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daisychainsandbowties · 9 months

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prompt! mary + "we give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone" (fredrick backman)

Mary sits cross-legged in the courtyard, hood pooled around her shoulders, staring straight ahead without seeing the younglings in her eyeline, pretend-duelling in a patch of sunlight.

Her hands pluck at the air, threading strands of invisible luminescence between her fingers, tugging them into a lattice, an alignment of colour and intention.

She ignores the ache that spirals through her hips from sitting in the same position for hours and hours, as dawn came and put dew onto everything, as the sun touched the furthest edge of the courtyard, coaxing the flowers back into bloom. Sound, sight, the texture of the stone beneath her, all of it fades as Mary presses every ounce of her concentration into holding her Force shield.

It’s supposed to be second-nature to her at this point. The others do it with a gesture, with a breath, casting a loose net of Force into the air to deflect soft projectiles and, more recently, stones. Mary has bruises all along her arms, her ribs, from blocking each one with her body.

Shannon’s fingers soft up under her shirt, probing each with terrible care.

“It’s not like… building a wall.” She said this, unhelpfully, while trailing the tip of her tongue along the path of Mary’s neck as they lay on her bunk, tangled up in Shannon’s nudibranch-print blanket. She splayed her palm over Mary’s shoulder, pressed lightly. “It’s more like throwing a tantrum. You just… put it out there.”

“Ah, that explains why you’re so good at it.”

Shannon’s teeth on her neck. Not a warning, never anything angry, just the pressure of her mouth.

“Oh, my girlfriend is a Jedi and a comedian?” Her breath laced with the faintest hint of toothpaste and the sour candy she ate afterwards, “Score.”

That was the same word she said on Ilum, shivering from the cold after Mary pulled her from an ice-cold pool. She stood with her teeth chattering, tucked her hands under Mary’s shirt to steal her heat. They were climbing through caves of ice and rock and monsters in search of kyber crystals and their first real lightsabers, not yet really certain of love.

In the dark, Shannon pressed a dozen of her effortless, invisible shields into the air above them, inviting Mary to press her hand into it, to feel the stretch of the molecules.

She explained it a dozen times, stretching her metaphors until she fell asleep with her mouth partly open, resting on Mary’s arm until it went numb. Still, Mary didn’t move.

The shield wouldn’t come to her. She could meditate for hours, trying to lash out with the Force, pretending to run with blaster bolts darting past her body, but no amount of daydreaming brought her any closer to manifesting a shield.

Maybe it was because, for her, using the Force has always been a thing of motion, a blind reaching-out. She touched it, used it first amid the blur of rock walls back on Tatooine, when she was seven and taking part in deadly races across the landscape of her home planet. Pod-racing was banned in Republic space, but there were no laws on Tatooine, just gangsters.

She remembers how she used to surround herself in a nimbus of something as her podracer threaded through the others. Her helmet rattling overlarge on her head and all the world reduced to the desert and the track and the need to cross that finish line. She used it more than usual on the day she met Shannon, performing a breakneck manoeuvre around crash close to the finish line, forcing power into her engine as she burned a runnel of hypermatter into the sand, taking a corner so fast that any other human would have broken the ship into pieces, but Mary held it through brute force.

The stands erupted when she pulled up, climbing out before the afterimage of the rupulsor-lines had disappeared from her eyes. She fought with the strap of the helmet under her chin, and then looked up and saw her.

The girl on the sidelines, surrounded by a gaggle of other, oddly-dressed children. There was a woman behind them, dark eyes fixed on Mary as she stood there.

The helmet slipped from her fingers, making a hollow noise as it bounced away from her boots, which were held together with random bits of leather and twine. She listed a little against the hot metal chassis, exhausted, but her eyes moved back to the girl, odd and golden with her hair chopped short.

She darted through the opening of the garage as Mary approached it, ignoring the other drivers glaring at her back and wondering if she’d be safe walking the eight miles back through the desert to her little nook in the old cave systems.

Wondering if Watto would pay her or insist on sinking her winnings into ‘repairs’ on the pod.

If she had enough credits in her threadbare backpack to buy some algae packets on the way through Mos Espa.

Then the girl, rushing out to meet her. Behind her, tall and steady and strange, was her guardian. Mary had always been observant – you had to be, living as an orphan on Tatooine – so she noticed the weapon on the woman’s hip as it caught the light.

She froze, even as the girl skidded to a halt in front of her with her arms behind her back, trying to stretch as tall as Mary.

