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ruler-of-garbage · 11 months

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Wait, You're My Colleague?!?!- Part 3

Part 1 HERE

MASTERLIST

1 Warning(s): Y/n is appearing to be feminine (No pronouns though)(Scaramouche will be the name, but its a mix of all of his personas)

This is MODERN AU

Word Count- 870

Ever since that day, everything has been going well. Scaramouche has fully settled into work life. And has been able to meet loads of interesting authors that… even if he believes them to be a bit stupid… create some very interesting stories. And with that, everything is working out great.

But…

NOW HOW THE FUC- HAVE WE NOT SPOKEN SINCE THAT DAY??? Everytime one of you two try to talk to the other, there is someone or something that has gotten in the way. Either it be Ajax popping into the cubicle with more work, a meeting that just so happens to be scheduled at that time… OR A CAT RUNNING LOOSE IN THE OFFICE AND NOW SCARAMOUCHE HAS TO TAKE AN AUTHOR NAMED VENTI TO THE HOSPITAL BECAUSE HE'S DEATHLY ALLERGIC TO CATS!!!!

Clearly the Gods of this world hate me. Scaramouche pouts as he stands up from his desk, looking over his shoulder at you. You are diligently looking at a cover sketch that came in for a new comic series. Making sure that the cover represented the series perfectly. Scaramouche knows that if he says anything, it would break your concentration. So, he doesn’t say anything and walks out for lunch.

Scaramouche watches the slow glow of the elevator lights that indicated the level that lift was on. Note, slowly.

The timing did lag a little, at least, that's what he’s been told, but he sure as hell hopes that it's lagging significantly because by the Gods it should not take this long to get from floor 2 to 5. He grumbles under his breath, some obscurities about the elevator, the person that had constructed it and this god forsaken company that has yet to acknowledge these minor troubles. Albeit, not much he could do besides wait, Scaramouche would rather jump out the window and hope he could suddenly fly than to walk himself down that shady stairwell that was most definitely beneath him.

As he waited, lightly tapping his feet to the seconds slipping by, his mind drifted. Wandering far, far away, all the way, to you.

Even though some time has passed, and sadly he never truly got to meet you, he was glad that you are still the same old forgetful, but also hard working person you were before. If it weren’t for you, maybe he would have never thought about taking chances that might have not been in his reach. Your soft skin that slumped over his shoulder, the hair that corressed his cheeks. All of these things still linger with him, taunting him everytime he sees you.

“Scaramouche.” a smooth, quiet but clear voice snaps him back to reality. He turns quickly, just the slightest bit stumbles backwards to create some distance. A pair of sharp citrine eyes meet his, a cat like diamond in its honey-like center. Xiao.

“Holy— Why don’t you make sound?” He hisses, trying to cover his surprise (and the embarrassing fact he was caught off guard because of something that matched a teenage boy’s fantasies) with annoyance. Which is still very real.

Xiao blinks at him, “I…I don't?”

“Nevermind,” Scaramouche waves his hand, as if to physically dismiss the sentence seeing as the man failed to pick up on the sarcastic undertone, “Did you need something?”

“I was just heading out as well,” Xiao says simply, “But I did want to talk about the editorial you were supposed to send me?” Shit.

By the gods please tell him that he didn’t forget an assignment because he was drooling over his cute co-worker. But even if it was true, Scaramouche wasn’t about to let Xiao of all people know that.

“I was going to email the file to you. But I got hungry… so I’m going to do it later.”

“I see.” Xiao nods, seemingly in understanding. Scaramouche can never tell what this man is thinking, this man had an eternally neutral expression whose greatest range of emotions he’s ever seen was a furrowed brow of annoyance from time to time. He sighs internally, believing that Xiao had let the incident go.

“Would you mind if I join you then? I wanted to discuss your last paper as well.” oh for the love of— Scaramouches face scrunches up, causing an almost immediate reaction from Xiao. “What? Are the adjustments I made not to your taste?”

“Yes.” Scaramouche extorts, interlocking his arms. My god does this man not have a filter.

Unmoving Xiao looks to the elevator that is almost at the floor. It seems that Xiao wasn’t going to accept a denied request. Actually, maybe he would, he doesn’t seem like he has too much interest in other people's business. But maybe having someone there would stop the hoard of eyes staring at him while he eats. And Scaramouche would rather listen to him slander his linguistic choices while he has the sanity of food than overtime on his fifteenth cup of caffeine.

“Sure,” Scaramouche waves his hand absentmindedly in the air, and before Xiao could say another word, he turns towards him, his indigo eyes ringed with curls of lightning piercing with brief authority (whatever authority he could muster at least), “But you’re paying.”

“If you insist.”

#wanderer x y/n #genshin wanderer #wanderer #wanderer x reader #wanderer x you #genshin men #genshin x reader #kuni x reader #kunikuzushi #genshin fanfic #scara x reader #scaramouche x reader #scaramouche #xiao #xiao genshin impact #xiao headcanons

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jesseuno · 1 year

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I went to a DDR Tournament (aka: Post-MOTL4 Thoughts)

As the title suggests, I went to a DDR Tournament in Mentor, Ohio this past weekend called Mistake on the Lake 4. Below are my thoughts on the event, focused primarily on my performance at said event:

First off, the reason I’m posting it here instead of something such as twitter, or facebook, or discord or something is because I feel like I can be honest with myself about how I played without feeling a sense of being around (for lack of better term) toxic positivity. It’s not that I don’t think the community means well, and there is a very reasonable chance that I’m putting too much pressure on myself even now, but the last thing I want to hear right now is “you have one leg, it’s okay” or “you weren’t feeling well” or “it’s been a long time” or any kind of justification like that. Those are valid reasons to not play well, but I feel like it takes a lot of the responsibility off of me. The fact is this: I sucked. I performed worse at that tournament than I ever have at any other tournament in my time playing competitively (2004 - 2010, 2018 - 2020.) and there’s some very legitimate reasons why that are just entirely on me. 1. Since the COVID mandates have been relaxed (if not lifted entirely), I haven’t played all that much. I have not put in the time that I should have. I didn’t give the tournament and the competition the respect that it deserved. I even had the audacity to honestly think that I should have been rated higher than I was, and the way I played showed that I belonged exactly in the pool I was in, and probably lower if such a pool existed. I was out-worked, straight up. 2. During the course of COVID, I let myself get significantly out of shape. Despite having options around me to stay active, I chose to ignore them. To stay sane, I probably drank my own actual weight in bourbon and other alcohol to cope with the stress of the situation. That would have been fine (or at least understood) DURING COVID, but when I got vaccinated and things relaxed down, I didn’t change those habits. I didn’t start trying to be more active again and I didn’t do anything to change the negative habits that developed during COVID. I basically let myself blimp up even further and become even more lethargic and lazy. I went from about 170 lbs. before COVID, to 187 lbs. during it, to as of right now, 216.1 lbs. AFTER. Carrying an extra 45 lbs. everywhere you go takes its toll physically. I just can’t do as much or go as hard as I used to be able to.

3. To piggyback off of the last reason, I drank entirely too much leading into the tournament. Literally, the night before, I polished off a bottle of coconut rum with two other people. The night prior to that, beer and bourbon and cokes. The night before? Shots of rum while I was packing. I was basically an internalized microbrewery who was bloated and awful, and had no energy to play when it finally came time to do so. I even felt sick and anxious as I played, and proceeded to vomit my guts out after I finished. It was only after that, well after I was eliminated, that I finally felt good and loose. All of this is to say that I didn’t give this tournament, the competitors in my pool, and for that matter, myself, the respect it, they, and I deserved, and it showed, and I embarrassed myself on stream. I don’t even want to watch the VODs or recorded footage of the matches because I’m so ashamed of myself up there. It fucking sucks. In essence, TL;DR: I let myself down because I let myself get fat, out of shape, unmotivated, and drunk, and I played like shit for it. I’m writing this because at the end of it all, I want to take accountability for that and I never want to feel that embarrassed again. I never want to play that badly again. I never want to be that ill-prepared ever again. And if I have my way, I’m not going to. Consider this my accountability plan. 1. With the USL Soccer Season officially over, I have my Saturdays to myself again. If I have any say in the matter, on top of Tuesdays and Sundays, I am going to spend my Saturdays in the arcade playing and getting back into playing shape. Additionally, I’m going to start going back to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu class on my Wednesdays to try and get myself back into decent physical shape. At the minimum, if I can get back down to under 200 lbs., that would be a good starting point. 2. It’s obvious that I have some bad habits that I need to work through. I need to eat better, I need to exercise more, I need to develop healthier mindsets for dealing with negative situations around me. This even includes dealing with playing badly. It’s okay not to be the player that I used to be. I’m not that person right now. Hell, I’m not the person I was two or three years ago, period. Looking back in the past is not going to do me any good. I need to work with who I am now and build from that. 3. This is the hard one to come to grips with, and I hate that I’m writing it. I’m actually kind of scared to even put it in writing, but I don’t think I have much choice anymore. Right now, I have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. I have for a long time now. And while I should thank my lucky stars that I haven’t said or done something egregiously stupid yet, I’m afraid that I’m probably teetering that razor’s edge. Even now, I constantly have an anxious feeling in my chest that I’ve said or done something wrong, or inadvertently hurt someone, and I’m going to get myself thrown out of a community that I love, and this was even after asking a friend of mine to effectively be my shadow at said event to make sure something like that explicitly DIDN’T happen. I can’t live like this and something has to change. Another friend of mine has challenged me to go till my birthday weekend (Dec. 9-11) without alcohol. I think that’s a good idea. If nothing else, to reset my body and mind. This part won’t be easy and I’m actually kind of afraid. I hope I don’t fail.

To hold myself accountable to this, I’m including two photos of myself currently. Unaltered, untouched, not hat on, etc. It’s me, as I am at 216 lbs., wearing a t-shirt and soccer jersey that is way too tight on me for my size.

Hopefully the next time I post photos of myself, I will look a little thinner, be in better shape, most definitely be under 200 lbs., and also being a little more sober. Ideally also playing DDR infinitely fucking better than I ever did this weekend. I can’t keep living like this. I have to do something about it now. :\ Thanks for reading.

#DDR #dance dance revolution #anxiety #alcoholism #overweight #weight loss #mistake on the lake 4 #motl4 #I feel like a failure right now #but hopefully that can change too

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corruptedsilence · 1 year

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OOC: Since you were talking about Des, I've actually been wondering what (if anything) could be done for him and the other Artifacts.

Letting the angry little shit free is a BIG no-no, but keeping him inside something that can be stolen and change hands isn't good either. Locking him up in an actual prison would just make him hate people more and there's still the chance someone could find him.

For better or worse, he's part of this world @seraphvie

That’s actually a really good question and honestly? I think it has to boil down to a few things that are, in my opinion, seemingly impossible to do:

1. Humanity and life itself has to get a better hold on their emotions. In my view the artifacts feed and live solely because people experience and feel the emotion that they have, as such their power and influence grows the more of the emotion they are associated is around/out of control. ie: For Des, the angrier people are, the more enraged and hatred they feel the stronger he gets in turn. It doesn’t help he to my canon has a natural aura that mortal beings+souls are effected by that make them feel an inclination to be more angry such as all wielders of the cane have. (As for soulless beings I don’t think his aura effects them)

Humans, animals, any living thing that can experience anger would need to get a better hold on regulating their emotions and not getting out of hand. This would significantly drain his ability and in turn the aura he can spread. But sadly this wouldn’t happen because you can’t expect all of life itself to be able to have a healthy relationship with their emotions since it’d only take 1 soul to ruin it for everyone.

Just as with every emotion you need regulation and healthy ways of experiencing the emotion and working through it. it’d be the same with Des and all the other artifacts. People need to get a better hold on their grief but like I said it isn’t feasably possible. Bottling them up into physical items, literally bottling up the universe’s grief in ticking time bombs would only cause more grief on an unimaginable scale once it’s let out.

2. Limited Freedom. @sweetestthrenody and I, my beautiful gf u///u, have thought of an idea of Nim and Eton that Nim basically helps invent a spell for Eton to be given *limited* freedom to interact with the real world but keeps his main core power within the shoes. This allows him the safety of any of the Empress’s soldiers that are still alive while still allowing him some kind of “freedom”. He can still do small things ofc on his own but he can’t cause catastrophic destruction with how power. It’s still mainly contained within the shoes but he has a more physical body that he is free to be more of himself in.

Of course another restriction is he can’t be too far away from the shoes/artifact still which is a downside but he isn’t 100% limited as he is being stuck inside it completely. I feel this could be the best way to more or less “rehabilitate” the artifacts into life by giving them limited freedoms via spells using their own magic in a way the artifacts themselves can’t use while trapped.

Kind of like how medications and things help limit your interaction with certain emotions but in the end you should still deal with those core emotions. Medications, depending on what it’s for of course, shouldn’t completely numb you or else it’s just another form of bottling your emotions. When it comes to more mood-regulating ones ofc. Only when you learn better coping mechanisms that you’re able to slowly get off of it if that’s possible for some (but i dont think the planet could handle any being fully freed. Earth got lucky with Brier since she didn’t want ot destroy the world but be accepted by it but even then she still fucked up the entirety of vampire kind). Even then I don’t think the artifacts could ever feasibly live their lives like they once had because the world can’t handle that much emotion especially having been stored in these artifacst for countless centuries and millenia even. If you think bottling up a decade or more of grief in you, think about that times as many people on the planet, over the span of hundreds of years. That’s what the artifacts have had to deal with fhewjkk

Both of these things together would allow Des, and the other artifacts, the ability to interact and gain freedom over time but for Des I don’t think he’ll ever be happy with it. This might work for Eton who is more of an inclination to bargaining the best situation he can get in my view, but Des and his delusional views of the world and himself as a god among mortals wouldn’t accept either of these terms and would constantly cause more issues. Sure, he might be with Eton in his limited freedom but he would always resent and be angered by not having complete freedom which he believes he deserves because the empress and life created him, so it’s not fair to bottle him up as if they aren’t responsible for what they created.

#Seraphvie #Out for a Bite // OOC #Screams from the Abyss // MT

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slasherhaven · 3 years

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hi!!

can I request hcs about a reader who is on a trip with her s/o and her best friend, and ends up defending Thomas from a group of other travelers, and ends up probably getting like punched in the face for him.

they have car trouble, and are allowed to stay at the Hewitt household for the night, (solely because reader took a punch head on, and still continued to defend Thomas) only for reader to discover that her s/o is railing her best friend, and u know that that means— death for them, and now Thomas gets to keep reader.

Thomas Hewitt X Reader

Warnings: cheating, mentions of blood

Disruptive:

This road trip had been being planned for the last couple of months, the three of you planning on travelling the states, hitting the more rural areas and not just the main tourist destinations. It was supposed to be a an opportunity to get away from everything just for a while.

The plan was in the works for a couple of months, so how hadn't any of you thought to plan ahead if the car broke down?

Ian, your boyfriend, had his head under the hood of the car while you and Cecilia, your best friend since childhood, stood by the edge of the road. Ready to wave down a car if one drove by, but none came. You hadn't seen another car for at least two hours now. You must have hit a very isolated part of Texas.

"Well, I think a professional need to take a look at this" Ian sighed as he closed the hood. "I think there's a gas station a little further down the road, maybe they know somebody who could help" he informed you.

Not wanting to leave your car full of your belongings on the side of the road, you all grabbed your own bag and locked up the car before beginning the walk.

It wasn't a long walk, but the heat made it feel much longer, before you arrived at the gas station. It almost seemed abandoned, looking pretty run down, but their was a truck parked outside by one of the gas pumps.

You walked behind your two friends as you approached the front door, pausing when you heard somebody shouting. With a frown, you stepped back as Ian and Cecelia stepped inside the station. Neither of them noticing that you were no longer following behind.

You considered ignoring the shouting but just couldn't, glancing back at the front door before walking around the gas station. As you walked around to the back of the small building, you saw three men.

One was significantly taller and broader than the other two. It looked like he was just trying to work, hoisting up a crate with an impressive amount of ease, while the two men just berated him.

The larger man just continued to ignore them. You wondered why he didn't respond, surely he could scare them off pretty easy. Maybe he was just trying not to cause any trouble while he worked?

"Hey" you finally spoke up, making the two men look at you. The larger man glanced at you, and that was when you noticed the leather mask. It was curious but you tried not to stare. "Is there a problem?" you asked.

"No problem. Just came for gas, didn't think we'd be treated to a free freak show as well" one of the shorter men jeered.

"Sounds like he's just trying to work and you're just being jerks" you folded your arms over your chest. The larger actually seemed to be reacting to the conversation now, placing the crate down and looking over at you. "Looks like you're just bothering him" you added.

"Just get outta here, we're only messing around" one of the men rolled his eyes.

"Dumb bastard probably doesn't even understand" the other man scoffed.

"He's the dumb one? You're the ones picking on some stranger to make yourselves feel better" you huffed, walking further towards the three men before smirking slightly.

"You know, from my experience if men feel the need constantly put others down and act like the 'alpha', they're usually overcompensating for something" you knew men like this and you knew the best way to get to them was to bruise their ego.

One of the men glared at you, stepping closer, trying to intimidate you. You glanced down at his crotch with a look of disappointment and disapproval. "Looks like the math checks out" you smirked as you met his gaze again, not backing down.

"You little bitch" he growled.

Maybe you had underestimated him...you had thought they were just a couple of jerks, finding some fun in pushing a stranger around, but you had underestimated them. You never even saw it coming but the bastard had punched you. You hadn't expected him to actually violently act out like that. You thought you would bother them enough for them to just storm off, you had been very wrong.

The shout that left you was out of your control, hands coming up to clutch your face after the impact.

You stumbled backwards, knowing you had to get away from these men, but there was suddenly something in front of you. The large man with the mask had moved between you and the two men as soon as they lashed out, squaring his stance and glaring them down, fists clenching at his sides.

Thankfully, the two men came to their senses and realised that they couldn't take the larger man even if there was two of them. They tried not to show fear on their faces but failed as they muttered to themselves, hurrying back round to the front of the gas station.

"Ah shit" you cursed, clutching your bleeding nose.

The large man turned to you with wide eyes. What was he meant to do?

You pinched the soft part of your nose and tilted your head back like you heard you were supposed to do. The man quickly shook his head, stepping closer and cautiously touching your head, making you look down instead.

"Thank you" you thanked him for correcting you. "I've never been punched before" you confessed with a slightly bitter laugh. He didn't know what to do, so he just stood there, his feet shifting slightly in the dirt.

Once you had managed to dry your eyes that had started to water, you lifted your head slightly too look at the man. "Are you alright?" you asked, glancing down at your bloody hands once you stopped holding your nose.

The man just nodded, digging around in his pocket before pulling out some clean cloth, holding it out you.

You thanked him again as you accepted it, brining it up to your nose to soak up the blood.

"Is it broken?" you asked. Surely, you would know if it was broken? But he seemed more knowledgeable about this sort of thing that you were, you didn't even know that you shouldn't tilt your head back when your nose was bleeding.

The man hesitated before carefully lowering your hand, letting him examine your nose. Thankfully, he shook his head and you let out a sigh of relief.

You were about to ask his name but got interrupted by a call of your name. You recognised the voice, it was Ian.

"Back here!" you called back to them.

Ian and Cecilia came running around the corner, looking between you and the masked man, their eyes widening them they noticed the blood on your face and the cloth.

"What the hell did you do?" Cecilia snapped at the large man standing beside you, looking like she was ready to set Ian on him, not like he stood a chance if she did.

"Hey, leave him alone, he didn't do anything" you were quick to defend the man again. "Just some assholes" you told them.

"Christ, why are you always doing this sort of shit?" Ian rolled his eyes, seeming more irritated than concerned.

"I didn't know he was going to punch me. I was just trying to help" you muttered, feeling like you were being told off for doing something wrong when you just wanted to help.

"Well, the car is pretty much fucked and-" Ian began to change the subject, giving you an update on the car but he was interrupted by the back door of the gas station swinging open.

"Thomas, what is all this noise?" a older woman asked as she stepped outside. "What happened?" she asked, looking between the two of you, glancing over at your friends.

The man, Thomas as she called him, didn't answer, so you spoke up. "I'm really sorry, ma'am. There were some men causing trouble, I was trying to help but...guess I made things worse" you explained, pulling the cloth away from your nose, noting that the bleeding had slowed.

The woman looked between you and Thomas again, seeming to add things up in her mind. "You took a punch for my boy?" she asked, her expression softening slightly.

"Uh...I guess, just asked them to leave him alone. Guess I pushed it too far" you nodded.

"You with those two?" she asked, gesturing towards your friends, "with the busted car?"

You just nodded and she hummed to herself. Feeling a little uncomfortable, Ian and Cecilia moved closer, coming to stand just behind you.

"Alright well...for your trouble, how about you come stay at the house for the night, we can get someone to look at your car tomorrow morning" the woman offered, surprising you.

"Oh we couldn't intrude" you shook your head, hating to be a burden.

"I insist. It's the least we can do" she didn't look like she would take no for an answer.

"Only if you're certain" you looked back at your friends, who just shrugged, alright with the arrangement. "Thank you, this is very kind" you look back at her with a smile.

"I'm Luda May, this is my son Tommy" she introduced herself and the man that was awkwardly standing to the side now.

"I'm Y/n. This is my boyfriend, Ian, and my friend, Cecilia" you introduced your small group.

Tommy frowned under his mask. Boyfriend. Of course. It's not like he even dreamed of getting his hopes up, thinking your kindness was anything more than pity. Still, for some reason, it stung a little. He just couldn't explain why.

"Come on, dear, let me lock up and get you back to the house, get you cleaned up" Luda May offered, placing a hand on your arm comfortingly.

After Luda May locked up the gas station, you all walked back to their home. It was a large but somewhat run down house. Luda May guided you all inside and introduced you to Hoyt and Monty, two rather rude older men, but she had told you not to pay them any mind.

"Thomas, will you help Y/n clean up while I show them to their room?" Luda May asked as you all stepped out of the living room, leaving the two older men behind. Thomas seemed surprised by her request but nodded.

Ian and Cecilia were ushered up the stairs, taking your bag with them as well as their own, while you followed Thomas into the kitchen.

Thomas gestured for you to sit down on a chair and you did, while he grabbed a bowl of water and a clean cloth. He seemed nervous but determined to help, cautiously taking your hands in his to clean them.

You watched your hands, almost in amazement. They looked so small in his hands, he must have been able to break your arm just by holding on too hard.

"Can I call you Tommy?" you asked, breaking the silence. He paused for a moment, looking up from your hands to meet your gaze. He had nice eyes. He nodded. "Well, thank you, Tommy. I'm sorry about those men, I hate people like that. You'd think they'd grow out of it when they left school, but they don't" you sighed.

Thomas only nodded again, obviously not a talker but you didn't mind. He still seemed nice enough.

Once your hands were clean, Thomas moved to clean the blood from your face but you noticed how he paused, seeming nervous again. He didn't want to make you uncomfortable and you thought that was sweet. "It's alright" you assured him.

Gently placing his hand under your chin, Thomas angled your head up slightly, holding it in place as he wiped away the drying blood from your face. Making sure to be extra careful around your nose.

You stayed still, letting him work. He was a large man with strong arms and large hands, and yet he was being so gentle. Like he was afraid of hurting you. It made you smile a little.

Just as he finished cleaning you up, pulling his hands away from your face, Ian walked into the kitchen. "How's your nose?" he asked, walking over to you, glancing at Thomas suspiciously.

"Good, it's stopped bleeding" you told him with a smile. "Thomas said it's not broken, but it still hurts" you chuckled. It was sore but there was no real harm done.

"Just don't get what you were thinking" Ian huffed, shaking his head.

"Was just trying to help" you rolled your eyes, not in the mood for an argument.

"C'mon, he's like twice my size, I don't think he needs you defending him. I'm sure he could've took a couple of men" Ian scoffed, making Thomas tense again. He had been so relaxed around you, now he wanted to leave the room, feeling like he had done something wrong.

"Ian, stop being rude, you're being an ass" you told him, sounding tired.

"Fucking freak" he muttered under his breath, glancing at Thomas.

"Ian!" you snapped, eyes wide in shock and disgust. "What is wrong with you? Just get outta here" you stood, pointing towards the door. You didn't even want to look at him right now.

Ian just rolled his eyes before leaving the room, not seemed to care about your anger towards him.

"God, Thomas, I'm so sorry" you turned towards the masked man, looking genuinely apologetic and horrified by your boyfriend's behaviour. "I don't know what's been wrong with him lately...never used to be like this" you made a weak attempt at an explanation, sighing as you returned to your seat.

Thomas just shook his head, telling you not to worry about it, but you knew it had bothered him.

"Hey, I'll kick his ass for you as well, if you want" you offered with a playful smile, hoping to lighten the mood a little.

It worked, at least a little. Thomas smiled a little under his mask, you were cute and kind. He liked you and, if he didn't know any better, he would think that you liked him.

Luda May had provided the three of you with one room, the only spare room they had, but that was kind enough in your eyes. She had even invited you for supper with the family. All of you sitting around the table, you sitting between Thomas and Ian, as Luda May dished out the food.

It was a little awkward, eating with complete strangers, so you all mostly ate in silence. "So, where are you lot heading?" Luda May finally asked, breaking the silence and trying to start a pleasant conversation.

"Nowhere in particular" Cecilia shrugged, still being polite.

"Just taking a little road trip. Get away from things for a while, you know?" you added.

Ian and Cecilia had been glancing at Thomas whenever they were in the same room. From behind the gas station to right now at the dining table. You thought it was rude but as long as they didn't say anything stupid, you wouldn't comment on it.

Unfortunately, there was a lull in conversation and Ian thought he would speak up. "Alright. What's with the mask, anyway?" he asked, looking past you to Thomas.

"Ian" you warned through gritted teeth, in complete disbelief with him and frowning at Cecilia when she giggled to herself.

The Hewitt family was looking at Ian, glaring. Thomas had tensed beside you. Shit, how do you save this one?

"Did you make it yourself?" you asked, turning your full attention to Thomas. He just nodded, staring down at his plate, assuming you were going to beginning mocking him. "That's pretty impressive, it looks good. You must be pretty handy" you complimented with a smile. Thomas looked at you with surprise in his eyes but smiled, as did Luda May.

Ian muttered something under his breath that you couldn't understand. You just ignored him, not wanting to risk him causing more trouble.

The rest of the supper was uneventful and you had thanked the family once again before everyone started to turn in for the night.

You had taken a shower before bed. When you returned to the bedroom, you frowned when you saw that both Ian and Cecilia were gone. With a sigh, you left the room and began to search for them.

You couldn't find them anywhere in the house so you stepped outside, onto the front porch. Once you were outside, you heard movement and followed it. Hopping down the steps of the porch and wandering around the side of the house. Maybe they had stepped out for a smoke? You thought Ian had quit, maybe he hadn't...

You followed noise until you heard what sounded like a moan. You frowned and turned the corner, freezing at the sight that greeted you.

Ian was pinning Cecilia up against the side of the house, her bare leg hooked over his hip, his pants bunched down under his ass. They clearly hadn't noticed you.

"What the hell!" you shouted, getting their attention.

They both jumped apart, Ian pulling up his pants and Cecilia fixing her skirt, looking horrified. "Shit" Ian cursed.

"Yeah. Shit" you scoffed. "Are you seriously fucking my best friend?" you asked rhetorically, wondering how he was going to try to talk his way out of this one. He didn't speak. "And you're fucking my boyfriend?" you looked to Cecilia, who looked down at her feet. "Will somebody answer me!" you were tired of being ignored.

"Yes!" Ian snapped, making you flinch. "Obviously that's what we were doing" he rolled his eyes, knowing he couldn't lie his way out of this one.

"...how long as this been going on?" you asked.

"About a month" Ian shrugged.

"I can't believe you!" you shouted at him, tears stinging your eyes. You were furious, more from the betrayal than anything. Ian had become a jerk over the last few months but now you were losing your boyfriend and your best friend.

"Look, we can talk this out, alright?" Ian approached you, going to place his hand on your shoulder.

"Don't touch me" you snarled, stepping back. How could he even think that you would be willing to 'talk this out'.

"What the fuck is all the shouting?" Hoyt's angry voice boomed as he rounded the corner.

"God, you are a fucking asshole" you ignored Hoyt, glaring at Ian. "I hope you're real happy together, you deserve each other" you spat before turning around, walking past Hoyt, who watched you leave with an irritated expression.

By the time you had made it back inside the house, tears were rolling down your cheeks. Thomas had been coming to find the cause of all the shouting, nearly running straight into you.

"Oh, uh, sorry Thomas" you apologised as you nearly collided with his chest. You kept your head down, hoping he hadn't seen the tears. But he did, and he worried that you had been hurt, had Hoyt hurt you? He swore he heard Hoyt shouting.

Without thinking, Thomas gently took hold of your shoulders and examined you. You were confused by his actions at first but when you realised what he was doing, you smiled a little.

"I'm not hurt, Tommy" you chuckled, sniffing slightly. He looked so concerned for you, it was sweet. You couldn't remember the last time Ian had looked at you like that when you cried. "So, uh...Ian really is an ass" you laughed bitterly, wiping away some tears. "...he's been cheating on me with Cecilia" you told him, explaining the cause of your tears.

Thomas could kill him. You were so kind and sweet, putting yourself in harms way for a complete stranger. How could he do something like this to you? How could he or your friend betray you like that.

Both of you could hear shouting coming from outside again, it sounded like Hoyt and Ian were arguing.

"Oh god" you groaned, embarrassed by everything that had happened. "I'm so sorry, we shouldn't be bothering you all with this" you were crying again, and getting frustrated with yourself.

Thomas wasn't sure what to do, people didn't normally like being around him but you didn't seem to mind, so maybe you wouldn't mind him comforting you as well. His movements were slow and careful, guiding you closer to him and wrapping his arms around you.

As soon as you realised he was offering you a comforting hug, you accepted it. You wrapped your arms around his waist, just needing somebody to hold you, as you cried into his chest. Feeling more confident, Thomas wrapped his arms around you more securely. His arms were large and strong, making you feel safe. His body practically engulfed yours, making you fell like the world couldn't touch you. It was a nice feeling.

"Thomas?" Luda May asked, also coming to investigate the commotion. "What is all that shouting about...are you alright, dear?" her attention turned to you when she saw that you were crying.

"I, uh..." you sniffled as you pulled away from Thomas, wiping your wet cheeks. You looked up at him and he nodded, reassuring you that you weren't being a burden. "I think Hoyt and Ian are arguing about something outside" you told her.

"Is that why you're crying?" she frowned. Has Hoyt decided to pick a fight even when she had warned him not too?

You shook your head. "...I caught Ian cheating on me with Cecilia" you sniffled again.

"Oh...I'm so sorry" Luda May's expression softened once again. Something flashed behind her yes but it was too quick to name.

"Thomas, will you go and help Hoyt?" Luda May asked calmly, looking up at her son. Thomas squinted at her and she nodded.

Thomas gave you a soft look before leaving through the front door. You didn't like the idea of other people dealing with your problems, but you couldn't argue because Luda May already had your attention again.

"Come on, dear" she took your hand, leading you to the living room and sitting down with you on the couch.

"I'm so, so sorry. You've all been so generous and my friends have been rude and now we're being so disruptive. I'm so sorry" you apologised. This family had tried to be so kind to you all and now you were being completely disrespectful.

"Hush now, it's not your fault" Luda May cooed, gently guiding your head to lay against her shoulder, beginning to stroke your hair. "Tommy and Hoyt will take care of them" she promised.

You just nodded, trying to stop the tears. You were too worked up to dwell on what Luda May meant exactly, just letting her hum and soothe you.

Luda May smiled as she stroked your hair, humming the same tune she would hum to shush Thomas when he was a child. You seemed pleasant, polite and kind. You would make a good addition to the family and you were so good to Tommy. Of course, she had seen how her son looked at you, amazed by your sincere kindness, already falling for you, the poor boy. Your so called friends did not deserve any kindness, but you deserved mercy.

Oh, she hoped you could forgive Tommy, she hoped you would continue to see him as the sweet boy he is.

