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starculler · 3 years

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Whumptober 2021: Day 9

Word Count: 1281 || Read on AO3

Tags/Warnings: Anakin Skywalker, The Force, Mentions of Rex Ahsoka and Obi-Wan, Implied/Referenced Character Death (not explicit), Mild Comfort

This falls into Anakin-has-a-vaguely-eldritch-connection-to-the-Force territory and I will not apologize.

Anakin stared, rooted to the spot while the battle raged on around him. A rumbling, discordant symphony of sound deafened him to the screaming, blasterfire, and the steady, heavy thudding of hundreds — thousands — of droids marching steadily forward, growing louder with every painful beat of his heart. He hardly seemed to breathe, an unmoving statue amid the chaos, and the unnatural stillness that had possessed him seemed to leak outward.

The wind died. The dust settled. Even the little scraps of life that remained in the wide canyon scurried off to hide, settling as deep in the darkness of whatever crags and cracks they could find as they could, every sense alight with a call of Danger-Predator-Death.

He felt his pulse pound against his skin. Felt a chill sink down into his core, burrow into his bones, and come out a fine, misty fog when he finally exhaled. Felt the static buzz of Power dance just out of reach, teasing at his fingertips and daring him to seize it. To dip in a hand. To dive headlong into the depths. To embrace what he was. What he could be if he only let go of that last length of his leash.

Time stretched and shrunk. Blasterbolts singed his robes. His men screamed, dying and surviving and falling and rising — each a little pinpoint of light so far on the edge of his senses that they might as well not have existed at all. Some part of him, distant and outraged at his paralysis, railed against that, beating against the slowly swelling storm surging outward from within. But all he did was stare.

At his Captain.

At his Padawan.

At his Master.

At the people he loved, still and silent on the sun-baked ground, tossed like dolls and left to the wastes to rot among the corpses of his fallen men.

He blinked once, his eyes dry and aching, and slowly pried his flesh hand open from the white-knuckled fist he didn’t remember making. The wind picked up, gently at first and then stronger, wilder, until it howled across the canyon and kicked up thick, choking clouds of dust. He heard his men shout, pulling back and ducking for cover as rocks pelted the battlefield and the droids pressed on, unseen and undeterred by the weather’s sudden turn. It was little more than white noise to him.

Anakin lifted his hand, still open, and let go of his leash.

The Force was an ocean, murky and deep, and he the storm that would pull it to shore. One and apart. Feeding each other until it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began, light and warmth giving way to frigid violence. They were the wind ripping through the ranks, the dust in the air, the earth cracked and splitting underfoot. They were the churning, fiery flows feeding into dormant bluffs and peaks, and the thrum of fear coursing through the veins of the thousands of unfortunate sentients bleeding pain-loss-fight-survive into the air. Into them.

They were all and they were none and they howled the pain of their loss and their gain into the skies and the stars. All and none were with them, lost and found in the tides they loosed upon the soulless heaps of metal that had dared to steal what was theirs. The echoes lingered and soothed and bent to their rage, ghosts of lives lost, forgotten, mourned, loved, and missed. Tangible in a way they hadn’t been when they had been only finite flesh and not the cosmos condensed.

Their Master.

Their Padawan.

Their Captain.

Always there. Always gone. Spurring on the destruction they wreaked and pulling them back. They snarled, wind whipping and cutting more fiercely than before against crumbling, centuries-old stone and quickly accumulating metallic debris. Who were they to command them to stop? To pry at their anger to the fraying edges of peace slumbering beneath?

They were Nothing.

They were Everything.

They were his.

They— Anakin gasped, wet and ragged, as the world condensed back down to a single point. A single body, kneeling on the ground amidst the husks of thousands of battered, broken droids. Feeling came back slowly: electric fire in his limbs, the buzzing malfunction of his prosthetic against healed flesh, and hands. On his arms, his shoulders, pulling on his tunics.

His men, he realized through the receding fog that had clouded him to his dull, human senses, each of them a tiny star unto themselves so much like the supernovas he’d danced among in the Force when he was them rather than just himself. The members of Torrent he could see looked battered, wide eyed and shaken badly enough that he almost didn’t recognize the terror bleeding off of them for how rarely he’d seen it so potent and widespread.

He reached out to the man closest to him — Kix, wide eyed and pale even as he set about checking Anakin over — and flinched when the medic startled. Afraid of him. He let his arm fall back to his side, noting how the others had tensed when he’d moved, and pressed his lips into a thin, unhappy line.

