sight. Anakin’s heart saddens once more. He glance’s a the temple for a bit,With a powerful glare forming he enters the temple.

A few hours later...

On the planet of Naboo Padme sits looking at a holo message as Anakin enters the room. Padme’s expression now changes to a satisfied smile to see her husband again.” Padme:”Ani were have you been?” Anakin grunts. “I was on a stake out again for the Council, bounty hunters tried another assassination attempt on our new chancellor.” Padme:”But he just got into office.” Anakin:”People didn’t agree with the Republic’s decision of who would be the new chancellor. There are bound to be aggressive opinions in the Galaxy Padme.” Padme stares at Anakin in disbelief. Anakin:”Y’know politics.” Padme:”Your son actually came by this week.” Anakin:”Oh ... how is he?” Padme:”As a Jedi he’s fine.” Anakin:”Okay Padme what is this about?” Padme:”He needs his father Anakin, he may not admit it but his hidden rage is growing, and I don’t want him to live miserable for the rest of his life.” Anakin:”Padme, Jin is just going through a phase he’s thirteen.” Padme:”Watch over him, I can’t stop him anymore, he’s tired of listening to me. I fear our connection is drifting apart.” Anakin:”He loves you..we both do, he’s just going through a tough time, it’s a stage in his life you gotta understand.” Padme:”what about you Anakin, even if he loves me, He loves you a lot Anakin, he misses you, he wants to see you more.” Anakin:”I have a job to do.” Padme:”it isn’t easy being the son of the chosen one.” Anakin:”I know, I’ll talk to him tomorrow alright.” Padme breathes slowly. Padme:”Promise me.” Anakin:”I promise.”

Meanwhile...

Three different starships flew nearby heading straight down the buildings of Corasaunt. “We’re almost they’re men, ready your canons.” The ships fired down on the buildings instantly causing panic. Screams were heard across the city. A man in blue flew through the city. “There it is”, he says determined. His eyes of laser fires one of the ships to the ground. The Man lands on the streets right infront of the fallen ship with a confident smile. “Superman”, he says to himself ,”I like the ring to it.” “Hey!, look super freak”, yells a criminal. “You better get yer ass away from here, or you’ll hear it from Overnight!” The man turns to the pirate. The crook looks back scared before running off. The other two ships flew away. The Man looked up at them and then back at the Criminal who disappeared between the citizens. “I’ll need another go at this”,The Man says before flying away.

[lilhemmo]

i..uh.. need a fix it fic for tros... if you're interested

a/n: of course i’m interested :) need i say spoilers ahead?? omitting what i don’t want from canon (what i know) and adding in whatever i feel :) 

Isolation is the one thing Rey knows best, so it’s the only thing that makes sense to her when she falls back into reliance on her survival instincts. 

She tries the desert planet of her mentor.

The sand is all too familiar between her toes and in her teeth. The biting wind turns her cheeks to raw skin. The heat warms her whole body to a pink color, the flush on her cheeks fabricated from a sunburn.

It isn’t long before Rey remembers...she hates the sand.

And she feels the green calling out to her, night after night, when the desert cold settles in, chilling her down to the marrow.

It takes a while, but finally, Rey answers. 

It is a siren song, reminding her of Han Solo’s warm smile as she took in the sight of a new planet for the first time. She can hear his voice ringing in her ears as she drives the Falcon towards a planet that screams brightly at her through the Force. She can smell the foliage through her connection with the life force of the entire galaxy; it calls to her with a voice as soft as the petals of an Anagallis flower. 

As her feet touch the ground and fresh blades of grass split between her toes, she feels a wave of nausea force her to her knees.

Find me. Please, find me.

Rey covers her ears with her hands and pushes herself back to her full height. She winces at the familiar voice, tears surfacing in her eyes immediately while his words resonate in her mind. 

“You’re gone,” she spits, angry with herself for falling so quickly back into hope. Still, she searches frantically for even the muted blue glow of the Force somewhere in the distance. 

She sleeps in the Falcon with her staff tucked underneath a pillow. The low hum of the kyber crystal lulls her to sleep at night, drowning the voice reverberating in her head. 

Every morning she finds herself something for breakfast - either a fish from the nearby river or a little animal in the woods - and she cooks it just under the shield of the Falcon, sitting on a log and picking under her fingernails when she’s done. 

She thinks of how he might critique her, how he would despise the way she’s living. He means well, of course. Or rather meant well, given he can’t mean anything anymore. Even still, Rey swears that she can feel his heart beating in the background of her soul, pushing her forward each day with it’s strong song.

He starts to come to her in her dreams.

She decides to leave the green planet and find another.

--

This time it is blue.

Blue like his saber. Blue like his soul. Blue like his light.

All she can remember of him is blue.

Rey swallows thickly as she steps down from the Falcon’s steps to traverse onto the new planet, trying to shed her old skin like a reptile, moving on into the next step of her life. 

As soon as her feet touch solid ground, something buckles in the Force.

Her heart beats heavy in her chest and sweat beads on her forehead. Rey feels a throbbing at the back of her mind, pulsing like a heartbeat. She follows where the Force leads, beckoning her closer to the edge of the planet, closer to the blue sea. 

Her toes dip in when she hears his voice echo in the wind, “Find me. I’m here.”

Tears fall down her cheeks just as they always do when she hears his voice calling out to her like a dream. She shakes her head and water falls from the sky. Rey falls to her knees, digging her hands in the sand, water up to her elbows.

“I can’t fool myself any longer,” she cries out to the ocean. Her eyes burn with saltwater, “No more tricks, no more lies. Please. I’m tired.”

And then it’s no longer blue, but black.

Hollow, cold blackness.

Rey has felt this before - on Ahch-To, when the deep called to her then. Master Luke admonished her for her flailing towards the sadness that ironically gave her hope. She should feel scared, frightened even, but all she can taste is the honeyed thought of home just against the tip of her tongue. It begs for her to swallow, to allow the warmth to seep into her bones. 

Instead, she meets the chill of the ocean. The tide rises and steam billows from the difference in temperature. Her heart hammers in her chest, eyes fluttering behind thin lids. Rey stands back to her feet, trousers soaked to her knees.

She remembers how she is supposed to be afraid of the dark, to scamper from it. Her limbs should be shuddering and her heart should be a block of ice in her ribs but all she feels is temptation and heat. 

Rey swallows drily, her mouth turned to sandpaper, and then she dives.

--

She isn’t sure how she can breathe under the water. Maybe that’s the Force too. 

Either way, Rey pushes herself until she gets to the part of the water that numbs her body. It brings her closer to the pulsing until her mind cannot focus, cannot feel anything but the Force overwhelming her, begging her to dive deeper.

Rey is afraid that if she dives too far, she may never come up for air.

Was this what Master Luke warned her about?

She does not have time to think because her fingertips brush over the hilt of a saber in the murky sand below. Rey’s fingertips wrap around the base of the saber and it is one she knows all too well - the cross-guard is unmistakable.

As both hands touch the hilt of the lightsaber, Rey is thrown backward against a jagged rock somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. The base of her neck cracks against the rock and her body falls limp into the sand.

A few bubbles part from her lips and then everything goes black.

--

“Foolish Jedi,” a voice murmurs, warm and gentle. “I suppose you’re not really a Jedi though now, are you?”

Rey feels her hair brushed away from her face and she wants to force her eyes open because she’s afraid she may be in danger, but her body won’t listen.

The voice is deep, rough from disuse, “I’m not sure how you found me. I’ve been calling to you.”

The voice is one from her dreams.

“Ben?” her voice cracks.

Rey wills her eyelids to open and she swears he is a dream. Or a nightmare.

“Hey, sweetheart,” he speaks, and she realizes his hands are against her neck and waist, just like the day he died. Tears spring to her eyes and Rey lurches forward, ducking her head into his neck. She will not take for granted their time, even if he is a figment instead of reality.

His arms wrap around her and he feels solid, but she won’t be tricked. He has been an imaginary thing in her mind for far too long for her to start trusting herself now.

“I’m here,” his voice echoes as if he were reading her mind.

Which, if she were to think too hard about it, he probably is. He’s been in her mind since the day he removed his mask and bared his soul to her. She grits her teeth and forces herself to look him in the eyes.

He is dark, but he is also light.

His clothes are all varying shades of black, and his eyes are deep, ebony to match his hair. However, the light in his irises, the hope in his voice - it all balances.

“I can’t take this,” her voice wobbles, but her hands find solid skin when she touches his torso. “This sick dream has turned into a nightmare and you haunt me. Can’t I be free of this pain?”

Rey’s words echo his from all those years ago - words he wailed to Han Solo before the flash of red and singed flesh filled the desolate air.

Ben looks over her frantically, as if trying to put together a puzzle she can’t quite see. He brushes the back of his palm over her cheek and she is reminded of the feel of his own skin under the pads of her fingers as he flashed her his final smile.

“Please, Ben,” her voice breaks. Rey sniffles and her shoulders shake.

He shakes his head, “I don’t know what to tell you, Rey. You found me. I thought you would be free of the pain that has clouded you since Exegol.”

“F-Found?” Rey echoes.

Her big, brown eyes look up at him like a confused animal and he has to fight back the desire to chuckle between his lips.

Instead, he nods, “Yes. I’ve been stuck in this, uh, this world between worlds of sorts. I can’t get out - at least not alone.”

Once she understands, it’s as if her whole world has turned back right-side up. Rey’s beaming smile returns and Ben feels his heart expand in his chest so much so that he fears his ribs may hurt, but he doesn’t care.

“I found you,” she repeats, her hands on his cheeks now.

All she can think about is his mouth, his touch. She wants to drown in it, like she did the ocean. Her hand flexes, remembering the lightsaber.

“Your saber.” Rey turns frantically, searching for the weapon. She swallows before turning back to him, “When I touched it, that is what brought me here.”

Ben blinks one time too many before focusing back on her face again. He shakes his head, “No matter. It’s a relic of a dead man, passed away when you healed me.”

As if seeing him for the first time, Rey draws the tip of her index finger down where his scar used to be - where Kylo used to be. The splitting of his soul in two.

“I didn’t even notice,” she murmurs, eyelids threatening to close with the nearness of him intoxicating her. She sighs and he chuckles just loud enough for her to hear him.

Ben is quiet for a moment, drinking her in slowly like she might disappear any second now. Rey does not break his eye contact, her soul unwilling to be apart from him again.

“I’m not sure how to get out,” he tells her, tone heady.

She watches as his lower lip trembles and she wonders what it would feel like against her own mouth. Rey looks around, breaking eye contact with him for a mere moment.

When her gaze returns to his, he’s instilled with a confidence he’s not sure he’s ever possessed.

“We’ll figure it out - together.”

It has been a long time since Ben Solo knew he could count on anyone other than Kylo Ren. 

He’s not quite sure when this scavenger dug her own hole in his heart, but he knows better than to push her away. Instead, he tucks her further into his arms, heart beating wildly against the fabric of his shirt.

“I like the sound of that,” he mumbles, eyes flitting closed as his lips find hers for the first time in too long.

Rey loses herself in the taste of his lips, the feel of his body. His arms are around her like a cage, securing her so she won’t fall apart again.

She’s not quite sure when trusting him became second nature, but she knows better than to push him away. Instead, she grips him by the collar and the jaw and bruises his mouth with her own.

And for the third time, Ben Solo and Rey work together to fight a common enemy.

--

a/n: i actually really like this???? not real worried about how it works plot wise or lore wise, i’m just having a good time 

#reylo #ben solo #rey #reylo fic #benrey #benrey fic #rey x kylo #rey x ben #rey x ben solo #ben solo x rey #kylo x rey #kylo ren x rey #my songs #star wars

[snowstcrm]

TROS, mixed feelings

I’m going to try and get all my thoughts in order about The Rise of Skywalker. I had some general points I wanted to write about but lost my focus when I came home to a pet emergency.

The first thing I want to say is that the movie is good, in the sense that the spectacle is enjoyable to watch. There are some amazing sequences and some awesome beauty shots. One that sticks out to me is Rey walking to the throne room and it’s this really wide shot of her underneath that large mass and the blue lighting in the back.

So the pros are:

Beautiful shots I’m sure were taken straight from awesome concept art

Good action movie if you aren’t emotionally invested/don’t know much about star wars

I did find myself enjoying it at parts, but it was at surface level. With each new plot development, I felt the established canon collapsing in on itself and it was upsetting if you decided to focus on the plot.

Kylo and Rey / the Force side of the plot continued to carry the trilogy. There were many cool things done with the force bond, including objects being passed through their connection.

Getting confirmation that the Sith kill one another so their souls transfer to the younger stronger vessel and then continue to get passed down

More talk about the Jedi and Sith in general. I personally always enjoyed this part of star wars more than the rebellion plots

Now onto the cons...

Just.. too much. Way too much plot stuffed into one film, which then contributed to too much force-fed exposition, and just too much dialogue. Characters literally NEVER stopped talking. Less is more, and that showed when the most powerful scenes were ones where the characters would just shut up for two seconds and let the audience form their own thoughts.

Characters were being dragged by their hair through this plot. Their actions and dialogue didn’t feel like it came from internal motivations, but because the plot needed the characters to do things and therefore they did.

The attempts to throw in new characters into the plot, which leaves them half-assed and better off giving that screen time to characters that are already established. I understand there was backlash against Rose’s character but the solution shouldn’t have been to just erase her relevance.

The forced trio dynamic.. it just doesn’t work for these three... Rey spent some time with Finn in TFA, spent a whole movie away from the Resistance in TLJ, and is now forced by the writers to stick around Finn and Poe when she continuously is breaking off from them anyway. They’re all constantly arguing with each other, and the tone is off. They were going for a cute bickering between friends but they all just seemed annoyed with one another.

Chewie’s death fakeout was so absurd. They really tried to explain it off with “it must have been a different ship!” when they were in the middle of the desert and there were no other ships to be seen. It was so forced and dumb it was difficult to feel anything.

The overall lack of direction for Finn’s character in this trilogy. I kept holding onto hope for Finn’s character to stick the landing in the final episode, but the writing failed him. His love for Rey is dialed to 100 and he keeps chasing behind her when she is ten steps ahead. It’s just sad to watch at this point, especially when the story has already established the foundations of Finnrose. The romance set up was completely trashed by this movie in favour of him chasing after a girl who has no interest in him. His entire story this whole trilogy revolved around Rey.

Leia’s Jedi training past we’re just finding out about now..?? I feel this was completely tossed in with no regard to spinoffs. I read Bloodline and there was absolutely no mention or fit for Leia to have done Jedi training (to the skill level of constructing her own saber no less). This is a cool idea, but again it felt STUFFED IN.

Lack of presence from the force ghosts when they’re needed makes their appearance lackluster. It feels deeply cruel for the Skywalkers to not reach out and speak to their own blood when he needed it most, especially Anakin who if he spoke to his grandson in the FIRST FILM, Ben would have been on a complete different trajectory. The OT force ghost characters not reaching out to Ben makes their presence in these newer films all the more bitter. Ben was so desperate for guidance that it resulted in manifesting a memory of his non-force sensitive father. The scene was touching, but it was literally Ben having to talk himself through his decisions all alone while Rey gets love and support from thousands of generations of jedi when she needs it.

Rey’s god force abilities. Now listen, I’ve been adamant about defending Rey’s capabilities in the force, but TROS has just made it too impossible for me to continue to feel that. She displayed far beyond what her skill level should be after receiving minor training from Luke and then some nondescript training from Leia. She used force lightning, life force transfer and healing, and lastly turning Palpatine’s own lightning against him when he’s in a state stronger than he’s ever been before, and the explanation for all of this is...