#thomas hewitt x reader #slashers x reader #slasher x reader #slasher #slashers #my writing

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

Text

Uncle Ben and Little Luke

AKA we combine several types of time travel for maximum Soft Chaos, let’s go

EDIT NOW THAT I’VE WRITTEN THIS UP: jfc this ended up much angstier than initially intended uhhhhhhhhhh sorry

So a common enough thing I’ve seen in time travel fics is characters getting de-aged when tossed back physically, to neither the age they should be in that time, nor the age they were from the time they left, but whatever is most convenient. This is usually de-aging OT Obi-Wan into his TCW self, for reasons relating to, chiefly, removing the damage of Tatooine absolutely destroying his body alongside PTSD-driven alcoholism, but also because fic writers are horny, and Ewan McGregor playing a late-thirties negotiator is on average more appealing to people than Alec Guinness playing a vaguely feral desert hermit.

So, here’s how it plays out:

We take Luke and Ben from some point in the OT. There are a variety of options depending on how angsty we want it to be. My first instinct is ‘right after Owen and Beru die’ but I want to have that sweet angst where Luke knows that his dad is Vader and that Obi-Wan was trying to convince him to kill his own father without telling him that.

We’ll go with shortly after Bespin, and then they end up significantly before TPM. The Obi-Wan of the timeline proper is, eh, let’s say eighteen. Not really ready to be a knight, but old enough that we don’t have to worry about “if we go save Shmi, do we somehow wipe out Anakin?” which is absolutely a worry. Anakin is a toddler, and is in no place to be evil, on account of being literally two years old. He can’t even explode people with his brain yet.

Now, Ben finds himself mid-thirties, as is traditional. He’s not upset at this, because his joints hurt so much less than they used to! His knees aren’t exactly teenage-perfect, but by the Force are they better than they were in the years before he died! His hair has color! He doesn’t have arthritis! And, goodness, no physical withdrawal symptoms! The psychological aspect is still there, but nonetheless, he’s in much better shape than he last remembers being.

Luke looks like he’s about six. He was recently twenty-two. This is not an upgrade. Ben keeps having to carry him. He can’t see over the counter when they enter a bar for information. He can’t enter the bar in the first place. He’s very annoyed by all of this.

Ben is not annoyed. Ben is having a lot of emotions, actually, but annoyance isn’t one of them. He didn’t get to help raise Luke the way he might have if Anakin hadn’t lost his shit, okay, he sees a small Luke and he wants to hug him and cry.

Luke would like to be able to purchase a speeder part without the lady at the stall asking him if he needs his “dad’s” permission.

Once they figure out when and where they are, they need to decide where and how to leave. There are general shenanigans to gamble their way into enough money to hire a ship. They are in the ass end of nowhere, but definitely not Tatooine. There appears to be a jungle. There appears to be a significant variety of man-eating creatures. There appears to be a temple to the Force of questionable origin. None of this is actually helpful, except for the moment they find a “baby’s first lightsaber” in the temple.

Luke only has one hand and, being a six-year-old, his body is growing too fast for him to bother with getting a wired-in prosthesis the way he could as an adult. He can get a more basic prosthesis, but nothing that attaches to the neurons. He’ll outgrow it too fast.

He’s tiny and he’s not used to doing things with just one hand. He uses the Force to do what one hand can't, and every time someone tries to tell him he's misusing the Force he whaps them with the empty sleeve.

So, you know, they find out what year it is. Ben has a breakdown. Luke is upset that he left behind his friends. Ben admits to him that Leia was his twin. Luke stares in horror because dude, she kissed him, you couldn’t have mentioned this earlier???

Ben points out that Beru and Owen were keeping Luke away from him for nineteen years, and then they had about three days of awkward travel to find Leia in the first place, and then Ben died. He didn’t have a whole lot of time to figure out how to tell him.

(This sparks an argument that lasts several days. All onlookers assume that Ben’s son is throwing a tantrum. He doesn’t correct them, even though this is a very valid reason to be upset, because the truth is much harder to explain.)

Sooooo they travel. Mostly, Ben plays Sabacc, cleans house, and pays their way towards Coruscant. Luke still really wants to learn to be a Proper Jedi, even though Ben is pretty sure that Luke would have... a lot of difference of opinion with the Temple, but sure. Coruscant. They can at least stop by, and see Qui-Gon, and Mace, and Quinlan, and Bant, and everyone else that’s still alive and not tragically deceased in the horror following the start of the Clone Wars and then the birth of the Empire, and Ben can have a nice sob over all his dead friends being alive again.

Ben is only barely holding it together while Luke is in the room with him at any given point. But it’s fine! It’s fine. He’s fine. All of his loved ones have come back to life! It’s great! HE’S FINE.

He is not fine.

Luke is also grieving all the people who haven’t been born yet, but he’s... significantly more okay than Ben is.

The closer they get to the Core, the more often people just assume Ben is Luke’s father, and then look shocked and uncomfortable when Luke flatly calls him by his name, and they just... compromise. This is the point at which Luke starts calling him “Uncle Ben.”

Ben cries in his bunk later that night. Luke overhears it and wonders how the HELL Ben is more unstable now, when there’s a chance to fix things and no Vader or Empire trying to kill or capture both of them, and all his friends are alive.

(Luke will later learn a lot about PTSD and realize this is actually a fairly normal situation, to process significant events and emotions only after gaining safety or catharsis.)

(Twenty years on a ball of sand with an alcohol addiction and debilitating fear of the man you raised as your own brother is not, in fact, safe or cathartic.)

At any rate, they’ve settled into that pattern by the time they reach the Inner Rim. The Inner Rim is the part of the galaxy at which they’ve collected enough money (and mental stability) to travel a little better, and to take a few more risks.

Risks like “manipulate people with those baby blues.”

Ben tells Luke that he’s a menace, after he pouts so cutely that he gets a free scarf added on to a purchase that Ben makes. Luke responds that Ben has no room to talk, since he flirted a free breakfast out of that one inn owner.

Also, Luke is currently physically six. That is objectively a situation that sucks. He deserves to use it for all it’s worth if he’s stuck like this.

“You know, if you keep wearing all-black and looking longingly at the velvet cape and Space Chanel boots, the temple is going to worry that you’re a darksider.”

“Uncle Ben... you told me, yesterday, that I sparkle so brightly in the Force that it’s almost blinding.”

“Yes, but the gloves--”

They don’t agree on this, but Ben relents. He does actually understand good fashion, unfortunately, and he’s not unaware of how much Leia taught Luke about such things.

Luke’s about forty years ahead of the curve, of course, but Skywalkers are prone to such things. It’s usually in regards to technology, granted, but...

They get to Coruscant. Ben is very obviously a Jedi. He knows all the right words and walks like a Soresu master and feels warm and comforting in the Force. They let him in with minimal questions. They note down “my first padawan left the order to have a child, but died shortly after; I consider Luke here to be my nephew, and have raised him as such,” and move on.

Luke is vaguely annoyed because he already had an uncle (and aunt) that raised him, but he admits that a person can have more than one uncle. He can live with this. Ben was more family to Anakin than Owen was, in some ways, so it’s kind of true. Luke is even working on feeling more childish affection for Ben instead of the complicated mess of emotions that come from being lied to about some very large and important subjects, and then seeing the person saying those lies have regular emotional breakdowns due to something as small as Luke saying he likes the curve of the hull on that freighter.

(Apparently he sounds just like his father did as a child. This is almost heartwarming.)

The thing is! The thing. The thing is, they almost make it to the Halls of Healing to get looked over for weird viruses, or Outer Rim Parasites, or whatever the hells needs to be happening. They almost make it without Ben having a flashback to dead younglings or brainwashed troopers or the declaration of a Sith Empire. They almost make it without incident.

Then Ben sees Qui-Gon, and freezes, and does not move again.

Luke cannot get him to restart.

People are staring.

They haven’t even made it to Medical, Uncle Ben, come on.

Young, local Obi-Wan comes over and asks if there’s something he can do to help. Or maybe this “Ben” knows Qui-Gon? Master Jinn doesn’t recognize Ben, but maybe Luke knows more?

Luke does know more, but what Luke actually says is “he probably needs a mind healer.”

(Ben will not appreciate this.)

(Ben is unfortunately standing in the middle of the hallway and completely unresponsive, and is unable to argue with this assertion.)

(Ben is pretty much proving this assertion entirely correct, actually.)

Obi-Wan is helpful, if a little bitchy in the manner of most late-teens individuals, and offers to help get Uncle Ben down to the Halls of Healing. It involves Obi-Wan gently pushing on Ben’s shoulders, and Qui-Gon offering to carry Luke so he can be in Ben’s sights (because Ben is a Mystery, and Qui-Gon is quite fond of those, so he wants to stay involved). Ben kind of just... shuffles on down.

There are medical tests. They ask about how Luke lost his hand. He refuses to talk about it. They ask how Ben got all his scars. Luke says he doesn’t know. They ask if he knows why Ben looks like he’s been through a war. Luke says it’s because he probably was.

They check for foreign viruses. They find evidence of thus-far-unpatented vaccinations. They ask Luke if he knows what he’s vaccinated for.

“How would I know? I’m six.”

They agree that this is a good excuse.

(It is not. He’s lying. They do not know this.)

They do some more tests. They find a lot of questionable medical bullshit in Ben’s body. Most of this is from the clone wars, but they don’t know this. Someone realizes they haven’t gotten a ping back from the Shadow Network regarding “do we have permission to pull the medical file of a Jedi that isn’t in the normal database? We’re assuming you know who he is, since we don’t.”

The Shadow Network does not know who Ben is.

The healers, of course, go “huh, that’s weird, but maybe the name he gave his nephew was fake. We can’t exactly ask ‘Ben’ for more details right now. We already had to sedate him. Let’s check the DNA!”

The DNA pulls up as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The padawan who brought this guy in two hours ago.

“Huh, that’s weird. Let’s call in Kenobi and ask if he knows what’s going on.”

Obi-Wan absolutely does not know what’s going on.

They ask Luke.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, lying through his teeth and not even pretending otherwise.

“You’re not a very good liar,” teenage Obi-Wan tells him.

“I’m not trying to be,” Luke says. “Can you get Master Yoda? I feel like we’re going to need him.”

They normally wouldn’t get Yoda on the request of a six-year-old, but they also normally don’t have a catatonic thirty-something Jedi who looks like he’s been through a war popping up in the medical database as the pimply teenage padawan that broke his pinky trying to do a Badass Ataru Flip last week.

Or... whatever Luke i... is... oh dear.

“Young one,” Qui-Gon asks, while people whisper-shout behind him, not realizing he’s cutting the Correlian Knot and just asking the kid himself. “Do you know why your midichlorian count is so high? It’s almost unheard of.”

“Uncle Ben said my dad was the Chosen One,” Luke says, because he is capable of being a little shit and is actually really eager to let Ben deal with some of the fallout. He feels for the man, really, but he’s also tired of being the one to field every single question.

Also, the expressions that pass on Qui-Gon’s face are hilarious.

(Luke may or may not be more affected by his six-year-old brain than he would like to admit.)

“Thank you,” Qui-Gon says, sounding more than a little strangled about it.

It takes another three hours for Ben to wake up.

He listens to the questions. He hears what they say his ‘nephew’ said. He looks at Luke.

“Is this revenge for not telling you about Leia?”

“It’s not revenge,” Luke does not lie. “I just don’t know how to explain it.”

“It’s pretty easy to explain.”

“It’s not my secret.”

“This is revenge for the Leia thing.”

“No,” Luke says. “Revenge for the Leia thing was when I ate a live frog in front of you.”

This is the point at which someone interrupts and points out that they appear to be stalling.

“Oh, he is,” Luke tells them. He gestures at Ben. “I can’t tell you more, because it’s more his story than mine.”

“I’m afraid, Master, that I am very likely to have an emotional breakdown if I allow myself to consider the reality of this situation for longer than the fraction of a second I already have,” Ben reports, full of false cheer. “Suffice to say, I am far from stable and have only held out this far for Luke’s sake.”

“Can you explain why you have my DNA?” Obi-Wan asks, as the person who’s most concerningly involved in this situation.

“You can,” Ben says, smiling like there is absolutely nothing wrong in the slightest, ever. “I’m you, from the future. I actually died and spent a few years dead before coming back. I’m not sure why I’m younger than I was when I died, but I appreciate being able to put on my shoes without my knees attempting to mutiny.”

“He needs a mind healer,” Luke reiterates, in case the strained grin hasn’t made it clear. “So do I, but not as much.”

“I have felt literally every person in this Temple save for Luke and Yoda die,” Ben reports, looking a shade more manic than a few seconds earlier. “It’s very overwhelming to feel you all being alive again. I may be approaching a mental breakdown, and I’ve been rather strictly advised against using alcohol to treat my traumas again.”

Luke kicks him in the thigh. It’s not a very hard kick, because he is very small, and he does actually like Ben. “I’m not letting you turn into an old drunk again.”

After several seconds of silence, a healer quietly suggests that everyone clear the room, and asks if someone could fetch Master Yoda as the youngling requested.

(THIS IS ALMOST THREE THOUSAND WORDS. I started it less than two hours ago. Why am I like this.)

#Ben Kenobi #Obi Wan Kenobi #Luke Skywalker #Qui Gon Jinn #Time Travel #De Aging #Phoenix Posts #Uncle Ben and Little Luke

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vicious-vixxxen · 3 years

Text

Tenya Iida X Male Reader: 7 Minutes in Heaven

Been working on this for a minute, thought it was about time I showed this boy some love! Hope you guys enjoy :3 ((Totally SFW, but things do get a wee bit steamy. Enjoy ;3))

“Unbelievable! The level of unprofessionalism from class 1A no less! This is a highly inappropriate way to be spending our free time! It should be spent honing our abilities to their greatest potential, and encouraging each other to bl-“ “Iida...Iida please for the love of god /stop/.” Snatching one of the other boys chopping hands by the wrist, your free hand settled on Iida’s chest to pat gently. “For someone who didn’t put up much of a fight getting tossed in here, you sure won’t shut up about it.” You mused, smirk evident in your tone

Despite the closet being too dark to tell; the only light the thin, dim strips around the doorframe- one of which caught the corner of Tenya’s glasses, and reflected back on the boys flushed cheek. Whether they were like that because of the intensity of his ramblings, or the situation at hand, was still yet to be determined. “I beg your pardon?” Iida nearly gasped, and you snorted despite yourself. Keeping your hold on the larger boys wrist firm, even as he tried to continue his chopping motion out of it. “I assumed my protests would be considered before they’d have a chance to get us in here, and despite our combined abilities to escape, the rules of the game are very clear and seeing as how we’re here now I don’t see the point in not participating. As class 1A’s representative it’s imperative I encourage the other students to socialize and become a more cohesive unit. Even if it means doing ridiculous things like this, DESPITE protest.”

You’d almost, /almost/ landed on Kaminari. Who had you hurt in a past life to deserve this?

“So you’re unwilling to participate because you’re too busy scolding the other participants for wanting to participate. In a game in which you deem inappropriate, but will still abide by it’s rules. While the same time doing anything but. Did I get that right?” You asked, even unsure yourself.

“Well, I-“ “Is it cuz I’m a dude?” You asked suddenly, genuinely curious. Tenya balked. “O-of course not!” No further elaboration. You smiled. Now you were getting somewhere.

“Then I believe we have about five more minutes for you to get with the program Iida.” Finally letting his wrist go, you brought your hand down towards your face. Checking the watch you didn’t have intently, hoping he could see, for effect if anything, before bringing your hand down to rest on Iida’s hip gently. Snickering at how stiff his stance was, as he tensed impossibly tighter. “It’s just kissing,” You reminded him quietly, squinting in the dark to catch the blush high on his cheeks deepen. Iida was significantly taller than you, but he was acutely conscious of the fact. Shifting his knees, and hunching over slightly to bring himself in closer. More on reflex than anything. Until now he hadn’t quite realized he was primed for the taking, so to speak, and attempted to shift back, but finding the wall just as unyielding to his back as it had been when you’d entered together. A sweat broke out across his forehead, and Tenya began to take the most soft, shallow breaths of his entire life. “You have kissed someone before...haven’t you Iida?” You asked, usual playfulness gone, as you slowly started to piece together the sudden intensity behind Tenya’s protests of the game from the very beginning. “Kissing...not that it is any of your business, I was under the impression was to be saved for someone you cared a great deal about. Someone special. Not a fellow classmate in a musty closet in our dorms!” Iida hissed, but there was no real heat behind it. Mostly..nerves. “We’re friends, aren’t we?” You asked, curious as to the others mind. Iida may not have cracked your top three since arriving at UA, friend wise, but he was a good guy, with a heart of gold, and a powerful personality. If not always the most easily digested. Point is, he was good. And sweet. And handsome. And you, as were your fellow classmates when the idea of drawing names for 7 minutes in heaven arose, were really in the mood to kiss /someone/. And Tenya made a good partner If he’d just be a little quieter. That’s all. “Well yes, but-“ “And you care about me?” You interrupted, smiling at the grunt of frustration the taller boy let out. A puff of hot breath ghosting across your cheeks from above, sending goosebumps down the back of your neck. Minty. And warm. Perfect, actually. “Of course! But that’s hardly-“ “So what’s the deal? Loosen your tie a bit and just kiss me, jet boy. Plenty of time in the future to give the most special kisses to the most special people. Right now...how about starting with giving me just one?”

Your voice was quiet as you slid your hand up from Iida’s waist to his chest to join your other, a barely whispered ‘please’ in the dark. Iida stared down at you, his own hands twitching, before they came up to meet yours. He’d had every intention of removing them, setting them back at your own sides, but when you’d gripped his shirt, and leaned up on your toes to brush your nose along his jaw, he’d frozen. Gripping your wrists tightly, just hanging on really. “Mm...you smell nice.” Leave it to Tenya to casually wear the most expensive, mouth watering cologne to a dorm sleepover. Who was he, a Giorgio Armani sponsor! Sheesh. “...thank you,” Tenya gasped finally, as you nipped at his chin- barking out a laugh, so loose and carefree, Tenya couldn’t help the way his shoulders dropped minutely in response. Maybe...maybe.

“Alright then.” Iida agreed. Stealing himself for the inevitable, though he’d be lying if he said the beads of sweat breaking out across his forehead weren’t because of how soft the plushness of your lips felt trailing up towards his own bitten ones. He’d never quite considered something like this happening to him, at school of all places. Tenya had a firm idea of what he’d come to UA to do, how he’d accomplish it, and how he’d feel after achieving all his goals. Going pro. There really was no time for any straying from that. Bakugou, for instance, for all the glaring faults Tenya found in his personality, was admirable in that at least he had a similar mindset, albeit a more extremist one...goal oriented to the max. And Tenya did admire it, strived for something similar. He’d never quite struck gold when it came to friends before UA, maybe because they’d never quite understood why he worked so hard to get to the next step, and the next step. But here, his classmates understood the importance of their classes. Their position. ...well, most of them did. And yet here he was now, backed into a literal corner, clammy hands holding tight to y/n’s wrists as the smaller boy continued to whisper random nonsense against Tenya’s chin- his cheek. All because he wanted to appeal more to his peers. Figures. Not that he was complaining. Not anymore, at least. “Ready?” You asked, nerves nearly getting the best of you now too as you focused in on the glint of light in Iida’s glasses again- frowning briefly, and nudging the boys chin with yours to get him to move just enough for the light to reflect in the deep pool of blue that was his eye. Sparkling, and searching. You’d expect nothing less from the class rep. God, he was handsome.. “As I’ll ever be, I suppose,” Tenya whispered, meaning for it to come out more sure, and failing miserably. You were already keyed up enough to be crowned the king of sexual frustration, so you wasted no time in letting out a soft ‘hm’ of confirmation, before leaning in and sealing your lips fully over Iida’s. You’d be lying if you said you’d never imagined just how plush his lips would actually feel. Sure it was something you’d fantasized about with /most/ of the guys in class, but Iida especially. He had great lips. And fuck, they felt nice against yours. Not too soft, not too rough. Plush, like a pillow. Fuck, you wanted to bite them. To tug on his lower lip till he mewled into your mouth. Shit.

Moving your hands tentatively at first, as they were still being held firm by Iida. you slid them up and over his shoulders, hesitating briefly before allowing them to slide further up to cup the boy on either side of his neck. Squeezing there briefly as you pulled away. “This okay?” You asked, thumbs brushing over Iida’s jaw, words whispered against his lips, you were still they close. “...y-yes, yes that’s alright.” He was too quiet to be sure, but something told you Iida was coming undone at a rapid pace. “Would another be alright then? We don’t have to, I don’t want you to-mph!-“ and Iida’s lips were back on yours. More insistent, more sure. Firm and soft and you moaned, quietly, still conscious of your classmates on the other side of the door, but just barely. “Sorry...sorry, I...I’m so sorry, y/n,” Iida huffed, grip just as tight on your wrists as before as he broke away suddenly, guilt wracking his system immediately as he intended to pull away, because what the hell was that?! He’d just-

“No, Iida, please...come on, don’t do me like that, I want it. More...come on,” you pleaded, breathless and giddy at how he’d taken control. On the one hand, of course he would. But on the other, this was /kissing/, and it was /Iida/. What even? Iida’s lips parted in a soft ‘o’, body flushing with heat at how your pleas seemed to effect him. “Okay.” Clearing his throat, his words coming out too husky for his own liking, Iida finally, FINALLY, moved his own hands. Thinking suddenly of movies, and how people kissed there. He could do that. Iida’s hands were on your hips then, gentle, yet sure. Cupping there, finding his footing. Iida finally seemed comfortable leaving one against your hip, the other flat against the small of your back to bring you in close. Whoa. Hadhis hands always felt so big?

Shit.

“Move your lips how I move mine,” you instructed, breath ghosting the shell of Iida’s ear, and you bit your lip gently when Iida nodded. Eager. Fuck. And you were kissing again. More urgent this time, a few presses of lips, before you began to move. The quiet of the closet being broken by the rustling of your clothes, the slick sound of your lips, and both of your needy breaths. Iida was a skilled learner, and it was almost scary how that transferred over to kissing. Pausing when you move your lips against his in a certain way. Savoring it, before applying it back to you. “It’s concerning how good you are at this,” you laughed softly against his lips, Iida rewarding you with a little breath of a huff in return as his grip on your hip tightened, and he sealed your lips once again. Urgent. Needy.

You could relate. Soon enough you found one arm curled around Iida’s neck, your other hand holding firm to the crop of hair on his head as he kissed you. A shift in stance caused his hand to drop to the outside of your thigh, and on instinct, you’d lifted your leg to Iida’s hip,

Iida hadn’t even hesitated to grip your thigh and hike your leg up higher, bringing your middles closer together, and what? What the fuck? Since when did he know how to do that?! “Shit,” you hissed, overwhelmed by how turned on you were. It was embarrassing, but so good.

“Language,” Iida whispered, not missing a beat, pushing his head up into your hand briefly, encouraging, before kissing you /again/.

Jesus, he was good. It was kind of ridiculous how so. “Ah,” you cried before you could stop yourself, when Iida’s grip on your thigh shifted and tightened, palm held firm over the sensitive underside, and you had to stop. Lips sliding from Iida’s, along his cheek, and down into the crook is his neck. “Are...are you alright?” Iida panted, trying to pull back to look at you- as best he could in the dark- but you held tight to his hair, keeping him in place, as you caught your breath. ‘Look at me’ you thought, nodding your head against Iida’s shoulder, ‘coming apart like a fucking virgin!’ Which, you were...kind of, the specifics of previous encounters were still vaguely juvenile enough for you not to count them

“Just...,” pausing, you took a breath. Blowing it out through your nose, and closing your eyes as you began to litter Iida’s neck with kisses. “-sensitive, down there, is all. But it’s good. Very good.”

Iida was too quiet, tense all of the sudden for an entirely different reason, and you were all too aware of where his brain was probably going. “My /thigh/, Iida, your holding my thigh like you’re about to pitch a softball, and it feels really nice- just caught me off guard, is all.”

Patting him on the head, you evened out your breathing finally, just being for a few long moments, as Iida stood still. “...this is much more-ah...much more than I’d imagine it being.” Iida spoke softly, fingers playing nervously against the back of your thigh. “How incredibly vague,” you teased, giggling quietly, before the both of you were a fit of laughter. Iida’s deep, boisterous sound like music to your ears. Had he ever laughed like that in front of you before?

You vowed to make it happen more often, in any case. “You know what I mean,” he added finally, allowing your leg to slip from his grasp, bringing both hands back to your hips to squeeze gently. Tentatively. Your breath faltered briefly, imagining suddenly getting to feel this again. Whenever you wanted. What an idea. Your face was too hot then, even more so than before, and you hoped Iida couldn’t sense it as you pressed even deeper into his neck. Scratching idly through his hair, fingers skirting across the seam of his undercut. “If you applied this kind of enthusiasm into your studies, you wouldn’t be scrambling to study with Kaminari last minute, you know.” Iida added simply. “Excuse you?!” You shouted, no heat behind it as you reeled back, staring at the general area of Iida’s head in faux shock.

“If Midoriya and Uraraka didn’t steal you away all the time, /maybe/ I’d have asked you to study with me at some point. Once you and Yaomomo are busy the pickings are slim, you know. Kiri asked me to join he and Bakugou once...but hard pass, as I don’t particularly like being slammed over the head by our textbooks.” Iida stilled briefly, before sighing and nodding his head dejectedly. “His methods are almost cruel, yet his results are unquestionable. Kirishima has been doing much better lately. At the cost of his physical and mental health though, which in the long run could have some serious long lasting effects.”

“Oh my mental health is constantly on the verge anyways, so that would be fine.” You joked, snickering as you were pulled back rather harshly, for Iida to get a good look at you no doubt.

Good luck with that in the dark, pal, you thought. “Kidding, kidding. Kind of. Anyways, point is, if you’d make yourself more available to other students, maybe I’d pick your brain about the homework sometime.”

“I...suppose I have grown comfortable with my own study group- and as class rep it’s imperative I take initiative to make sure each one of us is reaching their full potential, whether it be studying, or during combat.” Iida mumbled. If his hands hadn’t been firm on your hips, you swore they’d be chopping the air around your head. “I don’t need as much oversee as Kaminari. I apply myself when it counts, so if you could spare even an hour or two on the weekend to answer some of my more pressing questions it would be a big help,” you explained, awkwardly untangling yourself from Iida as you cleared your throat. The mood not entirely broken, but you couldn’t very well sit in here and make out with Iida all night.

Unfortunately. “Of course! Your room is right down the hall from mine after all, it’ll be easy to navigate and configure the perfect time to study. We-“ he paused, hands up in the air somewhere, you could hear the whooshing. “I don’t care much for movies, and the others will be thoroughly entertained enough with this game after us anyhow, if you’d like to go back to my room and set up a study plan?” He offered, and you couldn’t help the way your heart thumped madly once more at the offer. They’d decided on one of your favorite movies tonight, and you’d promised Kami a running commentary.

Oh well, “Let me fix your hair, and you’ve got a deal. Last thing you need is everyone thinking I defiled you in here.”

Pulling your phone from your pocket, and face the screen straight up, you unlocked it- the bright light from the screen illuminating the closet just enough to see. Snorting, you took in Iida’s fluffed up hair, sticking up at odd angles, vaguely reminiscent of Midoriya’s.

“A willing defilement , I suppose, but a defilement nonetheless if we’re being technical,” Iida supplied quietly, as you fussed over his hair. “Willing indeed, you lug. Who would have guessed the class rep would get so /handsy/.” You teased, smiling brightly at the wide eyed expression Iida supplied in return. “And don’t apologize, I...I haven’t kissed many people, but that was definitely the best kiss of my entire life. Something to be proud of. I guess..” You tried to sound nonplussed, but given the new light, it wasn’t hard for Iida to see your blush. “I’ve never kissed anyone, but I can’t imagine it gets better than that,” Iida offered quietly, blush high on his cheeks to match yours.

You both paused, Iida staring down at you, you up at him. Your hands back on either side of his neck, hair as good as it was going to get. ‘Maybe we could do it again sometime’ the little voice in your mind screamed, but the last thing you wanted to do was push Iida. This was just a one time thing. But hey, maybe it meant being closer friends...which was even better, if you were honest with yourself. “We should uh...get going. Out there. The sooner we retreat back to your room, the better. They’ll be hounding as soon as he step out.” Sliding your hands down Iida’s broad chest, you patted twice there just for effect, before snatching up your phone. Steeling yourself for the hoots and hollers, and nagging questions everyone before you had endured. An eye roll all prepped as you stepped out of the closet, missing the way Iida stared after you, if only briefly. Brushing off the wish of you, with your loud personality, and lack of filter, to offer up more of something he couldn’t bring himself to ask for. He couldn’t find the words. He’d hoped you could. Or would. But that was alright. Late at night, after everyone had gone to bed, and the lingering scent of your own cologne faded from Iida’s room, he’d still have the memory of your lips on his. Your voice, soft and needy in his ear. Your thigh heavy, and hot in his palm. Yeah...that would do. For now, at least.

#bnha x male reader #bnha x reader #mha x male reader #mha x reader #tenya iida x male reader #tenya iida x reader #tenya iida x y/n #tenya x reader #tenya x male reader #iida x reader #iida x male reader #tenya iida

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tommyspeakycap · 3 years

Note

Can you do a jealous John stones please 🥺🥺🖤

jealous stonesy coming right up! feel like john is the quick to get jealous type :) this gif does things to me

Black Tie Turbulence

John’s hand is both a constant and comforting presence on your lower back from the moment you both stepped out the car. He’s careful with his feet to not step on the bottom of your beautiful long dress that was matched in colour to that of his delicately placed pocket square.

“Aren’t you two a sight?”

John leads the turn so you can both face Kyle and Annie, also both dressed to the nines and offering each of you a glass of sparkling champagne. “The heels are already a killer,” you joke, making Annie giggle immediately. Heels were a must for almost all black ties, but more so when your boyfriend is an absolute giant.

It was a charity ball that a good few England and their players had been invited to, mostly in order to try and sweet talk the donors into giving more of their money than they originally would. You had gotten used to these events and liked to think you had actually gotten very good at sweetly chatting the vendors into emptying the metaphorical pockets. John wasn’t the world biggest fan of these events, but he knew they had to come hand in hand with the joy of doing what he loves each and every day. Plus, he gets to see you all dressed up. That’s good enough for him.

“I’m gonna go see if I can grab another drink.” You tell John, leaning up to press a chaste kiss into his jaw. He nods, eyes following you intently as you walk off with your heels clinking and dress swaying. “Earth to Stones.” Harry Kane waves, clicking his fingers to get the defenders attention. John shakes his head with a soft chuckle. “He’s fucking whipped, mate.” Kyle laughs heartily, eliciting similar laughter from Kane and his wife.

You stood up at the bar as the tuxedo glad bartender went off to collect your order for you when an older man appeared next to you. He too was looking to order a drink. “I hear the sambuca shots are exquisite this year.” You suggest with a teasing grin and a sparkle in your eyes, very successfully gathering the full attention of the silver fox who you had turned to face. He chuckles, eyes meeting yours as his tongue hits out to lick his lips. He was probably in his mid fifties, so you didn’t feel gross for a little bit of flirting to get some cash for a children’s charity.

“I’m just joking,” you note softly, “But the whiskey is fantastic.”

He nods, a smile overtaking his pink lips and stretching his face to fill a happy 60 years worth of laughter lines. He seemed truly sweet, not that you were at all interested. But he wasn’t sleezy, didn’t have a wedding ring in and looked a little younger than you knew he was. A little bit like Patrick Dempsey, actually. “A woman after my own heart.” He responds, flagging down the waiter for two whiskey’s.

As you got to talking, you learned he was a CEO. You had always been in awe of the kind of money that John had immediate access to in his bank account, what with you still paying off student loans and such until John took went behind your back and payed them off with an insistence that “his girl shouldn’t be worrying about anything ever.” But this man had even more money than that, you suspected. He just screamed out overpriced whiskey, fancy holidays, houses on every continent and boatloads of cars that you hadn’t even heard of. Yet, he seemed very sweet. You told him about some of the work you had gotten up to on a year abroad doing aid work during your second year of uni and he had been extremely curious about it, genuinely listening which shocked you significantly.

John would have said it was because the way that you spoke, completely captivatingly as you got lost in your own stories. You made people feel as though they were part of the adventure, drawing them in and leaving them hanging on every word. Most would claim that you were the only reason John still got invited to these black tie charity events because he certainly wasn’t so good at wooing older men out of their money.

“You’re definitely a whiskey lady, then.” You nod your head at the statement from the older man, a small laugh as you remove your hand from his arm that you had reached for when he made you ‘laugh’ with his last joke. “Mhm…well travelled, beautiful, very elegant and clearly incredibly loved.” You furrow your brows slightly his words, eyeing him carefully in search of their meaning. He leans in slightly, his eyes soft with a kind smile of his face. He nods his head behind you, “He’s been watching you since the moment I stepped up next to you.”