She was shorter, just by an inch.

The Jedi stayed in the shade of the garage opening, letting the others racers stream inside, watching them shoulder-check Mary on their way past, though they avoided the other girl like water parting around a stone.

Mary wanted to run, or hide, or go back and drive the pod straight home even if it meant being charged for the fuel cells, but something in the girl’s posture stopped her.

She stuck out a small hand for some reason.

“Hi, I’m Shannon. You race well, but your corners are sloppy. You know momentum is a vector quantity, so you should keep to your lines as much as possible.”

Her hand stayed where it was with Mary staring at it. She didn’t know what a vector quantity was, but she knew how to take corners out in the desert. With a glare, she said, “The sand doesn’t let you travel in perfect lines. It has texture, and it moves with you. If I tried to move in a straight line, if I tried to fight it, I’d just lose more speed.”

“Oh, like a boat.”

“A what?”

“That’s enough, Shannon,” the Jedi called from inside the garage, but not harshly.

The girl – Shannon – stuck her hand back in the pocket of her robes. They were beige, and clean.

Mary, in contrast, wore her better shirt and the soft pads on her shoulders and her arms and her knees, which would stop her skin from sloughing off if she got thrown from her pod. They were patched together from dozens of trash piles, cannibalized into something that made her look like an overstuffed sofa.

“Master,” Shannon did a dainty little half-turn, heel rotating in the sand with a dancer’s grace, “I think I can feel it!”

Mary clutched at her helmet as the Jedi nodded, gesturing for Shannon to return to her side, which she did, hopping over and slotting herself in a half-step behind the Jedi.

Nothing spared Mary from that dark, alert gaze. There was a softness threaded under the Jedi’s words as she spoke, but they were a command.

“Tell me, child, where are your parents?”

A day later, Mary sat in a ship sent all the way from Coruscant to collect them, belted into a seat with cold metal coating her spine in goose-pimples. Her arms, too.

The ship had atmospheric controls, according to one of the droids tucked in at the entryway. The other children had ignored it, but Mary stopped to stare at it, all shiny in its casings, so unlike the PIT droids who scuttled around her pod at the refuelling stations.

Droid binary was Mary’s fourth language, so she wasn’t very good with it, but she knew enough to understand that atmospheric controls meant the ship could sit at an even 283 Kelvin, despite the heat of the desert.

Shannon noticed her prodding at the goose-pimples on her arms. At the time, she just thought of them as cold bumps, lacking the vocabulary for describing cold. Even in the desert, at night, when the temperatures can plummet fast and hard, Mary never left her skin so uncovered as to see it take on that texture.

“You’ll get used to it,” Shannon chirruped right in her ear. She’d claimed the seat next to Mary by glaring at one of the other younglings, who bowed out with the grace Mary expected from a Jedi in training.

Back then, Mary didn’t know what a bird was, but in the years to come she’d describe Shannon to herself as birdlike, flitting from place to place as though forever on the edge of flight.

“Get used to what?”

“Being cold.” Shannon nodded sagely, “Space is cold.”

The hum of the engine started in the metal all around them, and Mary pressed down into the seat, trying not so show fear. In Mos Espa, people could smell fear from a half-mile away even over the mounds of Ronto dung and the smell of roasting meat, so Mary had learned to bury hers deep out in the desert. She only took it out when she was alone with the light of her lantern, praying that her solar battery would last long enough for her to rehydrate the algae packet stuffed down in her boot.

A hand slipped over her armrest, catching Mary’s fingers in a tight, sweaty grip. “Don’t worry,” Shannon said lightly, “If we explode, we’ll barely understand that we’re dying before it’s all over.” She seemed to think this was comforting.

It was.

Mary stared, gravity pressing her into her seat as the ship peeled away from the planet’s surface. It only occurred to her then that she was leaving, and that in all likelihood she would never go back to Tatooine. She clung to that hand – her hand - as the ship accelerated, staring at the fingers criss-crossed with lines of charcoal, or ink.

Shannon was always sketching. She’d sketched Mary’s little house – or, well, her cave – when the Jedi drove them there on a speeder so that Mary could say goodbye to it. She wasn’t supposed to take anything with her, because she was going to the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, because Jedi had to leave all of their past behind them.

There was nothing she would have taken, anyway, except perhaps a spare algae pack to keep in her boot, just in case it was all a trick, but the fingers tangled in hers felt solid as the ship transitioned into weightlessness and Mary floated up against the straps holding her in her seat. She became suddenly and violently aware of being loosened from the ground; that there was no ground, only space.