Rey is a Palpatine... I had made a tinfoil hat theory about this back during TFA. She has the accent and her character story starts out in the ruins of a Star Destroyer. I guess it could have been a decent reveal if they had spent the last two movies actually building that. Over the years I had come to love the idea of Rey truly being no one, that the force didn’t only favor those with bloodline. It could call on anyone, even those who by the world’s eyes is worth nothing. Rey Palpatine should have never been a thing, and Palpatine showing up in these movies at all when Anakin’s entire 6 episode story arc was him eradicating that evil for the love of his son. Anakin’s powerful and sacrificial actions really lose weight within the story when the evil was never really killed.

Things that mattered werent dwelled on enough for the audience to process them. The movie was so eager to race to the finish line that information/events that should have deeply effected the characters didnt.

Im biased but I truly believe that Ben shouldnt have died. That's not how his arc should have ended. It's far too cruel, especially because his death was unceremonious and as an audience we were expected to move on because LOOK!! everyone's hugging!!

The ending felt deeply uncomfortable. It's like watching a tragedy but with happy swelling music in the back and characters smiling.

So yeah.. I feel like there's more I could say but Im sure other people have said the same things with better words. Despite my list of complaints being large it genuinely was entertaining... As mentioned if you try not to focus on the plot too much it can be really good at a surface level.

#my post #tros spoilers

[smirkingsolo]

Orpheus: A Reylo Story (Chapter 1: Ash and Memory)

The World Between Worlds Reylo Fix it fic you’ve been craving since TROS ripped out your still beating heart and crushed it to death.

Canon-compliant, universe-plausible, multi-chapter

Please read the Prologue first; it will literally not make any sense if you don’t!

Prologue can be found here or over on my AO3 (Rinnagirl) at https://archiveofourown.org/works/21984730/chapters/52460923

Your comments, likes, reblogs, kudos, etc. mean the absolute world to me!

Chapter 1: Ash and Memory

For what feels like the hundredth time, Rey ignites Leia’s saber. Its blue beam casts the surrounding woods in an unearthly glow. The effect is immediate. A sound like a distant scream of frustration echoes in her mind, pounding against the walls of her skull like some caged creature desperate to break free. She drops the saber, hands shooting to clutch at her throbbing head, clamping down over her ringing ears. When the saber hits the ground, de-igniting, the silence is just as immediate.

Two months.

It has been two months since Exegol. Two months since she has been able to use the saber, either saber. Though it had meant the triumphant return of her staff, the inability to use the only sabers she had was becoming incredibly inconvenient. She could tell she was already losing some of her skill and coordination with single-bladed weapons after two full months of being unable to even ignite the sabers, let alone train with them, without the horrible screams. Some days she vowed to ignore it and train anyway.

That never lasted long.

Even when there was no screaming, the alternative was not much better. It was either a desperate, trapped scream or a chorus of voices so loud they drowned out her every thought with their incessant chatter.

She glares at the saber resting oh so innocently on the forest floor. They are on Takodana at the moment, a place Rey would normally have enjoyed visiting. Poe and Finn were meeting with Maz to discuss what Rey usually referred to as “CC (co-comander) business.” In the months after the Battle of Exegol, the group of former Resistance fighters had kept busy. More than enough small pockets of First Order loyalists and even the odd scattered Sith cultist groups still stirred up enough trouble here and there to keep them on the alert.

Rey, honestly, hasn’t a clue what Maz and her friends are meeting about this time. She’s sure Finn told her, maybe no more than two hours ago on the ship, but like so much in the last two months, it just slips right off as soon as she hears it. She is distracted, and now, thanks to her lovely situation with the sabers, incredibly frustrated.

She picks up the saber, turning it over in her hands like she used to do with the scrap parts she looted from the ships crashed in the Jakku desert. Leia’s saber, like Luke’s, was a marvel. She never grew tired of the schhwizz that accompanied an igniting lightsaber. But the Skywalker sabers still feel distant in many ways, like they are still being borrowed even though they had both technically been left to her. You need to make one of your own, she thinks, not for the first time. But how?

She sighs, tucking Leia’s saber into her belt and settling into her meditative position. The Force hums around her, coming alive in her new attentiveness. She feels the grass growing and the brush of the wind across her skin as it stirs fly-aways loose from her buns. The solid earth presses upwards towards her and she can feel herself lifting up off it, her diving off point into a sea of feeling. A sense of pure calm washes her bones in sunset warmth. She concentrates. Be with me. Be with me. Be with me.

She reaches out, stretching towards the memories and souls of the past Jedi, their experiences hovering at the edge of her consciousness like her own forgotten thoughts. There is a sense of understanding, of surety, and she chases after it, the fingered tendrils of her mind reaching further, tracking the feeling. She catches up to the memory, brushing against it like one might brush the hair from a lover’s eyes.

She sucks in a breath. It’s him.

In her mind’s eye is a young Ben Solo, white padawan robes and all, eyes closed in focused meditation. Before him float the pieces of an unfinished lightsaber, twisting and hovering, held in place only by his concentration. She feels an understanding of what he is doing seeping into her own mind. Then the scene begins to flicker, the once defined shape of Ben Solo blinking in and out of form, alternating with another, smaller figure. It’s her. Her vision leaps rapidly between the two of them, both somehow occupying the same space and position. As she watches, the two begin to blur together before settling on the image of Ben once more, his eyes snapping suddenly open, wide and dark.

He is looking at her.

She feels a jolt; a once familiar tug in her gut overtakes her. It’s been two months since she last felt this feeling. The feeling of him. The feeling of connecting to him across lightyears of space rocks and stardust. The feeling of their Force bond comes alive inside her and she aches. She knows it is impossible to connect with a memory, for it to acknowledge her in return, but Ben’s eyes are focused, looking past the hovering lightsaber pieces and trained on her.

“REY,” Finn's voice collides with her like a blaster bolt, ripping through her vision of Ben and snapping her meditative state in half, dropping her unceremoniously to the dirt. She is breathless and disgruntled when Finn reaches her and she has half a mind to smack him with her staff.

Times like this almost make her wish for the solitude of Jakku again. They’ve been hovering over her these past two months, Finn and Poe. Moments of peace and quiet are rare. She knows they mean well, appreciates what they are trying to do for her. But it has been difficult to grieve with them around. There is something more personal about her grief over the loss of Ben Solo, something they would not understand. It wasn’t like losing Leia. It was like losing part of her own soul. He still felt close to her in some strange way that she couldn’t quite identify, but still, it wasn’t the same.

She hadn’t known what he was to her when she lost him, hadn’t had the time to even try to work it out. Their relationship up until that point had been complicated to say the least. So much so that she hadn’t even known how to explain herself when she returned from Exegol a shell shocked mess. They had attributed it to her encounter with Palpatine, to the revelation of her bloodline, to the loss of Leia. She had told them what she could in the simplest of terms. Told them that Ben Solo had had a change of heart after all, had come to help her fight Palpatine, had saved her life. Finn had pressed her about it, about the life saving bit in particular, almost as if he knew that she had died completely. She waved it off, claiming that he took a blow meant for her and died of the wound. She still wasn’t entirely sure why she lied to him, but something about the intimacy of that memory felt too precious to share with someone who still only knew him as the hated Kylo Ren.

There was only one person with whom she had shared the full account of the events on Exegol. She hadn’t expected the conversation, hadn’t expected to share so much, but Lando Calrissian was quite charming. There was an ease about him that seeped into her and knocked loose her secrets.

So few were the people left who had known Ben Solo before he was Kylo Ren. She had asked him with as much nonchalance as she could manage what Ben had been like as a child. Lando had studied her for a few moments before answering. But then he had launched into a tale of the time he’d presented young Ben Solo with a blaster with which he’d accidentally blown a hole through the wall of a visiting diplomat’s chambers.

Lando had caught her not long after that conversation in the back of the Falcon, tears in her eyes and a small lockbox open in her lap that contained a plain black shirt with a hole burned through it and a familiar blaster. He asked her how she had come to acquire Ben Solo’s blaster and from there the truth had tumbled forth.

He had listened patiently, placing a comforting hand on top of hers on the blaster when it came to the difficult parts. A gesture that reminded her of Leia. She had even told him about the kiss. He didn’t press or ask her to explain, he only nodded, a knowing look in his eye.

“Some people are never really gone, Rey. Especially the ones we love.”

*****************************************************************************************************

When they reach the ship Rey gathers Finn and Poe to her.

“There’s somewhere I need to go.”

Both Finn and Poe nod, but she can tell they aren’t really hearing her. Both are eyeing a precariously placed BB-8 on the roof of the Falcon, his tiny blowtorch ignited in an attempt to reseal a crack that Poe had undoubtably caused.

She gives them each a light tap on the head with the end of her staff and they refocus their attention on her.

“I need to go to Dagobah. Alone.”

*****************************************************************************************************

“Ben, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Ben rolls his eyes, shooting his mother a look of thinly veiled annoyance.

“Yes, mother. I’ve flown plenty of interdimensional ghost crafts before.”

Leia presses her lips together; a tiny, wry smile threatens to slip through.

Ben wonders if she can tell he is doing none of the steering. It isn’t that he couldn’t fly the Falcon if he wanted to, but this Falcon has a mind of its own and a clear destination that Ben cannot discern. He can’t even see through the front windows for the blue blur of lightspeed until they land, as if the ship has shifted from lightspeed to landed without need for transition. Then it’s nothing but sand.

Kriffing, World Between Worlds rules.

Before Ben can push the release on the door, Leia clears her throat. He only half turns.

“Yes?”

“I don’t quite know how this world works, but I wonder if perhaps we ought to dress a little more inconspicuously. We still don’t know if or how we will appear to others.”

He notes now that she has already changed into a spare set of clothes, ones she stored in a compartment long ago, still right where she left them, even in this strange dimension. Ben glances down at himself. All black. Perhaps she is right, it is a bit dark side for what appears to be a hot desert planet.

She offers a bundle to him and he heads off to change. He snorts derisively when he opens the bundle. It is clear that these were once his father’s clothes. They practically scream “scoundrel smuggler,” but there is no sense in disagreeing with an insistent Leia Organa, even in an alternate dimension. She turns away from him quickly when he emerges, concealing a small smile and a few tears, and he knows he must look exactly like Han. Though he elects to keep his own black pants and boots, the loose white shirt and lightweight vest are better suited for the environment, necessary even. At least, that’s what he tells himself. He knows the low slung blaster belt and holster are nowhere near as necessary, but he straps them on anyway. May as well.

The nearest village is eerily familiar, at least to Ben. The longer they linger, the more he remembers, and he truly wishes he didn’t. They are on Jakku in the village of Tuanul. The village is largely empty with the exception of a few marauding scavengers who seem entirely unable to see them. Leia calls out to one, even moving to touch the man’s shoulder, but there is no response. Her hand passes through him, a blurry mirage-trail of her movement following behind it. They are smoke and ash here, a match to the ruins of the settlement.

Ben is staring at one of the burned out structures when Leia returns to his side, placing a hand on his shoulder.

“Ben?”

“I did this.” His voice is no more than a choked whisper.

The air around them begins to stir, a sluggish tornado of trailing ash forming images as the remaining scavengers move off into the desert, unaware of anything more than a light breeze.

The images solidify, Ben’s memory set around them now in a frozen rendition of the past. The villagers cower in a huddled mass in the center of the village. Ben can see himself, as Kylo Ren, strike down Lor San Tekka. No mercy, no pause, no regret. They watch as he gives the stormtroopers the order to execute the remaining villagers, and he looks away, unable to bear witness to the terror in their expressions. The terror you caused, murderer.

He feels sick, an overwhelming urge to vomit pits his gut. What does it matter if you could live again? Do you even deserve to? More than any one of these innocent people you sentenced to death?

He stumbles away from the scene, finally collapsing to his knees in front of the memory-figure of Kylo Ren. His tears fall, mingling with the ash. Black raindrops in the sand. He’d thrown away his saber, but knows he can’t throw away his past actions so easily. He’d told the memory of Han Solo that he wasn’t sure if he had the strength to do what he needed to; Han had assured him that he did. So he had. He had thrown away his prized saber. He had given his life for another. But this? What more of himself had he to offer? He was a ghost in the world now, not even a body or soul to give. Was there even anything he could offer that could atone for these sins if he returned to life?

Leia’s hand is on his shoulder again, warm and firm, offering a light squeeze of reassurance. He turns towards her, arms wrapping around her legs, his face pressing into her stomach like he is a little boy again, ashamed and afraid.

She strokes his hair, bringing her other arm around as she bends to hold him.

“Mother...” His voice breaks. “I don’t know how to undo the past. I don’t deserve to live again, not after all of this.”

“Ben.” He never understood how his mother managed to sound both gentle and stern all at once, but there it is, the tone she would use on him when he was a child. He holds her tighter.

“Ben, there is so much you must unlearn if you are to live in the world again.” She cups his chin in her hand, tilting his face up to look at her. “But you have taken the hardest step. The first step is always the most difficult, but it matters. It means something that you made the choice to walk away from this life. I won’t lie to you, my son, you have done many things that are worth regretting. I know you did so much out of anger, out of fear, loneliness, sorrow...”

Leia’s voice shakes; she tightens her hold on him.

“So much done out of the pain that we... that I was supposed to protect you from.” Her tears flow freely now. “And I am so sorry, Ben. I am sorry we ever made you feel like you were less important to us, like you were unloved or unwanted or abandoned. Your father and I loved you and still do. And I want nothing more than to see you live a life of happiness and belonging. Oh Ben, what you have done doesn’t matter nearly as much as what you will do. If you return to life, you need only live a life of deliberate, intentional love. Choose to take care of others. Choose to be compassionate, protective, kind. You earn the life you live by making the lives of others worth living. There is still time, Ben. It is never too late to love others, to care for them.”

She slides to the ground, kneeling before her son, placing both hands on his face.

“I sense great love in you, Ben. I always have, but now more than ever.”

With that he folds into her, clinging to her with abandon, a lost child found again. They stay like that for a time, the years of emotions ebbing away gently, leaving them both peaceful and renewed.

When they stand again, the memory-figure of Kylo Ren has dissolved into ash once more, scattered in the desert wind.

The pair once again move about the frozen memory, observing as parts of it begin to dissolve. Ben pauses in front of a lone Stormtrooper. A bloody handprint stains the trooper’s mask.

“What happened to the stormtrooper? FN-2187. The one who defected...is he...is he happy?”

Leia smiles, nodding. “Yes, he’s quite happy now. He’s found a home. It is my understanding that he is now co-general with Poe Dameron who you might recognize.” She gestures towards a memory-figure frozen in the act of being dragged towards the First Order ship by two half-dissolved Stormtroopers.

She smiles at him affectionately. “Yes, Finn is in good hands.”

Ben nods, extending a hand towards FN-2187...Finn, resting it on his shoulder.

“I am glad.”

*****************************************************************************************************

Lightyears away Finn jolts in his seat, a vision passing before his eyes, the mug in his hand splattering caf onto Poe who lets out an indignant shriek.

“Kriff, Finn! What was that about?!”

But Finn barely hears him. His hand resting on his shoulder where he had just felt the presence of a hand, not quite touching but close enough to sense. Not just any hand. The hand of Kylo Ren. Through new to his Force-sensitivity Finn recognized the Force signature immediately.

“Finn, Finn? Are you okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Poe is standing now, hovering near Finn, wide eyes creased with lines of concern.

“I...I think I did.”

Poe cocks one eyebrow at him, but doesn’t scoff.

“What did you see?”