Your eyes land on John when you turn around, trying to look as though he wasn’t watching the interaction intently with those fiery blue eyes. You giggle to yourself with a soft sigh. “You made an old man feel incredibly young again,” he begins with genuine joy in his eyes. “You could change the world with that heart. It’s that reason and that reason only that I’ll be making such a hefty donation. None of this wining and dining, fancy ballroom party they’ve thrown. Passion,” he pauses, “Your kind of passion for better is what this is all about. But I reckon you best get back to the man who looks like he’s going to eat me alive.”

His words were touching and incredibly sweet, but the end was also true. You could hear your boyfriend’s footsteps approaching at a pace that might make you question his fifa rating from last year. You turn yourself back around to offer a thank you for the donation in your name, but all you see is that head of salt and pepper hair disappearing off into the crowd. John has suddenly remembered why he hates these things so much. You’re very clever at getting exactly what was needed from these men and you had no shame at all for flirting with them. If you had it, why not use it? You always said.

Despite knowing it meant nothing, it still sent John absolutely crazy and though you’d never admit it, that was one of the biggest reasons you did it. He used to bring you these things as his friend before you had started dating, which was very coincidentally where he burst and told you he loved you when you had asked what had irritated him so much afterwards.

His jealousy wasn’t something you exactly regarded as a demon, a little bit more of a treat.

Seeing him hot and bothered, angry flush to his cheeks with his jaw set firm and his muscles tense in irritation. It was beautifully hot.

“Flirting with older men again, eh?” He says sharply, his eyes burning a hole in you with the fire of their irritation. You shrug nonchalantly and take a sip of your drink. “Not a big deal,” you hum softly in response, watching carefully as anger flickers through his eyes. He turns his back to you with a scoff and a shake of his head, grumbling something under his breath.

“We’re going.” He states. You roll your eyes. “Oh don’t be like that, John.”

“Like what, eh?” He presses, still not turning to look at you.

“All angry and shit, it’s not a big dea-“

John isn’t having it. He whips around quickly, using his large body to press you back into the bar and takes the drink from your hand with ease when you still, enjoying a sip of it before he places it down on the bar, out of the way easily with those long arms. His hands come down to hold onto the dark mahogany surface of the bar top, trapping you with your back against it between his arms and your front against his chest. “Not a big deal?” He challenges, being careful to wedge his thigh in between your legs, he presses it up against you.

“It’s all for charity, John.”

Your face remains unchanged as you look into his eyes, darkened by lust with his pupils swallowing the blue of his iris.

“I don’t care,” he rumbles, his voice low, reverberating through your ear where he had loved his mouth to, his lips and hot breath tickling your neck with each word he speaks. You open your mouth to response, but John sees this and ceases the opportunity he has primed himself for so you can’t speak before he does. The words are lost on your tongue, dying before they ever have the chance to exist when he flexes the muscles of the thigh between your legs, tightening and pushing it up against you. He swallows your squeaky whimper with his mouth over yours.

“You’re mine.” He growls against your lips, continuing to make his presence between your legs known, very very known. He does pull back k slightly though, his darkened smirk flattering to a soft smile as he tilts his head to take in your rosy cheeks. “My sweet, kind girl.” He coos, lifting both his hands to cup your cheeks, thumbs smoothing over the soft surface. You giggle at his words, blush deepening. “Seriously though, love,” he hums, “Hate the action, love the cause.”

That prompts another giggle, your head falling to rest on his chest gently. His hands strokes over your hair softly as his lips press down on the top of your head.

“Not mad?” You query, listening in to the soft and slow thud of his heart against your cheek. John has moved you effortlessly to the ballroom dance floor from the bar with only a few backwards steps, letting you lean in against his chest again. “Little bit, of course.” He replies.

John has his arms wrapped tightly around your body to keep you flush against him in every way, swaying back and forth in time with the music.

To any onlookers, it would appear as normal, mundane and incredibly sweet to see the relatively young couple enjoying each other so close on one of his few nights off. Truly, it was adorable when you factored out the reason for the proximity John keeps to your body.

“John?” You lilt, your voice a daring misfire between sweet and sultry. “Mhm?” He rumbles in response, keeping his cheek rested on the top of your head. “Your hard-on is pressing into my stomach.” He chuckles to himself, your words too quiet for anyone else anywhere near to eavesdrop on but enough to flush his cheeks ever so slightly.

“And I would much rather it was in some far more pleasurable places.”

John does not need those words explained to him, nor does he waste even a moment leading you hastily off towards the exit of the ballroom, sure that he could find somewhere in this venue suitable enough to let everybody hear just who you belong to.

#john stones #john stones x reader #john stones imagine #john stones imagines #england national team #england national team imagine #footie fics #football fics #footballer fics

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ialwaysknewyouwerepunk · 3 years

Text

perfect now - a close reading

only pure and true love for this one. it’s soft and sweet because the one he wrote it for is and needs cheesy uncool romcom soundtrack-worthy affirmations and it’s the most wonderful thing oh my the flurries

some album booklet art for your viewing pleasure

((just a warning for below: while the lyric analysis was kept fairly neutral and close to the words and their meaning, more and more parallels did ensure me larrying out by the time the analysis kicked off so if you’re not into that, you can skip this one!))

⟼ check out @bluewinnerangel ‘s magnificent post with all the parallels to 1d/h&l bc it’s exhaustive and was a source for mine <3 thank you again for your service <3 bc this song really is a fanpiece of every song that has been important to them throughout their career so far, whether they wrote it or not, and it’s honestly kinda impressive

SUMMARY

you’re sad and i love you so much i will do anything to make that undone but while you’re sad know that i sill very much love you and you’re also strong enough to conquer all of this on your own but i’ll be by your side anyway

lyric breakdown ft. the many parallels, incl. little things, through the dark and wmyb

what this says about louis, his partner and the relationship he is in

never gonna dance again frenzy

identity

louis is a marvellous majestic sonofabitch basically <3

walls, track 10

～ little things “you still have to squeeze into your jeans, but you’re perfect to me”

You don’t feel pretty and it’s hard to miss

later lyric: “like a neon sign” - i see through you trying to hide away your insecurities

I wish that you could see my point of view As someone staring back at you

“you” is also staring at him, but perhaps is too insecure to realise how mutual the adoration is

i wish i could get you out of your own negative spiral and give you a look at yourself from my perspective

～ wmyb “everyone else in the room can see it, everyone else but you”

～ wmyb “right now i’m looking at you and i can’t believe you don’t know you’re beautiful”

～ little things “you never love yourself half as much as I love you, and you’ll never treat yourself right darling but I want you to. If I let you know, I’m here for you, maybe you’ll love yourself like I love you”

On Friday night when we’re all out I turn to you and you’re looking down And you don’t wanna dance I know you love to dance You never stop given half the chance

heavy echoes of kmm again, but the opposite: the “nightmare on the dance floor” doesn’t want to dance

when “you” is confident rlly not being subtle with who i think that is, they love to dance <-> tpwk “feeling good in my skin, i just keep on dancing”

“i know you love to dance” = i know what you love bc i love you

“given half the chance”

～ tpwk “giving/given second chances”

given a chance tattoo, making another appearance (see below for more tattoo meltdowns)

Just keep your head up, love, keep your head up

term of endearment <3

～ dlibyh

this album is full of encouragement to keep going and as much as it gives me life it ruins me

Don’t hide away, don’t ever change

“be happy, proud”

～ “just hold on”

“pick someone who’s supportive”

Keep your head up, love, keep your head up Don’t look away, don’t look away

don’t look away from me

～ through the dark “and I can see your head is held in shame”

Cause everybody’s looking at you now, my, oh my

they have the stage to themselves / new career paths they’re doing on their own

could also mean ppl they’re going out with are looking at them, which “you” interprets as sth negative, which makes them self-conscious, while they’re actually admiring them bc they steal the scene

～ wmyb “you’re turning heads when you walk through the door”

I guess some queens don’t need a crown And I know why Even when your tears are falling down Still, somehow, you’re perfect now

“you” is royalty to louis, to put it simply

they don’t need something on their head to make it known to everyone else - they’re a queen and everyone knows it

gendered: female - also used in drag contexts - the only time L has used any gendered word to identify his partner on the entire album (more on this below)

～ steal my girl "she's been my queen since we were sixteen" can't believe i forgot this one thank you @mortalenemiestolovers for reminding me!!!

～ falling

～ through the dark “you tell me that your tears are here to stay”

You never do, but if you asked me to I’ll tell the truth lying next to you

“you” never asks for affirmations directly, but by saying shit like their pants are too tight make it clear enough to L that they do need to hear once in a while that it’s not true

Cause you’re the only one when it’s said and done You make me feel like being someone

Good to you even at your worst

～ always you

i love you so much you are a force of life to me, and even when you hate me i want more

～ drag me down “If I didn’t have you there would be nothing left, the shell of a man who could never be his best. If I didn’t have you, I’d never see the sun. You taught me how to be someone” (sung by louis first, harry second)

～ through the dark “even if you scream and shout, it’ll come back to you and I’ll be here for you

You steal the scene and it’s unrehearsed

reference to working on a stage - their natural presence wins everyone over - that charisma is never manufactured

Don’t you wanna dance? Just a little dance I’ll never stop given half the chance

L keeps encouraging them, will also not pass by any chance to dance with them

Every insecurity, like a neon sign, as bright as day If you knew what you were to me You would never try to hide away

“it’s hard to miss”

L sees through them trying to hide their insecurities, pretend to be strong

～ through the dark “but I know you were only hiding”

SYNTHESIS

Perfect Now is not a fan favorite and I am so not here for that discourse, so please do not pester me with negativity about this chocolate drop of a song.

As others have pointed out, the parallels with other songs written by Louis, Harry or for One Direction are extremely present. Especially Little Things is echoed loudly, but there’s so much more to be read, as you’ve seen. These are songs that are clearly near and dear to Louis, bc he wrote them or bc performing them was special, like with Little Things and What Makes You Beautiful. A lot of the same emotions come back in Louis’s writing, so much so that you can’t help but see the larger story behind it all. Throughout Walls you can hear him singing about not giving up and holding your head high despite hardships, and if you look back at his earlier writing, it’s always been there. Through the Dark is an early and striking example of this style of Louis song: you’re sad and i love you so much i will do anything to make that undone but while you’re sad know that i sill very much love you and you’re also strong enough to conquer all of this on your own but i’ll be by your side anyway

basically through the dark’s chorus:

Oh, I will carry you over Fire and water for your love And I will hold you closer Hope your heart is strong enough When the night is coming down on you We will find a way Through the dark

It is very clear that Louis is faced with a partner - I can freely say it’s Harry now right? are the antis gone by now? i think so - that struggles with his body, with his identity, with how he wants to present himself vs how opinions on that might push him down and dampen his spirit. Louis, always the supportive boyfriend, then tries his best to make him see the light, while keeping that space for his sadness, his struggles, or their joint struggles. Accept the sadness but don’t lose your heart to it.

I’ve linked @bluewinnerangel ‘s post at the start of this post, but I need to stress how good it is once more as I also shamelessly insert a screenshot from it here bc it makes me feel a lot and summarizes perfectly just how deeply Perfect Now is woven into the history of their lives, relationship and especially “you”s/Harry’s personal struggle with their identity/body/confidence...

Because yes, i absolutely think these tattoos are being echoed in the song. “Never gonna dance again” as a lyric and then as a tattoo on Harry’s legs like shackles around his ankles represents the sensation of shame, of being stuck, bc of your desires, bc of your sexuality. Obviously we can never know why Harry got the tattoo, as in what experience pushed him to choose those lyrics or what exactly he recognizes in himself, but it’s safe to say it’s about the struggles of being queer and navigating relationships with that identity and with others.

Most importantly, the sense of shamelessly dancing, dancing like no one’s watching, dancing together with your lover, as a celebration of self, life, love, is the key here. Harry got that tattoo ages ago, at a time when he undoubtedly felt way more stuck. When he couldn’t dance freely the way he wanted to and with whom he wanted to. Perfect Now is a reminder to him, an encouragement to still dance if he wants to, no matter what people say or think. Significantly, then, Harry’s own Treat People With Kindness heavily features that same sentiment, but in an extremely positive light: i have found a place (in life and in myself) where i feel like i have given and was given second chances and now i dance bc i finally feel good in my skin.

Louis has obviously been there from the start, or at least from when or before Harry properly started experimenting with/questioning how he likes to present and how he identifies as. Before he ever dared to consider pulling on a pair of women’s skinny jeans, never mind a ball gown. Louis has seen him limit himself as well as being limited by others ofc and has always seemed to have been there, with a secure hand on Harry’s back, to encourage him. Even at a time when boys wearing nail polish or skirts was unthinkable. Just remember how much encouragement Harry needed when growing out his hair; Louis literally joined him. yes this might make me cry okay i need to stop bc i’m going off track and this is just becoming a larry breakdown while i was trying to hype up this beautiful song.

What I’m trying to say is: Louis has always seen all of Harry. He’s always had his back, no matter what. He’s loved every part of him. And now, on a completely gender neutral album, in the sweetest, softest song off of the entire thing, Louis puts in the word “queen”, and that is so very deliberate it makes me want to scream. It’s Louis confirming his love again and again while affirming the multitudes contained by Harry, including everything involving his gender journey. brb crying

It’s a raw Louis, an honest, sweet, kind, loving partner, and both of them are fucking lucky to have each other, and I also wish that all of us end up in a caring and wholesome relationship like that. I truly do.

#wow i thought this one was gonna be easier #i always do why do i think that???#every time i look closer into l's lyrics i see more depth #this is all just a perfect mushy mess so it's on brand for me #perfect now analysis #lyric analysis #my posts #parallels

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drabblecat · 3 years

Text

Yandere!Heisenberg x F!Reader Part 2

Rating: Explicit (18+)

Warnings: yandere behavior, slight nudity, drugging

Part 1

Slightly longer than i was aiming for but that's ok! My initial thought was more pwp but then I realized I kinda wanted some sort of plot... Anyways, big plans for next chapters! As always I'd love to hear what you think and the ask box is open!

You took a moment to try and calm your nerves. Heisenberg still had your face in his rough hands, and you couldn’t try to run with that chain holding you down. As his thumb ran across your lips anger built inside you. Mother Miranda was supposed to protect everyone in the village, but as soon as shit hit the fan there was no one that came to the rescue. You parted your lips as if starting to speak, his thumb now pressing down on your lower lip. Tilting your head forward ever so slightly, you bit down on the man’s thumb. He pulled back and sat up in shock that someone in your current position would do such a thing.

“Take care of me huh? Like Mother Miranda was supposed to? Yeah, well look how that worked out!” The hand still next to your head quickly gasped onto your neck, lifting you up to meet his eyes.

“That bitch was just using the village. It was a lie she used to make sure we had the right number of bodies to work with and everyone fell for it!” Tightening around your throat you started to gasp for air, hands pulling at Heisenberg’s grip. He let you go, house bouncing against the mattress. “It seems you need some more time to adjust. I’ll be back later and hopefully you’ll realize your place here.” The bed shifted as he stood up. Walking to the door and closing it behind him you heard a loud telltale click of a lock.

You stared up at the ceiling for a moment, not only to catch your breath, but also in attempt to process what exactly was happening. Tears formed in the corner of your eyes, one spilling over your cheek and rolled down to your chin. You let it fall for just a moment, and then gathered yourself. What was done was done. True you saw people that you knew dying in the streets, but you didn’t truly know them. You were just the new girl in town, if they were in your place, they would just be happy to be alive. Besides, Heisenberg was one of the town’s lords, right? It’s possible that this isn’t all that bad, you don’t know anything about him besides owning the old factory. At least he’s not Beneviento or Moreau. The dolls were creepy as hell, and you were never one for going near the waters that looked like they’d eat you if given the chance.

Using the sheet you wiped your eyes, and decided it was best to examine your surroundings further. Getting off the bed, the chain falling to the floor with it, you saw the cuff had a decent amount of length to it. Besides the bed and the heavy door, there were a few other things. There was the chair still at the end of the bed, a small nightstand, a vanity, and two other doors. Walking over to the vanity you were taken back. It had a framed photo of you that you do not remember taking. Especially since it was of you just out of the shower! Hesitantly you tipped it over, not wanting to even think of what that photo implied. Below the vanity were some drawers, opening them you found a hairbrush, and what only could be described as some of the raunchiest lingerie you’ve ever seen. Then came the two doors, one was significantly smaller than the other. Trying the small one first in the back left of the room, no luck. After turning the round door knob a few times you gave it a rest. Next was the larger door, this one opened right away. Nothing too interesting, just an ordinary bathroom. It was a little dirty, but nothing worse than what you’ve seen at certain gas stations.

Starting by opening all the possible cabinets you found they were all empty. Nothing to even try to use to get out. No cleaning chemicals or even medicine in the medicine cabinet. Heisenberg must have thought this through this for some time. The chain finally ran out of length at the toilet, just short of the bath. Seeing as nothing came from this, you returned to the bed to stare at the ceiling and think. Not like there was anything else to do. Who knows how long it took you to explore the room and think your thoughts. Without windows or any sort of clock there was no way to tell. Curling up to one side you snuggled into the blankets. Once again you heard the door click, causing you to bolt upright to face the noise. Heisenberg came through the door, carrying a metal tray holding a plate of food, a fork, a glass with what looked like water, and a small white vase with two wilted yellow flowers.

“Dinner time! Now I know I’m not the best cook, but you should find this to at least be appetizing. After all you must be starving darling.” He sat the tray on the bed and sat back in his chair. The plate was just as he said, didn’t look five stars, but your stomach growled at the mess of food. It looked like some baked beans, accompanied by some thick slices of grilled ham, and a chunk of corn bread. You still didn’t move, despite your hunger.

“Ok ok, you probably think I drugged the food, right? Well, I didn’t. Drugging you would be easier with a dart gun.” He lowered his glasses slightly to look you in the eye. With a sigh he grabbed the fork, picking up an entire slice of the ham, ripping a bite out of it. “See?” he placed the ham with the fork in it back down on the plate, speaking as he chewed. You couldn’t hold out much longer. If now was dinner time, that means you missed an entire day with nothing to eat. Planning any sort of escape or resistance to him couldn’t be done on an empty stomach. Reaching forward you used the fork the cut off a bite sized piece. It was surprisingly well seasoned, and super tender.

“There you go sweetheart! I knew it would just take some time to get used to, I’m not all that bad.” He chuckled and watched you as you ate. Only because he was watching you did you eat just a little faster than you had wanted to. Sure, he was a little off putting, but he seemed happy when you played along with whatever sick fantasy he had conjured up in his head. Once the meal was done, he set the flower on your nightstand and the tray right beside it. He stood up, taking his hat and coat off and throwing it on the chair.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I had a full day today and I am beat. Time to get some shut eye.” He glanced over to the vanity; a small piece of cloth poked out from where you had rummaged around. “I see you had some fun today as well. Your still in that ragged gown, I think you might want to change into something a little more… fresh.” Shit, you thought you’d put everything back to where it was. You mentally curse yourself as he opened the drawers. He was right though; you were still in the stained nightgown from the attack. As much as a fresh outfit was a good idea, you dreaded what his choice might be.

After a few moments of rummaging, he pulled out a gown that looked like it went down to mid-thigh, in a deep crimson color. It would have been a nice gown, if it wasn’t for the fact that the entire section around the breasts were almost see through lace with slits on both sides that went from the bottom and halfway up.

“Absolutely not.” You blurted out, causing him to chuckle.

“Sweetheart I don’t think you have a choice in the matter. Besides you and I both know that if you stay in that grimy thing, it’ll make you more uncomfortable than wearing this. It’s soft to, pure silk.” He tossed it on the bed and gave you a wink. Giving a defeated huff, you picked it up. He was right, it was incredibly soft. Getting off the bed with the garment in hand you headed towards the bathroom.

“Aww, and I thought I was going to see you strip. Maybe some other time…” He looked at you with his shit-eating grin. Your face became flustered, and you slammed the door as fast as you could, not shutting all the way due to the chain. Once inside the bathroom you began to change, making sure he couldn’t see you through the crack in the door. It was only then that you found the slip came with a matching pair of panties. Sighing in defeat and honestly just tired of all the bullshit thrown at you these past days you just put them on. It did give you some comfort, surprisingly feeling clean in this lewd outfit over your much more covering, yet crawling with filth, night gown. Taking a look in the mirror you looked yourself over. At least your tits looked hot in this, a confidence boost is good, right?

Slowly opening the door further, you became almost timid at what you saw. Heisenberg had also begun to strip down to his boxers for the night. He was in the middle of removing his shirt. His muscular back was littered with all sorts of scars. His muscles flexed as he took of the white stained undershirt, the smallest beads of sweat wicked away by the fabric. His tight ass was also a sight to see. Looking over his shoulder, he locked eyes with you, no longer having glasses obscure the direct line of sight.

“Well well, seems we’ve both found ourselves some eye candy huh.” Tossing the last piece of clothing to the chair he approached the door. Opening it and taking your hand he looked down at you, you quickly looked away to avoid feeling more embarrassment. Suddenly he picked up bridal style, your hands immediately reaching for his chest in attempt to hold on. In doing so your hands felt the warm firm handful of his pecks. He chuckled as you quickly folded your hands back into your own chest. Ever so gently he set you back on the bed, a sharp contrast to what had happened earlier.

Settling down next to you, you turned away from him. As you felt the bed dip with his weight, he wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled you close. You could feel a slight bulge resting against your ass. You tried to create some sort of distance, but you couldn’t move at all. Resigning to the situation, you tried to settle down, eyes unable to close despite some tiredness. All you could see in the limited range of movement you had was the nightstand, remnants of the meal, and the two flowers wilted but vibrant as they sat in the small vase.

#karl heisenberg x reader #karl heisenberg #re8 #yandere!heisenberg #yandere resident evil #smut #re8 smut #x reader #karl heisenberg x you

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nordic-language-love · 3 years

Text

1 year as an italki student

I realised that I’ve now been taking Norwegian lessons on italki for over a year! My first lesson was on the 12th of September 2020, and since then I’ve taken 72 lessons (that’s a lot!) I figured I’d do a little review of what I’ve learnt and generally how I feel about it!

What has improved?

The most important thing that has changed is my confidence. Before, I felt like I couldn’t hold a conversation in Norwegian at all. After a few months of lessons, I finally felt confident enough to chat with my good friend @pilvenhattara after years of saying I definitely would, as soon as my Norwegian was less shit. I also now book lessons with new tutors without a second thought, and genuinely enjoy meeting new people and speaking Norwegian with them.

I no longer feel embarrassed by my mistakes. When I first took lessons, I felt so embarrassed that my vocabulary and grammar was awful that it stopped me from speaking. I’m glad I didn’t give up though, instead opting to try different tutors until I found ones that really worked for me.

I also speak a lot more fluently. I don’t spend as much time searching for phrases, and I can usually reformulate my sentences if I don’t quite know how to say exactly what I want to say.

So in summary, it’s fair to say that my speaking has improved significantly, and continues to improve month on month.

What hasn’t improved?

Honestly, my grammar hasn’t improved that much. I haven’t really focused on my grammar in lessons though - perhaps if I asked my tutors to spend more time on it, my knowledge would improve.

My writing. If anything, my writing’s got worse because I don’t do it as much! Before, it was the only way for me to practise producing the language, so I would do it several times a week. Now that I spend so much time speaking, I find writing a bit boring. However, I’m now working to tackle that by doing weekly writing tasks for my tutors.

My pronunciation. But then, this isn’t really a problem area for me. There’s room for improvement, but the only criticism I’ve really had is that I sound “very neutral” (ie I speak østnorsk rather than any particular dialect, but I’m not in a rush to change that - I’ll learn the local dialect if/when I move to Norway).

My vocabulary. Okay, it’s improved a bit, but I still feel very limited. I think I need to work on this outside of classes more.

Has it been worth the money?

For me, it’s been a worthwhile investment because I feel a lot happier and more confident with my speaking. I finally feel like I’ve reached my goal of being able to speak a second language, which is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I realised I couldn’t speak French anymore.

I also genuinely feel like I’ve made new friends, which is awesome.

And of course... I really enjoy my lessons! I love having the opportunity to use the language I’ve dedicated so much of the past 6 years to learning.

That being said, I don’t think a language tutor is necessary for you to reach your goals. Of course a tutor can help, but a combination of immersion, authentic materials, apps, social media, good dictionaries and persistence will eventually get you where you want to be.

Some tips for taking classes

Try out different tutors if you can. You get three trial lessons, so be sure to use them! Don’t just settle for the first tutor you find if you're not sure they’re right for you.

Message your tutor before the lesson (or before you book a class) to let them know what you want, or ask them about their teaching style. You’ll be much more likely to get a tailor-made lesson if your tutor knows what you want to work on!

Tell them what corrections you want and how you want them delivered. Do you want them to interrupt you or wait until you’ve finished talking? What do you want them to pay most attention to? (Chances are there’ll be too many mistakes for them to correct them all, but if you narrow it down to eg prepositions, verb tenses, article use then that can be helpful)

Don’t be afraid to come to the class with questions. I’ve never had a tutor who didn’t like my questions!

#italki #langblr #language blog #learning languages

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flashflashhundredyarddash · 3 years

Text

batkids and their relationships with their siblings headcanons. under read more because this got fucking LONGGG

dick

dick is the eldest so he doesnt want to bog down his younger siblings with his problems, but if he DOES, he tends to talk to jason about it

dick and cass start to really begin to bond when Cass shows up to dicks gymnastics class for 3rd-6th graders and then cass shows up all the sixth graders and they get frozen yogurt after lmao

dick and tim are Very much thick as thieves. tim is very much like bruce on the Emotional Suppression scale, so dick just really wants to make sure his little brother is safe and happy ALL the time

Duke and Damian are the only two really permanently at the manor anymore, so when dick drops by he tries to do something with both of them. duke frantically zoom calls dick every other week to help him with his his trig homework. dick shows up to dukes high school graduation with literally the BIGGEST SIGN

everyone insists damian is dicks favorite but he does actually genuinely love all his siblings equally, his relationship with damian is just Very different from the others because of the age gap and being dami's primary caretaker for a year. dick babies dami every chance he gets

jason

would sell Dick to satan for One corn chip

him and cass don't have the greatest start to their relationship because cass is very much Against Killing so it takes a while for jason to warm up to her and earn her trust. now, though, jason is competing with steph by showing cass all the classic American Teenager things she missed out on. steph is currently winning but jason is like 98% positive a crunch wrap from taco bell is going to push him over the edge

tim and jason are currently competing over who can solve the most cases in a month. tim is winning. that won't last long.

jason Loves to Big Brother duke its so embarrassing. duke will get out of school and go to his car and jason is SITTING IN THE FRONT SEAT FRANTICALLY WAVING TO GET DUKES ATTENTION. JASON THAT IS MY CAR. signal has one (1) mission with arsenal and arsenal goes hey did you ask that girl to homecoming yet and duke is like I DON'T EVEN KNOW YOU.

Damian is proof that Actually, Little Brothers are Pests. Jason fully believes that he was brought back from the dead PURELY to torment damian and he will fulfill this mission at any cost

cassandra

it actually really upset her when Dick didn't accept her at first. she knows her other siblings really adore dick so his lack of trust was really disheartening. it takes dick a while but once he Actually Accepts that cass is going to be a permanent part of their life and oh, wow, dick you really hurt her feelings he really hyperfocuses on bonding with cass for a couple of months which definitely improves their relationship

she really likes jason!! their relationship doesn't start well but because he's close with steph and tim who are cass's top two favorite people to exist ever, cass is like well i GUESS ill hang out with him more. jason is fun to talk to because he always tries his best to explain jokes and give context to what people are talking about (also tim took her to taco bell already but she didn't tell jason she just wanted to hang out)

cass LOVES tim. they just click okay. tim always seems to know when to give her space and when to push and come closer. Tim's "guest room" is just her room lets be real. tim and cass occasionally get mistaken for twins and Cass Loves it.

duke makes cass listen to metal once and cass loses. her. damn. mind. they bond over music a lot because they both Love Music to a degree the others in their family don't.

damian!! damian is her little brother!!! dami isn't As Hostile to cass at first because he is 100% aware cass has the edge in fighting and respects her. cass likes all of his instagram posts and they have a snapchat streak going

tim

tim Loves dick, dick was his first sibling!! he had Very strong hero worship when he first met dick but it mellowed out when tim got older because wow 17 is really not that cool and mature lol. tim has an open invitation to dick's apartment which he does occasionally take advantage of. tim has more than once scared the shit out of wally when wally comes over and wally is convinced they're being robbed (HA) for half a second. i mean. he's not wrong.

listen. tim understands that forgiving the guy who tried to kill you would be a Struggle for some people and it was! definitely! but also at least he can trust jason to, uh, be open about if he doesn't like tim. which is not an assurance he has with other people. so if the guy who tried to kill him tells him tim is cool now then like. maybe tim isn't that bad or annoying a person? also jason arrested a whole gang and won the cases competition but then it created a power vacuum that the whole batfam had to clean up the rest of the month. thanks, jason.

tim LOVES cass. you know how most of the time theres this empty feeling inside you and you just kind of ignore it because you don't know what will fix it or if you do, you know you can't fix it? cass makes that empty feeling feel a little less empty. they just click. tim always tries to travel with cass whenever she leaves gotham.

tim and duke. Tim is actually the sibling who duke goes to whenever he has questions he doesn't want to ask bruce or alfred about, like, life or vigilante-ing or school or college or whatever and Tim is always like yes!! i love Giving Advice and Solving Problems!! tim and duke and jason fill out their college applications together.

tim and damian. LMAO. ROUGH START THAT'S ALL ILL SAY. at some point alfred goes like fuck it. family therapy. and tim and dami are PISSED. tim and damian get along best when they have a common enemy to work against. their relationship gets much better when damian is older and they actually talk about their feelings like emotionally stunted bats. despite how bad their relationship was, tim will ALWAYS protect damian

duke

very much intimidated by dick at first. dick is so much older and has his own job and friends and life and is very much AN ADULT. dick likes to take duke out to do lots of cool stuff (paintball, lasertag, tech exhibitions, concerts, etc). also, dick PERSONALLY introduced duke to superman and is dating THE FLASH. 10/10 awesome big brother.

was intimidated by jason for 0.5 seconds before jason actually opened his mouth and started speaking. jason is literally. So Embarrassing. which is weird because nobody else really seems to feel that way about jason but duke knows he's 100% in the right here. like yeah jason is also An Adult and does Adult Stuff but he's also at the manor like every other weekend???? and he always complains about bruce but always seems to be in the same room bruce is in????? like okay jason. they bond over literature!! jason and duke and alfred will spend literal hours talking about books and duke loves it. duke is the only one who doesn't think jason is funny and jason gets so upset about it lmao.

cass has this one week where she gets really into photography and by virtue of being nearby (and also not nocturnal), duke becomes her victim subject. duke prints out all the pictures and hangs them up in his room (his favorite is one he took when he stole the camera and took a really bad selfie of them together).

tim is closest in age to duke so duke tends to hang around with him a lot. tim introduced duke to his young justice friends and duke is like yes!!! meta-friends!!!! tim really helps duke out with his powers because tim is always like wow i wonder if your powers would work if we did This? can you see farther than other people? is your visible spectrum of light different than other humans? Bruce does the same thing but bruce is boring about it lol.

damian and duke live in the same house and will be in the same room and just send each other social media posts back and forth. they follow each other on instagram and will, OCCASIONALLY, make tik toks together because they're tik tok fiends. each of his siblings have visited his parents once or twice but damian routinely comes with him.

damian

damian gets a special bullet point to say that it took him. forever to come around to the idea of having siblings. he very much believed that he was Bruce's Blood Son and everyone else were just tagalongs or allies. it took him ages to acknowledge that dick, jason, tim, and cass were his siblings, so when duke came and like a week later damian was like Ah, Yes, this is my brother Thomas everyone else was like dude wtf

listen. LISTEN. Obviously. Richard is very highly skilled. and also Father values him highly. and also Richard will listen to Damian complain about his schoolmates. and also Richard is much more patient with Damian than other members of his family. listen....,,, (all this to say damian kind of fucking adores dick lmaooooo this kid).

