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#'i want to see you successful and happy' okay why are you still charging me rent then

williammorgan45 · 19 days

Text

It was just after a few months his work here in Playtime Co. and with his charge in both Playcare and Home Sweet Home.

The change was soon there as he began his duty, both day and night. At day he would help the staff with things such as delivering delivering reports of the workers or helping the caretakers with organazing new small toys for the kids that would light up everytime he would appper at the orphanage.

And by night doing his patrol with his flashlight to make sure everything was okay, in order and nothing or someone suspicious was on the prowl.

...But that night was different from the rest.

It sstarted simple enough. He wait until all the workers where gone, the factory closed for the day and both the caretakers and the children where sleep to began his nightly patrol. He would first check all around Playcare, making sure that everything was in order and nothing was out of place.

Next he would check Home Sweet Home quietly as posible. He knew the kids where sleeping and didn't want to wake them up. So quietly as a mouse, he would check he halls and see if everything was normal.

It was his duty as the guard of Playcare and Home Sweet Home to help the kids have a some what happy life before getting adopted and feeling the love with being with a family that will care them.

...Just as to him... A long time ago...

He shocked his head. There no time for that. There's still stuff to do.

And with that, his patrol was smooth and without problems. Since he knows most the place, it was like autopilot and before he knows it, it's almost over.

He nodden in satifaction as his patrol was a success he began his way back to his room.

...Until his ear twitched at a faint sound.

He stopped on his track as he stood still and listen for the sound.

His ear twitched once again as he was trying to locate the origin of the sound. He began walking slowly and steady to the source of the noise.

Whatever it was, he needs to be careful. Anything on the dark is not safe.

He was getting closer to sound as he was getting near it, he could almost recognize the sound.

It sounded like... Static? But not from a TV. It was from something else.

Soon enough, he was around the corner of the sound. He put his back against the wall, hand on flashlight as he took a deep breath.

He quickly turned around the corner to face whoever or whatever was making that noise and saw...

...Nothing.

Just some some tables, chairs, and other stuff that probably was forgotten by the staff. But in the middle was the thing that was making the noise. A portable radio that was its the cause of the noise he heard.

He walked around the radio as he looked around his envarioment. He spents a good few minutes and it was just him and the sound of the radio on empty noise.

He took his attention back to the radio. Why was it here? Who left it on? Was it some kid playing a prank on him?

He couldn't think of anyone who would a radio on the middle of Playcare. Especially near Home Sweet Home. He should report this on the morning.

But first, he walked to the radio and pressed the OFF button to silance the noise it was making. Once he did that, everything was silent once again.

He stood again and looked around him one last time to see or hear the person or thing that put this here.

But he was met with the silance of the night.

After standing, looking and hearing for anything and found nothing, he began his walk to back to his room.

...That was until he radio came back to life that made him stop on his tracks.

Come along, down with me

You're not alone, you will see

The children, they have each other

And each other is all they need

He turned around slowly when the radio was playing the music as he was listening. But how? He turned it OFF didn't he? So why was it playing that music? With some cautious steps, he knelled down to turn it OFF again but stopped when he heard the lyrics.

In the hour of joy in this Paradise

I thought about all that could have been

If we had never done the things we did

If we had realized all our sins

He took his paw away from the OFF button as he was listening to the lyrics. The things they did? Sins? Is the song about regretting what they did in their so call Paradise?

Come along, down with me (come along, come-a come along)

You're not alone, you will see (come along, come-a come along)

We children, we have each other

And each other is all we need

The...children? Is it talking about...? No. It can't be. It must be a coincidance...Right? Just as he trying to make sense of it, the voices of children in the lyrics sounded.

In the hour of joy, in the hour of joy

Hour... of joy? Why does it sound so...important to them? A celebration? He was trying to make sense of it but he could help to just...listen. He sat on the ground as he put his flashlight and bag away and just...listen to it.

Artificial facade from a fraud of a God

All due to the path that we trod

We just wanted to heal, but now our nightmares are real

And now we'll never wake up, for we've torn apart

We want freedom, freedom

Freedom, freedom, freedom (we all fall down)

We'll sleep well now

Dream, dreams knocked out

New blooms when playtime sprouts

He was trying to understand he meaning of the lyrics but his mind was in another place. He wanted to make sense of their wording. But his brain was saying 'Don't think. Just listen'. It was like he was on a trance and he couldn't break from it.

Come along, go to sleep (come along, come-a come along)

And leave here without a trace (come along, come-a come along)

Though life in the shadows isn't much

It's better than living in a cage

Can you see us?

Can you hear us?

Artificial facade from a fraud of a God

All due to the path that we trod

We just wanted to heal, but now our nightmares are real

And now we'll never wake up, for we've torn apart

The fraud of a God... Nightmares being real... Never waking up... And without him noticing, he subcousciously sang the part of the chorus.

"We want freedom, freedom

Freedom, freedom, freedom" (we all fall down)

We'll sleep well now

Dream, dreams knocked out

New blooms when playtime sprouts

Artificial facade from a fraud of a God (la-la-la-la, la-la)

All due to the path that we trod

We just wanted to heal,

But now our nightmares are real (la-la-la-la, la-la)

And now we'll never wake up, we've torn apart

Artificial facade (la-la-la-la, la-la) (La-la-la-la, la-la).

And with that, the final instrumentals and the song faded away. Signifying the end of the song. He sat on the on the ground a few minutes before blinking once, then twice and then multiple time as he shooked his head and stood up breathing ragged as a drop of cold sweat was trailing down his forehead.

What just happen? Why he couldn't stop listening to it? So many questions where running on his head.

He once again looked at the radio once more as its cassette tape holder opened to reveal the cassette tape that was playing. He carefully grabbed the tape. It was white but the letters written on in where in red.

H O J

He knew what those letters meant. Hour Of Joy. The beggining of the song was sang about it. But it only bringed more question and leas anwsers.

But his knows one thing. This...was a message. Of something that will happen. But when? He doesn't know. But if this 'Hour Of Joy' was going to be a danger to the kids... Then he better prepare for it.

Gripping the tape on his paw, he grabbed his flashlight and messager bag, putting the tape on inside it as he made his way back finally to his room to undertand what just happen.

Little did he knew, a certain 'God' was watching him trough the venta before sliding in into the darkness...

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

And cut! Wow, that took a long while. I wanted to make the introduccition with him and the other Smiling Critters but this part just came to me and i was listening to Sleep Well and said 'fuck it we ball' and made this instead. Anyway this is just another installment of my Realizin AU. Still havent found a Name for our wolf guard but ill think of something... Eventually.

The Realizin' AU is made by the awesome @realizinau and if your seeing this, hope you like this lore im cooking. I'm not Sanji but i hope i could deliver. Anyway, toddles and see you all very soon! I think...

#oc #oc art #realizin' au

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viatagrinner · 1 year

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Clavis Lelouch. More Love with the Beast. Epilogue + Letter

Epilogue

When MC has a problem, Clavis wants her to consult with him first, and he wants her to put him, above official duties.

In other words, it was also a necessary punishment for the future.

With the words, "I'm in charge now," he hugged his fiancée.

For forgetting to rely on her fiancé, the girl faces punishment.

Clavis: I won't let you go until you get me in a good mood.

MC aughs.

MC: It's easy to please Clavis, isn't it?

Clavis: Oops, I didn't expect you to think of me as such an easy-going man...

The girl offered her lap as a pillow.

Clavis: ....

He's easy to figure out.

This saddened the king a little, but then an mean thought popped into his head.

(I won't let it end with just a lap pillow, though...?)

It had been a long time since Clavis had used the girl's lap as a pillow, it seemed to him.

He turned his face to her stomach...

MC: Clavis, I don't like this.

Clavis: Why not? You're the one who offered your knees as a pillow.

As he rested his face on her belly, MC gasped.

MC: Knees lower!

Clavis: Well, I like it here.

(If you thought I'd be okay with a regular lap pillow, you'll have to change that opinion.)

(....But that in itself is weak punishment, isn't it?)

Clavis took off his gloves and touched the girl's leg. His hand moved higher up her leg. MC tried to stand up.

Holding back a laugh, he grabbed her by the waist and stopped her.

Clavis: Isn't it easy to catch my mood?

MC, guessing that his mood has improved, tries to chase him to his room to sleep it off.

Clavis: Ahaha, is something wrong?

The heroine, trying to get him to sleep, desperately strokes his hair.

Clavis laughs to himself, thinking that this tactic wouldn't work on him. However, it did work.

━━━━━━━༻❀✿❀༺━━━━━━━

Middle of the night.

The moon is high in the sky.

Clavis is the kind of person who gets up early and can't stay awake at night, so the heroine's touch completely relaxed him.

(I'm sorry for what I did.)

He thought so because his fiancée had fallen asleep in a sitting position.

But here the girl's head fell into Clavis' lap.

(Oh, the roles have reversed...)

Now Clavis is stroking her hair.

She, too, is tired.

(Starting something new is fun, but it takes physical strength.)

The sheer number of papers stacked in her room is a testament to her efforts.

Clavis just wants to keep stroking her hair.

MC, meanwhile, turns her face to his stomach.

He felt her warm breath through his clothes, and his heart jumped.

(No, wait, this is harder than I thought!?)

The girl's arms wrapped around his waist.

Clavis: ........Pardon me.

Turns out she was pretending to be asleep.

MC: I didn't think the prank would be such a success.

He didn't think the day would come when MC would be pranking him.

Her happy laughter and defenselessness drove Clavis' heart to the limit.

Clavis: I see.... Now it's my turn.

MC: !? It's late... Huh...

Clavis interrupted her words with a kiss. His tongue entwined with hers. MC grunted more than she really minded.

While he kissed the heroine, he unbuttoned the buttons on her blouse and began removing her clothes.

She blushes and calls him a pervert.

Tucking up her skirt and slipping his hand inside, Clavis felt the wetness between her legs.

A simple kiss gives her such a reaction.

MC blushes and covers her face with her hands.

But this turns Clavis on even more.

MC: I take back what I said about how easy it is to put Clavis in a good mood......

He calls himself "cruel."

━━━━━━━༻❀✿❀༺━━━━━━━

Morning.

Perhaps because the girl was exhausted, she was still sound asleep, Clavis when he woke up next to her.

She's talking about something in her sleep.

Clavis: What are you dreaming about?

On the bed, where traces of last night's affair remained, he leaned on his elbows and looked into MC's face.

She was smiling defenselessly.

(Nothing could surpass the happiness of this moment.)

He remembered how his fiancée had said she wanted to turn this kingdom into a land of joy/pleasure and books.

(...I'm sure the "pleasure" you speak of refers to this moment...)

It would be nice to have a country where everyone who lives in the country can feel it. He wants to be a king who can provide the people with joy.

(Because funny stories are my specialty. Leave it to me, MC.)

He doesn't know how many years will pass, but the land of fun and books will surely appear.

And for that, we have to get up and go about our official business.

After kissing the sleeping MC, Clavis left the bedroom...

Clavis: Well, I have to do an extremely bad thing today, too, don't I?

━━━━━━━༻❀✿❀༺━━━━━━━

Letter

What to Do if your Beloved Fiancé is in trouble/Your actions in case your beloved fiancé is upset for some reason.

Before we became lovers, I think I used to share some secret information about Mr. Clavis with you, but I haven't done so recently.

I'm a man of secrets... so I'll keep you informed regularly after we become engaged.

This time your actions are in case your beloved fiancé is upset for some reason.

It sounds like you've already mastered the "good lap pillow" method, but there are a lot of other things besides that, right?

For example, just the fact that you say "I love you" to me makes me feel good. Even if it's in a whisper, it's cute, so I'll take it as a good thing.

I also like the way you jump into my arms with your face bright red when I open my arms. Lately, you've been jumping into my arms more often, haven't you?

I'm glad.

All I have to do is watch you happily going about your business, and I forget about all the unpleasantness.

Oh, that's a new point, isn't it?

If you're cute and lovely and look like you're having fun, I'm usually in a good mood.

.....Don't say it's easy, okay? Because it's love.

Clavis Lelouch

━━━━━━━༻❀✿❀༺━━━━━━━

Clavis' Masterlist

#ikemen prince #ikepri #ikemen ouji #ikepri translation #clavis lelouch events #masterlist clavis lelouch #clavis spoilers #clavis #ikemen clavis #ikepri clavis #ikemen prince clavis #clavis lelouch

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blackbloodredpepper · 5 months

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Something that I’ve noticed in bobs burgers is that they seem to be hinting at the passage of time starting around season 10-11 ish??

Like hear me out:

It really feels like they’re hinting that almost a year has passed since the first season

in s11 when they make the trip to the airport to see gloria and al, Bob is all excited about it because that means they don’t have to go on their trip to florida “this year” and we know that they visit Linda’s parents yearly

And we have only had one episode in which they actually visit them lol

Not to mention the fact that Tina has now had two “bday”episodes (s12 wasn’t rlly birthday related, but it takes place in the weeks before her bday and it is a minor side plot) which heavily indicates that they are trying to imply the passage of time in which all of these episodes kind of take place in the same year

Obvi Christmas and thanksgiving eps are repeated a ton but you (as in the collective you) have to keep in mind the fact that this is a tv show and tv shows typically have to follow certain rules and such esp if disney/fox is in charge

And the movie takes place in the summer time (which comes after Tina’s bday, as i just learned)

+ the summer also happens in the first season after Tina’s birthday yet again

So after saying all this, there’s just one thing that I DO NOT understand at alllllllll which is the fact that they didn’t make s13 or 14 have Tina starting high school or the kids going into dif grades and such

Like fr people THINK of the possibilities

There would be soo many emotions with gene and louise navigating going to a different school than tina and tina just starting high school in general

UGH and all of the high school experiences she could have

And tbh we could keep her as a 9th grader forever and I would be just as happy

Okay obviously I do actually understand WHY they chose not to do that, bcs sometimes when they age characters up in shows like that it bombs

But think of All Grown Up (rugrats reboot/aged up) which I know is kinda niche(?) and an entirely different series from rugrats but still I always just loved the idea of aging characters up so that we kind of grow with them lol

(btw am i the only one that can kind of see a tina-tackling-high school spin off show being semi-successful?)

and I also feel the need to mention Boy Meets World which effectively aged their characters up AND kept it all in one show lmao

So we know it’s possible, it’s just dangerous 💀

Anyway, at end of my very long winded rant, I just want to say that the creators are just (subtly) shoving it right in our faces and we just are not acknowledging the fact that only a year as gone by in the canonical bobs burgers universe and that is just totally wild to me

thank u for your time 🤟

#bob’s burgers #bob belcher #fangirl #tina belcher #louise belcher #bob’s burgers headcannon #bobs burgers #gene belcher #linda belcher #headcannons #knowledge #i love bob so much

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wrestlingwiththoughts · 5 months

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"Hangman" Adam Page vs. Swerve Strickland, AEW Full Gear 2023, November 18, 2023

In middle school and high school, a girl and I called each other "soulmates." Whether each of us knew what that charged term means or even if each of us used the term the same ways is unknown and probably irrelevant. I can only say that she meant a lot to me then, and it crushed me when our relationship, whatever it was to each of us, ended. Nonetheless, I like to pick at scars, so I would search for her on social media and on search engines when the sleep that's owed to me is dodging me or if I'm caught in a moment without other distractions. Don't ask why I searched; I don't have a satisfactory answer to give myself, much less you.

Through the years, there was nothing until there was something. Having found her, having seen that she was fine and successful and alive and smiling, at least in that professional headshot, I was able to close the door to that room in my mental holding facility.

At AEW Grand Slam 2023, as I knew my relationship with AEW had ended. The fans around me laughed when Toni Storm, in the early life of her current Timeless Toni persona, attacked Saraya during their match with her shoe. I knew that the company would just make this ridiculous character even sillier. The teenage fans a row away cheered for an obnoxious, saccharine, and unpleasant Maxwell Jacob Friedman over Samoa Joe, a serious competitor who, in AEW at least, has told professional wrestling stories. The company presented something that other fans enjoyed but that I detested. I mourned the end of this relationship and moved on to other companies; after all, I had Dragongate and All Japan Pro Wrestling matches to watch.

Nonetheless, AEW is a hard presence to avoid, and so I couldn't help but hear the praise for the Texas deathmatch between "Hangman" Adam Page and Swerve Strickland at Full Gear 2023. It supposedly exemplified the old AEW spirit, the idea that the company could offer something that no one else could: intense professional wrestling that felt dangerous, was presented with high production values, and was easily accessible to American consumers. I had to pick at this scar and watch.

Page and Strickland's match lived up to the hype and delivered violence and spectacle that felt fresh and energizing. I slapped my couch when Page stapled his child's drawings on Strickland's face. I hollered when Page laid below Strickland and drank Strickland's falling blood. I jumped up in excitement when Strickland hanged Page until Page was unresponsive to the referee's ten count. It was, in a word, awesome.

But then I remembered that we were supposed to believe that Strickland invaded Page's house and stood over Page's sleeping child. And I read in the show results that Maxwell Jacob Friedman overcame a fake leg injury, drove the ambulance into the venue, and beat Jay White in the main event. And the blood that was quickened by Page and Strickland's hard work slowed and I remembered why I felt like AEW and I had very different visions of what we wanted and where we were going. And I turned off my tablet and walked away.

I might still listen when I hear about AEW now and going forward; it's hard to not at least hear what's happening in the second biggest wrestling company in the world. I might even be happy to see that it's doing well. However, I've closed the door to AEW's room in my mental holding facility, and like my soulmate, I'm okay knowing that it's okay and hopefully thriving on its without feeling like I need to seek it out and try to reconnect like we once did.

#pro wrestling #wrestling #aew #aew full gear #hangman adam page #swerve strickland

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pinkaddiofficial · 1 year

Note

https://youtu.be/WVkD4lgXTEU

* They stop, staring out at the skyline with apprehension. What would they find there?

* The phone begins to play the song, and Cammercial pulls out their phone, listening to the song filter through its speakers.

"As the souls of the dead fill the space of my mind, I'll search without sleeping, 'till peace I can find."

* They inhale, gripping tightly to the handles of their crutches. They remember...

"I fear not the weather, I fear not the sea. I remember the fallen; do they think of me? When their bones in the ocean forever will be?"

["My Prince, you must wait! My poor legs cannot handle such a run!"

"C'mon, Pinkguy, you'll miss all the cookies!"

"Ho ho, I am coming! I wouldn't want to miss out on any cookies, after all. Just remember that I must take it slow, precious charge!"

"Weeell... I'm sure that there will be a few leftover!"

"Attaboy."]

"As the souls of the dead fill the space of my ears - their laughter like children, their beckoning cheers - my heart longs to join them, sing songs of the sea."

["Oh, my Duke! Would you like to try some own-flavoured tea? It is my specialty!"

"Own-flavoured tea? How dost thou maketh such a thing?"

"Come, sit down! I'll show you."

"Now, dear customer, I will need you to stay still for this part of the process. In order to make own-flavoured tea..."]

"I remember the fallen, do they think of me, when their bones in the ocean forever will be?"

* They open their eyes.

"Though their eyes speak of death filled with struggle and strife..."

["You're going to sacrifice yourself to open the Fountain?!"

"Seam, I-"

"You cannot!"

"It is the only way we can be free!"]

"Their smiles below say I don't owe them my life."

["Is it truly freedom if it comes at such a cost?"

"I..."

"...You are doing it for him, aren't you?"

"I am doing this for all of us."]

"As the souls of the dead fill the space of my eyes, and my boat listed over and tried to capsize, I'm this far from drowning, this far from the sea."

["...And this is what you choose?"

"It is."

"..."

"...Then I will support you. Please, come and sit. You will need rest before the final battle."]

"I remember the living, do they think of me?"

* They inhale, breath catching on a sob.

"When my bones in the ocean forever will be..."

["Hey, Cammy, look who Viv's got on the couch." "Another Viviki?" "No- an Addison!"]

["Your name is Spamton? Like, the whole thing, not just your designator?" "YES!" "Wow, he's loud." "Heh, welcome to the adgroup, Spamton. We aren't the most successful, but we'd be happy to have you if you'd have us."]

["Come on, surely the Lightners will notice you eventually. You've got the skills, they just need to, well, see you! And in the meantime, we'll stick with you, okay?"]

["Spammy, are you sure that that guy on the phone is... well, trustworthy?" "DON'T WORRY, CAM! HE'S DONE NOTHING BUT HELP ME; WHY WOULD THAT CHANGE?" "...but this is the first time you've spoken to me- to any of us- in a month..."]

"As the souls of the dead live for'er in my mind..."

["Lightners... all of you..."

"For the sake of Darknerkind; for my family, my friends..."

"I won't allow you to pass!"]

"As I live all the years that they left me behind..."

["There was just... garbage noise? No, you don't mean... did the voice on the phone...?"

"Vivi, did he-?!"

"Where is he, Vivi?! Where is my Spammy!?"]

"I'll stand on the shore, but still gaze at the sea..."

[* Tastes like pomegranate, with a faint echo of sweetened coffee. A hint of the familiar in the unexplored. Heals 60 HP.]

"I remember the fallen, and they think of me, for our souls in the ocean together will be."

[* Tastes like pomegranate. The lingering hint of coffee has begun to disappear, making way for something new. Heals 100 HP.]

"I remember the fallen, and they think of me...!"

["You can talk to me if you wish, Lightner."]

["Yeah! Susie and the other Lightners and I had a lot of fun!"]

["I was forced. I never wanted this to happen."]

"For our souls in the ocean together will be."

* ...

Thank you, Player.

I think... I think I know now what I must do.

* They lift their head and forge onwards towards the city.

I need to find a way for the Light and the Dark to coexist.

#ic #addilore dump #*throws this beast of a songfjc post on the groind after having brutslly wrestled it to death*#IT IS DONE. THE NEXT ARC BEGINS !!!!!#addison music

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windvexer · 2 years

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Raising Power: An Intro Into Powering Your Spells

This post is part of a series of animistic, spirit-oriented spellcasting for beginners. Go to the masterpost to see them all.

I'm having a fun time thinking of a new way to say the same disclaimer for what is now my 13th post in this series: I'm attempting to present one way of working with practical magic. This way is not universal. It's not even particularly helpful for many. If you are already pleased with your magical success, I am not trying to invalidate you by telling you to start doing stuff in a much more formal, ritualistic way. Rather, this series is for people who aren't happy with where they're at and want to try new stuff to troubleshoot their success.

I'm worried that in most of this post my tone is a little more "this is definitely the right way to do things" than my other posts in this series. While I always strive to state and restate that this is really only one way of doing magic, sadly I can't afford to hire a copy editor. Just please be aware that for the whole post I really only am talking about the style of spellcraft described in the overall series.

This post is I think the longest out of any of them, almost all of it is under the cut :)

Yes. Let's get to it.

Stuff needs power to go.

Car needs gas. Lightbulb needs electricity. Spell needs energy.

If you have a car without gas, you'll still have a car. The lights might even turn on and the engine will try to turn over - it's just not going to go, you know?

I have a lightbulb in the lamp. I still have it; it's just not doing anything. If I turn on the flow of electricity, it's going to do it's job - until I turn the flow off again (or it burns out; it happens).

I very commonly see spells that explain how to set up a magical machine, but fail to explain how to actually power it.

"Just leave it in the sun!"

If the sun automatically charged everything in its light with magical power, why aren't my lawn ornaments incredibly powerful sources of magical energy?

"Leave it in the sun with intent!"

Yes, now we're getting somewhere! But this is charging or recharging outside of actual spellwork - taking something out into the sunlight once you're done with a spell really isn't the same thing as raising and directing energy during the course of a spell.

And, okay, once again, this is just my belief system that I believe in because it's how stuff works for me:

But if no energy was raised during the actual creation of the enchantment, how do you know that the spell actually exists? I mean an enchantment has to exist before you can charge it, according to my linear understanding of time.

"All you need to do is speak or think your intent, and your enchantment is complete."

Well, that's true. I have been practicing magic for a little while now, and I know how to access my personal power, and raise and direct it only through my words. This is a fair bit more tiring for me because it directly drains my personal energy into the spell's battery, so to speak.

But in order for this process to be really successful, I still have to access and raise my personal power.

Consider the differences in these two approaches:

I hold a rose quartz ring and say, "this ring glamours me to look beautiful," with the same state of mind as ordering from Taco Bell. I say it with a ton of intent - I mean I really mean what I say - and that's that.

I hold a rose quartz ring and drop into my magical state of mind that connects me to my personal power. I scoop a ladle of golden energy out of myself, and pour it through the crystalized intent of my words - "this ring glamours me to look beautiful." My words are a hollow structure with specific form, and as I speak them I pour the nectar of my power into them, filling them up as molten metal fills a mold. My intent had structure, but now it is set, permanently - my power has made my words real; my words have given structure to my power. And that's that.

When I do the former, there is still some enchantment. I truly believe that words spoken by humans have incredible power. Truly, just by speaking "this ring glamours me," I have already done an act of magic. It is not psychological - as my word, so shall it be. Not, as my power.

Yet I find that when words are spoken without being filled with power, they are like molds made of sand. Yes, there is structure there for now - yes, you can fill it with power. But if you are not careful, and do not quickly empower the enchantment, the sand will crumble under the pressure of astral winds, and little of the original will be left.

But I kind of feel that raising a lot of power during the initial casting is way more important than raising little/no power and just charging it later.

Let's switch metaphors away from molten metal and sandy molds.

Let’s imagine something a lot more mystical.

Suppose your intent is pencil drawing. During your act of magic, you are literally raising your two-dimensional drawing off the paper and turning it into a living, animated, three-dimensional form.

Once the spell is done, the three-dimensional form is set. Yes, you can go back to your spellspace and modify it later, but unless you do that, the spell is what it is.

The amount of power you raise during the initial casting of the spell is how much of your two-dimensional drawing actually gets converted into its animated, 3D form.

Let's say I cast a spell for *spins wheel*... opening doorways to learn more about witchcraft. My pencil drawing might be books about witchcraft and a teacher willing to mentor me.

