#deciding what other clones to de-age but a lot of them feel like they were Just Like That™ since day 1 so no real change besides smol

[mwolf0epsilon]

Force Shenanigans™ strike again and turn various clones of the GAR and Coruscant Guard into cadets with no prior memory of being adults.

The Jedi are bewildered because somehow all commanding officers were spared of this, but at least a handful of men from every battalion has been turned into children... Children who, because they've been turned back into a stage of their lives where they haven't fully developed their senses of self and confidence just yet, act completely different from their adult versions.

Only their closest brothers now know how to handle them (provided they themselves haven't been transformed as well) and it quickly becomes a bit of a mess.

On that note, picture the following:

Cadet Waxer who's super shy and a little afraid of meeting new people. He clings to Boil, not because he recognizes his closest brother, but because the other is an older clone and he's learned to trust his ori'vode when in difficult situations.

Waxer who's got zero confidence in himself but who trusts his older vode without hesitation because that's the very first lesson a clone learns. To trust in their brothers. And maybe the vod with the funny moustache just feels safe, even if he's a grumpy-pants.

Cadets Boost and Sinker who are a little afraid of spaceships and who immediately freak out when they realize they're in a big ship in the middle of the vast expanses of space. They give Wolffe nothing but trouble because they are running and he cannot catch both of these little hellions.

Boost and Sinker who, upon realizing they're giving a Commander™ the runaround, decide to make it their mission to make his life a living hell. At least they've stopped fretting about space but lord if Wolffe wouldn't have preferred they hadn't...

Cadets Echo and Dogma who are both autistic and who are on opposite ends of the Uh-Oh Spectrum for the 501st, because they're all so used to both of them being mature young adults with a good handle of their emotions and who have stable routines they adere to on a daily basis.

Echo who's incredibly withdrawn and who doesn't engage verbally on his own, and who instead just repeats words spoken to him because it both soothes and grounds him now that he's somewhere he doesn't recognize. Echo who's super sensitive to food textures and who immediately refuses to eat most foods they have at hand because the texture is WRONG. Echo who sees Fives's goatee and tries to cut it off with child scissors because it's against regulations.

Dogma who acts up and screams because all these new surroundings are unfamiliar and overstimulating him. Everything is just wrong and terrible and he doesn't know or trust any of these older clones. He screams absolute bloody murder when Tup tries to touch him and only stops when Kix picks him up because medics are Safe™. Anyone else gets anything that's not nailed to the floor thrown at them because Dogma does not know them. Also he bit Rex at some point.

Cadet Hound who's scared shitless of animals and comes to in the Corrie Kennels. Cadet Hound who is staring up at the drooly fanged mouth of Grizzer who's been waiting patiently and worriedly by his side since he suddenly collapsed and shrunk.

Hound who screams his head off and tries to run away from Grizzer, only to be followed by the confused Massiff that basically chases him around all the way over to the Senate building, and that practically climbs all over a very shocked Fox who had just gotten comms over other Guard vode being turned into children unexpectedly.

Just... Clones getting turned back into clueless cadets that still need to do a lot of growing and learning before they fully become the people they are.

And also the brothers left as their normal selves to deal with their transformed vode'ika, getting a clear picture that some of their vode were vastly different when they were cute little cadets.

#star wars #the clone wars #clone trooper waxer #clone trooper boost #clone trooper sinker #arc trooper echo #clone trooper dogma #sargeant hound #writing prompt #age transformation #age regression #deciding what other clones to de-age but a lot of them feel like they were Just Like That™ since day 1 so no real change besides smol #jesse maybe? hardcase? i feel like hardcase would be good with kids so maybe not hardcase... #gregor is a good candidate because hes a commando and there's no way he wouldn't pull a home alone scenario vs the 212th #decisions decisions...

[phoenixyfriend]

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.

#Ahsoka Tano #Captain Rex #Leia Organa #Jango Fett #rex and ahsoka #Quinlan Vos #Tholme #Depa Billaba #Obi Wan Kenobi #Ben Kenobi #Maul #Darth Maul #time travel #de aging #ptsd #trauma #child soldiers #Phoenix Files #Uncle Ben and Little Luke #Auntie Soka and Little Leia #disaster lineage

[willowcrowned]

[slides into your ask box like] can I prompt literally anything involving baby clones? It can be any of the AUs (Babysitter Han, one of the other time-travel fics, an inexplicable de-aging fic immediately post-battle where Anakin's grounded for medical reasons and has to take care of a clone toddlers) I just. I'm having feelings? About babies. The tubies need so much love.

I am SO glad you said this because I’ve been obsessed with this art of bb Rex and bb Soka (they’re so small.. so round... so squish... ✪o✪ T-T), but since canon baby clones are a topic that is unremittingly depressing, let’s do Phantom of the Past AU.

Here’s what happens:

Anakin, who is down an apprentice and up a little brother, decides that he’s actually, like, really good at this sibling thing. ‘Oh, I know,’ he thinks, ‘since Ahsoka isn’t old enough to be a Padawan yet, but I miss her, she can just be my little sister!’ He doesn’t bother to get anyone else’s input, because he’s Anakin.

He waltzes into the Temple, finds Ahsoka in the crèche, and gets down on his knees, and says,

“Hey, kiddo, want to come on an adventure?”

Because Ahsoka is seven, and Anakin is cool, and Jedi children are taught to trust Knights (even Knights that really should have a nanny 24/7, or at least, like, a jiminy cricket), she agrees readily.

Anakin does all sorts of things that siblings do with her— or at least what he thinks siblings to together. He teaches her how to hold laser swords, they have pillow fights, they land on a remote planet and help cull an infestation of gundarks, and there’s at least one afternoon where they go to the zoo and ice cream melts all over their hands. (Fortunately, Anakin is at least peripherally aware of the fact that Ahsoka had a hard time with incredible violence the last go around, so he doesn’t expose her to as much of it as he might have.)

Eventually, though, they end up on Kamino, because Ahsoka misses having kids her age around and Anakin refuses to take her back to the Temple, where Obi-Wan will undoubtedly be waiting to give him a disappointed look.

Ahsoka takes to the babies.

Like, really takes to them.

(In her defense, they’re SO cute, and the older ones are almost universally willing to try to fight her.)

At one point, Anakin, who doesn’t really understand the concept of children, shows her Rex, because they’re totally gonna be best friends here too.

Ahsoka is mildly disappointed and highly disinterested. Rex is a baby. He does nothing besides sleep and cry.

But then Rex starts walking.

She LOVES it. He’s like a little wobbly tower that keeps falling over. She makes him little mazes. She puts toys a couple feet away from him and watches him toddle towards them. She levitates him with the Force. She levitates him and most of his batchmates with the Force all at once. It’s the best.

All the clones, for the record, think she’s awesome. They were being trained to protect Jedi already, but this is a Jedi who’s their age! And she has powers! And sparring skills! And is willing to catapult them off of high objects whenever they ask!

They’re already getting a more rounded education (with options for tons of hobbies), and they have lots of free time, so in general all the clones are a lot happier.

But then Ahsoka shows up and introduces them to the concept of citywide paintball.

They adopt her that evening.

#BABIES!!!! BABIES!!!!!! #phantom of the past au #asks #phoenixyfriend #star wars #star wars au #willow's aus #ahsoka tano #captain rex #baby clones #long post

[sweetest-honeybee]

Wels and Hels Become Smol

This s what I’m counting as a ‘First Chapter’ but let me know what you think! I’ll write more if y’all like it :D

Summary: Tired of his evil clone, Wels asks Beef to make a new machine to pull Hels out of history. Though....It doesn’t really work that way. Some malfunctions cause a bit of de-aging.

TW: Smoke, sparks, the kinda stuff in terrible machinery. Also brief blood mention but overall not a very triggering chapter.

Characters: Welsknight, Helsknight, VintageBeef, Xisuma

Enjoy!

—————————

It was inevitable. At some point, Wels was going to go back up to Beef asking if by any chance he could get rid of Hels. And at some point, Beef was going to comply and create a whole new machine to test out on the knights. And at some point, Wels was going to drag Hels out of his dimension to use the machine and Hels was going to dread losing his body that he only just got a couple weeks beforehand.

So, that’s where they were now. Underground in Beef’s testing room while Wels discussed the instructions with Beef and how the machine worked, which it probably wouldn’t. Hels on the other hand just sulked against the wall with his arms crossed. He had no sword, no armor, a wrapped arrow wound on his arm from having to be forced down there after being held at bow point.

Beef really wasn’t all too excited if he were being honest. Mostly since he didn’t have a lot of faith in the machine working but surely if he reversed some settings here and there, Hels would disappear and the Hermitcraft server would have one less evil doppelgänger to worry about. Though, his cloning machine was technically successful and Hels really hadn’t done any harm since he just stayed in his dimension. There wasn’t really a need for this.

But, either way, it came down to Wels, who made it very clear that he held such a distaste for his evil counterpart. That being said, Beef instructed both knights to step inside the machine at the same time holding a clock. Really, he intended for it to work like a time machine but without Wels going back in time. Essentially, if it was going to work, he would be able to pick and choose what did and didn’t happen on the day Hels was created and thus Hels would disappear and the whole thing would be forgotten.

Reluctantly, Hels shuffled inside the glass tube connecting from the ceiling to the floor with Wels and snatched the clock from the patiently waiting Beef outside of it. Weld rolled his eyes but who was he to judge. He certainly didn’t want to be erased from history more than Hels did but it had to be done if the evil hermit had ill intentions for their lovely server.

“And you’re really sure you wanna go through with this?” the butcher clarified before he handed Wels his clock. A bit of guilt emerged with what he was about to do, but again, it was Wels’s decision.

Wels hardly hesitated with his answer. “Yes, I do. If Evil Xisuma can escape banning then I’m not risking anything.” The knight eyed his counterpart as he said it, only earning a hard glare in return.

“You were better off just killing me,” Hels replied with a sneer. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Beef shrugged, handing Wels his clock. He took a last glance at Hels who made an obvious commitment to avoiding eye contact. Before the butcher could really dwell on it further, he shut the iron door on the machine and moved behind a newly mined out area in the back of the room. Thick layers of glass separated it from the machine for the sake of his own safety and redstone connected to a leaver trailed from the machine through a small hole by his feet.

“Alright, you guys ready? And again, Wels, you’re absolutely positively 100% sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” both knights dragged.

Beef sighed. “Okay, here we go then.”

The butcher took the lever and flipped it, almost kind of surprised that it even turned on. Lights and buttons on the wall flashed periodically, the smooth whirring noise lasted more than five seconds, and neither of the knights expressed any unusual discomfort from what he could see. Good signs, that meant that he could open the control panel and begin removing Hels.

Though, he must’ve spoken too soon when the whirring began becoming choppy, sparks replacing its paused seconds. Where the sparks came from, bits of smoke emerged and the moment the other two saw it, they, even Hels, sent Beef very worried expressions.

The malfunctions continued when various beeping voiced from the machine and the clouds of smoke grew larger.

“Ohh….that cannot be a good sign,” Beef muttered, pulling his hands to his hair. Admittedly, he should’ve just shut off the machine but he was too busy freaking out.

“Uh, Beef?” Wels began, his voice sounding muddled from the loud sounds in the room. Yet, Beef could hear him. The knight pointed at his clock. “I don’t wanna assume but I don’t think this was supposed to happen!”

That earned a smack upside head from Hels.

“Just give it a second I think it’ll figure itself out!” Beef decided, still ignoring the lever beside him.

“Oh for the love of- I’m breaking out!” Hels announced. Before his fist even made it to the glass, every light in the room shut off with a loud crack, the machine shutting down with it and the sound of shattering glass.

Startled, the butcher covered his face, only peeking through his fingers when all he heard was silence. No snarky comment from Hels, no attempt at an uplifting comment from Wels. He pulled his hands from his face, trying to look through the thick layers of smoke in the room on the other side of the glass. He couldn’t see the figures of either knight and at that moment, he began panicking, wondering if he had just erased both of them from history all together.

Quickly, he ran into the clouded room, glass crunching under his feet, muttering curses along the way. The entire tube was no longer there, just in shards on the floor. He waited for a second, watching the smoke thin a little more before continuing. Thankfully, some light from the doorway emerged, casting yellow rays into the room. Beef squinted into the used-to-be machine with the new source of light, seeing two much much smaller figures, not hardly a block and a half tall. One stood, wobbling for a second, then falling into the glass from tripping on a wad of something beneath its feet.

And at that moment, Beef heard a child crying.

Oh, oh no. Oh no, no, no, no.

He took off his apron, using it to fan away the smoke. He crouched down near the little figure, letting the light do its work for him. The crying continued, then another child’s cry began and now both of them were crying. As the smoke cleared, two of the smallest toddlers he’d ever seen looked right at him. Sets of the biggest, bluest and reddest, tearful eyes rested on him. The blue eyed toddler notably was covered in scratches from his fall onto the ground.

“Oh my….Wels?” He looked at the red eyed toddler. “Hels?”

For some reason, that only made the blue eyed one, which he’s now assuming is Wels, cry again. Probably since Beef was looking on the brink of a lot of external panic. Hels followed suit, sniffling and then choking on a high pitched sob. The butcher rushed to soothe the both of them, picking them up and moving them upstairs- noting how they were too small for their adult clothes and were now naked. They coughed and choked on the leftover smoke through their tears and that really just made him feel worse.

Finally upstairs, he opted to put the two in the animal farm room. He sat them down on the sandstone and it took a few seconds to get them to release their hands from his shirt. Hels complied, calming down to sniffles and moans. Wels on the other hand didn’t let go. The little knight simply tucked his face into Beef’s chest sadly.

“Wels, buddy, you need to let go so I can get the blood off of you, okay?” Wels moved his head, tilting it up at him. Who was he kidding, Beef’s heart melted at the little guy. Though, the snot running down his mouth was a bit of a pain since he now had it all over his shirt.

“Okay,” the toddler mumbled. Beef let out a sigh of relief, thank god he knew words. When did children even start speaking, he was unsure, but Wels understood him and that was all that mattered.

With that, he sat him on the floor next to his twin, Beef moving to grab some wool from the sheep for makeshift bandages. When he turned back from his crafting table, he found the knights staring at the pigs. Despite their still shared worry and obvious fear, they occasionally giggled at the pigs who squealed and oinked at them.

“That a piggy?” Beef tested. Just to see what they knew.

“Piggy,” the two said back to him. “Piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy, piggy!” At the word, they erupted into a fit of snorts and laughs, momentarily forgetting their previous moods. That was until Beef approached Wels with a bucket of water and the wool cloths.

“Be brave for me, okay? You’re a tough knight,” he ruffled the child’s hair and was pleased when he stuck out his legs to him. “Thanks, bud, won’t be more than a minute.”

With a patience he didn’t know a toddler could have, considering Wels didn’t hardly squirm away from his grip, he finished in no more than a couple minutes. He washed off the little knight’s knees while the other decided he was bored and went to stick his hands up in the glass pig pen. The butcher’s heart warmed at the sound of the little giggles from it when the pigs didn’t hesitate to lick his hand. Hels pulled his hand back with a squeal, grabbing his counterpart’s attention.

Wels pointed at the pigs, looking at Beef. “Piggy?”

“Sure,” Beef exhaled with a shrug. He left the knight to have his fun with his twin, and the pigs. Now, he needed to make them some clothes. Maybe armor? The thought of toddler sized knight’s armor made him chuckle to himself.

He went to the sheep, grabbing red and blue eyes from the chest. With haste, he sheered the newly died sheep of both colors and set off to the crafting table on the other side of the room while the boys moved to the cows. Sewing wasn’t hard, that was a skill he needed in survival. He knew how to make shirts so it was just like making tiny versions of those shirts and with leg holes and buttons. Easy onesies for the twins.

Momentarily, he was distracted by the two mimicking the mooing coming from the cows. He already knew that would get annoying very quickly.

Beef had a thought while he was making the onesies. We’re they potty trained? Did he need to make diapers as well? How on earth do you handle a toddler? Shaking his head, he opted to make some cloth diapers for the both of them, not wanting to be wrong if he guessed they were already potty trained. The last thing he needed was an accident.

Finishing the onesies and diapers, he whistled at the boys, catching their attention. He held up the onesies and they dramatically awed at his craftsmanship. Beef couldn’t help but to feel a bit of pride at that.

Eagerly, they stumbled up to him to put on their new clothes. One at a time, he clipped the diapers on the, with a safety pin. Then, he slid the onesies on the two and marveled at how they giggled at each other happily, poking at each other’s outfits. Gosh, it was so darn cute.

Now, the real question came to mind. What on earth does he do with them? He’s nowhere near fit for fatherhood at the moment and he needed a lot of alone time to fix that machine. He’d have to explain to Xisuma what happened, won’t he. He’s already imagining how that conversation would go. Hey Xisuma, I just turned two of your Hermits into children please help me. That would end in either utter confusion or laughter. Probably both, knowing the admin.

“Alright then,” he began. The knights looked up at him expectantly. “You guys wanna see Xisuma?” They tilted their heads in unison at the question.

“Is Suma?” Wels asked.

“Iggsooma,” Hels added, as if he were correcting his twin.

Beef grinned at their odd little relationship. “Yeah! Xisuma!”

He threw on his elytra from his inventory, dark wings spreading slightly behind his back. Again, the knights awed at him and he couldn’t help but to laugh. The butcher scooped them up into his arms, the two still weighing not nearly as much as he thought they would but working with sandstone was no easy task.