Todd is kind of unbearable but damian has been informed this is both a normal feeling when it comes to Todd and also big brothers. damian was an only child for ten years so yes, Father, if Todd attempts to tickle me I WILL break his fucking nose. yes i WILL put money in the swear jar but I want you to know i don't regret it. they always try to sneak up on each other but mostly fail.

DRAKE!!! but no lol once damian grows up and is like I Apologize for attempting to murder you it was wrong and you are just as much a son to Father as I am tim is like UGH i guess its cool since ur being so emotionally mature and all. also im 2 for 5 on siblings trying to murder me so im definitely going to win trauma bingo and damian is like i take it back you are insufferable. When Will My Older Siblings Stop Joking About Their Trauma.

CASS!!! listen. cass is cool. Cass Gets It. They have a special Bond. also damian really likes it whenever cass is home because 1) he gets to hang out and do something cool with cass and 2) he feels significantly safer with cass in the house because Nobody will be able to hurt any of their family if Cass is there. ALSO he tries to call her cain but everyone is like DONT DO THAT and he doesn't want to call her wayne bcus theyre ALL wayne (dick adds it on as a middle name but also Richard John Wayne West-Grayson is just. the lamest name ever so dick needs to reconsider it before his upcoming nuptials)((dick will not reconsider it except maybe whether grayson-west would work better)) and so he tries cassandra but cass is like :) call me cass and damian is like cassandra is more formal and respectful and cass is like :) and finally damian just has to give in.

Duke! him and duke actually live together so they get the Most Bonding Time and have a bunch of inside jokes as a result. (is it bad i wanted to laugh because inside jokes... joker... i'll see myself out). they're eating breakfast together (and also alfred sits with them IM NOT A MONSTER ALFIE'S LIKE 70 NOW OKAY) and duke laughs and bruce is like what are you laughing at, son? and duke is like oh damian just showed me this funny meme and then he shows the phone to bruce and bruce grabs it (both the boys groan) and after WAY TOO LONG is like "i don't get it" and so now duke and damian have to try and explain the comedic intricacy of bob's burgers

#this took. two fucking hours #batfam #batman #bruce wayne #dick grayson #jason todd #cassandra cain #cassandra wayne #not sure which one to commit to yet #tim drake #duke thomas #damian wayne #dc #the burd squawks #birdflash #birdflash was like. one of my first ships lmao

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davidmann95 · 3 years

Note

Sooo… Superman and the Authority?

magnus-king123 asked: Your thoughts on Superman & the authority Give it to me...lol

Anonymous asked: Seeing Bezos take his little trip into space the same day Morrison puts out a Superman comic that touches on how far we’ve fallen from the days when we dreamed of utopian futures where everyone explored the stars was a big gut punch. Not used to Superman being topical in that way.

Anonymous asked: What'd you think of Superman and the Authority#1?

This is far beyond what I can fit in the normal weekly reviews, so taking this as my notes on the first six pages, with this and this as my major lead-in thoughts:

* Janin's such a perfect fit for Morrison - the scale, the power, the facial expressions selling the character work, the screwing around with the panel formatting as necessary to sell the effect, the numinous sense of things going on larger than you can fully perceive amidst the beauty and chaos. It's a shame he wasn't around 25 years ago to draw JLA, but I'll take him going with Morrison onto other future projects.

* His intro action sequence is such a great demonstration of why Black actually does have something to offer, and also how he's such a dumbass desperately needing Superman to save him from himself.

* While Jordie Bellaire didn't legit go with an entirely monochromatic palate the way early previews suggested, it's still an effect frequently and excellently deployed here. And glad to see Steve Wands carry into this from Blackstars since there's such an obvious carryover from its work with Superman.

* "Gentlemen. Ladies. Others." Great both because of the obvious - hey, Superman's nodding at me! - and because it's a phrasing that reinforces that this take on him (and let's be real Morrison) is old as hell.

* I'm mostly past caring about whether this is an alt-Earth Superman until it becomes indisputable one way or another, this and Action both rule so what does it really matter? But while there are still a couple signs in play suggesting some kind of division (the Action Comics #1036 cover, Midnighter up to time-travel shenanigans) the "lost in time" quote clearly thrown in after the fact to explain how he could have met Kennedy outside of 5G that wouldn't be necessary for an Elseworlds, the assorted gestures towards Superman's current status quo, the Kingdom Come symbol appearing in Action, and that Morrison would have had to completely rewrite the ending if this wasn't supposed to be 'the' version of Clark Kent going forward as was the intent when they first planned it all say to me that no, no fooling around, this is our guy going forward one way or another.

* Janin and Bellaire making the first version of the crystal Fortress ever that actually looks as cool as you want it to.

Anonymous asked: I like that Superman and The Authority is basically the anti-All-Star; instead of the laid back, immortal Superman who is supercharged, we have a stressed, ageing Superman whose tremendous powers are fading. The former will always be there to save us, but the latter is running out of time and needs to pull off a Hail Mary. Also, he mentions in his monologue to Black that he was "lost in time" when he met JFK, so maybe he is the main continuity Clark. Or he's the t-shirt Supes from Sideways.

* You're absolutely right - the power reversal is obvious and the ticking clock in play seemingly isn't for his own survival but everyone around him as he wakes up and realizes all the old icons grew complacent with the gains they'd made and he's not leaving behind the world he meant to. Both, however, are built on the idea of preparing the world to not need them anymore - it'll still have a Superman in his son, but that'll only work because of the others he empowers and inspires. The question is what happens to Clark if he's not going to live in the sun for 83000 years.

* Clark's 'exercise' here does more to sell me on the idea of Old Man Superman as a cool idea than however many decades of Earth 2 stuff.

* Intergang being noted alongside Darkseid and Doomsday speaks to how much Kirby informed Morrison's conception of Superman.

* This isn't exactly the most progressive in its disability politics but at least it makes clear Black's being a piece of shit about it.

* It's startling how much Clark can get away with saying stuff in here you'd never expect to come out of Superman's mouth. "I made an executive decision" "Privacy, really...?" "You have nowhere to go, Black. Nothing to live for." "There are few people in my life who I instinctively and viscerally dislike, and you've always been one of them." It only works because there's zero aggression behind it, he's just past the point of niceties and being totally frank while making clear none of these assessments preclude that he cares and is going to unconditionally do the right thing every time. He is absolutely, per Morrison, humanity's dad picking us up when we're too drunk to drive ourselves home.

* The story doesn't put a big flashing light over it, but it's not even a little bit subtle having the material threat of the issue be a ticking timebomb left by the carelessness and hubris of generations past.

* Manchester keeps trying to poke the bear and prove his hot takes about Superman and it's just not working. The front he put up under Kelley is gone after decades of defeats, and as Morrison understands what actually conceptually works about him as a rival to Superman underneath the aging nerd paranoia he's exposed as what he absolutely would be in 2021: a dude with a horrific terminal case of Twitter brainworms. I was PANICKED when I heard there was an 'offensive term' joke in this, I was braced for Morrison at their well-meaning worst, but it's such a goddamn perfect encapsulation of a very specific breed of Twitter leftist who uses their politics first and foremost as a cudgel and justification to label their abrasive, judgmental shittiness as self-righteousness (plus it's a killer payoff to a joke from way back in his original appearance). Cannot believe they pulled that off when they're so very, very open about basically not knowing how the internet works.

* @charlottefinn: Manchester Black using his telekinetic powers to force someone he hates to fave a problematic tweet so that he can screenshot it and start a dogpile

@intergalactic-zoo: “Once they cancel Bibbo, Superman won’t be *anyone’s* fav’rit anymore!”

* Friend noted this issue had to be fully the conversation because the whole premise stands on the house of cards of these two somehow working together, and with three 'silent' inset panels the creative team pulls off that turning point.

* So much of this feels on the surface like Morrison bringing back the All-Star vibes with Clark, but when he drops a "That's all you got?" in a brawl you realize what's underlining that bluntness and confidence in the face of failure is that deep down this is still the Action guy too. This dude ain't gonna get wrecked in his Fortress while the other guy chuckles about him being A SOFT WEE SCIENTIST'S SON!

* Bringing up Jor-El made me realize that Morrison already spelled out that this is the final threat to Superman, what he faces at the end of the road:

"Now it's your turn, Superman."

* A l'il Superman 2000/All-Star reference with the Phantom Zone map!

* There's so much intertextuality going on here even by Morrison standards - Change or Die with the old hero putting together a team of morally nebulous folks out to 'fix' everything, Flex Mentallo with the muscleman trying to redeem the punk, Doomsday Clock with the fate of the world hinging on whether Superman can get through to a meta stand-in for an idea of 'modern' comics cynicism, DKR and New Frontier and Kingdom Come and Multiversity and Seven Soldiers and What's So Funny and All-Star and Action and the last 5 years of monthly Superman comics and Authority and probably Jupiter's Legacy and Tom Strong - but none of that's needed. You could go in with the baseline pop cultural understanding of the character and not care about any of the inside baseball shit and get that this is a story about a leader of a generation that let down the people they made all their grand promises to as inertia and day-to-day demands and complacency let him be satisfied with the accomplishments they'd made long ago, looking at a new era and seeing the ways its own activists are dropping the ball. The only thing that fundamentally matters in a "you have to accept you're reading a superhero story" sense is that because he's Superman he's willing to own up to it and listen to people who might know better about some things and try to set things right while he and those who'll take his place still have a chance. And yes, the oldster looking back on their legacy with a skeptical eye and hoping for better from the next generation, hoping most of all that their little heir apparent can fulfill the promise inside of him instead of being a provocating little shitkicker, is obviously also autobiographical.

* The overlaying Kennedy reprisal is such a great visual of a sudden intrusive thought.

* The Kryptonite secret is the obvious "This is going to matter!" moment, but "He lied about his son" is a bit that doesn't connect to anything going on right now so maybe that's important here too? More significantly, the Justice League can't actually be the villains here but that Ultra-Humanite's crew are in an Earth-orbiting satellite makes pretty clear what's up.

* I've said before that between Superman, OMAC, and a New Gods-affiliated speedster this was going to use all of Morrison's favorite things. King Arthur playing a role isn't exactly dissuading me.

* Love the idea that all the antiheroes have their own community in the same way as the capes and tights crew. They definitely all privately think the rest are posers though and that they alone are Garth Ennis Punisher in a mob of Garth Ennis Wolverines.

* Manchester's fallen so far he's gone from trying to convince Superman to kill to convince him to dunk on people for their bad takes and Clark just doesn't get it. Official prediction of dialogue for upcoming issues:

"According to these bloody Fortress scans, the only thing that can restore your powers is an unfiltered hit of dopamine. Don't worry, Doctor Black has a few ideas."

"Hmm. Maybe I'll plant a nice tree?"

"...fuck you."

* Ok I already talked about how great the Fortress looks in here but LOVE this library.

* A pair of pages this seems like the right spot to discuss from Black's original appearance that underlines both his and Superman's inadequacies up to this point:

Responding to the problem of "the government and penal system are hopelessly corrupt" neither of them has any actual notion of what to do about it in spite of their respective posturing beyond how to handle individual outside actors - each is in their own way every bit as small-minded and reactionary as the other. Clark's coming around though, and he's holding out hope for the other guy.

* Superman: Have a lovely mineral water :) proper hydration is important :)

Manchester Black: *Is a dude who can get so mad he vomits and passes out. At water.*

* That last page is the one to beat for the year, and does more to put over the idea of this as an Authority book than that Midnighter and Apollo are literally going to show up. It also feels like Morrison tacitly acknowledging all the ways the premise could go or at least be received wrong - from Superman saying 'enough is enough' to who he's bringing into the fold to go about it - in the most beautifully on-the-nose fashion imaginable. Maybe they'll save us all! Or maybe they'll drown us in their vomit.

#Superman and The Authority #Superman #The Authority #Manchester Black #Grant Morrison #Mikel Janin #Jordie Bellaire #Steve Wands #Opinion

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ashesandhalefire · 3 years

Text

progress report: i am missing you to death

alex, michael, and a lot of unsaid things.

inspired by an entirely out of context teaser shot of alex and a desperate need for interaction that has yet to be satisfied by season 3 canon.

Deep Sky provides the coordinates and the time, so Alex shows up and waits.

While he stands in the cool night air, he scans the flat terrain that stretches out to one side and the gully where the highway sits. Other than the whizzing traffic, oblivious to his insignificance, everything is quiet.

After about twenty minutes of the vibrating stillness, Michael slinks out of the shadows with his hat tucked low over his face and leans against the back of the car beside Alex’s SUV.

Blood rushing in his ears, Alex does a second quick sweep of the lot’s perimeter. Nothing obvious has changed in the shadows since he crept through the bushes to check potential sight lines, but Alex isn’t stupid. He was in over his head when Project Shepherd turned out to be just his father’s backroom hobby. Deep Sky outclasses his expertise in a way he isn’t ready to reckon with. They could be anywhere—somewhere in the lot, somewhere down the road, somewhere miles away—and Michael has sauntered directly into their crosshairs.

He left about five feet between them when he stopped to hook one ankle over the other and stare out at the traffic, and the distance is enough for deniability. Alex tightens his hands into anxious fists and forces a long, deep breath through his nose.

“Hey,” Michael says with a casual nod of his head. They stand listening to the roar of tires chewing their ways along the desert highway, and Alex waits for a sign. He checks Michael’s chest for the red point of a laser sight just in case. Nothing happens. They stand a little longer, and then Michael leans over and asks, “You got a light?”

“No. You got a cigarette?”

The corner of Michael’s mouth twitches. It stirs up a fondness that Alex has carefully and surgically distanced himself from for the last few months, and he glances around the parking lot again. Being in love with Michael is too easy. He falls into it without needing to think about it or to try, and the laziness of trusting things to fate is probably why they’ve never gotten it right. He should probably consider himself lucky. Sinking back into those feelings now, fruitlessly, after so much time has passed, will make him sloppy in a way he can’t afford.

“You shouldn’t be here. They could see you.”

Michael tucks his hands into his jacket pockets and shrugs, easy and unbothered. Or, almost unbothered. The muscles in his jaw are tight and tense. “You don’t even know what they do or if they’re looking for me. I haven’t exactly been hiding for the last year.”

“That doesn’t mean you should paint a bullseye on your chest.”

“But you should?”

Michael spits barbs like an old man working his way through seeded melon, careless and precise in equal measure. He always finds soft flesh.

“This isn’t a game,” Alex grits out, face growing hot with frustration. He watches a tractor trailer speed by on the road below and shoot a piece of trash out from beneath its tires.

“So tell me what it is, then,” Michael says, mouth turning down and voice suddenly going sharp as a knife’s edge, “because I didn’t really wait around to hear the rest of the story after Valenti said you were joining a cult.”

Alex looks over, and Michael’s brow is pinched to match the irritated wrinkle of his nose. Anger and tension leak off him like heat shimmers off the pavement at midday. He holds his casual posture, ankles crossed and hands tucked, but his eyes are furious.

“It’s complicated.”

Michael scoffs. “You know what, I shouldn’t bother. I should just drag your ass home, no questions.”

And now Alex’s temper flares: “Try it.”

“You think I wouldn’t? To save you?” He laughs meanly. “I’d have you over my shoulder so fucking fast—”

“I don’t need to be saved.”

“Obviously, you do.” Michael pushes off the car. The brim of his hat catches the light from the lamppost and casts half his face in shadows. “We have enough problems on our hands right now. We don’t need to poke the bear.”

“This bear poked first,” Alex says, equally furious. He checks behind Michael before hissing through his teeth, “They kidnapped Mimi. They drugged Jenna Cameron. Turnabout is fair play.”

“This isn’t turnabout! This isn’t even revenge. You’re joining their club. You are flinging yourself into a pit, Alex. A big, dark, deep pit, and when you get far enough in, none of us are going to be able to get you out. We’re gonna lose you. For good. And for no fucking reason.”

“Not for no reason,” Alex says. A tingle of shame trickles up the back of his neck. He knows he’s unprepared, going in without an exit strategy. But he can’t sit on his hands and do nothing. It makes him nervous and paranoid to be idle. “They know things.”

“Who gives a shit? Who gives one fucking iota of a shit about what they know?”

Alex frowns. “You have always wanted to know more—”

“Not like this! Not at the risk of—” Michael puts a fist to his forehead. Then he pulls off his hat and takes another step closer. His voice is softer when he speaks. “Why are you so hellbent on doing this, huh? This isn’t just your dad anymore. This is bigger than that.”

“I know.”

“They are gonna swallow you whole, and what’s the point if you’re just gone?”

Alex draws another long inhale through his nose. The weight of the thick, ugly ring on his finger feels like an anchor dragging him down. The memories of Caulfield crumbling to pieces in a cloud of fire are heavier. “If there’s even a chance that they know something, what choice do I have? I’m not getting caught off guard again. I owe you that much.”

“Bullshit,” Michael says with a jerk of his chin. “Doing it is one thing, but don’t pretend you’re doing it for me.” A pair of low-riding sports cars scream down the highway behind him, bobbing and weaving through the minimal traffic with their engines blaring. One falters behind a gas tanker and then chases its companion off towards the horizon with an roar. “If you had any interest in doing something for me, you would stay.”

Cold uncertainty creeps into Alex’s chest, and no number of layers can keep it out. He wants to ask: would I be welcome? Because he hasn’t felt like he would be in a long time. He had showed up, again and again. Sometimes, he had been wanted, and sometimes, he hadn’t been. The haze of open mic night had cleared for an instant, and the future had been visible, tangible, workable, and then, just as quickly, had vanished into the air. He had been left with Isobel’s obvious, humiliating pity, her mouth turned down as she stood to listen through the last note. That door had been closed. And yet, he wants to ask: would I be welcome? Dignity be damned.

“Are— are you asking me to stay?”

There must be something in his voice when he says it, no matter how hard he tries to control the pathetic wavering and the sunken surprise on his face, that means something to Michael. His whole body eases forward as if carried by an invisible current before he catches himself and says, “I’m done asking people for more than they’re willing to give me.”

“But you would ask? If you thought—?” Alex pushes. “You would want to ask?”

The corners of Michael’s mouth turn down and his gaze narrows almost imperceptibly, but Alex is watching for it. The more Michael closes off, the more Alex feels himself splitting open. Something bright and electric stirs in his chest.

“Because I thought you wouldn’t,” he says, waiting for the moment when Michael’s eyes widen, just slightly, just enough to understand. It comes, exactly as expected, and Michael sways closer.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d ask. I’m not about to beg, but I’d ask.”

He’s gotten Michael to beg before, but never for something as serious as love. On his back or on his knees or in the bed of his truck, Alex has heard him plead and bargain for things he wants in the neediest, most desperate whispers, but that had been all carnal, base pleasure, and he had known Alex wouldn’t tell him no. Here, he’s talking about a different type of submission, the kind that humiliates someone like Michael, someone who has never been given enough. Michael won’t beg, and Alex needs to be asked, and a lot of time has been wasted between them thinking that one is the same as the other.

He can’t say he’ll stay. He’s too far in to back out. And, even if he could do it, staying doesn’t mean riding off into the sunset. It means more of the same: the secrets, the conspiracies, the mysteries, the agonies, the scraping open of old wounds in last-ditch efforts to heal them. But it also means Michael, so everything else is white noise.

Michael sees it all play out on his face. He sets his hat on the roof of Alex’s car and then turns to lean against the hatchback. He sighs, and Alex can tell that more weight than usual is resting on his shoulders. It’s not just Max dragging him under. His whole body sags with it, and the sharp focus that’s been in his eyes begins to recede as he drifts away towards the call of whatever nightmare is lurking at the back of his mind.

“It’ll be okay,” Alex says because he lacks for anything else to say, and Michael stares at his boots with a sad smile. His throat bobs as he swallows down whatever it is that’s too hard to talk about with so little time left to say it, and then he turns to look at Alex.

“Your dad was a piece of shit,” he says, like this is some sort of revelation, “and you’re you.”

The words, said like an accusation, should probably turn his stomach, but they’re also said with a reverence that pushes Alex’s heart up into his throat. Whatever is happening has rocked Michael to his core far beyond how Alex knows to help.

“Less of a piece of shit, I hope.”

Michael stares at him, flexing his hand, and then says, with a nod, “Significantly, yeah.”

“I guess that’s the best I can hope for.” Alex laughs, and then he tips his head back to look at the starless sky. “I’ll take being afraid of being like him over being proud of being like him any day. At least it means I’m going in the right direction.”

Jesse haunts Alex differently than he haunts Michael. To Michael, Jesse is another human face that did something terrible to him, just more proof that looking for another planet to run to is a good idea. Jesse is a more specific phantom for Alex, much harder to let blur into the background of the general awfulness of life. There are reminders of his father all around town: placards, photographs, the sign for the street they lived on, a six-foot statue in town square. Those can be faced much more easily than the hints of his father that Alex finds in the mirror: the deep-set wrinkles in his brows, the cut of his mouth when he frowns, the tone of his voice when he yells, the shape of his thumb. To be a little less like him every day is an exhausting but necessary struggle.

Michael smiles, and Alex, mystified, thinks maybe he managed to help after all.

“Your plan wasn’t really to drag me home over your shoulder, was it?” he asks to distract from how Michael carefully swipes a finger at the corner of one eye.

Michael huffs, and the car jostles. “I don’t know. Maybe. I just wasn’t about to let you go without—” He licks his lips and says, “I wasn’t about to let you just go.”

Alex scuffs his shoe against the loose gravel. “Couldn’t get Kyle’s hubcaps off this time?”

Guilt settles over him after he says it. Guilt and something else, something like the relief of setting down a heavy burden that’s been carried too long.

“I thought you were making a mistake back then, too.” Michael takes the comment in stride, accepts it, and reaches out to touch the ring on Alex’s hand. He pinches it carefully, Alex’s fingers curled into the heat of his palm, and rolls his thumb until the ring twists to expose the thinner underside of the band. He strokes, skin then metal then skin, over and over. “Flinging yourself into some dark pit that you’d never come out of again.”

Alex wants to tell him that this is different. He can’t.

“Do me a favor, okay?”

Hand slipping up over Alex’s wrist and into the soft corner of his elbow, Michael crosses the final inches of space between them and pulls Alex close. In the dim light of the parking lot, they might be mistaken for the sort of strangers who meet in shadowy corners for quick exchanges of misery with rough words and rougher touch. But then Michael, trembling, touches the lapel of Alex’s jacket and presses a long kiss to his cheek.

He keeps his mouth there, breath hot and soft, and, before he gathers himself enough to continue, Alex says, “I’ll come back.”

Michael laughs, but it sounds like a gasp for air. “Not even gonna let me ask?”

Alex hums. “I’ll come back.”

“Yeah, you’ll come back,” Michael warns, “or I’ll come get you. And it won’t be fucking subtle.”

It sends a shiver down his spine to think of Michael storming a place as infinitely large as Deep Sky feels. If it comes to that, he’d be better off left behind. But as the thought comes, Michael’s grip shifts and the tentative press of their sides becomes a full-bodied hug that envelopes him like a warm breeze. His nose turns into the side of Michael’s neck: rain, crisp and fresh; gasoline, but faint; smoke, from his fire pit.

“I’m not really going anywhere. It’ll be fine.”

Michael squeezes, and Alex squeezes back. Everything else he wants to say is too big for this moment. And, selfishly, he wants to know that Michael will wait to hear it. He scolds himself for the thought, because they’ve each done their share of waiting miserably at the wayside, but then he lets it stand. Michael squeezes again, fingertips digging into separate points as he clings.

Alex cups a hand to the back of his head and touches his curls. He thinks about what it would mean to kiss Michael now, to kiss someone that he loves, who loves him, and imagines a tower of precariously stacked dominoes. Michael laughs wetly, and Alex lets go first, fingers lingering reluctantly.

#malex fic #malex #roswell new mexico #michael x alex #my fic #i read the jungle; the grapes of wrath; and another country in less than two weeks. idt my writing style even knows which way is up rn #but i had to Produce Something or i was going to go crazy so :/

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galactic-magick · 3 years

Text

As Long As I’m With You: Agnes/Agatha Harkness x Reader

Request: Hi, can you please do where Agnes (a villain) saves fem reader's life because she has feelings for her? In the end they end up together // also took some ideas from this request

Summary: You’re accused of witchcraft in your village, and a mysterious beautiful witch comes to your aid.

Words: 2200+

Warnings: fem reader, Agatha is low key evil so she hurts some people, a swear word, reader has an angsty past

Author’s Notes: This can be read as either a standalone fic or as a prequel to my other fic “Spell Practice.” I took quite a lot of creative liberty with this, hopefully that’s alright. Also disclaimer I am in no way a history expert so even though this is set in like the 1500s-1600s it’s probably very inaccurate, but it’s fanfic so anything goes right?

Taglist: @nyx-aira @midnight-lestrange @thestrangeundoing @thegayances @sleep-deprived-athlete @dr-robotnik-said-hella @fallingfor-fics @p-nymph @thelanawinterrs @sunproud (if your tag didn’t work it might be bc your blog isn’t searchable so make sure that’s on so you’re notified of future fics!)

You had no idea how much your life would change when you left your house that day.

It started out with a simple run to the market and the garden to get what you needed for supper that night, a job that almost always falls to you. You don’t necessarily mind getting away from your family and talking to some people in town, but it’s clear that your family doesn’t want you in the house as much as possible either.

It’s gotten to the point where they’re just looking for a reason to get rid of you. You’re a disappointment, after all. You refuse to marry in order to help your family’s status, even though you’ve gotten a couple offers. You counter your parent’s rules and ideas every chance you get, no matter how much they tell you you’re crazy. They belittle you constantly, saying your dreams are worth nothing and you’ll have to be dependent on them forever if you never submit to the role in society you’re supposed to.

Obviously bullying you out of their lives wasn’t working, so they’ve moved on to spreading rumors about you and setting you up for crimes. None have worked yet, of course, but every day you fear they’ll get too close.

Until you get burned at the stake, though, they’ve given you basically every responsibility of the house. You do all the shopping, cooking, and farming, as well as taking care of your younger siblings. You wonder what they’d do without you, despite how much they seem to want you gone.

As you’re buying a few crops and eggs from your neighbors, you swear you see something move. You turn around and see a little boy floating in the air, screaming.

You drop everything in your arms and reach up to him, trying to grab him and help him down, but he keeps flailing, and his screams start to feel directed at you.

“Hey! It’s okay! Let me help you!” you hold your hand up, speaking as calmly as you can. “I’m not going to hurt you,”

“WITCH!” a man yells as he sees you. “SHE’S A WITCH!”

Everyone around turns and watches you.

“No! No! I’m not the one doing this! I’m trying to help!”

“Let him down and maybe we’ll wait to kill you til tomorrow!” someone else demands.

A couple people march towards you to grab you, and all you can think to do is start running.

You race out of the center of town into the trees, and about five men chase after you. You keep going until it feels like your legs are going to give out and you can barely breathe, but they keep coming.

“Please! Please stop! It wasn’t me I swear!” you cry. “I don’t know what was happening!”

“Shut up, girl,” one grunts. “Your father always said there was something wrong with you, makes sense that you’re a witch!”

“What’s so wrong about witches?” a female voice calls.

You and the men spin around, trying to figure out where it came from.

Before you can blink there’s purple smoke surrounding you, and the men are thrown against the trees. They’re knocked unconscious instantly, but you remain standing and untouched.

“Who are you?” you ask, your voice quivering.

“Don’t be afraid, my dear,” the smoke starts to fade and you can make out her silhouette, then eventually her face. “I’m here to help you,”

She’s beautiful. You’ve never seen someone that immediately feels so friendly, so different in all the best ways.

“It’s alright to stare, I know I’m quite a sight,” she laughs. “I’m Agatha,”

“I’m Y/N,”

“Ah, yes, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of you,” she smiles. “Everyone in the village can barely stand you,”

“Thanks…?” you’re not sure how to respond, especially after all that just happened. “Wait, if you live in my village, why have I never seen you? And how come you’ve never gotten caught using magic?”

“Memory spells, of course,” she shrugs. “Now, let’s get you somewhere safe, alright?”

You nod, and she wraps an arm around you. She takes you deep into the forest until you reach a small house, the glimmer of the fire peering through the windows.

You settle down on a chair while she makes some tea and food. She offers you a blanket and hands you the cup and plate, sitting down across from you.

“So how long have you been practicing magic?” she asks.

“Oh…I…well actually I don’t know how to use any magic,”

“Really? Why were the witch hunters after you then?”

“I was set up, I think,” you say. “There was a little boy floating in the air, and since I was near him they thought it was me. But I wasn’t doing anything,”

“Well,” Agatha sips her tea. “Sometimes magic can manifest itself subconsciously. Maybe you were doing it but didn’t realize it. It’s quite common,”

“But…how would I have magical powers? I’ve never learned it from anywhere,”

“Some people are just born with the gift,” she grins.

You exhale, thinking over what she said. Could it be true? You’ve been a witch all your life without even knowing it?

That night, Agatha conjures another bed for you to sleep in. But even though she made it as comfortable as she possibly could, you can’t get a wink of sleep.

You lift off the blanket and wrap it tightly around you, getting up slowly and quietly. You walk outside and sit against a tree, looking up at the stars.

You’re sure your family has heard the news by now. Their disappointment of a daughter is finally gone, accused of witchcraft. It seems that the foreseeable future will be spent with Agatha, the only safe person you have.

You wonder just how much she already knows about you. She mentioned she’s heard people gossiping about you all the time in town, yet she still saved you after hearing all those negative things.

Why is that?

“Can’t sleep?”

You jump at her voice, and she chuckles a bit at your reaction.

“Sorry,” you sigh. “I just have a lot to think about from today, I guess,”

“No worries,” she sits down beside you. “So do I,”

“Agatha,” you say. “Why did you save me?”

“Us witches have to stick together. I saw you were in trouble, so I saved you,”

“But you knew, didn’t you? You’ve known I was a witch long before this, didn’t you?”

“I had my suspicions,” she agrees. “Whenever I heard people talk about you, I figured you weren’t like everyone else. But I didn’t know for sure until today,”

“I wish you had taken me before,” you huff, a few tears falling down your cheeks. “It’s been so bad, Agatha, feeling worthless just because you’re different, everyone hates you…”

She pulls you into her shoulder, letting you cry into it, “I know, dear, I know,”

It takes you a while to come to terms with your potential powers, but as soon as you’re ready Agatha begins to teach you how to use them. You spend your days studying her spell books and practicing simple spells, most of which you fail at.

She encourages you as much as possible, explaining to you that magic is not something you can learn overnight, sometimes not even over years. She tells you that she’s actually thousands of years old (a surprise to you due to her stunning looks) and she’s been practicing for much of that time, and there’s still some spells she hasn’t mastered.

Your impatience still gets the better of you most days, though. You can’t imagine waiting several centuries to get something to work, if you get it to work at all.

One day you’re sitting at the table, trying out a simple transfiguration spell. You wave your hand repeatedly at a potato, hoping to turn it into an apple. It doesn’t even wobble, not even a single spark, but you’ve been sitting here for hours and don’t want to give up just yet.

You nearly fall asleep from exhaustion when all of a sudden it happens. It works.

There’s an apple in front of you. Not a potato, an apple.

“Holy shit!” you scream. “Agatha! I did it!”

You run over to her and point at your small accomplishment.

“Look at you go, darling!” she smiles, hugging you. “At this rate you’ll be changing rocks into cats before you’re 200!”

You laugh, “Oh come on, this is literally just one of the beginner spells,”

“So what? That’s where everybody starts,”

You break out in giddy excitement again, jumping up and down a bit and looking back and forth just to make sure your creation is still there.

Without thinking, you kiss Agatha quickly on the lips.

She stares at you, mouth open.

Before you can apologize, she grabs your face and kisses you hard. She’s everything you’d imagined and more, soft and warm but with a spark you can’t ignore.

When you finally break apart, her hands linger, brushing across your features and in your hair, “I’ve been waiting to do that,”

Things change after that, but in only the best ways.

Agatha isn’t just your mentor anymore, the only friend who came to your aid.

She’s your everything now, a soulmate, your home.

You tell her all about your life, and she tells you all about hers. As she has significantly more stories to tell, you’ll fall asleep many nights to her whispering all the legends she lived through that no one else knows are true.

She makes you laugh every day, and makes sure you always know how much she cares about you. There’s only so much you can do in your hidden home in the woods, but with magic the possibilities are endless and she’s never short of romantic ideas.

Tonight you find yourself lying your head in her lap while she plays with your hair, close to the fire so you can watch the little shows she creates with the flames.