If I raise only a little power, maybe only the books pop out of the page and become real. They're small and don't take much energy to raise up, after all. If that's all the power I put in the spell, that's what the spell is going to do for me - it's going to bring interesting and helpful books to my attention. When I recharge the spell later on, it's still just an "interesting books, come hither!" spell. Recharging is not the same as going back to reforge and expand the capacity of the spell.

If I raise a little more power, maybe the head and shoulders of the teacher pop up along with the books. Now, I will not only get lots of books coming my way, but also knowledgeable people start talking to me to give me tips. If I recharge the spell, it's still going to be a "interesting books and helpful advice" spell. Because what the spell is now, and what it does when I recharge it, was set during the initial casting.

What about the initial intent? The initial intent doesn't matter once you actually create something and set it loose.

The initial intent will influence the spell during it's creation.

But if you lacked the resources, energy, etc., to call that intent fully into being during the initial casting, then it's like drawing up the plans for a Ferrari, only having the energy to build the frame, and asking why the battery isn't powering the interior lights. There are no interior lights. There is no interior. You never built it. Putting gas into an engine on a frame can't power features that you never had the energy to build.

I hear you barking big dog - What about people who are really bad at raising energy and have difficulty casting huge whopper spells?

This is why I'm a huge advocate of limited, focused spell intents.

Guess who can't pull of amazing feats of expansive power and build a Ferrari all in one setting?

Remember our spell intent to "open doorways to learn more about witchcraft"? And how some of that energy went to pulling in books, and only after that, the rest of the energy started going towards a teacher?

Well as it turned out, what I really wanted was the teacher. I just had a spell focus too general, and some of that energy went to other places.

If I recast the spell to only say, "connect me with a teacher who will help me improve my craft," the books aren't sucking up my energy any more. And yeah, maybe I can't manifest the whole teacher in a perfect way, but I can at least this manifestation is going way further. At the very least I can pull him out of the page down to like, his knees.

You can also do stuff like, cast one spell to banish blockages, so that your "addition" spell cast next week (when you've had a chance to recharge a bit) has way less resistance, so that energy goes even further.

Or, you can basically keep spells "under construction" (ideally on altar, but we all do what we gotta do) for an extended period of time, returning to work on it and slowly empower it for a period of time before sealing it ("so mote it be," etc.).

And, what the whole point of this whole dang series is about - you can just pay spirits and powers to donate their energy to fill up your spell and really make it pop off the page.

How do you access your personal energy, or tap into external power sources?

Okay! Yes! THIS IS WHAT ALL THOSE SUPER IRRITATING PSYCHIC/MAGICAL EXERCISES ARE FOR!

Have you ever seen someone say, "how can I get started with spells?" and someone else is like "why not try meditating and making energy balls?"

And you were like "how? How does that help? What does that have to do with anything??"

As it turns out, they really help a lot! There's just usually a huge disconnect between explaining techniques that teach accessing and manipulating power, and spellcasting.

So let's plug 'em in together :)

Now y'all might be a bit frustrated because this post is not the place to step out detailed descriptions of various exercises. I'm just going to put some general categories here to provide search terms and such.

Breathing, meditation, visualizing, and altered states of consciousness

Accessing your personal power is something you're going to have to figure out for yourself. Generally, most people find success through breathing techniques, meditative exercises, or any method which provides an altered state of consciousness (ASC).

Entering into an ASC on its own is not likely to automatically connect you with your personal power.

Rather, it can help give you the space to explore yourself, outside of everyday concerns, so you can find the power within.

Visualization is therefore often used to guide yourself through altered states until you find what you're looking for.

Examples include using breathing techniques to reach ASC, then using visualization to develop a connection to your inner power. For example, if I continuously use a visualization that my inner power is located at a very specific lake in my mindscape, that lake will eventually legitimately become connected to my inner source of power.

You could also pathwork to your source of inner power, or use ASC to speak to guiding spirits who explain to you how to access it.

You can experiment with energy body techniques to see if your personal energy is primarily located at a certain point (many people store their energy in their spines, hearts, or solar plexus, for example).

You can also get yourself very worked up into a certain emotional state and drain out that emotional energy to power a spell (useful if you want to be emotionally drained).

I found my inner source of power by fucking around until I figured it out. One day I was trying to send messages out to spirits, but I could intuitively tell they didn't work. Then I figured out if I visualized my inner voice as a certain color, it suddenly... just started working. That was the first building block. Later on, I "spoke" words not from my throat, but from a different place within. That worked even better. Just by a process of experimentation, I discovered how to speak with power, and that led me back to my source of power.

Although practice to reach ASC and/or discovering how to tap your inner power may be frustrating at first, and be time-consuming each time you do it, that practice stacks up. I can slide in and out of my magical awareness now very quickly, not because I am a talented natural witch (HAH), but because I've spend such a long time practicing that it's become easy for me.

Straight up energy work exercises

Practice taking energy from one thing and using it to power another thing, like how this post describes.

Practice energy exercises where you root into the ground and draw power up into yourself.

Practice energy exercises where you call your excess energy back from wherever you left it and into your body.

Practice those elemental energy balls!

Now I want to make a wee note here. I don't practice "energy work" when I cast spells. When I cast a spell I do it Ye Olde Wytche style, with candles and herbs and chanting and stuff. I do not sit down and specifically visualize and direct balls or tendrils of energy myself as one does with energy work techniques. However, because I have a background in energy work, I know how it feels when energy is moving. I can feel the difference between when I'm working with energy, or working with nothing. Because I've sat down and made energy tethers between lots of things, I know what it feels like when an object is properly tied to an energy source that powers it.

You don't need to specifically do energy work to cast spells. But if you are struggling to understand what it feels like to raise, manipulate, and program energy, then energy workers have you covered! They have like a million exercises that's just practice, practice, practice of working with energy.

Just ask. That's what this whole series is about.

Here's a fucked up lil trick that's basically cheating, it's so goddamn easy. It's so wild. You don't have to feel energies or enter ASC or tap into your personal power or any of that shit. It's the best. It goes like this:

*Gather some kitchen basil in a little dish* *Gentle incense cleansing going on* *Wash face and hands, prepare to meet important, special guest.* *Hold basil dish.*

"Basil, hi. My name is Fool Chicken. I've been reading about you and I've been told you're a really powerful, special plant with a lot of uses. I'm actually quite fucked in the finance department lately, if you know what I mean. There's no way I can pay all my bills this month and I need, need, need my phone for work. I'm asking you to please help me out and donate your energy to this money candle I'm making. I know such a spell would be trivial for you to accomplish; I've heard you can make mountains move if you choose to do so. I'm therefore asking you now to apply your great powers to my purpose, that my bills are taken care of this month, or at the very least my phone. As upfront payment to you, I'm dedicating this incense to you, and this glass of water. And once this spell has become manifest I will bring you whatever offering I am able to afford. I trust that in your hands my finances are safe. Thank you."

*Sprinkles basil in a little circle around cleansed, consecrated candle* *Light candle*

All that being said, talking to spirits like this now automatically sends me to ASC. But your mileage will vary ^-^

Like for example, maybe Basil isn't your BFF right now and doesn't want to hear your life story; maybe he's not going to be keen to sort out your needs and he's only going to help if you give him a clear, direct statement of intent: "Basil, I request your power unto this intent: My bills are taken care of this month. I thank you for undertaking this operation for me." *Lights candle* "Basil, as thanks for assisting me in this spell, I have these offerings for you:..."

Or maybe, you've not got the strongest spirit voice yet, and you need a couple extra little steps like casting a circle, or opening the roads, to help you. Or maybe your spells are only really thriving when you call on Hekate ahead of time, or pray to your ancestors first.

There's a lot of troubleshooting that sometimes needs to go down. But actually stopping to either personally raise power, or invoke spiritual powers, is going to go a long, long, long ways towards powering your spells.

Powering them to such an extent that you make yourself scared about the power of witchcraft ^-^

#craft and cast practical magic #raising power #spellcrafting #spell casting #spell theory #magic theory #witchblr #witchcraft #witchcraft 101 #witch tips #book of shadows #grimoire #witches of tumblr

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fedzkun · 3 years

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Villain Hunt Arc Meta: All For One’s Horrific Guide to Methodically Breaking Down Your Local OFA Holder

Ft. Turning the ‘Overpoweredness’ of OFA into a Setback, and AFO’s Successful Manipulations Of Midoriya Izuku

In which I also give AFO too much credit for all the pain he’s probably caused, and theorize that his plans to break Izuku actually started getting enacted even before he’d escaped Tartarus.

(A.k.a. me loving the angst because this is really good angst writing, but also hating it because the manga doesn’t come with a Angst with A Happy Ending tag unless you count Izuku’s ‘this is the story of how I became the greatest hero’ which isn’t really a guarantee of happiness )

So. What an arc! In the span of ten chapters (starting from the end of the War arc) Hori delivered a full-on Villain-looking, Vigilante Midoriya Izuku. Congratulations, Horikoshi, for finally introducing Akatani Mikumo!

The fast pacing and lack of breather panels are so fitting for this arc truly. AFO never gave them a moment’s rest. Yes, from henceforth as he’d promised... It’s always going to be his turn.

Izuku is making amazing progress with unlocking the full power of One For All. In his words, his abilities might as well already be on par with what a healthier All Might could do, and with no recoil to boot. Plus, there’s only one last quirk to unlock. For villain fights, I don’t think we need to worry about him losing, or him breaking anymore bones at this time.

Which, some might argue, makes Izuku too ‘OP.’

To start with, I want to talk first about the ‘overpoweredness’ of the One For All quirk. It’s a wonderful quirk truly, having inspired and amazed so many because of its sheer power. Used well, it could grant instant victories and restore the people’s wavering faith to the heroes. Because with a quirk like that on your side, everything’s going to be alright, right? There’s always gonna be that bit of hope that something is still strong enough to stand against the looming evil...right?

Yeah. That’s what the people who’d lived under All Might’s Era of Peace thought so too. History repeats.

OFA’s ‘OP-ness’ is both a great blessing and a great burden.

Here are some points on how the narrative has made OFA's 'overpoweredness' a setback:

1. All For One—that bastard—exploits the urge that comes with OFA. Just as ‘AFO the quirk’s’ goal is to steal OFA, OFA’s job is to defeat AFO, and Izuku is sacrificing himself to its cause.

Here’s another thing I want to point out: The conclusion that the heroes drew about AFO planning to capture Midoriya Izuku alive? In rereading, I’m starting to believe it’s nothing but a mere assumption of his plans. Aside from the deal made with Lady Nagant—of which I think AFO didn’t take seriously anyway and set her up for failure— (and while we as readers are already aware of his true intentions to wear Izuku down) it’s weird that nowhere had AFO directly mentioned to Izuku that he’s going to kidnap him and take his quirk from him.

2. OFA made Izuku so brilliant (e.g. Pros and former Pros alike going “This kid...”) that they really can't help but place all their hopes on him. Sighs. In an ideal world, this would be a dream come true of Izuku getting his due credit for all his heroic achievements Pro heroes have started to do to Izuku what they’ve done all their lives to All Might--which is to put him on the pedestal, while they fall back to cover him like guards/safety net. Hence, falling back to the One Pillar Model mindset.

3. OFA makes Izuku untouchable, not only to the villains, but also to his allies. Prime material to reinforce isolation. And if Izuku doesn't want to be caught, he won't make it easy for either side.

4. OFA IS SUS AF, OKAY? What are the Holders doing?! While gaining access to them makes it easier and convenient to have personal trainers in handling OFA, the vestiges prove to add a lot to Izuku’s mental load. If they’d allowed Izuku to come to the point of being caked with blood and filth, they’re not doing very well at guiding him. Realize that most of their arc interactions with Izuku is Quirk Talk. They, of all people, should know how AFO’s machinations work! Hey First, for the love of god, warn Izuku! He’s showing so many signs of being manipulated that you should be picking up on. please /sobs ;;

Tbf, like, I’m pretty sure that the Holders haven’t been as mentally okay either, which would feed into Izuku’s current mindset.

Now that the setbacks have been listed, let’s dive in to AFO’s plans to toy with Midoriya Izuku.

PHASE 1: Pre-Tartarus Breakout

Speaking of OFA being sus, there’s something that has been niggling at the back of my mind.

All For One basically tells Izuku: “You were my main interest that entire time I was in prison”. So, to pass the time in Tartarus (since he can’t use any(?) of his quirks), AFO has been doing nothing but apparently daydreaming and designing a personal hell for the Ninth Holder during that entire period. HOWEVER, it also made me wonder…

…Even before he’d broken out, had AFO made any moves at all in enacting his plans to break Izuku?

Yeah?

And here’s the kicker: he says that before Blackwhip bursted out.

AFO is a master manipulator. Assuming that Izuku doesn’t have any latent AFO quirk (for whatever reason *coughs* maybe dfo if you're a believer) or that Quirk Singularity has anything to do with it, what is the trigger to Izuku suddenly having access to Blackwhip?

I’d argue that it is All For One himself.

Why? What’s his goal? If you notice during the Joint Training arc, Izuku is feeling pretty confident about his progress. He’s rather happy and feeling blessed, and he is making leaps and bounds with base power OFA.

AFO can’t have that. He can’t allow the Ninth Holder to become too emotionally stable, or else he’d have a stronger will. So by somehow activating Blackwhip, AFO makes Izuku feel like he hasn’t made any progress with his quirk at all. During the evaluations, Izuku mentions that he still needs a lot to work on, and while not all of it is visible, with the way he behaves, it’s pretty evident that his self-confidence has taken a rather large hit.

But, wait! If AFO had tampered with OFA during the JT arc, paving the way to unlocking the rest (like he’d also done during the War arc when he tried to ‘steal’ it then), then wouldn’t AFO be sabotaging himself since he’d be making Izuku a more formidable opponent?

Sure. Except that the quirks inside OFA are mostly useless when it comes to the mental part of the fighting. The only thing they’re useful for is for the current Holder to be able to play keep-away in the physical realm. And AFO could easily just find counters for those through his work on Tomura.

You know how else the situation becomes advantageous for AFO? With every quirk unlocked, Izuku’s goalposts keep on getting away from him, and Izuku will always feel like he isn’t ready or prepared enough. Izuku will push and push himself to master OFA to its fullest, to become more powerful, at the cost of his mental/emotional stability and physical wellbeing as he wears himself down.

And every time Izuku grew more powerful, and became more ‘OP,’ he is burdened with all the aforementioned setbacks that came with it. He could be the most powerful person in the world, but it’s all for naught if he doesn’t take care of himself. This plan is both a high risk and high reward on AFO’s part, and as of the moment, with a bloody Izuku staggering all over, AFO is visibly reaping these high rewards.

PHASE 2: Post-Tartarus Breakout

He’s going to toy with Izuku until Izuku fucking breaks. What follows is his series of actions that instills the desired responses from Midoriya Izuku. Let’s see how the master manipulator plays this game of chess, shall we?

Izuku’s plan: Reach out to villains and try to save them.

AFO’s counter: Kill off those who turn their back against villainy and/or acknowledge Izuku as a true hero.

Izuku’s resulting response: Stop reaching out to villains. Gain an instant victory and move on.

After all, what do you get when you block a hero from showing sympathy? You get an unfeeling living weapon.

---

Izuku’s plan: Work with the top pro heroes to bring down AFO.

AFO’s counter: Make plans that will serve to highlight how the top pros are just slowing Izuku down. (e.g. Making moves while it’s raining, so as to divide them, but also to bring out No. 1 Hero Endeavor’s "slowness" in the rain. Nope, I don’t think that’s a throwaway line at all.)

Izuku’s resulting response: Grows more reckless, often leading the charge.

---

Izuku’s plan: Track AFO down.

AFO’s counter: Lead them to dead-ends. Or when they do supposedly reach something, endanger them.

Izuku’s resulting response: His tunnel vision worsens, as he grows more desperate.

---

Izuku’s plan: All Might following him around is okay since it would help All Might from worrying so much, and Izuku could simultaneously keep an eye on and protect All Might.

AFO’s counters: There are a lot to really fuck with this bond, damn you AFO.

Taint that passing the torch memory of ‘You’re Next.’

Declare that All Might no longer interests him. Liar. He outright stated before that he’s one for keeping a grudge

Send another assassin to Izuku [Underlying Message: You yourself are a walking danger zone to those whom you dearly care for.]

Izuku’s resulting response:

Interpret that memory of ‘You’re Next’ as taking up the position of being AFO’s shiny new plaything, and therefore supposedly sparing All Might from the torment (Unfortunately, making Izuku push AM away is just part of the torment ;A;)

Think that AM is no longer in the direct line of fire as long as AFO focuses on Izuku

Finally, push his last line of morale support away, and completely isolate himself.

Btw, I wonder how All Might feels about Izuku using Nana's quirk to get away from him.

---

The suffering doesn’t end.

Izuku’s plan: Save people.

AFO’s counters: (possibly offscreen) Send more villains and assassins to torment Izuku some more with the knowledge that he can’t save them. Sending villains out also puts innocents in danger.

Izuku’s resulting response: He won’t stop for anything. He won’t sleep, won’t eat, won’t slow down. He will always do his best to save as long as someone is in danger.

His body will keep on moving and moving and MOVING on its own.

--- All For One is very effective as a supervillain. He has managed to make the heroes think that his only goal is to capture Izuku alive for his quirk. He has Izuku right where he wants him: dancing to his tune at the palm of his hand, utterly toyed with, left with no escape in sight.

Psychologically vaulted.

PHASE 3

And so, if Izuku is being manipulated to drive himself further and further into self-destruction, what then is there left for All For One to do?

So much more. Because, my god, I think AFO has mastered the art of traumatizing the OFA Holders.

All For One once told All Might, “I will destroy all that you’ve protected.” And boy, is he delivering. He's definitely not done with AM btw.

First, he destroys All Might's image. And he is manipulating Izuku to drive himself to that point. To looking into his absolute worst.

And when that point arrives, AFO will hammer the final nail home.

Something like...

BEHOLD

JAPAN’S SYMBOL OF PEACE.

And oh, how it'll hurt. To see All Might's pride and joy be flaunted about as looking nothing like a hero to the masses, for him to be so utterly humiliated.

"See what I did to All Might's successor."

AFO will be banking upon the possibility that the angry masses will not want to be saved by whom they're tricked into viewing as someone that's the cause of all the pain. Izuku might have the willpower to stay true to his resolve, but with him on the verge of total breakdown, what would happen when he is shunned by the very people he is trying to help?

I once wrote a post about how the current events seem to be a bastardization of Izuku's wildest fantasies: he's working with the top pros, he has the most powerful quirk, and he's working with All Might (whom technically acts as a sidekick to him rn).

AFO has warped all that into a never-ending nightmare. And Izuku...

Izuku is really in need of saving.

Last thoughts:

Let me just say that it shouldn't be a competition about who gets to get through to Izuku. Right now, he’s gonna need all the help he can get, and it can’t be delivered by only one or two people. Saving Izuku is going to be a team effort, a solid support system that sees Izuku as their classmate/friend/student/actual person that they care about. And there’s sufficient space for that.

More hands reaching out means more chances to catch him if he falls.

#bnha #bnha 317 #bnha manga #bnha analysis #bnha meta #all for one #afo #midoriya izuku #all might #toshinori yagi

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aitaikimochi · 3 years

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My Hero Academia DRAWING SMASH Exhibition Master Thread + Audio Guide Summary Translation!

1) All My Hero Academia DRAWING SMASH Tweets and Info 2) Horikoshi’s Interview about the Exhibition 3) Pre-Order MHA Exhibition Merchandise

FULL AUDIO GUIDE SUMMARY TRANSLATION: 1) Welcome Message 2) Roaring Sports Festival 3) The Test 4) My Hero Academia School Briefs 5) ULTRA HEROES 6) WANTED VILLAINS 7) ONE FOR ALL 8) ONE’S JUSTICE 9) Ending Credits

TRACK 1: WELCOME MESSAGE

All Might introduces and welcomes us to the My Hero Academia DRAWING SMASH Exhibition. Deku is also there and says that while listening to this audio guide, please don’t stop movnig as you will hold up the line and flow of traffic. He explains that the Exhibition is split into many different areas, and there’s tons of hand-drawn panels by Horikoshi-sensei on display too. There is also a section in the Exhibition that focuses on the anime too! All Might tells Deku that there’s a section dedicated to All Might himself, and Deku gets super excited and turns to Bakugou and says, “Kacchan, did you hear that? Uh Kacchan? Where are you?” Deku tries looking for Bakugou, but Aizawa comes and tells Deku to move along the line.

TRACK 2: ROARING SPORTS FESTIVAL

Ochako waves at Deku and says, “over here, Deku!” Deku goes to where she’s standing and looks at the different manga panels from the Sports Festival. He says thanks to Ochako, Tokoyami, and Hatsume, they were able to win that fight in the Sports Festival. Ochako sees her fight with Bakugou and says he was too strong, but she really wanted to win that fight for her Mom and Dad. Deku tells her it’s okay because she definitely tried her best. Ochako gets a bit flustered at this. Bakugou then passes by and asks, “Who did their best? No matter how many times I fight Deku, I’d obviously always win. But if Deku maybe was a bit more buff, he could PERHAPS put up a fight.” Ochako exclaims, “WOAH! Bakugou praised him! It’s definitely going to snow tomorrow.” Bakugou tells her to shut up.

Deku sees the next panel, which is the fight between himself and Todoroki. Ochako excitedly recites the line Deku said to Todoroki, which was the “It’s your power isn’t it!?” line. Deku gets embarrassed and tells her to stop. Todoroki thanks Deku and says it’s because of him that he remembered why exactly he wanted to be a hero in the first place. Bakugou yells at them for being sappy and gross. They then turn their attention to the panels featuring the fight between Todoroki and Bakugou. Deku said Todoroki performed really well, but Bakugou’s Howitzer Impact move was super strong. Bakugou yells that he doesn’t want to be reminded of his unwarranted victory from that fight. Todoroki apologizes.

Ochako says that Bakugou’s poor performance made his image look really bad since it was broadcasted on national television, but Bakugou says he could care less. Todoroki says he’s sorry he didn’t fight his best as he was troubled during that fight, but his head is clear now. Todoroki says he will be a proper hero. Deku says he wants to be like All Might. Bakugou says he wants to surpass All Might. Aizawa then comes and tells the group to move along as they are holding up the line.

TRACK 3: THE TEST

Deku explains that after the Sports Festival, the Hero Class went on internships with Pro Heroes. Todoroki mentions that during this time, the villains started to make moves in society, such as when they encountered Stain. Deku then goes on to say that after the Stain encounter, their class went to do the Forest Training during the Summer. Ochako remarks that Bakugou got kidnapped during this training period, and Bakugou tells her to shut up. Todoroki then explains that he, Iida, Kirishima, Yaoyorozu, and Midoriya went to save him. Bakugou continues to tell everyone to shut up. Deku then says he’s glad they were successful in saving Bakugou, all thanks to Kirishima. Bakugou says, “I told you guys to stop talking about this!”

Deku then talks about the next moment in the timeline, which was the Provisional License Exam. Ochako said she trained so hard using her Zero Gravity quirk that just thinking about it now makes her want to throw up. Deku says that even though it was really difficult to train for the exam, the training did help him master using the Shoot Style with his legs as well. Todoroki mentions that the move Midoriya came up with using his feet was very strong, and Deku said that he also got used to it. Deku thanks Hatsume for making the costume and shoes for him.

Ochako says the Provisional License Exam this year in particular was difficult as the passing rate was abysmally low. She asks Bakugou if the Provisional License Exam was difficult, and Bakugou says “shut up don’t remind me.” Todoroki then says, “Yeah, it must have sucked to fail the Provisional License Exam” and Bakugou says, “What the hell- you failed too!” Deku tells them all to calm down. He says that Bakugou’s team did well in the first exam thanks to Kaminari’s new technique made possible by the point shooter gear he got from Hatsume. Bakugou once again tells everyone to shut up.

Todoroki recalls that their entire class did well in the first round, but he personally messed up in the second round, which caused him to fail the exam. Bakugou mocks him and says “what a loser, failing the exam” and Ochako says “but you failed too.” Bakugou yells “SHUT THE HELL UP!!!”

TRACK 4: MY HERO ACADEMIA SCHOOL BRIEFS

This entire track is a recap of various events that happened at U.A. Academy on campus. Deku starts off by saying he was so nervous when he first started school at U.A. but was thankful that he was able to make friends with Iida and Ochako so quickly. Bakugou scoffs and says, “isn’t it because you just didn’t have any friends in middle school?” Deku nervously says, “I think I had a few friends…!” Todoroki asks Deku why he didn’t deny it though.

Ochako remembers that Aizawa first asked the class to test their quirks, and Aizawa comes in and says he did that because he wanted to see their potential. Deku gets nervous and wonders if Aizawa came up to them because they were holding up the line, but Aizawa said he didn’t even say anything.

Todoroki said being part of the Hero Class meant that they had tons of different types of classes, and it was sometimes quite confusing. Ochako says even though it was difficult, it was still fun, such as when they had to decide on their hero names. Bakugou scoffs and says, “Stupid Deku actually chose his Hero Name as ‘Deku’ the hell? Did he finally lose it?” Deku rebutts and says, “But I actually like that as my Hero name!” Bakugou asks Deku, “What’s so good about that name?” Deku then asks Bakugou if he had decided on a hero name yet, and Bakugou says, “Nah, I’m not gonna tell you.” Deku replies, “What, why not?”

Aizawa reminisces and says that Deku and Bakugou fought really well against All Might during the Final Exam. Bakugou said he did that so he could win against All Might. If it wasn’t for that why would he team up with Deku? Bakugou then yells, “Stupid Deku! I’m gonna Kill you!” and Deku gets confused as to why he’s saying this. Ochako mentions that saying stuff like that would definitely get them cut from all Hero interviews, and Todoroki mentions that they should be careful about what they say.

Bakugou gets mad and says he’s going to kill all three of them, and Deku asks, “so now you’re targeting 3 people!?”

Aizawa reprimands them and Deku apologizes, promising that he won’t argue anymore. Aizawa keeps a firm stance to Bakugou too. He tells Bakugou that heroes need to use their quirks to save people, not kill them. Bakugou says it wasn’t like he was actually going to do that, he’s not that kind of person.