“Sir,” Kix started but trailed off, an obvious question in his eyes nestled close to poorly hidden fear.

“What was that?” The question came from someone behind him, sharp and demanding with only the slightest tremor snaking through the words. He wondered who it might have been, still too shaken and his senses too muddled to parse out anything more specific than one-of-his-men and not-Kix.

Anakin hesitated. Unsure if he could explain. Unsure if he even understood, let alone so something so complicated as talk. He was sure just moving, being, was a miracle. Talking, and words at all really, seemed … beyond him. He shook his head in lieu of an answer and hoped they understood. The sudden spike in anger told him they didn’t — or just didn’t like that he couldn’t — but that was fine.

They deserved a little anger for how badly he’d scared them, no matter how he couldn’t remember much beyond the anger and the connection to something more. They deserved more than anger for how badly he’d let them down.

Rex.

Ahsoka.

Obi-Wan.

If he didn’t feel quite so tied up in knots, Anakin thought he might have started bawling now that the anger had been fed and stripped away, leaving behind only raw grief underneath the mess he’d made of his mind and connection to the Force.

A hand on the back of his neck startled him, snapping his head to the side to see Jesse, grim and unhappy — grieving, his mind supplied — but not backing down when their eyes met. The men seemed to hold their collective breath, waiting, and only relaxed when Jesse nodded, one short, sharp jerk of his head. He squeezed the nape of Anakin’s neck once, an offer of comfort he wasn’t quite equipped to process yet, and didn’t pull away when Kix shuffled forward again to reach for Anakin’s hand.

He watched Kix clean and treat the worst of his wounds in a daze, most of his attention split between the men around him and the bulk of his forces further back, helping each other. They’d lost more men than he liked, and he wasn’t sure how many were his fault. He Didn’t know how to ask how many lights he’d personally snuffed out, so he didn’t. Not yet.

Later, when he’d seen those three buried and his men’s injuries treated, he would ask. For now, he let himself drift, still a little too close to the stars, and let the guilt eat him alive.

#whumptober2021 #no.9 #(blind) rage #star wars #anakin skywalker #fic #mentioned character death #my fanfic

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wafflesrock16 · 3 years

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Shakarian Western AU (part 2)

I’ve had a couple requests for a continuation on my previous western drabble, so ta-da! As a fair warning, it gets a bit steamy toward the middle. >=}

It was the dead of night. Brilliant swaths of stars burned overhead and deep blue shadows from the canyon walls stretched and warped in the firelight. Coyotes cried in the distance, the mournful sound echoing through the rocky fortress where Shepard and Garrus had been forced to retreat.

Normandy snorted and shook his head in response to the coyotes. Widow, Garrus’ lacerta, lay nearby chewing on the bleached femur of a dead deer they’d come across earlier that day. If the howling bothered the giant lizard, Widow hid it well.

Shepard rested her chin on her knees, eyes focused on the fire; the soft snap of the twigs and glow of embers. There was no shortage of kindling down here, where the Attican River still flowed full and tumultuous through the labyrinth it’d carved over the millennia.

There were rabbits and deer and dorcas and other game hiding in the canyon brush and meager trees. They’d seen plenty of tracks in the wet mud of the riverbank and Widow always managed to find new and fascinating scat to sniff, much to Garrus’ annoyance.

We can hole up here for weeks--months if we have to, Shepard mused, eyes still trained on the fire. Omega’s gangs couldn’t hunt them forever. Besides, they’d taken heavy casualties in the shoot out at Kima Corral. Shepard was sure Garm was dead--even a krogan couldn’t survive decapitation. The Blood Pack might have lost interest after their leaders’ death, but that still left the Eclipse and Blue Suns.

“Hey.” Garrus’ tall figure appeared from the gloom beyond the firelight. “My turn to take watch,” he said, coming to sit next to her.

Shepard hummed in reply but didn’t move.

Garrus took a stick and stoked the fire, causing a miniature tornado of embers to whirl in the cool night air before blinking out. From somewhere nearby an owl screeched. Garrus leaned back on his elbows with a sigh, staring off into the darkness. Turians had far superior night vision to humans. Several times during their partnership Shepard had seen his eyes reflect in fire or lamplight, shining an eerie opalescent white. She didn’t find it unnerving like some humans she knew. It was actually something of a comfort to know Garrus was watching out for her. Them. Well, she was included in them she supposed… Shepard shook her head to dislodge the confusing--and increasingly frequent thoughts--about Garrus and his feelings for her.