“Leia and Kylo Ren. They’re somewhere. Not quite alive, but definitely not dead. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like he almost touched me.” He gestures to his shoulder. “Dead people can’t do that, Poe, not even through the Force! Look, I know it sounds crazy but—” Poe slides his hand to cover the spot on Finn’s shoulder and gives it a squeeze, effectively cutting off Finn’s babbling. He looks Finn straight in the eye.

“I believe you.”

#reylo fanfic #reylo #reylo fix it #reylo fic rec #my writing #orpheus: reylo #rey #ben solo #ben solo is alive #or at least he will be #world between worlds #wbw fic #wbw fix it #tros spoilers #tros fix it #reblog bitches #go read my other Shit too #rey x ben #kylo ren #rey x kylo ren #reylo fic #reylo fic roundup #stormpilot #like stormpilot lite #rec me to your fave reylo blogs y'all #my writing #Orpheus

[hlwim]

Not All of Me Will End [3/3]

Summary: Nothing remains of her but what must be left behind. Tags: Character Death, Cancer, Tragedy, Angst, Bittersweet, Post-Canon Pairings: Royai, Edwin, Havolina AO3  ff.net

who tells your story

From the peak of the roof, Ed can see the long and lonely stretch of the rail line disappearing into the mountain. He still loves the cool whisper of its whistle far-off and heading in, but it doesn’t fill him with a longing for the road the way it used to. He’s a husband now, and teacher frequently and village councilor sometimes, and soon—alarmingly soon—a father.

The nearness of coming change is what’s driven him up a ladder, to straddle the shingles and, with nails clamped between his teeth, to patch holes and join new trestle to old. The house is getting cramped—the front half’s a real clinic now, with a proper doctor hired in from Rush Valley and the automail shop having swallowed all the basement. They get patients and clients and more visitors than they reasonably have beds for, and three months now Winry’s been asking when he’d get around to building that extension. He tried putting it off until Al was back, because of course alchemy will speed the work, but excuses are excuses are excuses.

“I’m not holding my knees closed for another four months!” she’d said, jabbing dead-center of his chest. “You’re plenty handy at carpenter work, and you’re owed about a million favors in town.”

And this was true—Ed never liked charging for his services, as the dregs of his state stipend are enough to keep them flush for ten lifetimes. But people around here insisted on showing gratitude in practical ways, like extra pounds of meat from the butcher or hand-wrought yarn for Granny’s knitting. Ed had had a crew up for most of the day: boys that hang around after class to hear his stories and poke at the holes, and the girls who spend summers baling hay and shearing sheep. In the space of a morning and an afternoon, they’d raised walls and laid the floor and wedged in a dozen or so windows. He sent them off to their homes for supper and admonished them not to return tomorrow, knowing anyway that there would be a cart of eager hands on its way back by dawn.

He sets the hammer against his knee and leans back, breathing deep. The breeze carries to him the quiet lull of church bells, and then Winry’s voice.

“There’s a telegram come for you,” she calls up, as Ed slides down the ladder and tosses his work gloves over a rung. She’s getting slower, huffing and waddling adorably, which Granny keeps mentioning is a sure sign the baby will be along any day now. “It came in with the invoices, but I didn’t open it.”

“Brigadier General Mustang,” Ed snorts, raggedly tearing the envelope open with his thumb. He only reads the first line before his fingers go numb, letting the delicate carbon sheet flutter to the ground.

“Ed, what is it?”

Breath seems suddenly hard to come by—though not from exertion.

“It…”

He wants to read it over again and won’t.

“It says Riza Hawkeye’s died.”

He has to be the one to tell Al. No telegram is going to find him in the chaos of the Chang clan’s village. It takes long enough to connect a call—Ed listens to the tick and buzz and tick for a good twenty minutes, and he holds the telegram flat beneath his hooked thumb and index finger. The words flash disconnected in his gaze: regret and informand Hawkeye and died. Funeral tomorrow—the telegram was a day late in arriving.

Mei Chang’s grandmother answers, and Ed has to negotiate with the little Xingese he knows to be passed from house to house and reach his brother. Al answers with a breathy laugh, expecting happy news.

“I can’t remember the last time I saw her,” he says, voice cracking.

“Me either,” Ed replies quietly. The kitchen is black with night, and the light switch is too far for him to reach. “I think it was Central. Their engagement party? She looked so happy.”

“She did.”

There is a long silence where they can both cry, quietly, connected even through this distance.

“I’m going to have to decide soon, aren’t I?” Al asks helplessly. “I can’t have two homes forever. When I’m here, I feel like I should be there. And I should be, now, of all times…”

He takes a shuddering breath.

“I can’t believe she’s gone. Just… someone else we didn’t get to say goodbye to.”

Winry refuses to be left behind, so Ed pays extra for the private sleeping car, where cushions keep her from jostling left and right with the train’s sway. They’re west-bound, to some spit of a village called Wellesley and then ten miles farther. He’s received the instructions from Jean Havoc, who answered the telegram’s indicated number with a thick sigh.

“How long was she sick?” Ed had asked, twisting his empty hand against his leg.

“Not long,” Havoc said. “But too late to do anything about it.”

“How is he?”

“Bad. You’re probably going to miss the funeral, but there’s a thing after, at their house.”

“We’ll come.”

He expects the platform to be busier and maybe wreathed in black drapery, but it’s a little place hardly bigger than Resembool’s station. There are two benches inside, empty and facing the only window—rosette, perched high in the roof beams.

The village is small and packed densely, houses circled close against the encroaching trees. Half the streets are paved, but enough mud has tracked across the cobbles to paint them the same indistinguishable red-brown. Ed hates the car ride, for the way the poorly-upholstered bench forces them tightly together. The temperature seems to rise as they crawl farther and farther west—he’s the first to step out of the car when they arrive, and humidity nearly knocks him back against the fender.

The front door of the house is closed, and it seems no one is waiting to let them in.

“It’s lovely,” Winry says, huffing her way out with the help of Ed’s hand. “Except for the trees, we could almost be home again.”

Which is bizarrely true—unlike the wattle-and-daub look of West City or even the river-stone cobbles of Wellesley, the Hawkeye house rears back symmetrical and clad in white, imperiously simple in its understated decoration of blue paint on its shutters and doors. The windows look mottled in the sunlight: glazing thicker at the bottoms of each pane and fogged up, with the vaguest of colors and shapes moving behind them. He expects somehow for the house to extend up into the clouds, but it stops after two stories, beneath a slate tile roof and a chimney that lists against the tide of winds high above the trees.

Ed helps the taxi driver stack their bags on the grassy pavestones.

“Do we go and knock?” he asks, but Winry is already halfway up the walk. The door opens before she can reach for the knob—Jean Havoc on the other side, looking somewhat narrower than the last time they saw him, in his dress uniform and black sash.

“You made it,” he says, leaning in to Winry’s greeting hug. “I hope it wasn’t too hard.”

“It was nothing,” Winry says. “But we’re not imposing?”

“No, there’s plenty of room to stay. Someone’ll get your bags upstairs. We thought—”

He sighs, stepping aside to let them pass. The house is many degrees cooler than outside, despite the quiet hum of the implied crowd further in. The hall extends straight through to the back of the house, splitting two rooms on either side, and it is lined with tastefully sparse chairs and hanging lamps.

“We thought, it was better he wasn’t alone.”

“Where is he?”

“Kitchen, I think. Führer's receiving in the sitting room here. If you’re hungry or something, there’s food set out banquet-style, so help yourself.”

“Is—is she…?”

Ed can’t quite form the thought into words. The air is dense with cold and feels closed, dusty, disused.

“We buried her this morning,” Havoc says. “Real nice place, by some trees. Rebecca and I were here the day before she—”

It’s a visceral reaction, a wince that travels to a shudder.

“She didn’t want people to see her like that.”

“I wish we could have said goodbye at least,” Winry says.

“You did. Last time you saw her—whenever that was, that’s how she wanted you to remember her.”

At the far end of the hall is a closed door, puzzled together out of narrow squares of glass. The garden beyond bounces sunlight off its leaves and paths, tainting the white paneling green and yellow. No one outside—the wind that bothers the treetops can’t reach the ground, and the world enveloping this house is motionless as a painting.

“Let’s go on through, and you can get some food,” Havoc says. “I have to get back to Rebecca.”

He heads for the front room, and they follow. Winry keeps a hold of Ed’s hand.

The room is too crowded for furniture—he can guess at the location of a chair by the awkward gap between mourners, but for the most part, the memorial is standing room only. A sea of dress uniforms broken by the occasional black hat or short veil. The führer is sequestered behind his guards on the far left and snuffling into a handkerchief, surrounded by a crowd of lower officers Ed doesn’t recognize.

“Let’s go over to Mr. Armstrong,” Winry says. “Didn’t that other man there with him used to work with General Mustang?”

“Falman, yeah. He stayed up at Briggs after the big fight.”

Lieutenant General Armstrong is concealed by her brother’s broad, bowed shoulders, and she keeps one hand resting habitually on the hilt of her ceremonial saber, but her frown seems a different inflection.

“Hello, Fullmetal,” she says. “They weren’t sure you’d make it.”

“Gave up that title a few years ago. Now I’m just Ed.”

“Of course, Edward.”

Alex, gravelly and grave as ever, turns slowly to bring them into the small circle.

“I hope your journey here was not particularly arduous, considering your current condition.”

“Oh, I get into more trouble now than I did before,” Winry says with a small smile. “Lieutenant General, ma’am, I’m sorry for your loss.”

“It wasn’t really mine.”

But her gaze doesn’t quite connect.

“Captain Hawkeye was a gifted officer—one of the finest I’ve had the privilege to serve with. She performed her duties as adjutant admirably, and she left me with a decent replacement.”

“I try my best,” Falman says, briefly tipping his wine glass. “It all happened so quickly towards the end—I saw her only a few months ago, and part of me was so certain this was all a hoax or a big misunderstanding. She never wavered. Never looked ill. It’s madness that she’s gone.”

“I gather it was a family affliction,” the lieutenant general says. “Her father died in a similar way, although I understand he had a little more time.”

Ever so lightly, Winry touches the back of Ed’s hand.

“I think I’d like to find a place to sit down.”

She won’t want company, but it’s as good an excuse as any to duck out. Winry finds an empty seat in the corner, on some antique-looking lounge, and she waves him aside.

“Go on,” she says. “Plenty of people around to get me whatever I need.”

He bends down to kiss her hairline and then straightens up again, catching the eye of Heymans Breda across the room.

“He’s not going to thank you for being here, but it really means a lot to him, to have us all around.”

“Havoc told us not to make arrangements for lodging,” Ed says, keeping his wrist straight and grip firm. Breda’s always been a bit of a hand-crusher, but Ed’s grown enough now to equal him out.

“Plenty of bedrooms,” Breda confirms. “Falman’s gotta go back with the Armstrongs, and the führer should be leaving any minute. But me, Havoc, you guys, Rebecca, and Gracia are all set upstairs. Not that you have to stay—if there’s something more pressing back home.”

“No,” Ed says. “We’re here, and we want to be here.”

Breda jams his hands back into his pockets.

“So how’s it been, being back home? Kept man—you miss the road at all?”

“A bit,” Ed says with a shrug. “But not enough to go out again. Al’s stories are enough for me.”

“His name’s always coming up in reports from Xing,” Breda says. “He thinking about making the move permanent?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think he could be away from home like that. I think he likes going between. Especially now, with little niece or nephew on their way.”

“Congrats, by the way. We put your postcard up on the wall at work.”

Ed thanks him, and they fall silent for a while.

As predicted, the führer is gradually making his exit and filtering the crowd of most unfamiliars. Ed shifts slightly, half-wishing he had left his hair down to better hide his face. His gaze falls on a collage of photographs littering the wall to their right—shots of buildings and crowds and the insides of pubs he’s never seen. Only one of just the two of them that he can see: embracing in a snowfall, surrounded by friends.

“When were they married?” he asks.

“Right after they moved here. They were planning on a long engagement, until she made major and got moved out to Central as Armstrong’s proxy. Sounded like it was only a few weeks away, when…”

Breda grimaces.

“I hate this. I really hate it.”

They watch the führer and his guards file out. The old man walks heavily, leaning most of his frame on an ornate stick, gold-tipped and dark wood.

“Granddaughter’s fucking funeral, and he still has to show off his trophies.”

“That’s seditious,” Ed says, eyebrow raised.

“Who gives a shit? He’s gonna retire in a couple months anyway, and then we’re under Armstrong’s thumb.”

“Really? Not…?”

Breda shakes his head.

“So who would take over Briggs?”

“Whoever’s next in line, I guess. Funny how we put in all this work, and nothing changed.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Ed says. “A lot of people down around us are talking about organizing district conventions.”

“That should be fun to watch,” Breda sighs. “First woman führer in the history of this country, toppled by democracy.”

The entourage passes by Armstrong, but she doesn’t glance, keeping that imperious chin high in the air. She doesn’t look bored, exactly, but contemplative—as though always waiting for the start of the next engagement.

“I should go find him,” Ed sighs. “Tell him… whatever the hell you’re supposed to tell someone.”

“Look for Gracia. He’ll be nearby.”

She is found not far from the closed kitchen door, and she hugs him long enough that Ed can still smell her perfume after she steps back.

“It’s Mrs. Cotter now, actually,” she says, a bit sheepish.

“Oh, that’s—”

He stutters his way through it.

“I’m so happy for you. Is he… here?”

“No, he stayed back home to mind the shop. We have a bookstore together. He—”

She half-smiles.

“Herman and I met at a social group for widows and widowers—he lost his wife young, to sickness, and all of this… it’s too close for him still.”

She falters a moment, and then brightens again, like instinct.

“He’s really a wonderful man. They didn’t have children of their own, but he loves Elicia so dearly. And he likes Roy, and he liked Riza, too, but—someone had to run the shop.”

“What about you?” Ed asks. “Are you alright?”

“Maes was different,” she says, after a pause. “It was sudden. There was a lot we hadn’t had the chance to talk about, and there was so much left… undone. With this—with Riza, and with Herman’s wife—there was time. Decisions and plans that could be discussed.”

“Hard to know which one’s worse.”

She smiles again and gently squeezes Ed’s hand.

“He’s just in the kitchen. He needed some time away from the crowd, but you can go in.”

The door is heavy and seems only recently white-washed. The kitchen beyond is dazzlingly bright and decorated with jar after jar of wildflowers. Roy Mustang sits at the table with a faraway look in his eyes, one hand upturned and held loosely by Elicia. She has a canvas and palette set out and idly paints a quiet meadow scene.

Ed pulls out a chair, and as he drops into view, Roy blinks, suddenly focused.

“Have I seen you already?” he asks. “It’s been such a long day.”

“No, we just got here,” Ed says. He feels obligated to speak softly, to half-smile with sadness and temper his gaze with gentle understanding—but that is not, and has never been, how they were with each other. “I’m really sorry, Roy. But I wish you’d told us.”

“It wasn’t on purpose this time, I promise.”

“Yeah, Havoc said as much. That it’s how she wanted it.”

Roy nods, and beneath his elbow, Ed can see the glint of silver.

“You smoke now?” he asks. And Roy looks down, following the point of Ed’s finger, surprised almost to see the lighter.

“No,” he says. “It was hers.”

Something is engraved on the front, but it’s probably rude to ask. Elicia mixes blue and green on her palette.

“Where’s big brother?” she asks.

“He’s in Xing. He couldn’t make it back in time.”

Her nod is as slow as Roy’s was—she still wears her hair in twin bunches, but it’s long enough now to plait over each shoulder, and she doesn’t bother to look up. Her brush moves the canvas slightly on the polished wood, but she doesn’t let go of Roy’s hand.