The trio made their way out of his desert village. He moved Hels to sit with Wels on his other arm so that he could fire off his rockets. As soon as he was in the sky, the knights were squealing with delight at the shrinking ground below them. It took no time to reach Xisuma’s jungle, but where the admin was right now, Beef actually had no clue. In chat, he said something about the iron farm so he flew into the landing bay on it.

Letting both toddlers down on the floor, he pulled out his communicator, letting his friend know that there was an urgent meeting they needed to have up there. It took no time for Xisuma to reply with a yes, much to Beef’s relief. Pocketing his comm, he turned to where the knights ran off to. Really, they were quite interested in the assortment of colorful shucker boxes laying on the floor.

Not to much of his surprise, he already heard another set of flapping wings landing on the bay.

“Alright then, what seems to be the- oh my goodness me.” Xisuma paused abruptly at the sight of the toddlers. Who he could only assume was Wels and Hels given Beef’s message. “Why are they children?!”

Ignoring his concern, they ran up to him happily.

“Suma!” the blond yelled.

Xisuma crouched down, meeting their height as best he could. They were just so small, he wouldn’t have ever expected this. They giggled at his silly looking helmet, the white feathers on the sides were certainly a sight to behold. He ducked his head to let them poke and prod as they pleased.

“Beef, what did you do?” the admin asked.

“Ah, long story. Wels created an evil doppelgänger of himself and in attempts to remove him with a new machine I made, I uh….” he gestured at the two. “That happened.”

“O….kay then. Well, what exactly do I do? I can’t really just change their ages through coding.”

Beef’s stomach sank. “You can’t?”

Xisuma chuckled at how Wels sat promptly in his lap, looking up at him with a snort. Hels copied him, sitting next to him. “Hm, no, I don’t believe so. You’ll need to fix that machine of yours.”

“Well, I uh, need alone time for that. I can’t take care of children at the same time.”

Xisuma nodded, wrapping his arms around the toddlers and standing, carrying both of them while they swung their legs. “Yeah, they’re adorable, I’ll admit, but I don’t have a place to keep em’ nor the time to look after them.” He walked over to Beef, plopping them in his arms. The other stumbled, concern spreading across his face.

“Who do I take them to, then?”

The admin tapped his chin thoughtfully. “I believe Cleo used to be a teacher in her older days, I think preschool might’ve been a part of that? If not, ask Stress or, I dunno, Joe? They seem fit for the task.” Finally, he shrugged. “Anyways, I’ll be off then. If there’s any trouble, you know where I am.” He waved, the knights waving back happily.

“Bye bye Suma!” they said. Xisuma laughed, nodding off to them before flying out of the landing bay. Beef in return huffed.

Why did Wels have to go through with such an idea.

#long post #my fic #welsknight #helsknight #vintagebeef #xisuma

[karmathecat]

Firewhiskey is Not the Best Mixer Part 3

The third part to my Next Gen time travel to the Marauder era! Thank you for reading guys!

Part 1 | Part 2

AO3 | FF

The halls of Hogwarts were the same James noted. He glanced over at his siblings and saw that they were both standing close to him, himself and Al on either side of Lily. The Marauder’s were oddly silent, sharing glances that James could only assume was a communication that he was not privy to. 

Sirius watched as the three new teenagers stopped at Lily’s behest. She bent over to take off her high heels, using Al’s shoulder for support as she did so. Once at her true height, Sirius noticed that she was quite a lot shorter than the Lily that he knew, coming up to perhaps his chest. She was complaining about her shoes hurting her feet now that the cushioning charm had worn off and there was no point recasting it as her feet already hurt. Sirius watched as one of the boys gave Lily his suit jacket to cover herself and was warmed by the clear love that was shared by the group, and once again wondered about their relationship to each other.

James’ attention was drawn to the group in front again as his grandfather cleared his throat as they reached a tapestry of a tall tower which reminded James of the princess stories that their dad read to Lily when they were younger. 

“This is the Heads’ dorms, there’s a guest room there with a double bed and we have a coach in the common room so you can decide who sleeps where. Evans will either be in her room or in the common room and I think that I might be best explaining what’s going on rather than ambushing her with her clone.” James smiled at the younger redhead as he said this in an attempt to reduce the tension that was not diminished on their journey from the Headmaster’s office. 

Lily pulled her brother's jacket closer around her as they entered the Heads’ common room. It was similar to the Gryffindor common room, which was unsurprising considering both of the Heads this year were lions. Lily wondered if the common room would be altered depending on the house of its occupants. Her grandfather bounded up the steps when the common room was clearly devoid of Lily Evans, and silence fell among the group. Lily let her breath out as a heavy sigh and thought about the current situation that she found herself in: forty years in the past, with her grandparents, Teddy’s dad, and a future traitor. Not only were they in the past, but she couldn’t reveal her true name without upsetting the progression of a relationship between her grandparents that clearly hadn’t begun yet. The more she thought about it, the more she realised how ridiculous everything was, and her attitude was completely backwards. She was meeting people that she had only heard stories about, she could ask questions and have an adventure, is that not what she was truly about? Why were her and her brothers being so closed off? 

With a short huff of a laugh, Lily decided that enough was enough, and yes the situation was strange but she was going to make the most of it, and sitting in silence was not the way to do that. With a new purpose, she walked over to the coach and sat next to Sirius and turned to face both the dark haired boy and Remus who was sat in the armchair next to him. 

“So, have you completed the map yet, or is that still in development?”

Two shocked eyes snapped to hers, and she smirked, “Yes we know about the map, Padfoot and Moony.” 

Hearing the conversation, James and Al also came to join, James sitting on the arm of the coach next to Lily, and Al sitting in the armchair beside him. 

“Yes that map has kept all three of us out of trouble on a number of occasions!” The three marauders grinned at each other delighting in the map being passed down to the next generations, they started asking them questions about how much they knew about the Marauders’ adventures, when a cry of alarm was heard from upstairs. 

“I guess James got to the interesting bit, I wonder how Evans will react.” The group fell silent and tried to distinguish the voices from upstairs. When they heard the door open and the voices became more clear, Lily felt a wave of anxiety come over her. She was about to meet the woman she was named after, she knew so little about her and was desperate to know as much as she could. 

James Potter descended the stairs and into the common room looking incredibly nervous, from behind him appeared Lily Evans, her bright green eyes only previously seen in their dad and Al surveyed the room rapidly, once they fell on Lily her mouth opened as if to speak. 

“If I can interrupt what is surely a very entertaining monologue,” Lily Evans’ eyes snapped to James Sirius and widened in surprise, but did close her mouth to stop her rant, “We are from the future, James is telling the truth, no it isn’t a joke, yes my brother and I are related to your James Potter, yes Lily is related to you, we’re from about forty years in the future. I would let you rant but we’ve already been through this and I really can’t be bothered doing it again. So if it’s alright with you I’d like to skip to the part where you’ve accepted that we are from the future because it’s been a really long day.” 

Lily bit her lip to stop herself from laughing at her brother, and saw Al roll his eyes, but she really couldn’t help agreeing with James, it had been a long day and if they skipped the rollercoaster of not believing to accepting that would be very beneficial. 

Lily Evans opened and closed her mouth several times before looking at the Marauder next to her, “That speech was so like you, and I don’t think anyone would choose to have that fluffy hair. Also Dumbledore sent me a message, so for fear of this blowing up in my face, I will accept that we don’t all need to be shipped to St Mungos immediately.” 

Lily was surprised that she accepted the events so quickly, but the word of the Headmaster clearly carried a lot of weight in this time. Lily Evans came and sat on a cushion in front of the fire directly opposite Lily, and was eyeing her with a great interest that was mirrored in the other redhead’s face. 

Lily looked over towards her brothers and then back at Lily Evans, “The pictures don’t do it justice, we do look oddly similar.” The two girls laughed at each other, and Lily saw the other girl square her shoulders and try to relax. 

“So, you’re my daughter?” 

“Granddaughter.” Lily corrected, and the other girl nodded and then looked at the two other time travellers, “And your James’ grandsons, do I dare ask for your full names?” Lily could see the battle playing on the Head Girl’s face, she clearly wanted to know her future and Lily couldn’t blame her, if she was faced with this situation she wasn’t sure she would be able to hold back her questions. 

“I’m not sure that would be the best idea.” Al looked around the room from his siblings to the marauder’s and his grandmother. 

“Okay, I guess that makes sense,” Remus looked put out that the main question wasn’t going to be answered, “how do you know each other then? How was it that you ended up here together?” 

“We were at the ball together, all the wizarding families were invited.” James dodged the question well in Lily’s opinion, but the dodge was clearly noticed by the group.

“You all seem really close, and that you knew each other well. Especially with a prank war?” James Potter eyed the three newcomers with intense interest, he was desperate to know how close they were, hoping that his life was intricately linked with the love of his life. 

James Sirius laughed nodding, “Well it was actually Lil that started that, it started small I guess at Christmas, using the invisibility cloak to move all my stuff an inch to the left so I kept walking into stuff which was incredibly annoying, so I got a rain cloud to follow her all of New Year’s, and that escalated to me being naked on the roof and then to a de-ageing potion gone wrong, and here we are.” 

Everyone was laughing by the end of James’ speech. “So I see that the desire to cause trouble is genetic!” Lily Evans laughed smirking at James, eyeing the Head Boy with amusement as he ruffled the back of his hair. She truly could not believe the situation that she had landed herself in. If a patronus from the Headmaster had not arrived as James attempted his stuttering explanation of who she would find in the common room, she would have never believed it. But her sense of adventure was peaking, she was a Gryffindor afterall, and she knew that this opportunity was something she couldn’t pass up. 

“Would I be able to get changed? This dress isn’t as comfortable as it is fancy I can assure you!” Lily laughed smoothing out her green dress, she was starting to feel more comfortable with the situation she was being presented with. She had her brothers, yes they’d have to be careful to not reveal too much, but she wasn’t alone and she was technically with even more family. She was going to try and make the most of it. 

Lily followed her grandfather up the other set of stairs and into his room. She walked in and looked around as he searched through his drawers. She smiled at pictures of the Marauders on his bedside table, as she sat on the edge of the four poster bed she picked up the frame watching as the four boys laughed as they sat under a tree down by the lake. 

“Here you go, I always find that quidditch stuff is the best to sleep in.” James smiled as he handed her what looked like a practice top, jumper and a pair of jogging bottoms. 

“I agree, I stole James’ all the time before I went to Hogwarts and he was home, and then once I made the team it was literally all I wore!” Lily laughed, and was slightly surprised when James sat on the bed next to her, appraising her with interest. 

“You play quidditch? Evans has never been too into flying.” 

Lily nodded, and decided that the information wasn’t too revealing and found that talking to James was just like talking to her brothers, “Yeah both my parents played at school, but my mum was a professional she played for the Harpies she retired when I was young. So I couldn’t not play! I’m a chaser for Gryffindor, and I’ve been told I’m just as good as my mum, I’d love to play after I finish school but I want to do it off my own back, rather than because of who my parents are.” 

They continued chatting easily for a few minutes, James voicing his excitement about her mum playing professionally, and encouraging her to play herself. James was surprised by how much Lily was talking to him, she seemed so calm and comfortable in his presence, something he could only dream of achieving with Lily Evans. But if this Lily was so connected to the Potter boys, maybe all was not lost after all when it came to his relationship with Evans. 

He stood and gestured to the other door in the room, “That’s the shared bathroom, feel free to use anything, but maybe not my toothbrush.” They two laughed and Lily thanked him before walking into the bathroom. James made his way downstairs and smiled as he watched the two Potter boys gently teasing Lily and to his surprise Lily was laughing and teasing back with equal intensity. As he entered the group again, he sat on the floor next to Lily and told the two Potters that he had left some clothes on his bed for them. 

As Lily reentered the common room in her new comfortable clothes, pulling the sleeves of the familiar knitted material over her hand and taking comfort in the feel. She could feel several sets of eyes on her, and the conversations ended slowly. She eyed them all in question, before James Potter cleared his throat. 

“I guess I didn’t think how weird it would be to see ‘Potter’ written across your back.” 

Lily frowned and then realised, to these boys and Lily that she was not a Potter, she was an Evans or some undescipt surname. 

Lily Evans viewed her granddaughter and had to admit that seeing another girl, family or not, with James’ quidditch jersey on gave her an unpleasant feeling in her stomach. She had to admit that in the presence of the James who was not her Head Boy, she felt slightly flustered. The new James was clearly a few years older than them, perhaps 19 or 20, and if that was the case James Potter was only going to get more attractive, and she didn’t think that was possible. She could imagine her James becoming more defined and more mature in the coming years, and she had decided during her sixth year that she wanted to be around to see the developments. The proof that her and James’ lives were going to be linked to the point of their grandchildren knowing each other was thrilling to her, but the idea that she didn’t know anything about these children’s relationship bothered her. She wanted James Potter for her own, she knew that in herself, he wasn’t the immature bully that he was three years ago, he was a mature man who had strong morals and a loyalty that she had not witnessed in anyone else. And here in front of her in the form of a girl who could be her twin lay the answers to whether James Potter was serious about a life with her. She could ask all the questions she wanted without fear of losing a friendship with someone she wasn’t sure was romantically interested in her anymore. In that moment a plan formed in Lily Evans’ mind. 

“Lily, why don’t you come and share my room? The bed is big enough and that way the two boys can have the spare room. It would save you sleeping on the coach.” 

Lily looked up into the welcoming eyes of her grandmother and was thrilled by the idea of spending some alone time with the Head Girl, and quickly agreed.

James and Al quickly ran upstairs and got changed and met their sister before she headed up to bed. The Marauders watched in amusement as each of the boys kissed Lily on the cheek goodnight before retiring to the spare room. 

Xxx

Lily watched as her grandmother entered the room from the bathroom and pulled back the covers on her four poster bed. The room was exactly the same as James’ had been, and Lily had looked at the photos that littered the room as she waited for the other girl in the bathroom. She had been intrigued by the mix of muggle and magical photos, and spent extra time looking at Lily Evans’ parents so she could tell her Dad about them once she returned home. 

Once she was sitting in bed next to her grandmother, the light was extinguished. Lily could tell the older girl wasn’t going to sleep, she could feel the tension in the air, so wasn’t surprised when Lily Evans rolled over to look in Lily’s hazel eyes. 

“Are you related to James, my James I mean.” Lily was surprised by the phrase my James, as far as she could tell her grandparents were not in a relationship yet so she knew that she had to tread carefully. 

When the younger girl didn’t respond but continued to look at her, Lily steeled herself to plough on, “It’s just, if you were, that might mean that James and I could be in touch after Hogwarts. And if you aren’t related you just happen to be super chummy with his offspring then I know that I’m wasting my time right now and I need to get over whatever it is I have for James. So if you could help me not waste my time I would be incredibly grateful.” 

Lily watched as her grandmother’s pleading emerald eyes bore into her own, she could see how much bravery it took for her grandmother to admit to her feelings. Lily blew out a huge breath and made the decision. She wasn’t sure if she would regret it, and she definitely knew that she should ask Al his opinion, but Al wasn’t here. 

“You’re right, we are related, I share the same name as my grandmother, my name is Lily Potter.”

#harry potter fic #harry potter time travel #next gen time travel #james sirius potter #lily luna potter #lily evans #james potter #next gen fic #marauder fic

[takaraphoenix]

The Tale of FD, Scottie and Gucci

(For @sterek - because your enthusiasm about the headcanon I pitched made me want to actually write it. I hope you like it!)

Foxes weren't pack animals. But her mom used to say that, if something ever happened to her, they should go and seek out another fox. Follow their noses and hope for the mercy and compassion of another fox. This wasn't a fox. Not really. He was walking on two legs and he was way too tall and he had not enough fur, but he smelt like fox. And fox was meant to be protection and safety. And she was really very hungry and so were her brothers – and her youngest brother was hurt. So she gathered all of her bravery and approached the human-shaped fox. She chirped at him pleadingly.

/break\

Sometimes, Stiles still had a hard time to grasp just how much Beacon Hills had changed over the past years since him and Scott had literally stumbled over the body of Laura Hale. Very slowly, one pack had gathered, just to be split up into two different packs. The Hale Pack and the McCall Pack.

The Hale Pack, with Derek who had worked hard to become an alpha, with Isaac, Erica, Boyd, Jackson, Cora and Peter in it. Stiles had been right there, with Derek, had watched Derek fight tooth and nail to protect this pack, to keep this pack safe – and oh, there had been close calls, when the Alpha Pack had come and they barely found Erica and Boyd in time, or when Jackson's parents in their infinite wisdom decided it'd be good to remove the boy struggling with his identity from everything and everyone he knew, including the place where his biological parents were buried, or when the Mexican hunters had come for the she-wolf and Derek had feared for Cora. But they had prevailed. Through all of this, by fighting together, they had prevailed. And Stiles had come to appreciate Derek in a whole new light, he found himself being... proud of Derek.

Though Stiles knew, deep down, that the Hale Pack wouldn't exist like that without its strongest allies. The McCall Pack. Scott, who had become a "true alpha", who had gathered a small pack of his own over the years, with Lydia, Kira, Malia, Liam, Corey and Mason.

And then there was Stiles. Stiles, who wasn't a wolf or a banshee or a kitsune or a chameleon, but Stiles who was something. The boy who ran with wolves. The one whose loyalty laid with two alphas, the human who belonged to two different wolf-packs. He had been the one to broker peace between the two head-butting alphas, he had helped both alphas build up their packs.