All Might steps in and says they should put this behind them. He suggests that they should just go and see the other stuff in the Exhibition together in the U.A. area. He sees that there’s a section made just for Mineta. Deku says, “Wow it’s full of Mineta scenes!” Ochako looks at it and says, “Oh, how nice” and Bakugou says, “hmph, it’s just a place to show off an animal.” Todoroki asks Bakugou if he’s jealous that Mineta has the spotlight, and Bakugou says, “Ha! As if!!”

All might sees the Cultural Festival area and says, “Oh! This is the time when U.A. Academy held the Cultural Festival!” Ochako mentions that it was really fun. All might says Class A performed with both a band and a dance team. Deku mentions that during the Cultural Festival, the whole school gets together to create activities and open stands around the campus, and it’s not just the Hero Class but the General and Economics classes also join in too. All Might asks who’s idea was it to do the dance for Class A? Deku says it was Todoroki’s idea. Todoroki said he just thought it would be nice to have something that everyone can participate and have fun, and Deku says it was a great idea.

Ochako says everyone was able to participate in it too. Deku mentions Jirou was the one in charge of leading the band, Ashido was in charge of the dance team. Todoroki said they did well using their quirks to create a great performance. Ochako says she didn’t expect Bakugou to actually participate and play the drums for them, and she recites his line, “Let’s kill ‘em with sound!” Bakugou scoffs at her and Todoroki asks Bakugou, “why do you get angry when people praise you?” Bakugou replies, “What the hell are you even talking about!?”

Todoroki goes on to say that Jirou’s performance during the song was really great. Bakugou yells at hiim to stop changing the subject!

All Might asks if Deku enjoyed the Cultural Festival. He answers that it was really fun, and seeing people outside of their class was awesome, such as Eri as well. Deku mentions that they were able to finally let her smile, and that made him so happy. Aizawa also agrees.

All Might says it’s important for heroes to bring smiles to people’s faces. He tells them to never forget that. Deku says, “Of course, All Might!” Aizawa says to Deku that he’s stopping in line again. Deku apologizes, and All Might asks them to hurry along down the line.

TRACK 5: ULTRA HEROES

This track plays in the area where you see all the Hero panels. The heroes on display are Mirko, Bakugou, Ochako, Deku, Todoroki, Hawks, Endeavor, Amajiki, Kirishima, Mirio, and Nejire. Ochako says, “woah, there’s so many heroes!” Deku gets excited and sees the first Hero, Mirko. He goes on a ramble saying she’s ranked #5 in the Hero Ranking, her quirk is using her bunny abilities. He says that Mirko has not only a ton of male fans, but female fans as well. Bakugou snickers at Deku and exclaims, “you’re such a Hero nerd!”

Ochako mentions that the next Hero after Mirko is Bakugou. Deku introduces Bakugou, saying “This is Bakugou Katsuki. He’s enrolled in U.A. Academy and sits in Seat #17 in Class A. He has a hero name, but he won’t tell him…”

Bakugou gets angry. Todoroki then continues and says, “His quirk is explosions by using nitroglycerin that he emits from his hands.”

Bakugou tells them to shut up.

Todoroki ignores Bakugou and continues with, “His personality is…”

Bakugou screams, “SHUT THE HELL UP!!!!”

And Todoroki finishes with, “…like that.”

Ochako then sees herself and says, “Oh it’s me!!” She explains her quirk and how she can cause anything to float if she touches then, but if she puts her fingers together, she can release the zero gravity as well. Bakugou then mentions that she also throws up if she uses her quirk too much. Ochako gets embarrassed and says that he really did not need to say that!

Deku says they should go on to the next person, which is him. He introduces himself as Midoriya Izuku, and his hero name is Deku. He whispers, “My quirk is…One For All…Please read the manga to find out more about it…” Todoroki asks Deku why he’s whispering, and Deku gets nervous and says, “Oh, it’s nothing at all!”

Deku sees that next up is Todoroki. Ochako introduces Todoroki and says “his full name is Todoroki Shouto, anad his hero name is just like his first name, Shouto!” Todoroki explains his quirk, and Deku says he has a truly impressive quirk since he can combine them together to create awesome attacks. Todoroki says he still needs to polish his quirk, and Ochako mentions he’s a very stoic person.

The next hero is Hawks, and Deku gets excited, saying “Oh it’s the winged hero Hawks!” Deku goes on to ramble details about Hawks, such as him being Rank #2 on the Hero Ranking Billboard, his quirk is using his feathers, but he keeps going on and Ochako says, “Ahh, maybe we should move on to the next one!”

Next up is Endeavor. Todoroki explains that Endeavor’s Quirk is called “Hell Flame.” He can emit fire at extremely high temperatures, but if he overuses his quirk, he gets burned instead. Deku says on that note, Todoroki’s quirk is better than his father’s since he can use the ice part to cool himself down. Todoroki muses that perhaps he does have an advantage over his Father.

The next Hero in line is Amajiki Tamaki. Deku introduces him as part of U.A. Academy’s Big 3. His hero name is Sun Eater. His quirk is transforming parts of his body into animals, and he can do this by eating food of that animal. Ochako explains further that if he eats takoyaki, he can use octopus arms, if he eats fried chicken, he can use the chickens legs. She then goes off saying, “tuna, beef, fish roe, mochi…” Todoroki asks if she just suddenly started rambling on about food because she just wants to eat those food, and Ochako says “I’m hungry…”

Deku sees that the next hero is Kirishima. He asks Bakugou to introduce Kirishima since they’re friends. Bakugou says, “What do you mean friends? He’s just my lackey!” Deku says, “Err…okay, Kirishima Eijirou, Hero name Red Riot. His quirk is Hardening.” Bakugou then scoffs saying, “He’s just an idiot who gets hard, that’s all!” Ochako comments, saying, “Well, you don’t need to be shy about it!” Bakugou then yells, “I’m not being shy!”

Todoroki moves the conversation along and mentions that the next Hero is Mirio-senpai. Deku introduces Mirio’s hero name as Lemillion and mentions his quirk allows him to go through things. Ochako says that according to Aizawa-sensei, Mirio is the closest to being the same rank as the Number 1 Hero. Bakugou grumbles and says, “No, I’M the one who’s going to be Number 1!” Ochako says, “Right…of course you are…” and Bakugou gets furious, saying, “YOU DARE MAKE FUN OF ME!?”

Ochako notices that the next Hero is Nejire Hado. She introduces her and says her Hero name is Nejire-chan. Ochako explains how her quirk works, and Deku remarks that Nejire can also use it to fly. Ochako adds that Nejire also won the U.A. Beauty Contest during the Cultural Festival.

Todoroki says after seeing all the Heroes lined up like this, everyone truly has amazing quirks. Bakugou says they’re all underlings compared to him though. Ochako says, “Right…of course…” and Bakugou explodes once again, asking, “What the hell, are you making fun of me?” and Ochako repeats, “right…of course” to which Bakugou curses. Deku says to the group, “We really should be moving down the line now…”

TRACK 6: WANTED VILLAINS

Aizawa asks All Might to look at the new data he pulled up on the computer about the League of Villains. The first villain they look at is the various Nomu. The file says that the Nomus are injected with quirks that are stolen or enhanced from either themselves or other people. The next villain is Stain, who Aizawa mentions killed many heroes that he deemed unfit to be a Hero. His quirk is being able to control people by drinking their blood. All Might says the next villain in the file is Gigantomachia. Aizawa mentions that aside from being able to make his body gigantic, not much is known about Gigantomachia’s quirk. What they do know is that he works for All For One.

The villain after that is Twice with a quirk that allows him to multiply hiimself.

All Might mentions that the next villain file is Shigaraki. Aizawa says he’s the current leader for the League of Villains. His quirk is the formidable disintegration quirk that can disintegrate anything that he touches with five fingers. Next up is Dabi. Aizawa mentions that his quirk is unknown but he has been seen using blue fire. Aizawa remembers fighting against Dabi during the Forest Training, and he saw that blue fire.

All Might pulls up Toga’s file afterwards. Aizawa mentions that she can turn into anyone if she has even just a sip of their blood. The villain after her is Mr. Compress, who is able to compress and decompress things or people. He can also use it on multiple objects at the same time.

The villain after Twice is Re Destro, who is the leader of the Meta Liberation Army. Aizawa says that his quirk is stress, which he builds up to release immense power.

All Might then opens All For One’s file. Aizawa says that they really don’t know anything about his quirk. The villain after him is the Doctor, who also has an unknown quirk. They do have information that the Doctor is the one in charge of creating the gruesome Nomu and High End Nomu too.

All Might mentions the League of Villains is probably plotting something even though he fought All For One and sent many of them to Tartarus. Aizawa said they must be scheming something since if the incident with the High End nomu is any indication. All Might says even if the League of Villains is on the move, the Heroes will not lose to them.

TRACK 7: ONE FOR ALL

Track 7 is a monologue by All Might. It plays in the All Might section of the Exhibition where manga panels of All Might are on display as well as a ton of decoration with All Might on the walls as well.

All might says that in order to create a society where people can freely smile and feel safe, it was necessary to have a Symbol of Peace. He wanted to be a pillar where people can depend on and smile when they see him. All Might says he inherited One For All to do just that. He is the 8th successor of One For All, and all previous One For All holders and he worked together to try to defeat All For One. However, even if they lose their lives in the fight against All For One, their hope still passes onto their successors.

They need to be Symbols of Peace for the people. All Might says he wants to be the person who can bring smiles to people’s faces. No matter what happens, he needs to keep on smiling. Those who are able to keep smiling are the strongest. That’s why he smiles.

He says that Young Midoriya and he were both quirkless. But after meeting Midoriya and seeing the strong willpower that he possessed, he knew that he had to mentor him to be his successor. All Might says to Midoriya, “Everything, from One For All to my own feelings in my heart, I entrust them all to you. Young Midoriya, you’re next.”

TRACK 8: ONE’S JUSTICE

Track 8 plays in the room where there’s panels leading up to the Paranormal Liberation War Arc. All Might starts off the audio track by explaining the big war between the Villains and the Pro-Heroes, which the U.A. Academy heroes in training also participated in. Endeavor, Miruko, and Eraserhead were dispatched to the lair of the Villains where Shigaraki unfortunately awoken as well. Once he woke up, he began destroying people and things one after another. However, the Heroes did not waver and fought back to villains while protecting the civilians.

What the villains want is to create a new world without heroes.

What Shigaraki wants is to destroy everything.

What Midoriya wants is to protect everyone with a smile.

What Bakugou wants is to be the best hero and not lose to anyone.

What All Might wishes is if Young Midoriya and Young Bakugou can work together and acknowledge each other, they can both become who they want to be.

To save and win, to win and save.

All Might says if they are able to do this, they can become the Strongest Heroes.

Deku then exclaims, “Go forward, Midoriya Izuku! Use the power All Might entrusted in you to save people. I will save and win!”

Bakugou then says, “I will win and save! That’s Bakugou Katsukis’ way of life on the path to become the Number One Hero!”

All Might ends the track with the line, “To destroy the word or to save it. One For All’s successor Midoriya Izuku fights head on with All For One’s successor, Shigaraki Tomura.”

TRACK 9: END CREDITS

All Might says he’s come to send us off and thank us for visiting the exhibition! Deku also says thanks for coming. Ochako asks if we had fun? Todoroki says they were able to relive a bunch of different moments at this exhibition. He says he is thankful for it, and Deku agrees. Ochako asks Bakugou how was the exhibition? Bakugou says screw this- they should all go back inside and just focus on everything Bakugou related, forget about the Villains or anyone else. Todoroki says, “Well, if we do that we’ll need to reserve tickets again so…”

Aizawa asks All Might to do the closing message. All Might thanks us again for visiting, but things don’t just end here! The world of My Hero Academia will only keep getting bigger and bigger! Deku hopes that we can always cheer them on.

All Might then leads everyone in saying “GO BEYOND, PLUS ULTRA!!!”

Deku says to us, “Let’s meet again soon, everyone!” He then turns to All Might saying, “That’s good right? Oh, oh crap I still need to get in line to buy the limited edition goods only sold at the Exhibition! Wait let me go line up ahhh!” and scurries off.

All Might then laughs and says “as expected of the headstrong Young Midoriya!”

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phoenixyfriend · 3 years

Text

Auntie ‘Soka and Little Leia (and Rex)

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

Listen. You all knew this was coming.

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

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

Rated T, gen.

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

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

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

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

Reminder that none of them have been born yet.

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

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

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

(Ahsoka can fake Mandalore. Sometimes.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, of course, is when things get interesting.

Specifically, Ahsoka spots a Mandalorian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wanna explain why your kid has my face?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you staying?”

“What?” Leia bites out.

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

Well, kriff you too, Ahsoka thinks.

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

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

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

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

“For free?” Rex demands.

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

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

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

“Yeah?”

“How much?”

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

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

Leia glowers, cute and furious. “No.”

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

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

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

“You’ve got conditions,” he guesses.

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

“Yeah?”

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

“You’re children, I wouldn’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“There are other risks.”

“There are.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You already know my name.”

“I do.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My last fight--”

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

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

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

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

“Jedi?”

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

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

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

“Bit young for that.”

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

“Not in command.”

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

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

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

This part of the story is his.

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s the difference?”

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

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

“Time travel.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s say I believe you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That why you’re special?”

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

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

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

Rex grins. It is not a kind expression.

“Let me tell you about Kamino.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Caf?”

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

“Whiskey?”

“That’s a definitely shouldn’t.”

“Hoth chocolate?”

“...please.”

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

“Do I ask what it was this time?”

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

“Try me anyway.”

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

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

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

She can feel the tears. Fuck..

“You want to dull the edges.”

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

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

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

“You’re hard on yourself.”

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

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

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

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

“Auntie ‘Soka? Why’d you stop?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahsoka feels light-headed.

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

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

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

It’s Depa.

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

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

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

“Are you Depa?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then Depa is standing right in front of her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s like the start of a sick joke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Auntie Soka? You’re shivering.”

Is she?

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

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

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

Does she?

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

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

Right. That.

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

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

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

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

That was a forgone conclusion.

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

She does.

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

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

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

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

She feels more like a person come morning.

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

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

“Feeling better?”

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

“I was hoping to speak with you about your options,” Depa tells her, once she’s sat at the table. “Fett and your friend Rex took care of most of the negotiation, and I feel like I have an idea of what would work best for you.”

Ahsoka nods slowly. “Okay.”

“There is a Master-Padawan pair a few planets away,” Depa says. “The Council informed me when I spoke with them about you and your wards. They’d be headed back to the Temple in a few days anyway, and the Council has agreed to extend an offer to Fett to handle the transportation. The presence of a Jedi Master on board will allow for him to get in and out of the Core unmolested, and we’d like for you and yours to have a Jedi escort, given what happened yesterday afternoon.”

Her complete spiral into nonbeing?

“I understand,” she says instead. “I suppose Fett agreed because he’s still trying to get Rex to like him?”

Depa shrugs. “That part isn’t my business.”

Of course it isn’t.

“Rex can stay with me for a while, right?” Ahsoka finally asks. “I know it’s not exactly protocol, but I’m...”

“In need of a support system until you’ve seen a mind healer, and against all odds, the child is part of it,” Depa summarizes. “Yes, I recognized as much. I think the Council will be able to allow some leeway there. I don’t know if he’ll enjoy it, given that all the others his age are Initiates, but we can adjust as necessary. On that note... Do you know Leia’s midichlorian count?”

“No,” Ahsoka says, and hesitantly adds, “But her biological father was my Jedi Master, and I’m told his count broke records even as a child. Given what Leia’s shown so far... it’s why I’ve been in a hurry to get her to the Temple.”

Depa frowns at her, clearly working through the implications of a Jedi having a daughter and still teaching... and then visibly dismisses the situation, eyes closing to breathe in the steam of her caff.

Biological father certainly implies a child that was raised by her mother or adopted out so the Jedi father could remain in their chosen career without a conflict of interest or duty.

She’ll tell the council the truth, or... at least Master Koon. Master Kenobi is still a padawan, but she can tell Master Koon.

She already told Jango Fett, of all people.

“Padawan Torrent?”

Her head snaps up. She hasn’t been a padawan in over fifteen years. It’s weird to hear. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I asked if you wanted some time to think it over before I presented the offer to Fett,” Depa says.

Ahsoka gets the distinct feeling that Depa is planning a report to the Council that has ‘needs a mind healer’ underlined at least three times.

“No, I’m--I’m fine. That sounds like a good plan.”

“I’ll speak with him, then. Would you like to come with?”

"No, thank you.”

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

Fett agrees. Ahsoka’s pretty sure it’s all to do with Rex and maybe Leia. It’s probably nothing to do with ‘Sokari.’ She’s a Jedi, an adult in mind and in body, or at least close enough to count. She’s a damn sight more ‘enemy’ to Fett than the other two are. Not as much as Depa, maybe, but Fett’s been playing nice with her for Leia’s sake.

He plays nice with Ahsoka for Rex’s. That’s all.

They’re only a few planets over from the meeting point, and they have a few days to hang around before the escort meets them. Depa hadn’t given them a name--apparently it could have compromised the opsec for the Jedi team--but Ahsoka’s pretty sure she’ll be able to identify almost anyone. She gets the feeling that the Force is going to send her a familiar face, just as it did Master Padawan Billaba.

Ahsoka lets herself feel the world around her. It’s dark and dreary, in the sense that the beaten-down port is full of petty crimes and less petty horrors, but it’s still lighter than most of the Empire had been. She sneaks away from the ship at night, ignoring Fett at her back, and performs a bit of vigilante justice while she can. She’ll be banned from doing so as soon as she’s reinstated as a Jedi, probably, but for now... for now, she can look at the drug cartels and ‘they’re not slaves, really’ workers and do something to help.

She doesn’t use her sabers. She doesn’t need to. It’s been a long time since she has, for small fry like these.

“What are you doing?” Fett asks her, landing heavily behind her back.

“Chip removal,” she says, hand pressed to the slave’s leg. Her eyes are closed, but she can hear him shifting. “Let me concentrate, I don’t have a meddroid for this.”

He’s silent until she finishes, and waits until the people she’s helped are on their way to the planet’s freedom routes. He doesn’t ask what she did with the owners.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Regularly,” she confirms. “You?”

He doesn’t answer that, just ambles over to the the chains and stares down at them.

“Fett?”

“You go through this like it’s as easy as breathing,” he says. “It’s... impressive.”

“I guess?” she hesitates to continue. “I’m... I don’t think of it that way. This is the easy stuff. A time-waster that helps people. If I wanted to help for real, I’d been going after Jabba or Sidious or--”

“How old were you?” he asks, turning on his heel to face her dead-on. The vocoder of his helmet pulls the emotion from his voice. “When did this... these missions, the slavery battles, when did that start for you?”

“Fourteen,” she says. She’s not entirely sure, really, what counted as a mission for ending slavery and what counted as just a part of war, but she can round down. “Maybe fifteen. It’s a bit of a blur.”

“And you just kept doing it.”

“Of course,” she says. “If I have the time and the energy, if I need to do something and there’s nothing official on my hands, why not?”

He doesn’t answer her.

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

Rex greets them before she does.

Ahsoka, in her defense, is asleep at the time. It’s a restless sleep, but it’s enough that she doesn’t sense the nearing Force signatures until they’re almost at the ship.

She recognizes one of them.

“Auntie ‘Soka?” Leia questions, when she lurches to her feet and starts pulling on her boots with all the energy of a zombie. “Where are you going?”

“Jedi,” Ahsoka grunts. “Here.”

“I see.”

Leia dresses to follow her, in a little coat that’ll withstand the chill of the outside air, and Ahsoka makes it to the cargo hold just in time to hear Rex saying, “I’m not shaking your hand until you put your gloves on, Vos.”

She laughs to herself, breathless with the knowledge of what she’s about to find. She jumps the railing of the upper walkway, drops down just in front of the Master-Padawan team, and keeps her back to Fett and Rex. “Hello, there.”

One human, one Kiffar. She knows the latter.

“Would you be Sokari Torrent?” the Master asks.

“I am,” she says, with a slight bow. She can tell there’s a bit of judgement for how she’s dressed, but they’re covering it well. A Shadow and his trainee know the value of armor better than most Jedi bother with. “I’m afraid Padawan Billaba didn’t inform me of your names before we met.”

“And yet your friend knew my padawan,” the Master says.

“By reputation,” she says, as smoothly as she can. “I’ve encountered Quinlan Vos before, though I doubt he remembers--”

“I’d remember someone like you,” Quinlan interrupts, with a grin she’s sure is meant to be charming and rogueish.

He’s... very young for her, and not her type. Mostly, she wants to pat him on the head, but that probably wouldn’t go over very well. She still looks like she’s younger than him.

“Anyway,” she says, turning back to the master, “I’m afraid I still don’t know who you are, Master.”

“I am Tholme,” he says, with the bow that a Master gives a Padawan. She feels a little slighted, but it’s fine. She looks the right age, it’s fine.

It’s not like they know.

“It’s nice to meet you, Master Tholme,” she says. “My charges are Rex Torrent, the young man behind me, and currently coming down the ladder is Leia Antilles. I’m sure you’re aware of Jango Fett.”

“The Mand’alor,” Quinlan volunteers, and Ahsoka can almost hear Fett’s teeth grinding.

“Don’t call me that,” he says. She’s sure he’s got a hand drifting for his blaster.

“There isn’t a whole lot of room on the ship,” she says before the men can get into whatever weird contest she’s sure someone might start. Her bet’s on Fett. “But Leia and Rex are small enough to share with me, so I’m sure we can make it work.”

“There’s spare rolls for anyone comfortable with sleeping in the hold,” Fett grunts. “Or on the floor in the passenger room.”

“Well, I guess I could ask for a little help fi--”

“Vos,” Ahsoka snaps, letting her voice take on the kind of ‘obey me or get fresher duty’ irritation that she’d perfected back when the rebellion still had her managing people, before they’d realized she was more use in the field. “Do not.”

There’s a moment’s pause, and Tholme looks unimpressed with that raised eyebrow, but the kind of unimpressed that’s split between his own padawan and the stranger before him.

“Um,” Quinlan says. “I just--”

“No,” she cuts him off. “No flirting.”

It’s weird and uncomfortable and she’d have maybe been okay with it if she was actually the seventeen-or-eighteen-ish(?) that she looked, but she’s not. She’s in her thirties and Vos is... what, twenty? Twenty-one? No.

He stares at her, and she wonders momentarily if she’d gone too far in the direction of judging his intentions in the Force and preempted actual flirtations.

“I’m sorry?” He offers, looking confused, but ashamed. “I, uh, I’ll keep that in mind.”

She definitely preempted the actual flirtation.

Fuck.

Ahsoka closes her eyes and breathes in. Breathes out. Opens her eyes. “Right. That was... I’m not sure how much Padawan Billaba told you about me.”

“Enough,” Tholme says. He moves forward and puts a hand on Quinlan’s shoulder. Ahsoka has no idea if it’s to comfort him or hold him back. “I didn’t share most of it with my padawan, but I have a general understanding of what’s going on.”

Quinlan darts a look at his teacher, but Ahsoka doesn’t acknowledge it. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

“Thank you for your understanding,” she says, and bows, and stiffly turns away to walk to the galley.

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

Leia squirms into the bench seat, shoving her way under Ahsoka’s arm like a particularly wriggly tooka.

“What was that?” Leia demands, the authority of a rebellion general rather useless in the squeaky voice of a child.

“What was what?”

“The whole thing with Padawan Vos,” Leia says. “You blew up at him before he even did anything.”

That’s pretty true.

“I felt the flirtation coming before it happened and reacted inappropriately because I panicked. I’m significantly older than him, but I can’t tell him that, so it’s just awkward and uncomfortable and... I’m not okay, Princess. I haven’t been for a long time.”

“Yeah, we can tell.”

“Leia.”

“What? I need therapy too! Captain Rex needs therapy! I’m pretty sure Fett needs therapy! You, Fulcrum, you really need therapy. None of us are okay.” She huffs, wiggling impossibly closer. “I don’t like it, but it’s true.”

“I know,” Ahsoka groans. “I just... I just need to hold out until the Temple.”

“Will you be able to hold it together if you see someone you actually care about?” Leia demands. “What are you going to do when you see Kenobi?”

“Stop.”

“I’m serious, you--”

“Leia, that’s enough,” she snaps. “I was fighting that war before you were even born, and I’ve dealt with the consequences since. I know the risks and I’ll thank you to remember who taught you to control your own mind.”

Leia stiffens, sucking in a sharp breath. “That was uncalled for.”

“You’re not the child you appear to be,” Ahsoka reminds her, not a little sharply. “You want to dish it out, be ready to take it. What will you do when we see Bail Organa? When we see the toddler that is Anakin Skywalker?”

“I get it.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Ahsoka mutters. She isn’t surprised when Leia ducks out of the embrace and leaves the galley. She lets the girl go, guilt warring with the memory of how Master Kenobi had more than once spoken that way to Anakin at the height of the war. The fact that she’s an adult in the body of a child isn’t an excuse for poking at Ahsoka’s open wounds. It was cruel and unnecessary, and unbecoming of a... not a Jedi. A princess. A politician.

She rests her head on her arms and zones out. She should meditate, but that seems like... too much effort.

She can feel Vos and Tholme setting up in the room they’ve been assigned. Neither seems particularly angry. Most likely, Tholme’s given the absolute shortest explanation of ‘child soldier, dead master, highly traumatized and emotionally unstable’ to Vos to smooth over the incident in the cargo hold. Rex is with Leia; he’s agitated, but less so than Leia herself. Fett’s annoyed, in the cockpit, but he seems annoyed as often as not. There’s a shudder at lift-off, and a few minutes later, they’re in hyperspace, headed for the Core.

Fett finds her, falls into the other bench in full armor, and drops his elbows onto the table. The helmet clunks down a moment later.

She doesn’t lift her head. “What do you want?”

“Do I need to keep Vos away from you?”

“What?”

“Vos. He made you uncomfortable. Was that him being someone that hurt you in the future, or just the interaction being awkward?”

She lifts her head. She stares at him. “What?”

He leans back and crosses his arms. “Do you need me to tell Vos to stay the hell away from you?”