“You know you can’t call me little brother anymore,” Ed says. “I’m gonna have a baby soon.”

“Mommy told me. She said you’re having a girl.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Well, I know it,” Elicia says. “I know everything. What’s her name gonna be?”

“We’re still not settled on one.”

Roy has returned to the blank stare—although it has shifted to the window and the empty garden beyond.

“I should go out,” he says, wearied by exhalation.

“Grumman just left,” Ed offers. “It’s probably safe.”

Elicia lets go without a look upward, focused solidly on her artwork. It’s encouragement, not callousness, as Roy closes his eyes and then stands, scraping the chair back. Every movement seems drawn up from a deep well of pain.

“Winry’s here?” he asks, focusing on Ed. They’re the same height now, but the hunch of shoulders shortens Roy—his uniform is hanging so horribly loose.

“Yeah, in the parlor. She needed to rest her feet a bit.”

He feels, half-heartedly, that he should offer a shoulder for Roy to lean on, but, soldier that he is, Roy straightens up, takes a breath, and steps through the door with shoulders square. No one notices—or at least they all have the courtesy to pretend otherwise—and Roy exhales, eyes focused on the floor. He still holds the lighter tight between his fingers, little flashes of silver catching Ed’s gaze now and again.

Winry is alone, but someone’s brought her a glass of water and a plate of little pastries. She smiles at seeing them and Ed smiles back, half-relieved, before realizing that Roy is no longer beside him.

He must have looked up at some point, and landed his gaze squarely across the room, on an over-large portrait of Riza Hawkeye. Ed can’t remember if he himself had noticed it until now—the führer had been standing in front of it, with his coterie of hangers-on, and Ed had always done his utmost to never again attract the attention of military men. Maybe there’d been a curtain draped across it.

It is clearly a depiction of Riza—blonde hair, brown eyes, pointed nose and chin, sharp jaw—but something about it is fundamentally, unshakably , flawed. He remembers a piercing gaze that could read a room and every man’s intentions in ten seconds flat, a quirk at the corners of her mouth that betrayed the arrival of a rare smile, and a squareness to her shoulders, as though she couldn’t fathom any posture but parade rest. The woman in the portrait wears Riza’s face, but she isn’t. Distant, demure, wrapped in some old-fashioned frock the color of sour milk. This woman sees nothing, feels nothing—sits silent and unblemished, pressed like a dead flower between sheets of cracked wax paper.

“Why?”

Roy is ash—unable to break the painting’s stare, knuckles white, swallowing hard against the tears watering his eyes. Gracia materializes at his elbow, arms ready to brace him from dropping like a stone.

“The führer wanted it out for display,” she says quietly. “I tried to tell him no.”

“All her pictures—”

“They’re safe. We’ll put them back up.”

“It’s not real.”

His voice breaks barely over a whisper, and Ed looks away, half-ashamed and unsure why. It seems most of the guests had the same instinct—only Breda and General Armstrong are watching, silently angry in their own separate ways.

“That’s enough for today,” Gracia says. “You don’t have to do anything else. Let’s just go upstairs, alright?”

He is, in so many ways, diminishing by the second. He speaks to no one as they move back through the parlor to the hall, and Ed has a vision suddenly of a hammer suspended by spider silk above a sheet of glass.

Winry slides her arms around his shoulders as he sits heavily on the cushion beside her.

“Everybody said the service was nice,” she tells him.

“But it wasn’t her?”

He feels her shrug and leans into it.

“Funerals are more for the people left behind. They’ve always been.”

A door closes somewhere upstairs, and Breda crosses the floor, seizing the painting at the corners. It lifts awkwardly, and he turns it to lean face-down against the wall, exposing an expanse of white paint and a series of empty nails.

The house empties in a trickle not long after—enough will be taking the same train back to Central that any residual mourning can be wrapped up at the station. Havoc takes up the mantle of awkwardly gracious host, shaking hands at the door and thanking each guest for their exit. Rebecca gathers Winry up to deal with the kitchen. They’ve been eating small plates all day, with no time to stop for a proper meal.

“Come on,” Breda says to Ed. “Let’s put things back the way they were.”

The portrait goes first—they carry it into the cellar together, to the pile of paper wrapping and snapped twine that had clearly been protecting it from view.

“When was this made?” Ed asks, draping the scraps as best he can.

“Couple years ago, I think. I guess he had one made of her mom once. Riza hated this thing.”

“They didn’t put in the scar on her neck.”

“Does that surprise you?” Breda sighs.

“No.”

The oil lamp hanging from the ceiling is set too high up—the shadow of a floor joist cuts sharply across the face, from cheek to cheek.

“I’d hate it too,” Ed mutters.

There’s several couches and tables to carry up and arrange, rugs to unroll, and lamps to dust off and plug in. Sunset floods the room as Ed adjusts the final cushion, frowning, and Breda stands at the empty wall with a handful of photo frames.

“I don’t know what order they were in,” he says, when Ed joins him.

“Does it matter?”

“I think it did.”

They try—the position of each nail gives a hint at the pattern, but something in the arrangement is definitely wrong to Ed’s eye. The muted swirl of colors, when viewed from a distance, are unbalanced, but he can’t think how to fix them. There isn’t even a common theme in the photos themselves to act as guide: flowers, rainy street scenes, crowded bars, books spilling from shelves all take equal space in simple frames. Breda gives up with a shrug.

“That’s gotta be good enough.”

Dinner is stew and bread at the table where Elicia’s left out her paintings to dry.

“I’m going to give one to Herman,” she says, kneeling on her seat to reach equal height with the adults.

“Can I have one?” Ed asks.

“If you pay me,” Elicia says with a shrug.

“Hey, I have to save money for the baby.”

“That’s not true. Uncle Roy says you’re loaded.”

Breda laughs, and smiles slip across a few other faces.

“You were an alchemist like him,” Elicia accuses. “And he said alchemists get lots of money from the military, so you’ve got lots of money to pay me.”

“Darling, please,” Gracia scolds, biting down her own smile. “It’s rude to discuss money at dinner.”

“Someone’s gotta fund that tuition,” Havoc says quietly.

Winry reaches beneath the table and squeezes Ed’s hand. He wonders if she’s thinking too of similar quiet moments of levity after a hard day of mourning. After Mom’s funeral, Granny had made them dinner and tucked them in and read funny stories from the newspaper until they all fell asleep. He’d felt wrong laughing, but it helped some.

Havoc and Rebecca are sorting through stacks of condolence cards and telegrams at the opposite end of the table, organization as soothing instinct. One pile is for strangers, diplomats, and sycophants—and a much smaller pile for the few that merit response, although Ed doubts Roy will be writing them himself.

“Poor kid,” Havoc sighs, setting another telegram on the response pile.

“Fuery?” Breda says, and Havoc nods.

“Where is he?” Ed asks.

“Middle of the Aerugian sea. Testing long-range communications. Still has six months on the tour.”

“That’s awful.”

Havoc nods at the piles.

“Especially now.”

Having picked the chair nearest the hall, Ed is the one to see the front door creak open, though Havoc hastily excuses himself to greet the newcomer—a large, stately-looking woman wrapped in black furs and a veiled hat, who sets down a pair of polished cases and envelopes Havoc in a hug.

“That rotten bastard had all the rail lines shut down like he was the only one who needed to be here. Where’s my boy?”

“Upstairs.”

“His mom,” Breda says quietly, to Ed’s unasked question. “Call her Christine.”

She leaves her bags for Havoc and takes each step heavily.

There’s no call for nightcap. Everyone is tired—Gracia collects plates as though to wash them, but Breda stops her.

“This isn’t important. It can wait for morning.”

Elicia leads Ed and Winry upstairs to their room: a study at the end of the floor, with desk and chairs pushed against the wall to make room for a low bed. A fireplace is set between the windows, but only as facade. The grate has been bricked over, and the old opening covered by a decorative screen.

“Mommy and me are next door,” she says. “Other side’s a bathroom and then Uncle Roy’s room. You got enough blankets?”

“We’ll be alright,” Winry replies for him. Elicia kisses them both on the cheek and closes the door—she has to use both hands and walks backwards to manage the weight.

Ed can’t find sleep. Winry hardly has a choice in the matter, barely settling on the mattress before she’s out. He doesn’t mind, though, loving the sweet openness of relaxation that smoothes every wrinkle of worry from her brow. He sets a hand on her belly to check, but really he hopes the baby will let her sleep.

Unfamiliar houses at night always seem to belong to another world entirely—he steps with care, knowing he has no chance of predicting which footfall might produce a creak. Every door is pulled shut, and there’s no sliver of light beneath any to betray whether he’s less alone than he feels.

Breda took the the sitting room for himself, and Ed hesitates at the top of the stairs, waiting in a long silence until the radio is switched off, and the rustle of fabric and cushions has stilled. He will not be able to explain to anyone who asks what he is doing, or why it must be done now, when stillness has closed over the house.

He at least remembers that the door to the basement is inside the kitchen, and that a box of matches is sitting beside the oil lamp at the bottom of the steps. It’s as cold as he’d expect, and he curses himself a bit for not bringing shoes. His automail foot might not mind, but the flesh one is burning on the dusty flagstones.

The portrait has already shed some of its paper veil—there must be a draft down here—and the peaks and valleys of paint pick up the lamp’s approaching glow and begin to glitter.

Again, he thinks, it’s not really Riza. Just the ideal of her: a porcelain mask with her lips and nose and something like the serious tilt of her brow. He’d only seen her hair down a handful of times—never styled in such old-fashioned curls. The dress as well is an oddity, lace and low-cut and gathered at her shoulders in little puffed sleeves. It reminds him a bit of Winry at five, in the church dress she ruined with mud.

Too much is missing. That thick line of flesh on her neck which stretched from ear to clavicle, the little spray of freckles perched at the end of her nose. She even had a thin scar on her cheek—he presses a finger to that stretch of canvas, knowing it’s wrong, knowing that he is diminishing what was intended as perfection. But hadn’t Breda said she hated it? And of course she would, knowing better than anyone the futility of hiding from all the ugly little truths she had to carry with her every day.

Ed wishes the artist had painted her looking away. The effect of unreality is greatest in her eyes, its eyes, with that dead stare straight forward, soulless and immobile. He would expect the sensation of being tracked—but shifting left and right, the pupils don’t seem to move. Fixed, forever. He wants to look over his own shoulder, seek from the shadows what must be lurking, what must be holding that frozen gaze, but he won’t.

She looked like this and not like this at the end, he’s certain—though he couldn’t bear the idea of asking, when the memory of his mother’s face is swimming so close beneath the surface. The stitched-shut eyes, the puffy dusting of powder to hide her already sinking features, the hands linked by fingers that were too stiff to bend right. It fills him with an aching hollow to think of Riza the same way. Like a scissors set beneath his ribcage and sawing straight across.

He cannot remember the last thing he said to her—it may have been as simple as good night.

Before leaving, he turns the portrait to face the wall, letting the shreds of paper spread limply across the floor beneath.

Only an hour of rest—then he’s up again, defeated, braiding back his hair and sliding uncomfortably into yesterday’s clothes. The sky outside is just beginning to gray, and he doesn’t want to bother anyone with running water. Breda’s still asleep in the sitting room. His snore rattles the glass a little, and Ed smiles, nudging into the kitchen door.

Someone else is awake. The coffee on the stove is warm, and there’s fresh crumbs of bread beside the butter dish. An apple core, perfectly cylindrical and neat, rests upright on the counter, just beginning to brown. But nothing else in the kitchen is disturbed—the chairs are pushed in, the dishes stacked in the sink, the empty jars lining every window sill sparkle with dust. Ed takes an apple for himself and pours a cup of coffee, not bothering to reheat it first.

The house seems to have gotten smaller somehow, overnight. The steps between the study upstairs and the basement could have covered a quarter mile, but now he hesitates even to lean against a table, as though the smallest scrape of sound will jolt everyone sleeping on the other side of a fragile curtain.

Haze dabbles the garden. The sun will have to work its way up through the trees, so lingering shadows fill the lawn like fallen leaves. Ed stands as close to the windows as he can, staring blankly through the mottled glass, thinking of nothing.

It takes a moment to notice the little bistro table sitting outside, one of its chairs askew on mossy flagstone. There’s a mug on the table, and an empty plate, and half a folded newspaper spilling from the cushion. Early risers always seeking solitude of some kind—he can smile at this, knowing it now so intimately himself.

From the right, Hayate suddenly enters the frame, trotting purposefully, sniffing out a path. And, behind him, swinging a stick to throw and be fetched, is Roy: gaunt, pale, grayed out and wavering through the window, like a branch caught beneath rushing waters. He whistles, and tosses the stick high, and then he returns to the chair and the table, neatening up his discards and pulling a thick leather satchel Ed hadn’t noticed, from the seat of the unused chair.

Their eyes meet through the window, and Roy raises a hand, either greeting or goodbye. Grateful he’d thought to put on his shoes, Ed crosses quickly into the hall and then outside, breathing the dewy air deep and coughing.

“Hey,” he says, wary.

“Hey,” Roy replies. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

“No. I didn’t sleep much.”

Ed feels the sting of rudeness. What does that matter? Roy only nods, and Ed half-expects his head to shear from his neck completely, like tearing wet cardboard.

“I didn’t want to bother anyone,” Roy says. “They all did so much yesterday. Figure they need their rest.”

“What about you?”

Roy glances down at the satchel, slung over his opposite shoulder. There’s something inside, something bulky and solid.

“That part hasn’t hit me,” he says. “I know it’s coming. Grief is exhausting, and your body doesn’t know what to do but sleep—but I’m not there.”

The yet doesn’t come. They stare at each other, fifteen feet apart, shoes sponging up every bit of water clinging to the grass. Ed feels a knot balling up in his stomach, and Hayate comes trotting back from the brush, happily depositing the stick at Roy’s feet and leaning against his leg with a contented huff. Roy’s fingers drum against whatever’s in that satchel.

“Listen—” he says, and stops himself with a grimace. “There’s something I need to do.”

Ed’s fingers go cold.  He shoves them into his pockets, hoping to hide the blanch.

“Could I come with?” he asks, knowing either answer is pointless to his intentions.

“Yeah,” Roy says, as a little awful smile flits across his mouth. “I think she’d like that.”

They go on wordlessly. Roy leads, stepping into the brush while Hayate gallops back and forth, more interested in the worried birds than the stick Ed helplessly tosses ahead. A twinging part of him worries about poison oak, so he follows almost directly in Roy’s wake, figuring he’ll at least get some warning this way.

The trees rise up fast around them, dense almost as soon as they leave the lawn. It’s not too dissimilar from the forests at home, if a bit thicker, and Ed is warmed by the sudden rush of memory, of trailing along behind his mother while she scoured the forest floor for blackberries.

Distantly, crows scream themselves awake and are answered by the trill of songbirds irritated at the interruption. Vaguely, Ed can see rodents scampering through the branches and starting fights over the meaty rinds of not-quite-ripe walnuts. The branches overhead protected everyone from the night’s rain, and the air as well feels thinner and cooler threading through his lungs.

Roy stops suddenly and points up.

“Do you know what that is?” he asks, and Ed can see a small, sturdy lashing of planks jutting out from a tree, maybe fifteen feet up. No ladder, but the greenish remains of rope hang from one corner, hinting at past ascensions.

“No,” he says.

“It’s a deer blind.”

Roy is smiling, eyes fixed on the wood.

“She built it. And then it collapsed, so she built it again until it stayed up. She never had anyone to tell her how—she learned it all in books. What to do.”

“How old was she?”

“I think seven or eight. It was before I met her, anyway.”