“What about love?” you ask.

“What about it?”

“Out of all the stories you’ve told me, you’ve never mentioned being in love before,”

“Well,” she sighs. “That’s because I haven’t been,”

“Why not?”

“It’s just never appealed to me,” she says. “Until I met you,”

“Oh,” you grin, looking up at her.

She leans down to kiss you, but you’re broken apart by a loud noise outside.

You shoot up, looking at Agatha in pure panic. Your heart races as the noise gets louder and louder, eventually leading to shouting and knocks at the door.

“WE FOUND YOU!” a booming voice yells.

“Aggie?” you whisper. Everything crumbles around you. Your perfect, happy life, now about to be stolen from you. You have no idea how they found you, if you are about to be dead, if you’ll be able to defend yourself at all.

She kisses you and stands up, “Stay here. I’ll take care of it,”

With a fling of her fingers the door flies open, and the torches the townspeople are holding are burnt out. She smirks, purple smoke covering the area as she goes through them one by one, some just throwing to the side and others suffering a painful death.

She turns their own weapons against them, their own people against them, and makes them regret everything they’ve ever done.

When she returns to you, you’re still in so much shock and panic you couldn’t tell exactly what she was doing.

“Did you…kill all of them?”

“They got what they deserved for threatening us,” she says nonchalantly. “But we’re not safe here anymore. It’s time to find somewhere new,”

“Okay,” you nod as she pulls you against her. “As long as I’m with you,”

“I’ll always protect you, even when you learn enough to protect yourself,” she kisses your forehead. “Always and forever,”

APPROXIMATELY FOUR CENTURIES LATER

“I’m back, darling!” Agatha calls, shutting the door behind her.

“How’d it go?” you run to her, grabbing her hands.

“Splendid, that poor Wanda already loves her new neighbor!”

“Wow,” you giggle. “You know I must say, this whole living in a sitcom thing isn’t that bad, you look gorgeous in that 50s dress,”

“Oh darling, somehow after all this time you still flatter me,” she pretends to fan herself. “I have to go back over real quick, alright? Gotta give her this spicy magazine,” she holds her hand up in the air and magically forms one in her grasp.

“Ah! Be sure to get some ideas to use on me when you get back,” she laugh.

“Oh I will honey,” she winks, kissing you before going out the door.

You settle on the couch, looking around at your home. Out of all the places you’ve moved to together, this was by far the weirdest. There’s no color, and everyone besides you and Agatha and Wanda are under some kind of mind control.

You never imagined that day all those years ago would bring you here, spending your life with a beautiful witch and being her partner in all things, even sinister ones. But you wouldn’t have it any other way, and you know this strange town will only bring you more opportunities to practice your magic and help Agatha with her plans.

#agatha harkness #wandavision #agatha harkness x reader #agnes x reader #wandavision spoilers #wandavision x reader

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

Text

Auntie ‘Soka and Little Leia (and Rex)

The counterpart to Uncle Ben and Little Luke (Original Post, Chrono)

Listen. You all knew this was coming.

This got... very long and detailed and I’m going to have to clean it up and post to AO3. As in, this was supposed to be 2-3k and is literally ten times that long. It crossed 25k. And the initial section actually glosses over a bunch, actual fic-style writing starts at “That, of course, is when things get interesting.”

Warnings: discussion of various canon traumas (most relating to being child soldiers), general PTSD, several scenes featuring dissociation or panic attacks upon being triggered, and canon-typical violence.

Rated T, gen.

I still want there to be de-aging nonsense involved so Ahsoka is physically a late teenager despite having a solid two decades of field experience behind her (we’re pulling her from Malachor).

Leia, much like Luke, is now six. She just came from being a rebellion general. She is not happy about being a child. She was already short, this is just mean. She’s a human espresso.

UNLIKE BEN, Ahsoka is not happy about this turn of events. Being seventeen-ish is not helpful in the outer rim. She’s a female togruta, young and healthy, and in the Outer Rim, caring for a small human child. Sure, she has her lightsabers and plenty of combat experience, and she can keep them safe, but she’s just one person, and a major target for those looking to make some quick cash. It doesn’t matter how good she is; she needs sleep at some point.

It makes my heart happy to treat Ahsoka and Rex as two halves of the same black ops specialist so you know what, he’s there too! He’s physically like... 10-12 in natborn, maybe. They’re not sure, because clones age weird. He’s moderately more useful than Leia (who is very competent but also physically six, and short for that age), but he’s still... very small.

Reminder that none of them have been born yet.

Ahsoka has a harder time explaining WHY she has children with her, since she's barely more than a kid herself, and clearly unrelated by species. She sometimes just says “Oh, my adoptive brother’s kids” since it’s kind of the truth for Leia and she’s not touching the actual truth about Rex with a ten foot pole.

Ahsoka definitely knows about Leia being a Skywalker, or at least has suspicions that Bail never outright confirmed but was conspicuously quiet about. She does tell Leia about it, but it’s not like that means anything, right? Just, you know, your dad was my teacher! I don’t have to tell you he became Va--oh shit, you already knew that part. Well, fuck. What do you mean he had a son? OH SHIT, PADME HAD TWINS.

Alt take for explaining why she’s got kids: She’s my foundling, I know her name as my child (Leia shut up!!!)

(Ahsoka can fake Mandalore. Sometimes.)

That said, there is... significantly less gambling and significantly more theft to get to Coruscant.

As previously stated, Ahsoka is a black ops kinda gal, and more importantly, she looks like a fairly attractive young woman in the Outer Rim, with two children in good health. She’s a target, and also not the kind of person one generally gambles with. If she does gamble, people get upset when she doesn’t lose, in ways they don’t get upset about Ben doing the same, because she’s, again, a cute teenage girl. It’s exhausting.

As things go, she largely ends up stealing from people who deserve it and/or smuggling herself and her charges into someone else’s ship. They’re small, they can hide. Sometimes she can get them all passage by working as a mechanic, she’s good at that.

Once they’ve got a handle on when they are, they have to decide on Names. None of them have been born yet, so technically they could use their own names without anyone Knowing. Rex and Leia might not even be born, depending on how successful they are at, you know, stopping the war and everything. Ahsoka, though, she’s going be born in two years, and there’s no reason to prevent it, so... she doesn’t want to steal baby-her’s name. That would be mean.

Leia is already calling her “Auntie ‘Soka” when she can for reasons like “selling the bit” and “manipulating adults” and “making us both feel better after we had a mutual breakdown about Anakin being Vader.” Ergo, she decides that whatever new name she picks better include that in some way, and decides on “Sokari” because it sounds pretty.

Overall, they don’t... they don’t actually make it very far before there’s an Incident. Again, teenager with small children. They spend a lot of time hiding out in space ports looking for an opportunity.

That, of course, is when things get interesting.

Specifically, Ahsoka spots a Mandalorian.

She doesn’t recognize the armor. She does recognize the sigil, and thinks ‘well, they’re more likely to help than some,’ because from what she’s heard, the Haat Mando’ade are Decent People Overall. Her view is a little biased, mostly on account of the sheer level of grudge she has against Kyr’tsad. It’s fine! The True Mandalorians have the same grudge, right? And Mandalorians like kids and Ahsoka hasn’t slept in five days and it’s fine. It’s fine! IT’S FINE.

“Oh shit,” Rex whispers, before she can suggest anything. “Oh fuck.”

“Stop cursing,” Leia hisses, elbowing him. “People are going to notice.”

“That’s the Prime,” Rex panics, mostly quiet. Ahsoka’s heart drops, because fuck is right. “That’s Fett.”

Leia isn’t impressed. Ahsoka just angles herself between Fett and Rex and hopes that he doesn’t see them. That’s just asking for trouble.

Unfortunately, Ahsoka is in fact running on none sleep with left trauma, and doesn’t notice Fett walking up and dropping into a seat across from them until he’s actually done so, removing his helmet to glare a little more efficiently.

“Wanna explain why your kid has my face?”

Ahsoka later tells herself that he’s killed Jedi and that’s why he can sneak up on her, and that she can be forgiven some slip-ups with the exhaustion being what it is, and that she’s obviously going to be dealing with some emotional instability in light of the sudden return of teenage hormones and new forms of anxiety that are markedly different from those she was dealing with a few weeks ago.

What Ahsoka wants to say is “that’s kind of a long story,” or “maybe he’s a cousin,” or “kriff off, I don’t know you,” or maybe even “he’s a clone.”

What Ahsoka actually does is burst into tears, which is embarrassing for her, for Fett, for the kids, and for the entire rest of the bar.

It really is the straw that broke the eopie’s back. Even when she was actually this age, she didn’t exactly cry much. Objectively, Fett quasi-aggressively asking a valid question shouldn’t send her into a panic. She’s been through torture and worse. She shouldn’t be crying.

But she is, sobbing her eyes out with no control, and he’s just sitting across from her and looking uncomfortable while Rex wraps his little arms--oh Force he’s so small--around her, and both ‘children’ glare at Fett.

“So, I’m going to take it she didn’t kidnap you from a loving family or do something illicit with a blood sample,” Fett says, after it becomes obvious that Ahsoka’s not going to be ready to talk any time soon.

“She didn’t,” Rex says stiffly, with just the right emphasis for Fett to catch what’s implied. Ahsoka just keeps her head down, eyes pressed against the heels of her palms, trying to get her body to stop rebelling against her.

Fett’s eyes dart to Leia, who folds her arms and draws herself up, every bit the unimpressed princess. “My father claimed her as a sister, so she’s my Auntie ‘Soka.”

The man dithers a bit, the conversation clearly not going where he’d expected. “Right,” he says. “You--you’re all kids. I thought she was a little older, at least, but I didn’t have a good look at her face before.”

She is older, but actually admitting that is only going to make this worse, both for her pride and for her chances of making it out alive.

“Where are you staying?”

“What?” Leia bites out.

“You’re kids, you’re alone, and you’re clearly not okay if you were trying to hide the one with my face as blatantly as you did, and then... whatever this is, when I confronted you,” Fett explains. Ahsoka lifts her head to glare at him, but it’s probably not doing much with the way her eyes are rimmed with red and still wet. “Don’t give me that look, ad’ika, your kids looked as confused and horrified by that as the bartender did. They obviously didn’t think it was normal either.”

Well, kriff you too, Ahsoka thinks.

“And what do you mean by ‘blatantly,’ here?” Leia challenges. It’s adorable, but Ahsoka watched this tiny girl shoot a man last week, and wonders when people are going to start taking that seriously.

“There’s a lot of people in this galaxy, and I don’t exactly have the clearest memory of what I looked like at that age,” Fett says, slow and careful like he thinks they’re dumb. Ahsoka decides to chalk it up as being because Leia’s visibly six. “I would have thought it was just a coincidence if you hadn’t put in effort to hide him.”

Leia huffs, and Rex glares harder. Fett just sighs, like they’re all going to give him grey hairs.

“You can explain whatever the hell’s going on,” Fett says. “I’ll let you stay on my ship, there’s a spare bunk and you’re small.”

“For free?” Rex demands.

“A night on a bunk in exchange for information,” Fett clarifies. “We can negotiate from there.”

Ahsoka takes a few moments, notes that both of the others are waiting on her for the decision, and cringes. She doesn’t feel steady enough to carry that. She has to anyway.

“Rex?” she asks, voice rasping after the breakdown of the past few minutes.

“Yeah?”

“How much?”

He looks up at her, eyes calculating, and grimaces. “We don’t want Order 66. A warning is better, even if we... share information.”

She nods, and turns to Leia. “Any premonitions, princess?”

Leia glowers, cute and furious. “No.”

“No, don’t tell, or no, you aren’t getting any vibes about sharing info one way or the other?”

“The latter,” Leia clarifies, huffy to the last.

“Right,” Ahsoka says, and then just... hesitates. “Fett...”

“You’ve got conditions,” he guesses.

She bares her teeth in what could have, through a squint and perhaps a few drinks, been called an apologetic smile. “Just one, really.”

“Yeah?”

“No hurting, killing, or turning us in for bounties,” she says. “Any of us.”

“You’re children, I wouldn’t.”

She blinks at him, slow and careful. She hesitates. She reaches down, out of sight, sees him stiffen.

She unclips her sabers from her belt and puts them on the table.

His eyes are fixed on the weapons the second they enter his line of sight, and don’t move as he clearly realizes why she made the condition she did.

“I left years ago, because I couldn’t stay without it ruining me,” she says. Still slow. Still careful. She’s so tired. “But if I want to keep Leia safe, I have to get back to Coruscant.”

His eyes finally lift from the sabers, expression blank. “Just her?”

“Rex doesn’t have the same monsters coming after him,” she says. “If it were just me and him, I’d worry less. Leia’s a different kind of target.”

“You’re putting a lot of faith on the table by telling me that,” Fett says, voice flat and toneless. “Considering my occupation.”

“She’s a child,” Ahsoka says, feeling heavy and boneless. “Even with what I was and will be, even with what money you would get from the right buyer, you wouldn’t.”

“There are other risks.”

“There are.”

They stare at each other for too long, probably, and then Fett jerks as Rex kicks him under the table. The boys glare for a moment, and then Rex says, “If she weren’t good, I’d still be a slave to those who grew me.”

Fett blinks, and then nearly growls the word, “What?”

“She freed me,” Rex reiterates. “While I was trying to shoot her.”

Ahsoka lifts a hand and puts it on his far shoulder, pulling him into her side. She doesn’t meet Fett’s eyes again, because part of her is back on Mandalore, dodging her own soldiers and crying out as her family dies across the galaxy.

Fett breathes in. Breathes out. He puts a hand to his head, visibly frustrated. “Fine. A good Jedi kid, and two smaller kids, one of which is apparently in some way mine.”

Rex makes a face, which is fair, but also not helping.

“To the ship,” Ahsoka says, putting her sabers back on her belt and sliding out of the seat. “I’m... I’m Sokari.”

“You already know my name.”

“I do.”

---------------------------

Fett watches her like she’s a predator, which has the benefit of being accurate and slightly flattering. She lets other two take care of most of talking, and then Fett tells her to sleep first, and talk in the morning.

“You’re dead on your feet, jetii,” he snorts. “And that crying jag didn’t do you any favors. Sleep.”

So she does, and Fett doesn’t even wake her. He just lets her sleep. He watches her in the way of a guard. She sees him when she gets up to use the ‘fresher in the middle of the night, but he doesn’t even comment when she collapses right back into the mediocre cot she’s borrowed for the cycle.

Rex and Leia are safe, her hindbrain tells her, even in the depths of sleep. Her mind curls around theirs in the Force, and she trusts that they are here. They are not happy, but they are alive and unharmed, and that has to be enough.

When she stumbles her way to true wakefulness, groggy and loose-limbed, Fett greets her with caf.

“The kids wouldn’t let me near you,” he tells her.

“They’re good,” she says, cupping her hands around the mug. She feels wobbly, in every sense. Her body, her mind, her emotions, her connection to the Force. Nothing is on-kilter right now. “Did they tell you anything?”

“They waited for you,” he says. “But the little miss needed a nap of her own. They’re down in the other bunk.”

“I didn’t notice,” she admits. She should have. She’s Fulcrum. She’s a veteran of the Clone Wars. She’s... she’s supposed to be better than this.

“How long?” he asks, and then when she squints up at him, he clarifies. “How long did you fight?”

“My last fight--”

“No, whatever war you came out of,” he says. Her chest twists cold. “I don’t know if the Jedi sent you into it or if you waded in yourself once you left, but you move like a soldier.”

“I was,” she confirms. “But... but I don’t want to talk about the details. Not until the other two are here.”

He frowns at her. “Is there anything you can talk about?”

She shrugs and looks away, trying to take solace in the warmth of the caff she holds above the table, as if it can hide her, guard her, from the disgraced Mand’alor across the table.

“Jedi?”

“I’m not officially a Jedi,” she says, voice quiet. “Not anymore.”

“Then what do I call you?” he asks. “We’re not exactly close enough for names.”

“Torrent,” she says. “It’s not--I can’t claim my family name anymore. But I can claim Torrent, so I will. And if you want a title, I was a commander.”

“Bit young for that.”

“I got the rank when I was fourteen,” she says, and watches his face do something complicated and unpleasant. “Don’t. I know your own culture puts children on the field that young.”

“Not in command.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, well... the soldiers were technically younger. Adults, but...”

Ahsoka can see the way he casts about to figure out what species grows at that rate. He guesses a few, and she shoots all of it down.

She won’t tell him. Not until Rex is awake.

This part of the story is his.

--------------------------

When Leia tries to sit alone, a foot away on the bench like a proper adult, Ahsoka refuses to let it happen. She pulls the younger girl to her side and quells protests with a glance. It’s a decent skill, but she’s not sure how long it’s going to work on her niece-in-spirit.

“Your body needs the chemical release of skinship,” she says, and Leia glares at her. “I spent way too much time with the boys to not know about this. Deal.”

Rex sits close enough to knock their knees together under the table, and his warmth is the old comfort she needs.

“Do you want the story you’ll believe, or the truth?” Ahsoka asks.

“What’s the difference?”

“One of them involves something so impossible that even most Jedi wouldn’t believe it,” she tells him.

Fett folds his arms and leans forward to rest them on the table, challenging but oddly open. “Try me.”

“Time travel.”

He blinks, just once, fully controlled. “That’s a tough one.”

“There were only three Jedi left alive when I died,” she says. “Or... whatever it is that happened to me. I think I died. All I know is that one moment, I was thirty-two and dying, and the next, I was... seventeen again, and had these two with me. All of us younger than we were. None of us have even been born yet.”

She refuses to look him in the eye. “They both outlived me by... six years, maybe. Got caught up while traveling instead of dying. Leia was twenty-two. Rex was thirty-five. I’m not technically the oldest anymore. I mean, physically I am, but that doesn’t mean anything, and it’s not exactly doing us any good, and--”

Rex bumps his shoulder to her arm. “I dunno, Commander. I’ve spent a long time looking older than I should. Nice to look younger for once.”

She shoots him a small, pained grin. “Could be worse, yeah.”

“Let’s say I believe you.”

Her attention snaps back to Fett, who’s looking damnably blank, and is showing even less in the Force.

He waits a second for her to relax back into her seat.

“Let’s say I believe you,” he repeats. “How’s ‘Rex’ connected to me? What’s so special about Leia there? And what war did you fight in that has you acting like a veteran?”

“Three years in the clone wars,” she whispers, glancing to Rex and forcing herself to not go for her sabers to defend against an attack that her paranoia says is coming and the Force says is not. “Then almost all the Jedi were wiped out at once, and I spent a year... drifting. Then black ops for the next fifteen.”

“Black ops,” he repeats, still damnably flat.

“There was a Sith Empire,” she says, and she can hear her own tone growing somehow emptier. “Glassing planets. Enslaving entire species. Committing genocides all over. Of course, there was a rebellion, and of course I joined it. I was one of the only people left with Jedi training. For all that I’d left the Order, I still had a duty to the universe.”

His eyes flit to Leia, who shrugs and tries to look prim. “I was adopted and raised by one of the founders of the rebellion, a movement built on the desire to instate freedom and democracy in a galaxy that had lost even the pretense.”

“That why you’re special?”

Leia smiles, thin and patronizing. It doesn’t fit on her little face. “I’m special because my biological father was one of the most powerful Force users in history, and his Fall to the dark side and choice to become a Sith is why the Emperor’s rise was nearly uncontested. I do not like power, but it’s in my veins and I can’t change that. Force users are... a lucrative trade, and I’m still the size of a child, so I can’t fight back. I’ll be safer in the Jedi Temple, even if I don’t want to be a Jedi.”

Fett looks to Ahsoka, makes to ask a question, and then shakes his head. Not the time, maybe.

“So, that’s all... very complicated and I don’t know how much of it I believe, but it doesn’t explain...” he trails off, and sighs. “My kid, or whatever you are. I heard you mention clones.”

Rex grins. It is not a kind expression.

“Let me tell you about Kamino.”

---------------------------

Ahsoka has no idea if Fett believes them. Either he thinks they’re telling the truth, or he thinks their delusional kids. Whatever the case, he offers to take them closer to the Core. Ahsoka quietly offers to take a look at his engine in return, and then pretends not to notice when Fett awkwardly drifts to and away from Rex.

“They put chips in our brains to make us kill the Jedi we respected, cared for, even loved. I tried to shoot ‘Soka, Fett. She was seventeen and risked her life to get that chip out of my head while I was trying to kill her. I have never hated myself more than when I woke up and realized what I’d almost done, and I was one of the few that were able to fight it. I heard the stories of dozens of brothers who woke with their chips having degraded and chose to eat their blaster rather than live with the guilt of the orders they’d followed without question because of a thrice-damned Sith slave chip in their head.”

“So no, I won’t call you father or acknowledge you as clan until you do something to prove you’re worth it, shared blood or not.”

What Ahsoka does get out of the arrangement, for all that Fett’s route mostly takes them on a meandering path that isn’t faster than their previous system, is sleep. She gets to rest. She gets to trust that Fett won’t kill Rex, out of guilt for something he hasn’t done, that he won’t kill Leia out of a worry that she’s just a delusional child, a real child, that he won’t kill ‘Sokari’ because it would ruin any chance of gaining Rex’s favor, ever.

She’s not safe, won’t believe she can be until she’s in the Temple and Sidious is dead dead dead, but she’s safer than she’s been in a long time.

Every night, Ahsoka wakes up and stumbles to the little galley, deaths and torture sparkling behind her eyes with the energy of a thousand lost Jedi, ten thousand mourned brothers and sisters.

She is not the only one of their little group to be a survivor of a near-total genocide, but Rex could not feel his brothers die in the Force, even if his nightmares featured what they heard of suicide missions by the emperor’s favored shock troopers, and Leia had... Alderaan had more off-world survivors than there had been Jedi at all.

It’s not worth comparing their pain. It’s stupid to even think it. Part of her can’t help but do it anyway.

“Caf?”

She feels a lek twitch in response to the voice of the only other person on board who can reach the top shelf. “I probably shouldn’t.”

“Whiskey?”

“That’s a definitely shouldn’t.”

“Hoth chocolate?”

“...please.”

She doesn’t lift her head from her arms until the mug clicks down in front of her, ceramic on plastisteel.

“Do I ask what it was this time?”

She shrugs. “It’s hard to explain to non-sensitives.”

“Try me anyway.”

Ahsoka twists the Hoth chocolate in her hands, takes a sip as she thinks. “The Force isn’t just one thing. It’s... energy and philosophy and spirit, a sense of being that ties the entire universe together. Sentient and inanimate and living and dead, empty space and lush forests and stifled cities. For those of us who are sensitive to it, it’s possible to feel the life of everyone around you, theoretically possible to feel entire systems. If you have a Force bond, like a master and padawan, that can stretch across planets, even systems if one or both are particularly powerful.

“So just... just imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to feel the screaming of all those Jedi in the Force as their trusted men shot them down.

“Some of them were close enough that I could feel them die,” she manages. “I... it’s horrible. It’s horrific. It’s not something I can ever forget, and I want to. I want to forget what that moment was like. Not that it happened, but...”

She can feel the tears. Fuck..

“You want to dull the edges.”

“Don’t we all?” she asks, scrubbing the back of her hand across her eyes. “Leia lost her entire planet, billions of people, and she was forced to watch. Rex... Force, I can barely imagine, and I was there for most of it.”

Fett watches her, measuring. “From what he said, they were as much your brothers as his, by the end.”

“No,” she immediately denies. “They could have been, maybe, but the ones I was closest to died earlier, and then I left, and by the time the Empire rose, all but a handful were... no. Rex, I will claim as a brother in all the ways that matter, but I don’t get to do that with the rest. I don’t have the right.”

“You’re hard on yourself.”

“Fate of the galaxy, my good bitch. Guess who’s got it on her shoulders.”

He snorts at her, and nods at the mug. “Drink your Hoth chocolate. We’re landing in eight hours, and you’ve got kids to look out for.”

---------------------------

There’s a twitch in the Force when they land, something pulling at her in a way she barely feels. She’s had her shields up so fully for so long that it’s natural to hide away what she is to the point where she can hardly tell what anyone else is, either. It takes more than a moment to remember how to let herself spread out across the world.

“Auntie ‘Soka? Why’d you stop?”

She doesn’t have an answer to Leia’s prodding question. “I don’t know.”

It’s almost familiar. Old and half-forgotten, not the same as what she remembers, but--

“This way,” she says, and wanders off into the crowd. Leia and Rex follow without question. Fett curses and rushes through the rest of his transaction with the docking attendant. The sound of him jogging after them is almost funny, with the armor, but she can’t focus on that.

Ahsoka slips between people with the ease of a career built on such a habit, children trailing like ducklings. She knows this feeling, she knows this person, what is she missi--

“Oh,” she breathes, going stock still. She knows that face. She knows those braids. She even knows the presence.

Younger than Ahsoka had ever seen her, but unmistakably Master Billaba.

“Torrent, what the hell?” Fett demands, finally catching up. “You can’t just run off like that!”

“It’s Depa,” she says, eyes still fixed on the woman parsing through a datapad with an irritated vendor. She has a padawan braid. It doesn’t feel like Master Windu is on-planet, so this might be a solo mission, a... oh. Senior Padawan, Knight Elect. This is the kind of mission taken to test if she’s ready to be promoted.

Ahsoka feels light-headed.

Fett waits for her to elaborate, but she can’t. This was Kanan’s master. This was a member of the High Council. This was a woman who died and--

“You need to sit down,” Fett says, not a touch gruff. He puts a hand on her shoulder and guides her off the main walkway. “I’m... going to talk to the woman in the Jedi robes. You three just stay there and don’t get kidnapped.”

Ahsoka nods, feeling like she’s not quite inhabiting her own body.

It’s Depa.

Her eyes track Fett without conscious control, and her montrals pick up the sound.

Depa looks up when the armor comes close enough, free hand tensed in a way that says she’s preventing herself from reaching for a saber in reaction to the heavily-armored individual standing several feet away.

“Mando,” the woman says. “May I help you?”

“Are you Depa?”

Depa doesn’t do anything so dramatic as gape or step back, but she does blink rapidly for a moment. She then folds her hands down in front of her, drawing her spine up ramrod straight. “I am Jedi Padawan Depa Billaba, yes. May I ask why it is that you need to know?”

Ahsoka imagines Fett grimacing, or rolling his eyes, or maybe dithering. She can’t tell from this angle, and he has a helmet on besides. It turns his awkward silences into judgmental ones.

“I’ve had some Jedi kids on my ship, hitching a ride,” he says at length. “One of them recognized you and then just... froze.”

“You have our younglings in your care,” Depa says, carefully not accusatory, but close enough to be a warning.

“Not quite,” he says. “The one that actually came from the temple is seventeen. One of ‘em isn’t Force Sensitive, and the last one is but hasn’t been to Coruscant before. They’re trying to get the little one to the Temple for her own safety.”

Depa considers that, and then passes the datapad to the vendor. “Lead on.”

It’s surprisingly simple, really. Fett did all the talking.

And then Depa is standing right in front of her.

“Like I said,” Fett sighs. “She froze up.”

“Hello,” Depa says, hands laced together inside her sleeves. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Ahsoka shakes her head. “I know of you. I’ve seen you spar. You’ve never spoken to me.”

All true. A little misleading, but it’s fine, it’s all fine.

Depa waits a moment, and then says, “You seem to have me at a disadvantage. You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“Sokari T-Torrent,” she manages. The words feel clunky in her mouth, the sound abrasive for all that it’s just her own voice, no different from usual. A little shaky, maybe. She can feel a cool breeze on her upper arms. Shouldn’t she have armor? She should have armor. “It... it’s been a long time since I’ve seen another Jedi. I’m having a hard time believing you’re real.”

“I see,” Depa says. “Perhaps we should take this somewhere more private? You seem a little unsteady.”

Ahsoka lets herself be led back to the ship, in the company of Mand’alor Jango Fett, Jedi Padawan Depa Billaba, Princess-General Leia Organa, and good old Captain Rex.

It’s like the start of a sick joke.

---------------------------

Fett and Depa talk where she can hear, but they rarely address her directly. Both seem to realize that she’s not particularly useful right now. Leia and Rex are pressing up against her at the little table in the galley, and Ahsoka lets them.

This is real. She can feel Depa in the Force, recognizes her energy even if it’s not quite what it will-was-could-have-been. This is happening.

It’s a textbook Traumatic Stress Response case, one of them says.

Fett has his helmet off. Ahsoka’s sure that’s wrong for some reason. She thinks he might already be on wanted lists. Should she worry about Depa trying to arrest him?

Depa asks about Rex at one point. Fett tells her that someone cloned him without his knowing, but the kid is more comfortable with Ahsoka so they’re still working on what that means for him.

It’s more or less true. Rex squeezes her hand the one time someone suggests separating them. She’s not letting that happen unless Rex wants to leave for whatever reason. They’ve worked apart before. They can do it again.

“Auntie Soka? You’re shivering.”

Is she?

Leia cuddles in closer, and Ahsoka runs a hand over her hair. It’s an absentminded motion, and for all that she knows Leia’s hair is fine as silk, it feels like plastic in the moment.

“I don’t think I’m okay,” Ahsoka announces. The words hang in the air like lead balloons, and she can feel Depa staring at her. “I haven’t been for a very long time.”

“Yeah, we noticed,” Fett says. “Do you need to lay down, Torrent?”

Does she?

“No,” she says. “I... I don’t know what I need.”

“The spicy drink,” Rex tells them. “It’s grounding.”

Right. That.

Fett goes to grab it, and Depa continues to watch.

“How long ago did you leave your master?” Depa asks. “Or... did he die?”

Ahsoka closes her eyes and shakes her head. She can feel the shivers now, tremors in her biceps and a shudder she can’t control in the height of her ribcage. Her teeth grind together, jaw like stone.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Depa assures her. “I’m... going to recommend you see a mind healer on Coruscant.”

That was a forgone conclusion.

A cup clinks onto the table. Fett’s back. “Drink.”

She does.

Depa and Fett continue discussing it as “the adults” at the table. She’s older than both of them. Rex is older than all of them. Ahsoka follows about half of what they say. She agrees with most of it. Rex bullies his way into speaking when she doesn’t, without her even asking, because he knows her mind as well as she does. Fett rolls with it. Depa lets him.

She’s going to reach out to the Temple and see about getting them a ride back to Imperial Center Coruscant.

Fett makes Soka go to bed, taking Leia with her.

---------------------------

She feels more like a person come morning.

Depa’s sitting at the table, datapad in her hands and caff on the table in front of her.

“Good morning,” Ahsoka says, rough and croaking, and Depa’s eyes flick up to meet hers. She nods a shallow hello.

“Feeling better?”

“Much,” Ahsoka says, and goes about gathering a breakfast. There’s definitely some dried meat in here. She can get something fresh when they stop by the market later.

“I was hoping to speak with you about your options,” Depa tells her, once she’s sat at the table. “Fett and your friend Rex took care of most of the negotiation, and I feel like I have an idea of what would work best for you.”

Ahsoka nods slowly. “Okay.”

“There is a Master-Padawan pair a few planets away,” Depa says. “The Council informed me when I spoke with them about you and your wards. They’d be headed back to the Temple in a few days anyway, and the Council has agreed to extend an offer to Fett to handle the transportation. The presence of a Jedi Master on board will allow for him to get in and out of the Core unmolested, and we’d like for you and yours to have a Jedi escort, given what happened yesterday afternoon.”

Her complete spiral into nonbeing?

“I understand,” she says instead. “I suppose Fett agreed because he’s still trying to get Rex to like him?”

Depa shrugs. “That part isn’t my business.”

Of course it isn’t.

“Rex can stay with me for a while, right?” Ahsoka finally asks. “I know it’s not exactly protocol, but I’m...”

“In need of a support system until you’ve seen a mind healer, and against all odds, the child is part of it,” Depa summarizes. “Yes, I recognized as much. I think the Council will be able to allow some leeway there. I don’t know if he’ll enjoy it, given that all the others his age are Initiates, but we can adjust as necessary. On that note... Do you know Leia’s midichlorian count?”

“No,” Ahsoka says, and hesitantly adds, “But her biological father was my Jedi Master, and I’m told his count broke records even as a child. Given what Leia’s shown so far... it’s why I’ve been in a hurry to get her to the Temple.”

Depa frowns at her, clearly working through the implications of a Jedi having a daughter and still teaching... and then visibly dismisses the situation, eyes closing to breathe in the steam of her caff.