She’s gaping. “You realize I’m thirty-two, right? I can handle my own battles.”

“You’re also traumatized as hell and everyone can see it,” Fett argues back. “If Vos himself is a trigger, I can handle it.”

“He’s not,” she tells him. This is strange. Fett’s being strange. “He was actually a friend of my grandmaster’s. I’m just uncomfortable with the flirting because I’m a lot older than he realizes, and I can’t tell him that.”

He nods sharply, and then looks away. The silence sits.

“Thanks for asking?” Ahsoka says, well aware of how her confusion over the offer turns it into a question. “I mean, thank you for... caring.”

I guess, she finishes in the privacy of her own head. Or at least pretending to.

Fett makes a face, still not facing her. He eyes the galley instead. She can guess where his thoughts are going. The galley is... not very big, especially with six people on board instead of one, but she’s sure they’ve stocked up enough. On the off chance they do go through more than expected, because of how many growing bodies are in residence, they can stop off and buy more. They have those resources now.

Jango never does ask what she did with the slavers.

“Who’s going to cry if I spice things properly?” he asks.

“Probably Leia,” she says immediately. “Vos will try to power through it even though he’s going to be overwhelmed. No idea about Tholme, but I think he’ll keep a straight face whether he likes it or not. Rex and I are fine, ‘hot’ was pretty much the only flavor of seasoning the GAR had.”

“GAR?”

“Grand Army of the Republic.”

He finally looks at her.

“You already knew I was a child soldier, Fett; don’t act surprised.”

“That doesn’t mean I like hearing about it.”

“I was fourteen. That’s old enough by Mando standards, Fett. Just think back, when did you get on the battlefield?”

“I take your point,” he says, lip curling unpleasantly. “It just hits different now that I’m old enough to look back and think of how damned young fourteen really is.”

Ahsoka shrugs. “Yeah, well--”

“You said the clones were ten.”

There’s the rub, isn’t it?

Of course it was about the clones.

“...closer to seven, by the end. Kamino was just making speedies at that point. Triple growth on the average instead of double, but averages in that case meant they’d been growing at double rates for six years and then got forced through four growth cycles in a single year to beef up the army when we kept losing men.” She looks down at the table, picking at a scratch in the plastipaint with her nail. “Rex and the rest of the ones from the beginning were basically twenty in mind and body, even if they’d only been decanted ten years earlier. The speedies... I always wondered. They’d gone from functionally twelve to functionally twenty in a year. That’s not... even in Kamino, that can’t have been normal. They didn’t act like adults, not the way the originals did.”

Fett rubs at his face, groaning. He swears under his breath in three different languages.

She pities him, if only because he hasn’t actually done any of this yet. He’s paying for the crimes of a man he likely won’t ever become.

She kicks him under the table. “Wanna make tiingilar and see how long it takes Vos to start crying while he insists it’s fine?”

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

Dinner is when the questions start. Some are relatively easy. Others, not so much.

“My Master was Leia’s biological father,” is an easy truth to share. “She inherited his power, so I need to get her to the temple for her own safety, because home no longer is.”

“Yes, her adoptive parents were unfortunately killed rather recently. We’d prefer not to talk about it.”

“Rex is with me. Where he goes, I go, and vice versa.”

That one gets her an odd look.

“I thought...” Quinlan trails off, gesturing between Rex and Fett.

Fett keeps his face impassive, but his discomfort and guilt leak into the Force. “I didn’t know Rex existed until I ran into these three in a spaceport cantina a few weeks ago.”

Quinlan blinks at him, looks at Rex again, and then turns back to Fett with a grin that might have been described as ‘saucy’ if he were less smug about it. “Wild oats, huh?”

“Are you shitting me right now,” Leia whispers, and Ahsoka elbows her.

“That was inappropriate, padawan.”

Quinlan’s grin fades as Fett just continues to eye him.

“Um, so--”

“How old is the kid?” Fett interrupts.

Darting eyes answer him, as Quinlan tries to gauge Rex. “Ten? Maybe twelve?”

“And how old am I?��

“...early thirties?”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

Quinlan’s grin fades further as he does the math.

“I’d have been between fifteen and seventeen when he was born,” Fett says, tone flat. “Between fourteen and sixteen at conception. I know damn well I wasn’t doing anything that could have resulted in a kid at that age.”

Quinlan rallies. “So, brothers?”

Tholme sighs loudly, hand over his eyes.

“I’m a clone,” Rex says, and Ahsoka can feel the amusement he gets out of Quinlan’s confused shock. They’d both had plenty of respect for Master Vos, but Padawan Vos was nothing but trouble. “Harvested genetic material, grown in a tube, inconsistent aging meaning I don’t even know how old I am for sure.”

“I broke him out,” Ahsoka adds, which is half true.

“There was a chip in my head,” Rex adds, with a bright smile. Quinlan’s discomfort grows. “She got it out. Also, lots of brothers. None of them are... around anymore. The creators were trying to make an army.”

Vos and Tholme have no response. Fett looks like he’s been carved out of stone. Leia’s just ignoring them and picking at her food.

Ahsoka lifts a hand and, without looking, Rex high-fives her.

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

“Drop your elbow.”

Ahsoka tries to cover her smile at the dirty look that Leia shoots Fett. Fett remains unimpressed by the glare of royalty, just gestures for the girl to do as he said.

“I know how to fight,” Leia grumbles. “I took lessons. I was good at them.”

“And I’m better,” Fett says, leaving no room for argument. “You want the Torrents to take over?”

The Torrents. Rex and Soka. She likes being referred to that way. Like they’re a team that never got split up.

Force, she wished they’d never gotten split up.

“Again,” Fett orders, and Leia moves through the Mandalorian kata with ill grace in her emotions and all grace in her sweeping limbs.

Well, as much grace as an undersized six-year-old can, at any rate.

“Think he’ll ask me to spar her again?” Rex asks, dropping down into the seat next to Ahsoka and passing her a drink.

“Maybe,” she acknowledges. “I think he’s wondering if it’s worth asking Vos to spar with her, so she gets more experience with size differences.”

“Hm?”

“She flinched at his face again,” she tells him. “The whole... thing with Boba, I guess. She still won’t tell me why Fett triggers her sometimes, but he’s not pressing her to spar with him, and there’s only so much she can get out of fighting me. Asking Tholme would be presumptuous, but Vos is just a padawan. I think it’d work out.”

“And you?”

She looks at him, already feeling a cresting wave of bullshit she doesn’t want to deal with. “What about me?”

“Are you going to spar with the Jedi?”

She should. She hasn’t sparred with a saber since she got tossed back into a body only half-familiar to her. She’s let Leia borrow the shorter one to learn some basic blocking moves, Shii-Cho and then, with hesitance, the first Soresu form. Another time, she loaned it to Rex to practice some attacks; they both know that the next time he picks up her saber in battle, having lost his weapons or she her grip, it will be neither the first or last time he wields a sword of light. None of that, however, is... sparring.

None of that is against someone who knows what they’re doing.

How long has it been since she sparred with anyone other than Kanan and Ezra?

How long has it been since she sparred without the looming specter of Darth Vader in the back of her mind, without fear of the Inquisitors, without the knowledge that any saber held by someone other than her two friends would be red as blood and twice as drenched.

Would she be able to hold back as she fought?

“I should,” she acknowledges, eyes on where Fett is nudging Leia’s feet into position for some kind of leveraging flip. She’s so small. “It would probably be a good idea to spar against a master at some point.”

“Do you think you can?” Rex asks.

“I never knew him,” she says. “And he isn’t Dark. It should be fine.”

Rex nods, taking her word for it. They watch as Leia stumbles on a final move, and Fett gestures for her to sit down and get a drink.

“That man is a terror,” she informs them.

(She’d once described him as a slave-driver. She had not made that mistake twice.)

“Least it’s not Kamino!” Rex tells her cheerfully. When Leia refuses to look impressed, he laughs at her.

Ahsoka has a half-second’s warning before heavy boots thud to the ground next to her. “What’s Kamino?”

“Hello, Vos, it’s nice to see you too,” she drawls. “I’m good, thanks for asking, and yourself?”

The boy-not-quite-man rolls his eyes. “Hi, Torrents; hi, tiny one.”

Leia glares at him next.

“So, Kamino?”

“Planet by Rishi,” Rex says.

“Why were you there?”

“They specialize in cloning.”

Ahsoka covers her mouth as the conversation drops into the same awkward gap that always happens when Quinlan stumbles into a subject he didn’t know to avoid.

“Like... you were made there, or you were researching how it works for your own--”

Ahsoka slaps a hand over his mouth. “Now’s a great time to stop talking.”

He licks her palm.

She bares her teeth and arches her fingers just enough to press nails into his cheek.

He bites at her palm, and she yanks her hand away.

“You’re all children,” Leia accuses, conveniently forgetting that Ahsoka and Rex are both over a decade older than her.

“I can throw you the length of a swimming pool,” Ahsoka tells her. “One of the fancy competition-ready ones that would make a Tatooinian cry. You are absolutely the child here.”

“Using the Force is cheating, sir,” Rex informs her.

“Only if there’s a competition,” Ahsoka shoots back. “And proving that a certain princess is a small child is not a competition. It’s a declarative fact.”

“I’m going to rip open the seams on all your tops except the ugliest one,” Leia decides.

“Try me,” Ahsoka challenges. “Adi’ka.”

A low, rough cough interrupts them. “Are you done?”

Fett has his arms crossed, and an eyebrow raised. He knows they’re all adults here, and is entirely unamused. As the silence drags, the eyebrow climbs a little higher.

“Done with what?” Quinlan finally asks, thereby volunteering himself to spar in hand-to-hand with Jango Fett, as one does.

“Poor, poor Vos,” Rex laughs, watching as Fett barks out orders at Quinlan every five seconds to fix his footwork, to stop dropping his guard, to stop wasting energy on flips instead of just dodging the easy way.

“Throw him!” Ahsoka calls. To her delight, Fett obliges.

The thing is, Quinlan isn’t bad at brawling. He’s got training, endurance, skill. The man knows what he’s doing, objectively. He’s just not a match for Fett, and is used enough to relying on his saber that his hand-to-hand skills are rusty. They are perhaps less rusty than those Jedi who don’t take questionable jobs in the Mid-Outer Rim, and Ahsoka’s got a suspicion that Vos regularly gets into bar fights in his downtime, but none of that is enough for him to actually do more than survive against Fett without his saber.

Even the saber wouldn’t help, if Fett had his armor.

“Whose idea was this?”

Ahsoka cranes her head back and smiles. “Hello, Master Tholme. Vos... volunteered.”

“Did he know he was volunteering?”

“No comment.”

Tholme snorts, crossing his arms and eyeing the spar in front of him. “I thought Fett hated Jedi. Giving us a ride for the sake of you three is one thing, but why is he teaching my padawan?”

Ahsoka shrugs. “Constructive bullying?”

There’s a small twitch of a smile, quickly gone. “He said something wrong, I’m guessing?”

“There was no way he could have known,” she dismisses. “We’re just, like, ninety-percent tragic backstories.”

“You’d think the Force would warn him,” Rex notes.

“That’s not how the Force works,” Leia chides.

“No, no, he’s right,” Ahsoka corrects. “The Force does sometimes step in to stop a person from saying something stupid. However, Padawan Vos is at an age where people think they are very rational while being more irrational than they likely ever will be again.”

“Do I want to ask what you were doing at that age?” Tholme asks.

“Running bla...” she trails off, then whips around to gape at him.

He smiles, bland and unassuming. “Does Fett know?”

“Know... what?” Ahsoka asks.

“That you’re significantly older than you look,” he says, voice just low enough that the sparring duo can’t hear him. “All three of you.”

Ahsoka turns back to the spar, only catching Tholme out of the corner of her eye. “He knows.”

“Mm. Were you planning on telling the Council?”

“Yes.” That part was never in question. “How did you figure it out?”

“I am a good investigator,” he says. “And you rely a little too heavily on your physical forms to obfuscate. Were it just one of you, that wouldn’t be a problem, but the pattern repeated across three is a little easier to discern.”

“I hoped the whole ‘child soldiers’ thing would be a bigger distraction,” Ahsoka mutters. She glances at Leia and Rex. Both of them are used to being in charge to some degree, giving orders and making contingency plans, but in this... in this, Ahsoka is in charge. They’d decided that at the very start. It didn’t matter that Rex had lived longer and had more experience, or that Leia had held the highest Rebellion rank of the three of them. Ahsoka had been agreed as leader, and they were relying on her.

They’re waiting on her orders. Stiff and unhappy, in Leia’s case, but they trust her.

“Will you be telling Vos?” She asks.

“No,” Tholme says. “Your secrets remain your own unless they endanger us, and I’ve a feeling they won’t be.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Rex jokes, smile not reaching his eyes. “I’ve been working with this family for too long to trust that trouble won’t find them around the next corner.”

“This family?” Tholme repeats.

“Sokari was telling the truth about her master being Leia’s biological father,” Rex says. He shrugs. “I worked with him, with his wife, with both of his kids, with his master and his padawan. All of them, to a one, are trouble magnets.”

“Ah, but that’s not the secret that’s putting us in danger,” Tholme points out. “Simply existence as a Jedi.”

Rex shrugs. “Fair enough. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.”

Ahsoka lurches to her feet, turning with a smile and dancing backward into the the stretch of empty cargo hold they used for such things. “A spar, Master Tholme?”

He looks past her, to Quinlan, and raises a brow. “Would you not prefer to spar with someone a little closer to your level first?”

She barks out a laugh. “Master Tholme, I’m afraid I’ve spent more of my life fighting to survive than having normal friendly spars. My style is more lethal than the average, and you’ve already seen what war’s done to my mind. I ask to spar with you because, if I lose control, if I slip in time or react on an instinct that isn’t appropriate, I trust that you’ll be more able to stop me than a senior padawan.”

He smiles. “Yes, I gathered as much. Still, better to ask. Shall we wait for them to finish up?”

Ahsoka shrugs, turns, and yells. “Clear the deck!”

Rex snorts behind her, and lowly mutters, “Sir, yes, sir.”

She smirks at him over her shoulder. “At ease, Captain.”

“That’s ‘Commander’ to you, I got promoted,” he sniffs, chin held high.

Heavy steps herald Fett’s arrival at their little group. “The hells are you doing?”

“I’m going to have a spar with a Jedi Master, and I want you and Vos to not get stabbed.”

“I’m not that easy to injure in an actual fight, let alone by accident,” Fett grouses. He looks up and over at Vos, who is already significantly taller, if a fair shot less built. “This one, on the other hand...”

“Hey!”

Ahsoka laughs and backs into the center of the cargo hold, drawing her sabers. “Don’t worry, Vos, I won’t play dirty. You’ll probably get your master back in one piece.”

He wrinkles his nose at her. “Getting a bit ahead of yourself there, aren’t you? He’s a Jedi Master and former Watchman. You’re... what, eighteen?”

Ahsoka raises a brow and activates her sabers, tapping the blades together and watching as more than one person winces. “Wanna bet on how long I last?”

“No,” he says immediately, stepping back to join Rex on the bench. “You’ve already blindsided me enough. I’m not dumb enough to fall for whatever you’ve got up your sleeve.”

“I don’t have sleeves.”

“Armwarmers-slash-greaves, then.”

“Greaves go on the legs, these are vambraces.”

He throws his hands up in the air. “I’m just going to stop talking now!”

“Good plan,” Leia snarks, and then literally hisses when Rex ruffles her hair.

Tholme lights his saber and sinks into an opening stance.

Ahsoka mirrors him.

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

She wins, but barely. She's had a few weeks to practice her forms, has sparred hands-only with Rex and Fett, but this is her first real try at using her sabers against a person, instead of a blaster or thin air, since she arrived in the past. She’s only mostly adjusted to her body.

But Tholme is a healer and a watchman, not a duelist. Ahsoka held her own against Ventress, against Grievous, against Maul when she was this age. Still adjusting to her body or not, her lineage is one of battle, and it bled true.

“You’re terrifying,” Quinlan tells her after they’re done, smiling like the sun as he hands her a towel. “Please never turn that on me.”

She laughs at him. “Would you believe that I’m out of practice?”

“Out of practice with what?” he asks, horrified and fascinated. “Fighting Sith Lords?”

“Among other things,” she says, and smirks when he chokes on his drink. “Multiple darkside users who claimed to be Sith, at least. One being a full Lord, one that was disowned by his master, and one that was apprenticed to a Banite apprentice, so she wasn’t technically allowed to be a Darth because of the rule of two.”

Tholme meets her eyes past Quinlan’s shoulder, head tilted and eyes half-shut in consideration. He’s taking her seriously. He knows what she’s not saying.

“How...” Quinlan trails off and shakes his head. “You know what, no. Asking you people questions never ends well.”

“Good plan,” Ahsoka says, clapping a hand down on his shoulder. “Also, you need to spar with Fett more. Your footwork is shit.”

“It is not,” Quinlan gripes. “You’re all just scary good at this stuff.”

“You mean surviving?” Leia pipes up, and smiles innocently when Quinlan turns to pout at her.

“You’re getting bullied by a six-year-old,” Rex informs him.

“Yeah,” Quinlan sighs. “I know.”

Ahsoka laughs, and it’s fine. It’s all fine. For a week, everything is honestly great. She trains, she laughs, she works through the nightmares.

Then fucking Denon happens.

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

Denon is a city-planet on the intersection of two major hyperlanes. It’s the kind of place where they stop for two things:

Fuel.

Paperwork.

Technically, there’s a whole mess of paperwork they have to fill out to continue along this specific hyperlane, since they aren’t official Republic ships, and don’t have the licenses to just pass along like ships that are pre-registered to the Trade Federation or the like. They could sneak past--literally all of them know smuggler’s routes--but it’s honestly less of a pain to do things legally. They have a Jedi Master. They have cash. Some of that cash wasn’t quite legally acquired, but nobody needs to know that.

It’s supposed to be a pit stop. That’s all.

It’s just a pit stop.

But no, the galaxy isn’t that kind and Ahsoka’s luck is currently being compounded with a Skywalker, two Fetts, and Vos, which means that of course they run into trouble. Of course they do. There was never any other option, was there?

“Motherfucker,” Ahsoka snaps, lifting her head up and slamming her drink on the table.

The glass is empty. That’s good. They’re in a restaurant right now, a little splurging after weeks with only each others’ company, and spilling the sugary child-friendly juice with that move would have drawn way too much attention from the servers.

“Language,” Tholme says, voice idly unconcerned.

“Sir?” Rex asks, kicking Ahsoka under the table. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wr--that jackass,” she hisses, getting to her feet. “Rex, grab a blaster, I’ve got shebs to kick.”

“Okay,” Rex says, grabbing one out of Fett’s holster and scooting out of the booth before anyone can tell him not to. “Whose?”

“I didn’t even know that he was... osik, I don’t have jurisdiction,” she realizes. “I don’t have any record of wrongdoing. I can’t arrest him since we don’t have evidence of criminal wrongdoing...”

“Are you two going to explain what’s going on?” Vos asks. “Or sit down, maybe?”

Ahsoka makes her decision. She eyes the window--the restaurant in question is a little dingy, but it’s also several dozen stories in the air. “Rex, remember the thing we did on Geonosis that you hated?”

He pauses, and then sighs heavily. “Yes, sir. I remember the... yeeting.”

Hah. That slang doesn’t even exist yet.

“Great. With me!”

It’s a good thing the windows are forcefields instead of transparisteel. A bit of a twist to the energy and they’re gone.

She only hears a little screaming before the wind tears all noises away while they plummet.

They land lightly--of course--and Ahsoka wraps them both in a don’t notice me aura. Nobody even notices that they’ve just come from above. It’s great that she can just Do These Things again, and get brushed off as Weird Jedi Shit, instead of worrying about the Empire. She’s missed being able to jump out of windows without fear.

Rex follows her as she starts running through the city. They don’t have comms, and he’s still so small, which means he can’t keep up with her even if she runs at normal speeds without Force enhancement.

“Should you carry me?” he asks, before she can figure out if it’s worth suggesting. She did it a few times before they joined up with Jango.

“It’s not... urgent, I think,” she says. She hesitates to speak, even as she keeps jogging with Rex at her heels. “Honestly, I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything I can ding him for so we can attack him. It’s all well and good that I can beat him right now, but all the crimes I know about haven’t happened yet, so it wouldn’t be legal...”

“Commander?”

“Hm?”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

She scrolls the conversation back mentally, considers, and says, “Oh.”

“Who’s getting steamrolled?”

“Uh, Maul’s here,” Ahsoka admits.

“Ah,” Rex says. He makes a face. “I understand the desire to jump out a window, now. I don’t agree with it, but I understand.”

Ahsoka laughs. “I mean, I just... every time I’ve seen him for almost twenty years, it’s been like... on sight, you know? We’ve never not attacked each other, except when I needed him to cause problems on Mandalore. But I always knew I was in the right, then.”

“So... what do we arrest him for?” Rex prompts.

“Um... carrying a lightsaber without a license?” she hazards. “We’ll need Tholme there. Hopefully I can just shout at him and he’ll attack me, but I think he only went full nutjob after Master Kenobi cut his legs off. He might be too controlled to try to kill me just for yelling at him.”

“...do we have to stalk him?” Rex asks, sounding like he’d most likely sigh if he weren’t mid-run.

She scoops him up and swings him around onto her back before she answers. “I think we have to stalk him, Rex’ika.”

“Don’t call me that.”

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

Maul is... exceptionally sneaky, actually. Either that, or he hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Ahsoka’s betting on the former, because she’s seen this particular skocha kung take over a planet before anyone realized he was the most dangerous person around.

Or maybe he’s just not committing crimes, and is in fact just here to buy groceries.

He’s examining a papaya.

She fantasizes about jumping across the market and greeting him with a heel to the cheekbone.

“Are you imagining a flying kick, Sir?”

“Yeah...”

“He’s examining a papaya, Sir.”

“I know...”

“Does he know we’re here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? Do you think I should go hit him?”

“No.”

“Should I hit on him?”

“No, Sir. I would not advise that.”

“He’s looking at the neloms.”

“I can see that.”

“Why does he have to be so bo--did he just fucking bite a nelom?”

“It appears so, Sir.”

“Like... like rind and all. Just bit the little fucker.”

“Seems it.”

A scuff of metal. “What the fuck are you two doing?”

Ahsoka tips her head around to peer through the grate. “We’re spying, Fett, what does it look like we’re doing?”

Rex cranes his head. “We’re hanging upside-down from a fire escape to get a look at a suspected Sith Apprentice that is currently shopping for various fruits, Mand’alor.”

Ahsoka waves. “Hi, Master Tholme.”

“Sokari,” the master greets. “This seems a very conspicuous way to spy.”

She shrugs as well as she can from this angle. “Yes, but you see, this way’s more fun.”

“Is it now.”

Rex shifted. “He’s on the move!”

“To kill someone?!”

“No, to the deli meats.”

“Kriff.”

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

Apparently, Tholme and Fett had told Quinlan to take care of Leia, as Leia had wanted to finish her juice and refused to get involved in the Torrents’ nonsense. According to her, if they couldn’t be bothered to explain the nonsense, they didn’t need her.

This was true and accurate.

Quinlan shows up while they’re still stalking Maul, having moved to a low rooftop for a decent vantage point with less likelihood of being spotted. He’s giving Leia an eopie-back ride, and the pout on her face at needing it is adorable. She pouts harder when she sees them.

“Are you even trying to hide?” Leia scoffs.

“Not really,” Ahsoka admits. She’s got Fett’s binoculars out. “I’m not sure he’s caught wind of the fact that we’re here yet.”

“Or he has and he’s just biding his time to escape while we’re distracted,” Tholme points out.

“Meh,” Ahsoka says, avidly devouring the visual that is a teenage Maul glaring at leafy vegetables. “I just want him to do something so I have an excuse to beat his ass.”

“Do I get to know who?” Quinlan asks, setting Leia down on the roof. “Or are we going to keep being completely unwilling to share information?”

“Baby Sith Lord,” Ahsoka says. “He’s fifteen. A child.”

“A baby,” Rex agrees.

“You’re... that’s... ugh,” Quinlan groans as loudly and as dramatically as he dares, flopping down to the rooftop. “Master Tholme, please tell me this isn’t a real Sith.”

“He’s Dark,” Tholme confirms. “Sith is... up for debate until we have evidence.”

“He’s a bitch is what he is,” Ahsoka mutters. She observes the teenager in question stop to poke at some pink tomatoes. “E chu ta, break the law, already!”

“Does he have a lightsaber?” Quinlan asks. “If he has a lightsaber and no Jedi ID or specialty license, we can probably arrest him.”

“Auntie Soka doesn’t have a license or ID,” Leia points out.

“She’s got a Jedi escort,” Tholme says. “And if our supposed Sith is polite and plays nice, we can probably escort him to the Temple as well.”

Rex snorts derisively.

“Do you know why he’s on Denon?” Fett asks.

“No clue,” Ahsoka admits. “Evil reasons, probably.”

“You’re useless,” Leia tells her.

“Thanks, princess, how’s that attempt to open the jam jar by yourself coming?”

Leia says something very inappropriate for a princess, for a child, and for a lady. It’s fairly appropriate for a soldier, which is admittedly what she’s been for a few years now. Ahsoka sticks her tongue out at the girl like the mature operative she is.

“I wish we could still get him to lose his osik by just showing up and insulting him,” Rex mutters, low enough that Quinlan probably can’t hear.

“I wanna punch him in the face,” Ahsoka confesses. “I want him to try to punch me in the face, and fail.”

“Don’t bully the baby Sith,” Rex admonishes.

“He’s a Sith.”

“He’s fifteen, it’s tacky.”

“But it’s Maul.”

“I know, but you’re tw--significantly older than him.”

“But... but it’s the motherfucker himself.”

“...you can bully him a little, but only because he’s a Sith.”

Fett steals the binoculars. “You can borrow them again when you stop acting like children.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rex says, dry as Ryloth. “I’m ten.”

“Pretty tall for your age,” Ahsoka mutters, and then giggles.

“Don’t steal my jokes,” Rex says. He elbows her, hard.

“You know,” Quinlan says, slow and tired. “Master Tholme and I are trained investigators.”