Ed feels a little strange for having assumed the place belonged to Mustang—which of course made little sense in the context of Mustang’s money and the sparse living style Ed had seen of Hawkeye’s apartment in Central and, later, her quarters up at Briggs. He’d always felt a kind of kinship in pragmatism with her.

Of course Roy is city-bred—it shows mostly obvious in his shoulders and the casual disregard of his stride. He’s moved a few steps, close enough to rest a hand on the tree’s mossy bark.

“Sometimes I’d climb up with her, when I was bored or her father was in one of his moods. I’m sure I always ruined hours of work—drove every animal in a square mile far away with the noise I made climbing up. But she liked it. She’d ask me to read sometimes. So I’d bring whatever text I was studying and just drone. I don’t know how it didn’t drive her crazy.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“What?”

“You grew up together.”

Roy shrugs.

“Sort of. I asked her father to take me on as his apprentice in alchemy, and he agreed.”

Ed cranes his neck up, as though he could see the top of the blind with just a shift of perspective.

“Sometimes I’d bring her food, if she’d been out a while. We’d climb down at night, and she’d always stop to check her traps before going. I never understood how she could see, but I think she just had it memorized.”

Roy laughs a little—he looks down, and Ed follows, seeing now the narrow, clear path of dirt sheltered by overgrown weeds. They turn back and walk on, and Roy eagerly points out various landmarks that barely rise above the overgrowth. A split-rail fence where she used to walk and balance and then overtip in his waiting arms, a jagged boulder which marks the end of the property in only a technical sense, a tree that forks half-dead and points on one end to a deep pool.

“She said we couldn’t go too far,” he says, pausing to whistle Hayate back. “I never found out why, but I think she was just messing with me. She did that a lot. I knew nothing, and I was a fun target for teasing.”

He breathes deep, with a ragged half-smile.

“We’re almost there,” he says. “Over left.”

The path slopes down and turns craggy—Ed follows Roy’s cautious lead in picking his way down the jutting stones and roots. Somewhere very nearby, a creek is whispering its way through pebbles. Roy stops about ten feet down the incline, jostling between the satchel and Hayate’s thumping tail, and he pulls aside a section of hanging leaves.

“Here,” he says, nodding at Ed to step through first.

On the other side of the curtain is a strange, squat room lined in crumbling stone and mortar. A few wood beams remain of a roof, and flowered ivy grows thick as thatch across. Part of the collapsed wall on the eastern side forms a narrow shelf, and Ed can see a series of dirty glass jars and small animal bones strewn across it as decoration. The stream must be nearby—it echoes quietly around his ears.

The floor is half stone and half dirt, pitted with moss and soft under every step. Pollen perfumes the air, and the haze of coming sun swamps the small space.

He feels—enveloped. Warm, solid, as though the air could take shape and form itself into comfort. The quiet here is reverent, a stillness so close to the peace of an undisturbed pond moments before a pebble stumbles from the shore and breaks the surface.

“What is this?” Ed breathes.

“It used to be a mill,” Roy says, dodging. He nudges a patch of moss, revealing the cool glisten of old leaves beneath. Decay, but a sweetness of promised renewal. These ruins sit untouched by rot.

“A mill?”

“Probably a hundred years ago. They dammed the river up in town, and all the little creeks like this one dried up. You can still see the wheel outside.”

He points, and then indicates the shadow of a long pole past their feet.

“They’d hook a donkey to a harness, and he’d drag the wheel into the water and out, as they needed.”

Roy goes silent, and Ed nods.

It’s a nice place—this deep in the woods, truly indistinguishable from home. Here, Ed can conjure the memories of stick forts he’d built with Al as easily as if he could step back through that curtain of vine and find his baby brother, mud-splattered and impatient to play.

“This was her temple,” Roy says quietly. His voice is thick—he’s staring down at the leather satchel on his hip, and Hayate leans patiently against his leg. “When she was little, they taught her about Xerxes—how they had a hundred gods, and all the gods had temples. But she got it wrong. She thought—she thought that the people built the temples first, and then waited for the gods to show up.”

There’s the slightest streak of blackening against one wall—a fire she built as she built the blind? Where she might have sat and she might have watched, willing the effort to be something less than vain?

“So she made this. She’d used it before, as a place to rest during a hunt or as a shelter when her father was in one of his moods. But she thought it would do good as a temple—she planted those vines and cleared space, and tried to assemble an altar.”

Even now, gone, Ed cannot picture her as anything but the woman she was. Full grown, she parts the veil and passes through, solid determination painting her face as she gently twists the flowering vines around the roof beams, as she gathers wildflowers into the glass jars, as she arranges the littlest bones into the vague shape of an invented summoning ritual.

“But no one ever came, of course. So she gave up on it. She kept using the place because she needed it, but she said it sometimes felt a little like failure. When she first brought me here, and told me, there was so much disgust for herself in her voice… but I thought it was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard.”

The satchel unbuckles beneath his careful fingers, and then Roy is lifting a small vase into the air—a flat, reflectionless glaze stoppered with a dark wood lid. No bigger than a milk jug, and hefted so perfectly in the cradle of Roy’s palm. He catches Ed’s stare and nods.

“Yeah. She told me, when it came down to it, what happened after was my choice. Funerals and burials—she said whatever it was, I’d be the one who had to live with it. When she wanted to come back here, to—”

The tiniest little split. It had happened, it was happening, even now. Even with all that she was, contained in so small a space.

“To die,” Roy finishes, as though the word might pull all his insides out. “I knew immediately this is what I wanted.”

“Did you tell the old man?”

“No,” Roy says. “He thinks he buried her next to her mother and the man they both hated. He has no right to this.”

A sentiment Ed can find no fault in.

“I always thought we’d…”

A tear escapes, twisting towards the corner of Roy’s mouth and then disappearing down his chin.

“I thought if we had a daughter, we’d bring her here.”

He rotates the urn around in his hands, gently caressing the surface.

“This is where you should be,” he says to it, and then steps forward, clearing a little space between the jars and bones, and he nestles the urn at the center.

The sun follows them back to the house, tracing their steps and silence. Even from the edge of the lawn, Ed can see movement inside the kitchen. Winry will still be asleep, and hopefully it’s early enough that no one will have thought of sending a search party.

Roy pauses at the table on the patio, still with its dirty plate and folded newspaper.

“I wonder,” he says, “if I could ask you a favor.”

“Anything.”

Too quick—Ed winces, hoping it won’t fester into regret.

“She spent a lot of time writing. Towards the end.”

“Memoirs?”

“Some of it.”

Slowly, imperceptible maybe from the right distance, Roy is beginning to crumble. It’s over, and it’s just starting to catch up with him. Without a thought, Ed sets one hand on his shoulder and the other on his arm, and he guides Roy to sit in the empty chair, clearing the cushion of the other for himself.

“She had so many ideas,” Roy says. “Things she wanted to say, things she wanted. Not for herself—for everyone. The future of the country.”

The last he says like he’s quoting something. Tears fill his eyes and spill over—more blind now than when he crossed through the Gate, all those years ago. Ed wonders, idly, fleeting, if she’ll wait for him there, if she’ll rise and meet him with hand outstretched, all time and distance collapsed to the infinite they still step through and see together.

“I can’t look at it. Not yet.”

A ray of light hits his eyes directly, and Roy blinks, shutting it out for only a moment.

“But it’s not right to hide it. Everything she wrote is important, and people should see it.”

The door behind them opens: Gracia steps outside with a cup of coffee, approaching them slowly.

“I had ulterior motives putting you and Winry in the study.”

“So you need an editor?” Ed asks.

“Only if you’re willing.”

“I’m honored that you asked.”

Gracia crosses to his side, glancing at the empty bag between his feet.

“So it’s done?” she says, rubbing gently between his shoulders.

“Yeah. Ed came with.”

“It was beautiful,” Ed says with a nod. “It felt like the right place.”

“I’m glad.”

“I’m tired,” Roy sighs. “I think I’m going to sleep now.”

He rises with a sudden heaviness, as though his center of gravity has suddenly rushed upwards above his heart. Hayate curls along beside him, a brace to rest against once or twice on the long walk back inside the house.

Everyone else is up and filtering through the various rooms, maintaining a reverent silence. Even Winry, having folded the bed linens neatly at each corner before heading into the bathroom. Through the walls, Ed can hear alternately the thrumming chant of water rushing through the pipes and the indecipherable murmur of Elicia’s voice.

He closes the door and crosses to the desk pushed up against the wall. Too dark or too distracted last night to notice, he sees now the cascade of papers spread across its surface.

This cannot be disturbed just yet—he feels this commandment sharply, so instead he simply looks. Leaning over, scanning his gaze across the jumbled words, picking up only flashes of the sentiments contained within. A torn shred, somewhat standing free of the pile, makes him turn his head against his shoulder to read more closely.

It’s a list—of titles, by his guess. Anarchist from the Deathbed, Non Omnis Moriar, Rights of the Amestrian Citizen: strong, stout, even a little seditious.

The chair is still pulled out a little ways, and with a bit of effort, he manages to sit without moving it. The window on his right pours sunlight across the desk top. A pen lies between his hands, he realizes, tossed against a seam of parchment and then rolled back to rest in a crease, sideways, careless of a dribble of ink, as though any moment she might return and take it up again.

He sets his fingers along the grooves—she was right-handed, and held the tip between three fingers, leaving her little finger to trail on the page, to guide the lilt of her writing.

He holds it just the same. He breathes. He pulls the first, the last, of her words forward, and he begins to read.

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on this earth.

“Late Fragment” by Raymond Carter

#edward elric #roy mustang #riza hawkeye #royai #fmab #hlwim fic #not all of me will end #long post

[dearlazerbunny]

Chasing Home

Pairings: Poe Dameron x Reader

Genre/Warnings: Canonical violence

Words: ~13,000

- Summary: Caderyn Ren is tasked with teaching Rey what she knows- only to find someone else capturing her heart in a way she never thought possible

Requested Tags: @giggleberts

*Though Cade is meant to be reader insert, I avoided second person pronouns

A/N: Chapter 1 of 16

I wasn’t expecting to meet anyone on my first day.

Leia leads me to the command room, and it’s so… busy. People running back and forth, tech and droids being thrown every which way, a frenzied hum rising in the air like the strange cicadas that made their home in D’Qar’s trees. Infinite distractions. But I focus on keeping my gaze straight ahead, quelling my curiosity. You’re not here to be curious.

As I watch the commanders filter in, I’m hyper aware of everything around me. My braids winding around my skull, tight enough to pull skin. The traveling cloak draped around me, conveniently hiding the small insignia patched onto my right shoulder. My pack, holding what little I brought, digging into my shoulders as the leather straps grow heavy with gravity. I’m glad for a familiar face standing next to me. The reunion with Leia was heartfelt, to say the least. She met me on the outskirts of the planet, and I could feel as I was landing her holding back tears, because I was doing the same.

Underneath the main hologram console, she gives my hand a reassuring squeeze as the rest of the people gather around us. Two of them- probably mechs, gathering from their oil-slick clothes- have pulled up stools and are chatting animatedly about something or other. Head of medical, in his white lab coat, is absentmindedly scrawling notes on a digipad. Last to come in is a curly-haired pilot, orange jumpsuit tied around his waist. Nearly everyone in the room calls out a greeting to him and he nods back with a large smile. Charmer. I make a mental note to stay far away from him. Charmers have a way of getting you to trust them much too easily.

“I believe I will call us to order,” Leia says, her soft voice backed with steel as it filtered through the room. The conversation around us dies, leaving only the atmospheric hum of a busy workplace. “Thank you for meeting me. As I’m sure you read, we have a new arrival on D’Qar. I expect you all to make her feel welcome in the following days.” Days. Weeks. Months. Who knows how long I’ll be here. “Cade, would you like to say something?”

I step forward, fingers drumming a tattoo on my right hip where my saber would normally hang. Nervous tick.  Blue light illuminated the faces surrounding me in an eerie glow. I try not to think of it as a premonition. “Thank you, General. As she said, my name is Cade. You may address me as such.” I pause, trying to think of something else to say. At home, that would have been enough. Here, they’re much more… open. “It is an honor to be accepted by the Resistance. I look forward to aiding you all in my time here.” Satisfied, I give a small nod and step back into shadow, feeling safer in the partial concealment.

They still seem to be waiting for more, but Leia speaks up before I’m put on the spot again. “Poe, I’ve assigned you to show Cade around the base until she’s comfortable with it herself.”

Charmer pilot steps forward with a broad grin, hand outstretched. I stare at it for a second before tentatively shaking it, not letting his grip outweigh mine. “I’m Poe, Poe Dameron. Commander of the Black Squadron here on D’Qar. Looks like I’ll be showing you around.” He winks at me, and I have the sudden urge to roll my eyes so hard they detach from my head. Leia gives a disapproving tut, but there’s warmth behind it.

“Poe, please, let’s keep the flirting to a minimum.” He had the decency to look mildly embarrassed. “I’ll consider us adjourned. Thank you all, you’re dismissed.”

As everyone floats away, it’s just me, Leia, and Poe left. She nudges me subtly on the back towards the pilot before being called away to another post. “I’m glad you’re here, Cade. We’re glad you’re here.”

I nod to her, grateful for the kind words. I hike my pack farther up on my shoulder and look expectantly at Poe. “I’m told I have quarters in the East wing?”

“I- yes, of course! It’s just through here.” He gestures to a door nearest us and I follow, a few steps behind to his left. Protocol. Difficult habit to break. He winds us through corridors of dirt and concrete, a maze of workrooms, quarters, and people, all rushing to get to where they need to go. There are a few groups here and there meandering through the chaos, laughing, and I assume they’re on break. “This here’s the mess hall.” He points to a cavernous room to our right, filled with the sound of echoing voices. “Best food on the planet, twenty-four-seven. And over here is…”

I try to listen politely, but the exhaustion of the day’s work is taking over, and all I want to do is crash in a bed. Finally, we seem to reach a quieter part of the base. Less movement, and a settled sort of feeling. A welcome change from the madness of the rest of the place.

“So, Cade. Where ya from?”

I eye him, trying to suss out how much he knows. “Here and there. Nowhere permanent.”

“No home planet?”

“No.” He seems surprised at my lack of an answer, which I take to mean he’s completely clueless as to why I’m here. And if he’s clueless, so is everyone else. Fantastic.

“What made you want to join the Resistance?”

I stiffen involuntarily, one hand squeezing the leather strap slung over my shoulder until it bites into my hand. “I am not with the Resistance, Mr. Dameron. Make no mistake on that.”

“…still deciding, then.”

He makes it sound like that’s the only other possible explanation. As though everyone in the world is tripping all over themselves to join the Resistance. “No, Mr. Dameron. I currently remain unaffiliated.”

He looks at me like I’m crazy. “We don’t usually allow visitors on D’Qar.”

“The General and I have an agreement.”

“Such as?”

Stars. “Do you always ask this many questions?”

“Only when I’m trying to be nice.”

I sigh. “I take it no one here has actually been informed of my arrival.”

“Other than meeting you in command today? No, no one knows a thing. You’re quite the enigma.”

He says it jokingly, like he’s trying to get a rise out of me. “I see. Perhaps that’s for the best.” No telling as to what they’ll do when I start swinging a saber around, but hey, if Leia didn’t tell them, I’m certainly not going to. I’d be a smudge on the floor before the day is up.

He blessedly says nothing for the remainder of the trip until we stop in front of a heavy metal door. “C3, East wing. Your new abode.”

I step forward and pretend to press buttons on the keypad, when really I just unlock it with a swipe of my hand. “Thank you. I appreciate the guidance.”