Somewhere along the way, he had lost himself. Had lost himself in the void. The nogitsune. But both packs had come together to help and save him and as traumatic and nightmarish as the experience had been, it had pushed Derek – pushed Derek to admit what he truly wanted. Even before they knew Stiles was possessed, when they had been in the hospital, thinking Stiles was sick. Derek had been so worried, had been so angry. Angry because he couldn't keep losing the people he loved. And oh. Oh. So Stiles was someone Derek loved? Like... pack, right? Stiles' back had connected with the wall as the angry alpha pinned him against it with a very low-hissed no. No, not like pack. It had been their first kiss, one filled with fear and anger at circumstances beyond their control. All Stiles could do was cling onto Derek, cling onto that moment.

Soon after, Stiles' life was rattled once more when it turned out he wasn't actually sick. He was just possessed by an evil dark fox-spirit. Easy that one. No, seriously! Supernatural catastrophe? Villainous monster-creature? Those were things both Stiles and Derek could deal with. Those, they knew how to fight. They knew they could fight. A deteriorating brain? They wouldn't have been able to fight that, they would have been helpless. So yay, possession!

And they did. They did fight it and they did win, all of them together. Hale Pack and McCall Pack coming together to fight for the human who ran with both packs. They defeated the nogitsune and Stiles was free. Exhausted, traumatized, confused, but free.

He had a lot to deal with afterward, mentally speaking. The possession had taken its toll on him, but it wasn't just that. Remembering his mother, facing this deeply seated fear that he might have what she had, it had been a trauma all on its own. So Stiles manned up, acted like a responsible adult, seeking an actual doctor for counseling, for sorting through his issues.

At least all but one issue. The issue of a certain brooding wolf who now kept his distance, because he wasn't sure if the moment they shared had just been a I-might-lose-you moment or more. Stiles had rolled his eyes, very slowly and very exhausted, before pinning Derek to a wall – yeah, yeah, he knew he could only do that because Derek was letting him, but whatever – and kissing him.

Life went on after that. The McCall pack grew, while the Hale Pack settled. Most of them graduated and sought out a future. Stiles left for Quantico, Derek was being a miserable, mopey large puppy-dog (that was how Erica put it, with Boyd smirking knowingly in the background), but Derek and Stiles actually made it work. They made the long-distance thing work, until Stiles finished his training and got back to Beacon Hills as an official FBI liaison. A bit like Rafael McCall, just... actually wanted and also actually useful. Granted, working with his dad was sometimes frustrating, but for the most part, Stiles loved his job. He loved his life. Because after moving back to Beacon Hills? He redecorated the loft to make it actually look like a place someone could live in instead of... whatever Derek had been going for in there, because yikes to his interior design abilities.

So he was living with his boyfriend, he was still overseeing two packs, having a lot of fun at Scott's expense (seriously, Scott trying to be a wise mentor to the younger teens who kept gravitating to Beacon Hills, seeking out to be a part of his pack, it was hilarious to watch for Stiles).

Life was good. Life was... really very good. That was the thought occupying Stiles' mind when he was walking through the woods, feeling a bit like little Red Riding Hood (well, he was on his way to be devoured by his Big, Bad Wolf, so—o...). An odd chirping sound interrupted Stiles' thoughts though and caused him to look down at the – huh. There was a small baby fox sitting right in front of him on the path, staring up at him and chirping at him. It looked very thin and very dirty and – was that blood? Yeah, that was blood. Stiles had gotten exceptionally good at spotting blood on fur (he blamed his stupid, big wolf for that). A little lost, Stiles paused and knelt down.

What was he supposed to do now...? He had heard somewhere not to touch wild baby animals because then their moms might not recognize them again, or something like that. But the little one was clearly hurt and – a rustling sound interrupted Stiles' contemplation. Behind the small fox, the bush was rustling and, looking more closely, Stiles spotted two more foxes. Both also small. He approached the bush very carefully, keeping eye-contact with the fox that had first chirped at him. When he pushed the leaves out of the way to properly look at the other two, he saw that they were just as dirty, ruffled and malnourished as the third. Something told Stiles that there was no mom. Or dad. Or great-cousin twice removed. Those three were on their own.

"Okay. Okay. Okay", whispered Stiles to himself. "Okay. You know what we're gonna do? We're gonna go visit uncle Scott. He's a doctor, he'll be able to tell if you're okay. Okay?"

/break\

Half an hour later had Derek barging into the vet clinic, looking wide-eyed. "Where's the baby?"

"What... baby?", asked Scott slowly, looking from Derek over to Stiles, who just shrugged.

"Our baby!", exclaimed Derek, pointing from himself to Stiles and back.

"I... what?", was all Stiles could muster, slowly approaching his boyfriend.

In way of explanation, Derek lifted his phone to show Stiles and Derek a message from Lydia – Congratulations on fatherhood, Derek. They have your eyes. It took Stiles a few moments.

"Your... grasp on biology troubles me", muttered Stiles and pinched his nose. "You and me, we... can't physically have a baby. And even if, don't you think that there would have been some stages, like a pregnancy, before you get a baby with your eyes?"

"Stiles", growled Derek deeply. "This is Beacon Hills. You could have been hit with a spell, some weird experiment gone wrong that results in a baby-aged clone of us-"

"You're not Superman. I'm not Lex Luthor. We didn't make a Superboy", snorted Stiles amused. "There is no baby. Well. No human baby. I... found three baby foxes in the woods, I called Lydia to drive me here so Scott could check them and make sure they're alright."

Stiles took a step aside to show the two small foxes sitting huddled together on the table in front of Scott. Derek furrowed his brows. Oh. So Lydia had just... joked. Derek heaved a relived sigh.

"Wait. You said three foxes", grunted Derek. "And... Lydia... did she imply that you want to keep the foxes? Stiles, we're not keeping three wild animals-"

"That hardly seems fair. Stiles decided to keep you too, after all", commented Scott dryly.

Derek threw a half-hearted glare at the other alpha, while Scott just smirked. Though then Derek's attention was drawn toward something moving in the hood of Stiles' dark-red hoodie. A fox, the third fox, poking its tiny head out of the hood and peeking over Stiles' shoulder.

"De—er", drawled Stiles, making a miserable little sound. "Scott says they're malnourished and the state of their coat is suggesting they don't have anyone. They're just... babies. Look at them."

Stiles stepped back to the table and easily picked the two other foxes up, even though Derek wanted to protest – don't just pick up wild animals like that, Stiles – but the protest died on his tongue when Stiles gently cradled the two fox babies against his chest, the third one still poking out from the hood, resting its tiny little paws and head on Stiles' shoulder.

"Stiles says he just... picked them up from the forest floor, carried all three of them to the car and they stayed well-behaved until they came here", explained Scott at Derek's look.

"And since they seem so fond of you, you want to keep them?", sighed Derek.

"Yes? Ple—ease?", begged Stiles with the largest, most impossible to deny eyes. "They're really cute and sweet. Please, Derek. I promise I'll take care of them. I already named them."

"...What did you name them, Stiles?", asked Derek wearily.

Stiles smiled brightly, lifting one fox-baby a little. "This one is FD. Fox Derek. Because he's grumpy and growly but he really likes when I pay attention to him. Clearly a Derek."

Derek made an offended, displeased noise, before Stiles continued. "And this one is Scottie. Because he's clumsy and awkward and an absolute disaster, but also so adorable."

It was now Scott's turn to make a small noise, before Stiles pointed at the one sitting in his hood. "...And this one is Gucci. Look. I wanted to name her after Lydia, but she said 'over my dead body' in the car already, so... she got to name her and she decided on Gucci."

Derek took a deep breath as he looked at FD, Scottie and Gucci. He... now had three fox children.

#Sterek #Stiles Stilinski #Derek Hale #Teen Wolf #Fanfiction #Fluff #Phoe's Tumblr Drabbles #I mean y'all know I ain't good at the 'drabble' part

[adamwatchesmovies]

The Worst of 2019

I had to follow-up my “Best of 2019″ list with its opposite universe counterpart but before I give the movies that made me suffer another lashing, let’s make a couple of things clear. I’m not a paid professional and even if I was, all I would be is a film critic. Making movies is hard. Nobody in the industry aims to do a bad job - there are much easier ways to make a living. Even though I might’ve hated these films with a passion that still smolders now, I’ve got mad respect for anyone who decides to put themselves out there and put together a movie. At the end of the day, your work is going to live on. You made something millions will see. Me? I’ll ultimately fade away. Take this into consideration as we single out the movies that tried and failed, sometimes spectacularly.

10. Cats

Cats is the kind of movie that doesn’t come around often. It’s actually kind of fascinating to watch, or it would be if it weren’t so boring. Rebel Wilson (who was destined to have a movie on this list when she starred in The Hustle) plays a cat who unzips her skin to reveal an outfit… above her skin again? She leads a choreographed troupe of singing mice and cockroaches that fill you with terror and confusion. It’s as if they’ve been scaled so the actors could scoop them up and swallow them whole - as cats would do - but because human proportions are so different from cat’s the objects and other animals they interact with change size from scene to scene. Meanwhile, Idris Elba is prowling around with his coat all open, his non-existent junk exposed to all who want to see. Our main character is so bland and unmemorable she makes no impact on you whatsoever. There’s magic in a plot that’s composed almost entirely of introductions - which might make it accurate to the broadway show but not entertaining as a movie -, dodgy special effects in every frame, lame jokes coming from the left and the right… and yet, I don’t hate this film like I do the others on this list. In fact, a part of me even admires Cats.

The thing is, had this movie worked, it would’ve been hailed as genius. It didn’t so it’s being ridiculed but I have to give it points for its ambition and willingness to take chances. That means a lot in a year in which every single one of the top ten grossing films were sequels, remakes or expansions of already-existing properties.The gamble didn’t pay off, but Cats had the guts to walk up to the plate.

9. Dumbo

I was tempted to lump The Lion King and Aladdin along with this tale of a baby elephant that learns to fly while a family of circus performers learn that the big circus tycoon played by Michael Keaton is a meanie. Few of the Disney “live-action” remakes do anything to validate their existence. They’re just feeding you what you can already watch at home for free because you probably already own the originals on home video or you have Disney+. I’m going to single out Dumbo as the worst because it actually tried something different and failed spectacularly. This means we can expect all future Disney remakes to take as few chances as possible.

8. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot

There are other movies I could’ve put in this spot (see the Runner-Ups section below for examples) but I had to consider the experience as well as the movie itself. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is an unfunny comedy that walks into the room as if it’s going to marry your mother and be your new father. It makes fun of the very thing it’s doing. This might make it appealing to members of the “View Askewniverse” cult but not to me. Whether you’ve been brainwashed by Kevin Smith or not, it’s impossible to sit through the painful bonus material which follows the film, particularly the interviews conducted by Jason Mewes. The actor displays no charisma whatsoever while asking questions you don’t care about to people who obviously don’t want to be on camera. I get what Smith was doing; he was trying to give his fans more than just the movie but anyone in their right mind should’ve seen the bonus footage and burned it.

4. Dark Phoenix

What a disappointing way to end the X-Men franchise. Dull until the very end and then interesting for just enough time to make you realize you didn’t just dream it all, the movie was a bad idea from the start. We haven’t known the young version of the X-Men long enough for this story to mean anything and the choices made to make this story more faithful to the comics makes you wonder if you stepped into the wrong movie. Even before seeing Dark Phoenix, I thought people were being too harsh on The Last Stand. They did a lot of things wrong in 2006 but they had the good sense to leave out the aliens. It’s not great but it’s been somewhat redeemed since because its plot advanced the series and meant something in the end. Even if Disney had considered keeping this franchise alive while it was acquiring Fox, this is such a mess they now have no choice but to reboot the whole thing.

4. Jexi

Jexi feels like it just escaped from a time capsule. Even when it would’ve been new, it wouldn’t have been funny. This had no business appearing in theatres and watching the trailer again reminded me of why I hated it as much as I did. If you suspect you have mutant powers that just need to be unlocked by a traumatic or life-altering event, barricade your doors and start playing this movie. You’ll want to escape so desperately, you might suddenly develop the ability to bend space and time.

6. Rambo: Last Blood

This 5th entry in the Rambo series didn’t even have the guts to commit to being a proper conclusion. The titular character appears to succumb to his wounds as the picture closes… only to get up and go find medical attention during the end credits. Senselessly gory and violent, its depiction of Mexico leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

5. Shaft

No one was asking for this movie, not even fans of the original Richard Roundtree films or the 2000 Sam Jackson reboot. It tired story attempts to introduce a new version of the classic blaxploitation character to a new audience. In the process, it makes you hate the two “heroes” we follow through a generic plot filled with offensive humor. The only good thing about Shaft is that it prompted me to check out the originals.

3. My People, My Country

The Farewell made me think a lot about how we should view other cultures, particularly China. In it, Awkwafina’s Billi is caught in a moral dilemma when she learns her beloved grandmother is dying and that her family is keeping the secret from sweet Nai Nai. You go in thinking the American-raised woman is going to do the right thing by tearing the charade apart but it’s not long before you realize this scenario isn't that simple. When it comes to My People, My Country, I am going to judge. What’s the moral of this movie again? Give up your life, your dreams, your family for the sake of a country that sees you as nothing more than an expandable pion? If that weren’t bad enough, the movie’s so dull it’ll be an epic struggle to stay awake. Whose idea was it to have an entire segment of this anthology dedicated to the engineers who ensured the mechanism that would raise China’s flag in 1949? It’s as exciting as it sounds.

2. ¡Ay, mi madre!

The worst part of this list is that I know how few people reading will be able to relate. ¡Ay, mi madre! wasn't released theatrically in North America, but movies release “Straight to Netflix” have become such a big deal I’ll make an exception to my usual rule of disqualifying direct-to movies from this list. In terms of filmmaking, this is the worst movie I’ve seen in a long, long time. It’s more technically inept than anything else on this list by far. The comedy is so unfunny it’ll make you question your life, the actors are not convincing even before they open their mouths to speak and the ending might as well be a big middle finger towards the people watching. It ha no ending, almost as if they cobbled together the few salvageable strands of footage someone scooped out of the trash into something vaguely related to “coherent”. Remember the name so you know never to click “play” if you happen upon it like I did.

The Runner-Ups

Simmba

I was deeply offended by this Bollywood film but technically, it’s a 2018 movie so I decided to only include it here. It’s loathsome but admittedly, my hatred for it has somewhat subsided since I saw it. Don’t ask me why. This movie sucks.

Playmobil The Movie

This is what we thought we were going to get when they announced “The Lego Movie”. Terrible songs, a lazy plot that makes terrible use of the property it’s advertising, unfunny jokes, and a lack of imagination guarantee this film is destined to make everyone involved regret the day it was released.

Hellboy

Yet another failed superhero movie that enthusiastically sets itself up for a sequel when it’s so obvious to everyone watching that there isn’t going to be one. The one thing it’s got going for it is a pretty cool scene towards the end where demons escape into our world and begin tearing civilians to pieces. To get to that, you must sit through endless scenes that bash you over the head with a mallet marked “Rated R”. Gallons of blood and intestines spilling onto the floor, doesn’t mean the movie is meant for adults. This was written by a teenager disguised as a grown-up.

Gemini man

They waited all these years for the de-aging technology to get where it is now… for this story? Someone should’ve pointed out to director Ang Lee when he was getting ready to film that training doesn’t alter your DNA. Why waste millions cloning Will Smith when you could just raise a normal kid and train them to be an assassin? Ultimately, the movie isn’t really all that bad. It’s watchable but it’s such a big disappointment it needs to be taught a lesson.

Replicas

I’m giving this one a break because no one saw it. I also think it’ll play better at home, where you’ll be free to make fun of it or verbally abuse the loopy plot aloud while your friends listen. If there’s a movie this year that was “So bad it’s good”, it’s this one.

After

At least “Twilight” had its original take on vampires and some danger mixed into its romantic triangle to keep things theoretically interesting. This film started off as - I kid you not - a “One Direction” fan-fic. The drama it serves up will have you howling like a werewolf flying through laughing gas. On the upside, a sequel is coming. In fact, the teaser is scheduled for today!

1. Unplanned

This was the most uncomfortable movie experience of 2019. Most of the Christian propaganda films don’t seem to put much effort into their production - they’re preaching to the choir so why should they? - but 2019 had Breakthrough, which was quite good. It showed these movies don’t have to appeal solely to the churches who will buy tickets en-masse. This movie is ridiculous, gory like a horror film, misleading, and phony. It did have what is undoubtedly the most outrageous and unintentionally funny dialogue of the year, however. “Fast food outlets look to break even on the hamburgers they sell. That’s all they do is break even ... Do you know where they make all their money? The french fries and soda. Low cost, high margin items. Abortion is our fries-and-soda.” Are we sure this was based on a true story? If so, I don’t know why the director decided to edit out the scenes in which Cheryl (Robia Scott) takes the buckets of aborted fetuses home to cook them. I think it would’ve really driven home how evil her character is. I felt dirty sitting in the theater next to people who ate this up.

#movies #films #reviews #movie reviews #film reviews #film criticism #simmba #Playmobil: The Movie #hellboy #gemini man #replicas #after #cats #dumbo #aladdin #the lion king #Jay and Silent Bob Reboot #jexi #rambo: last blood #shaft #dark phoenix #My People My Country #¡Ay mi Madre! #unplanned

[crystallized-iron]

So I got bored and answered an entire ask meme.