Biological father certainly implies a child that was raised by her mother or adopted out so the Jedi father could remain in their chosen career without a conflict of interest or duty.

She’ll tell the council the truth, or... at least Master Koon. Master Kenobi is still a padawan, but she can tell Master Koon.

She already told Jango Fett, of all people.

“Padawan Torrent?”

Her head snaps up. She hasn’t been a padawan in over fifteen years. It’s weird to hear. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I asked if you wanted some time to think it over before I presented the offer to Fett,” Depa says.

Ahsoka gets the distinct feeling that Depa is planning a report to the Council that has ‘needs a mind healer’ underlined at least three times.

“No, I’m--I’m fine. That sounds like a good plan.”

“I’ll speak with him, then. Would you like to come with?”

"No, thank you.”

---------------------------

Fett agrees. Ahsoka’s pretty sure it’s all to do with Rex and maybe Leia. It’s probably nothing to do with ‘Sokari.’ She’s a Jedi, an adult in mind and in body, or at least close enough to count. She’s a damn sight more ‘enemy’ to Fett than the other two are. Not as much as Depa, maybe, but Fett’s been playing nice with her for Leia’s sake.

He plays nice with Ahsoka for Rex’s. That’s all.

They’re only a few planets over from the meeting point, and they have a few days to hang around before the escort meets them. Depa hadn’t given them a name--apparently it could have compromised the opsec for the Jedi team--but Ahsoka’s pretty sure she’ll be able to identify almost anyone. She gets the feeling that the Force is going to send her a familiar face, just as it did Master Padawan Billaba.

Ahsoka lets herself feel the world around her. It’s dark and dreary, in the sense that the beaten-down port is full of petty crimes and less petty horrors, but it’s still lighter than most of the Empire had been. She sneaks away from the ship at night, ignoring Fett at her back, and performs a bit of vigilante justice while she can. She’ll be banned from doing so as soon as she’s reinstated as a Jedi, probably, but for now... for now, she can look at the drug cartels and ‘they’re not slaves, really’ workers and do something to help.

She doesn’t use her sabers. She doesn’t need to. It’s been a long time since she has, for small fry like these.

“What are you doing?” Fett asks her, landing heavily behind her back.

“Chip removal,” she says, hand pressed to the slave’s leg. Her eyes are closed, but she can hear him shifting. “Let me concentrate, I don’t have a meddroid for this.”

He’s silent until she finishes, and waits until the people she’s helped are on their way to the planet’s freedom routes. He doesn’t ask what she did with the owners.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Regularly,” she confirms. “You?”

He doesn’t answer that, just ambles over to the the chains and stares down at them.

“Fett?”

“You go through this like it’s as easy as breathing,” he says. “It’s... impressive.”

“I guess?” she hesitates to continue. “I’m... I don’t think of it that way. This is the easy stuff. A time-waster that helps people. If I wanted to help for real, I’d been going after Jabba or Sidious or--”

“How old were you?” he asks, turning on his heel to face her dead-on. The vocoder of his helmet pulls the emotion from his voice. “When did this... these missions, the slavery battles, when did that start for you?”

“Fourteen,” she says. She’s not entirely sure, really, what counted as a mission for ending slavery and what counted as just a part of war, but she can round down. “Maybe fifteen. It’s a bit of a blur.”

“And you just kept doing it.”

“Of course,” she says. “If I have the time and the energy, if I need to do something and there’s nothing official on my hands, why not?”

He doesn’t answer her.

---------------------------

Rex greets them before she does.

Ahsoka, in her defense, is asleep at the time. It’s a restless sleep, but it’s enough that she doesn’t sense the nearing Force signatures until they’re almost at the ship.

She recognizes one of them.

“Auntie ‘Soka?” Leia questions, when she lurches to her feet and starts pulling on her boots with all the energy of a zombie. “Where are you going?”

“Jedi,” Ahsoka grunts. “Here.”

“I see.”

Leia dresses to follow her, in a little coat that’ll withstand the chill of the outside air, and Ahsoka makes it to the cargo hold just in time to hear Rex saying, “I’m not shaking your hand until you put your gloves on, Vos.”

She laughs to herself, breathless with the knowledge of what she’s about to find. She jumps the railing of the upper walkway, drops down just in front of the Master-Padawan team, and keeps her back to Fett and Rex. “Hello, there.”

One human, one Kiffar. She knows the latter.

“Would you be Sokari Torrent?” the Master asks.

“I am,” she says, with a slight bow. She can tell there’s a bit of judgement for how she’s dressed, but they’re covering it well. A Shadow and his trainee know the value of armor better than most Jedi bother with. “I’m afraid Padawan Billaba didn’t inform me of your names before we met.”

“And yet your friend knew my padawan,” the Master says.

“By reputation,” she says, as smoothly as she can. “I’ve encountered Quinlan Vos before, though I doubt he remembers--”

“I’d remember someone like you,” Quinlan interrupts, with a grin she’s sure is meant to be charming and rogueish.

He’s... very young for her, and not her type. Mostly, she wants to pat him on the head, but that probably wouldn’t go over very well. She still looks like she’s younger than him.

“Anyway,” she says, turning back to the master, “I’m afraid I still don’t know who you are, Master.”

“I am Tholme,” he says, with the bow that a Master gives a Padawan. She feels a little slighted, but it’s fine. She looks the right age, it’s fine.

It’s not like they know.

“It’s nice to meet you, Master Tholme,” she says. “My charges are Rex Torrent, the young man behind me, and currently coming down the ladder is Leia Antilles. I’m sure you’re aware of Jango Fett.”

“The Mand’alor,” Quinlan volunteers, and Ahsoka can almost hear Fett’s teeth grinding.

“Don’t call me that,” he says. She’s sure he’s got a hand drifting for his blaster.

“There isn’t a whole lot of room on the ship,” she says before the men can get into whatever weird contest she’s sure someone might start. Her bet’s on Fett. “But Leia and Rex are small enough to share with me, so I’m sure we can make it work.”

“There’s spare rolls for anyone comfortable with sleeping in the hold,” Fett grunts. “Or on the floor in the passenger room.”

“Well, I guess I could ask for a little help fi--”

“Vos,” Ahsoka snaps, letting her voice take on the kind of ‘obey me or get fresher duty’ irritation that she’d perfected back when the rebellion still had her managing people, before they’d realized she was more use in the field. “Do not.”

There’s a moment’s pause, and Tholme looks unimpressed with that raised eyebrow, but the kind of unimpressed that’s split between his own padawan and the stranger before him.

“Um,” Quinlan says. “I just--”

“No,” she cuts him off. “No flirting.”

It’s weird and uncomfortable and she’d have maybe been okay with it if she was actually the seventeen-or-eighteen-ish(?) that she looked, but she’s not. She’s in her thirties and Vos is... what, twenty? Twenty-one? No.

He stares at her, and she wonders momentarily if she’d gone too far in the direction of judging his intentions in the Force and preempted actual flirtations.

“I’m sorry?” He offers, looking confused, but ashamed. “I, uh, I’ll keep that in mind.”

She definitely preempted the actual flirtation.

Fuck.

Ahsoka closes her eyes and breathes in. Breathes out. Opens her eyes. “Right. That was... I’m not sure how much Padawan Billaba told you about me.”

“Enough,” Tholme says. He moves forward and puts a hand on Quinlan’s shoulder. Ahsoka has no idea if it’s to comfort him or hold him back. “I didn’t share most of it with my padawan, but I have a general understanding of what’s going on.”

Quinlan darts a look at his teacher, but Ahsoka doesn’t acknowledge it. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

“Thank you for your understanding,” she says, and bows, and stiffly turns away to walk to the galley.

---------------------------

Leia squirms into the bench seat, shoving her way under Ahsoka’s arm like a particularly wriggly tooka.

“What was that?” Leia demands, the authority of a rebellion general rather useless in the squeaky voice of a child.

“What was what?”

“The whole thing with Padawan Vos,” Leia says. “You blew up at him before he even did anything.”

That’s pretty true.

“I felt the flirtation coming before it happened and reacted inappropriately because I panicked. I’m significantly older than him, but I can’t tell him that, so it’s just awkward and uncomfortable and... I’m not okay, Princess. I haven’t been for a long time.”

“Yeah, we can tell.”

“Leia.”

“What? I need therapy too! Captain Rex needs therapy! I’m pretty sure Fett needs therapy! You, Fulcrum, you really need therapy. None of us are okay.” She huffs, wiggling impossibly closer. “I don’t like it, but it’s true.”

“I know,” Ahsoka groans. “I just... I just need to hold out until the Temple.”

“Will you be able to hold it together if you see someone you actually care about?” Leia demands. “What are you going to do when you see Kenobi?”

“Stop.”

“I’m serious, you--”

“Leia, that’s enough,” she snaps. “I was fighting that war before you were even born, and I’ve dealt with the consequences since. I know the risks and I’ll thank you to remember who taught you to control your own mind.”

Leia stiffens, sucking in a sharp breath. “That was uncalled for.”

“You’re not the child you appear to be,” Ahsoka reminds her, not a little sharply. “You want to dish it out, be ready to take it. What will you do when we see Bail Organa? When we see the toddler that is Anakin Skywalker?”

“I get it.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Ahsoka mutters. She isn’t surprised when Leia ducks out of the embrace and leaves the galley. She lets the girl go, guilt warring with the memory of how Master Kenobi had more than once spoken that way to Anakin at the height of the war. The fact that she’s an adult in the body of a child isn’t an excuse for poking at Ahsoka’s open wounds. It was cruel and unnecessary, and unbecoming of a... not a Jedi. A princess. A politician.

She rests her head on her arms and zones out. She should meditate, but that seems like... too much effort.

She can feel Vos and Tholme setting up in the room they’ve been assigned. Neither seems particularly angry. Most likely, Tholme’s given the absolute shortest explanation of ‘child soldier, dead master, highly traumatized and emotionally unstable’ to Vos to smooth over the incident in the cargo hold. Rex is with Leia; he’s agitated, but less so than Leia herself. Fett’s annoyed, in the cockpit, but he seems annoyed as often as not. There’s a shudder at lift-off, and a few minutes later, they’re in hyperspace, headed for the Core.

Fett finds her, falls into the other bench in full armor, and drops his elbows onto the table. The helmet clunks down a moment later.

She doesn’t lift her head. “What do you want?”

“Do I need to keep Vos away from you?”

“What?”

“Vos. He made you uncomfortable. Was that him being someone that hurt you in the future, or just the interaction being awkward?”

She lifts her head. She stares at him. “What?”

He leans back and crosses his arms. “Do you need me to tell Vos to stay the hell away from you?”

She’s gaping. “You realize I’m thirty-two, right? I can handle my own battles.”

“You’re also traumatized as hell and everyone can see it,” Fett argues back. “If Vos himself is a trigger, I can handle it.”

“He’s not,” she tells him. This is strange. Fett’s being strange. “He was actually a friend of my grandmaster’s. I’m just uncomfortable with the flirting because I’m a lot older than he realizes, and I can’t tell him that.”

He nods sharply, and then looks away. The silence sits.

“Thanks for asking?” Ahsoka says, well aware of how her confusion over the offer turns it into a question. “I mean, thank you for... caring.”

I guess, she finishes in the privacy of her own head. Or at least pretending to.

Fett makes a face, still not facing her. He eyes the galley instead. She can guess where his thoughts are going. The galley is... not very big, especially with six people on board instead of one, but she’s sure they’ve stocked up enough. On the off chance they do go through more than expected, because of how many growing bodies are in residence, they can stop off and buy more. They have those resources now.

Jango never does ask what she did with the slavers.

“Who’s going to cry if I spice things properly?” he asks.

“Probably Leia,” she says immediately. “Vos will try to power through it even though he’s going to be overwhelmed. No idea about Tholme, but I think he’ll keep a straight face whether he likes it or not. Rex and I are fine, ‘hot’ was pretty much the only flavor of seasoning the GAR had.”

“GAR?”

“Grand Army of the Republic.”

He finally looks at her.

“You already knew I was a child soldier, Fett; don’t act surprised.”

“That doesn’t mean I like hearing about it.”

“I was fourteen. That’s old enough by Mando standards, Fett. Just think back, when did you get on the battlefield?”

“I take your point,” he says, lip curling unpleasantly. “It just hits different now that I’m old enough to look back and think of how damned young fourteen really is.”

Ahsoka shrugs. “Yeah, well--”

“You said the clones were ten.”

There’s the rub, isn’t it?

Of course it was about the clones.

“...closer to seven, by the end. Kamino was just making speedies at that point. Triple growth on the average instead of double, but averages in that case meant they’d been growing at double rates for six years and then got forced through four growth cycles in a single year to beef up the army when we kept losing men.” She looks down at the table, picking at a scratch in the plastipaint with her nail. “Rex and the rest of the ones from the beginning were basically twenty in mind and body, even if they’d only been decanted ten years earlier. The speedies... I always wondered. They’d gone from functionally twelve to functionally twenty in a year. That’s not... even in Kamino, that can’t have been normal. They didn’t act like adults, not the way the originals did.”

Fett rubs at his face, groaning. He swears under his breath in three different languages.

She pities him, if only because he hasn’t actually done any of this yet. He’s paying for the crimes of a man he likely won’t ever become.

She kicks him under the table. “Wanna make tiingilar and see how long it takes Vos to start crying while he insists it’s fine?”

---------------------------

Dinner is when the questions start. Some are relatively easy. Others, not so much.

“My Master was Leia’s biological father,” is an easy truth to share. “She inherited his power, so I need to get her to the temple for her own safety, because home no longer is.”

“Yes, her adoptive parents were unfortunately killed rather recently. We’d prefer not to talk about it.”

“Rex is with me. Where he goes, I go, and vice versa.”

That one gets her an odd look.

“I thought...” Quinlan trails off, gesturing between Rex and Fett.

Fett keeps his face impassive, but his discomfort and guilt leak into the Force. “I didn’t know Rex existed until I ran into these three in a spaceport cantina a few weeks ago.”

Quinlan blinks at him, looks at Rex again, and then turns back to Fett with a grin that might have been described as ‘saucy’ if he were less smug about it. “Wild oats, huh?”

“Are you shitting me right now,” Leia whispers, and Ahsoka elbows her.

“That was inappropriate, padawan.”

Quinlan’s grin fades as Fett just continues to eye him.

“Um, so--”

“How old is the kid?” Fett interrupts.

Darting eyes answer him, as Quinlan tries to gauge Rex. “Ten? Maybe twelve?”

“And how old am I?”

“...early thirties?”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

Quinlan’s grin fades further as he does the math.

“I’d have been between fifteen and seventeen when he was born,” Fett says, tone flat. “Between fourteen and sixteen at conception. I know damn well I wasn’t doing anything that could have resulted in a kid at that age.”

Quinlan rallies. “So, brothers?”

Tholme sighs loudly, hand over his eyes.

“I’m a clone,” Rex says, and Ahsoka can feel the amusement he gets out of Quinlan’s confused shock. They’d both had plenty of respect for Master Vos, but Padawan Vos was nothing but trouble. “Harvested genetic material, grown in a tube, inconsistent aging meaning I don’t even know how old I am for sure.”

“I broke him out,” Ahsoka adds, which is half true.

“There was a chip in my head,” Rex adds, with a bright smile. Quinlan’s discomfort grows. “She got it out. Also, lots of brothers. None of them are... around anymore. The creators were trying to make an army.”

Vos and Tholme have no response. Fett looks like he’s been carved out of stone. Leia’s just ignoring them and picking at her food.

Ahsoka lifts a hand and, without looking, Rex high-fives her.

---------------------------

“Drop your elbow.”

Ahsoka tries to cover her smile at the dirty look that Leia shoots Fett. Fett remains unimpressed by the glare of royalty, just gestures for the girl to do as he said.

“I know how to fight,” Leia grumbles. “I took lessons. I was good at them.”

“And I’m better,” Fett says, leaving no room for argument. “You want the Torrents to take over?”

The Torrents. Rex and Soka. She likes being referred to that way. Like they’re a team that never got split up.

Force, she wished they’d never gotten split up.

“Again,” Fett orders, and Leia moves through the Mandalorian kata with ill grace in her emotions and all grace in her sweeping limbs.

Well, as much grace as an undersized six-year-old can, at any rate.

“Think he’ll ask me to spar her again?” Rex asks, dropping down into the seat next to Ahsoka and passing her a drink.

“Maybe,” she acknowledges. “I think he’s wondering if it’s worth asking Vos to spar with her, so she gets more experience with size differences.”

“Hm?”

“She flinched at his face again,” she tells him. “The whole... thing with Boba, I guess. She still won’t tell me why Fett triggers her sometimes, but he’s not pressing her to spar with him, and there’s only so much she can get out of fighting me. Asking Tholme would be presumptuous, but Vos is just a padawan. I think it’d work out.”

“And you?”

She looks at him, already feeling a cresting wave of bullshit she doesn’t want to deal with. “What about me?”

“Are you going to spar with the Jedi?”

She should. She hasn’t sparred with a saber since she got tossed back into a body only half-familiar to her. She’s let Leia borrow the shorter one to learn some basic blocking moves, Shii-Cho and then, with hesitance, the first Soresu form. Another time, she loaned it to Rex to practice some attacks; they both know that the next time he picks up her saber in battle, having lost his weapons or she her grip, it will be neither the first or last time he wields a sword of light. None of that, however, is... sparring.

None of that is against someone who knows what they’re doing.

How long has it been since she sparred with anyone other than Kanan and Ezra?

How long has it been since she sparred without the looming specter of Darth Vader in the back of her mind, without fear of the Inquisitors, without the knowledge that any saber held by someone other than her two friends would be red as blood and twice as drenched.

Would she be able to hold back as she fought?

“I should,” she acknowledges, eyes on where Fett is nudging Leia’s feet into position for some kind of leveraging flip. She’s so small. “It would probably be a good idea to spar against a master at some point.”

“Do you think you can?” Rex asks.

“I never knew him,” she says. “And he isn’t Dark. It should be fine.”

Rex nods, taking her word for it. They watch as Leia stumbles on a final move, and Fett gestures for her to sit down and get a drink.

“That man is a terror,” she informs them.

(She’d once described him as a slave-driver. She had not made that mistake twice.)

“Least it’s not Kamino!” Rex tells her cheerfully. When Leia refuses to look impressed, he laughs at her.

Ahsoka has a half-second’s warning before heavy boots thud to the ground next to her. “What’s Kamino?”

“Hello, Vos, it’s nice to see you too,” she drawls. “I’m good, thanks for asking, and yourself?”

The boy-not-quite-man rolls his eyes. “Hi, Torrents; hi, tiny one.”

Leia glares at him next.

“So, Kamino?”

“Planet by Rishi,” Rex says.

“Why were you there?”

“They specialize in cloning.”

Ahsoka covers her mouth as the conversation drops into the same awkward gap that always happens when Quinlan stumbles into a subject he didn’t know to avoid.

“Like... you were made there, or you were researching how it works for your own--”

Ahsoka slaps a hand over his mouth. “Now’s a great time to stop talking.”

He licks her palm.

She bares her teeth and arches her fingers just enough to press nails into his cheek.

He bites at her palm, and she yanks her hand away.

“You’re all children,” Leia accuses, conveniently forgetting that Ahsoka and Rex are both over a decade older than her.

“I can throw you the length of a swimming pool,” Ahsoka tells her. “One of the fancy competition-ready ones that would make a Tatooinian cry. You are absolutely the child here.”

“Using the Force is cheating, sir,” Rex informs her.

“Only if there’s a competition,” Ahsoka shoots back. “And proving that a certain princess is a small child is not a competition. It’s a declarative fact.”

“I’m going to rip open the seams on all your tops except the ugliest one,” Leia decides.

“Try me,” Ahsoka challenges. “Adi’ka.”

A low, rough cough interrupts them. “Are you done?”

Fett has his arms crossed, and an eyebrow raised. He knows they’re all adults here, and is entirely unamused. As the silence drags, the eyebrow climbs a little higher.

“Done with what?” Quinlan finally asks, thereby volunteering himself to spar in hand-to-hand with Jango Fett, as one does.

“Poor, poor Vos,” Rex laughs, watching as Fett barks out orders at Quinlan every five seconds to fix his footwork, to stop dropping his guard, to stop wasting energy on flips instead of just dodging the easy way.

“Throw him!” Ahsoka calls. To her delight, Fett obliges.

The thing is, Quinlan isn’t bad at brawling. He’s got training, endurance, skill. The man knows what he’s doing, objectively. He’s just not a match for Fett, and is used enough to relying on his saber that his hand-to-hand skills are rusty. They are perhaps less rusty than those Jedi who don’t take questionable jobs in the Mid-Outer Rim, and Ahsoka’s got a suspicion that Vos regularly gets into bar fights in his downtime, but none of that is enough for him to actually do more than survive against Fett without his saber.

Even the saber wouldn’t help, if Fett had his armor.

“Whose idea was this?”

Ahsoka cranes her head back and smiles. “Hello, Master Tholme. Vos... volunteered.”

“Did he know he was volunteering?”

“No comment.”

Tholme snorts, crossing his arms and eyeing the spar in front of him. “I thought Fett hated Jedi. Giving us a ride for the sake of you three is one thing, but why is he teaching my padawan?”

Ahsoka shrugs. “Constructive bullying?”

There’s a small twitch of a smile, quickly gone. “He said something wrong, I’m guessing?”

“There was no way he could have known,” she dismisses. “We’re just, like, ninety-percent tragic backstories.”

“You’d think the Force would warn him,” Rex notes.

“That’s not how the Force works,” Leia chides.

“No, no, he’s right,” Ahsoka corrects. “The Force does sometimes step in to stop a person from saying something stupid. However, Padawan Vos is at an age where people think they are very rational while being more irrational than they likely ever will be again.”

“Do I want to ask what you were doing at that age?” Tholme asks.

“Running bla...” she trails off, then whips around to gape at him.

He smiles, bland and unassuming. “Does Fett know?”

“Know... what?” Ahsoka asks.

“That you’re significantly older than you look,” he says, voice just low enough that the sparring duo can’t hear him. “All three of you.”

Ahsoka turns back to the spar, only catching Tholme out of the corner of her eye. “He knows.”

“Mm. Were you planning on telling the Council?”

“Yes.” That part was never in question. “How did you figure it out?”

“I am a good investigator,” he says. “And you rely a little too heavily on your physical forms to obfuscate. Were it just one of you, that wouldn’t be a problem, but the pattern repeated across three is a little easier to discern.”

“I hoped the whole ‘child soldiers’ thing would be a bigger distraction,” Ahsoka mutters. She glances at Leia and Rex. Both of them are used to being in charge to some degree, giving orders and making contingency plans, but in this... in this, Ahsoka is in charge. They’d decided that at the very start. It didn’t matter that Rex had lived longer and had more experience, or that Leia had held the highest Rebellion rank of the three of them. Ahsoka had been agreed as leader, and they were relying on her.

They’re waiting on her orders. Stiff and unhappy, in Leia’s case, but they trust her.

“Will you be telling Vos?” She asks.

“No,” Tholme says. “Your secrets remain your own unless they endanger us, and I’ve a feeling they won’t be.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Rex jokes, smile not reaching his eyes. “I’ve been working with this family for too long to trust that trouble won’t find them around the next corner.”

“This family?” Tholme repeats.

“Sokari was telling the truth about her master being Leia’s biological father,” Rex says. He shrugs. “I worked with him, with his wife, with both of his kids, with his master and his padawan. All of them, to a one, are trouble magnets.”

“Ah, but that’s not the secret that’s putting us in danger,” Tholme points out. “Simply existence as a Jedi.”

Rex shrugs. “Fair enough. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.”

Ahsoka lurches to her feet, turning with a smile and dancing backward into the the stretch of empty cargo hold they used for such things. “A spar, Master Tholme?”

He looks past her, to Quinlan, and raises a brow. “Would you not prefer to spar with someone a little closer to your level first?”

She barks out a laugh. “Master Tholme, I’m afraid I’ve spent more of my life fighting to survive than having normal friendly spars. My style is more lethal than the average, and you’ve already seen what war’s done to my mind. I ask to spar with you because, if I lose control, if I slip in time or react on an instinct that isn’t appropriate, I trust that you’ll be more able to stop me than a senior padawan.”

He smiles. “Yes, I gathered as much. Still, better to ask. Shall we wait for them to finish up?”

Ahsoka shrugs, turns, and yells. “Clear the deck!”

Rex snorts behind her, and lowly mutters, “Sir, yes, sir.”

She smirks at him over her shoulder. “At ease, Captain.”

“That’s ‘Commander’ to you, I got promoted,” he sniffs, chin held high.

Heavy steps herald Fett’s arrival at their little group. “The hells are you doing?”

“I’m going to have a spar with a Jedi Master, and I want you and Vos to not get stabbed.”

“I’m not that easy to injure in an actual fight, let alone by accident,” Fett grouses. He looks up and over at Vos, who is already significantly taller, if a fair shot less built. “This one, on the other hand...”

“Hey!”

Ahsoka laughs and backs into the center of the cargo hold, drawing her sabers. “Don’t worry, Vos, I won’t play dirty. You’ll probably get your master back in one piece.”

He wrinkles his nose at her. “Getting a bit ahead of yourself there, aren’t you? He’s a Jedi Master and former Watchman. You’re... what, eighteen?”

Ahsoka raises a brow and activates her sabers, tapping the blades together and watching as more than one person winces. “Wanna bet on how long I last?”

“No,” he says immediately, stepping back to join Rex on the bench. “You’ve already blindsided me enough. I’m not dumb enough to fall for whatever you’ve got up your sleeve.”

“I don’t have sleeves.”

“Armwarmers-slash-greaves, then.”

“Greaves go on the legs, these are vambraces.”

He throws his hands up in the air. “I’m just going to stop talking now!”

“Good plan,” Leia snarks, and then literally hisses when Rex ruffles her hair.

Tholme lights his saber and sinks into an opening stance.

Ahsoka mirrors him.

---------------------------

She wins, but barely. She's had a few weeks to practice her forms, has sparred hands-only with Rex and Fett, but this is her first real try at using her sabers against a person, instead of a blaster or thin air, since she arrived in the past. She’s only mostly adjusted to her body.

But Tholme is a healer and a watchman, not a duelist. Ahsoka held her own against Ventress, against Grievous, against Maul when she was this age. Still adjusting to her body or not, her lineage is one of battle, and it bled true.

“You’re terrifying,” Quinlan tells her after they’re done, smiling like the sun as he hands her a towel. “Please never turn that on me.”

She laughs at him. “Would you believe that I’m out of practice?”

“Out of practice with what?” he asks, horrified and fascinated. “Fighting Sith Lords?”

“Among other things,” she says, and smirks when he chokes on his drink. “Multiple darkside users who claimed to be Sith, at least. One being a full Lord, one that was disowned by his master, and one that was apprenticed to a Banite apprentice, so she wasn’t technically allowed to be a Darth because of the rule of two.”

Tholme meets her eyes past Quinlan’s shoulder, head tilted and eyes half-shut in consideration. He’s taking her seriously. He knows what she’s not saying.

“How...” Quinlan trails off and shakes his head. “You know what, no. Asking you people questions never ends well.”

“Good plan,” Ahsoka says, clapping a hand down on his shoulder. “Also, you need to spar with Fett more. Your footwork is shit.”

“It is not,” Quinlan gripes. “You’re all just scary good at this stuff.”

“You mean surviving?” Leia pipes up, and smiles innocently when Quinlan turns to pout at her.

“You’re getting bullied by a six-year-old,” Rex informs him.

“Yeah,” Quinlan sighs. “I know.”

Ahsoka laughs, and it’s fine. It’s all fine. For a week, everything is honestly great. She trains, she laughs, she works through the nightmares.

Then fucking Denon happens.

---------------------------

Denon is a city-planet on the intersection of two major hyperlanes. It’s the kind of place where they stop for two things:

Fuel.

Paperwork.

Technically, there’s a whole mess of paperwork they have to fill out to continue along this specific hyperlane, since they aren’t official Republic ships, and don’t have the licenses to just pass along like ships that are pre-registered to the Trade Federation or the like. They could sneak past--literally all of them know smuggler’s routes--but it’s honestly less of a pain to do things legally. They have a Jedi Master. They have cash. Some of that cash wasn’t quite legally acquired, but nobody needs to know that.

It’s supposed to be a pit stop. That’s all.

It’s just a pit stop.

But no, the galaxy isn’t that kind and Ahsoka’s luck is currently being compounded with a Skywalker, two Fetts, and Vos, which means that of course they run into trouble. Of course they do. There was never any other option, was there?

“Motherfucker,” Ahsoka snaps, lifting her head up and slamming her drink on the table.

The glass is empty. That’s good. They’re in a restaurant right now, a little splurging after weeks with only each others’ company, and spilling the sugary child-friendly juice with that move would have drawn way too much attention from the servers.

“Language,” Tholme says, voice idly unconcerned.

“Sir?” Rex asks, kicking Ahsoka under the table. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wr--that jackass,” she hisses, getting to her feet. “Rex, grab a blaster, I’ve got shebs to kick.”

“Okay,” Rex says, grabbing one out of Fett’s holster and scooting out of the booth before anyone can tell him not to. “Whose?”

“I didn’t even know that he was... osik, I don’t have jurisdiction,” she realizes. “I don’t have any record of wrongdoing. I can’t arrest him since we don’t have evidence of criminal wrongdoing...”

“Are you two going to explain what’s going on?” Vos asks. “Or sit down, maybe?”

Ahsoka makes her decision. She eyes the window--the restaurant in question is a little dingy, but it’s also several dozen stories in the air. “Rex, remember the thing we did on Geonosis that you hated?”

He pauses, and then sighs heavily. “Yes, sir. I remember the... yeeting.”

Hah. That slang doesn’t even exist yet.

“Great. With me!”

It’s a good thing the windows are forcefields instead of transparisteel. A bit of a twist to the energy and they’re gone.

She only hears a little screaming before the wind tears all noises away while they plummet.

They land lightly--of course--and Ahsoka wraps them both in a don’t notice me aura. Nobody even notices that they’ve just come from above. It’s great that she can just Do These Things again, and get brushed off as Weird Jedi Shit, instead of worrying about the Empire. She’s missed being able to jump out of windows without fear.

Rex follows her as she starts running through the city. They don’t have comms, and he’s still so small, which means he can’t keep up with her even if she runs at normal speeds without Force enhancement.

“Should you carry me?” he asks, before she can figure out if it’s worth suggesting. She did it a few times before they joined up with Jango.

“It’s not... urgent, I think,” she says. She hesitates to speak, even as she keeps jogging with Rex at her heels. “Honestly, I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything I can ding him for so we can attack him. It’s all well and good that I can beat him right now, but all the crimes I know about haven’t happened yet, so it wouldn’t be legal...”

“Commander?”

“Hm?”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

She scrolls the conversation back mentally, considers, and says, “Oh.”

“Who’s getting steamrolled?”

“Uh, Maul’s here,” Ahsoka admits.

“Ah,” Rex says. He makes a face. “I understand the desire to jump out a window, now. I don’t agree with it, but I understand.”

Ahsoka laughs. “I mean, I just... every time I’ve seen him for almost twenty years, it’s been like... on sight, you know? We’ve never not attacked each other, except when I needed him to cause problems on Mandalore. But I always knew I was in the right, then.”

“So... what do we arrest him for?” Rex prompts.

“Um... carrying a lightsaber without a license?” she hazards. “We’ll need Tholme there. Hopefully I can just shout at him and he’ll attack me, but I think he only went full nutjob after Master Kenobi cut his legs off. He might be too controlled to try to kill me just for yelling at him.”

“...do we have to stalk him?” Rex asks, sounding like he’d most likely sigh if he weren’t mid-run.

She scoops him up and swings him around onto her back before she answers. “I think we have to stalk him, Rex’ika.”

“Don’t call me that.”

---------------------------

Maul is... exceptionally sneaky, actually. Either that, or he hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Ahsoka’s betting on the former, because she’s seen this particular skocha kung take over a planet before anyone realized he was the most dangerous person around.

Or maybe he’s just not committing crimes, and is in fact just here to buy groceries.

He’s examining a papaya.

She fantasizes about jumping across the market and greeting him with a heel to the cheekbone.

“Are you imagining a flying kick, Sir?”

“Yeah...”

“He’s examining a papaya, Sir.”

“I know...”

“Does he know we’re here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? Do you think I should go hit him?”

“No.”