“No problem. Let me know if you need anything. There should be a comm pad in there with my ID keyed into it.”

I nod and step forward, then will the door shut, not caring that I left him mid-sentence. The room is small, but adequate. A bed tucked into an alcove, a chest of drawers, a door leading to what I assume is the bathroom. There’s even shelves for knickknacks or books, which strikes me as a little absurd. This is a military base, not a dormitory. Then again. I think of Faustina back home, who keeps pictures from magazines taped up beside her bed. For the color, she says. Maybe it’s a universal want.

I investigate the drawers. They’ve been filled with plain clothing, conspicuously absent of any Resistance logos. Thank you, Leia. I change into a comfy looking pair of pants and shirt and climb into bed, leaving my bag to be unpacked tomorrow.

I get up again. Tie the pants tighter around my hips, situate my boots at the corner of the bed so I can leap into them in a moment’s notice if need be. I take my saber from my pack and it hums underneath my palms, begging to be activated. Some sense of normalcy in this strange new place. But instead I carefully tuck it under my pillow, just within reach.

Just in case.

A/N: On continuity- I suck at it. Plot points in this story will be mentioned that occur in TLJ, but in TLJ D’Qar is destroyed. However, most of this story takes place on D’Qar. So... just ignore that inconsistency, please and thanks! :)

#star wars #Star Wars fanfic #reader insert #poe dameron x reader #poe dameron x you #poe dameron x oc

[arielsojourner]

Vader Strikes Back - Part the Fifth

Not beta read/really rough/not really proof read/plot holes and OUT of order.  Also spoilers for the original first story in AO3 Back From the Future: Episode VI The Clone Wars.  Check the tag #vader strikes back on my page for the other parts to this mess/fic outline. Again I value feedback and ideas if you have any.

*

The Medical Quarters were unusually full. It was driving Quick crazy. He could barely make his rounds in between all the visiting clone brothers and his patients moving around to cluster around Fives’ bed since he was still the most incapacitated. The holoscreen was blaring and he’d nearly lost track of whom he’d given meds to already and who still needed their daily dose twice. If things didn’t calm down and soon he was going to break his promise and throw every healthy clone out and tie down all his patients until they were healed! 

Enough was enough. He was calling Captain Rex and putting a stop to all of this right now.

*

“So that’s what we’ve got,” Uni finished, muting the holonet. “The whole story came out of a leak from Senator Organa’s office but the real source appears to be the Jedi Council. Now most of the Holonews isn’t touching the stuff but the story is gaining traction and it won’t be long before it will be featured on even the biggest networks.”

“It’s total poodoo is what it is,”  Slice grumped. “Luke died a hero and Vader isn’t interested in ruling anything! The Order is just--just prejudiced.”

“We know all that, but what are we going to do about it?” Echo asked. 

“We could go public,” Hardcase suggested. “Tell the truth.” At the incredulous looks of his brothers, Hardcase rolled his eyes. “C’mon, stop thinking like you’re still on Kamino. We have rights like any other sentient. We can and should speak out just like any natural born person. We’ve got a story. We should tell it.”

“But who’s going to listen?” Mixer interrupted. “Luke and Vader and a few systems may treat us like we’re free but everyone else thinks we’re no better than fleshy droids. No one’s going to believe a clone. The Republic doesn’t care about us. The Separatists hate us. The League aren’t the problem and the Order, well, they’re the cause of all of this!”

This sparked off a chorus of voices yelling over one another.

“Hey, hey!” Fives yelled from where he lay flat in the middle of the arguing brothers. “Enough! Hardcase, sit down before Quick sedates you. The rest of you shut up for a second.” The men quieted around him. “Now, Mixer has a point-- no, quiet and listen. Just because you don’t like to hear it doesn’t mean it’s not true. We are more than just numbers and canon fodder but that doesn’t mean anyone else out in the galaxy knows any of that. If we want to fight these lies we need to get people to trust us first.”

“Oh, like that’s going to be so easy,” Mal said with a scowl. “None of us even know any civilians, let alone holonet reporters. It’s not like we have friends or family outside the GAR. What do we know about getting people to trust us? We’re lab grown clones. What do we even know about any of this? Nothing. Each of us is barely a handful of years old and we know nothing about anything except how to fight and how to kill!”

A pillow hit Mal smack in the face and the troopers began shouting again.

“I’ve got friends.”

“What?” Fives yelled over the din, trying to raise his head. “Shut up would you? What did you say? Uni, get off Echo! Who said that? CT-9779, what did you say?”

Over a dozen faces turned to the young clone on the edge of the group. He was engrossed in his data pad. 

“CT-9779! Hey!” Hardcase said waving his arms. “What did you say?”

The unremarkable familiar face devoid of ink or anything other than the standard hair cut looked up. He flushed under the regard of his older brothers. “Er, nothing, nothing.”

“No, you said something about friends. What was it?” Fives prompted him. 

CT-9779 shrugged. “I’ve got friends. Y’know, who aren’t brothers. Civvies.”

“Who you? Yeah right. How?” Mal scoffed.

“Shut up, Mal,” Slice said digging his elbow into his squad mate’s side. 

“Who’re you friends with?” Hardcase asked. “Anyone I know?”

“Er, well, on the holonet,” he said pointing to his datapad. “I joined the groups that Hack Squad set up, y’know between squads and I messaged a couple of brothers I know in some other battalions and shared some of my credits from my stipend and helped them get datapads so we could stay in touch and then, well . . . I messaged Ventress and connected with her, and then just for a joke I messaged the Duchess Satine on this one holosite and they both messaged me back! So I joined a few other sites. They’re free and everything. And I started sharing and reblogging things. And the stuff I shared, and it wasn’t classified, I was careful, it was popular. There’s not a lot of news from the front y’know. People, natural born people, civvies, they wanted to know. And the Duchess has all these contacts on a bunch of systems and they connected with me on all these different holosites, asking questions and being  . . . nice and-- and we’ve become . . . friends,” he finished awkwardly at the incredulous looks he was getting. 

Uni moved closer reached for the datapad. “Lemme see.” Before CT-9779 could stop him he snatched it up and started scrolling through the open programs and pages. “What the hell?” he muttered. 

The clones leaned forward trying to see the screen. 

“Be careful!” CT-9779 said. “I was in the middle of posting something. Don’t delete it. I haven’t saved it yet.”

“What? What is it?” Echo asked.

Uni shook his head. “This can’t be right. This says you’ve got close to  a million followers on this one site alone. And over here, you’ve got almost a three hundred thousand just following what holo pictures you take and most of these followers aren’t brothers at all. It’s gotta be fake.”

CT-9779 tried to take back his datapad but Uni moved out of his reach. “They’re not fake. They’re natural born people.”

“You’ve got a ton of people as an audience without even trying. And they-they like it. They like things you write about and post about, about clones, about General Skywalker and Luke, about Vader, about all of us.” Uni handed over the datapad to Slice who after a moment passed it to Mal and then around the rest of the circle of clones. “We can use this. You think no one will listen? These people will and if we really try, we can spread this everywhere. Who needs the holonews? If enough people talk about it we’ll make our own news.”

“You can’t seriously think this will work though?” Mal asked. “Just because a bunch of civvies talk about us and about the truth isn’t going to change anything.”

“Worked for Luke though,” Chatterbox reminded him with a shrug as he took the datapad and Force tossed it back to CT-9779.

“Yeah, yeah it did,” Fives said with a growing sense of excitement. “Luke said the war was over and everyone thought he was crazy. I don’t even think Vader believed it. Hells, we didn’t believe it at first either, but he kept saying it. He kept saying it to everyone, senators, other Jedi, planetary leaders, all of us and look around. The war is over! It’s over because he said it was  over and he did everything he damn well could to show everyone else the truth. We just need to do the same thing.”

“It could work,” Slice said rubbing his chin. “But it would be better if we could talk about what we’re doing now, share that on these media sites.”

“What, healing and driving Quick crazy?” Hardcase joked.

Fives hit his clenched fist against his bed in frustration. “No, we need something big. Something important so people pay attention, something like--”

“Something like Vader’s plans to liberate Tatooine,” Rex said, stepping into the Medical Quarters, Quick on his heels.

The men came to attention as best as their various levels of health would allow.

Quick glanced around his domain and stomped over to start picking up previously thrown pillows and cups and bits and pieces the troopers had knocked over during their arguments, muttering under his breath. 

“Captain,” Echo said, standing at attention. “We, er, we’re off duty and just visiting.”

Rex merely raised one brow at the ARC trooper who winced and shut his mouth. “Seems more like planning than visiting to me, trooper. And your plans not half bad to be honest. You just need a little more focus and a little less throwing of pillows.”

“Yes sir,” the men chorused. 

“CT-9779,” Rex snapped.

“Y-yes sir,” the clone said, saluting sharply. 

“You’re reassigned to Hack Squad effective immediately. Get started on a media campaign with them to get the word out to the other Battalions and to the civvies on both sides of the galaxy. The rest of you that are well enough, I’ve got Vader’s plans uploaded on the shipboard link and they need to be firmed up. I want suggestions and creative ideas. This isn’t your standard liberation plan against the Seppies. When we rendezvous with him in a half rotation, I want to be ready to brief him in full and get moving on the campaign as soon as possible.”

“Yes sir!”

“Very well,” Rex said with a nod and then his stern features softened slightly. “I think-- I think Commander Luke would’ve been very  . . . pleased to see you all working together like this. Good work, all of you.”  

The troopers all looked at each other and smiled as the Captain left.

“Well, you heard the Captain,” Hardcase said gleefully, using the Force to snag the remote and unmute the holoscreen. “We better get ready for the briefing.”

“Now wait just a minute!” Quick yelled snatching the remote from him. “You are not well enough yet to do anything, let alone go to the briefing! Back to bed, all of you and the rest of you get out!” 

*

Krennic has surrounded himself with bodyguards but it makes no difference. They die screaming under Vader’s blade. He stops briefly at a computer terminal to infect it with the worm Hack Squad has prepared for him and continues the hunt. Vader is trying to treat this like any other mission. He tries to remind himself that this is no different than hunting down Rebels or the Death Star plans but the mere thought of that turns his stomach.

(Leia. He had tortured his own daughter).

But at least the hate is better than the grief. It may burn inside him but it is better than collapsing numb and powerless under the weight of sorrow. Let me burn, he thinks to himself savagely as he tears apart the droids barring his way, slashing through bulkheads following Krennic’s desperate trail. Let the rest of me just burn away. 

Vader finally breaks into the last panic room and Krennic shoots at him frantically. It is all too easy to block the blaster bolts, tear the weapon from the man’s hand and strangle him. He watches as Krennic collapses, turns blue and then purple and then finally gagging drops dead to the floor.

Vader grips his lightsaber tighter and looks down at the body. He has long hated Krennic with his weaseling manipulative ways, his blatant desire for power and authority. He’s dreamed of killing him more than once. It is good that he is dead and his weapon plans destroyed. 

But Vader can feel no satisfaction. He still hates and wishes that Krennic had somehow marshaled more of a challenge against him, provided more targets for him to vent his rage against. He casts his mind out. Perhaps there are still some bodyguards or droids left alive. Perhaps there is someone else he can kill or destroy.

But no. He has been thorough. There is no threat left alive. 

Everyone is dead.

He turns and goes back to the computer terminal. Maybe there is a new trail to follow, a new name he will recognize and he can start the hunt again.

(The Emperor’s Hound, his attack dog, Sith monster, the Emperor’s pet killer running his quarry to ground . . .)

Vader draws himself up short. He’d hunted Luke this way, chasing down leads, slaughtering as he went and in the end it was a simple message not a threat that brought his son to his side.

Without thinking, Vader reaches out through the Force for his son.

--dark, warm, sad, pain, burning--

Vader wrenches himself away from the baby’s Force presence, cursing himself. He knows better. His Force presence filled with hate and anger overwhelms the baby. He will destroy both of the children if he is not careful, if he cannot control his weak ways. He needs to stop reaching out. There is no one to reach back.  

Luke is dead.

He stares at the computer screen blankly. What is he going to do now? he wonders bleakly. Vader considers the still lit saber for a long moment.

His commlink beeps. He answers it.

“Captain Rex reporting, sir. We’ve just arrived in orbit. We have a company ready to join you on the surface if need be.”

Vader disengages his saber.

“There is no need Captain. The target is dead. I have destroyed the files. I will rendezvous with the ship shortly.” 

“Understood sir. Oh, and sir?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“We have some information to brief you on when you arrive on board.”

“Very well. Vader out.”

Vader turns and begins the journey back to the Twilight. Perhaps the 501st will have a new mission. Perhaps Hack Squad has found another danger that needs to be destroyed. Perhaps . . .

*

Obi-Wan  finds Anakin in the nursery. He is soothing the children. Luke is crying and Leia is whimpering in sympathy. It is good to hear Anakin’s voice again.

“Are they all right?” Obi-Wan asks.

“Luke’s just a little scared,” Anakin replies. “I think . . . I think Vader sometimes forgets. He reaches out and . . .” Anakin shrugs.

Obi-Wan’s eyes widen in shock. He hurries over to the crib, looking anxiously at the twins. “Do you mean, he actually . . . is he here?”  Obi-Wan doesn’t know what to do if Vader has come to Naboo. Will he have to fight him? What if he comes for the children? What does he want?

Anakin shakes his head. “He’s light years away. He won’t come here.”

“Light years? But--”

“If size doesn’t matter to the Force, and time obviously doesn’t matter to the Force, then distance probably doesn’t matter either,” Anakin says sardonically as the babies quiet under his hands. 

For Vader to be that strong . .  . Obi-Wan internally shudders at the thought. He looks at his former Padawan and wonders what feats of the Force Anakin is capable of.

“How do you know he won’t come here? If he’s reaching out as you say . . .”

“He doesn’t mean to. He doesn’t mean to frighten Luke. He pulls away as soon as he realizes it’s  . . .not who he’s really looking for.” Anakin says softly. “He’s not going to come to Naboo or anywhere Padme or the children are now or ever. He’s not going to come because I wouldn’t come.”

“I don’t understand,” Obi-Wan says after a long moment. It makes no sense to him. Seeing how devoted Anakin is and remembering even those few moments with Vader, how desperate he was to protect Padme as she was giving birth, he would expect Vader to come. He feels like he doesn’t understand Vader, never understood Anakin properly at all. 

“When you hate yourself that much, when you are afraid that you will destroy who you desperately want to protect, you avoid the ones you love.”

Obi-Wan swallows hard. He knew Anakin’s emotions ran strong and he didn’t think he would ever forget the Forcestorm of hate, betrayal and self-loathing he felt from Vader. But he’d always believed that those who fell to the Dark were different, altered permanently from those who stood in the Light. Anakin couldn’t possibly know all this unless he knew what Vader was thinking and feeling intimately. “And you? Do you feel. . .” Obi-Wan trails off. He doesn’t want to ask. He doesn’t want to contemplate that the boy he raised has anything in common with the Sith Lord. 

Anakin looks at him and smiles painfully. “Always. The fear’s always been there,” he admits and it’s like a blow that leaves Obi-Wan breathless. “The hate . . . that grew later. But one of us needs to be here for Padme, for Leia and Luke, for Ahsoka, and for you. So I’m staying here and he’ll  . . . stay away. You won’t have to fight him, not unless you seek him out.”

“No. I cannot face him. I won’t.”

Anakin nods, gaze returning to the now sleeping infants. “Thank you,” he whispers. He takes a few shuddering breaths, hands gripping the edge of the crib tightly. “I know I’ve failed--”

“No, you didn’t fail. You didn’t Fall.”

He huffs a laugh. “Close enough.”