She clung to Shannon’s hand, laughing despite herself at the absurdity of it all. Over the roar of the engine, she heard Shannon yell, “I like to just pick a direction and call it down. It helps you not to feel sick if you can orient yourself, even arbitrarily.”

It was odd, hearing words like arbitrary coming from a seven-year old girl. The children Mary knew spoke mostly in curse words and a melange of different languages all competing with each other for syntax. She blinked, looking around for a direction. It made sense to decide that the floor of the ship was down, but some part of her knew that she had already oriented herself instinctually in relation to the hand clasped around hers, in relation to the girl at her side.

Shannon

///

She senses her first.

It’s a feeling Mary didn’t understand, for months and months after they kissed and the bond snapped into place. She described it to herself over and over as an indescribable warmth, or the first bite of food after starving, or the feeling right before you reach the finish line when you know you’re going to get there before anyone else.

‘Oh.’ She remembers sitting in her room with Shannon, elbows pressed together as they sat in the frame of the window looking out at the lights in the city where it poked above the bedrock. Mary sat there trying to describe what she felt when she touched Shannon, all the while watching a sketch take shape on the pad in Shannon’s lap, but it stopped when she floundered at the end of a sentence.

Shannon looked at her, and said ‘oh’, and then dropped her pencil onto the pad to take Mary’s hand. ‘I can describe it for you, if you want. It’s very simple, actually.’

‘I’ve been doing emotional long-division over it, so I hope not.’

A tight laugh, ‘It’s not really a, um…’

‘A skill issue?’

That was old slang, from the race track. A thread of their first argument about sand and corners and momentum.

‘No, it’s just…’ Shannon licked her lips, huffed out a sound that was not a laugh, not a sigh. Just an exhalation, maybe. ‘When I reach out for the bond,’ her hand tightened around Mary’s, ‘It, uh, it feels like coming home.’

That left her speechless. Many things did.

In the courtyard, with the impression of a barrier shimmering in the air like oil on water, Mary senses her first.

Sees her then, resolving into a smear of colour and light. Mary has to pick her out in pieces; her particular gait, sprinting full-tilt across the courtyard. The padawan braid behind her right ear, threaded with a ribbon of blue silk, a white band at the bottom because Shannon is studying healing.

She keeps bringing her notebook full of anatomical sketches into Mary’s room, showing her joints and tendons and using words like abduction and adduction, circumduction and plantarflexion.

Mary thinks she does it on purpose, because she thinks it makes her sound seductive.

It does.

She runs, trailing a succession of disapproving but unsurprised looks from Jedi in various meditation poses. Her braid is stuck to her neck with sweat and Mary knows immediately that she must have been ten levels down eating shrimp noodles, must have climbed up through the ducts and the elevator shafts to get here. Indeed, as the barrier wavers and collapses, as the feeling of home cuts through Mary’s concentration, she sees the streaks of black grease on Shannon’s hands as she hops over a decorative stream and straight through a bush until she has a straight shot at Mary.

Without deciding to, Mary stands, braces her backfoot for the moment Shannon crashes into her, hands tangling in her robes. “If you’re being chased by a fruit vendor again I’m not-”

But Shannon just pulls her behind one of the pillars, still out of breath. Her fingers leave stains on Mary’s robes.

“Did you-”

“Yeah the lift was taking too long to arrive but Mary, listen. I just had the worst thought in the world.”

“So you just had to share it with me.”

“Mary this is so, so serious.” And, despite the dab of sauce on her chin, despite her sweaty hair, longer now and pulled into a tail, she does look serious. Mary’s hand tightens on her shoulder, a wordless thing passing through the bond between them.

Shannon smiles, melting into Mary’s arms. She ducks her head, presses into Mary’s sternum, voice almost lost in the folds of her robes. “So I was down arguing with someone about the best broth for synth-noodles and you know it just hit me that we’re both shipping out soon. You have Cere and I have fucking knobbrains-”

“His name is Vincent.”

“-and then we’ll be ready for the trials in literally no time because you’re amazing and I’m stubborn.”

She pauses, suddenly. Mary rolls her eyes when she realises it’s for dramatic emphasis, and not so that Shannon can catch her breath.

“And then… we’ll be Jedi.”

“Shan, please tell me it isn’t just occurring to you now that we’re going to be Jedi.”