Describe your comfort zone—a typical you-fic.

My comfort zone for writing might be emotional angst. 

Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?

Sci-fi, the kind with ships and space aliens, probably similar to Star Wars but with my own spin on it

Is there a trope you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole?

I wouldn’t be so dramatic with the wording, but I will not write kidfic (that’s when some are kids and others aren’t, right?) or de-aging. I would only write characters as kids if it’s part of a super long series and they all age together. And I haven’t even done that.

How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?

Charles Xavier supposedly died but his consciousness was recovered by scientists and then transferred to a cloned body of his. Then they get scared when he starts to actually use his power.

Share one of your strengths.

Painful scenes.

Share one of your weaknesses.

Fluff

Share a snippet from one of your favorite pieces of prose you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

He rubbed his head. They just would not stop.

- sun is dropping - did you hear - the bodies should -

Bodies?

- be at the bottom -

His hand lowered to his side. Did he catch the thought of a murderer? He could pick it out over the usual hum. So he was nearby.

The door to the inn opened and someone walked inside.

There was a flash of a moment in Charles’ mind. A group of men. Their faces pierced grotesquely by their own fishing hooks. And dragged to the bottom of the sea.

The screaming was chilling. But… but...

It was no ordinary person that committed that sinful act. He was gifted, like Charles himself.

Someone bumped into him and Charles caught the image of a girl. Bruised. Starved. ‘They give one fish for using us.’

‘Using you?’

‘Our bodies. We would fight, but… Food is food.’

“Private room for one if you can.”

It was not out of pure cruelty, not from an evil nature. He was stopping those that brought pain to others.

“Charles, let’s go,” Raven said, key in hand.

“He is with us as well,” he stated, getting the man to turn and stare at him.

======

The Gifted, Chapter One

I like this scene here. We see Charles’ just picking up the thoughts of others because he cannot control his powers yet. We get a glimpse into what Erik did, and even why he did it (although that is also an earlier scene). But the closer Erik gets, the more Charles can see, showing that proximity is a big factor in what Charles can see when it comes to mind reading.

Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you’ve written and explain why you’re proud of it.

Charles faced him. “I am not sure how much I can tell you.”

“You read my mind.”

“It is the loudest.”

Erik folded his arms. “So what can you tell me?”

“Only about my life after the age of twelve. But I warn you, I am terribly boring.”

“You are a mind reader. How is that boring?”

“But that is just what I can do. Aside from that I'm a boring person, really.”

“Let me decide that,” Erik said.

Charles nibbled his lip while he decided where to start, his mind catching a question from the other man. “Of course you would want to know more about that.”

“Of course. Because you were hurt.”

Shaking his head, Charles said, “I really do not know who she is. That all happened just before Raven.”

“What do you mean, just before?”

He gazed at the floor. “My earliest memory is running. Just running. There is nothing before that.” His arms came up, wrapped around himself. “There is just the stars above me, the cool breeze, the night sky. Cold grass beneath me that crunched with every step.”

Erik came closer.

“My lungs were burning, my heart was racing, I… I just kept thinking ‘run’.”

“And you don’t know why.”

“I don’t. I was in the woods. And I tripped over a tree root. I suppose it was lucky. Raven happened to be hiding nearby. She found me.” He raised his head and looked at Erik. “In the dream, that woman… she… you know.”

“Choked me,” Erik finished for him.

“Yes. Well. That part, it… it must have really happened.” Charles swallowed down the emotions trying to force their way out. “I didn’t… I didn’t know until she said… there were marks.” He moved a hand down his neck. “I know my power is protecting me. Or I would remember all of it, or… maybe be even worse off. Not sure. But whatever it was had to be... really, really horrible.”

Erik stood in front of him. “But you survived it.”

“I don’t know how. I… don't want to know.”

=======

The Gifted, Chapter Four

This scene, I think I pulled it off well. Charles’ emotional explanation of what he does remember from the time just before meeting Raven.

Which fic has been the hardest to write?

That would be So Beautiful, simply because there’s a lot of subs but no comments, anywhere, period. The number of comments really does make a difference in how quickly something might be updated, you know. (And at this point, I’ve temporarily fallen out of MCU love and am now focused on X-Men, cherik specifically)

Which fic has been the easiest to write?

Currently, that is The Gifted. I’m already writing chapter 8, but only up to 5 is posted so far. Probably a good thing because I edited both 6 and 7 maybe three times now.

Is writing your passion or just a fun hobby?

Both. I am passionate about writing, but the fanfiction part has to be a hobby. Now I just need to get working on my original work more.

Is there an episode above all others that inspires you just a little bit more?

For me it’s moves, and probably X-Men: The First Class right now.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever come across?

When you’re writing a fight scene, you are doing it because you want the character to get hurt. Even if they run away, you need to have the injury goal in mind, because that determines the way the characters move and all that. So decide the injury goal first.

What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever come across?

Never use -ing, never use -ly, never use blah blah blah.

If you could choose one of your fics to be filmed, which would you choose?

I can think of three right away, but I would say The Gifted.

If you only could write one pairing for the rest of your life, which pairing would it be?

Fuck... right now, cherik.

Do you write your story from start to finish, or do you write the scenes out of order?

Generally start to finish, but I will occasionally outline random scenes for the end. I’m always planning for the end and then get stuck in the middle.

Do you use any tools, like worksheets or outlines?

I’ve tried. Right now I have a tiny notebook map for The Gifted, and a few scenes outlined, but that’s it.

Stephen King once said that his muse is a man who lives in the basement. Do you have a muse?

I don’t think so. I wouldn’t know if I do or not. Maybe it’s James himself lol. His various characters influence a lot.

Describe your perfect writing conditions.

Cat is napping, tv isn’t super loud, I’m not expected to socialize, nothing I want to pay attention to is going to be on, it’s not after 9pm yet, I have ideas and the perfect soundtrack and plenty of empty pages to use.

How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

Depends. Prompt fills are lucky to get any revision. The Gifted goes through my own editing as well as my beta’s. Promised Love and A Lie to Live, when they were getting weekly updates, had one revision each, right after typing, and then were immediately posted. I stressed over those two a lot during that time though. Not doing it that way again lol.

Choose a passage from one of your earlier fics and edit it into your current writing style. (Person sending the ask is free to make suggestions).

From Comfort Original:

It had been a bad night, the tower getting cooler than usual as the wind whipped around outside. Even with how well it was built, the windows still had a slight rattle against the force of it. Bucky hated the cold, too many negative memories involved. Watching outside, he knew he was safe, knew that the chances of something coming up this high, without him noticing it, were extremely low, but he still worried. He couldn't go back to Steve, though. Things had been getting a little complicated between them, mostly due to the man that had taken them in.

Edit:

The wind howled outside, chilling the tower more than usual. The windows rattled with every strong gust. Bucky stared outside. The cold reminded him of being thrown from the train, of being frozen for days, weeks, months at a time. It made him think of HYDRA, and even though he knew the chances of anyone sneaking up on the team here were extremely low, he couldn’t stop the worry from creeping up on him.

But he couldn’t even seek out his best friend for comfort after their fight over the man that had been kind enough to take them in.

If you were to revise one of your older fics from start to finish, which would it be and why?

I already decided I will be doing this for A Lie to Live, because I know I can write it so much better now.

Have you ever deleted one of your published fics?

Never. Anything I’ve ever posted, you can still find it if you know where to look.

Although it looks like one site decided to delete my work. And my account. I have backups on my flash drive, I’m pretty sure, but still.

Always back stuff up. This was mostly original though. Too high rated for fictionpress.

What do you look for in a beta?

Mostly that they will be okay with the content I want to create. I tend to write darker stuff (had a beta for violent vampire fic and have a beta for dark x-men fantasy au), so it’s good to know they will be okay with that. Also things that I think may be triggering, I mention ahead of time before I write it. Just to be sure everything is still good.

Do you beta yourself? If so, what kind of beta are you?

I tend to be my own beta and mostly catch typos and reword stuff, change the flow if I have to, maybe move a scene or a chapter.

Being a beta for others? I fix grammar mostly. I feel like I’m shit at suggestions though lol.

How do you feel about collaborations?

I love them but they never get finished lol. There’s two people I’ve collaborated with on different stories over the years, one I started a page with, and someone that was interested, but that’s it.

My only issues these days, with the invention of google docs and able to write back and forth and all that, I am a shy writer so I will wait for the other person to leave the document, especially during... certain scenes...

And also, that the breaks in between adding a part does not exceed a week. The last one I worked on has now passed a year since anything added, so I don’t think it will be updated again any time soon.

Share three of your favorite fic writers and why you like them so much.

LadyDarkPhoenix because she got me into fanfic and into the MCU fandom and her ideas are awesome. One of the people I’ve collaborated with for years over different stories.

NotEvenCloseToStraight has some of the best fics. I haven’t read any for awhile for a variety of reasons (not to do with her, my own distracted mind and now fandom switch really) but she is amazing and a sweet person.

Kellyscams has written some amazing stuff. Just, really check them out.

If you could write the sequel (or prequel) to any fic out there not written by yourself, which would you choose?

Um... Oh, this is tough. I think I’m mostly reading prompt fills and wips right now.

Maybe a sequel to Coming Home by helens78, only because I didn’t know how much I wanted Wesley/Charles until then. And then add in the implied interest in Erik as well, and yes.

Do you accept prompts?

I do.

Do you take liberties with canon or are you very strict about your fic being canon compliant?

It varies. Prompt fills lately are more canon compliant, but if I’m doing chapters, it’s way AU.

How do you feel about smut?

I love reading it. I somewhat write it in collaborations.

I panic and stop every other sentence when I attempt writing it alone.

How do you feel about crack?

It can be good.

What are your thoughts on non-con and dub-con?

Depends on the character and the situation.

Would you ever kill off a canon character?

I’ve killed Tony at least twice now.

Which is your favorite site to post fic?

AO3 for sure.

Talk about your current wips.

The Gifted is a fantasy AU in the X-Men Alternate Timeline Movies fandom

Promised Love is an arranged marriage fantasy AU in the MCU fandom

A Lie to Live is a fantasy AU in the MCU fandom

So Beautiful is a modern, no powers, college AU in the MCU fandom

Help Me is a sequel to Bite Me and it is a vampire au in the MCU fandom

Talk about a review that made your day.

This chapter made me feel feelings. My poor boys! :'( And well done with Erik's anger, lashing out and the aftermath. I understand you are upset, Erik, but that is not an acceptable way to treat a friend. And it's good that you realized that too.

===

This one especially. Also their previous two comments.

Do you ever get rude reviews and how do you deal with them?

Not really. Not since, like, high school.

That was a long while ago. I was still really into the LoTR movies.

Write an alternative ending to [insert fic title] (or just the summary of one)

Bite Me

Bucky tried to block Aldrich’s blows with his arms but the monster gave him a harsh stomp to the stomach. Bucky coughed as he rolled onto his side, tasting his own blood in his mouth.

“I truly did want more of a fight than this out of you. How pathetic.”

“T-think so?” He looked up to see Tony coming back.

Aldrich caught the stare and turned, grabbing onto the wooden stake made from the leg of a desk.

“Shit!” Tony struggled.

“Thank you, Anthony.” Aldrich yanked the stake from Tony’s hands and, finding Bucky on his feet, thrust it through the other vampire’s chest.

“No!” Tony cried, trying to get past Aldrich to reach the man he loved, but his Master gripped his shoulder and threw him back.

“You were perfect,” Aldrich growled, “but I will never have your heart, will I? Not as a mate.”

Tony blinked away tears that threatened to blur his vision. “Never.”

Leering at the vampire that held Tony’s affection, Aldrich shoved the stake deeper, Bucky’s cold, dark blood gushing out around it, and then pulled it free.

A grotesque, thick flow fell from the hole in Bucky’s chest.

“No, no, no!” Tony needed to reach him, but he froze once the already stained wood pierced him next.

“You can join him, Anthony,” Aldrich spoke so sweetly, giving it another push to be sure neither would leave.

Tony stared at him. His chest felt wet, cramped, cold. Fear shook his body.

His knees hit the floor. “B-Buck...y...?”

But no response came.

As Aldrich walked away, Tony found himself all alone in a place that reeked of blood and horror. His vision began to falter. He grew so tired... so very tired... so very... very... tired...

#ask meme #writing

[butchgwenwhyvar]

“And all the stars that scream” “there are no happy endings” “what endings find us happiness”

OW FLAIM WHYYYY 

ok here we go

“And all the stars that scream” would be a codex fic where Rex finds out what happened to Cody on Utapau and the aftermath, and ends in Rex going to Kamino in a royal snit to try and de-brainwash his husband. Unbeknownst to him, Cody’s no longer under the influence of the chip and is training the latest batch of stormtroopers. He’s bitter and lonely and depressed and hates what he’s doing. Sure, there was no glory in war, but he was fighting for a cause, fighting for honour and safety. There’s none of that in the Empire, and now he’s just training a bunch of kids who are freshly kidnapped and scared and he has to show them how to fight and he just can’t take it anymore. The Empire gets hold of Rex and tortures him in front of Cody, and Cody can’t do anything but watch and scream as his husband is slowly killed in front of him. 

Eventually, the rebellion (and Ahsoka) comes to rescue them because Rex got a distress beacon out before he was captured and they get to a safe planet, but it’s too late to save Rex. He gets his happy reunion with Cody, but he dies in his husband’s arms. His last words are probably something sappy like ‘the stars were never as beautiful as you’ (because I like tying fic titles into dialogue for some reason), and Cody joins the rebellion and fights for all that Rex tried to save him from

(and now I’m sad and I want to write this. It’d probably be a multi-chapter epic with a giant playlist and fanart or something)

I thought about turning “There are no happy endings” into my usual obianidala with Obi-Wan moping post RotS but I’ve written three and posted two of those and it’s utterly fucking typical for me, so I’d say this would either be Vader reminiscing about the war and how happy he was and how he fucked it up, or it could be force ghost! Padme looking at Vader and Obi-Wan moping and murdering. 

If we went Vader, it would start with Anakin and Obi-Wan and Padme waking up together and having a peaceful morning with the twins and Ahsoka dropping in and it’s all happy. And then Vader wakes up feeling slightly unsettled, like something from his past’s just come out of his head and whacked him on the helmet, but he ignores it and goes about his day. He keeps seeing things in the corner of his eye though, like there’s a kid following him around the ship. He just shrugs it off because there’s stormtroopers to intimidate and a death star to build, but it keeps him wondering about what really happened to Padme and Obi-Wan and their kids (he can’t be certain, but in those last dreadful moments before Padme’s force blinked out entirely he felt two children). Eventually he confronts Palpatine about it and Palpatine goes all torture-dark-lord-etc on him.

If we went Padme, the fic would open with her death, and seeing Qui-Gon in the force. He’d probably tell her what’s going down and she sits and watches over Luke and Leia and Obi-Wan (she can’t make herself even think about Vader in the early days, can’t think of the man he used to be and the monster he’s become), and eventually figures out what Ahsoka’s doing and helps her set up fulcrum. She’d appear to Luke and Leia a few times, she’d try to talk to Obi-Wan but he’s probably crawled into a bottle or something at this point and is therefore passing off her messages as hallucinations and ignoring it. Vader, on the other hand, is so desperate to hear from anyone from his family, so he imagines Padmé everywhere even though she’s not. Padmé sees what’s going on and tries to snap Vader out of the dark but it doesn’t work, and she tries to help Obi-Wan but it doesn’t work either and the fic ends with her bemoaning her husband’s fates and being sad I guess (thus the title, ‘there are no happy endings’. If I was actually gonna write this fic, it would be called ‘(there are no) happy endings’ just to drive the angst home).

(Oh no I kinda wanna write this one as well)

“What endings find us happiness” would be an au where Anakin didn’t fall, Padme didn’t die, Obi-Wan didn’t go off moping in the desert, and (most of) the clones listened to Rex and Fives and took out their chips. Fives survived because Fox had his guns on stun (like they were supposed to be) and so he was only knocked out; he was around for Anaxes and getting Echo back. 

Mustafar plays out differently, with Obi-Wan and Anakin fighting a fallen Barriss, and as they’re barely escaping with their lives, Padme goes into labour. They end up at Polis Massa with Bail and Yoda etc, when the truth comes out about obianidala’s relationship. Yoda tells Anakin that Ahsoka is most likely dead, but Anakin insists that he can still feel her in the force. There’s an epic screaming match between Obi-Wan and Anakin, who are all for going off and looking for survivors, and Yoda, who wants everyone to go into a nice quiet exile. 

Anakin ends up pinching a ship with his spouses and tiny children (Bail offers to look after them for a while and they very nearly take him up on it) and heading to the Mandalore system to try and find Ahsoka and the clones. Padme suggests that they check Utapau to see if Cody’s alive (and not under the 66 trance as well) but Obi-Wan can’t face it and Anakin’s freaking tf out about Ahsoka so they ignore Utapau for now. 

Once they get to Mandalore, they find that Rex and Ahsoka have gone missing (and possibly the fake grave that they set up in the Ahsoka novel), as well as a dying Kix and a freaking out Jesse, with Fives and Echo nowhere to be found. Everyone freaks out and grabs the two survivors (despite the two clones involved in the chip debacle being 501, not many listened to Fives. A few removed their chips, and tried to protect Ahsoka when 66 went off but were gunned down. Rex and Jesse barely escaped with their lives, and Kix was shot several times while trying to save a brother) and they go off on a massive road trip, looking for everyone else. Kix recovers slowly in this time, but Anakin has to build him a prosthetic leg and he’s still in a lot of pain. Jesse usually refuses to leave his side. 