She moved to mirror Garrus’ relaxed position, leaning back and tilting her head up to watch the swirling nebula that burned like Saint Elmo’s fire in the heavens. The stars had always been her companions. A Citadel Deputy traveled alone unless the situation called for a partnership. Shepard was used to the solitude, the constellations and Normandy her only counterparts.

Garrus made a gentle purring noise and Shepard turned to see him regarding her with an expression she couldn’t easily read. His eyes glittered like sunlit oceans and his mandibles were pulled down in a turian smile. He seemed relaxed but she’d known him long enough to read the tension in the taut lines of his body and subtle flexing of his feet.

“Something on your mind?” she asked.

“Hmm?” Garrus seemed to snap out of a daydream. “Oh, no, I umm.” He cleared his throat, mandibles pinching tightly against his face. “Just…” He glanced up at her before coming to some internal decision. “You look beautiful in the starlight,” he said in a voice so soft it was almost a whisper.

Shepard’s eyes went wide as she felt her cheeks flush. She absently tucked a strand of her loose hair behind an ear. “Thank you,” she muttered. Should she say something else? Tell him she thought he was ruggedly handsome? That his voice did things to her that’d make a madame blush?

“Well, you should probably try to catch some rest,” Garrus said into the silence that stretched between them like a yawning chasm. He sat up, rubbing the back of his neck and refusing to make eye contact. “We’ve got a long day of riding ahead of us tomorrow if we wanna make that eastern ridge we talked about. It’s a good vantage point for a sniper, and will allow us a full view for miles.” He coughed awkwardly into a closed hand. “You can use my blanket if you want, it’s kinda cold away from--”

She flung herself at him, seizing his plated face in her hands and pressing a searing kiss to his mouth. Garrus went ridged in shock before wrapping her in his arms and kissing her back as best he could. A low, sultry vocal rippled through him, sending heat to pool in Shepard’s abdomen.

They toppled backwards, Garrus leaning over her and running his slender blue tongue along her pulse. Shepard gasped, hands flying to his shoulder and behind his head to keep him close. Her fingers inadvertently pressed against a soft patch of hide beneath Garrus’ fringe. The dark, drug out moan that elicited was lust incarnate and had Shepard clenching her thighs together.

“Spirits, Shepard, I…” Garrus laughed breathlessly as he stared down at her, mandibles flared. “That, this is,” he lowered his head to press his brow to hers with a resonant purr. “Never knew you had a thing for turian bad boys,” he said, quoting her comment from weeks earlier.

“And I never knew you had a thing for goody goody human deputies with messy hair,” Shepard returned.

Garrus pulled his head back and cleared his throat uncomfortably. “The hair comment wasn’t what I really thought, I was just annoyed…” He stopped speaking as Shepard moved to trace his colony markings with her thumb. Garrus relaxed into her touch, eyes closing and the purr from earlier returning louder than ever.

“I think I love you, Garrus Vakarian,” Shepard heard herself say.

Garrus’ eyes flew open. She expected a witty retort or suave return, but instead all the infamous Archangel could manage was “Wow.” A three-fingered hand moved to brush away a lock of her hair. “What do we do now?” he asked in a hushed tone.

“You really have to ask?”

“Well.” Garrus dipped his head. “There’s sleeping together, but this is...different. For me.”

She didn’t think she could love him more if she tried. Tenderly she reached for him, pushing aside his jacket. He flung it off, cradling her head as he licked her lips in question. Shepard groaned as their tongues met, her hips canting against him in unspoken demand.

“Humans call it making love when it’s...different,” she whispered airily.

“That I can do,” Garrus rumbled.

Overhead the cosmos swirled and the river rushed over stones and boulders. When rose-colored dawn beat back the chill of night, the fire had smoldered out and Shepard and Garrus lay pressed together beneath Garrus’ blanket, plate to skin and limbs entwined. Deep in dreams of star-crushed passion, Shepard registered one thing with the sunrise: She wasn’t alone anymore. There wouldn’t ever be a Shepard without Vakarian.

#Mass Effect #Western AU #shakarian #garrus vakarian #commander shepard #turian cowboys #lemonade is what I'm calling this #not exactly smut but heated #garrus and femshep

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