Ahsoka and Rex look at each other, and then up at him.

“Okay?”

“...do you want me to find actual evidence of this guy doing something criminal?”

“Oh, yes please.”

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

Quinlan, as it turns out, is not overselling his skills. He does catch Maul doing something illegal later that day. It’s a little more ‘stealing corporate secrets in the dead of night’ and less ‘torturing people for kicks,’ but it’s still enough to legally arrest him. Quinlan attempts to do so.

Quinlan does not succeed, and is forced to jump out a window to avoid getting cut in half. Maul follows, steals a passing speeder by throwing out the driver, and takes off. Someone--looks like Tholme--drops back to save the driver, but the rest of them give chase. Ahsoka gleefully takes point on that, of course. She’s the best pilot.

(Rex looks bored, but someone is likely to puke by the end of the night. She hopes it’s not Leia, who insisted on coming for some fucking reason.)

“How the kriff is a teenager that good?!” Quinlan yells, clinging to the edge of the speeder to avoid getting tipped out as Ahsoka swerves around a corner with a wild laugh.

“He’s a Sith!” Leia shouts over the wind. “What do you think?”

Quinlan is not impressed by the claim of Sith.

Ahsoka screeches as she drifts across four lanes of traffic and into an alleyway to pursue Maul. He’s pretty good at dodging cross-building walkways, but she’s better. She bares her teeth, hissing, and tries to pick a plan.

“Vos, how’s your aim with Force throws?” She calls to the backseat.

“Uh, decent?”

“Great! Fett’s the projectile!”

Vos takes a second longer to process that than Jango does.

“I’m wh--”

He cuts off, screaming, and is flung forward by Quinlan to crash headfirst into a teenage Sith.

“Take the wheel!” Ahsoka commands, not waiting to see who follows the order, because Fett and Maul are both getting to their feet, the other speeder is about to crash, and she’s not sure who’s going to win that fight.

She jumps from the speeder they’ve been violently dragging around Denon, and lands feet-first on Maul’s... shoulder.

Hm.

That definitely dislocated something.

“You should wear armor!” she chirps at him, drawing both sabers and grinning as he whirls to face her, eyes wide with hate.

He’s utterly silent.

That’s disturbing. Expected, but disturbing.

“Did you just throw me?” Fett demands, higher pitched than she’d normally expect.

“No, Vos threw you.”

“Because you told him to!”

“Yeah, it’s a good strategy!”

“It is not!”

“Why not? Throwing people was standard practice in the GAR.”

She can’t see his face, but she’s pretty sure he’s about ready to strangle her.

Ahsoka cannot, at that point, continue snarking with the father of her best friend, because there’s a red lightsaber coming for her throat, and she should probably worry about that. Maul’s very good at killing people and she’d like to avoid becoming part of that statistic.

As she is quickly reminded, he is... fifteen. And shorter than she’s used to. And already injured.

It’s really, really easy to take him out, actually.

At some point, the other speeder was safely recovered before it caused property damage, and their own is landing a few meters away with Vos and the kids.

“You have Force-negating cuffs, right?” Ahsoka asks.

“No, Master Tholme has them.”

“Oh,” she says, and grimaces. “I guess I’ll just... keep sitting on him then.”

Maul snarls, and she raps him on the skull. “Stop that, it’s uncivilized.”

Rex snorts.

Jango makes a noise that is incredibly frustrated with the lot of them, and turns on Rex. “Was she telling the truth?”

“About?”

“Throwing people being standard practice for the GAR.”

Rex’s face goes pained. “It was in the five-oh-first. And a few others.”

“What’s the GAR?” Quinlan asks.

“None of your damn business,” Fett snaps.

Quinlan throws his hands up in the air again. “Come on! I just proved I know what I’m doing!”

“And their tragic backstory is none of your business, prudii!”

Quinlan blinks at him, and then glances at Ahsoka. “Um.”

“He called you a shadow since your training, um, seems to be pointing in that direction,” she says as carefully as she can. “We were theorizing.”

“Wh... you actually paid attention?” Quinlan asks, looking horribly confused. “I thought I was just annoying you.”

Ahsoka laughs at him. “Oh, Vos... I’ve been running black ops for... much longer than most would guess. Trust me, I know another spy when I see them.”

She smiles as kindly as she can, because she hadn’t actually meant to make him feel left out or unwanted or... well, she’d been pretty patronizing, especially for someone seemingly younger than him. The smile does not work. Quinlan just looks kind of horrified about how young she just implied she started spy work.

Granted, she’d been sixteen for Zygerria...

Deciding to ignore him for a bit, she shifts on Maul’s back and pats him on the cheek. “Don’t worry, Baby Sith. We’re going to get you lots of nice therapy. Mind healers, no Sith tortures, all that fun stuff. Maybe some plushies.”

“You’re also getting therapy, right?” Quinlan asks. “Please say you are. I’m required for the specifics of my training and if anything you’ve said is true, I feel like you really need it and I’m scared of what’ll happen if you don’t.”

Ahsoka laughs, knowing exactly how empty it sounds. “Oh hell, if I didn’t get therapy, I imagine Kix would rise from the grave to force me into it.”

The name means nothing to anyone except Rex, and... ah, yeah, she told Fett about Kix a few weeks ago.

“No more throwing me without warning,” Fett grumbles, dropping to sit on the ground next to her. “Especially not at baby Sith Lords.”

“I am not a child!” Maul spits.

“He speaks!” Ahsoka cheers. “Aw, I knew you could do it.”

“’Soka, I told you not to bully him,” Rex complains. “It’s tacky. You’re being tacky.”

“I’m allowed to be tacky,” Ahsoka declares. “I’ve died twice, that’s, like, permission from the universe.”

“You’ve died twice?” Quinlan asks, back in ‘fascinated horror’ territory. “Wait, no, I shouldn’t ask--”

“Too late! The first time was on a planet that doesn’t exist and my Master lost his mind, killed a god, and used the good favor of another god to have me brought back to life at her expense. Not in that order.”

“I--what? No, that’s--what?”

Ahsoka smiles brightly. “You asked.”

Tholme finally shows up with the cuffs.

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

“You should eat something.”

He glares at her.

“Baby Sith Lords need to eat.”

He keeps glaring at her.

“Maul, you’ll never get big and strong and ready to kill if you don’t eat your vegetables.”

He bares his teeth.

“No, I don’t eat my veggies, but I’m a Togruta, so if I eat too many vegetables I throw up.”

Rex kicks her thigh, right on the faulds. “What did I say about bullying the Sith Lord?”

“Not to.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Making him eat his vegetables.”

“Soka.”

“Rex’ika.”

He kicks at her again. “Get up, we’re swapping out the watch.”

“But I wanted to hang out with my favorite little criminal mastermind.”

Rex drops to the floor and presses his forehead to her shoulder. “How the hell is being around this guy the first thing to make you cheer up in weeks?”

“I’m allowed to be mean to him.”

“He’s going to bite you.”

“I’ll bite back.”

Rex jabs a finger into her ribs, and she squeaks. “Go get something to eat, Commander.”

“Fine,” she huffs, rolling to her feet and moseying along to the galley. She walks in on Tholme and Fett having an argument about the ways in which Jedi and Mandalorians differ. Quinlan’s on the side, watching with wide eyes, and little Leia’s drinking a juice box at his side, tucked up under his arm and occasionally saying things to fan the flames. Ahsoka assumes she’s enjoying herself.

She opens the cooling unit, looks over the contents, and pulls out a raw leg of eopie mutton. She leans against the counter, bites into the chilled-but-not-frozen meat, and uses the back of one hand to wipe the blood off her chin. The ‘real adults’ don’t notice.

“I’m like ninety percent sure you’re doing this to mess with me but also...” Quinlan trails off, staring at her with horror. “Why?”

“A girl’s gotta eat.”

“Yeah, but all the obligate carnivores I know are like... generally holding to basic rules of courtesy when it comes to not grossing people out,” Quinlan says. “Like, I don’t chew with my mouth open. You don’t... eat in the most intimidating--did you just crack the bone with your teeth?!”

Ahsoka smirks at him, using her free hand to take away the shard of bone so she can suck out the marrow without eating the bones themselves. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this isn’t polite society. We’re in a galley on a bounty hunter’s ship, and I’ve been living on the run or in an army for most of my life. Table manners are optional.”

“No, they’re not,” Leia orders. “Fett, it’s your ship, tell her to--”

“--and another thing!” Fett snaps at Tholme, clearly paying less than no attention to the food argument.

Ahsoka keeps on eating, trying to catch wind of where the discussion’s at. Mostly, it seems to be at ‘talking past each other.’ Neither of them seems to have fully grasped more than the absolute most basic parts of the other culture, and that’s only enough to insult each other, not actually have a constructive conversation. She’d have expected more out of Tholme, at least. He’s not exactly young.

“Hey, quick question,” she says, in a moment where both of them have paused for breath and the opportunity to seethe. “Fett, when’s the last time you worked with a Jedi, or any member of a Force-based religion, before I popped into your life?”

His nose scrunches up as he makes a face.

“And Tholme, when’s the last time you worked with anyone from the Mandalorian system?”

Tholme’s reaction isn’t any more gracious than Fett’s.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says. “Vos, were either of them actually interested in that conversation, or just looking for an excuse to yell?”

“Now listen here, jetiika--”

“Fett,” she snaps. “I am not a child.”

“And neither am I,” he growls right back. “This is my ship, and I damn well don’t need you treating me like a misbehaving youngling. You’ve got a problem, you bring it to my face, not get all smug about people’s tempers blowing over.”

Well, then.

She smiles thinly. “Of course.”

He stands with his arms crossed, in full armor save for the helmet. She puts aside the eopie meat and wipes her hands, smiling until she can put her hands on her hips and let it drop to a challenge.

“You know, I’m just--I’m just gonna go,” Quinlan mutters, pulling Leia out with him, the girl hanging from under one of his arms. “This, uh, this looks like a problem for... you folks. Um. Yeah.”

He sidles out.

Tholme doesn’t.

Fett rubs at the bridge of his nose, and then gestures at the table. “Sit.”

“I’d prefer not to.”

He drops his hand and glares at her. “We have another week on this ship together. We are going to have this conversation. Sit.”

She sits, right on the warm spot left behind by Quinlan and Leia. She crosses her arms, lifts a brow, and waits.

Fett takes the seat across from her. Tholme leans against the counter.

“We all know you’re older than you look,” Fett says. “I heard Tholme mention it, I know that much has been shared. You’re acting like an actual teenager, and I’ve... I’ve put up with a lot. I am trying to keep things civil, particularly with you. I’ve tried to be friendly. You’ve been fucked up since we met, fine, everyone’s got trauma. The thing where you’ve started talking shit to our faces for what seems like your own amusement? That has to stop. You’re older than me, Torrent. Fucking act like it.”

She blinks at him, slow and not exactly happy, and turns to Tholme.

The man shrugs. “I was planning to put up with it until we arrived to the temple and handed you over to some mind healers. Fett doesn’t have that kind of time.”

There’s a curdle in her stomach, defensive and angry and guilty.

“You’ve been... a bitch,” Fett finally says. “You know that. I’m not going to mince words. You’ve been holier-than-thou and rude and condescending, and aiming that at Antilles is one thing, when you’ve apparently known her since she was a toddler and taught her things. Aiming at the rest of us isn’t going to fly. We’re all adults trying to share a space. Stop acting like... just like you have been.”

There is no defense to be made that they aren’t both already aware of.

She closes her eyes and tries to strangle the burst of irrational rage.

Their accusations aren’t unfounded.

They deserve an apology.

She is in the wrong.

She’s felt freer than she had in years, and in that freedom allowed herself too much rein, let herself lace her words with barbed wires and poison instead of sparks and spices, comments that were cruel instead of just joking. Too familiar. Too comfortable.

“My behavior’s been inappropriate,” she finally says, the words clumsy and too big in her mouth. “You’re right about that. I’m sorry, and I’ll endeavor to keep a tighter rein on my less pleasant behaviors in the future.”

At least she only lashes out with words. It could be worse.

She opens her eyes, fixes her gaze on the wall behind Fett, wrestles her expression into stiff neutrality. “Am I dismissed?”

“...uh, no, not after that,” Fett says, sounding just a little horrified. “What the hell was that?”

Tholme hisses out a breath. “Let her go.”

“No, this needs to be discussed, that’s not a healthy rea--”

“Fett, let her go,” Tholme insists, low and heavy.

Fett looks between the two for a moment, seems to come to a realization he doesn’t like, and then gestures almost violently towards the door. “Fine. Go.”

She walks out, doesn’t sprint. She’s stiff. She’s controlled. She’s the one that fucked up, so it’s fine if she doesn’t feel great right now. Getting called out on one’s own failings as a person isn’t something to get upset about if the failings are real. The feelings are real and normal, but this was her fault, and so it’s up to her to fix it, and she can’t let them know it hurt her, because this was her mistake.

She goes to the cargo hold.

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

Ahsoka works out her frustrations on Fett’s punching bag. She does not augment herself with the Force, just uses raw strength and technique, ignoring the tears that press at her eyes.

She’s fine.

It’s not weird. It’s not odd. It’s not strange to not notice she’s been kind of a bitch since her mood came up with the whole Depa thing, and then Maul. She’s been mean, mostly to Vos and Fett, and nobody’s confronted her about it until now. They let her have room for her trauma, and she hadn’t reined it in. She’s just gotten worse.

‘Snippy’ she’d always been, but age apparently hadn’t fucking tempered it.

“Um.”

She catches the punching bag, breathing heavily and covered in sweat. She hasn’t worked out all the twitchy, nervous energy yet.

“Vos,” she greets, once she’s caught herself enough that her voice won’t waver. He’s on the other side of the bag, but she knows his voice. “Do you need something?”

“You’re kind of... projecting,” he tells her, drifting to where she can actually see him. “Not self-loathing, but, um, recrimination? You just don’t feel very good and I was hoping to help”

Why in all the Sith hells does he have to be nice.

“I got called out on my behavior and wasn’t ready to face the fact that I’d kriffed up,” she tells him. “I’ll be fine. And I’m... sorry. I haven’t been fair to you and was using you as an easy target for some of my ruder comments.”

“I mean, I kind of figured,” he admits, coming closer. “I’ve been tutored by Shadows before, and a lot of them act like you. I just assumed it was more of that.”

“I still shouldn’t have let myself run loose like that,” she says. “I’m... it wasn’t appropriate. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

He shrugs, not meeting her eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she says. “Not with... not with you. Or anyone other than Rex and a mind healer, really. Most of it is...”

She trails off, distantly noticing that her eyes are tearing up enough to blur her vision, and her nails are digging into the bag in a way Fett won’t appreciate.

There’s so much that beat her down, never quite breaking her, that she doesn’t even know what made her act the way she does.

“Want to spar?”

She looks over at him, wonders what he sees that makes him want to fight her when she’s visibly unstable.

He smiles, kind and easy, and it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. It’s genuine in intent, if not in energy. He wants to help. “You all keep saying I could work on my hand-to-hand. Just take off the armor so I don’t break a finger, maybe.”

“You’re serious.”

“No, I’m Quinlan.”

She’s going to wipe the floor with this boy. “You sure you wanna fight me?”

“You won’t be able to meditate until you do,” he says. He’s right, damn him. “The other option is that I go get your... vod, I think? I go get Rex and you two can talk it out since you trust him with more. I don’t want to do that, though, he’s still a kid.”

She eyes him, lips pressed together and mind awhirl with emotions and thoughts she’d tried to beat out of her head and into the bag. “Ever fought someone without the Force?”

“...yes?”

“Was it cuffs?”

“Oh, you meant me not having the Force,” he realizes. “Er, no. Is... is that something you’ve done a lot?”

She smiles at him. “You’re planning on Shadow work. That means getting captured and stripped of everything you are at some point, Force included. Unfortunately, the cuffs are in use on a very annoying Dathomirian right now, so we’ll have to make do with you shielding like your mind’s a Kessel Spice Mine.”

“...do I want to know how often you’ve been captured?”

“No, you don’t.”

When he comes at her, it’s easy to dodge. It’s easy to tap him on target points, little pokes that show she could take him out, but isn’t going to until he’s learned something. He stays grinning throughout, letting her take the lead, and he treats her like... like a knight. Like a teacher. He’s stepped back and gone from trying to impress her as a fellow padawan, to proving himself to a full knight.

She’s not sure when that change happened, or why or how, but it makes things much smoother. She wants to think that it would have even if she hadn’t gotten a wakeup call from Fett.

So she treats him the way she treated Ezra, for the year she’d spent traveling with Kanan. She treats him as a student that’s willing to learn, good but not yet great, competent but not yet ready to survive. She draws him into the kind of chest-heaving exhaustion that tells a fighter just how much energy they waste.

(Ahsoka may have had her own style, but her grandmaster had been the pinnacle of a Soresu user. She’d spent years on the frontlines of a war. She knew the worth of conserving energy, and she’d teach it to any who stepped in to challenge her.)

“Who taught you to fight like this?” He asks, when they’ve taken a handful of moments to circle each other. His steps are heavy, sure, planted. Her own are light and ready.

“Soldiers,” she says. It’s true enough.

“Not your Master?” he asks, just as he tries to kick for her upper arm. It’s a safe question. For anyone else, it would be a safe question.

But for Ahsoka, it’s another chink in the armor, after a maelstrom of emotion, a storm of self-loathing, a dervish of instability.

She doesn’t break right away.

She spirals. She fights Quinlan, but doesn’t quite see him. Her strikes get sloppy, her feet stumble. She can’t make herself meet Quinlan’s eyes, not when the scrape of his heel against the metal sounds like the rasp of a breathing machine. Her shields get fuzzy, she knows, and she leaks what she feels into the air, making it sour and thick. She doesn’t notice, because all she can see, all she can--all she can hear and feel and--

She drops to her knees and grabs at her head, trying to stop it.

“Sokari?”

She breathes. In and out, harsh and jagged but natural in a way that the damned respirator wasn’t.

Her master her teacher her brother the traitor the hound the executioner

Her face is hot. Something prickles. It might be tears.

She tries to say something, tries to say a name or a request, tries to make anything come out of her mouth that isn’t the broken wail of a woman who hasn’t let herself think about how she died.

She feels herself pulled into someone’s arms, and she can’t quite tell who, but they’re bigger than she is, and feel warm and worried. They care. They don’t understand, they’re scared, but they care.

Her hands shake, clutched to her chest and she can’t breathe she can’t make herself take in enough air to do a Force-damned thing the empire is going to feel her her shields are down and broken and her emotions are spilling and the empire is going to find HER ANAKIN IS GOING TO FIND HER AND--

“COMMANDER!”

Rex.

Rex is here.

Her breath is coming so fast that she’s hiccupping more than she’s actually inhaling. She feels small hands in gloves on either side of her face, and then her forehead presses to something warm.

Rex. A Keldabe kiss. Her brother, her partner, her other half. He’s here. He’s calm. If he’s calm, then things are fine.

“What happened?” Light voice, high voice, small and distant. Leia. Little Leia little princess Leia she’s in danger she’s in trouble Anakin will--

“Commander.”

No. Here and now. She needs to focus on here and now. Her throat feels cold. She breathes too fast, still. She can’t stop it.

“I don’t know.” That’s Vos. He was... they were doing something. He was here. Talking to her. “We were sparring, and she just--”

Right, sparring.

“I don’t know if I said something?” He offers, voice pitching up, unsure and worried. Is he the one holding her? He’s the one holding her. That’s embarrassing.

“Commander?” Rex prompts. “Commander, can you open your eyes?”

She tries. She can’t. She shakes her head.

“Soka?” he asks, voice quiet. “Where are you?”

“F-F-Fett,” she manages. It’s enough.

“And where were you?”

His voice is so soft. So worried. She held him the same way after Mandalore, after Order 66, after all his brothers, all her friends...

“Soka.”

Her mind is spinning, and suddenly all she can hear is Anakin Skywalker is dead. I destroyed him.

Her breath hitches, and she wails.

“Commander,” Rex tries again, but her head is a vortex of Then you will die and Perhaps this child and not the Jedi way.

Our long awaited meeting.

I destroyed him.

Then you will die.

She can’t breathe she can’t breathe she can only see that yellow eye that’s too familiar but belongs to a stranger can only hear a voice that shouldn’t exist can only mourn and break and--

“Soka?”

“Malachor,” she manages. “I--h-he--I died.”

“What did you say?” someone asks. A vod. It’s the right voice, almost, rough and business-like, not accusing anyone yet, and... and... no. No. Not one of her boys. It’s Fett.

“Um, right at the end? I asked her who taught her to fight like this,” Quinlan says, nervous. “And she said it was soldiers. And I joked, I asked that it wasn’t her Master, and she didn’t answer that. A couple minutes later, she just started...”

“Oh, Soka,” Rex whispers, pulling her closer. “Commander, just breathe with me.”

“H-h-he, he just--R-Rex, he j-just--and I c-c-couldn’t--”

“I know,” her captain whispers. “I know, just breathe with me.”

“He k-k-k-killed me,” she sobs, falling out of the Keldabe and into too-small arms. “I l-loved--he was my broth-ther and--and he just--he killed me, he didn’t even stop.”

“I know,” Rex whispers. “Soka, I know.”

Of course he does.

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

“It was just bad timing,” Rex says, once they’re in the room she’s been sharing with her little family, curled up under a blanket and watching the floor like it has all the secrets to how she lost her world three times over.

“Is there anything we need to keep in mind?” Fett asks, gruff and uncomfortable. She wonders if he’s angry that she took his necessary confrontation and turned it into this mess.

“Don’t bring up her Jedi Master,” Rex says, and pulls her in when she shivers. Her eyes squeeze shut before she can stop them, tears beading up again. “Just... don’t. It’s too soon.”

“He’s--”

“He Fell,” Ahsoka interrupts. “I thought he died, but he became a Sith. And fifteen years later, we ran into each other, and I refused to join him in the Dark, so he tried to kill me.”

Fett swears, low and muffled. She thinks he has a hand over his mouth.

Quin and Leia aren’t there. She thinks they’re keeping an eye on their Baby Sith prisoner. That’s good.

“Soka,” Rex whispers, and she buries her face in his shoulder. She’s too old to be this kind of mess. She’s thirty-two. She’s Fulcrum. She’s...

She’s in need of a lot of therapy.

“We can avoid the subject unless you bring it up,” Tholme promises. “Definitely until the Temple. Is there anything else we shouldn’t talk about?”

Ahsoka can practically feel Rex’s deadpan look. “Sir, we’re a trio of child soldiers ripped from everything we know. Every other sentence is a risk. We’re just... working our way through.”

There’s a knock at the door. Oh. Quin and Leia.

“Just figured we’d drop this off before we went down to visit Mr. Grumpy-Face,” Quinlan whispers. He still thinks Leia’s a child. He’s trying to make things less terrible for her. That’s nice. “We decided he’ll be less angry if he tries Hoth chocolate, and made some for everyone.”

They definitely made it for Ahsoka herself, and Maul was an afterthought. Still. It’s sweet.

“Commander?” Rex prompts, jostling her a little to try and get her to sit up.

“Gimme a sec,” she manages. It takes longer than it should to push herself away from him, to accept the mug that Leia gives her, too-serious worry in the furrow of her brow and the twist of her soul.

She doesn’t look six. She doesn’t even look twenty-two. This girl was always too old for her skin, forced to grow up in the hostile fear of the Empire.

“Thank you, Princess.”

She sips.

She can barely taste it beyond the ashes she imagines coating her tongue.

I destroyed him, her memory echoes. His slightest hesitation before he made the final move, it haunts her. She almost reached him. If only she’d tried harder, yelled louder, been better...

She shivers.

“Do you need help falling asleep?” Tholme asks. “I’m a regular healer, not a mind healer, but...”

She probably should.

She takes another sip of her drink, willing herself to taste it. It’s good. She likes it. She knows she does.

“Can you make it dreamless?” she whispers.

“It doesn’t always work, but I can try,” he tells her.

She nods. “When I finish the chocolate.”

“Of course.”

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

Everyone’s careful around her for days. The whole decision to be nicer doesn’t mean anything when she’s walking about in a daze of too few emotions, drained of everything she could feel in favor of a grey cloud of fluff in everything she does.

She does forms. Single saber and Jar’kai. Ataru and Djem so and Soresu. Reverse grip, regular grip, partial reverse on either side.

Again. Again. Again.

She loses herself in the motions, not meditating so much as just empty.

Rex worries. Fett worries. Vos worries.

Leia and Tholme keep their shields locked up tight, and she doesn’t know how they feel. She thinks Leia might be judging her. She think Tholme might be pitying.

Maul simply hates. It’s an old and familiar sensation to walk into, and she takes unthinking comfort in his rage. She’s silent instead of snippy, when she plays the role of guard, and they stare at each other in silence. His eyes burn, and she wonders how much he’s heard of her nightmares.

“You need to talk,” Rex tells her, when he finds her with a cold cup of caff, eyes fixed somewhere beyond it all. She lifts her head. “Soka.”

She just stares at him.

He sighs and pulls her into a hug. “Commander, please.”

She can’t.

Ahsoka stares at the wall behind him, resting her chin on his head. Her neck itches under the lek at the back of her head, a little tingle of a feeling that she can’t bring herself to do anything about. The pale light of the galley is sharp against the chipped paint of the metal that surrounds them. It hurts her eyes to look, but it’s not the deep and dark lit only by red--

Then you will die, her memory growls.

She flinches.

“Breathe,” Rex tells her, too-small hands clinging at her back. “Just breathe, ‘Soka.”

She curls in tighter and tries to just breathe.

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

“Tell me something good.”

Ahsoka blinks. She looks at Leia. She doesn’t have the energy to parse that.

Leia chances a look at Rex, who isn’t leaving Ahsoka’s side any more than he has to, and Fett on the other side. Tholme’s asleep and Quin’s on Baby Sith duty. It’s just people who know, right now.

The little girl across the table, the child senator, the spy, purses her lips and huffs in irritation. “You knew my biological father before he became one of the worst people in the galaxy. Both of you did. Tell me something good about him.”

Good things.

About Anakin.

“You fought a war as a Jedi,” Leia prompts. “Surely you must have done some good things with him, or at least thought you were.”