They’re about six months into the ‘road trip’ (complemented with newborns, injury recovery, and the usual PTSD and nightmares combo that they all have) when they find Rex, who’s laying low somewhere in the outer rim. Rex has no idea where Ahsoka went after they parted ways, so they start methodically checking all the planets near Mandalore first, and then they get to Thabeska and find her there, about to head back to Raada to save Kaeden and Miara (they also find out about Bail’s rebellion at this point). Raada plays out pretty much the same. Ahsoka still gets her sabers, and Bail ends up hiding them on Alderaan until the proper rebel base is set up. 

Once the base is set up and they’re monitoring Imperial chatter, they hear reports about two renegade clones causing trouble in the outer rim territories. They start to monitor those frequencies more carefully, and eventually hear of an attack on Kamino by these two. Obi-Wan and Padme, who become the commanders of that particular base, send Anakin and a squad of X-Wings to Kamino to extract the clones and help them out. 

The clones turn out to be Fives and Echo, trying to rescue Cody and Wolffe, and any other clones, dechipped or not (Wolffe’s chip was damaged when Ventress took his eye, he managed to pull himself out of the 66 trance just after Plo was shot down). Anakin and his squad get them out with a couple casualties (Bly is still on Kamino when Fives takes out his chip, he sacrifices himself so that the others can escape because he can’t live with the fact that he killed his General, his riduur) and head back to the base. 

There’s lots of tearful reunions when they get off the ship. Ahsoka immediately launches herself at Fives and Echo. Rex and Cody refuse to leave each other’s sides for ages, and there’s a very emotional conversation had along the lines of ‘I should have listened to you’. Cody and Obi-Wan have their reunion as well and that’s sad as hell.

Life goes on in the Rebellion, Kaeden and Ahsoka get married when they turn 20, and the twins grow up with X-wings for playgrounds and the sounds of air-raid sirens as a lullaby (some nights, when Padme’s waiting up for Anakin, who’s in an X-wing far above, engaged in desperate dogfights with the TIE’s that Palpatine sends, and Obi-Wan’s in the control room, she wishes she’d left her children with Bail or Mon. No child should grow up in a war zone. And then 3 year old Luke starts snoring in the bed beside her and Leia’s hair is in her mouth as her daughter does the octopus on her shoulder, and she thinks that she can never leave them no matter what). Other surviving Clones and Jedi make their way to the rebellion as well, until there’s a thriving community on an outer rim planet full of retired Clones and Jedi and their families. 

A New Hope plays out differently: the twins have been trained (by Ahsoka and Obi-Wan and Anakin) and they know what they’re doing, and Luke and Ahsoka waste no time in grabbing some random smuggler off of tatooine and dragging him out to the death star, where Ahsoka and Barriss fight as Han and Luke rescue Leia. The twins help their older sister and get her (injured, but alive) onto the ship, and Luke joins the death star run while his parents and sisters are chewing their nails to the quick down in the war room. 

Empire Strikes Back is much the same, including Luke heading to Dagobah because Obi-Wan,  Anakin, and Ahsoka decided they needed Yoda’s help to deal with Barriss. The Han and Leia arc plays out the same, and Luke still goes to rescue them and fights Barriss again. 

Return of the Jedi is also pretty much the same as in canon, but it’s Ahsoka and Luke who go up to the Death Star and fight the Emperor and Barriss. There’s an emotional scene between Barriss and Ahsoka at the very end, where Barriss comes back to the light and apologises for what she did. There’s a party on Endor which turns into Wedge and Luke’s impromptu wedding; Han and Leia get married a few days later. 

Everything is happy and nice and calm, no one dies, and nothing bad ever happens to them ever again the end.

(I also want to write this one as a full-blown au like what I planned modern au to be)

#flaim-ita #ask game #lee writes #aus #codex #obianidala #hanleia #wedgeluke #star wars #prequels #tcw #ot #ahsokaya #echofives #(well it's implied) #jessix #(that's also implied) #kaesoka #fix-it au

[univentoremarchived]

|| This folks, is how you manipulate a naive child~

(verse specific, so apologies if you don’t know the exact context, summary follows) 

A closed verse in which supernatural creatures are observed and monitored through the guise of a circus. All performers have an ability that isn’t mundane, such as magic, elements, transformation and so forth.  Ayden was revamped into a half-fae in this verse. Born to a fae mother who took him to Tír na Nóg as a baby and raised him until he was thirteen. He was kidnapped by Hyousuke and taken to Cirque de Nuit and became a Child of the Night (performer) ever since. 

   The rules were simple. You do as you are told. That is the first thing a Child of the Night is told and all they will hear the years that follow. If you don’t listen, or neglect your duties, then the so called Redheads will punish you. Whether it was a coincidence both ‘leaders’ of the circus had red hair was unknown to Ayden. Hyousuke, one of the two and who was the recruiter of the circus, has been here for ages (literally), while the other redhead, Efrain has been here a bit longer than Ayden. 

   Ayden was twenty years old in human years by now. He was barely conscious of his age as he was still treated like a kid by most immortals around this place. After all, compared to someone who has been alive for literal ages, he really was just that, a child. 

   After having been summoned by Efrain, Ayden made his way to the scientist’s camper, knocked on the door and waited until he received the usual ‘Yes, yes, come in,’ before actually entering. The inside of the camper looked nothing like the outside, for it was not at all a usual camper. Inside it was filled with high tech, screens, doors locked with a code system, tools used for means Ayden would rather not think about (similar to the tools used for surgery) and pots that contained body parts of different kinds of species. It wasn’t a pleasant place for more reasons than one. For Ayden, the biggest reason was the lack of simple nature. There was none of it present. He bet if he put a plant in here it would die within the day or Efrain would find new ways to clone the plant, evolve it or whatever. 

   Science was ruining Earth, Ayden had been told over and over again by his mother. 

   “You wanted to speak to me?” he asked hesitantly, a cold spot forming in the pit of his stomach. Efrain was looking at a screen, filled with numbers. It seemed the scientist was reading them as if it was a language of its own, muttering thoughts while continuously noting down even more numbers. Ayden had no idea what he was doing. 

   With a sideways glance, Efrain looked at Ayden, then pointed at the chair next to him. Ayden did as told and sat down, still wondering what it was Efrain wanted to speak about. After all, it was usually Hyou he answered to, not the scientist. 

   “How is your new job coming along?” 

   Ayden tilted his head, then remembered what he meant. “O-Oh, the administration for the campers and tents.. Yes, well, it’s not difficult.. Haven’t heard any complaints either..” 

    “Good. You’ve proven your loyalty many times over and it made me wonder if you would be interested in having more.. responsibilities in this camp. After all, you’re a clever boy and are designed for more than simple knife throwing in the circus.” 

   “I see..” 

    Efrain frowned at him. “You see..?” 

   “I mean, yes, that would be great.. but what?” 

    At that, a hum escaped the scientist, looking up at the roof for a moment before returning his attention to the fae boy. “Fae are known for persuasion, among other things, yes? There are a few Night Children who don’t quite understand the rules yet, so I need you to help Hyou and me teaching them the ways of the circus. How does that sound?” 

   Ayden blinked, not having expected this. “Uhm.. Thank you? Sounds like a big responsibility..” 

   Efrain sighed. “Of course, you will be compensated for it, which I gather, you could use ever since you decided to move to your own tent with your sibling. Which, brings me to my next point. I need you to get Casey to accept the ways of the circus and settle with us. They’re not going anywhere, so acting like the enemy as they are so good at won’t help them. I believe Casey doesn’t trust Hyou and me, but they do trust your opinion, so what better way than to start with them?” 

    Ayden needed a moment to take it in. Convince Casey to become a trusted member of this society... Was that even possible? Nevertheless, Ayden had the urge to defend them. “I mean.. they say a lot, I know, and they’re quite unique, but that’s just how they are. They speak their mind. And they’re new, so...” He wasn’t really sure how to use proper arguments, not when Efrain had such a piercing glare. 

   “I see. You clearly trust them because they’re your family. I get it. You want to defend them. It’s only natural.” He turned in his chair, facing Ayden directly and leaning in to come closer. “Have you ever wondered what kind of life Casey might have led? What was your childhood like, Ayden? Wonderful? Peaceful? Did it feel that way?” 

Tír na Nóg... Of course he remembered it that way. It had been home... 

    “However,” Efrain continued. “Did you ever think of what it was like when Casey joined your family? They don’t carry fae blood, not in their genetics anyway, from what I could gather during the DNA tests, nor are your genes similar, yet Casey looks more fae than you. This means they are a changeling, yes? A human snatched by a fae and claimed as their child. Didn’t your mother’s attention shift from you to Casey? Didn’t Casey have a lot more to learn?” 

   “Sure Casey had a lot more to learn..” Where was Efrain going with this? 

   “Doesn’t that frustrate you? Casey had all the attention from your mother back then, didn’t they? Are you okay with that?” 

Ayden nodded, furrowing his eyebrows at the scientist. 

Efrain shook his head however. “No, my boy, how can you be? You are her blood, her first born, were you not? How could you not have been jealous of Casey? And now they appear as a fae, with all those abilities you never got to learn and Casey looks like the confident full blood fae who believes they can do as they please. Doesn’t that anger you? It would anger me if they were my family.” 

    “But Casey doesn’t mean anything bad by acting as such.. they’re just.. very protective of me, that’s all!” 

    “Even though you’re the older brother? Even though this is your home and Hyou raised you like his own? He never gave Icarus more attention than you or the other way around, did he? He treated you both equally, trained you both equally. And then there is Casey, waltzing in like they own this place, even though you know it much better than them and have many more privileges here than them.” 

   Ayden shook his head, gaze locked on the chair legs beneath them. 

   “Oh please.” Efrain cupped Ayden’s cheeks. “I know you’ve been thinking it. Don’t deny it. Hyou and I know you better than most here. I bet I know you better than Casey knows you. I see you’ve been hesitating lately. You haven’t been in the best of moods either, have you?” 

   Ayden grabbed the sides of his chair, holding onto it tightly until his knuckles whitened from the grip. “That was just-” 

    “Don’t bother, I know what you’re thinking. I bet Casey has been trying to convince you of other things, made you feel like you would want to go back to the land of the Faerie, did they not? They believe you’re weak and naive for listening to Hyou and me, but that’s not the case is it?” 

    Ayden shook his head, Efrain’s cold hands still on his face. 

   “See? You’re a clever boy, Ayden. You know exactly what this circus is all about, you’re the clever one, not Casey. And you need to help them along. Help them believe in our cause so you two can lead a good life here, because you did build up a decent living. It can be even better, I can promise you that. You know I never go back on my promises, don’t you? I know how important deals and promises are to supernaturals, so I take it seriously as well.” 

Ayden nodded, hesitantly looking up at Efrain. “Casey’s not bad, really..” 

    “Then help me believe that, my boy. I would love nothing more than for them to have a home here, like you. Who knows, maybe you can learn a few more magic tricks as well. See? There is only more to gain by having them settle here, so don’t allow them to persuade you otherwise, because you’re the one who sees clearly, not them.” 

The cold spot in the pit of his stomach turned into a blazing hot fire as he hesitated about the words swimming in his mind. Should he say it? 

   “What is it?” Efrain had seen the hesitation.  

   “Casey.. they were talking about escaping this place.” He gulped, throat feeling dry, knuckles now hurting. “I-I mean, that was only the first day, they haven’t said anything like that ever since! I just.. I..” Efrain had been right. They did think they could do as they please. Worse yet, they made him hesitate about the circus which had been his home for years now. 

Efrain grip on Ayden’s face tightened, the fae boy flinching in pain. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier, huh?” He pulled Ayden up, not releasing him, and pushed him against the wall, reminding Ayden of what Kai had put him through for years. “You should have told me this right away!” 

   “I’m sorry! They seemed to have changed their mind so I didn’t think it was necessary any longer!” 

    “You know words of escape should always be reported! The streets are filled with hunters who will snipe you down as soon as you set foot outside without permission!” Grip tightened, as if Efrain was trying to hurt him as much as he could by simply squeezing his face. 

    Ayden’s jaws hurt.. “I’m sorry,” he managed to mumble. “I just wanted to give them a chance..! I never meant to against any rules myself! I swear!” 

    Efrain released him and held his shoulders instead. “Don’t make me punish them. Gain their trust, make them settle and you will both continue to lead decent lives here. It’s that simple, yes?” 

    Ayden nodded, cowering as if expecting another blow from the scientist. This was why he preferred Hyou. He was less explosive, a lot nicer.. a lot more understanding. 

   “You can go now. Tell Hyou about this meeting, will ya?    

   The fae boy nodded once more before hurriedly leaving the camper. 

#{ drabble } #{ circus verse }

[fangirlunderground-blog]

Meta Monday

!MAJOR SPOILERS! for season 6 of Voltron: Legendary Defender. If you can’t watch yet, might I recommend some of my favorite Sheith AUs instead? For everyone else, here are six things I’m currently living for: 

1) “I love you;” 2) “You found me;” 3) Schrödinger's Shiro is finally over; 4) Keith is now 21, end of debate; 5) Space Wolf has two daddies; and, of course, 6) All this new Sheith meta on my dash! ...So much meta, in fact, that despite it only having been out for a couple of days, I might have gone overboard on today’s Meta Monday (and yes, it’s exclusively about Sheith in season 6). 

At this rate, I may even wind up doing a Part Two in the next week or two, or maybe a follow up with meta from previous seasons. Let me know if you’re interested in that! And, as always, let the original authors know you appreciate their work. 🦁 

Voltron: Legendary Defender - Keith/Shiro

Black didn’t pick Keith to be her paladin, Shiro did by @belovedsheith, You know what I just realized? We’ve been talking about how Shiro allowed Kuron to pilot Black, right? But that means…Black didn’t pick Keith to be her paladin. Shiro did. (Mirror Link)

Brother vs. ‘Brother’: A Sheith meta by @ea-stofnar​, [...] Still with me? Okay, so to lay the groundwork for this meta, I first need to address the elephant in the room; the word that a lot of people in this fandom seem to get stuck on. That word is ‘Brother.’ Now whether you’re an anti or a Sheith shipper, that word holds a lot of weight. For antis because they’ve stuffed, mounted and made it their grizzly rallying cry; claiming that it means Sheith is dead and we are fools who continue to ship it. And we shippers get caught in the trap. The majority of the fandom seems to either try and talk around it, or pretend it doesn’t exist within the context of Shiro and Keith’s relationship. I say, we don’t have to do either. (Mirror Link)

The DND episode was so important for Shiro/Kuron than we think and here’s why by @jaegereska, It showed Kuron was fucking human being, that it wasn’t an act, and that he is still Shiro, himself, despite it all. He wanted to spend his time off with the team, he was already playing with Coran Pidge and Hunk before Allura and Lance decided to join them. (Fun side note: Haggar probably watched the whole dnd session through Kuron). (Mirror Link) 

Sheith evidence from the French version (and other languages) by @spiftynifty, I’m tired of the totes desperate brogane/dadgane rhetoric going around about this season. So here’s the french version of the “raising him” scene, just in case anyone needed further clarification that Krolia wasn’t saying “thanks for adopting my son”. In dialogue she says, “He’s the man he is today because of you.” The captions offer a slightly less profound, “Thanks for making him the man he is today”. (Mirror Link)

Sheith isn’t dead by @saltyshiro, Here’s the thing, anon - I don’t at all feel that sheith is dead or anything like that bc of the “You’re my brother. I love you” line. In fact it just reaffirmed my love for sheith :’) @arahir made a great point about this before the season dropped - the whole brotherly or sisterly love thing is something that’s pretty common among queer ppl. (Mirror Link)

Shiro’s love for Keith by @arahir, Oh man, I’m really glad someone asked [if Shiro cares about Keith just as much]. I think the way Shiro acts toward/around Keith is one of the most well produced parts of vld. they do such an incredible job with Shiro’s character in general, but so much of his character depth is centered on Keith. No matter how you interpret their relationship, the fact that they love each other is never in question, and it’s done so well. (Mirror Link)

Keith and Shiro’s bond by @as-many-times-as-it-takes, It wasn’t a lack of time, but a lack of connection. He was able to appear just brief enough to Lance, as they still have a great bond, as Shiro does with the other Paladins. But not like Keith. (Mirror Link)

Krolia’s line on Shiro “raising” Keith is not literal by @quiznackingqueen, I’ve gotten a few asks about this, and I keep seeing antis harp on this line, so we’re gonna take a closer look at it. This is definition of raise I see the antis using: to care for a child or young animal until it is able to take care of itself. This doesn’t fit the situation. Shiro was not Keith’s guardian, he wasn’t a parental figure, he was not literally responsible for Keith’s well being. That fell to Keith’s actual guardians, be they the Garrison, the employees at the home, or Keith’s case worker. These were the people that kept Keith fed and clothed and safe. (Mirror Link)  