“Should I hit on him?”

“No, Sir. I would not advise that.”

“He’s looking at the neloms.”

“I can see that.”

“Why does he have to be so bo--did he just fucking bite a nelom?”

“It appears so, Sir.”

“Like... like rind and all. Just bit the little fucker.”

“Seems it.”

A scuff of metal. “What the fuck are you two doing?”

Ahsoka tips her head around to peer through the grate. “We’re spying, Fett, what does it look like we’re doing?”

Rex cranes his head. “We’re hanging upside-down from a fire escape to get a look at a suspected Sith Apprentice that is currently shopping for various fruits, Mand’alor.”

Ahsoka waves. “Hi, Master Tholme.”

“Sokari,” the master greets. “This seems a very conspicuous way to spy.”

She shrugs as well as she can from this angle. “Yes, but you see, this way’s more fun.”

“Is it now.”

Rex shifted. “He’s on the move!”

“To kill someone?!”

“No, to the deli meats.”

“Kriff.”

---------------------------

Apparently, Tholme and Fett had told Quinlan to take care of Leia, as Leia had wanted to finish her juice and refused to get involved in the Torrents’ nonsense. According to her, if they couldn’t be bothered to explain the nonsense, they didn’t need her.

This was true and accurate.

Quinlan shows up while they’re still stalking Maul, having moved to a low rooftop for a decent vantage point with less likelihood of being spotted. He’s giving Leia an eopie-back ride, and the pout on her face at needing it is adorable. She pouts harder when she sees them.

“Are you even trying to hide?” Leia scoffs.

“Not really,” Ahsoka admits. She’s got Fett’s binoculars out. “I’m not sure he’s caught wind of the fact that we’re here yet.”

“Or he has and he’s just biding his time to escape while we’re distracted,” Tholme points out.

“Meh,” Ahsoka says, avidly devouring the visual that is a teenage Maul glaring at leafy vegetables. “I just want him to do something so I have an excuse to beat his ass.”

“Do I get to know who?” Quinlan asks, setting Leia down on the roof. “Or are we going to keep being completely unwilling to share information?”

“Baby Sith Lord,” Ahsoka says. “He’s fifteen. A child.”

“A baby,” Rex agrees.

“You’re... that’s... ugh,” Quinlan groans as loudly and as dramatically as he dares, flopping down to the rooftop. “Master Tholme, please tell me this isn’t a real Sith.”

“He’s Dark,” Tholme confirms. “Sith is... up for debate until we have evidence.”

“He’s a bitch is what he is,” Ahsoka mutters. She observes the teenager in question stop to poke at some pink tomatoes. “E chu ta, break the law, already!”

“Does he have a lightsaber?” Quinlan asks. “If he has a lightsaber and no Jedi ID or specialty license, we can probably arrest him.”

“Auntie Soka doesn’t have a license or ID,” Leia points out.

“She’s got a Jedi escort,” Tholme says. “And if our supposed Sith is polite and plays nice, we can probably escort him to the Temple as well.”

Rex snorts derisively.

“Do you know why he’s on Denon?” Fett asks.

“No clue,” Ahsoka admits. “Evil reasons, probably.”

“You’re useless,” Leia tells her.

“Thanks, princess, how’s that attempt to open the jam jar by yourself coming?”

Leia says something very inappropriate for a princess, for a child, and for a lady. It’s fairly appropriate for a soldier, which is admittedly what she’s been for a few years now. Ahsoka sticks her tongue out at the girl like the mature operative she is.

“I wish we could still get him to lose his osik by just showing up and insulting him,” Rex mutters, low enough that Quinlan probably can’t hear.

“I wanna punch him in the face,” Ahsoka confesses. “I want him to try to punch me in the face, and fail.”

“Don’t bully the baby Sith,” Rex admonishes.

“He’s a Sith.”

“He’s fifteen, it’s tacky.”

“But it’s Maul.”

“I know, but you’re tw--significantly older than him.”

“But... but it’s the motherfucker himself.”

“...you can bully him a little, but only because he’s a Sith.”

Fett steals the binoculars. “You can borrow them again when you stop acting like children.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rex says, dry as Ryloth. “I’m ten.”

“Pretty tall for your age,” Ahsoka mutters, and then giggles.

“Don’t steal my jokes,” Rex says. He elbows her, hard.

“You know,” Quinlan says, slow and tired. “Master Tholme and I are trained investigators.”

Ahsoka and Rex look at each other, and then up at him.

“Okay?”

“...do you want me to find actual evidence of this guy doing something criminal?”

“Oh, yes please.”

---------------------------

Quinlan, as it turns out, is not overselling his skills. He does catch Maul doing something illegal later that day. It’s a little more ‘stealing corporate secrets in the dead of night’ and less ‘torturing people for kicks,’ but it’s still enough to legally arrest him. Quinlan attempts to do so.

Quinlan does not succeed, and is forced to jump out a window to avoid getting cut in half. Maul follows, steals a passing speeder by throwing out the driver, and takes off. Someone--looks like Tholme--drops back to save the driver, but the rest of them give chase. Ahsoka gleefully takes point on that, of course. She’s the best pilot.

(Rex looks bored, but someone is likely to puke by the end of the night. She hopes it’s not Leia, who insisted on coming for some fucking reason.)

“How the kriff is a teenager that good?!” Quinlan yells, clinging to the edge of the speeder to avoid getting tipped out as Ahsoka swerves around a corner with a wild laugh.

“He’s a Sith!” Leia shouts over the wind. “What do you think?”

Quinlan is not impressed by the claim of Sith.

Ahsoka screeches as she drifts across four lanes of traffic and into an alleyway to pursue Maul. He’s pretty good at dodging cross-building walkways, but she’s better. She bares her teeth, hissing, and tries to pick a plan.

“Vos, how’s your aim with Force throws?” She calls to the backseat.

“Uh, decent?”

“Great! Fett’s the projectile!”

Vos takes a second longer to process that than Jango does.

“I’m wh--”

He cuts off, screaming, and is flung forward by Quinlan to crash headfirst into a teenage Sith.

“Take the wheel!” Ahsoka commands, not waiting to see who follows the order, because Fett and Maul are both getting to their feet, the other speeder is about to crash, and she’s not sure who’s going to win that fight.

She jumps from the speeder they’ve been violently dragging around Denon, and lands feet-first on Maul’s... shoulder.

Hm.

That definitely dislocated something.

“You should wear armor!” she chirps at him, drawing both sabers and grinning as he whirls to face her, eyes wide with hate.

He’s utterly silent.

That’s disturbing. Expected, but disturbing.

“Did you just throw me?” Fett demands, higher pitched than she’d normally expect.

“No, Vos threw you.”

“Because you told him to!”

“Yeah, it’s a good strategy!”

“It is not!”

“Why not? Throwing people was standard practice in the GAR.”

She can’t see his face, but she’s pretty sure he’s about ready to strangle her.

Ahsoka cannot, at that point, continue snarking with the father of her best friend, because there’s a red lightsaber coming for her throat, and she should probably worry about that. Maul’s very good at killing people and she’d like to avoid becoming part of that statistic.

As she is quickly reminded, he is... fifteen. And shorter than she’s used to. And already injured.

It’s really, really easy to take him out, actually.

At some point, the other speeder was safely recovered before it caused property damage, and their own is landing a few meters away with Vos and the kids.

“You have Force-negating cuffs, right?” Ahsoka asks.

“No, Master Tholme has them.”

“Oh,” she says, and grimaces. “I guess I’ll just... keep sitting on him then.”

Maul snarls, and she raps him on the skull. “Stop that, it’s uncivilized.”

Rex snorts.

Jango makes a noise that is incredibly frustrated with the lot of them, and turns on Rex. “Was she telling the truth?”

“About?”

“Throwing people being standard practice for the GAR.”

Rex’s face goes pained. “It was in the five-oh-first. And a few others.”

“What’s the GAR?” Quinlan asks.

“None of your damn business,” Fett snaps.

Quinlan throws his hands up in the air again. “Come on! I just proved I know what I’m doing!”

“And their tragic backstory is none of your business, prudii!”

Quinlan blinks at him, and then glances at Ahsoka. “Um.”

“He called you a shadow since your training, um, seems to be pointing in that direction,” she says as carefully as she can. “We were theorizing.”

“Wh... you actually paid attention?” Quinlan asks, looking horribly confused. “I thought I was just annoying you.”

Ahsoka laughs at him. “Oh, Vos... I’ve been running black ops for... much longer than most would guess. Trust me, I know another spy when I see them.”

She smiles as kindly as she can, because she hadn’t actually meant to make him feel left out or unwanted or... well, she’d been pretty patronizing, especially for someone seemingly younger than him. The smile does not work. Quinlan just looks kind of horrified about how young she just implied she started spy work.

Granted, she’d been sixteen for Zygerria...

Deciding to ignore him for a bit, she shifts on Maul’s back and pats him on the cheek. “Don’t worry, Baby Sith. We’re going to get you lots of nice therapy. Mind healers, no Sith tortures, all that fun stuff. Maybe some plushies.”

“You’re also getting therapy, right?” Quinlan asks. “Please say you are. I’m required for the specifics of my training and if anything you’ve said is true, I feel like you really need it and I’m scared of what’ll happen if you don’t.”

Ahsoka laughs, knowing exactly how empty it sounds. “Oh hell, if I didn’t get therapy, I imagine Kix would rise from the grave to force me into it.”

The name means nothing to anyone except Rex, and... ah, yeah, she told Fett about Kix a few weeks ago.

“No more throwing me without warning,” Fett grumbles, dropping to sit on the ground next to her. “Especially not at baby Sith Lords.”

“I am not a child!” Maul spits.

“He speaks!” Ahsoka cheers. “Aw, I knew you could do it.”

“’Soka, I told you not to bully him,” Rex complains. “It’s tacky. You’re being tacky.”

“I’m allowed to be tacky,” Ahsoka declares. “I’ve died twice, that’s, like, permission from the universe.”

“You’ve died twice?” Quinlan asks, back in ‘fascinated horror’ territory. “Wait, no, I shouldn’t ask--”

“Too late! The first time was on a planet that doesn’t exist and my Master lost his mind, killed a god, and used the good favor of another god to have me brought back to life at her expense. Not in that order.”

“I--what? No, that’s--what?”

Ahsoka smiles brightly. “You asked.”

Tholme finally shows up with the cuffs.

---------------------------

“You should eat something.”

He glares at her.

“Baby Sith Lords need to eat.”

He keeps glaring at her.

“Maul, you’ll never get big and strong and ready to kill if you don’t eat your vegetables.”

He bares his teeth.

“No, I don’t eat my veggies, but I’m a Togruta, so if I eat too many vegetables I throw up.”

Rex kicks her thigh, right on the faulds. “What did I say about bullying the Sith Lord?”

“Not to.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Making him eat his vegetables.”

“Soka.”

“Rex’ika.”

He kicks at her again. “Get up, we’re swapping out the watch.”

“But I wanted to hang out with my favorite little criminal mastermind.”

Rex drops to the floor and presses his forehead to her shoulder. “How the hell is being around this guy the first thing to make you cheer up in weeks?”

“I’m allowed to be mean to him.”

“He’s going to bite you.”

“I’ll bite back.”

Rex jabs a finger into her ribs, and she squeaks. “Go get something to eat, Commander.”

“Fine,” she huffs, rolling to her feet and moseying along to the galley. She walks in on Tholme and Fett having an argument about the ways in which Jedi and Mandalorians differ. Quinlan’s on the side, watching with wide eyes, and little Leia’s drinking a juice box at his side, tucked up under his arm and occasionally saying things to fan the flames. Ahsoka assumes she’s enjoying herself.

She opens the cooling unit, looks over the contents, and pulls out a raw leg of eopie mutton. She leans against the counter, bites into the chilled-but-not-frozen meat, and uses the back of one hand to wipe the blood off her chin. The ‘real adults’ don’t notice.

“I’m like ninety percent sure you’re doing this to mess with me but also...” Quinlan trails off, staring at her with horror. “Why?”

“A girl’s gotta eat.”

“Yeah, but all the obligate carnivores I know are like... generally holding to basic rules of courtesy when it comes to not grossing people out,” Quinlan says. “Like, I don’t chew with my mouth open. You don’t... eat in the most intimidating--did you just crack the bone with your teeth?!”

Ahsoka smirks at him, using her free hand to take away the shard of bone so she can suck out the marrow without eating the bones themselves. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this isn’t polite society. We’re in a galley on a bounty hunter’s ship, and I’ve been living on the run or in an army for most of my life. Table manners are optional.”

“No, they’re not,” Leia orders. “Fett, it’s your ship, tell her to--”

“--and another thing!” Fett snaps at Tholme, clearly paying less than no attention to the food argument.

Ahsoka keeps on eating, trying to catch wind of where the discussion’s at. Mostly, it seems to be at ‘talking past each other.’ Neither of them seems to have fully grasped more than the absolute most basic parts of the other culture, and that’s only enough to insult each other, not actually have a constructive conversation. She’d have expected more out of Tholme, at least. He’s not exactly young.

“Hey, quick question,” she says, in a moment where both of them have paused for breath and the opportunity to seethe. “Fett, when’s the last time you worked with a Jedi, or any member of a Force-based religion, before I popped into your life?”

His nose scrunches up as he makes a face.

“And Tholme, when’s the last time you worked with anyone from the Mandalorian system?”

Tholme’s reaction isn’t any more gracious than Fett’s.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says. “Vos, were either of them actually interested in that conversation, or just looking for an excuse to yell?”

“Now listen here, jetiika--”

“Fett,” she snaps. “I am not a child.”

“And neither am I,” he growls right back. “This is my ship, and I damn well don’t need you treating me like a misbehaving youngling. You’ve got a problem, you bring it to my face, not get all smug about people’s tempers blowing over.”

Well, then.

She smiles thinly. “Of course.”

He stands with his arms crossed, in full armor save for the helmet. She puts aside the eopie meat and wipes her hands, smiling until she can put her hands on her hips and let it drop to a challenge.

“You know, I’m just--I’m just gonna go,” Quinlan mutters, pulling Leia out with him, the girl hanging from under one of his arms. “This, uh, this looks like a problem for... you folks. Um. Yeah.”

He sidles out.

Tholme doesn’t.

Fett rubs at the bridge of his nose, and then gestures at the table. “Sit.”

“I’d prefer not to.”

He drops his hand and glares at her. “We have another week on this ship together. We are going to have this conversation. Sit.”

She sits, right on the warm spot left behind by Quinlan and Leia. She crosses her arms, lifts a brow, and waits.

Fett takes the seat across from her. Tholme leans against the counter.

“We all know you’re older than you look,” Fett says. “I heard Tholme mention it, I know that much has been shared. You’re acting like an actual teenager, and I’ve... I’ve put up with a lot. I am trying to keep things civil, particularly with you. I’ve tried to be friendly. You’ve been fucked up since we met, fine, everyone’s got trauma. The thing where you’ve started talking shit to our faces for what seems like your own amusement? That has to stop. You’re older than me, Torrent. Fucking act like it.”

She blinks at him, slow and not exactly happy, and turns to Tholme.

The man shrugs. “I was planning to put up with it until we arrived to the temple and handed you over to some mind healers. Fett doesn’t have that kind of time.”

There’s a curdle in her stomach, defensive and angry and guilty.

“You’ve been... a bitch,” Fett finally says. “You know that. I’m not going to mince words. You’ve been holier-than-thou and rude and condescending, and aiming that at Antilles is one thing, when you’ve apparently known her since she was a toddler and taught her things. Aiming at the rest of us isn’t going to fly. We’re all adults trying to share a space. Stop acting like... just like you have been.”

There is no defense to be made that they aren’t both already aware of.

She closes her eyes and tries to strangle the burst of irrational rage.

Their accusations aren’t unfounded.

They deserve an apology.

She is in the wrong.

She’s felt freer than she had in years, and in that freedom allowed herself too much rein, let herself lace her words with barbed wires and poison instead of sparks and spices, comments that were cruel instead of just joking. Too familiar. Too comfortable.

“My behavior’s been inappropriate,” she finally says, the words clumsy and too big in her mouth. “You’re right about that. I’m sorry, and I’ll endeavor to keep a tighter rein on my less pleasant behaviors in the future.”

At least she only lashes out with words. It could be worse.

She opens her eyes, fixes her gaze on the wall behind Fett, wrestles her expression into stiff neutrality. “Am I dismissed?”

“...uh, no, not after that,” Fett says, sounding just a little horrified. “What the hell was that?”

Tholme hisses out a breath. “Let her go.”

“No, this needs to be discussed, that’s not a healthy rea--”

“Fett, let her go,” Tholme insists, low and heavy.

Fett looks between the two for a moment, seems to come to a realization he doesn’t like, and then gestures almost violently towards the door. “Fine. Go.”

She walks out, doesn’t sprint. She’s stiff. She’s controlled. She’s the one that fucked up, so it’s fine if she doesn’t feel great right now. Getting called out on one’s own failings as a person isn’t something to get upset about if the failings are real. The feelings are real and normal, but this was her fault, and so it’s up to her to fix it, and she can’t let them know it hurt her, because this was her mistake.

She goes to the cargo hold.

---------------------------

Ahsoka works out her frustrations on Fett’s punching bag. She does not augment herself with the Force, just uses raw strength and technique, ignoring the tears that press at her eyes.

She’s fine.

It’s not weird. It’s not odd. It’s not strange to not notice she’s been kind of a bitch since her mood came up with the whole Depa thing, and then Maul. She’s been mean, mostly to Vos and Fett, and nobody’s confronted her about it until now. They let her have room for her trauma, and she hadn’t reined it in. She’s just gotten worse.

‘Snippy’ she’d always been, but age apparently hadn’t fucking tempered it.

“Um.”

She catches the punching bag, breathing heavily and covered in sweat. She hasn’t worked out all the twitchy, nervous energy yet.

“Vos,” she greets, once she’s caught herself enough that her voice won’t waver. He’s on the other side of the bag, but she knows his voice. “Do you need something?”

“You’re kind of... projecting,” he tells her, drifting to where she can actually see him. “Not self-loathing, but, um, recrimination? You just don’t feel very good and I was hoping to help”

Why in all the Sith hells does he have to be nice.

“I got called out on my behavior and wasn’t ready to face the fact that I’d kriffed up,” she tells him. “I’ll be fine. And I’m... sorry. I haven’t been fair to you and was using you as an easy target for some of my ruder comments.”

“I mean, I kind of figured,” he admits, coming closer. “I’ve been tutored by Shadows before, and a lot of them act like you. I just assumed it was more of that.”

“I still shouldn’t have let myself run loose like that,” she says. “I’m... it wasn’t appropriate. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

He shrugs, not meeting her eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she says. “Not with... not with you. Or anyone other than Rex and a mind healer, really. Most of it is...”

She trails off, distantly noticing that her eyes are tearing up enough to blur her vision, and her nails are digging into the bag in a way Fett won’t appreciate.

There’s so much that beat her down, never quite breaking her, that she doesn’t even know what made her act the way she does.

“Want to spar?”

She looks over at him, wonders what he sees that makes him want to fight her when she’s visibly unstable.

He smiles, kind and easy, and it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. It’s genuine in intent, if not in energy. He wants to help. “You all keep saying I could work on my hand-to-hand. Just take off the armor so I don’t break a finger, maybe.”

“You’re serious.”

“No, I’m Quinlan.”

She’s going to wipe the floor with this boy. “You sure you wanna fight me?”

“You won’t be able to meditate until you do,” he says. He’s right, damn him. “The other option is that I go get your... vod, I think? I go get Rex and you two can talk it out since you trust him with more. I don’t want to do that, though, he’s still a kid.”

She eyes him, lips pressed together and mind awhirl with emotions and thoughts she’d tried to beat out of her head and into the bag. “Ever fought someone without the Force?”

“...yes?”

“Was it cuffs?”

“Oh, you meant me not having the Force,” he realizes. “Er, no. Is... is that something you’ve done a lot?”

She smiles at him. “You’re planning on Shadow work. That means getting captured and stripped of everything you are at some point, Force included. Unfortunately, the cuffs are in use on a very annoying Dathomirian right now, so we’ll have to make do with you shielding like your mind’s a Kessel Spice Mine.”

“...do I want to know how often you’ve been captured?”

“No, you don’t.”

When he comes at her, it’s easy to dodge. It’s easy to tap him on target points, little pokes that show she could take him out, but isn’t going to until he’s learned something. He stays grinning throughout, letting her take the lead, and he treats her like... like a knight. Like a teacher. He’s stepped back and gone from trying to impress her as a fellow padawan, to proving himself to a full knight.

She’s not sure when that change happened, or why or how, but it makes things much smoother. She wants to think that it would have even if she hadn’t gotten a wakeup call from Fett.

So she treats him the way she treated Ezra, for the year she’d spent traveling with Kanan. She treats him as a student that’s willing to learn, good but not yet great, competent but not yet ready to survive. She draws him into the kind of chest-heaving exhaustion that tells a fighter just how much energy they waste.

(Ahsoka may have had her own style, but her grandmaster had been the pinnacle of a Soresu user. She’d spent years on the frontlines of a war. She knew the worth of conserving energy, and she’d teach it to any who stepped in to challenge her.)

“Who taught you to fight like this?” He asks, when they’ve taken a handful of moments to circle each other. His steps are heavy, sure, planted. Her own are light and ready.

“Soldiers,” she says. It’s true enough.

“Not your Master?” he asks, just as he tries to kick for her upper arm. It’s a safe question. For anyone else, it would be a safe question.

But for Ahsoka, it’s another chink in the armor, after a maelstrom of emotion, a storm of self-loathing, a dervish of instability.

She doesn’t break right away.

She spirals. She fights Quinlan, but doesn’t quite see him. Her strikes get sloppy, her feet stumble. She can’t make herself meet Quinlan’s eyes, not when the scrape of his heel against the metal sounds like the rasp of a breathing machine. Her shields get fuzzy, she knows, and she leaks what she feels into the air, making it sour and thick. She doesn’t notice, because all she can see, all she can--all she can hear and feel and--

She drops to her knees and grabs at her head, trying to stop it.

“Sokari?”

She breathes. In and out, harsh and jagged but natural in a way that the damned respirator wasn’t.

Her master her teacher her brother the traitor the hound the executioner

Her face is hot. Something prickles. It might be tears.

She tries to say something, tries to say a name or a request, tries to make anything come out of her mouth that isn’t the broken wail of a woman who hasn’t let herself think about how she died.

She feels herself pulled into someone’s arms, and she can’t quite tell who, but they’re bigger than she is, and feel warm and worried. They care. They don’t understand, they’re scared, but they care.

Her hands shake, clutched to her chest and she can’t breathe she can’t make herself take in enough air to do a Force-damned thing the empire is going to feel her her shields are down and broken and her emotions are spilling and the empire is going to find HER ANAKIN IS GOING TO FIND HER AND--

“COMMANDER!”

Rex.

Rex is here.

Her breath is coming so fast that she’s hiccupping more than she’s actually inhaling. She feels small hands in gloves on either side of her face, and then her forehead presses to something warm.

Rex. A Keldabe kiss. Her brother, her partner, her other half. He’s here. He’s calm. If he’s calm, then things are fine.

“What happened?” Light voice, high voice, small and distant. Leia. Little Leia little princess Leia she’s in danger she’s in trouble Anakin will--

“Commander.”

No. Here and now. She needs to focus on here and now. Her throat feels cold. She breathes too fast, still. She can’t stop it.

“I don’t know.” That’s Vos. He was... they were doing something. He was here. Talking to her. “We were sparring, and she just--”

Right, sparring.

“I don’t know if I said something?” He offers, voice pitching up, unsure and worried. Is he the one holding her? He’s the one holding her. That’s embarrassing.

“Commander?” Rex prompts. “Commander, can you open your eyes?”

She tries. She can’t. She shakes her head.

“Soka?” he asks, voice quiet. “Where are you?”

“F-F-Fett,” she manages. It’s enough.

“And where were you?”

His voice is so soft. So worried. She held him the same way after Mandalore, after Order 66, after all his brothers, all her friends...

“Soka.”

Her mind is spinning, and suddenly all she can hear is Anakin Skywalker is dead. I destroyed him.

Her breath hitches, and she wails.

“Commander,” Rex tries again, but her head is a vortex of Then you will die and Perhaps this child and not the Jedi way.

Our long awaited meeting.

I destroyed him.

Then you will die.

She can’t breathe she can’t breathe she can only see that yellow eye that’s too familiar but belongs to a stranger can only hear a voice that shouldn’t exist can only mourn and break and--

“Soka?”

“Malachor,” she manages. “I--h-he--I died.”

“What did you say?” someone asks. A vod. It’s the right voice, almost, rough and business-like, not accusing anyone yet, and... and... no. No. Not one of her boys. It’s Fett.

“Um, right at the end? I asked her who taught her to fight like this,” Quinlan says, nervous. “And she said it was soldiers. And I joked, I asked that it wasn’t her Master, and she didn’t answer that. A couple minutes later, she just started...”

“Oh, Soka,” Rex whispers, pulling her closer. “Commander, just breathe with me.”

“H-h-he, he just--R-Rex, he j-just--and I c-c-couldn’t--”

“I know,” her captain whispers. “I know, just breathe with me.”

“He k-k-k-killed me,” she sobs, falling out of the Keldabe and into too-small arms. “I l-loved--he was my broth-ther and--and he just--he killed me, he didn’t even stop.”

“I know,” Rex whispers. “Soka, I know.”

Of course he does.

---------------------------

“It was just bad timing,” Rex says, once they’re in the room she’s been sharing with her little family, curled up under a blanket and watching the floor like it has all the secrets to how she lost her world three times over.

“Is there anything we need to keep in mind?” Fett asks, gruff and uncomfortable. She wonders if he’s angry that she took his necessary confrontation and turned it into this mess.

“Don’t bring up her Jedi Master,” Rex says, and pulls her in when she shivers. Her eyes squeeze shut before she can stop them, tears beading up again. “Just... don’t. It’s too soon.”

“He’s--”

“He Fell,” Ahsoka interrupts. “I thought he died, but he became a Sith. And fifteen years later, we ran into each other, and I refused to join him in the Dark, so he tried to kill me.”

Fett swears, low and muffled. She thinks he has a hand over his mouth.

Quin and Leia aren’t there. She thinks they’re keeping an eye on their Baby Sith prisoner. That’s good.

“Soka,” Rex whispers, and she buries her face in his shoulder. She’s too old to be this kind of mess. She’s thirty-two. She’s Fulcrum. She’s...

She’s in need of a lot of therapy.

“We can avoid the subject unless you bring it up,” Tholme promises. “Definitely until the Temple. Is there anything else we shouldn’t talk about?”

Ahsoka can practically feel Rex’s deadpan look. “Sir, we’re a trio of child soldiers ripped from everything we know. Every other sentence is a risk. We’re just... working our way through.”

There’s a knock at the door. Oh. Quin and Leia.

“Just figured we’d drop this off before we went down to visit Mr. Grumpy-Face,” Quinlan whispers. He still thinks Leia’s a child. He’s trying to make things less terrible for her. That’s nice. “We decided he’ll be less angry if he tries Hoth chocolate, and made some for everyone.”

They definitely made it for Ahsoka herself, and Maul was an afterthought. Still. It’s sweet.

“Commander?” Rex prompts, jostling her a little to try and get her to sit up.

“Gimme a sec,” she manages. It takes longer than it should to push herself away from him, to accept the mug that Leia gives her, too-serious worry in the furrow of her brow and the twist of her soul.

She doesn’t look six. She doesn’t even look twenty-two. This girl was always too old for her skin, forced to grow up in the hostile fear of the Empire.

“Thank you, Princess.”

She sips.

She can barely taste it beyond the ashes she imagines coating her tongue.

I destroyed him, her memory echoes. His slightest hesitation before he made the final move, it haunts her. She almost reached him. If only she’d tried harder, yelled louder, been better...

She shivers.

“Do you need help falling asleep?” Tholme asks. “I’m a regular healer, not a mind healer, but...”

She probably should.

She takes another sip of her drink, willing herself to taste it. It’s good. She likes it. She knows she does.

“Can you make it dreamless?” she whispers.

“It doesn’t always work, but I can try,” he tells her.

She nods. “When I finish the chocolate.”

“Of course.”

---------------------------

Everyone’s careful around her for days. The whole decision to be nicer doesn’t mean anything when she’s walking about in a daze of too few emotions, drained of everything she could feel in favor of a grey cloud of fluff in everything she does.

She does forms. Single saber and Jar’kai. Ataru and Djem so and Soresu. Reverse grip, regular grip, partial reverse on either side.

Again. Again. Again.

She loses herself in the motions, not meditating so much as just empty.

Rex worries. Fett worries. Vos worries.

Leia and Tholme keep their shields locked up tight, and she doesn’t know how they feel. She thinks Leia might be judging her. She think Tholme might be pitying.

Maul simply hates. It’s an old and familiar sensation to walk into, and she takes unthinking comfort in his rage. She’s silent instead of snippy, when she plays the role of guard, and they stare at each other in silence. His eyes burn, and she wonders how much he’s heard of her nightmares.

“You need to talk,” Rex tells her, when he finds her with a cold cup of caff, eyes fixed somewhere beyond it all. She lifts her head. “Soka.”

She just stares at him.

He sighs and pulls her into a hug. “Commander, please.”

She can’t.

Ahsoka stares at the wall behind him, resting her chin on his head. Her neck itches under the lek at the back of her head, a little tingle of a feeling that she can’t bring herself to do anything about. The pale light of the galley is sharp against the chipped paint of the metal that surrounds them. It hurts her eyes to look, but it’s not the deep and dark lit only by red--

Then you will die, her memory growls.

She flinches.

“Breathe,” Rex tells her, too-small hands clinging at her back. “Just breathe, ‘Soka.”

She curls in tighter and tries to just breathe.

---------------------------

“Tell me something good.”

Ahsoka blinks. She looks at Leia. She doesn’t have the energy to parse that.

Leia chances a look at Rex, who isn’t leaving Ahsoka’s side any more than he has to, and Fett on the other side. Tholme’s asleep and Quin’s on Baby Sith duty. It’s just people who know, right now.

The little girl across the table, the child senator, the spy, purses her lips and huffs in irritation. “You knew my biological father before he became one of the worst people in the galaxy. Both of you did. Tell me something good about him.”

Good things.

About Anakin.

“You fought a war as a Jedi,” Leia prompts. “Surely you must have done some good things with him, or at least thought you were.”

Did they?

Every mission ended in tragedy or was just a ploy of Palpatine’s. Every saved life was just...

Wait.

“He built Threepio,” she finally says. “Your father wi--I mean, Bail wiped Threepio’s memory after the Empire rose, for your safety, but Anakin was the one who built him.”

Leia sits up, eyes brighter. “I didn’t know that. I... was Artoo involved? Did he build R2D2, or...”

“No,” Rex says, “But Artoo was his favorite astromech, and they always pushed each other into stupid stunts. We risked a hell of a lot to save that droid, more than once, and I didn’t find out until you started working with the Rebellion full-time, but Artoo and Threepio were the witnesses for your bio-parents’ wedding.”

Leia gapes at him. So does Ahsoka. (Fett doesn’t know enough to care.)

Rex grins, and if it looks a little forced, that’s fine. “He had a holo recording. I was one of the few people left that knew about the marriage that might have wanted to see, so Artoo offered. It was... sweet.”

He waits, probably for Ahsoka to add something herself, but she has nothing.

“I think that’s when they swapped droids, since Threepio was more useful to a politician and Artoo did his best work when we set him loose on the enemy.”

“He never changed,” Leia muses. “Did he always swear that much?”

“Yes,” Ahsoka answers, as Rex laughs. “Always. All the binary I learned started with the best swears.”

She tries to think of another good memory, something else that Leia might appreciate. Her mind ticks back to saving Stinky, which is just a terrible option, because that mission started with Hutts and ended with the Battle of Teth. That massive loss of life, all for the son of the creature that had put Leia in chains.

She wonders if she has anything in her memory that doesn’t end in blood and graves.

“Soka.” Rex.

“Hm?”

“Remember that time Fives and Echo got lost in the undercity their first time on leave, and we had to get the General to help us find them?”

She does.

He’s right, that’s a good story.

“Okay, so what you have to understand,” Ahsoka says, already digging the faint details out and dusting them off, “is that these boys were ARC troopers, top-notch, terrifyingly competent once they got through specialty training, and loyal as hell. Echo had memorized the reg manuals front to back, and Fives was... well, Fives ended up being the only person to figure out the chips before they went into action. Point is, the Domino twins were good... eventually. Just like everyone else, though, they started out shiny.”