Did they?

Every mission ended in tragedy or was just a ploy of Palpatine’s. Every saved life was just...

Wait.

“He built Threepio,” she finally says. “Your father wi--I mean, Bail wiped Threepio’s memory after the Empire rose, for your safety, but Anakin was the one who built him.”

Leia sits up, eyes brighter. “I didn’t know that. I... was Artoo involved? Did he build R2D2, or...”

“No,” Rex says, “But Artoo was his favorite astromech, and they always pushed each other into stupid stunts. We risked a hell of a lot to save that droid, more than once, and I didn’t find out until you started working with the Rebellion full-time, but Artoo and Threepio were the witnesses for your bio-parents’ wedding.”

Leia gapes at him. So does Ahsoka. (Fett doesn’t know enough to care.)

Rex grins, and if it looks a little forced, that’s fine. “He had a holo recording. I was one of the few people left that knew about the marriage that might have wanted to see, so Artoo offered. It was... sweet.”

He waits, probably for Ahsoka to add something herself, but she has nothing.

“I think that’s when they swapped droids, since Threepio was more useful to a politician and Artoo did his best work when we set him loose on the enemy.”

“He never changed,” Leia muses. “Did he always swear that much?”

“Yes,” Ahsoka answers, as Rex laughs. “Always. All the binary I learned started with the best swears.”

She tries to think of another good memory, something else that Leia might appreciate. Her mind ticks back to saving Stinky, which is just a terrible option, because that mission started with Hutts and ended with the Battle of Teth. That massive loss of life, all for the son of the creature that had put Leia in chains.

She wonders if she has anything in her memory that doesn’t end in blood and graves.

“Soka.” Rex.

“Hm?”

“Remember that time Fives and Echo got lost in the undercity their first time on leave, and we had to get the General to help us find them?”

She does.

He’s right, that’s a good story.

“Okay, so what you have to understand,” Ahsoka says, already digging the faint details out and dusting them off, “is that these boys were ARC troopers, top-notch, terrifyingly competent once they got through specialty training, and loyal as hell. Echo had memorized the reg manuals front to back, and Fives was... well, Fives ended up being the only person to figure out the chips before they went into action. Point is, the Domino twins were good... eventually. Just like everyone else, though, they started out shiny.”

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

“Tholme’s hiding something.”

Ahsoka wonders if Leia will just leave if she ignores her enough. Probably not. This was the girl that got kicked out of boarding school for leading a sit-in at age seven. She’s got patience.

“His job requires him to hide a lot of things,” Ahsoka says instead. “Not as many as Vos will have to, eventually, but a lot.”

“He’s hiding something from us,” Leia insists, visibly frustrated that Ahsoka isn’t as upset about this as she is. “Something important.”

The way she says ‘important’ is clumsy and impacted by the missing baby tooth. She can’t say the r. It comes out as ‘im-poh-ten,’ which is adorable, and if Ahsoka comments on it, she’s probably going to get punched by a six-year-old.

“The Force doesn’t care,” Ahsoka says. “I trust his intentions, if not him as a person.��

“If you don’t trust him, then why trust his intentions?”

“Leia, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I trust one and a half people in the galaxy,” Ahsoka points out. “Me not trusting a person isn’t a sign of anything except my paranoia. The only person I trust fully and without reservation is Rex. Even you, I only mostly trust, because my brain starts screaming if I think too hard. That’s why you’re the half.”

“Okay, whatever, paranoia aside,” Leia barrels on, “He should tell us. Whatever it is that he’s hiding, we deserve to know. We’re not children that he can just hide things from for our own good.”

Ahsoka presses her lips together. “Leia. Princess. I know you’re used to holding all the cards--”

“This isn’t about me being a control freak!”

“It is, though,” Ahsoka soothes, and smiles. “Your mother--the bio one--was the same way. You spent years as one of the leaders of the Rebellion, so obviously you’re used to having all the information, and people reporting to you... but Tholme is a Jedi Master. He reports to the Council and the Republic. Do you know how many people I kept secrets from while I was a padawan? We’re an unknown, Leia. They have no proof that we’re on their side, especially since we’re traveling with Fett.”

Leia crosses her arms and glares as hard as she can.

“I’m not going to bother him,” Ahsoka says. “I’ve already had, like, five unrelated mental breakdowns. I’m putting this on hold until we get to the Temple and I can trust that there’s a healer on hand to sedate me or something.”

“You... want to be sedated?”

“Leia, this... really should be obvious, but a Force-Sensitive losing their osik the way I have been isn’t actually safe. I know I broke a weapons rack last week.” Ahsoka gestures vaguely. “If the Jedi Master isn’t telling me something for reasons that might relate to my clear and obvious mental instability, I’m going to assume he’s got a point.”

“So he should tell me or Rex.”

“We’ll be on Coruscant in four days,” Ahsoka soothes. “Just... let it be. They won’t hurt us.”

“You don’t know that.”

Ahsoka shrugs. “I don’t have to. The Force leads me in all things, including this.”

Leia isn’t impressed by that, but Leia isn’t impressed by much in the first place.

She strides off in a fit that is, perhaps, more influenced by her six-year-old emotional control than she’d like to admit. Ahsoka lets her. It’s not worth the argument.

It’s only a few minutes later that Fett strides in, takes the seat Leia was just in, and asks, “What would it take for you to teach me how to use a jetii’kad?”

She blinks at him. “You want to learn how to use a lightsaber?”

“Yes.”

“...why?”

“Viszla.”

“I see.”

She does.

Ahsoka taps her fingers against the table, eyeing him with the kind of interest she copied from Master Kenobi, years ago. Fett doesn’t fidget, but she thinks he might want to. He just looks back, waiting for her judgement.

“You’ll need to justify it,” she finally says. “It’s a significant difference from what you actually did, so I need to know your reasoning for doing it, and your plans for once it’s done.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s step one,” she corrects. She tilts her head, considering. “My standards for you aren’t built in a vacuum, and you know that. Explain to me what you plan to do and how you plan to do it, and if I approve...”

“You’ll help me achieve it.”

“Maybe,” she allows. “A lot of that depends on Rex.”

“I expected as much,” Fett says. “He is... an admittedly large part of the reason.”

“He would be,” she says. She gives the silence a few more seconds to sit awkwardly between them, and then stands up. “I’d guess you’ve been brainstorming already. Do you have it written down or is it mostly just in your head so far?”

“I’m still... debating options, so to speak.”

She grins, and the shape of the predator’s smile, the baring of teeth... that almost makes him step back. She can see it in the twitch of his muscles. Smart man.

“Follow me,” she says, and doesn’t wait for him to stand. She strides out with tooka-light steps, hears the heavy beskar tread behind her, and goes to the cargo hold. Fett’s confusion grows tangibly behind her, especially when she tosses him a wooden quarterstaff. She picks up the other and spins it in one hand.

“You’re going to fight me,” she tells him, stretching and letting the staff help with the process. “And while we fight, you’re going to tell me what your plans for Mandalore are.”

He mimics her, but there’s a frown on his face. “And why staffs?”

“You and I, we’ve only sparred bare-handed,” she says. “I need a feel for how you fight with a weapon anyway. These are a good start.”

“Not the beskad?”

She grins, and the twitch is back. “No. That can wait. We start with the staffs.”

He takes a stance, and she mirrors him. She lets him strike first with a weapon, but she’s the one that asks all the questions.

(He is the only one on the ship that can fight her one-on-one right now, and he can win. Still, she makes him work for every inch, and what she doesn’t win in bruises, she wins in words.)

(Fett might yet be a proper Mand’alor, but Ahsoka learned war from her brothers, negotiation at the knee of a general and in the shadow of a prince, and government at the side of duchesses and queens.)

(If he wants her help uniting his people, he needs to prove that he can hold them together once she’s gone.)

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

Ahsoka’s interrogation of Jango’s plans is thorough, and she’s not the only one involved. She brings Leia in, and has her join in on the grilling. She maybe laughs as the twenty-seven-year-old survivor of Galidraan, the Mand’alor, a man who has killed Master Jedi with his bare hands, gets lectured on various government structures by a tiny girl that's missing several teeth and needs to sit on books to see the table properly.

Still, Leia knows this better than any of the rest of them do. The girl might have grown up heir to a monarchy, but she got a classical education and was drilled on democracy and all associated forms of government. Where Ahsoka knows military protocol and law enforcement, intersystem relations and defensive measures, Leia knows agricultural subsidies and welfare programs, infrastructure and education.

Ahsoka may know how to find out if someone’s breaking a zoning law, but Leia knows why it exists in the first place.

“And I grew up in a cult,” Rex says, when an argument on that topic breaks out. Everyone that hasn’t heard the joke-that-isn’t-a-joke stares at him. “The Jedi grew up in a religious meritocracy; Leia grew up in a monarchy; and I grew up in a cult.”

Ahsoka elbows him. He’s not wrong, but still.

Unfortunately, Ahsoka is about forty-seven percent sure that Leia will put her foot in her mouth when it comes to Mandalorian culture, blunt as the girl is. That prefrontal cortex isn’t anywhere near as developed as it should be, either, so impulse control for the princess isn’t great. Ahsoka refuses to let Leia and Fett talk about ways to mend the breaks between tradition and the pacifism of the New Mandalorians without either Rex or Ahsoka herself as a mediating presence. Tholme sits in a few times, but while he knows that Leia isn’t really six--though not about the time-travel, yet--Quinlan doesn’t.

They admittedly end up doing this while he’s on Maul-sitting duty.

“It’s like he doesn’t even care about making nice with the people that, at this point, make up the majority of his people!” Leia grumbles one night, as Ahsoka kicks over a step stool so the girl can brush her teeth. “He may not like the New Mandalorians, but from what I understand, it’s still early enough to prevent the majority of the cultural bleaching you brought up. If he stays this stubborn--”

“Leia,” Ahsoka says, and the girl’s mouth snaps shut. “I’m aware of your reasons for not trusting his intentions. But if I may say? Chill.”

“He’s not even trying!”

“He’s trying a hell of a lot harder than he did in the original timeline,” Ahsoka reminds her. “Brush your teeth.”

“I’m not a--”

“Teeth.”

It’s a little worrying, how the child’s brain affects Leia, but... well. That’ll pass in time, hopefully. Until then, Ahsoka gets to be the aunt she should have been. This includes tucking Leia in, which the girl grumbles about despite the fond waves of comfort that enter the Force around her. Ahsoka doesn’t call her out on it, just brushes back wisps of hair to plant a kiss on Leia’s forehead, and then does the same once Rex stumbles in, grumbling about the limitations of a cadet’s body, but far more ready to follow the protocol that is bedtime.

Rex doesn’t pretend to not like getting tucked in, for all that he’s sharing with a grumbly, already-asleep princess. He smiles up at Ahsoka, lets her hug him, and pretends they can be a normal family for five seconds.

Quinlan’s making a late night snack for himself in the galley. Tholme is guarding the Baby Sith. Fett...

Ahsoka goes to the cockpit, takes the copilot’s seat, and watches hyperspace pass them by.

It takes long minutes before either of them say anything.

“Do Jedi believe in souls?”

His shields are up, locked up tighter than the innermost chambers of the Imperial Palace. She has no idea where he’s taking this question. She has to cast about for an answer.

“That depends on how you define a soul,” she finally says. “Leia told me about Force Ghosts. A Jedi Master who underwent the right meditations and training could pass into the Force upon their death without losing their sense of self. They could remain themselves, to an extent, and interact with force-sensitive individuals. I don’t know if they could last that way indefinitely, but depending on your definition, I could argue those ghosts were evidence of a form of soul.”

“So you believe that the dead pass into the Force, but that what passes could be a soul. Something must exist for a sense of self to disappear at death in a way that impacts the Force as you understand it, and many would use the word ‘soul’ for that something.”

“Mm,” Ahsoka considers it. “I’d say that’s pretty accurate. You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

“What about those not yet born?”

Her fingers feel cold, and she finds herself no longer able to watch the passage of hyperspace as passively as she had, and her eyes catch on streaks and motes of what is not dust, her vision unable to keep any more still than her heart.

“Oh,” she hears herself say. “The clones.”

It’s a long time before he answers, but the walls come down. He carries a confused sort of grief with him, guilty and a mite resentful. His questions have been building for longer than she’d thought. His voice is rough. “I’ve taken plenty of lives, but I’ve never known the name of someone I erased from existence before they were even born.”

“The stories we told Leia about the brothers.”

There’s a grunt of agreement from Fett, so those dots at least connect.

“I take it my answer wasn’t helpful,” she manages to say.

“Will they still exist?” Fett asks. “Will they be born elsewhere? Or is... is a soul something that only comes into existence after the body does?”

“I have no idea,” Ahsoka admits. “I want... I want to think that I’d be able to find them eventually, to recognize them, if their souls are still born into this world elsewhere.”

“And if your Sith finds someone else to build his army out of?”

Ahsoka looks at him, sharp and pointed. “You wouldn’t.”

“They’ll be doing it anyway, if their plans are as ironclad as you say.”

“You’re already associating with Jedi,” Ahsoka says, fighting the urge to break his nose. “They wouldn’t approach you, not now. They can’t leverage your anger against you. They won’t know everything, but they’ll know that you have friends among the Jedi.”

“You think they can’t come up with better lies?”

He has a point. He has more than one point and she hate hate hates it.

A Jedi does not hate.

I am no Jedi.

“You’re going to have to convince me,” she says. “Especially if you want to somehow balance this with the darksaber thing. I won’t teach you how to fight with it if you’re not planning to retake Mandalore.”

“That’s how they’d sell it,” he says. “Retaking Mandalore. An army ostensibly for the Jedi, and ultimately...”

“You’d build an army of slaves.”

“No, I’d be the inside man for when they build that army anyway.”

She holds his gaze. She looks away first.

“Torrent?”

“I’m thinking.”

He lets her.

“I’ll need to talk to Rex. Probably Leia.”

“Understandable.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I’m only just considering it. It’s an idea, not a plan.”

“That’s the only reason I haven’t ripped your throat out with my teeth.”

“Hyperbole doesn’t suit you.”

She glares at him, and leaves, her mind chopping up and laying out every possible angle on Fett volunteering to do the exact same thing as last time, but somehow worse.

Great. Just what she needed.

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

Ahsoka isn’t there for the shouting match between Rex and Fett, but she doesn’t have to be. She can hear it form clear across the ship, and Rex comes to her afterwars. He’s been crying, which isn’t as surprising as it could be. These bodies are still prone to such things, and will be for years. She doesn’t comment.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

“We need to take out Sidious before he starts anything on Kamino.”

“Agreed,” she says. “It’ll be hard, though.”

“I don’t care.”

“What did Fett say?”

“That if it wasn’t going to be my brothers, it would be someone else’s. Either we stopped the cloning from happening at all, or we mitigated damage by being there.”

“I don’t think Sidious is going to tap him for it,” Ahsoka admits. “Not unless you’re willing to stage that kind of fight publicly enough for Fett to claim the Jedi poisoned you, family, against him. It could work, but it’s a gamble.”

He knows all of this.

“I miss them,” he says, and she cards her fingers though the curls he’s managed to grow in the past weeks. “I just... even at the end, I had Wolffe. I knew Boba was out there; I wouldn’t be surprised if the beskar let him survive a Sarlacc. I had brothers. Not as many as I used to, but there was always someone. I miss them all, so much it hurts.”

“It wouldn’t be them,” she reminds him. She pulls him closer, puts her cheek to his head. “It would be the same process, the same faces, the same training, even, but the boys themselves...”

He clings to her and shudders.

“Rex?”

“I can’t force them to grow up the way I did. I want them back. Sidious is going to make the army no matter what. Someone’s going to suffer, and I don’t want it to be my brothers, but they won’t exist otherwise, and...”

“And it’s an impossible choice,” she summarizes. “And it sucks.”

“It’s sucks Gungan balls, ‘Soka.”

She laughs, and feels him smile against her shoulder. Good. He needs to smile more.

“He’s still trying to get me to like him,” Rex says. "He’s still making an effort, and he never did that for anyone except Boba, and it’s weird. I don’t know what to do with any of that.”

“Gain a brother,” Ahsoka whispers, and she feels him jerk against her. “If that’s what you want.”

“He’s not vod.”

“Same blood as all the rest, and you’re older than him, so he’s not really in a position to be a parent to you like he was to Boba,” she says carefully. “You don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to, but... I think he’s trying. I think this means a lot to him, and that he isn’t any more sure of what to do than you are. You don’t have to forgive him for what he did in the future, you don’t have to accept when he reaches out, you don’t have to ever talk to him again after we reach Coruscant if you don’t want, but I think... I think it’s worth at least considering what you have to gain. I think it’s worth looking at what he’s trying to give you.”

Rex huffs. “Why couldn’t he just be the shabuir I knew in training?”

“Something happened between now and then?” she offers. “I don’t know. I never met him in the original timeline. I just know the guy that keeps trying to get on my good side so you’ll like him.”

He outright scoffs. “Soka, that’s not the only reason he’s trying to get on your good side.”

“...I’m a former Jedi who talks trash to his face,” she says slowly. “And I cried on him. There is no reason for him to be nice to me, other than you.”

“He thinks you’re cool and a good person and wants you to be his friend.”

“Bantha poodoo.”

Rex grins in a way that goes straight to smirking. “Soka, I’m not joking. Jango Fett wants you to be his friend.”

“Kriffing why?” she asks, more than a little horrified. “I’m a mess, look like I’m ten years younger than him, have gleefully kicked his ass in front of an audience; I even told Vos to throw him at a baby Sith Lord. Putting up with me is one thing, but I’m... I’m only barely not a Jedi. I’m a historical enemy of Mandalore, and part of the community he hates more than anything, and--”

“And his reaction to you kicking his ass was pure Mando,” Rex says. “In that he now thinks you’re a badass, and thus worth being friends with.”

“I can’t believe that. I physically cannot.”

“Soka, just accept it. The Mand’alor wants to be friends with you.” He scratches at his scalp. “I mean, he met you while you were protecting what appeared to be children, and it’s apparently still early enough for him to care about that.”

She leans back in her seat, eyes on the wall ahead of her and back against the cool metal of the other side. Rex falls back with her. She wonders if Rex changed the subject so they didn’t have to talk about deciding how many of his brothers get to exist, and whether or not he can swallow the bitterness of his history to have a connection with at least one member of his blood. She doesn’t ask. If he wants to change the subject, that’s his right.

“I don’t... no.” She denies it as well as she can, and then the implications dig a little deeper. “Is this me accidentally signing up to be the Jedi Order’s official liaison to the Mand’alor?”

“I mean, this point in time... they’ve got Kenobi for the Duchess, yeah?” Rex shrugs. “Good relations with the system are probably a good thing, and you’ve got a stronger connection than Tholme and Vos.”

“Ugh,” she says. She rubs a hand against her head, and then lurches to her feet. “Fine! Fine. If it’ll get him to retake Mandalore before the Sith decide to bribe him with an army he doesn’t get to keep, I’ll teach him how to fight for the kriffin’ Darksaber.”

“That’s what makes the decision for you?”

“Well something had to!”

They only get one lesson in before Coruscant, but the lesson lasts a full day, and Ahsoka’s got his comm number. Fett’s a quick learner anyway, and Tholme was there to give pointers where Ahsoka couldn’t.

He won’t measure up to a Jedi in saber-to-saber combat, but he doesn’t need to. He just needs to learn enough to turn all those skills with a beskad to something that works with a jetii’kad.

(The balance of a saber is wrong to those used to a physical weapon. The inertia doesn’t work the way anyone expects. There’s no need to worry about damaging the blade.)

(Fett is good. Ahsoka is better. And, bless his heart, he knows it.)

(She will mold him into the shape of someone who not only can, but should rule a system with a history like that, and he damn well knows that too.)

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

“Dropping out of hyperspace in T-minus twenty seconds.”

The Slave I is not, in fact, a Venator-class starship, or anything else near the size and smoothness of the ships that Ahsoka grew up on. This is a bounty hunter’s vessel, and the drop to real space jolts like nothing else. Ahsoka’s in the copilot seat for the return, but Tholme’s going to swap with her as soon as they’ve got confirmation that there were no problems with exiting hyperspace, and nobody’s shooting at them.

“We’re not going to get shot at,” Tholme had assured her.

“I always get shot at,” she’d told him.

“I have our clearance,” he reminded her, seeming more amused than frustrated. “There’s no need to worry about getting shot at.”

“I also always get shot at,” Jango had thrown in.

“Okay,” Tholme had allowed, after several minutes of his trust in the Temple warring against Ahsoka and Jango’s learned paranoia. The looks Quinlan had darted around the room when Leia and Rex also claimed ‘chronic getting-shot-at disease’ had been a treat. The paranoia of a Watchman and a future Shadow was great, but the paranoia of three revolutionaries and a galaxy-wide criminal was greater. “You can take us in close enough to get in radio contact, but the second we have to ask for clearance and a vector, I’m in the seat.”

She’d agreed, of course. She was paranoid, not inexperienced.

“We’re much less likely to get shot down by ground control if you tell them we’re with you,” she’d said, to his hilariously apparent metaphysical exhaustion. “Obviously.”

“Good enough,” he’d sighed.

What that means is mostly just that Ahsoka gets to watch the distant star at the center of Coruscant’s system grow rapidly brighter. She can pick out the constellations she’d grown up with, the stars the creche had projected on the ceiling every night, the ones that she may not have seen from the surface, but had greeted her and then sent her on her way every time she left on yet another campaign that lost her men their lives for a Sith Lord's wretched plans. These were the shapes and stories she’d never seen again as Fulcrum, a woman so hunted that to come within a dozen subsectors of the planet was to court her death.

For sixteen years, she hadn’t ventured closer than Alderaan, save for a single trip to Chandrila.

And now, maybe twenty minutes away at this speed, was the Temple. It was home.

A home that didn’t know her, that had sentenced her to death, that had hosted the rampage of her former master... but home nonetheless.

“Stable?” Fett grunts.

“Thrusters are good,” she confirms.

“I meant you.”

Ah. “I’m... fine. As good as I could be, anyway.”

She hesitates, but manages to speak before he does. “You?”

“I’m not the one walking into an entire building of triggers.”

“Only because you’re not entering it,” she says. “It’s the home of your ancestral enemies who, bad info or no, killed off a whole lot of your friends.”

“I get to leave,” he says. “You don’t.”

She plans to needle him a bit more, maybe on something a little less based in both their traumas. She needs to talk, if only to fill up the silence and keep herself from reaching out to all the lights in the Force. It’ll be too much, she knows.

Tholme enters the cockpit. “Change of plans.”

“Better be a good reason,” Jango says, voice flat.

“Leia’s crying.”

Ahsoka’s unbuckling herself before she can process the words fully. “What?”

Leia doesn’t cry for no reason. Her emotional control is as difficult as the body makes it, but she doesn’t just cry. There’s always a cause.

“I don’t know. Rex said to get you,” Tholme explains. “She was saying a name. He seemed to recognize it.”

Not good not good not good. If Leia was feeling the Emper--No. She cuts the thought off there. No catastrophizing. Information first.

“What name.”

“Luke. Mean anything to--and she’s gone.”

Ahsoka ignores him, just sprints to where she knows the ‘young ones’ are. They’re all in Maul’s room, because nobody wants to be alone with him now, but it’s the worst time to leave him without supervision. It’s not the worst option; he mostly refuses to talk, still.

This holds true, because he definitely isn’t talking when she bursts in. He’s sitting on the bench, in a corner, hugging his knees and watching Quinlan try to calm Leia down.

“Captain, sitrep.”

“Vos and Tholme attempted to show Leia how to reach out to feel the Temple from a distance. They felt that it would be a good use of the time, and an interesting exercise at this distance. She attempted to do so, struggled for several minutes, and then reacted with shock. She has repeated the name ‘Luke’ several times since then, and we’ve been unable to fully calm her down. I asked Tholme to get you, as you are the only Force-Sensitive on board that understands the situation in full.”

“Understood.” She nods to him, and then goes to nudge at Quinlan. “Vos, move.”

“Torre--”

“You can sit behind her, hold her in your lap like you did when we had lunch the other day, but I need to get in her face.” She waits for him to comply, and then drops to her knees and takes Leia’s hands in her own. She radiates calm and assurance, even though she knows Quinlan’s probably been doing the same since this started. She dips her head enough to get in the girl’s line of sight, waits for her to meet eyes.

“Princess,” she says, and meets Leia’s eyes. “What did you feel?”

“Luke.”

From this distance... they’ve got half the system to go, at least, and Leia’s training shouldn’t reach that far for anything more than the fact that the Temple is there. Ahsoka could feel unshielded individuals from here, if she focused, but she’s also been doing this much, much longer. The twins theory holds more water than ever.

“Can you show me?” Ahsoka asks, instead of asking for more clarification. She squeezes Leia’s hands and smiles. “In the Force?”

Leia nods, and closes her eyes. It’s not the first time they’ve done this, but it’s the first time in a while that Leia’s needed Ahsoka to guide her through.

Luke’s light, for all that it’s unfamiliar to Ahsoka, is brilliant among the rest of the signatures in Coruscant. Like Anakin and Leia, he’s a star in his own right, but he’s brighter. He doesn’t have Anakin’s bitterness or Leia’s righteous anger, just... light. Ahsoka had asked Leia to show her instead of looking for herself because she’d expected to not recognize the boy, but she needn’t have. He’s unmistakable.

He’s so bright that she almost misses the other signature that she does recognize. She shies away, knowing that it would be there, but... but it’s almost twinned with another nearby. Not identical, but different in a way that comes with age, with trauma, with... death.

Leia hadn’t arrived alone, after all.

Why would Luke?

Her eyes snap open, her hand coming up not-quite-fast enough to clap over her mouth as she gasps. She feels a shudder, one that starts in her shoulders and reaches deep into her ribcage, finds a home in her chest and doesn’t stop.

“Oh fuck,” Quinlan whispers. “Torrent? Um, Sokari?”

Rex steps closer. “Commander?”

“That shabuir faked his death again,” she manages. “Three times, Rex!”

He blinks at her. “...I know way too many people who fit that description, Soka.”