Kuron’s Reaction to Older Keith by @dent-de-leon, Yes!! I’m a bi guy myself and I wholeheartedly agree. So, let’s get to it–for one thing, Kuron is a bit flustered in this scene, it’s so sweet. As soon as Keith gets on the comms, you can hear in Kuron’s voice just how much this boy means to him. He literally stutters. One moment he was completely composed and in control, but then Keith is suddenly back and his whole world is off its axis. “Keith? I–are you okay?” He stumbles, stops. He just doesn’t know how to place his emotions, and he’s visibly affected by this. He’s also the only one who takes the time to ask if Keith’s alright. Because no matter what, that’s what matters to him most. He obviously cares a lot. (Mirror Link)

The part I can’t stop thinking about from this season is this by @arahir, [...] He has absolutely no hope for himself anymore. For all he knows, this is the last time he’s going to see Keith or talk to anyone, but still, all he cares about in that moment is Keith. He just wants to know Keith can believe in himself and be ok. (Mirror Link)

The purple glow by @kcgane, Okay so if Shiro’s soul was in Black all along and when Allura transferred his soul back to the clone body that purple glow showed up... when Keith was piloting Black and that purple glow was there could that have been Shiro’s presence there with him?!?! (Mirror Link)

Sacrifice and Keith’s Development by @begrudging-fudanshi, I just have to point this out. These two scenes have some very interesting parallels that really showcase Keith’s development. First and most obvious, it’s pretty clear in both that Keith thinks he’s going to die, and in both he closes his eyes in preparation for what’s to come. However, there’s a huge difference between them. (Mirror Link)

Shiro went out of his way just to be in Keith’s arms by @im-love-sheith, [...] This scene at the end where Shiro leans into Keith. At first i thought “aw thats sweet, he happened to lean into Keith” but thinking back on it, even though Shiro was exhausted and literally just came back from the dead, he chose to lean on Keith specifically. (Mirror Link)

There’s always one episode in each season in which Keith finds Shiro by @zoetekohana, I had a thought about the “you found me” + “how many times are you gonna have to save me before this is over? as many times as it takes” quotes for Shiro/Keith. (Mirror Link)

Why I still ship Sheith, and it’s not “dead” by @dent-de-leon, [...] So, let’s get started with the dreaded ages thing that always comes up, just get that out of the way. According to the guidebook, they were 18 and 25 respectively at the start of the series. Shiro hasnt aged in the astral plane. Since, you know he’s been dead. And it’s more or less implied that Shiro has been gone for months, and then they meet Lotor and there’s the whole time that conflict plays out, then we fast forward to after he lays low and Keith says “Lotor hasnt been seen for months.” we can infer that more or less a year has elapsed since Shiro’s death/disappearance. Adding in the two year time skip, that puts them at about 21 and 25 respectively. You know, a completely reasonable age difference. (Mirror Link)

“You’re my brother.” by @biscoote, I’m gonna be honest I’m not the best at articulating my thoughts into words but hear me out because I think it’s worth looking at just what the term brother, and what brotherhood means to two men. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last few days after watching this episode, thinking especially about this comment and all the different responses to it and Shiro and Keith’s relationship as a whole. I’ve also been especially attuned to male / male dynamics (platonic or romantic) and how they play out in media specifically. (Mirror Link)

#vld spoilers #vld s6 spoilers #sheith #takashi shirogane #keith kogane #vld s6 #voltron #vld #voltron: legendary defender #m/m #meta #meta monday #fangirlrecs #mm37

[phoenixyfriend]

Madara and Obito... In SPACE

So the preface to this mess: I don’t know jackshit about Star Wars, so a lot of this went through friends who do know Star Wars (the primary of which does not have a tumblr).

(I have watched Episodes 7&8, and Rogue One. Of the first six movies, I remember watching maybe an hour total. I have not seen more than snatches of Clone Wars. Beyond that, nothing but fic.)

Anyway! Let’s go:

As y’all probably know by now, my favorite form of crossover is what I call “intrusive,” so... I'm enjoying the mental concept of "dump Madara on Coruscant and watch him go." (Prequels, probably.)

Does Madara know what's going on? No. Can he understand a word that's being said? No! Is he going to fight the first person to aim a weapon at him, and every person after that? Yes.

Is Madara fighting fit?

Nnnnnnnnnnnnnno, not really, he’s old as balls. This is "I was on cave life support but I'm getting back up to kick ass out of pure spite" Madara.

[Image description: A screenshot of a panel of the Naruto Manga. Uchiha Madara is old and visibly ‘decrepit,’ with spiky white hair and an amorphous black robe. He is sitting on a pale throne, and there is a scythe visible to the side. He has a speech bubble saying “I am... a ghost of the Uchiha.” End Description]

Two wrinkly old guys, staring each other down: There ain't enough room in this universe for the two of us. [Palpatine and Madara start fighting to the death]

Congrats, Palpatine! Your ass is getting kicked by a geriatric malcontent who doesn't speak any language you've ever heard or feel like literally anything in the Force. You may have Sith lightning, but do you have decades of frontline experiences and over half a century of cave-dwelling bitterness?

Both of them, simultaneously, in completely different languages: Get off my lawn, whipper-snapper.

Palpatine: Behold my mastery of the Dark Side, Foolish old man! Palpatine: [shoots lightning] Madara: Oh hey, you're like the seventeenth most dangerous person who can shoot lightning I've fought. Telekinesis? Fought that. Combat precognition? Fought that, have that, and let me tell you hwat, it doesn't help if you're opponent is just that much faster than you.

Now, I’ll take a step back and acknowledge that several people advised me that Palpatine would stand a chance against Madara, likely even win, if Madara just got hacked off of his life support and is down to one eye.

But. I want a shitpost, and also to clown on Palpatine, so Madara wins easily.

Madara also deserves to be clowned on, but the entire situation is clowning on him because he’s not in his cave anymore, and he really wants to go back to his Gedou Mazou statue.

Maybe Madara and Palpatine go Old Man Fight and then Obito just pulls a Ninja Move and kills Palpatine that way. Madara was ranting and Obito just. Ninjas behind Palpatine and slits his throat like “okay, you’re obviously evil so like... bye.”

(I just love causing "Wait what" reactions in characters that are used to having total control. Like. Have you read "Unexpected Guests"? The Bleach fic? Everything that happens in Hueco Mundo and after. That energy. I want that energy.)

Madara waves his scythe around like a cane. Obito just trails after like “Gramps, no” because it’s still pre-Sanbi, so he’s Mostly Innocent (you know, on the scale of how fucked up Obito is as a person), and just wants Madara to like. Stop.

Palpatine dies but nobody's sure what to charge Madara with since he did kind of expose a Sith? And Palpatine attacked first for [handwave] reasons?

Jedi: Well sir, in lieu of charging you with assassination of the emperor, we have decided to ask you politely to return to the elderly person's retirement home from whence you came. Please leave immediately. You are frightening the senate. Madara: [incomprehensible raving] Jedi: Yes yes, very interesting. Jedi, whispering: Does anyone know his caretaker???

Obito looks increasingly put-upon as events progress. You need Obito there to... well, not translate. Nobody can translate. But to at least poke Madara into being Slightly Less Homicidal.

Anakin seems sad about his friend dying and being evil so Obito challenges him to a spar. Madara and Obito get pulled into the Jedi Temple to help train Padawans? My first thought was "they wouldn't trust someone so obviously Weird, Crazy, and Incomprehensible around the younglings" and my second thought was "well they let Yoda do it and he's all those things so I mean? YEAH."

What if they put Madara in the bacta tank and he just freshened up like a daisy because of hand-wave Hashirama cell reasons (Blame Sir Tiddyface).

From “Decrepit and Reliant on Cave Tube Life Support” to “Will Call Down Meteors With Ease”

How many eyes does he have? Whatever’s funniest. Let’s say one Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan and one Rinnegan, for maximum chaos.

Would "half my body is missing" Obito freak out if Bacta regrew his eye? Can bacta regrow something like that? When characters lose limbs they usually just get cybernetic replacements, but  the person I spoke with said that apparently they saw somewhere that that kind of thing can grow back it just takes a really long time.

I want to imagine bacta would help Obito with the Zetsu integration.

Anyway! Yes. Have Madara help train people despite being... Madara about it. You know... kind of a dick.

(I’d put example gifs but I don’t feel up to it. Y’all know what Madara’s “weakness disgusts me” ass is like.)

Obito had to get his "these fools could never make me sweat" sass from somewhere, after all.

Do you think Obito could fight the baby Jedi that are around his age while recovering? I have no idea what their skill level is at fourteen, but I want to imagine Obito sparring the Padawans.

Obito + Zetsu + Bacta = he still needs physical therapy but he can spar again!

Madara is delighted to have a baby ninja to bully. He's too old to not bully baby ninjas, and Obito is the only baby ninja. TBH Madara just makes Obito his assistant teacher.

Obito: What are we even doing here and how do we get home? Madara: I'm still working on that. Obito: But I want to go home and see Rin and Kakashi! Madara, who was like two days away from triggering the Sanbi plan: I'm working on it.

Something sticking in my mind rn is Ahsoka&Obito, since Obito is still Baby.

I think Obito would be excited to have someone his age that thought he was Cool and Talented for being able to do Chakra Things instead of writing him off as "the dead-last." Like, Rin is friends with him, but she doesn't look up to him as someone more/differently talented.  He'd be excited to get to be "The Mysterious Cool Big Bro" for once.

I feel I also just like the idea of Anakin not knowing what to do with someone Several Years Younger that is also. Ninja Skill.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

Madara is a grouchy old man even AFTER he gets effectively de-aged via bacta dunk, for the record. He's back in his prime and the Jedi have no idea how. They're all concerned about tiddyface*. (When are people not concerned about Sir Tiddyface, really.) The mokuton is a problem.

*Sir Tiddyface is that random Hashirama face that Madara had growing out of his pecs for like... convoluted bullshit reasons.

(Madara doesn't have mokuton, but he has enough Hashirama cells that it interacted very, VERY weirdly with the bacta.)

Obito spends the intervening weeks trying to learn the local language. He's very eager. Not particularly fast. Still doing it though!

I want Obito juggling kunai as physical therapy while he's waiting for Mads to get out of the bacta tank and just gains himself the adoration of a gaggle of small baby Jedi children.

Madara comes out of the bacta tank looking like he did in his prime (which I mentioned earlier but whatever), and it absolutely incites a yelling match of an argument that draws way too much attention.

Someone tries to teach Obito how to access the Force, just to see what happens. He almost turns into a statue because the philosophy behind Force meditation is only a few steps away from Sage Mode Meditation.

Anyway, Madara smacks him with a stick like Fukasaku to make sure Obito doesn't turn into stone.

Madara grumps about the lack of paper and brushes and ink. Bitches about it until someone hits up an antique store or something to get them for him. The day before he and Obito are dispatched on a mission with someone, probably Anakin for plot reasons, Madara very publicly seals things into a scroll and then tells them that no, they can't learn it, because the Force isn't chakra so fuuinjutsu won't work for them, so There.

Obito practices some Teen Rebellion (tm) and like, tries to teach the Padawan friends he's made how to do Chakra Things... but he's so bad at explaining things that nobody can get it to work even if it were possible.

In Obito's defense, language barriers. Not in Obito's defense, he's just really bad at words sometimes.

#Star Wars #Star Wars Prequels #Naruto #Uchiha Madara #Uchiha Obito #crossovers #Phoenix Posts #body horror mention

[margridarnauds]

for the ship thing: wash/mira, ronan/laz, solene/olympe, ivanova/talia, domona/elisa

Wash/Mira 

The TN pairing we deserved. Like, we’ve talked about that “Still doing Taylor’s dirty work?” for ages and you did such a good job discussing it in your answer, but it’s just....SO IMPORTANT. Especially given that we get so little of a personal life for either of them. Like, Mira does NOT like Wash’s position with Taylor and obviously thinks she could do better. I know what the writers probably were going for (bitchy comment by female rival, probably out of jealousy) but....it didn’t work, especially because the look on Mira’s face is rather...irritated? Tired? Pissed? Like, this is not just a casual comment. Mira thinks Wash could do better than Taylor, and if she ever decided to leave Taylor for the Sixers, they would be a damn good power couple. And then that Wash does know exactly where Mira’s old quarters are....like, I’m sure Wash knows where everyone on the colony is, but you can’t tell me they didn’t bang in that house. (Which would have made it more painful when the Shannons moved in because it was one more reminder that she’s Gone and things are never going back to normal.) And, really, we don’t really get how much of a personal BETRAYAL what the Sixers did was, even though you know that personal bonds would have formed. Like, for me, they missed out on a lot of potential by not deepening this bond (and instead giving us an Unfortunate Taylor Bondage Ep), not just as far as giving both of them development, but also on a broader level as far as increasing the emotional stakes (and giving you more vid editing potential because I NEED THAT GAY SHIT IN MY LIFE). 

Ronan/Laz 

Definitely not the ship that I jumped onto 1789 for, but definitely the one that I stayed on it for. I think it’s very versatile, as far as the number of dynamics that you can work with, and the fact that both pairs (Matthieu Carnot/Louis Delort and Ryuu Masaki/Seijou Kaito) had better chemistry with each other than Olympe certainly helped. Obviously, it’s an inherently unequal pairing on multiple levels; I don’t hold any ill will towards anyone who ships it as such, but personally I find it more fun to reverse it so that Laz is a total gay mess who is totally whipped by his boyfriend even though neither party really notices. Personally, I think if we’re going to have Laz represent “the order and rigidity of the Ancien Regime” and Ronan representing the common man’s hopes for the Revolution, there has to be a point where they meet up and reconcile, given that, historically, there did come a point where both sides were pretty damned burned out. (Which is why I go SO HARD for the French version having them embrace each other at the finale, though I’m also enough of a slut for angst that Zuka!Laz turning his back on Ronan at the end also owns my soul.) 

And, in both the versions that are currently available (I’m steeling myself for the Toho with the knowledge that we’re going to get a much more...aggressive Laz this time around), there are so many queerbaiting signs that there’s...something that extends past hatred. Like, you’ve got French!Laz SWITCHING THE FUCKING “YOU”S DURING MANIAQUE (Going from over politeness to an extent that really would NOT be necessary with a man so below his station to using the informal “you”....after the half-naked homo-erotic dance number. Gee, I wonder what they could have done to merit the switch), you’ve got Laz jealously lingering in the background during La Rue Nous Appartient, you’ve got Olympe’s nightmare having the words “Monsieur de Peyrol, he’s yours now. Do whatever you wish with him” (Which....Olympe knows.) And...again....the FUCKING HUG DURING POUR LA PEINE. And this is post-Father Killing, not including the Almost Kiss. And then the Zuka version just.....ramps it up. From the entirety of Maniaque to Laz IMMEDIATELY AFTERWARDS trying to get Ronan away from the Revolutionaries, to Ronan actually calling out his friends the next time he sees them (if he really hated Peyrol that much, why the Hell would he give a damn what he thought about his friends, AKA the people who gave him a job when he staggered into the print shop?), the way Laz steps up from behind Ronan when he talks about “being able to make the ones we love happy,” and then...the finale, where Ronan gets shot in the cross-fire, Laz IMMEDIATELY gives the Bastille up, and Ronan reaches out to him before falling on the ground. And that’s not even touching on things that can be strung together like The Coat Theory. 

Basically, they banged on the printing press. It’s canon. And Ronan wanted to save his boyfriend and his boyfriend wanted to save him but, at some point, they just...barely missed one another. It’s so nice they end up in the Cretaceous together. 

Solene/Olympe 

The age old joke with me: 

Me: Oh, Peyronan is my OTP; I have so many ideas I want to work with them! 

Me: I want to do some writing! *Writes Solympe fanfic*

*Starts sweating*Me: I have no idea where that came from, I swear it just--

*Three more Solympe fanfics crawl out of my Notes application*

Me: .....Fuck. 

Still a very odd ship for me, because it’s so damn hard to work with what we’ve got in canon and keep a continuity going. I ship it to Hell and back, since it gives me an opportunity to work with two characters who never got the chance to meet up, as well as really touch on a lot of things that we never really got in canon. (Also, I’ve lowkey considered doing a straight-up self-indulgent role reversal where Solene is arrested and sent to the Bastille, where she meets up with Olympe, who is following in her father’s footsteps.) In many ways, I think they do work as a more functional version of L/R, having to make many of the same decisions and choices (though I’d argue that Solene parallels Laz more than her own brother and, in some ways, Olympe mirrors Ronan.) In many ways, I can’t really...conceive of writing one without the other, in the sense that I think they’re very much two sides of the same coin? I don’t know; one day I’ll actually type out how these two ships mirror and contrast one another, but suffice it to say I do try to tie the two of them together SOME WAY even if it’s not always exactly...clear to me. Solene has definitely gone through some hard knocks, and it’s a lot more obvious in the way she carries herself and goes about relationships, whereas Olympe has never really taken a fall like that. She’s obviously experienced pain (especially post-canon), but she’s still had a somewhat rose-tinted childhood, with a loving, middle-class aristocratic family deeply entrenched in Enlightenment ideals. I think in some ways that it’d be hard for Solene to really trust Olympe in a relationship, given how many people she’s loved have betrayed her. (Personally, one thing I really try damn hard to do is to build them up so that, if and when Solene decides to leave her profession to be with Olympe, it’s not so much “Let me take you away from this” cliche for sex work and more...Solene weighing her possible decisions based off of where she is and taking a risk.)