---------------------------

“Tholme’s hiding something.”

Ahsoka wonders if Leia will just leave if she ignores her enough. Probably not. This was the girl that got kicked out of boarding school for leading a sit-in at age seven. She’s got patience.

“His job requires him to hide a lot of things,” Ahsoka says instead. “Not as many as Vos will have to, eventually, but a lot.”

“He’s hiding something from us,” Leia insists, visibly frustrated that Ahsoka isn’t as upset about this as she is. “Something important.”

The way she says ‘important’ is clumsy and impacted by the missing baby tooth. She can’t say the r. It comes out as ‘im-poh-ten,’ which is adorable, and if Ahsoka comments on it, she’s probably going to get punched by a six-year-old.

“The Force doesn’t care,” Ahsoka says. “I trust his intentions, if not him as a person.”

“If you don’t trust him, then why trust his intentions?”

“Leia, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I trust one and a half people in the galaxy,” Ahsoka points out. “Me not trusting a person isn’t a sign of anything except my paranoia. The only person I trust fully and without reservation is Rex. Even you, I only mostly trust, because my brain starts screaming if I think too hard. That’s why you’re the half.”

“Okay, whatever, paranoia aside,” Leia barrels on, “He should tell us. Whatever it is that he’s hiding, we deserve to know. We’re not children that he can just hide things from for our own good.”

Ahsoka presses her lips together. “Leia. Princess. I know you’re used to holding all the cards--”

“This isn’t about me being a control freak!”

“It is, though,” Ahsoka soothes, and smiles. “Your mother--the bio one--was the same way. You spent years as one of the leaders of the Rebellion, so obviously you’re used to having all the information, and people reporting to you... but Tholme is a Jedi Master. He reports to the Council and the Republic. Do you know how many people I kept secrets from while I was a padawan? We’re an unknown, Leia. They have no proof that we’re on their side, especially since we’re traveling with Fett.”

Leia crosses her arms and glares as hard as she can.

“I’m not going to bother him,” Ahsoka says. “I’ve already had, like, five unrelated mental breakdowns. I’m putting this on hold until we get to the Temple and I can trust that there’s a healer on hand to sedate me or something.”

“You... want to be sedated?”

“Leia, this... really should be obvious, but a Force-Sensitive losing their osik the way I have been isn’t actually safe. I know I broke a weapons rack last week.” Ahsoka gestures vaguely. “If the Jedi Master isn’t telling me something for reasons that might relate to my clear and obvious mental instability, I’m going to assume he’s got a point.”

“So he should tell me or Rex.”

“We’ll be on Coruscant in four days,” Ahsoka soothes. “Just... let it be. They won’t hurt us.”

“You don’t know that.”

Ahsoka shrugs. “I don’t have to. The Force leads me in all things, including this.”

Leia isn’t impressed by that, but Leia isn’t impressed by much in the first place.

She strides off in a fit that is, perhaps, more influenced by her six-year-old emotional control than she’d like to admit. Ahsoka lets her. It’s not worth the argument.

It’s only a few minutes later that Fett strides in, takes the seat Leia was just in, and asks, “What would it take for you to teach me how to use a jetii’kad?”

She blinks at him. “You want to learn how to use a lightsaber?”

“Yes.”

“...why?”

“Viszla.”

“I see.”

She does.

Ahsoka taps her fingers against the table, eyeing him with the kind of interest she copied from Master Kenobi, years ago. Fett doesn’t fidget, but she thinks he might want to. He just looks back, waiting for her judgement.

“You’ll need to justify it,” she finally says. “It’s a significant difference from what you actually did, so I need to know your reasoning for doing it, and your plans for once it’s done.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s step one,” she corrects. She tilts her head, considering. “My standards for you aren’t built in a vacuum, and you know that. Explain to me what you plan to do and how you plan to do it, and if I approve...”

“You’ll help me achieve it.”

“Maybe,” she allows. “A lot of that depends on Rex.”

“I expected as much,” Fett says. “He is... an admittedly large part of the reason.”

“He would be,” she says. She gives the silence a few more seconds to sit awkwardly between them, and then stands up. “I’d guess you’ve been brainstorming already. Do you have it written down or is it mostly just in your head so far?”

“I’m still... debating options, so to speak.”

She grins, and the shape of the predator’s smile, the baring of teeth... that almost makes him step back. She can see it in the twitch of his muscles. Smart man.

“Follow me,” she says, and doesn’t wait for him to stand. She strides out with tooka-light steps, hears the heavy beskar tread behind her, and goes to the cargo hold. Fett’s confusion grows tangibly behind her, especially when she tosses him a wooden quarterstaff. She picks up the other and spins it in one hand.

“You’re going to fight me,” she tells him, stretching and letting the staff help with the process. “And while we fight, you’re going to tell me what your plans for Mandalore are.”

He mimics her, but there’s a frown on his face. “And why staffs?”

“You and I, we’ve only sparred bare-handed,” she says. “I need a feel for how you fight with a weapon anyway. These are a good start.”

“Not the beskad?”

She grins, and the twitch is back. “No. That can wait. We start with the staffs.”

He takes a stance, and she mirrors him. She lets him strike first with a weapon, but she’s the one that asks all the questions.

(He is the only one on the ship that can fight her one-on-one right now, and he can win. Still, she makes him work for every inch, and what she doesn’t win in bruises, she wins in words.)

(Fett might yet be a proper Mand’alor, but Ahsoka learned war from her brothers, negotiation at the knee of a general and in the shadow of a prince, and government at the side of duchesses and queens.)

(If he wants her help uniting his people, he needs to prove that he can hold them together once she’s gone.)

---------------------------

Ahsoka’s interrogation of Jango’s plans is thorough, and she’s not the only one involved. She brings Leia in, and has her join in on the grilling. She maybe laughs as the twenty-seven-year-old survivor of Galidraan, the Mand’alor, a man who has killed Master Jedi with his bare hands, gets lectured on various government structures by a tiny girl that's missing several teeth and needs to sit on books to see the table properly.

Still, Leia knows this better than any of the rest of them do. The girl might have grown up heir to a monarchy, but she got a classical education and was drilled on democracy and all associated forms of government. Where Ahsoka knows military protocol and law enforcement, intersystem relations and defensive measures, Leia knows agricultural subsidies and welfare programs, infrastructure and education.

Ahsoka may know how to find out if someone’s breaking a zoning law, but Leia knows why it exists in the first place.

“And I grew up in a cult,” Rex says, when an argument on that topic breaks out. Everyone that hasn’t heard the joke-that-isn’t-a-joke stares at him. “The Jedi grew up in a religious meritocracy; Leia grew up in a monarchy; and I grew up in a cult.”

Ahsoka elbows him. He’s not wrong, but still.

Unfortunately, Ahsoka is about forty-seven percent sure that Leia will put her foot in her mouth when it comes to Mandalorian culture, blunt as the girl is. That prefrontal cortex isn’t anywhere near as developed as it should be, either, so impulse control for the princess isn’t great. Ahsoka refuses to let Leia and Fett talk about ways to mend the breaks between tradition and the pacifism of the New Mandalorians without either Rex or Ahsoka herself as a mediating presence. Tholme sits in a few times, but while he knows that Leia isn’t really six--though not about the time-travel, yet--Quinlan doesn’t.

They admittedly end up doing this while he’s on Maul-sitting duty.

“It’s like he doesn’t even care about making nice with the people that, at this point, make up the majority of his people!” Leia grumbles one night, as Ahsoka kicks over a step stool so the girl can brush her teeth. “He may not like the New Mandalorians, but from what I understand, it’s still early enough to prevent the majority of the cultural bleaching you brought up. If he stays this stubborn--”

“Leia,” Ahsoka says, and the girl’s mouth snaps shut. ��I’m aware of your reasons for not trusting his intentions. But if I may say? Chill.”

“He’s not even trying!”

“He’s trying a hell of a lot harder than he did in the original timeline,” Ahsoka reminds her. “Brush your teeth.”

“I’m not a--”

“Teeth.”

It’s a little worrying, how the child’s brain affects Leia, but... well. That’ll pass in time, hopefully. Until then, Ahsoka gets to be the aunt she should have been. This includes tucking Leia in, which the girl grumbles about despite the fond waves of comfort that enter the Force around her. Ahsoka doesn’t call her out on it, just brushes back wisps of hair to plant a kiss on Leia’s forehead, and then does the same once Rex stumbles in, grumbling about the limitations of a cadet’s body, but far more ready to follow the protocol that is bedtime.

Rex doesn’t pretend to not like getting tucked in, for all that he’s sharing with a grumbly, already-asleep princess. He smiles up at Ahsoka, lets her hug him, and pretends they can be a normal family for five seconds.

Quinlan’s making a late night snack for himself in the galley. Tholme is guarding the Baby Sith. Fett...

Ahsoka goes to the cockpit, takes the copilot’s seat, and watches hyperspace pass them by.

It takes long minutes before either of them say anything.

“Do Jedi believe in souls?”

His shields are up, locked up tighter than the innermost chambers of the Imperial Palace. She has no idea where he’s taking this question. She has to cast about for an answer.

“That depends on how you define a soul,” she finally says. “Leia told me about Force Ghosts. A Jedi Master who underwent the right meditations and training could pass into the Force upon their death without losing their sense of self. They could remain themselves, to an extent, and interact with force-sensitive individuals. I don’t know if they could last that way indefinitely, but depending on your definition, I could argue those ghosts were evidence of a form of soul.”

“So you believe that the dead pass into the Force, but that what passes could be a soul. Something must exist for a sense of self to disappear at death in a way that impacts the Force as you understand it, and many would use the word ‘soul’ for that something.”

“Mm,” Ahsoka considers it. “I’d say that’s pretty accurate. You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

“What about those not yet born?”

Her fingers feel cold, and she finds herself no longer able to watch the passage of hyperspace as passively as she had, and her eyes catch on streaks and motes of what is not dust, her vision unable to keep any more still than her heart.

“Oh,” she hears herself say. “The clones.”

It’s a long time before he answers, but the walls come down. He carries a confused sort of grief with him, guilty and a mite resentful. His questions have been building for longer than she’d thought. His voice is rough. “I’ve taken plenty of lives, but I’ve never known the name of someone I erased from existence before they were even born.”

“The stories we told Leia about the brothers.”

There’s a grunt of agreement from Fett, so those dots at least connect.

“I take it my answer wasn’t helpful,” she manages to say.

“Will they still exist?” Fett asks. “Will they be born elsewhere? Or is... is a soul something that only comes into existence after the body does?”

“I have no idea,” Ahsoka admits. “I want... I want to think that I’d be able to find them eventually, to recognize them, if their souls are still born into this world elsewhere.”

“And if your Sith finds someone else to build his army out of?”

Ahsoka looks at him, sharp and pointed. “You wouldn’t.”

“They’ll be doing it anyway, if their plans are as ironclad as you say.”

“You’re already associating with Jedi,” Ahsoka says, fighting the urge to break his nose. “They wouldn’t approach you, not now. They can’t leverage your anger against you. They won’t know everything, but they’ll know that you have friends among the Jedi.”

“You think they can’t come up with better lies?”

He has a point. He has more than one point and she hate hate hates it.

A Jedi does not hate.

I am no Jedi.

“You’re going to have to convince me,” she says. “Especially if you want to somehow balance this with the darksaber thing. I won’t teach you how to fight with it if you’re not planning to retake Mandalore.”

“That’s how they’d sell it,” he says. “Retaking Mandalore. An army ostensibly for the Jedi, and ultimately...”

“You’d build an army of slaves.”

“No, I’d be the inside man for when they build that army anyway.”

She holds his gaze. She looks away first.

“Torrent?”

“I’m thinking.”

He lets her.

“I’ll need to talk to Rex. Probably Leia.”

“Understandable.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I’m only just considering it. It’s an idea, not a plan.”

“That’s the only reason I haven’t ripped your throat out with my teeth.”

“Hyperbole doesn’t suit you.”

She glares at him, and leaves, her mind chopping up and laying out every possible angle on Fett volunteering to do the exact same thing as last time, but somehow worse.

Great. Just what she needed.

---------------------------

Ahsoka isn’t there for the shouting match between Rex and Fett, but she doesn’t have to be. She can hear it form clear across the ship, and Rex comes to her afterwars. He’s been crying, which isn’t as surprising as it could be. These bodies are still prone to such things, and will be for years. She doesn’t comment.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

“We need to take out Sidious before he starts anything on Kamino.”

“Agreed,” she says. “It’ll be hard, though.”

“I don’t care.”

“What did Fett say?”

“That if it wasn’t going to be my brothers, it would be someone else’s. Either we stopped the cloning from happening at all, or we mitigated damage by being there.”

“I don’t think Sidious is going to tap him for it,” Ahsoka admits. “Not unless you’re willing to stage that kind of fight publicly enough for Fett to claim the Jedi poisoned you, family, against him. It could work, but it’s a gamble.”

He knows all of this.

“I miss them,” he says, and she cards her fingers though the curls he’s managed to grow in the past weeks. “I just... even at the end, I had Wolffe. I knew Boba was out there; I wouldn’t be surprised if the beskar let him survive a Sarlacc. I had brothers. Not as many as I used to, but there was always someone. I miss them all, so much it hurts.”

“It wouldn’t be them,” she reminds him. She pulls him closer, puts her cheek to his head. “It would be the same process, the same faces, the same training, even, but the boys themselves...”

He clings to her and shudders.

“Rex?”

“I can’t force them to grow up the way I did. I want them back. Sidious is going to make the army no matter what. Someone’s going to suffer, and I don’t want it to be my brothers, but they won’t exist otherwise, and...”

“And it’s an impossible choice,” she summarizes. “And it sucks.”

“It’s sucks Gungan balls, ‘Soka.”

She laughs, and feels him smile against her shoulder. Good. He needs to smile more.

“He’s still trying to get me to like him,” Rex says. "He’s still making an effort, and he never did that for anyone except Boba, and it’s weird. I don’t know what to do with any of that.”

“Gain a brother,” Ahsoka whispers, and she feels him jerk against her. “If that’s what you want.”

“He’s not vod.”

“Same blood as all the rest, and you’re older than him, so he’s not really in a position to be a parent to you like he was to Boba,” she says carefully. “You don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to, but... I think he’s trying. I think this means a lot to him, and that he isn’t any more sure of what to do than you are. You don’t have to forgive him for what he did in the future, you don’t have to accept when he reaches out, you don’t have to ever talk to him again after we reach Coruscant if you don’t want, but I think... I think it’s worth at least considering what you have to gain. I think it’s worth looking at what he’s trying to give you.”

Rex huffs. “Why couldn’t he just be the shabuir I knew in training?”

“Something happened between now and then?” she offers. “I don’t know. I never met him in the original timeline. I just know the guy that keeps trying to get on my good side so you’ll like him.”

He outright scoffs. “Soka, that’s not the only reason he’s trying to get on your good side.”

“...I’m a former Jedi who talks trash to his face,” she says slowly. “And I cried on him. There is no reason for him to be nice to me, other than you.”

“He thinks you’re cool and a good person and wants you to be his friend.”

“Bantha poodoo.”

Rex grins in a way that goes straight to smirking. “Soka, I’m not joking. Jango Fett wants you to be his friend.”

“Kriffing why?” she asks, more than a little horrified. “I’m a mess, look like I’m ten years younger than him, have gleefully kicked his ass in front of an audience; I even told Vos to throw him at a baby Sith Lord. Putting up with me is one thing, but I’m... I’m only barely not a Jedi. I’m a historical enemy of Mandalore, and part of the community he hates more than anything, and--”

“And his reaction to you kicking his ass was pure Mando,” Rex says. “In that he now thinks you’re a badass, and thus worth being friends with.”

“I can’t believe that. I physically cannot.”

“Soka, just accept it. The Mand’alor wants to be friends with you.” He scratches at his scalp. “I mean, he met you while you were protecting what appeared to be children, and it’s apparently still early enough for him to care about that.”

She leans back in her seat, eyes on the wall ahead of her and back against the cool metal of the other side. Rex falls back with her. She wonders if Rex changed the subject so they didn’t have to talk about deciding how many of his brothers get to exist, and whether or not he can swallow the bitterness of his history to have a connection with at least one member of his blood. She doesn’t ask. If he wants to change the subject, that’s his right.

“I don’t... no.” She denies it as well as she can, and then the implications dig a little deeper. “Is this me accidentally signing up to be the Jedi Order’s official liaison to the Mand’alor?”

“I mean, this point in time... they’ve got Kenobi for the Duchess, yeah?” Rex shrugs. “Good relations with the system are probably a good thing, and you’ve got a stronger connection than Tholme and Vos.”

“Ugh,” she says. She rubs a hand against her head, and then lurches to her feet. “Fine! Fine. If it’ll get him to retake Mandalore before the Sith decide to bribe him with an army he doesn’t get to keep, I’ll teach him how to fight for the kriffin’ Darksaber.”

“That’s what makes the decision for you?”

“Well something had to!”

They only get one lesson in before Coruscant, but the lesson lasts a full day, and Ahsoka’s got his comm number. Fett’s a quick learner anyway, and Tholme was there to give pointers where Ahsoka couldn’t.

He won’t measure up to a Jedi in saber-to-saber combat, but he doesn’t need to. He just needs to learn enough to turn all those skills with a beskad to something that works with a jetii’kad.

(The balance of a saber is wrong to those used to a physical weapon. The inertia doesn’t work the way anyone expects. There’s no need to worry about damaging the blade.)

(Fett is good. Ahsoka is better. And, bless his heart, he knows it.)

(She will mold him into the shape of someone who not only can, but should rule a system with a history like that, and he damn well knows that too.)

---------------------------

“Dropping out of hyperspace in T-minus twenty seconds.”

The Slave I is not, in fact, a Venator-class starship, or anything else near the size and smoothness of the ships that Ahsoka grew up on. This is a bounty hunter’s vessel, and the drop to real space jolts like nothing else. Ahsoka’s in the copilot seat for the return, but Tholme’s going to swap with her as soon as they’ve got confirmation that there were no problems with exiting hyperspace, and nobody’s shooting at them.

“We’re not going to get shot at,” Tholme had assured her.

“I always get shot at,” she’d told him.

“I have our clearance,” he reminded her, seeming more amused than frustrated. “There’s no need to worry about getting shot at.”

“I also always get shot at,” Jango had thrown in.

“Okay,” Tholme had allowed, after several minutes of his trust in the Temple warring against Ahsoka and Jango’s learned paranoia. The looks Quinlan had darted around the room when Leia and Rex also claimed ‘chronic getting-shot-at disease’ had been a treat. The paranoia of a Watchman and a future Shadow was great, but the paranoia of three revolutionaries and a galaxy-wide criminal was greater. “You can take us in close enough to get in radio contact, but the second we have to ask for clearance and a vector, I’m in the seat.”

She’d agreed, of course. She was paranoid, not inexperienced.

“We’re much less likely to get shot down by ground control if you tell them we’re with you,” she’d said, to his hilariously apparent metaphysical exhaustion. “Obviously.”

“Good enough,” he’d sighed.

What that means is mostly just that Ahsoka gets to watch the distant star at the center of Coruscant’s system grow rapidly brighter. She can pick out the constellations she’d grown up with, the stars the creche had projected on the ceiling every night, the ones that she may not have seen from the surface, but had greeted her and then sent her on her way every time she left on yet another campaign that lost her men their lives for a Sith Lord's wretched plans. These were the shapes and stories she’d never seen again as Fulcrum, a woman so hunted that to come within a dozen subsectors of the planet was to court her death.

For sixteen years, she hadn’t ventured closer than Alderaan, save for a single trip to Chandrila.

And now, maybe twenty minutes away at this speed, was the Temple. It was home.

A home that didn’t know her, that had sentenced her to death, that had hosted the rampage of her former master... but home nonetheless.

“Stable?” Fett grunts.

“Thrusters are good,” she confirms.

“I meant you.”

Ah. “I’m... fine. As good as I could be, anyway.”

She hesitates, but manages to speak before he does. “You?”

“I’m not the one walking into an entire building of triggers.”

“Only because you’re not entering it,” she says. “It’s the home of your ancestral enemies who, bad info or no, killed off a whole lot of your friends.”

“I get to leave,” he says. “You don’t.”

She plans to needle him a bit more, maybe on something a little less based in both their traumas. She needs to talk, if only to fill up the silence and keep herself from reaching out to all the lights in the Force. It’ll be too much, she knows.

Tholme enters the cockpit. “Change of plans.”

“Better be a good reason,” Jango says, voice flat.

“Leia’s crying.”

Ahsoka’s unbuckling herself before she can process the words fully. “What?”

Leia doesn’t cry for no reason. Her emotional control is as difficult as the body makes it, but she doesn’t just cry. There’s always a cause.

“I don’t know. Rex said to get you,” Tholme explains. “She was saying a name. He seemed to recognize it.”

Not good not good not good. If Leia was feeling the Emper--No. She cuts the thought off there. No catastrophizing. Information first.

“What name.”

“Luke. Mean anything to--and she’s gone.”

Ahsoka ignores him, just sprints to where she knows the ‘young ones’ are. They’re all in Maul’s room, because nobody wants to be alone with him now, but it’s the worst time to leave him without supervision. It’s not the worst option; he mostly refuses to talk, still.

This holds true, because he definitely isn’t talking when she bursts in. He’s sitting on the bench, in a corner, hugging his knees and watching Quinlan try to calm Leia down.

“Captain, sitrep.”

“Vos and Tholme attempted to show Leia how to reach out to feel the Temple from a distance. They felt that it would be a good use of the time, and an interesting exercise at this distance. She attempted to do so, struggled for several minutes, and then reacted with shock. She has repeated the name ‘Luke’ several times since then, and we’ve been unable to fully calm her down. I asked Tholme to get you, as you are the only Force-Sensitive on board that understands the situation in full.”

“Understood.” She nods to him, and then goes to nudge at Quinlan. “Vos, move.”

“Torre--”

“You can sit behind her, hold her in your lap like you did when we had lunch the other day, but I need to get in her face.” She waits for him to comply, and then drops to her knees and takes Leia’s hands in her own. She radiates calm and assurance, even though she knows Quinlan’s probably been doing the same since this started. She dips her head enough to get in the girl’s line of sight, waits for her to meet eyes.

“Princess,” she says, and meets Leia’s eyes. “What did you feel?”

“Luke.”

From this distance... they’ve got half the system to go, at least, and Leia’s training shouldn’t reach that far for anything more than the fact that the Temple is there. Ahsoka could feel unshielded individuals from here, if she focused, but she’s also been doing this much, much longer. The twins theory holds more water than ever.

“Can you show me?” Ahsoka asks, instead of asking for more clarification. She squeezes Leia’s hands and smiles. “In the Force?”

Leia nods, and closes her eyes. It’s not the first time they’ve done this, but it’s the first time in a while that Leia’s needed Ahsoka to guide her through.

Luke’s light, for all that it’s unfamiliar to Ahsoka, is brilliant among the rest of the signatures in Coruscant. Like Anakin and Leia, he’s a star in his own right, but he’s brighter. He doesn’t have Anakin’s bitterness or Leia’s righteous anger, just... light. Ahsoka had asked Leia to show her instead of looking for herself because she’d expected to not recognize the boy, but she needn’t have. He’s unmistakable.

He’s so bright that she almost misses the other signature that she does recognize. She shies away, knowing that it would be there, but... but it’s almost twinned with another nearby. Not identical, but different in a way that comes with age, with trauma, with... death.

Leia hadn’t arrived alone, after all.

Why would Luke?

Her eyes snap open, her hand coming up not-quite-fast enough to clap over her mouth as she gasps. She feels a shudder, one that starts in her shoulders and reaches deep into her ribcage, finds a home in her chest and doesn’t stop.

“Oh fuck,” Quinlan whispers. “Torrent? Um, Sokari?”

Rex steps closer. “Commander?”

“That shabuir faked his death again,” she manages. “Three times, Rex!”

He blinks at her. “...I know way too many people who fit that description, Soka.”

“Master Ke--” she cuts herself off. He might have changed his name, just like she had. There’s already an Obi-Wan here. Rex seems to be figuring it out, but she needs to give him another hint.

“He pulled a Hardeen,” she stresses, and Rex’s eyes snap shut with a tired groan.

“Who?” Leia asks, her own tumult of emotion paused in the wake of Ahsoka’s shock. There’s a hope and relief to her, and Ahsoka belatedly realizes that her main worry had been that she’d misidentified what was going on, that she’d given herself a false hope. Ahsoka’s internal reaction, her approval and awe at Luke’s presence, had trickled over enough to give Leia the reassurance she’d needed.

Unintentional as it was, Ahsoka was glad that she’d succeeded in helping her charge.

“Er...” she trails off. “I don’t know what name he’s going by, right now. We’ve spent so long in hiding...”

“The man Luke knew as Crazy Old Ben,” Rex says, and Leia’s eyes light up.

“Oh,” she breathes. “General O--no, names. The High General, then.”

“Yeah,” Ahsoka says, not a little soft. “Yeah, I guess death didn’t stop him any more than it stopped me.”

“I could have told you that,” Leia says, smiling far too widely. She squirms where she still sits on Quinlan’s lap. “He was... he taught you, right?”

“As much my master as the official one,” Ahsoka says. She glances as Quinlan, feels Maul’s gaze on the back of her head. “Your f... my official master was very young when I was assigned to him. He wasn’t ready to teach, wasn’t even ready to be a knight, entirely, so my training was split between him and his master.”

Quinlan pops in at that moment, “Your grandmaster was military, too?”

We all were, she thinks. Even you, in your own way.

“I landed in their care mid-battle,” she says carefully. “It was a complicated situation.”

He nods, and she vaguely notes that he’s got his arms wrapped around Leia, and his chin tucked on top of her head. She isn’t sure if Leia’s noticed, but Quinlan’s picked up ‘baby’-sitting duty so often recently that she’s fairly certain he’s all but declared her ‘little-sister shaped.’ It doesn’t matter that Leia’s older--she’s still taking the juice boxes and gummy snacks that Quinlan shoves at her every single snacktime.

“Do you think...” Rex trails off, something uncomfortable twisting in the Force, even though his face keeps it mostly hidden. “My brothers. If the General survived and... and made it back...”

“I didn’t feel any,” Ahsoka says, because she knows she’d have noticed if it was anyone she’d met, and likely any clone at all. They all felt different in the Force, but they all held a spark that made her know it was one of them. “I’m sorry, Rex’ika.”

“A long shot,” he says, that dash of hope shriveling up. He must see something in her face, because there’s a curl of warmth in him, even if his smile is brittle. “It’s fine, really. I have you, ‘Soka.”

Rex and Ahsoka. Two halves of one whole.

She can’t wait to hear the lectures on attachment, the way people who haven’t seen her wars try to criticize her for clinging to any chance at still having a will to live. She can’t wait to see them justify telling her that it’s selfish to hold her sanity in her hands and refuse to let the grief take it away. She can’t wait to stare someone down for asking her to ‘learn to let go’ after she’s lost her family, her life, her universe three times over.

Most of the Jedi are more sensible than that, are reasonable enough to see those shades of grey and how to approach rules in the spirit they are meant instead of the rigid letter, but there will be some.

There will be more than enough telling her she is wrong to hold her oldest, closest, best friend as dear as she can.

Attachment, they’ll say.

What they’ll mean is ‘codepedence.’

They won’t be entirely wrong.

She reaches out for him, lets him fall into her side and stay there, closes her eyes and reaches out for the man she’d long called father, when they’d still been in each other’s lives.

This time, past the deafening flare of surprise-love-hope of the little star next to him, she can feel him reach back.

---------------------------

The second the ship has landed, even before Tholme and Fett are done with the checks, Ahsoka’s waiting at the exit. She strains her hearing so she’ll know the second the system will let her open the massive door of the cargo hold.

Leia clings to her side, and the boys stand to her back.

Quinlan’s stressed enough that she can feel it like a cloud. She is very much not trying to feel that stress. Quinlan’s stress levels, back where he’s got Maul so he can keep an eye on Ahsoka and the Baby Sith at the same time, are so low on her priorities list that it’s a a little sad.

It doesn’t take long for her to be able to punch the button and open the damn door.

It opens slowly. She bounces on her toes, because there’s a beacon of light and a steady, familiar glow on the other side, and she’s so, so close. She can’t see through the crack yet, because it’s day in this part of Coruscant, and the sunlight is blinding against the dark of the hold. So close. She’s so close.

“The hell’s wrong with you?”

Fett? Fett. He’s already here to get off? This door’s slow.

She doesn’t answer him, because the door is finally open enough to let her out, and she leaps through the gap.

She lands on a pourstone floor, feels pebbles and grit compress under her boots, frantically looks around as her eyes adjust to light and--

The High General, the Negotiator, Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, looking just as he did when she first met him, if a little less armored and a little more fed. The hair, the beard, the crinkle in the corner of his eyes. His spirit is a little older, his smile a little more strained, his posture a little more tired, but it’s him.

He spreads his arms, low enough that she could have dismissed it if she’d cared less for hugs, except she’s almost as small as she was when they met.

And every other hug she’d given back then had been, functionally, her being a living missile aiming her montrals for someone’s organs.

She’s a little more aware of how to avoid stabbing her friends in the intestine now.

“Master!”

She sprints for him, collides and sobs, feels him stumble back and then sink to his knees on the too-hard floor, and can feel the tears pouring out of her already. Her breath hitches, and she wails like a child, and that last part of her that couldn’t even grasp at safety shreds itself. His arms are tight around her, warm and strong and Master Kenobi don’t you dare leave again.

It doesn’t matter that Sidious is out there, that the Republic’s been building towards war for a century, that even now someone’s kicking up the Trade Federation. Her dad is here.

“I’ve missed you too, my dear,” he says, pressing a kiss to the side of her head, the bristles of his beard scratching along the skin of her forehead. Off to the side, the binary suns that are Luke and Leia grow brighter in proximity, so bright she can barely bear it.

(“Fett, why the kriff are you reaching for your blaster?!”)

(“Torrent said her master tried to kill her.”)

(“Different guy, that was a different guy, put the blaster away.”)

(“You could have just warned me.”)

(“I didn’t expect you to go for a shot on sight!”)

(”Calm down, Jetiika, if I was going to shoot on sight, we’d already be in a firefight.”)

She ignores everything.

“If you fake your death one more time, I swear I’m going to kill you myself.”

He tries to pull away to talk to her more directly. She does not let him. He apparently resigns himself to this, because he just adjusts how he’s sitting and pulls her in closer.

“In my defense, I was far from the only one presumed dead that took advantage of that status, by the end,” he says, letting her slump into his lap and cry herself dry. “I’m proud of you. You know that, I hope.”

She nods against his chest, smearing tears and snot across the linen and wool. She doesn’t care that they’ll need a thorough washing. She can have her public breakdown and it’s fine because Master Kenobi is here.

He doesn’t even know what she’s spent the past fifteen years doing. Luke wouldn’t have known. He doesn’t know she’s thirty-two and broken, beyond a shadow and cut down by her own master. There’s so much he doesn’t know but the Force rings with the truth of it: he’s proud of her anyway.

“I’m going by Ben, now,” he mutters against her montral. “There’s already an Obi-Wan here, after all. Still, I remain a Kenobi.”

She can’t make the words come out of her mouth. She’s overwhelmed, so much so that speech is a mite bit beyond her.

Sokari Torrent, she presses along the frayed bond that’s knitting itself back to life with every breath they take. Leia was already calling me Auntie Soka, and Rex and I both took Torrent, for...

“For the men you lost,” he mutters. “Yes, that’s fitting.”

He smells like sapir tea and a spiced beard oil.

There’s a whirl of activity about her, greetings and ‘a Sith apprentice?’ and introductions. She distantly notes when Fett almost shoots Dooku before Rex shuts that down and advises the Master to leave the area before things spiral out of control. She feels Ben stand, and she stands with him, clings to his side like a child and trusts that whatever happens, whatever needs to happen, he’ll take care of it until she can stand on her own two feet without swaying.

Rex grabs her free hand, and she feels herself settle back into her skin, bit by bit.

She’s back at the Temple. The twins are safe. Her grandmaster is here. She has her other half.

They can save the galaxy this time.

She’s alive she’s home she’s okay.

She’s okay.

Everything’s going to be okay.