A finger pressed to her lips. One of the decorative fountains has a flaw in its plumbing - Mary can hear it, like she could always hear claws in the dirt when womp rats tried to bite her ankles back on Tatooine.

She listens to that, instead of the flutter of her heartbeat, as Shannon traces her bottom lip almost absently.

“No,” she admits. “I know we’re going to be Jedi, but did you ever think about, you know, what they call Jedi.”

“You mean Master.”

Shannon buries her face in Mary’s chest again, voice decidedly muffled now. “Mmff. Yeah. That.”

She waits, so Mary takes the bait, works it out. Just like long-division, always working back and back to follow the threads of Shannon’s thoughts. Mary imagines she’s untangling the wires of the repulsor engines in her pod, working to snap the energy field into place that latches the vehicle together and lets it fall apart gracefully when it doesn’t smash against a rock face.

It takes her almost a minute, during which Shannon keeps up a steady stream of pathetic noises.

Then, “Oh. Oh shit.”

“I’m going to erase myself from all legal records immediately.”

Mary looks down at her, at the nape of her neck still damp with sweat, the messy tangle of her tied-back hair. “Oh, come on. It won’t be that bad…. Master Masters.”

She darts a kiss onto Shannon’s scalp in the instant before her head whips up, pulling back to avoid Shannon’s head, to appreciate her consternated glare. Her laughter echoes through the courtyard, drawing eyes, but for once Mary doesn’t mind as she pulls Shannon into a hug.

She squirms, whispers harshly into Mary’s jaw, “You’re the worst girlfriend in at least nine parsecs.”

“Are you really upset?”

“Yes,” but she’s fiddling with Mary’s padawan braid. It’s simple, compared to Shannon’s with her bright silk thread, just a black band to mark her study in covert operations, in linguistics and in dampening her Force-signature. All the little techniques that keep Jedi spies alive in hostile space.

Mary kisses just under her ear, smirking when Shannon’s shivers against her. They’re still behind the pillar, but Shannon makes a small, wild noise and grabs Mary’s hand, pulling her into a small stand of tall shrubs and flowerbeds.

When they stop, she presses into Mary immediately, tongue slipping through her teeth. Mary kisses her back, feeling the Force spin around them as invisible threads of light.

Shannon breaks away with a breathy sound, taking both of Mary’s hands in hers and raising them up, leaning into them.

It’s an old game of theirs, locking hands, trying to push each other out of a ring of chalk sketched onto the ground. Now, it’s just habit.

“You can be the same as me,” Mary presses her thumbs into the soft centre of Shannon’s palms. “I don’t have a last name at all, so everyone will call me Master Mary, I suppose, which… also sounds stupid.”

“I promise to just call you Mary.”

They’re out of sight now, hidden among the tall shrubs and hushed by the noise of the water trickling through the grooves under their feet. Shannon doesn’t need to go up on her toes anymore to kiss her – she’s a whole inch taller, which she claims is ‘probably because of all the shrimp noodles and the shrimp chips and the-’

‘Wait, doesn’t ‘shrimpy’ mean small in Basic?’

‘Whatever.’

Mary feels the brush of her lips again, struck by their bond, that feeling of home, home, home. The kiss is long, lingering, Shannon’s hands slipping inside her robes, over her ribs. She knows where the bruises are, presses some and avoids others, swallowing the small sounds Mary makes.

It feels, for an instant, like they’re back on that ship making anchors of each other, like the floor is down but Shannon is the centre of it all.

When they pull away there’s a soft shimmer in the air all around them, a tight bubble that presses their bodies close. Shannon’s hands linger on Mary’s hips as she looks up, lips bruise-bright. She reaches out, and a cascade of colour erupts where her hand makes contact with something solid, shimmering and almost invisible.

“You did it,” she breathes, taking her hand back. Little globs of colourful light cling to her fingers for a moment before fading. “You made a shield.”

It’s stupid, repetitive, like things always falling toward the ground, but Mary reaches out and takes Shannon by the jaw. Kisses her because she knows too many languages to say the words that erupt in her mouth like bruises onto skin.

No, you’re my shield.

#wn star wars au #shannon x mary #warrior nun #ty for the prompt kei let's pretend it's been a short amount of time #casper writes #i will probably put this on ao3 somehow maybe perhaps #feeling very *screaming* lately about force-bonded jedi knights shannon & mary #oh and ty rayx for giving me this idea ykyk

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