It’s a bit hard because I tend to write them a bit more....pure than I usually like writing, in the sense that so much of their dynamic comes from healing one another. Which is good (obviously, it’s more the relationship ideal that you want to aspire to IRL) but also is very odd to me. Like, with Ronan and Peyrol, I tend to write them as helping one another as well, but they also have so much baggage to get through whereas Olympe and Solene don’t...have that, as much. There are differences, obviously, but it isn’t AS WIDE as I’m used to dealing with. One thing that’s going to be interesting with Pour la Peine is dealing with some of the political differences between the two of them, though I know that tbh it’s not going to last. 

Ivanova/Talia

Obviously, I’m still fairly new to B5, but there is SO MUCH tension here and I really, really appreciate that they’ve built it up like an actual RELATIONSHIP? Complete with fighting over PsiCorps, THE WATER SCENE, etc. Like, it isn’t an insta-love situation, it isn’t just SOFT GIRLS IN LOVE, it has a lot of...weight given to it, and the dynamic isn’t something we get all that much with WLW TO THIS DAY in media. Like, I know that referencing the DS9/B5 Schism is a dangerous game (I love both dearly, so when I speak, I speak as a fan of both), but compared to the cop-out they did with Dax, where we got a kiss, the relationship being due to Dax being (heterosexually) married to the host in another life, and then the love interest being shuttled off, not to be seen again because of a Trill law there was NO sign of in TNG, this feels like a more solid relationship as a whole, even with the knowledge of...what’s going to happen. It wasn’t something that was done lightly or as a stunt, it was a relationship built from the ground up. Which SHOULDN’T be praise in the Year of Our Lord 2018, but here we are. I’m fully expecting this ship to crush my soul. 

Demona/Elisa Maza

Outstanding chemistry in the battle scenes we got, a lot of potential, though it’d be hard to work it into a complete arc with how DEEPLY entrenched Demona’s anti-human attitude is. It would take a long, long arc to do something like that, but goddamit Gargoyles I WANTED it. Also, so much of Demona’s attitude, aside from her own unwillingness to take blame, comes from this sort of need to pull the trigger before someone else betrays her, so it’d be interesting to see how that dynamic would work in a relationship. Like, we got a hint of it with the Thailog/Macbeth situation, where she showed that she STILL could be trusting in a relationship, but Thailog is...odd in the sense that he’s a clone of her ex. Being with someone else, especially a human post-Macbeth...that would be interesting for her. And we do have Weisman saying that Elisa, “also proves or rather disproves Demona's theory that all humans are evil destroyers of the Gargoyle race. Demona's semi-fragile -- or at least ultra-calcified -- psyche can abide that thought.” Obviously, he’s using it to explain why Demona HATES Elisa so much, but...hatred’s a funny thing, and no matter what, Elisa does challenge Demona’s point of view. (Which...again, the last time we really saw that was with Macbeth, which, even though it’s not a ship of mine, still has a lot of romantic tension. And she has the same level of absolutely blinding hatred for him that she has for Elisa. My girl’s even worse than me at dealing with this sort of thing.)

I do like that this is a good, solid enemies to lovers type of ship (or, alternatively, just hatefucking), which is SO RARE to get solid examples of in femslash. And, on many levels, Elisa and Demona are really toe for toe. There wouldn’t really be one of them that’s “weaker” or “more innocent” than the other, and I think Elisa could give as well as she could take, which...being with someone like Demona, would have to be a necessity, and I think that’d extend as well into calling her out on her shit. (We’ve seen repeatedly that she’s not afraid to call Goliath out openly, even in front of the Clan.) Basically, I think it’d be a long arc, it’d be tricky to pull off with anything more than just hatefucking, especially given how often Demona does hurt people around Elisa (with a body count post-City of Stone that at least ranges into dozens of people smashed in a non-fun way), but I think it’d be a fascinating one. And even though I like Goliath, obviously, I never really felt the chemistry between him and Elisa (I know, I know, fandom heresy), and I think Demona/Elisa could yield a LOT more. (Pls Greg Weisman don’t kill me.) 

#long post #me rambling about ships #am I ever going to stop rambling? #the answer is no #janetcarter

[calyssmarviss]

Calyss Watches the Clone Wars - 51

03x10 - Heroes on Both Sides.

WHY ARE THOSE GUYS STILL ALLOWED IN THE SENATE.

OKAY SO I WENT AND ASKED WOOKIEEPEDIA because I just can't stand not understanding that shit and Lott Dod the Neimoidian apparently once said that they had "Nothing to do with the Separatists. Nute Gunray is an extremist. His views do not reflect those of the Trade Federation." But he was also working with Rush and Poggle (which I forgot) on that droid factory so, yeeeeeeah, the Trade Fed isn't that loyal to the Republic.

Is that Ahsoka in the background? I'm not sure with this shitty image but it really looks like her.

Don't other Senators have the *hover to the center of the Senate* function? They're all like *wave fist and shout* but Padmé just presses a button and suddenly everyone has to listen to her.

"Members of the senate. Do you hear yourselves? More money, more clones, more war. Say nothing of fiscal responsibility, What about moral responsibility? Hasn't this war gone on long enough?"

THAT'S NOT THE POINT PADME!!! The other side has droids, they can go as long as they want because those aren't sentient lives that they're wasting (and even if they were, I doubt that would bother them that much) and they probably don't hesitate taking credit from the Banking Clans in order to keep making them.

(Btw why doesn't the Republic use droids??? That would solve so many of their problems)

Well at least I'm pleased to see my characterization of her in my fic is spot on on that point: SHE WANTS TO NEGOTIATE WITH THE SEPARATISTS!!! Tho I'm for the right of the people to decide if they wanna belong to a nation or whatev' (like, for what I care, Corsica can fuck off if they don't wanna be french??? That's how democracy should work: If enough people in an administrative sector wants independence, it should be granted to them.) I'm not sure that it's what they really want. Like, sure that must be what local governments were promised by Dooku, but that's not what Palpatine wants.

Oh, yeah, that's Ahsoka, with Anakin. What are they doing there? Don't they have someplace to be like, I don't know... Fighting in the Clone Wars???

Bail's like "Why don't we, like WAIT for any EMERGENCY bill, uh??"

I really like this conversation for some reason:

Nix Card: "That legislation would have meant billions for us." Gume Saam: "I tried my best to push the bill through." Lott Dod: "You did your part, representative. Senator Amidala is the problem." Nix Card: "I thought age might temper her idealism."

(That guy needs to meet Satine. She's like 10 years older than Padmé and there is nothing temperate about her.)

Gume Saam: “I know people who could do something about her." Lott Dod, getting genre savvy: "That task is more difficult than you presume." Nix Card: "Gentlemen, the Banking Clan and Trade Federation are about business, not violence." Lott Dod: "Hmm, in this case, our business is violence." Nix Card: "Precisely.With or without senator Amidala, the Galactic Senate is unlikely to de-regulate the banks... Until this war hits home." Lott Dod: "What exactly are you proposing?" Nix Card: "Perhaps some unexpected bloodshed on Coruscant, uh, may change a few minds." Lott Dod: "Coruscant? Coruscant has not been attacked in over 1,000 years." Nix Card: "Then it has a false sense of security. There are some powerful clients on the other side who could help us, uh, shall we say, make the point?" Gume Saam: "Ooh, I like this plan." Nix Card: "No one cares what you think."

:'D

Padmé to Anakin: “You must ask the Jedi Council to...”

Imma gonna stop you right there, Padmé. Do you think the Council is going to listen to him???

“... speak with Chancellor Palpatine.” Anakin: “Don’t involve me in this!”

I love Anakin so much.

WAIT

DID IT JUST HAPPENED WHILE OBI-WAN WAS CHASING ZIRO WITH QUIN? DID ANAKIN HAD HIS MAKEOVER????

ANAKIN YOU’RE KILLING ME

"War's complicated, Ahsoka. But let me simplify it. The Separatists believe the Republic is corrupt, But they're wrong, and we have to restore order."

You sweet summer child.

Also did no-one thought to explain it to Ahsoka before?

Ahsoka: "Master Skywalker said you should teach me about politics." Padmé: "Right." Ahsoka: "You know, you two have more in common than you think. It's no wonder you get along well." Padmé: "Huh. Of course."

Oh, Ahsoka, baby... How do I explain to you... :’D

GRIEVOUS'S SPEECH TO THE DROIDS

I love this?

How the fuck was Mina Padmé's mentor? What was she doing on Naboo?

I want that house Uh. Mina's voice sounds older than she looks. And Ahsoka looks already done with Lux :'D

Seriously what a dollface.

AHAHAHAHAHAHA AHSOKA I LOVE YOU GIRL.

So it’s been a while but I’m pretty sure this was referring to Ahsoka and Lux and “seems like boys are the same weither they are Republic or Separatist.”

Padmé: "I sense Dooku's dirty hand in all of this."

Boy does he has dirty hands. Have you seen his fingernails?

Mina: "Too peace, then." Padmé: "To hope."

URGH. Can they talk about something else than hope in Star Wars? I'm growing tired of the optimism here. Like they could toast to common sense that would be refreshing.

That looks a lot like the british parliament.

So the Separatist Parliament agrees on meeting with the Senate to talk peace, which we all know is gonna fail obv... 

Grievous really gets all the best stuff. Look at this fancy chair! :o

Clone working directly for the Senate?

Because that's the Senate symbol... Don't they have their own guards? That's a rhetorical question I know they have guards I killed a whole bunch of them in my fic it was glorious. (No actually it wasn't I was too busy killing Temple Guards the Senate Guard got a bit overlooked)

Cleaning murder bots fucking stupid they don' teven know where the power generators are *eyeroll*

Senate Clone: "Stupid droids."

OMG SHEEV SHUT YOUR DIRTY FUCKING MOUTH. AND PADME YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE MORE CLEVER THAN THIS JUST DON'T SQUINT AT HIM LIKE "I don't understand" OF COURSE YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND BITCH NO ONE UNDERSTAND BECAUSE YOU'RE ALL FUCKING MORONS.

You gross Amedda.

What is this I love it. OH SHIT IT'S, LIKE, UNDER THE SENATE???? ARE THOSE THE POWER GENERATORS???? OMG.

1) are those radar technicians? no they're not but who cares they're the Matts from now one. 2) the Matts are all humans dudes so I think some higher up is both specist and mysoginist

Well shit. Oh much do you wanna bet no one is gonna suspect the Banking Clans when obviously there are the one who beneficiate the most from the vote not happening? AND HERE THEY GO. LET'S DEREGULATE THE BANKS. WHAT A BUNCH OF FUCKING IDIOTS.

For once Padmé is feeling the stupid too.

OH HELLO ANAKIN I'VE MISSED YOU. You're talking shit tho man. He's like "we have eyes and ears everywhere so ofc we know it's the Sepies". Ans also:

"It was dangerous and careless to go to Raxus, not to mention illegal. You went to far this time."

LIKE EXCUSE ME SKYWALKER BUT "DANGEROUS, CARELESS, ILLEGAL , and GOING TO FAR"???? That's you in a nutshell buddy.

Ahsoka: "You would do the same. You do the same all the time!"

THANK YOU SNIPS.

Prev/Next

#star wars #the clone wars #calyss watches the clone wars #padmé amidala #ahsoka tano #anakin skywalker #mina bonteri #lux bonteri #sheev palpatine #bail organa #tcw3 #long post

[bluering8]

TNG S02

TNG S02 roundup let’s do this let’s make it happen!

Data - I still love Data!! That’s it that’s all you’re getting on the topic because I love Data so much that if you let me talk about him at all I’ll Talk Forever and there are non-Data things in this show which  need to talk about.

Geordi la Forge - I’m glad that Geordi’s the chief engineer now. Last season was kind of weird in that there wasn’t a dedicated engineer character so they were pulling out a new random yellowshirt every time they needed someone to explain a thing to the main cast. If I’m yelling something at the screen (use a shuttle! fly in a different direction! fate is bullshit shut up riker!) then usually Geordi will be the one to say it. This is like, one of the fastest ways you can possibly endear a character to me.

Anyway, I love Geordi and I love his friendship with Data and honestly, you could give me an entire show entirely about these two being bros and I would adore it. I forgot that Geordi likes to build model ships, but now I remember and it delights me that he’s just like, a huge fucking dork in his own right.

...it occurs to me that I’m better-disposed to characters when I know what their hobbies are. Part of the reason I love Data and Geordi so much both as individuals and as a brotp is that the show devotes a lot of time to showing them fucking around and getting into shenanigans outside of their duties. Contrast that with the characters I’m more ambivalent towards, such as Riker or Dr Crusher, and it becomes really obvious that part of the reason I’m ambivalent towards them is that I have no real idea what they do when they’re not doing their jobs.

Kate Pulaski - I hated Pulaski the first time I watched TNG and now, several years later, it turns out that I still hate Pulaski!! I talked about her before and tl;dr: my issue with her isn’t how she treats Data or that she’s decided he isn’t a person, but that she thinks treating someone that way is acceptable as long as she’s decided they’re not a person. Listen, mate, I’m not here to insist that everyone should be a perfect morally-pure cinnamon roll (all my faves are problematic as Hecke). I hate Pulaski because it would be so so easy for me to love her as a character, but she simply doesn’t fit the universe. In a grittier setting? Fantastic, splendid, superlative, I’ll take ten. In spacefuture utopia? I can believe in Pulaski as a person who might exist, sure, but I cannot believe that the rest of the Enterprise crew would stand there and watch her treat Data the way she treats Data, and not respond by hauling her off for sensitivity training. I hate Pulaski not because there’s anything wrong with Pulaski, but because the way the rest of the characters let her get away with it feels like a betrayal of everything I believed in about Star Trek.

Wesley Crusher - Alias FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER, because he is the absolute worst. Why is he wearing a uniform now? I am not usually a guy with strong opinions about wardrobe choices, but I actually really liked his collection of ugly-ass sweaters. If Wesley adds anything to the cast it’s his identity as someone who, despite all his smarts, is still just a teenaged civilian, and as a result lacks both the experience and the training of the other characters. Once you stick him in a uniform you start to lose the impact of that difference. I mean yes the difference will inevitably be lost as he embarks on his Starfleet career but at this point he’s still not even a real cadet yet, let me have the one thing I actually kind of like about the character.

Also why is he on the bridge. Seriously why. Why why why. Stop this!!

William Riker - Somehow it took me until halfway through this season to realise that Riker is mostly just a clone of Kirk? I think this contributes to how bland I find him, all Kirk’s philosophical inclinations got given to Picard instead so Riker ends up feeling super flat and underdeveloped. He’s, like, generally a decentish person (sometimes), and he’s good at his job (sometimes), and he flirts with pretty ladies (often), and his dad is a piece of shit? That’s all I’ve got on him. Dude could use another personality trait or three.

S02E02 Where Silence Has Lease - I have very mixed feelings about this episode. The first half was excellent horror, the kind of thing I love about the SCP Foundation or the Sick Land, that scenario where you’re trying to look at a thing from the perspective of a researcher but you’re in a situation where research simply doesn’t work because the thing is a fundamental violation of the way you interact with reality, and you’ve reached the point where all you can do is look at it and describe what you’re seeing and hope really, really hard that someone will figure something out eventually maybe. (The exploration of the Yamato reminded me a lot of House of Leaves, which also has that delicious sense of nightmarish slowburn reality-breakdown even if it lacks the desperate attempts to Do Science to something which completely resists the application of the scientific method.) Horror is an incredibly subjective genre, but for me a vital part of it is denying me any explanation while maintaining the illusion that if I go just a little further, learn just a little more, suddenly I’ll have my explanation and everything will make sense.

This episode not only gives an explanation, but salts the wound by giving an incredibly shitty explanation. See, something something rats in a maze and then there’s a face in the sky and I don’t give a shit. It was Whatsisface all along!! All it achieves is making me super super confused about what are Whatsisface’s capabilities even. He can make fake ships and fake people and instakill a dude, but he can’t deactivate the ship’s autodestruct or prevent Picard from activating the autodestruct in the first place?

S02E03 Elementary, Dear Data - What the fuck is up with the holodeck? My friend pointed out that “bear in mind they probably have a thousand problem free uses of the holodeck for every freak issue” but like, that’s not the fucking issue here, the issue is that regardless of how many problem-free uses they’ve had, they’ve also had an alarmingly high number of potentially-fatal malfunctions in a relatively short span of time. Why is overriding the mortality failsafe even a thing which is possible?? I can completely buy the holodeck being too useful as a training tool to get rid of it, but they should really have some kind of restrictions or guidelines on the thing for recreational use. You’ve had it demonstrated to you multiple times over that holodeck malfunctions can end in corpses, why are you not doing something about this! Why is there apparently no Health & Safety department on this ship!!

S02E07 Unnatural Selection - Philosophical argument time: do transporters kill people? Normally I’m happy to put this question in a box labelled “let’s not think about that too hard” but the ending of this episode makes more sense to me if the answer is yes. Instead of some bullshit technobabble de-aging nonsense, what they’re actually doing is replicating a new body using the hair as reference and jamming Pulaski’s memories into it then destroying the old body.

S02E09 The Measure of a Man - See, Bruce Maddox is Pulaski done right. I’m straight-up incandescently mad that this episode was Pulaski-free, because whenever she never misses the opportunity to remind Data that he’s not a person, and I super wanted Pulaski and Maddox to interact. Pulaski’s absence here makes the issue with how casually the show treats her attitude towards Data even worse. I feel like if you’re going to spend an episode debating whether Data counts as a person you should at least have the decency to acknowledge the cast member who comes down firmly on the “no” side. You can’t have Data’s personhood as a serious topic for serious debate while simultaneously shrugging your shoulders and going yeah well Pulaski’s just Like That I guess nbd. It doesn’t work that way!