“Master Ke--” she cuts herself off. He might have changed his name, just like she had. There’s already an Obi-Wan here. Rex seems to be figuring it out, but she needs to give him another hint.

“He pulled a Hardeen,” she stresses, and Rex’s eyes snap shut with a tired groan.

“Who?” Leia asks, her own tumult of emotion paused in the wake of Ahsoka’s shock. There’s a hope and relief to her, and Ahsoka belatedly realizes that her main worry had been that she’d misidentified what was going on, that she’d given herself a false hope. Ahsoka’s internal reaction, her approval and awe at Luke’s presence, had trickled over enough to give Leia the reassurance she’d needed.

Unintentional as it was, Ahsoka was glad that she’d succeeded in helping her charge.

“Er...” she trails off. “I don’t know what name he’s going by, right now. We’ve spent so long in hiding...”

“The man Luke knew as Crazy Old Ben,” Rex says, and Leia’s eyes light up.

“Oh,” she breathes. “General O--no, names. The High General, then.”

“Yeah,” Ahsoka says, not a little soft. “Yeah, I guess death didn’t stop him any more than it stopped me.”

“I could have told you that,” Leia says, smiling far too widely. She squirms where she still sits on Quinlan’s lap. “He was... he taught you, right?”

“As much my master as the official one,” Ahsoka says. She glances as Quinlan, feels Maul’s gaze on the back of her head. “Your f... my official master was very young when I was assigned to him. He wasn’t ready to teach, wasn’t even ready to be a knight, entirely, so my training was split between him and his master.”

Quinlan pops in at that moment, “Your grandmaster was military, too?”

We all were, she thinks. Even you, in your own way.

“I landed in their care mid-battle,” she says carefully. “It was a complicated situation.”

He nods, and she vaguely notes that he’s got his arms wrapped around Leia, and his chin tucked on top of her head. She isn’t sure if Leia’s noticed, but Quinlan’s picked up ‘baby’-sitting duty so often recently that she’s fairly certain he’s all but declared her ‘little-sister shaped.’ It doesn’t matter that Leia’s older--she’s still taking the juice boxes and gummy snacks that Quinlan shoves at her every single snacktime.

“Do you think...” Rex trails off, something uncomfortable twisting in the Force, even though his face keeps it mostly hidden. “My brothers. If the General survived and... and made it back...”

“I didn’t feel any,” Ahsoka says, because she knows she’d have noticed if it was anyone she’d met, and likely any clone at all. They all felt different in the Force, but they all held a spark that made her know it was one of them. “I’m sorry, Rex’ika.”

“A long shot,” he says, that dash of hope shriveling up. He must see something in her face, because there’s a curl of warmth in him, even if his smile is brittle. “It’s fine, really. I have you, ‘Soka.”

Rex and Ahsoka. Two halves of one whole.

She can’t wait to hear the lectures on attachment, the way people who haven’t seen her wars try to criticize her for clinging to any chance at still having a will to live. She can’t wait to see them justify telling her that it’s selfish to hold her sanity in her hands and refuse to let the grief take it away. She can’t wait to stare someone down for asking her to ‘learn to let go’ after she’s lost her family, her life, her universe three times over.

Most of the Jedi are more sensible than that, are reasonable enough to see those shades of grey and how to approach rules in the spirit they are meant instead of the rigid letter, but there will be some.

There will be more than enough telling her she is wrong to hold her oldest, closest, best friend as dear as she can.

Attachment, they’ll say.

What they’ll mean is ‘codepedence.’

They won’t be entirely wrong.

She reaches out for him, lets him fall into her side and stay there, closes her eyes and reaches out for the man she’d long called father, when they’d still been in each other’s lives.

This time, past the deafening flare of surprise-love-hope of the little star next to him, she can feel him reach back.

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

The second the ship has landed, even before Tholme and Fett are done with the checks, Ahsoka’s waiting at the exit. She strains her hearing so she’ll know the second the system will let her open the massive door of the cargo hold.

Leia clings to her side, and the boys stand to her back.

Quinlan’s stressed enough that she can feel it like a cloud. She is very much not trying to feel that stress. Quinlan’s stress levels, back where he’s got Maul so he can keep an eye on Ahsoka and the Baby Sith at the same time, are so low on her priorities list that it’s a a little sad.

It doesn’t take long for her to be able to punch the button and open the damn door.

It opens slowly. She bounces on her toes, because there’s a beacon of light and a steady, familiar glow on the other side, and she’s so, so close. She can’t see through the crack yet, because it’s day in this part of Coruscant, and the sunlight is blinding against the dark of the hold. So close. She’s so close.

“The hell’s wrong with you?”

Fett? Fett. He’s already here to get off? This door’s slow.

She doesn’t answer him, because the door is finally open enough to let her out, and she leaps through the gap.

She lands on a pourstone floor, feels pebbles and grit compress under her boots, frantically looks around as her eyes adjust to light and--

The High General, the Negotiator, Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, looking just as he did when she first met him, if a little less armored and a little more fed. The hair, the beard, the crinkle in the corner of his eyes. His spirit is a little older, his smile a little more strained, his posture a little more tired, but it’s him.

He spreads his arms, low enough that she could have dismissed it if she’d cared less for hugs, except she’s almost as small as she was when they met.

And every other hug she’d given back then had been, functionally, her being a living missile aiming her montrals for someone’s organs.

She’s a little more aware of how to avoid stabbing her friends in the intestine now.

“Master!”

She sprints for him, collides and sobs, feels him stumble back and then sink to his knees on the too-hard floor, and can feel the tears pouring out of her already. Her breath hitches, and she wails like a child, and that last part of her that couldn’t even grasp at safety shreds itself. His arms are tight around her, warm and strong and Master Kenobi don’t you dare leave again.

It doesn’t matter that Sidious is out there, that the Republic’s been building towards war for a century, that even now someone’s kicking up the Trade Federation. Her dad is here.

“I’ve missed you too, my dear,” he says, pressing a kiss to the side of her head, the bristles of his beard scratching along the skin of her forehead. Off to the side, the binary suns that are Luke and Leia grow brighter in proximity, so bright she can barely bear it.

(“Fett, why the kriff are you reaching for your blaster?!”)

(“Torrent said her master tried to kill her.”)

(“Different guy, that was a different guy, put the blaster away.”)

(“You could have just warned me.”)

(“I didn’t expect you to go for a shot on sight!”)

(”Calm down, Jetiika, if I was going to shoot on sight, we’d already be in a firefight.”)

She ignores everything.

“If you fake your death one more time, I swear I’m going to kill you myself.”

He tries to pull away to talk to her more directly. She does not let him. He apparently resigns himself to this, because he just adjusts how he’s sitting and pulls her in closer.

“In my defense, I was far from the only one presumed dead that took advantage of that status, by the end,” he says, letting her slump into his lap and cry herself dry. “I’m proud of you. You know that, I hope.”

She nods against his chest, smearing tears and snot across the linen and wool. She doesn’t care that they’ll need a thorough washing. She can have her public breakdown and it’s fine because Master Kenobi is here.

He doesn’t even know what she’s spent the past fifteen years doing. Luke wouldn’t have known. He doesn’t know she’s thirty-two and broken, beyond a shadow and cut down by her own master. There’s so much he doesn’t know but the Force rings with the truth of it: he’s proud of her anyway.

“I’m going by Ben, now,” he mutters against her montral. “There’s already an Obi-Wan here, after all. Still, I remain a Kenobi.”

She can’t make the words come out of her mouth. She’s overwhelmed, so much so that speech is a mite bit beyond her.

Sokari Torrent, she presses along the frayed bond that’s knitting itself back to life with every breath they take. Leia was already calling me Auntie Soka, and Rex and I both took Torrent, for...

“For the men you lost,” he mutters. “Yes, that’s fitting.”

He smells like sapir tea and a spiced beard oil.

There’s a whirl of activity about her, greetings and ‘a Sith apprentice?’ and introductions. She distantly notes when Fett almost shoots Dooku before Rex shuts that down and advises the Master to leave the area before things spiral out of control. She feels Ben stand, and she stands with him, clings to his side like a child and trusts that whatever happens, whatever needs to happen, he’ll take care of it until she can stand on her own two feet without swaying.

Rex grabs her free hand, and she feels herself settle back into her skin, bit by bit.

She’s back at the Temple. The twins are safe. Her grandmaster is here. She has her other half.

They can save the galaxy this time.

She’s alive she’s home she’s okay.

She’s okay.

Everything’s going to be okay.

576 notes · View notes

sunfish-studies · 3 years

Text

Cogs

✄・・・ Feathery Ink [Karasuno Manager Series]

➜ Pairing: Karasuno x Manager! Reader

➜ Warning: none

➜ Notes: This is a separate series from Crisp Leaves. Similar to Crisp Leaves, manager in this story will be portrayed as a girl. She will be tall. This is just my appreciation towards tall girls, you guys are amazing.

Previous: ‹ VS Umbrella › | Next: ‹ Celebration ›

↷ SUMMARY ↶

Last day of summer training camp is here!

For the first time, you’re kind of reluctant rising from the warm and comfortable futon you slept on. However, once you’re mind began to work and realizing yourself that you’re still in the training camp, you jolted awake almost instantly–removing the blanket and began tidying up.

Gathering your facewash and toothbrush to freshen up, you found yourself yawning in between–it’s not just you fortunately, because Yachi did the same.

“I’m sure you’re pretty tired, Hitoka-chan, [Name]-chan,” Shimizu giggled at both of you. “Are you two okay?”

“Yes! We’re sorry!” Yachi was quick to apologize for the both of you.

“Today’s the last day, so let’s do our best.”

“Right!” this time, you’re the one who answered her.

Yachi said she was going on ahead, and that left you still tidying up–you’re thinking of just packed everything because in the evening, you’re already be on your way back to Miyagi. That and Takeda-sensei informed the managers about something so you would have no time to pack freely. After you finished everything, you finally could freshen up and start the day.

Descending downstairs towards the women’s bathroom, you bumped into Kageyama who went to fetch on something he left behind.

“Oh, Kageyama-kun, morning.” You greeted.

“Morning, [Name]-san.” He replied with a nod.

“You seemed energetic, weren’t you practicing with Hitoka-chan the night before?”

“Oh, about that,” you could see the excitement glittering from his eyes, he definitely had good news to present because for the past few days the boy was frustrated. “The tosses finally worked. Coach Ukai gave me some directions and it worked.”

“Really? That’s great!” the excitement was infectious, alright. You knew Kageyama had been working extremely hard to make it successful and after days of failure, he finally nailed it–you were incredibly happy for him. “I can’t wait to see it!”

“If that dumbass could keep up that is,” the raven-haired boy them grumbled underneath his breath.

“Don’t worry, Shoyo-kun changed,” you assured him. “Him, you, and the whole team too. Even Tsukishima-kun. That’s why I can’t wait to see this new Karasuno and the new quick.”

“We will make that quick happen,” Kageyama stated without hesitation. “Because we want to go to the nationals.”

You smiled at him. “I have no doubt.”

“Uhm, not to be offensive, but,” you found your shoulders shook violently from you tried your best to withstand the urge to burst out laughing and rolling on the floor–it practically costed you your whole will to hold it. “Why are you drooling, Kageyama-kun?”

Yachi watched from the sidelines–you approached Kageyama to gave him his water bottle and from whatever you’re talking about with him, he seemed to be extremely embarrassed. Then the raved-haired boy proceeded to lean closer and whispered something beside your ear–which made Yachi squeaked.

“[Name]-chan and Kageyama-kun is quite close these days, right?” Shimizu suddenly said.

“Yes,” Yachi answered almost immediately. “[Name]-chan said Kageyama-kun asked for her advices and Kageyama-kun usually walked her home after club when it’s too dark.”

“Do you think something else happened between them?” Yachi couldn’t help but feeling fire engulfed her face instantly from Shimizu’s (not-serious) speculation.

“WHA-NO-HEEE!?”

“I’m just kidding, Hitoka-chan!” still, Shimizu pretty much enjoyed the extremely flustered girl’s reaction. “Oh, [Name]-chan, what did you talk about with Kageyama-kun?”

After distributing half of the water bottles, you jogged back to where Yachi and Shimizu stood. You tilted your head before snickering underneath your breath and answered. “He asked something about barbeque this afternoon.”

“How did he know!?” Yachi yelped because mainly the info was shared only between the coaches, who arranged the whole thing, and the managers, who’s in charge to prepare all the ingredients.

“Sawamura probably accidently eavesdropping the coach,” Shimizu pointed out, smiling. “By the way, Hitoka-chan shouldn’t you give the other half away?”

“I-I’M SORRY!!”

Final match for Karasuno was against Fukurodani–even from all the losses, the boys were still in high-spirits thanks to Sawamura’s short speech. You knew they wouldn’t be disappointed even though they loss so many matches because now they earned several new weapons for the preliminaries.

Through the match, you understood how Fukurodani is called a powerhouse–the players are skilled and knew the opportunities to score even when their receives a bit off. That and Akaashi truly lived up to his name as a setter in the line-up. Also, Bokuto’s insane angle of spikes were sights to see every time.

“That’s an insane cut shot,” Sugawara commented which made Yachi looked at him questioningly, thankfully Shimizu was ready with an explanation.

“Hitting at a sharp angle against three blockers is really tricky. It can be hard on your shoulders if they’re not flexible, too.”

“[Name]-chan, [Name]-chan! Did you see that!? Did you see my awesome cut shot!?” Bokuto called out way from the other side of the court, looking at you expectantly after he pulled-off the move. You glanced towards Sawamura in search of his approval to reply to the excited owl-captain, to which he nodded.

“I saw it!” You replied with a smile. “It’s amazing, Bokuto-san! Do you think you could hit like that again?”

“ANYTHING FOR [NAME]-CHAN!!”

You almost laughed at Akaashi’s look of disapproval, both at you and the owl captain and clearly sent the ‘don’t encourage him’ message to you indirectly. Surely, today’s match was filled with many surprises–Hinata’s feint attack, Kageyama’s unexpected dump, and even the one you’ve been waiting for; Hinata and Kageyama’s new quick. Both you and Yachi instantly screamed in pure glee–hugging each other in excitement.

“You did it! You did it!” Yachi even cheered and jumping. “Nice kill, Hinata! Kageyama-kun!”

“Nice toss, Kageyama-kun! Nice kill, Shoyo-kun! You two are amazing!” You added, grinning widely–the two have been practicing hard for three weeks, and those three weeks of cold-shoulder towards each other too. It was putting quite a strain but now, the two were finally back in action.

The two thrusted their fists to you and Yachi in reply–you two were probably the happiest ever currently.

And the excitement only lasts for a few minutes because they nailed it one time, but not so for another. Probably just luck, still it’s happiness though–they needed to practice more, however it wouldn’t be a problem for the two.

This also could be count as Karasuno’s lucky day–Nishinoya and Azumane’s back attack pulled off perfectly although it’s still out. The libero, of course, was very much frustrated. The synchro-attack worked and you swore Tanaka was crying out of happiness and relief because he could score comfortably.

“Tanaka-san, nice kill!” you cheered, which made him perked up and then laughing in victory.

“Thanks, [Name]-chan!”

From all the matches you’ve watched, Karasuno clearly made a difference in this one–they’re in their top shape. When the score reached 18 for either team, a technical timeout was commenced. Both you and Yachi immediately worked on distributing water bottles and towels.

“Good work, Tanaka-san, Nishinoya-san!” you said, handing them their water bottles.

“Ryu!” Nishinoya suddenly gripped his chest tightly. “Our manager just praises us!”

“I’m feeling blessed, Noya-san!” Tanaka replied, mimicking the libero–and here you thought the heat maybe started getting into them. You panicked for absolutely no reason and then decided to excuse yourself.

“Good work today, Tsukishima-kun,” Tsukishima nodded and muttered a thank you in reply, taking the water bottle from your hand.

“…Is there a way to make your finger stays in place while doing one-touch?” now you’re surprised because he made an attempt to ask first, however you didn’t let it show because you knew how it would piss him off.

“You could tape it to made it stiff enough to receive one-touch,” you suggested in the end. The taller boy hummed in reply before giving you the water bottle back so he could return to the match.

The next match wasn’t going well–for the other team that is. You noticed how Bokuto seemed to be agitated and rash with his moves–he almost hit his teammate with his serve, demanding tosses from Akaashi, and finally, third time’s the charm, when he failed scoring from hitting the net instead. Another score for Karasuno, who managed to turn the match to their favor for the leading score of 20.

“W-was that a block?” Yachi questioned.

“No…” Shimizu replied, rather taken aback by the event. “It didn’t seem to make it over the net, so it was spike miss,”

“Bokuto-san, I mean #4’s movement is also unnatural,” you commented, making the two managers turned to look at you. “He’s been rushing things and has been on the edge ever since the time-out.”

“Now that you’re talking about it…” Shimizu nodded in agreement.

“Akaashi, don’t toss to me anymore!” Bokuto exclaimed, which sounded extremely out of place in the middle of a volley match. Sure, it not only confuses you but your whole team even Coach Ukai and Takeda-sensei.

“Do you know about this, [Name]-chan?” Yachi asked and you shook your head immediately.

“No, this is the first time I’ve seen Bokuto-san acts like that,” you answered. “And it looks like the team’s already used to this.”

True to your words, the team played like usual as if nothing happened–Bokuto only stared and follow the ball dazedly while the other working to attack and defend. What’s more amazing, with the lack of Bokuto’s participating they’re just as strong–something you would expect from a powerhouse school.

It caught your team off guard for a bit, however on the other hand, Tsukishima also wasn’t fazed a bit–could be seen from how he managed to shut out an incoming spike from #7. If Karasuno scored another, it would be deuce and a chance to turn the tables.

“Nice block, Tsukishima-kun!” you exclaimed, earning a glance and nod from the said boy.

When Asahi went for a usual serve rather than jump-serve, you understood he didn’t want to mess up their chance at winning. Fukurodani’s libero received in cleanly and Akaashi immediately went for a high-toss. Noticing how Tsukishima rushed towards the left, you knew your team lowered their guard.

“The left! Don’t let it open!” you yelled almost instinctively. Yachi’s soul jumped out of her body from your sudden loud voice, even Coach Ukai and Takeda-sensei was taken aback for a few seconds. Bokuto blew the blocker away because they’re only 1.5 block, it’s not even enough to had a one-touch. He killed it with a straight shot down the court and Fukurodani won with two points leading.

Disappointment flared in your team–from the ones on the court, the ones watching from the sidelines, even Takeda-sensei. Coach Ukai could only sigh, Shimizu resumed with her notes, and Yachi felt her shoulders slumped. You smiled bitterly at the turn out events.

“Whoo! Ace!”

“You’re so cool!”

“Nothing beats the ace in the end!”

Fukurodani’s team members started throwing compliments and it made you blinked in confusion–moreover, Kaori and Yukie even jumped in to join.

“Birds of prey!”

“Your hair’s like a great-horned owl!”

Was that supposed to be a compliment…?

“Otohaku-san…!” the call was in a form of a hissed whisper and unexpectedly came from Akaashi himself. The message he sent to you was clear, ‘please, help us this time’–you replied indirectly with pointing to yourself with a look of disbelief present on your face.

‘Me!? What should I say!?’

‘Anything. Just praise him.’

Probably taking a bit pity for the setter, Sawamura nodded to your direction and gave you a smile of reassurance. You wanted to cry from how compassionate he’s being–bless his beautiful soul. That and the look of doneness and a little pleading from Fukurodani’s team was extremely hard to reject.

“Y-You’re amazing! Nothing less from top ace of Japan!” You wanted to slap yourself from the poor excuse of praise. Thankfully it seemed to work magic because Bokuto was instantly revived back to his cheerful and boisterous persona.

“I’m the best afterall!!” he cheered, laughing in victory. “Hey, hey, hey!”

Meanwhile, Akaashi took his sweet time to get off the court to fetch his drink and towel. Although, he did give you slight a bow of gratefulness. In the end, it’s losses all the way for Karasuno, however they acquired several weapons to fight on the national court–it’s not overall a loss because they also gained something new in exchange.

“[Name]-chan! I’m the best, right!?”

“You sure are, Bokuto-san.”

“Stop bothering Otohaku-san, Bokuto-san.”

235 notes · View notes

duuhrayliegh · 3 years

Text

my hero - request

request: anon: hi could you write a sebastian x female reader fic where she suffers from anxiety and feels bad because of it but he comforts her and tells her there’s nothing wrong with her and how strong she is even though she has this disorder

pairing: sebastian stan x female!reader

warnings: self-esteem issues, anxiety, toxicity in the fandom, language?

a/n: hey nona! you weren’t super specific on what type of anxiety that you wanted to reader to have, so if this isn’t what you had in mind, lmk and i’ll write you another fic! other than that i hope you like it!

p.s.: my requests and tag lists are open!!

xoxo ray

check out my m.list

You and Seb met at a coffee shop in New York. It was totally cliche and seemed straight out of a storybook. You had somehow managed to spill coffee on that specimen of a man, and he was kind enough to let you pay for his dry cleaning. Your relationship didn’t grow until you ran into him again while you were at a bar with your friends. If he had any say in telling the story of how you met, he spotted you from across the smoky bar and he knew then and there that he had to get to know you. Truthfully, you liked his version, but the real one was just indescribable. It seemed, to you at least, that you were destined to be with this man. Seeing him twice in one week? Come on, that’s possible if you were in the small town you grew up in, but not New York.

You obviously had recognized him as an actor, but really you didn’t care. That’s what drew Sebastian to you in the first place. You treated him as if he was any other guy on the street, he was able to be a normal person around you. Now, two years later, you lounge on the couch of your apartment in LA that you shared with the man you love. He’s still auditioning for any role that catches his eye and you’re supporting him no matter what.

His fans for the most part adored you and your relationship with Sebastian. The fans who didn’t like you were your only issue with this whole affair, but they had nothing to do with Sebastian other than flood his socials with nasty messages about you. You weren’t perfect, that you knew all too well, and you tried to let the comments roll off your shoulders. Most of the time you were successful in your efforts, but other times they clung to your skin like an unwanted disease.

Sebastian was currently promoting his new project Endings, Beginnings. You were so unbelievably proud of Seb, he was doing something that made him happy. In this particular film, he was acting alongside Shailene Woodley, who was just amazing. Seb always came home gushing about the new inside jokes that they had come up with. One of your favorite things that Seb did with you was run lines. You liked having the inside scoop on his new works, but this one was harder for you. It had quite a few sex scenes between Seb’s character Frank and Shailene’s Daphne.

Not that it bothered you. Nope. Didn’t bother you. At all.

...mmm, okay maybe it bugged you a little. It wasn’t that you didn’t trust Sebastian, it was… well you couldn’t really describe what it was. Whatever the case may be, it was putting you deeper and deeper into a funk, one that you were having a hard time coming out of. And Seb’s fans who weren’t in your corner, weren’t really helping you any.

A few nights ago, Seb surprised you with a casual night out in LA. He texted you before he got home and told you that he was going to be taking you out. Did he give you a dress code for the evening? No, he did not (wonderful, thanks so much Seb). You decided to dress in a half business casual, half rail me when we get home outfit. You ended up wearing an adorable bustier top that was embroidered with pretty blue and pink flowers, a pair of destroyed jeans covered your legs. You finished it off with a pair of nude heels, when you looked in the mirror, you thought you looked hot as fuck. It was around seven when Seb picked you up, mouth hanging open, in awe of your outfit.

“Oh my god. You look so beautiful, Y/N.” He opened the passenger door of his car after he hugged you, giving you a small peck on the lips. Sebastian drove you to a restaurant a block off of Thai Town called Home Restaurant.

“Babe, this place is so cute!” You squeezed Sebastian’s upper arm, jumping up and down beside him. “How’d you find this place?” Sebastian shook his head, smiling at you.

“I asked Shai, actually.” He rubbed his hand on the back of his neck, and your heart sank a little. Why did it do that? “She said that the paps hardly ever come around here.” He leaned down pressing a kiss to your temple. “I thought that draga mea deserved a quiet night out on the town.” His voice rasped as he spoke in his native tongue, making a shiver race down your spine.

“Well, tell her I said thank you.” You offered him a small smile. He wrapped his arm around your waist, drawing circles on the exposed skin above your jeans. He spoke with the hostess as your mind drifted away. You were pulled out of your thoughts when he guided you to your table. Sebastian sat across from you, staring deeply into your eyes. You brought your hand up to rest your chin on it, staring back at him. “How’s everything been going?” You were genuinely interested in the answer and it made your heart warm watching his face light up.

“It’s been going really well. Everyone we worked with was real nice, it made all the scenes more comfortable.” Seb’s eyebrows rose at the mention of the scenes and you knew which ones he was referring to.

“Oh, right.” You tried not to let your emotions show.

“Yeah, we’re about to start teasing some of them to promote the show.” Seb sighed at the thought of having to use social media, you shook your head at him.

“I’ll help you with it, you dork.” You laughed to hide your discomfort. “Which scene did they approve for the posts?” Sebastian began to speak when he was interrupted by your waitress. After the two of you ordered your food, the waitress returned with your drinks. Sebastian took a large gulp of his before answering your previous question.

“They want me to post the trailer and then the scene between Frank and Daphne at the bar.” You tried to think back to the script, remembering the context. Frank and Daphne were meeting after Daphne had gone out on a date with Jack. Daphne was claiming that she didn’t want to be a wedge in their friendship, then proceeded to make out with Frank. If you were recalling correctly, Frank and Daphne’s first sex scene followed soon after.

“Okay, we can do that. Do you have any behind the scene pictures you wanna post too?” Seb got out his phone, scrolling through his camera roll to see. He had several different photos of him with Jamie and then him with Shailene. He showed you his phone on a picture of Shailene leaned against him on a couch, her arm over his waist. A red filter colored the photo, you had to hand it to him, it was a good one to use. “We can post it whenever we get home, love.” Sebastian locked his phone and shoved it in his pocket, to focus solely on you.

“How has your day been, draga mea?” You bit your lip as you thought about what you’ve been doing. You’ve been working towards your Master’s, so your days have been filled with preparing for your dissertation. On top of that, you’ve become a bit of an influencer on different social media platforms. Really, you believe your popularity came from your relationship with Sebastian. You’ve been giving his fans the content that they’ve always wanted. Not only that, but you’re active with them.