“Close only counts with Hardcase and pulse grenades,” Obi-Wan reminds him sternly. “You’re still here.”

Anakin closes his burning eyes tightly, too ashamed to even look at his old Master. “Obi-Wan, you have no idea,” he says, voice breaking. “I’m no Jedi. Not really. I could never learn how, no matter how hard I tried. You were right, Yoda was right. I’m dangerous.”

Obi-Wan takes hold of Anakin’s shoulder and turns him until they stand face to face. “Listen to me, Anakin. Please, just listen. There is good in you, so much good. If you have struggled with the Dark, if you have been unable to master letting go of your attachment, your fear, your anger, and your hate that doesn’t mean you’re not a Jedi or that you’re a failure. The truth is . . . I haven’t mastered those skills either. I don’t think I ever will. I’ve just gotten very very good at pretending,” he confesses gently as Anakin wipes at his eyes with one hand. “So, if that’s what makes someone dangerous, then you’re not alone.  I just hope you don’t mind the company.”

“No,” Anakin says with a watery laugh. “I don’t mind.”

“We’ll figure this out, all of it, together. We’re safe and the war is over. We have time and I promise you, I’m not going anywhere.”

#star wars #luke and vader save the galaxy #vader strikes back #clone wars

[missconduct]

As Strong as Darth Vader

<p>“Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” (Yoda, 1980, The Empire Strikes Back). I usually don’t begin an essay with a quote but in this case I feel it’s important. My theory here is just a theory based on how I’ve viewed this story for 35 years. If you don’t agree it’s ok take it with a grain of salt, my friends in Star Wars fandom, because it’s not canon lol this is all in my head. I’m speculating how the story could go, and that’s part of the fun in this saga is speculation.<br>

  The first time I heard they were making a new trilogy I cringed as a lot of people did fearing the worst for a story I love so much. I didn’t read spoilers, or cruise YouTube looking for theory videos. I barely watched the trailer. In fact all I saw of the trailer was a few glimpses of Finn wielding the blue saber (only because I was already a huge fan of John’s because of his character in Attack the Block). I stepped into this new world not knowing anything. I didn’t even know who Adam Driver was. I didn’t even know there was a girl protagonist in the movie. My canvas of TFA was blank.

  As I watched the movie quite a few things caught me by surprise. I’ll quickly list them; Kylo as a villain, the interactions between Rey and Kylo (that’s a huge ass one), where the hell is Luke? The symbolism in the story as a whole, and my deepest one is Kylo’s obsession with his grandfather. As I watched the movie these things caught my attention because the rest of the story is (and I saw it admittedly) a re-play of the original trilogy (which I think was a strategy to play on the nostalgia of the original). It intrigued me intensely though because there were all these twists in it that were obviously not a copy cat of the original trilogy.

  As I sat in the theater watching it for the first time the scene when Kylo is speaking to Darth Vader’s helmet began. I watched this clearly conflicted, confused, lost villain pleading with a dead man’s helmet to, “show him again, the power of the darkness.” I literally said in a whisper under my breath, “this doesn’t make any sense to me??? Vader’s greatest moment of triumph, his greatest strength was his ability to turn back to the light side. He chose to be good again, to do the right thing, to save his son, his family, from the darkness. Why would this mask show him anything dark???” I didn’t like it at first. The scene made me feel so sad. It was as if Vader’s sacrifice meant nothing at the end of ROTJ. Like his greatest moment was forgotten in this new world.

   Then I saw this girl who I viewed as confused and lost as much as the villain was. Trying to come to grips with where her life was going. Should she stay and wait for her family? Should she finally accept whatever the truth was and move on? Then she hears a call. I thought it was interesting that the call was a little girls cries, almost as if her own loneliness were calling to her. She touches this long lost relic that once belonged to Anakin Skywalker, and her life takes a turn that is going to forever change her destiny.

  I’ve watched Rey’s force vision way too many times to count and the 2 things that are consistent in them that stood out to me were 1: Kylo Ren, and 2: various voices from the past echoing through the force. Now a lot of people think that these past voices are the individuals speaking directly to her, but I didn’t see it like that. Even though Obi-Wan says her name, it’s more like the force is speaking to her through the echo of past force users. This is important because I’ll bring it up again later.

  Through my journey with Rey, I saw her frightened and alone after the vision. I know Maz is trying to help her, but it might freak me out if someone had just made me come to the realization that my deepest fear was true. That I had to accept the people who were supposed to care about me and come back for me were never coming back. She’s afraid, she’s alone (Finn just abandoned her also. He’s leaving her to go to the outer rim territory.) She runs, and who does she run right into? Our strange lost Villain. At this point, I was really wanting to know who and what was under that mask. Remember spoiler free, didn’t even know who Adam Driver was.

  Then he sweeps her away “Bridal carry” style onto his ship, abducting her! That had me on the edge is my seat because that whole scene had me trying to figure out where this was going. Was he a man under that mask ? Or a monster? Was this an endgame romance or a creepy stalker crush?

  Then I witnessed the “interrogation scene.” This is the most important scene in the movie for me, and not for the reasons you might think. Yes, my jaw dropped and (despite my very good looking husband sitting right next to me ) I almost wet my pants when Kylo took off his mask. I turned to my daughter and whispered in an awestruck voice, “I think he’s the leading man. How about you?” My 13-year-old daughter’s reply, “omg mom, damn” and we laughed. Yes, there is a lot of incredibly hot, passionate, sexually charged shit going down in that scene! That’s not why it’s the most important scene for me. As I watched, this girl rise to the occasion and step up onto the equal ground with this boy, she said those famous words that helped me piece my headcanon puzzle together, “you, you’re afraid, that you’ll never be as strong as Darth Vader!”

  Now a lot of people don’t pay much attention to this line. They simply think it’s just her calling him out on being a Darth Vader fanboy. Maybe the writers were going that direction, but I don’t think so. When I first heard that line I whispered under my breath “oooooooo that was deep.” And in my head it made sense. That was a huge foreshadowing of Ben solos redemption, and the part this girl is going to play in it. This part of the movie is what drew me deep into the story.

  So I went back and saw the film 5 more times after that, in the theater. Then immediately pre- ordered my iTunes copy to be available for download as soon as it was available. I watched, and watched, and watched it again, and again. I could even watch it again today lol. It wasn’t enough. I kept wanting to know more. I started cruising and just looking through fan bases, but it looked like the things I wanted to talk about weren’t subjects that were well received, so I didn’t venture into joining or posting in any fan sites. Then I started cruising YouTube and came across this channel called Star Wars Connection and found a video titled, “Visual Storytelling in The Force Awakens.” Omg, these ladies understood me !!!! They understood everything I understood in the movie!!! And listening to them helped me develop my theory about Kylo’s redemption and the connection between Rey and Kylo-Ben.

  During the second part of this outstanding podcast, they briefly talked about Luke’s journey into the cave on Dagobah. In that scene, Luke is confronted by Vader when he cuts his head off, and the helmet explodes revealing Luke’s own face within the mask. It got me thinking about Luke’s greatest fear and how it related to Kylo. They are similar but different. Luke’s greatest fear was falling to the Dark side and becoming just like his father. Kylo’s greatest fear is the (I hope this is the correct term) subverted version of Luke’s, that he will never be as Strong as Darth Vader, that he will never be like him. Is it possible that part of what went down between Luke and Kylo has something to do with this fact? This is all speculation but it got me thinking that if there are similarities between Anakin and Kylo, then wouldn’t there be similarities between Luke and Kylo also? When Luke sees his face in the mask it scares him. Kylo wants to see his face in the mask.

  While thinking about Luke and Kylo it leads me to Rey. These three individuals are key to what this story really is about. It’s not about who Rey’s parents are or aren’t that is irrelevant. I’m sorry to all those anti-Reylo���s out there who are gunning for her to be a Skywalker or Solo but in my headcanon, she’s not. Her part in this story in my mind is clear. It was a passionately romantic love that started all this, and it will be a passionately romantic love that will end all of this. 

   Rey and Kylo have collided. I have seen a lot of speculation about whether or not they knew each other prior to their meeting on Takodana. Through all the speculation I’ve seen the only one that makes sense to me is that they have seen each other in dreams and visions. In the novelization, it even says that Rey knows this man from a dream or a nightmare. I believe she has had dreams of him her whole life. Which is why I think he smiles when he sees her image of an island. Anakin had dreams of people and future events, why can’t Rey. I believe Kylo has had dreams of her as well. In my headcanon dreams and visions are two different entities. A dream coming to you in your sleeping state, a vision coming to you through a waking moment through something else. Rey has visions of Kylo when she touches Anakin’s lightsaber in the castle. Is it possible that Kylo has had a similar vision of Rey? Someone speculated that maybe Kylo had Obi-Wan’s lightsaber somehow. (Thank you Rebel Scum Podcast for twisting my idea lol to present it as yours, but you got it all wrong) Kylo doesn’t need anyone’s light saber to have a vision of Rey. He has Anakin’s mask. Part of my speculation is that Vader/Anakin’s mask is Kylo’s transmitter for his force vision.

  Now I know a lot of people probably think of Vader’s mask as a Completely Dark side relic. I’m sorry though I don’t see it that way. Remember I told you that the first time I saw the movie while watching this scene I kept thinking that the mask was more a representation and symbol of Vader’s greatest strength and triumph. Think about Vader’s last moments while wearing the mask. The moment Luke told him he could feel the conflict in him, and he knew there was still good in him. His sadness feeling torn, watching the emperor torture his son, Padme’s son! almost to death. The pain he must have felt being torn apart between the dark and the light at that moment. Vader chucking the old guy over the railing into the abyss to save his family, to do the impossible, something that Yoda said couldn’t be done. He came back to the light. Even the walk with Luke carrying him to the shuttle. Still trying to save his father. Removing his mask peeling it off of his face so he could look at his son one last time with his own eyes. That mask in my opinion saw a lifetime of light before Vader/ Anakin passed away and became one with the force again. I view that mask as potentially being a grey instrument of the force. If the mask has given him visions both light and dark it would make sense that he would ask it to show him again the power of the darkness. A lot of people think that individual characters from the past are directly speaking to both characters, as I pointed out earlier. Could Kylo think that Vader speaks to him through the mask. Is it possible that this is just purely THE FORCE itself using voices of powerful Jedi of the past? The force is just using these voices as an echo to bring these two very powerful force, sensitive individuals, together. Why would the force will this?

  I try to clear my mind and recognize what Yoda says over and over numerous times in the saga. It is this entity that binds everything together. It has a will all its own. It calls those bound to it, it is a force sensitive beings choice if they will answer the call. If they will choose the light path or the dark. Perhaps there is a medium ground.

   No matter which religion it is there are light and dark sides to it. Without one the other cannot exist. In my theory the force is trying to bind Rey and Ben together, and yes I do believe it is trying to bind them together using a romantic passionate love. The evidence of this is clear in TFA. Kylo is already addicted to her presence. He can’t just hand her over to Stormtroopers like he did Poe, he has to carry her. He’s not trying to intimidate or frighten her. He takes off his mask for her. He speaks softly and calmly. I’m sorry but when I was growing up if my brother was interrogating me for any reason (Like where I hid the remote to keep him from changing the channel.) he was never nice, never calm, and it usually ended with blows aiming for the head or the gut, and furniture flying across the room, and the last person we wanted around was the other one. Kylo is not her brother or cousin. Sorry folks it’s not in the story. He wants her in his life! He pretty much begs her to let him teach her, he needs her in his life. Which is a big reason Otze’s essay about force bonds is now my favorite Star Wars Reylo essay. If they are related, I will still love it, because it’s Star Wars.The story can still be explored through different characters in a future trilogy, but I will be reading and writing tons of Reylo fan fiction to get over it lol!

  While I believe that Kylo will be redeemed through this love he has for Rey I do not know how it will end for him in my head. I do not think it’s going to end well for him. I see them both being bound together through the force and I think it’s very foretelling that each one has a connection to a relic that once belonged to Anakin Skywalker. The lightsaber was Anakin’s. He was the first to wield it. The mask also belonged to Anakin. Anakin is still being chosen by the force to achieve balance. Using relics of both sides of his life To bring these 2 people who share this connection in the force together. I think this could foreshadow one of them (probably Ben) making a self-sacrifice to save the other. I really don’t want that to happen though, I want Kylo to survive. Maybe going on a journey of penance, wandering the galaxy trying to help others to pay for his past. IDK if that will happen either but I’d love that, and it could spark an animated series. (lol)

  I believe it’s possible. As many have said in fandom his character still has a lot of growing up to do. I’m so on the edge of my seat to watch that unfold. I want to know if in the end, he will fulfill his ambition and his destiny and truly become “As Strong as Darth Vader!”

 I went on for a long while now and I hope my day dream about this awesome passionate story made people think, maybe even daydream a bit themselves. I’m sure I’m probably completely wrong about this whole headcanon of mine lol (@Scavengershoard ) Like Rachel and Kirsty are always saying though it’s always fun to speculate. Have a great rest of your weekend everyone and thanks for reading

Feel free to leave comments and let me know what you think(Please be kind though, do unto others right!) ❤️⭐️

#reylo #reylo trash #reylo meta

[delicatefury]

TDPL 500 kudos snippet: Shadow of Vader

As promised, here’s snippet.

Disclaimer: I haven’t… exactly… seen the Mortis arc. I know of it thanks to fic and wookiepedia. I know enough to know what happens to Anakin and that I HATE the implications of the Father, Son, and Daughter and the Chosen One Prophecy (I know I’ve mentioned how much I despise the introduction of this prophecy into the Star Wars mythos before. It’s unnecessary and messy and destroys more of the narrative than it adds).

But after writing about Anakin’s promise to Leia that he’d never become (like) their father, this begged to be written.

As of now this snippet is not canon to TDPL. There’s a lot of stuff that will happen before I get to this point, and Obi-Wan’s unique situation will have to be explored before I touch Mortis with a 29-and-a-half foot pole, and really it should probably not end up anything like the original to be honest and… now I’m rambling. Basically, if everything stays the same between Anakin’s promise to Leia and Mortis (but it won’t, of course it won’t) this is what might happen.

Warning: Angst ahead

“You liar!”

Obi-Wan looks stricken. A dawning horror breaking past his Jedi stoicism as he tries to grab Anakin’s attention back to himself.

Good.

Let Obi-Wan feel the failure for once. Let him fear for the safety of a loved one. Anakin simply grins at his frail old master. The barest threads of focus and will are all that are keeping the man together.

He can feel the Dark snapping at his heels, an acidic presence eager to obey his whims. The Force fully obedient to him. It begs to be allowed at the new plaything standing on the ridge of the hill. Pleads to destroy one of the annoying little lights that took Obi-Wan away from his side.

“That’s what Obi-Wan does, little one. That’s what all the Jedi do. They lie.” He smiles at little Leia Whitesun as she glares down at him. “They lie and they lie and they lie. They say they are compassionate and then judge you when your mother dies. They say they’ll help the galaxy but then frustrate the only one who really wants to save it. They tell you that you’re powerful but then hobble you with their stupid, arbitrary rules!”

Obi-Wan is attempting to stand again, so Anakin knocks him down with a sharp kick to the knee.

“Not him, you sand-gargling Hutt slime!” Leia shrieks. In a distant part of his mind, one drowning in the darkness, suffocating under the weight of the visions he’s been shown, he can’t help but see the echo of Padmé in the girl, in her powerful stance and the righteous fury in her eyes. Though Padmé would never scream insults at him. Not his Angel.

Because of that difference, the rest of him is annoyed.

“You’d do well to remember your place, padawan.”