S02E10 The Dauphin - “She’s perfect, absolutely perfect,” says FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER about a girl he’s only met once and barely exchanged a dozen words with, and then he gets super super mad when it turns out she’s a weird space alien shapeshifted into a human which just goes to prove that her personality mattered to him not one iota and he only liked her because she was hot and gave him a boner. And... that’s it, that’s the episode. There’s no subplot, nothing else happens, the entire episode is about FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER having a crush. In conclusion: FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER.

S02E15 Pen Pals - If anyone ever attempts to fight me on the topic of Does Data Is Emotions?, this is the episode I’m pointing them to. I’m pretty sure there’s not a single action Data takes in this entire episode which can be justified from a completely unemotionless point of view. He goes from “I’m too focused on my personal project to spend two seconds stacking this crap neatly so I’ll just leave it lying around as a trip hazard” to “hey Captain remember when you said I could break the Prime Directive a little bit, is it okay if I break it twice that much? actually I broke it ten times that much sorry not sorry” to “so I know this kid has no memory of me or our interactions now but I stole Pulaski’s weird space rock to give to her anyway because sentiment is important to me”.

S02E17 Samitarian Snare - The a-plot of this episode is that multiple people tell Riker that sending their chief engineer over to some random alien vessel is a bad idea while Riker tries to insist that it is a great idea and will be totally fine and then is completely fucking blindsided when it turns out to have been a terrible idea. I’m pretty sure this is the first time Troi’s said anything useful so of course Riker ignored her because she’s not allowed to be a worthwhile character.

The b-plot is that Picard and Wesley take a shuttle trip together and Wesley is so incapable of taking a fucking hint that even when Picard gets up and moves seats to be away from him Wesley doesn’t realise that his constant stream of personal questions might not be welcome. In conclusion: FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER.

S02E18 Up the Long Ladder - Oh my god it’s like they listened to my complaints about S01E17 and somehow managed to fuck it up even worse!! WHY ARE YOU ALL SO WEIRD ABOUT CLONING.

tl;dr: Direct from my liveblogging of S02E03: “DATA CHANGED HIS OUTFIT data my boy my son my precious cinnamon roll how many sherlock holmes cosplay outfits do you own”. I know the reasonable explanation would be that he replicates one fresh each time, but I choose to believe that Data owns an entire closetful of Sherlock Holmes cosplay outfits.

#star trek #star trek tng

[deecherrywolf]

Fandom: Voltron Legendary Defender Pairing(s): Klance Rating: T Word Count: 3000 Prompt: 31 Days - Day 4 - someone needed to keep a closer eye on the kid

Notes: I write 300 words yesterday and today, I slap out 3k jlfdkj;sl

Anyways this is silly and based on a prompt at the kink meme - where somehow a klance clone baby shows up (prompt here) Anyway, anyone who reads - enjoy!

When Hunk woke up and trudged down the hall in his yellow lion slippers and robe toward the kitchen, he wasn’t expecting a mess, wasn’t expecting the way food goo hoses were out and leaking and definitely wasn’t expecting to see a baby in the middle of the mess, passed out from probably eating so much that their little tan belly was extended with the goo.

It wasn’t so much the mess that had Hunk panicking, it was the child.

How had a baby gotten on the ship!? More importantly, it looked like a human child! He looked right and then left before scooping the child up, watching its neck flop, eyes flickering open just for a moment to look at Hunk before Hunk fixed his hold on the child, cradling it better - watching it settle in his arms.

“Guys… guys!!”

He headed out of the room, rushing towards the common room, bouncing back and forth on his feet as he awaited for someone, anyone, to wake up.

“Guys!”

Coran was the first to make his way over, freshly dressed and curious as to what in the world was going on. “Oh dear, did one of you get hold of the de-ageing agent? Lance, is that you?”

Hunk blinked, looking down at the child in his arms. The child had darker hair than Lance, a lot darker, but his skin tone was the same. Was it possible? His eyes rounded out. “Lance?”

“What? I heard screaming, what’s going on?”

Both Coran and Hunk looked over at Lance, who was shuffling in, feet dragging as he made his way over - tired eyes finally seeing the child in Hunk’s arms. He opened his mouth in surprise.

“Why is there a baby on board?”

“I don’t know! I found the little guy in the kitchen.”

“Hmm, strange, we haven’t made any pitstops where a child that looks like this could make it on board, let me run some scans on the creature.”

Hunk’s nose wrinkled. “He is not a creature, he’s a baby.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, for all we know he could be an alien that is using a skin to mask its real figure to find a host.”

Hunk recoiled and dropped the child. Lance sputtered and lunged forward, catching the child before it landed, but the movements had woken it up.

Deep purple eyes stared at Lance and then, the child broke out into a smile, wiggling its tanned arms at Lance.

“Aww, I think he likes me.”

“Don’t Lance! He is trying to take over your body!”

Lance snorted, standing up now with the kid in his arms. The little child was really cute. Dark blacksish-brown hair, round puffy cheeks, and a cute nose. He had to be around maybe a year, just at the crawling, grabbing, trying-to-stand/walk stage probably.

“Let me take him to the pod, Lance - we need to run scans.” said Coran, not asking anymore, but demanding - face full of seriousness. Lance couldn’t argue with that, because despite the cute looks, it was a very large possibility that the child was, indeed, a monster in disguise.

“You two go get dressed and then we’ll all meet in the med bay.”

Lance nodded, heading back towards his room - feeling weird leaving the child, which was weird in itself.

--

The group of paladins all stood around the pod, eying the tiny figure floating in there. All of them weren’t sure what to make of the child, it definitely looked human - but that made no sense. There hadn’t been any planets were a human child could have possibly lived and escaped onto their ship, so what was going on?

Allura looked from the pod to Coran. “Any results?”

“Oh, many. It is extraordinary. It appears the child is actually Flewingian.”

“Flewingian? Those strange four legged aliens? But how?”

Allura’s eyes widened. “The King of Flewing did say he was giving us a gift, but was rather cryptic about it.”

Lance scowled. “I don’t trust this.”

“There is more,” continued Coran. “It is Flewingian, but it is also of your species - at least, containing human dna.”

Shiro frowned. “So these aliens took some of our DNA and made us a child?”

Coran nodded. “Precisely.”

“We cannot keep a child on the castleship. It will only hold Voltron back,” said Allura. “We must return to Flewing and give the child back.”

“I agree, but we must take care of the child until we make it back.”

“Wait, wait… whose DNA was used?” asked Hunk, causing everyone to look at him. He scratched his chin, an embarrassed look on his face. “I’m just curious, because… shouldn’t whoever his parent is, be the one to take care of him?”

“That’s a good idea, okay - can we figure that out?”

“I think he’s part Lance.” said Hunk, causing his friend to look at him in betrayal. “What? He liked you and he definitely looks like you - look at his nose!”

Lance’s eyes flickered to the baby in the pod and… couldn’t argue with that. He did have his nose and he definitely looked like him. He scowled. “Fine, I guess I’m taking care of the baby.”

“You’ll have help.”

Lance looked at Coran, who crossed his arms and looked as if he was trying to contain some sort of amusement.

“Your DNA wasn’t the only one in there.”

Lance’s nose wrinkled at the prospect of his DNA mixing with any of the other paladins. Who in the world did he make such a beautiful child with? Okay that thought made him blush and feel a little weird, but it was true. The kid was super cute, maybe Shiro? Shiro looked like he would have cute kids - or maybe… somehow, Allura? Lance could only hope so - he’d love to show Allura how to care for human children.

But, of course, Coran nudged Keith over and Lance felt the floor open up and swallow him whole, Pidge’s snort didn’t help.

Keith scowled. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Afraid not, I’m going to release the child now. You two make sure to take care of him, okay?”

“W-Wait! Can’t we just leave him in the pod?”

But Coran had already released it and Lance caught the baby as it fell. That strange feeling filled him once again - that strange warm feeling of protective pride. Was this the feeling of being a parent? He didn’t want to put the child down and when those deep purple eyes looked into Lance’s eyes, he felt a strange sensation of love.

Shit, this was his kid… it was strange. He hadn’t even knocked anyone up and yet…

“Lance?”

Lance looked at the others and sighed. “I guess I’m the best one for the job.”

Keith eyed the child and then looked at Lance. “It’s part me too, let me see it.”

Lance’s nose wrinkled and he held the child closer. “Um, excuse you - he is not an ‘it’, if you’re going to call him that, you don’t get any custody.”

“What! I just want to hold him.”

“Lance, let Keith hold the baby.”

Lance glared at Coran, but handed the child over and… oh no. A strange feeling pulsed through Lance as the sight of the child in Keith’s hands. The baby looked just as happy in Keith’s arms as it did in Lance’s, and in Keith’s arms - you could really, really, tell the child belonged to Keith too. The dark hair, the way the locks looked a little wild, and those deep eyes… they were Keith’s eyes, even the shape of them would definitely become like Keith’s.

And looking at Keith’s face - Lance knew he was feeling the same thing as he did - that deep feeling of love and protectiveness. The fierce feeling a parent feels for their child. Lance swallowed, feeling another pulse of pride. He felt a strange pull, feeling he should step closer to Keith and the child, his family unit…

Oh god, this was messing with his head.

Maybe they shouldn’t be the ones to look after the alien baby.

But it was too late, everyone else had already dispersed, leaving Lance and Keith with the baby.

Lance licked his lips. “You can, you know - go to the training deck like you always do, I’ll take care of the baby.”

Keith wiggled his left index finger as the child grasped it and when he spoke, Lance’s heart lurched at the fondness in that voice. “It’s all right, I want to take care of him with you.”

That soft sound in that voice did strange things to Lance and he felt his chest warm his entire body. “Yeah?”

Keith looked up from the baby to him, those dark eyes soft and searching as he looked at Lance. “Yeah.”

The two of them held their gazes, until, a soft whine brought their attention back to the child and then…

“Oh ew, smells like he needs a diaper changed.”

Keith’s nose wrinkled. “He’s definitely yours - this stinks so bad!”

Lance snorted, taking the child from Keith as he walked off to find something appropriate to change the child with - aware of Keith following after him.

--

The trip to Flewing was taking a little longer than they thought, but Lance didn’t mind at all. He was actually quite happy with the situation. The child, which they had decided not to name - so they wouldn’t get too attached, was actually a lot of fun to take care of. Lance had kind of missed this - looking after a kid. He had a niece at home that he had helped take care of a couple of times and some cousins too. He loved taking care of kids and this… this was one thing that made him feel a little closer to home.

But also, made him feel closer to Keith, which wasn’t his prerogative, but it just… happened.

They cared for the child - their child - together, helping the other out when needed, letting the other have free time when they needed, and more importantly - they did practically everything together with the child. It should have been unnerving to wake up on the couch, legs intertwined with Keith’s legs with a chubby baby against their chests, cradled gently between them - but it wasn’t. It only made Lance feel warm and happy. It also made his heart pulse with a fullness he’d never thought he’d experience. What was worse, was that feeling had escaladed when Keith’s eyes slanted open and he murmured a soft, ‘good morning’ and oh, Lance wanted to kiss him.

That, had brought Lance upright and he made the excuse of needing to change the baby as he hurried off.

Lance loved not only their child, but this strange fondness that was forming between them and it was beginning to drive him crazy.

“Was that your plan all along, hm?” he said amicably to the child, his voice full of love, eyes crinkling as the child giggled at him and squirmed in his lap.

The baby babbled at him, yawning again. Lance fought the urge to yawn too - his eyes finding Keith’s form walking in, carrying a bottle.

“How is he?”

“Good, freshly changed and already tired. He sleeps alot.”

“He’s a baby.”

There was a pause between them, Keith moving to sit down beside Lance, reaching over to rub a gentle finger over their child’s chubby cheeks. Lance swallowed as he watched the tenderness in Keith’s face.

“Coran said we should be reaching Flewing pretty soon.”

That finger stilled. “Oh?”

“Yeah… it… it will be kind of nice to be free of parenthood, yeah?”

Keith didn’t answer, just pulled his hand away and sat awkwardly beside Lance, the baby snoozing between them until he began to fuss, waking himself up with his soft cries for food. Keith took him and gave him the bottle, allowing the baby to hold it, helping him as he did.

“We should see if he’d like to try food goo again.”

Keith’s nose wrinkled. “He just makes a mess out of it. Which, is entirely your fault.”

“How is it my fault?”

Keith glowered at him. “You encouraged him to blow raspberries while his mouth was full!”

Lance’s lips quirked. “I thought it was funny, he did too.”

“You only thought it was funny because I was feeding him!”

Lance grinned, wrapping an arm around Keith’s shoulders, bringing him and their child closer to him. “How many more times do I have to apologize?”

Keith glared up at him, but it was definitely half hearted and then a tilted smirk was on Keith’s lips, eyes falling into a look that had Lance swallowing hard and his pulse racing. “I’ll forgive you if…”

Keith stopped mid sentence, as if he caught himself from saying something wrong. Lance frowned, eying him and then he did something that made his stomach clench and his chest constrict - he reached over, tipping Keith’s jaw toward him.

“If what?”

He barely whispered, breath fanning over Keith’s lips, their eyes slowly closing as they began to close the distance between them.

“We have arrived to Flewing, paladins!”

They broke apart, eyes wide as they looked at each other and then looked away, frazzled over what had almost just happened. The child between them merely made a high pitched happy sound. Lance cleared his throat while Keith stood up, taking the baby with him. Lance watched him walk away, the baby being held close to his chest, but looking over his shoulder at Lance with those big purple eyes - as if asking him why he wasn’t coming too.

Lance clicked his tongue and got up and followed closely behind before he caught up and walked beside Keith. The two of them entered the control room, where Allura smiled at them, giving the baby a soft smile too.

“I’ve seen a request to meet with the king.”

“He isn’t going to get upset we’re returning his… gift, right?”

“Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened, the King is quite used to it by now.” stated Coran, typing in coordinates for them to land. Which, Lance guessed wasn’t a surprise - a baby was a rather… big gift.

Once the entered the king’s court, the alien rushed over to them with its four legs, its yellow skin flushing with embarrassment as its three eyes squinted. “Paladins of Voltron, I am terribly sorry for the mistake in my gifting. But I had seen two of you touch the Tree of Birthing, so I just assumed-”

“It’s quite alright,” said Allura, smiling down at the smaller alien. “We’ve come to return the gift though. It was appreciated but as a member of Voltron, we do not have the time to look after such a gift.”

“Understood. Bring me the gift.”

Keith stepped forward, holding the baby to him. It was sleeping, its face nuzzling against his shoulder, tiny fist holding onto strands of his hair. Keith gently peeled him off, holding him softly.

“What will happen to him?”

“The gift will do what all unwanted gifts do, return to the tree of birthing and give its life back to it.”

Lance had to hold himself back, a streak of possessive protectiveness pulsating through him, wanting to scream ‘he’s not unwanted!’ but… he knew that Allura was right. They couldn’t have a baby on board, they couldn’t care for a baby when the universe needed saving. The child wasn’t even his… not really, anyways. But even so, it hurt to watch Keith hand over the baby, it hurt to see those innocent eyes open questioningly before, it seemed to understand too.

Apologies were exchanged once again and then, they were off.

Once away from Flewing, Lance found Keith standing in the observation deck, watching the stars go by. Lance swallowed as he approached.

“That was… something, wasn’t it?”

Keith didn’t even look at him at first, eyes on the darkness of space before the other sighed, looking at him. “Yeah, it was… and I miss it already.”

Lance felt the urge to wiggle, fidget under Keith’s gaze. He could feel his cheeks, warm and growing warmer as he fought back the rush of tenderness. He coughed it back as he took a more light-hearted route. “What? You saying you enjoyed raising a baby with me?”

Keith scowled, but then he looked serious - eyes on Lance with a certainty that made Lance’s gut clench.

“Yeah, I did.”

The teasing atmosphere dissipated and Lance found himself putting his arms around Keith, bringing him close to him, Keith going pliant in his arms and … for all that it should have been strange, it wasn’t. It felt as if they were mourning the child they really had - even if it wasn’t really like that.

Keith sighed against his shoulder, his own arms coming up to grasp onto Lance’s coat. “This is stupid, I knew we were bringing him back to Flewing, that he wasn’t really real-”

“Hey, he was real! Just… it’s too early, we weren’t really ready for that. But, maybe… maybe one day we will be.”

The insinuation wasn’t lost on Keith, he was looking at Lance now with a curious expression while Lance avoided his eyes, a blush on his face. He couldn’t even look at Keith right now, he knew his face had to be all shades of red.

Keith smiled. “Are you saying you want to have a family with me?”

Lance’s eyes darted to Keith now. The way those dark eyes squinted when he smiled - reminded him of what the baby looked like when he smiled, and how their children would look, if they could ever have any.

“Yeah I am, you got a problem with that?”

“No, do you?”

Lance licked his lips, embarrassment slowly bleeding out, being replaced with fondness. “No… so, one day?”

Lance’s eyes widened as Keith’s hands were suddenly cupping his cheeks and hot breath were on his lips. Keith whispered against his lips.

“One day.”

And then they kissed, their lips bearing a promise of a bright future together.

#klance #myfics #31dayswriting