The Dark begs to crush the life out of the child’s pale throat, to smother the spark out of the defiant eyes. Promises the power to save all he loves, to bind Obi-Wan to his side, mow down Padmé’s enemies, bring Snips back to life, if only he’ll sacrifice this one child.

He brings the Force to heel. He is the master here. He’ll decide who to sacrifice and who to spare. And it would be so much better if Obi-Wan chooses to stay with him of his own will. And the quickest way to a master is through their padawan. And oh, isn’t that anger perfect? All fuming and defiant.

The Force is thick on this planet and it responds to the strong emotions of its children. It kicks up a wind around her feet, pulling at the loose hairs falling from the intricate braids Ahsoka had put them in that morning.

Kark, was it only this morning?

“You are a Force-forsaken liar! You promised! You swore you wouldn’t be like him! You swore to me!”

Her ire perplexes him. Can’t she see he is going to save them all? He’ll end this war. And if either side refuses to see reason, he’ll make them. What promise could stand up to that?

“You said you’d never be like my father!” She hasn’t moved, so he has to come to her, stepping around Obi-Wan to do so. It’s a nice power play, and one he’ll allow to happen. Even with the incline he towers over the tiny padawan, barely a teenager.

So why does he feel like she’s brought him low?

Her father… she thought he was acting like the man who would torture his own daughter, harm his own son, and burn the galaxy behind him.

Instantly that pain turns to anger. “I am nothing like that,” he roars, bringing the full weight of his presence bearing down on her.

“No!” Obi-Wan cries from his place on the ground. Anakin doesn’t even look at him when he flings his pain and anger at the other man. But Leia stands strong, an unmoving column in the face of Anakin’s tremendous rage.

“You are exactly like him,” she grinds out.

No. This isn’t how things are supposed to go. Don’t they understand? He’s doing this, all this, for them! If the stubborn child would just listen-

His arm is up before he can register moving it, hand extended. Leia goes stiff as a board, her widened eyes the only sign of her fear. The Force roars in triumph and Anakin clenches his fist tighter.

“Anakin! Let. Her. Go.” It is all the warning he gets before Obi-Wan’s presence at his back… waivers. Bleeds at the edges then disappears completely. Just as suddenly, the connection between Anakin and his opponent is severed. Leia drops to the ground, rubbing her throat; winded but not too incapacitated to glare at him in disgust.

No… no. Obi-Wan’s not gone. He can’t find Obi-Wan’s presence because there are traces everywhere. Whispers of the man saturate the Force.

“Of course, you coward, you are not like my father at all,” the girl sneers past the raspiness in her voice. “You’d never attack someone weaker than you for having the audacity to disagree with you. What next? Will we be forced to adore you at blaster point? Take away our freedom to ensure our safety? Do your worst, Vader.”

That name, the name she calls him, spat out with the same vehemence with which she says “Father” cuts through him.

Suddenly he can’t breath. His ears are full of the sound that haunted his visions. The one that undercut the screams, the cries for help. That sound of mechanized breathing pervades his existence. It is echoing inside his head again, he can feel it rattle his bones, but this vision, this experience is somehow worse. There’s a pressure on his chest, and a weight on his limbs.

His lungs burn, his skin burns, the light burns but there is no relief. He wants to sob with the pain of it, but he can’t. The air cycles in and out steadily despite his wishes. He goes cold despite the unending fire. That monstrous noise… it’s him. It is his own lungs working. Not of his own volition, but at the whim of some machine.

His vision has gone strangely red, but he can see Leia scramble to escape him, escape from the monster he has become. For the first time since the Son gave him this gift, she is afraid of him. Not of what he can do, but of him. The type of fear that can drive out any care, any compassion, any love. The same fear he had worked so hard to overcome with her.

No, no, no! This isn’t what he wanted at all.

As he reaches for her, trying to calm her, to reassure her, he catches sight of his hands. Both of them are black clad. Both lack the fine sense of touch his flesh hand has. And he is bombarded with another round of visions. Sparring with Leia in the temple. Improving Artoo with Luke. Flying with Ahsoka. Breakfast with his little temple family at the Kenobi-Whitesun rooms. He wants to gasp, wants to sob, but he machine won’t let him and the visions won’t stop. They take a darker turn.

Leia in the temple hall, dressed in regal gowns and not Jedi robes, trembling behind the protective figure of Bail Organa, bowing her head before him, before his Master. Leia full grown, red tinted but dressed neck to toe in white, sneering at him from between two republic guards. Leia screaming at him as some horrific droid closes in on her. Leia snarling disdain despite a collected facade, glaring at him over the barrel of a blaster. Leia collapsing in grief as Han, their Han, is lowered into carbonite.

Then it is Luke he sees. Luke in Tatooian garb, screaming at him with the echo of a snapped bond pulsing through the Force. Luke flooding his senses with grief at the loss of Obi-No- The thought barely starts before he sees Luke standing opposite him in an orange pilot’s suit, Artoo behind him, blaster pointed at Anakin’s heart. Luke wielding a tantalizingly familiar blue 'saber as they clash in the underbelly of a station and Anakin’s… Anakin’s is red. Luke crying in pain as the red saber is flicked like Dooku’s and the boy’s hand is gone. Luke looking at him in denial, in rage, in disgust as he rejects the hand being offered. Disgust mirroring the look on his twin’s face. Then Luke letting go, jumping to his death before accepting help from whatever Anakin has become.

And always the sound of his own breath.

The vision ends and he is still standing on the hill, hand still outstretched to Leia, who still looks at him with abject fear and loathing. He looks down at his black gloved hands, both covered now. He did this. And she rejects his comfort.

But Obi-Wan’s presence wraps around her like a protective shield, and his old master becomes visible to his eyes once more. Blade drawn, aimed down and away, he looks broken but there is a quiet strength, a compassion for the monster who attacked his padawan. And with a steadying breath, Obi-Wan reaches his free hand to his first student, a plea to allow him to help.

And Anakin wants to sob but can’t.

#The Dark Path Lit by Sun and Stars #Star Wars #Anakin Skywalker #Darth Vader #Princess Leia #Obi-Wan Kenobi #Luke Skywalker #500 kudos! #mortis arc #Serious serious issues with The Prophecy #and the retconning of Balance in the Force #And what even is with the Daughter #She makes no sense #Augh #I'm gonna end up hating the Mortis trio #even more than the pacifist Lemurs #aren't I? #and that's saying something

[grumpyhedgehogs]

something old, something new

Summary:  Cody meets Luke. It stirs up mixed emotions. Cody also gets a mission; it's not any more straightforward. AO3. Part 4 of the “scraps” series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5.

Warnings: Grief/mourning, anger, canonical character death.

Cody meets Obi-Wan’s last padawan on a rebel base after he’s just signed up for a covert mission onto the Death Star.

His limbs shake. His spine tingles; heat and chills flash alternately over his skin. Cody feels sick bubble up his throat but swallows it as best he can. His vision is blurry around the edges. He can’t quite believe what he’s agreed to. He’s been running from the Empire for months, picking off Imps at a distance for months, avoiding the void in space that is the Death Star for months. But the rebel commanders are right; Cody is the best person to go back in. He’s the best undercover operative they have on hand. He’s already familiar with trooper regs, and he’s used to filling out the armor. His face, while recognizable as Jango Fett’s copy, is not uncommon among Imps. Cody is the best choice. It still turns his stomach.

He wonders if this is how Obi-Wan felt before the Hardeen incident. General Windu had told Ponds offhandedly that Kenobi had asked to veto the mission but was overruled by the need to save Chancellor Palpatine, and Ponds had let Cody know too. Cody wishes they’d just let him die.

He’ll have to leave behind his armor. His own logo has spread, first to Rex's chest piece, then Ahsoka had carved it into her vambraces, then any clone the rebels rescued seem to have the lightsaber and 212th insignias overlapping on their armor somewhere. It makes it a little easier to strip off his own armor, knowing the symbol will still be upheld when Cody isn’t wearing it. It still feels like a betrayal.

“I’m sorry,” Cody whispers to any Jedi spirits who might still be listening. “I’m sorry. I keep failing you.”

“Who are you talking to?”

Cody doesn’t jump, but his hand is on his blaster when he turns. A man not much older than boyhood stands at the entrance to Cody’s bunk; it’s not odd to see strangers on the base, everyone moves in and out as needed, but most people don’t stop to chat. Especially not with Cody. He thinks they might not be used to seeing someone so old fighting with them.

“You ever knock?”

The kid’s face, round and tanned and youthful, falls a little. “There’s no door,” he mutters, petulant. Cody is reminded absurdly of General Skywalker at the beginning of the wars. He shakes it off.

“What’d you need?” He has to get to packing. Cody bends down and picks up the repurposed trooper armor he’d been given for the assignment. The stark, empty whiteness mocks him. He longs for his own armor; his own trooper stuff or his 212th outfit, it doesn’t matter. At least they’re his . This costume he must don belongs to a dead man.

“I just heard you talking and wanted to know if you needed to talk to someone.”

“You go looking for conversations with strangers often, kid?”

The kid shakes his head, blond hair flopping in his face as he does. There’s a strange, familiar little smile on his face as he says, “Sometimes I just get these feelings about things.”

The smile is what does it, it's so like Obi-Wan's. It hits Cody like a blaster bolt between the eyes. He wobbles on his feet and the kid takes a surprised step forward, ready to assist, but Cody holds up his hand and regains his balance. He still feels shaky, and he ends up lowering himself onto his bunk. It’s reminiscent of all those months ago when he made the decision to desert; reflexively, he reaches over and tugs the robe from where he’d folded it after removing it from his armor. Cody pulls it into his lap and tries not to look directly at the young man. “You--Kenobi saved you from the Death Star. You and the Alderaanian princess.”

“Wh--yes,” the kid says. “How did you know that?”

“I was there.”

Blue eyes dart to his discarded armor, to his weathered face, to the new stormtrooper armor he’ll have to wear. He can see the gears turning before the kid blurts out, “You deserted?”

That's one way to look at the chip deactivating. Cody nods. The blond grins widely. “That’s great! Gosh, I knew not all of the Empire could be evil.”

“Enough of it is.”

He seems to shrug this off as he steps further into the room. He sticks his hand out to Cody. “I’m glad to meet you. My name’s Luke Skywalker.”

It takes everything in Cody not to crush his hand in surprise. He lets go hastily. “Where’d you get a name like that?”

“Tatooine. I’m named after my father, but I never met him. If you--you knew Kenobi?” Cody nods, numb. “He was from Tatooine too. He trained me in the ways of the Jedi before we got to the Death Star.”

No he’s not , Cody wants to say. He’s from Coruscant. He’s Stewjoni but he doesn’t remember any of that place and he grew up in the Temple on Coruscant. His padawan was Anakin Skywalker. Who are you?

But it’s all clicking in his head the minute he thinks of these questions. Skywalker, the former slave. He used to avoid sand like the plague. He never talked about his home planet. Amidala had been pregnant. Obi-Wan disappeared, presumed dead by most of the Empire, for years.

What was the one place Skywalker would never return to on pain of death?

“Clever,” Cody mutters. He waves off Luke’s confused expression. Cody focuses, evaluating, and Luke shifts on his feet, ducks his head. He’s wearing the orange flight suit of the rebel pilots, but he’s too skinny and it’s baggy on him. He certainly doesn’t look like he’s going to follow in his father’s footsteps to the Dark side. “I knew Obi-Wan in the wars, before the Empire. He was my general and I was his commander.”

“Really? That's so wizard! Can you tell me more about him?” Luke asks eagerly. His intensity is a little overwhelming. Cody picks up the new armor and starts strapping it to his legs over his blacks. He can’t stand to put on the new chest piece before he has to.

“I’ve got a mission.” He cuts Luke off shortly. His head pounds, his heart pounds. Obi-Wan would say he’s being rude. He is being rude. “Sorry.”

“Oh. Okay. That’s okay.” Cody doesn’t look up. Luke sounds like the shinies used to, all nervous and fearful of rejection. The sound clamps tight around his lungs. “It’s just that he knew my father but he didn't talk a lot about him. I was hoping…”

Cody looks up then, and rage blazes through him. He remembers Vader’s saber slicing through someone beloved, he remembers the black cloud of misery and death sweeping away, he remembers those loathed hands curling around the hilt of a trusted weapon. He looks up and Cody is ready to scream, to fight, to sink his teeth in and hold on.

He meets guileless blue eyes and a slight, kind smile. It’s a smile he’s used to seeing on a dead face. Cody’s mouth shuts with a click.

(This child doesn’t know his father. This child barely knew Obi-Wan. Cody trusts Obi-Wan still, at least enough not to break this child’s trusting idealism. There’s a reason for everything Obi-Wan did.)

“I didn’t know Skywalker personally.” He mutters, looking away. When he catches Luke sagging out of the corner of his eye, guilt gnaws at Cody. He amends, “I only met him during missions. He was a good fighter. Obi-Wan cared a lot about him. They were--people called them The Team, they were so good together.”

“Wow,” Luke breathes. There’s a ruckus outside, a group of fellow pilots and soldiers rushing past, but he doesn’t waver from his study of Cody’s tight expression. “Thank you.”

“Obi-Wan raised you, then?” Any topic is better than Skywalker. He wishes Rex were here, but he and Ahsoka have to deal with some mess the rebels had made for them on the other side of the universe.

“Oh, no,” Luke laughs. He scrubs a hand across the back of his neck and Cody’s heart twists. “No, but he was around the whole time. I think maybe he was watching out for me, in memory of my father, you know.”

“Sounds like something Obi-Wan would do.”

A taller man in a vest swings into the open doorway and crosses his arms over his chest when he sees Luke. Squinting, Cody thinks maybe he remembers this man from the Death Star too. Small galaxy. “Luke. It’s time to go.”

“Sure thing, Han!” Luke waits until Han has left with a grumble before turning around and holding his hand out to Cody again. Cody rises and shakes it; his skin doesn’t burst into flames from touching a Skywalker a second time. “Thank you for your time. If you--if you ever want to talk some more about Obi-Wan…?”

“You know where to find me.” Cody offers and hopes the words don’t sound too wooden. Then, moving as if he is deep underwater, he pauses and turns back to his bunk. The edges of the robe are even more frayed now, and there's one corner with a hole in it. Cody begins to lift the scrap of cloth up, because he loves Obi-Wan, he does, and he knows without a shadow of a doubt that Obi-Wan would want a Skywalker taken care of. His whole being rejects the notion, grief and heartache and longing screaming at him to stop, yet Cody offers it anyway, words dry on his tongue. But Luke's eyes are wide, and he shakes his head mutely. Relief floods through him. When Cody drops the cloth back to the cot, Luke carries on like nothing has happened.

“You’re going undercover on the Death Star, right? That’s you?”

Cody nudges the new trooper bucket near his foot and grunts. “Scarif helped us get schematics of the place, but the command wants to make sure we’re not leaving anybody--or anything useful--behind. So they’re sending me in to make sure, minimize collateral damage.”

“That sounds like a dangerous job.”

“I’m used to it.”

Luke pauses for a long moment. He doesn’t look directly at Cody, his eyes far away. Suddenly the kid turns back, continence even brighter than it's been for the entire conversation. “Keep your own armor on,” he advises. Then, with a sly glace to the cloth bundle on Cody's cot, he adds, “And the poncho. I think it might help you soon. It certainly couldn't hurt, right?”

Cody nods, a little uncertain. Luke smiles again and wanders out. Pensive, Cody turns back to his bunk and spreads his fingers over the fabric of Obi-Wan’s robe, trails them over the insignia on his armor. “Another Skywalker, huh? You sure know how to pick ‘em, Obi-Wan.”

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