“My day was good today. I had to edit a few papers from my other classmates but other than that I didn’t do much. I did make a few TikTok videos, but really today was a bit of a lounge day for me.” Seb smiled at you, proud of how hard you’ve been working.

“I should be getting a few days off soon, so we can relax together in the apartment, if you aren’t too busy with your classes.” He stretched his arm across the table, palm up waiting for your hand. Seb pulled your hand up to his mouth, placing a sloppy kiss onto the back of it. His eyes settled on you lovingly. To Sebastian, you were the greatest thing that had ever happened to him.

The two of you managed to finish your meal in peace. No fans came up to Sebastian asking for photos, no paparazzi swarms when you left, just a quiet meal for a normal couple in love. After you got home and you were snuggled in your pajamas alongside Sebastian in your comfortable bed, he handed you his phone to read over his post for his Instagram. The paragraph was sappy, about his time working with Drake, the director, and working with the rest of the cast. Seb always was a softy, never was able to hide it, especially in promo posts.

“It looks good to me. Are you going to post it now? Or wait until tomorrow morning?” Seb debated, he probably should wait and do it tomorrow, but he was most likely going to forget to do it. He clicked post, putting his phone on charge and snuggling into you.

“Thank you for always being there for me, Y/N.” He kissed your jawline, nuzzling his face into your neck. “It really means a lot to me, baby. I love you so much.” He wrapped both hands around your waist, pulling you to his front. You smiled wide, momentarily forgetting all of your troubles.

“I love you too, Seb.” You turned your head slightly, pressing a kiss against the corner of his mouth. “Now let’s get some sleep, love.” Little did you know that a single post could ruin all of the progress that you thought you had made.

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

You woke the next morning, alone in bed. You could hear pots clanging in the kitchen of your home, bringing a smile to your face. Before you left the safety of your bed, you checked your socials out of habit. You opened Instagram first, seeing an absurd amount of notifications this early in the morning. Your smile dropped as soon as you opened the first post. Comments on Sebastian’s post about Endings, Beginnings and his chemistry with Shailene weren’t entirely out of the ordinary. They were to be expected, they were playing parts in a love triangle. People were ‘shipping’ Shailene with Seb and Jamie, so that wasn’t too crazy.

What hurt you were the comments saying, “living for shailene and sebastian! she’s a much better match for him than y/n.”

“never thought that y/n girl was going to last, glad he’s going w shailene”

“shailene and seb supremacy”

“yes! i’ve always supported seb in everything he’s done, but i rlly questioned him when he got w that y/n girl. what was he thinking?!”

Tears gathered in your eyes as you continued scrolling. You never thought you and Sebastian never fit. You knew that people had issues with your relationship, but you never let it get in your head this bad. You checked your explore page, pictures of you and Sebastian from last night were riddling the page.

Your heart dropped.

There were pictures of the two of you from last night with parts of your body circled. The exposed skin above your waistband, the excess skin on your neck and arms. You don’t know where they got these pictures, but your stomach was steadily sinking with each picture you saw. The door of your room opened, revealing a smiley Sebastian with a plate full of eggs in one hand and a cup of orange juice in the other.

“Good morning, baby.” You quickly shoved your phone away from you, wiping your tears away from your eyes to meet his. His brows furrowed immediately. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?” You snuffled quietly, before answering.

“Uh, nothing. I’m just so proud of you.” You smiled at him, not wanting to bring down his already happy mood with your problems. Was that entirely healthy? Probably not, but you were doing it anyway, consequences be damned.

“Oh, well you don’t have to cry for me, Y/N. Even if you’re proud.” He walked up to your side of the bed, placing the cup and plate on your nightstand. He brought his hand up to your cheeks, wiping away your tear streaks. “You know that I only like to see tears whenever it’s me causing you so much pleasure you beg me to stop.” He winked at you, smirking at your rising blush. To say that didn’t lift your spirits for about half a second would be a lie. Sebastian brought the plate to your lap, waiting for you to start eating. At this particular moment, after seeing all those horrible pictures of your body, your appetite had gone out the window, but he was so smiley.

“After you eat, I want ya to shower.” Sebastian’s hand came up to your jaw, cupping it as you used it to chew the eggs. “We’ve got a long day of lounging and enjoying each other's company ahead of us.” Sebastian stood from the bed, throwing a wink at you as he left the room dramatically. You stopped eating soon after he left, the food tasting like ash on your tongue. At some point, you got into the bathroom, staring at the reflection in the mirror.

Your phone was in your hand again. The pictures flooding your Twitter feed. Shaky breaths left your mouth as you watched your reflection tilt its head. Tears began gathering in your eyes as it felt like you weren’t in your own skin anymore. You had worked so hard to be comfortable in your own body.

It’s amazing how just one picture can ruin everything.

You leaned forward on the countertop, hands holding up your weight. You shifted towards the mirror, examining every miniscule detail that your eyes could see. Your lids came down quickly, tears dragging down your cheeks. You squeezed your eyes closed, shaking your head back and forth.

“You are not going to let this get to you.” You took a few deep breaths as you turned on the shower. Not wanting to be around the mirror anymore, you kept your bath short, talking to yourself the whole time. By the time you left the bathroom, it was steamed completely, you couldn’t see your reflection even if you wanted to.

“He loves you.” You had a mantra and you continued to repeat it as you walked into your shared closet. “He loves all of you.” You pulled one of his old t-shirts off a hanger. “Sebastian loves you.” A pair of your underwear and his loose boxers covered your lower half. “Sebastian loves all of you.” You shoved your feet into a pair of fuzzy pink socks, leaving the closet still muttering to yourself. You tucked your phone into your waistband after checking your socials again. You know you shouldn’t have, but there was some part of you that just wouldn’t let you not.

The same shit covered your For You page on TikTok. Videos from the trailer of Seb and Shailene and then videos of you and Seb, comparing the two relationships. “They do fit well together.” You thought to yourself. A part of you wondering why Seb was with you in the first place.

“Did you say something, love?” Sebastian looked at you from the couch. A blanket was strewn over his lower half, his upper body inviting, waiting for you to join him. His smile dropped when he took in your glassy eyes instead of your usual happy expression.

“Oh baby, what’s wrong?” He started towards you, eyes running over your body for any outward injuries. An understanding look crossed his face when he saw your phone clutched in your hand. “Y/N, talk to me, baby.” Sebastian’s hands rested on your shoulders, lightly caressing your biceps. You recoiled from his touch, feeling uncomfortable in your own body.

“Just some stuff that some fans posted.” Seb’s thumb traced just under your eye, wiping away the tears. He held his right hand out for your phone, to understand what you were talking about. His brows furrowed deeply as he scrolled, not fully processing how destructive his fans could be. Sebastian always believed that they were the best fucking people in the world. He knew that they could be mean, but this was something else.

“They don’t know what they’re talking about, Y/N.” Sebastian’s voice was firm. It was almost strong enough to cut through the fog invading your brain, but not quite. You had officially zoned out. Dead to the world. Lost in your own thoughts. No matter how destructive those thoughts may be.

Sebastian noticed that you were already too deep, having experienced this with you many times before. He was aware that you were self-conscious, insecure, however you want to describe it. Your anxiety always got worse when you were stressed. Prepping for your dissertation was definitely a stressful time. Add on top of that, Sebastian was constantly pulling you from your work for various reasons. Had he contributed to this? Scratch that thought, he didn’t have time for that. He needed to bring you back down to Earth, back to him.

“Y/N.” His hands hovered over your hips. “I’m going to touch you for a second.” He directed you to the couch, settling on the coffee table in front of you. His fingers lightly traced circles onto your knees, as he assessed how he should approach this.

“Y/N. Baby?” Sebastian hesitated before bringing his fingers up to your chin, not wanting you to react badly. “I’m right here, Y/N, it’s Sebastian.” His left hand hadn’t left your knee, continuing to trace small patterns into your skin, giving you something to ground yourself with. He watched you blink and swallow harshly, inhaling sharply before opening your mouth.

“Why are you with me?” Your chin trembled with unvoiced sobs. “You deserve the world, Seb. I’m not even--” Your sentence was cut off by a loud whimper causing tears to start streak down. Sebastian wasn’t sure if this was a situation where you wanted him to be involved, so he waited for a sign.

“I’m not even worth a glance from you.” Your hand came up to wipe at your runny nose. “They’re so right. You need to be with someone like Shailene.” A bitter sob racked your body, making your body fold in half. Sebastian caught you before you hurt yourself.

“Y/N. I love you.” He always heard you say that to yourself when you thought he wasn’t listening. He knew that you suffered from anxiety, so he was always watching. Always paying attention to your little cues. The little things that he could use to help you as much as he could. “I love all of you.” He held one of your hands, running his thumb over the back of it.

“I don’t care what they say, baby.” He lifted your face to his, steel blue eyes locking with your cloudy pair. “I picked you.” He pecked your right cheek. “I want you.” A peck to your left. “I want only you.” One to your forehead. “It’s always been you, Y/N.” Another on your chin. “I love all of you, Y/N.” Sebastian landed a final short kiss to your lips, lingering for only a second.

“I want you to understand something, Y/N.” His gaze never left you. “I’m not going anywhere.” His brows raised as he hardened his voice. “I’m especially not going anywhere at the behest of my fans. I love them to death, but they don’t get to decide who I love.” Sebastian shifted to sit next to you on the couch. “Is it okay if I put my arms around you?” All he got was a brief nod in return, which was expected.

“I’m yours, Y/N. As much as you’re mine.” His arms descended around you, wrapping you in a loving embrace. You turned to face him fully, bringing your own arms around his waist, shoving your head into his neck.

“I’m sorry you have to deal with all my shit, Seb.” Sebastian almost missed your comment because you spoke into his shoulder and through loud snuffles. He backed away to look you in the face.

“I signed up for this, Y/N. I’m here for whatever we go through.” He tucked a stray hair behind your ear. “We go through ‘your shit’ together, Y/N. This is a partnership, a two-way street.” He looked at the weak smile on your face, heart warming slightly at the sight. His face turned serious, casting a glance at your phone on the coffee table.

“How long have you been sitting on this?” He knew how quickly your mind could twist things, so he wasn’t sure what to expect. You bit your lip, not meeting his eyes anymore.

“Just since this morning.” He held you away from his body, watching your expression.

“Is this why you were crying earlier?” You gave him a meek nod in response. “Baby, I thought we talked about this. We have to talk to each other when we think we’re going to go into a funk.” The two of you had talked about it before, but you didn’t think this was going to be a funk.

“I should’ve been able to just shake this off because I know you love me and you won’t leave me because of something that some people on the Internet say.” The words left your mouth before you could process everything, your mind quick to defend itself.

“It’s okay, Y/N. You don’t always have to be able to shake something off. We just have to keep each other in the loop.” Sebastian looked over your tear-stained face, pressing a kiss to your forehead again. “Let’s ditch the phones today. Just spend the day in each other’s arms, how’s that sound?” You smiled softly, nodding at the man in front of you. He got up quickly hiding both of your phones in the kitchen somewhere.

This definitely wasn’t a solution to dealing with your anxiety, Sebastian knew that. It also wasn’t dealing with the toxic people on the Internet, but you didn’t need that right now. You needed to be immersed in an environment that accepted what you were going through without judgement, Sebastian could provide that. Seb hummed happily when you snuggled into his side under the covers on your couch while he searched for a movie. He kissed the top of your head and he felt you smile against his stomach.

“I’m proud of you, draga mea.” You turned to face him, a confused expression lacing your features.

“For what, Seb?” He stroked your face with a single finger, mapping out your features.

“I’m proud of how you handle yourself. I’m amazed at how strong you are, even when you think you’re not.” He leaned closer to you, whispering his next words. “You’re my hero.” One corner of your mouth twitched upwards, not wanting to accept it. You rolled your eyes playfully, settling back onto his stomach before speaking.

“I love you, Sebastian.”

“And I love you, Y/N.”

426 notes · View notes

baepsaesbae · 3 years

Text

Babysitters Club

Pairing— Kim Taehyung x reader

Genre— SMUT, fluff, babysitting au, strangers to lovers au

Warnings— Dom!Taehyung, roleplaying, face fucking, oral sex (m and f), bondage, explicit rough unprotected sex please stay safe irl, squirting, choking, hickies, a surprise cameo from Spring Will Come Again!Jungkook because I have no self control

Word Count— ~7.6k

Summary— A generic summer job hunt leads you to babysit rowdy (but still cute) kids alongside the most handsome man you’ve ever seen. What shenanigans will you get into with Taehyung by your side?

A/N— HUGE shoutout to the lovely @kimtaehyunq for making this beautiful banner for me! This was literally the Taehyung I had in mind while writing this uwu. This fic is the epitome of self indulgence but I truly hope you guys like it too! Please let me know what you think! My askbox/inbox is always open, don’t be afraid to come chat with me. Love you all, hope you guys are safe <3

Crumpled up newspapers littered the floor as another ball was apathetically tossed aside. A sigh of defeat escaped your lips as you looked up at the ceiling in desperation.

“Still at it with the job hunt, huh?” your roommate, Hyuna, said when she saw your mess, “I told you to search online. Or try to get a job at a cafe or a boba shop or something.”

“Easy jobs online seem sketchy, and I told you I don’t want to work in the food industry ever again,” you groaned.

“But you’d rather...be a babysitter?” she questioned as she held up an ad, “Wait you could get paid up to $15 an hour? That’s pretty good.”

“I didn’t see that one. Is it an agency or something?”

“Not sure, take a look,” she handed you the paper.

“Oh, it seems like it’s a daycare run out of someone’s house. They’re looking for multiple applicants. You wanna do it with me?! I think it could be fun!” you ask excitedly.

“And spend most of my summer vacation with a bunch of snot nosed brats? I don’t think so. You have fun though!” she blew you a kiss as she walked away.

You whipped your phone out and immediately called the number in the ad. This job was the only one that seemed bearable, and you thought kids were cute for the most part. You’ve had a few babysitting gigs in the past so this shouldn’t be too bad.

“Hello?” a deep voice answered the call.

“Hi, I saw your ad in the paper! I was wondering if there was still a babysitting position open?” you inquired.

“Oh yes! Yeah there’s still a spot open. Um, can you give me a sec?” the man said quickly as you heard wailing kids in the background. After two minutes or so he returned to the phone.

“I’m terribly sorry about that. You don’t have a criminal background or anything right? Gosh, I’m sure this sounds unprofessional but--”

“Nope, I don’t have any charges or anything like that. Should I call back later?” you offered since it seemed like the man was a little preoccupied.

“It’s like this all the time. Why don’t we do a practice run tomorrow? Oh! I mean, whenever you’re available to start. Or technically have an interview? I guess? Hey, don’t put that in your mouth!” the man chastised at someone in the distance.

“I can come in tomorrow!” you said.

“Great! Just use the address in the same ad you got this number from! Oh, and please get here by 9am! See you soon!” the man hung up abruptly.

“That was chaotic…” you said to yourself.

A moment later your phone began to ring. It was from the babysitting guy.

“Hello?” you answered.

“I realized I never got your name! I promise I’m not always this frazzled,” he laughed as rambunctious laughter erupted behind him.

“Oh, I’m ______,” you gave him your first and last name.

“Cool. See you tomorrow Miss ____!” he said before hanging up again.

You were actually excited to babysit. It had been a while since you had done it, and playing with kids was usually fun. Then again, you’ve never had a bad experience with babysitting before. You prayed that this gig would continue the positive trend.

Donning shorts and a simple Mickey Mouse t-shirt, (you figured some kid was bound to like the mousey character) it was time to head off to your potential workplace. The babysitting place was actually fairly close to you, only about a 10 minute drive. It was 8:55am by the time you arrived. A couple of parents walked past your car to drop off their kids. All of the kids seemed to be pretty excited to enter the house, which was definitely a good sign.

You gently knocked on the door at exactly 9am. There was no response as you awkwardly waited for about a minute or so. All you could hear was shrill laughter and thumps that you presumed was the kids running about. You realized there was a doorbell, and sighed at your foolishness.

The door opened seconds after you rang the doorbell. A tall man with dark hair greeted you with a warm smile. You were taken aback by the handsome guy, suddenly questioning whether you were at the right place or not until a child popped up from behind his shoulder and yelled out a loud “Boo!” that caused you to jump.

“Ah, sorry about that! This one is always trying to play pranks,” the man laughed as he playfully jostled the child that was latched onto his back, “You must be ______?”

“That’s me!” you say with a little too much enthusiasm.

“Cool. C’mon in, I’ll introduce you to the kids,” the man led you inside.

The living room was littered with toys, from cars to building blocks to barbies. This place was definitely a kid’s happy place. Four little kids were playing with various things when you walked in. All of the kids there seemed to be between the ages of 4 to 6. At a glance, it seemed like they were all playing house. It took you a few seconds to realize that one of the kids was actually playing by herself; she was just physically close to the other kids.

“Everyone! This is our newest helper! Her name is Miss ____. Let’s all play nicely with her okay?” the man announced.

The kids playing house immediately stopped what they were doing and rushed to you. Two boys began asking you questions in a rapid fire succession, while the little girl merely clung to your leg.

“Those two are Kota and Bel,” the man pointed to the two boys, “The little girl stuck to you like glue is Ava, and the one playing over there is Lucy,” he continued to name each child.

“AND I’M SAM!!” the last boy exclaimed over the man’s shoulder.

“Yes, this troublemaker here is Sam. That’s basically the whole gang! We could get a few more additions as the summer goes on, but these guys are the OG crew. They’re all really sweet kids, once you get to know them. Any questions so far?” your employer asked.

“I don’t think I ever caught your name, sir,” you say politely.

“Oh! No need to call me sir. I think we’re probably around the same age? Not that I’m assuming your age or anything but--”

“He’s my horsey!” Sam interrupted.

“No, he’s the chef!” Kota yelled.

“No, he’s our dad who’s not our dad,” Lucy chimed in.

“My mom told me he was a babysitter?” Bel added, now visibly confused.

“I am all of those things,” the man reassured the children, “But my name is Taehyung. The kids call me Tae or Mr. insert whatever title I have in the game we are playing on that day. Pleasure to meet ya,” Tae extends a hand out to you, “Let’s see how your first day goes.”

The first few hours consisted of a rather intricate game of pretend set up in a fantasy world. You played a princess who was captured by an evil dragon, who was played by Taehyung (you couldn’t help but think about how you wouldn’t mind being his hostage).

The boys were valiant knights on their quest to rescue you. The girls played different creatures that aided the knights as fairies or unicorns or any other things they wanted to be. Most of the game consisted of you and Taehyung sitting together in a corner of the living room. Even though you didn’t have to do anything, it was fun watching the kids play. Their imagination amused you.

“Enjoying yourself, princess?” Taehyung asked as he also watched the children run around.

His deep voice sent chills down your spine. Something about the way the word “princess” rolled off his tongue was so enchanting. You cleared your throat before answering.

“This job has been pretty fun so far, Mr. Evil Dragon,” you smile.

“Hey! I’m not evil, just misunderstood,” he protested.

“Oh no! The dragon is about to eat the princess!” one of the boys cried out.

“What? No, I’m not going to eat her,” Taehyung said defensively.

“You need to pretend to eat the princess so that the knights save her,” Lucy, the quiet one, scuttled over to whisper to the both of you before hurrying back to her spot.

Taehyung turned towards you to appease the kids as they held their breath in anticipation.

“Rawr! I’m going to eat you!” he said in a deep voice.

“Oh no! Somebody save me!” you cried out, playing along.

A few moments passed but none of the kids moved. You both turned your heads towards them in confusion. They stared back at you blankly.

“You need to bite her!” Sam demanded.

“What?” you and Tae said in unison.

“Bite her! Bite her! Bite her!” the boys started to chant.

“But not too hard!” Ava expressed her worry for you, making you smile.

“I…uh…” Taehyung was at a loss for words.

“They’re not gonna stop, are they?” you whispered to him.

He nodded with a sigh as their chanting got louder. You offered him your arm. Kids can be crazy stubborn over silly things. Besides, you’ve done worse for less (college is crazy).

Taehyung shot you an “are you sure about this?” look, to which you just nodded. Once he got the okay, Taehyung grabbed your arm and pulled you harshly, causing your face to be a mere inches away from his.

“Fools! You think you can save the princess? I will devour her before your very eyes!” Taehyung declared with an even deeper voice. He opened his mouth menacingly, as if to show off his fangs. Then, he proceeded to bite your bicep. To be honest, he was being so forceful that you thought he was going to bite you for real, causing you to involuntarily close your eyes.

Instead, he gingerly placed his teeth on your skin so lightly that you could barely feel anything. You opened your eyes to see Taehyung grinning at you with your arm in his mouth.

“Aaaaggghhh GET HIM!!” Sam yelled, leading the other boys straight into Taehyung.

Taehyung quickly let go of you before he rolled out onto the floor. The boys began to pummel Taehyung with their foam swords and pretend bows and arrows. The girls came to your aid to help you escape during the battle.

The little boys triumphantly stood over their defeated babysitter who pretended to be passed out on the floor. You applauded their victory as the girls sat by your side.

“Okay! Good game, it’s almost lunchtime,” Taehyung announced as he quickly popped back up.

“Chef Tae makes the best mac and cheese!” Ava informed you excitedly.

“I wanted dino nuggies!” Sam puffed out his cheeks in disappointment.

“Sam, you know it’s Ava’s day to pick out lunch. It’ll be your turn tomorrow okay? I promise! You guys can stay here and play with Miss ____ till food is ready,” Tae called out as he walked to the kitchen. Lucy silently followed Tae.

“Lucy likes to help out in the kitchen a lot. She sets the table,” Ava explained when she saw you watching Lucy.

“You’re good at being a princess!” Kota butted in as he ran to hug your leg.

“I like your shirt! I like Mickey Mouse too. I saw him in DisneyWorld last year,” Bel said as he clung to your other leg.

The kids took turns holding onto your legs as you tried to walk around. Apparently the thought of making you tumble over was an exciting one, and that kept the kids busy until Taehyung called for everyone.

Five little bowls of mac and cheese were set up on the dining table. The kids took their seats as Taehyung handed out juice boxes. He positioned himself by your side as the little ones began to chow down.

“I normally just eat the rest out of the pot, but since you’re here I can get you a bowl. Sorry about biting you earlier, the kids really like it when I get serious about my roles,” Taehyung chuckled as he scooped out your portion.

“It’s no problem, you’re a great actor. Thank you,” you say politely as he handed you a bowl.

Lunch was spent making small talk with Taehyung. He was a newly graduated college student trying to make extra money before starting a real job hunt.Taehyung had been running this makeshift daycare since he was a senior in highschool.

“Summers are always fun with them,” Taehyung said while smiling fondly at the kids, “How has it been so far?” he asked.

“I’ve been having a good time. The kids are all really sweet! They have so much energy,” you answer.

“They do indeed, which is why playtime is so important in the morning! It makes what comes next easier,” he winked at you before collecting the empty bowls, “Okay kiddos! Who’s ready for nap time?”

Lucy quietly raised her hand while the boys groaned. You figured it would be hard to get those active boys to settle down, let alone to take a nap. You helped Taehyung set up blankets and pillows in the game room. The kids made a beeline to their designated blankets without a fuss.

“Do you sing, Miss _____?” Taehyung asked out of the blue.

“Um, not really?” you say hesitantly.

“Ah, I see. No worries. Everybody ready?” he said.

“Yes!” all the kids replied.

“Alrighty. Do you have any song requests, Miss ____?”

You thought about which songs would make for a decent lullaby, “Do you know Adore You by Harry Styles?”

“I’ll have to look up the lyrics but yeah I like that song! I like his whole album actually,” Taehyung nodded as he pulled out his phone and took a deep breath, “Walk in your rainbow paradise~”

You were shocked by his vocal talent. His voice control was superb and the quality of his voice was downright euphoric. Even though Taehyung’s voice is deeper than Harry Styles’, his range was incredible. He was still able to go as high as Harry without any trouble. All the kids had fallen sound asleep by the time he finished the song.

“This is when I typically have about an hour of free time,” he said after quietly leading you back into the kitchen.

“You have such a beautiful voice! Do you sing to them every day?” you praised him.

“Thanks! Yeah, I sing to them every day. They used to get duets actually,” Taehyung sighed.

“Did you have another coworker before?” you asked.

“Yep. My best friend actually. He’s my roommate too, but he landed an internship this summer so he couldn’t be here. I’m very proud of him! But usually this is a job for two people so I decided to put that ad out. I’m happy you came out! The kids seem to like you,” Taehyung gave you a thumbs up.

“I hope so! Lucy might be scared of me though,” you recalled the way she mostly avoided you all morning.

“Nah, she’s just really shy. She told me that she thought you were really pretty though, so that’s a good sign!” he tried to reassure you.

“I guess it must be true then. Kids are brutally honest,” you smiled.

“She definitely wasn’t lying,” Taehyung smiled back at you.

You had to look away awkwardly to hide your blushed cheeks. There’s no way you could handle a direct smile from this guy. How was it possible for someone to be that handsome without even trying?!

“So what happens after naptime?” you quickly asked to change the subject.

“Basically more playing until their parents come. It honestly just depends on what the kids wanna do. We can play inside, in the backyard, and sometimes we go to the park,” Taehyung answered with an amused smile, “Let’s use this free time to conduct a more formal interview, shall we?”

Taehyung then asked you a series of questions about your summer schedule, if you’re willing to work every day of the week, how you feel about the kids, along with other things. You answered truthfully and kept up a professional demeanor. Taehyung seemed to be satisfied with your answers and leaned back in his chair.

“That all works for me! The people who really need to approve of you are the parents. I’ll introduce you to them later this afternoon. I’m sure they’ll all be fine once I vouch for you,” he nodded.

Soft giggles caught your attention. Taehyung signaled that break time was now over and led the way back to the living room. Kota and Bel were wrestling each other while the others threw pillows at them.

“Did everyone have a good nap?” Taehyung sing songed.

“Yes!” they replied.

“Can we play house now?” Ava asked.

“Yeah! Miss ____ can be the mommy now!” Sam bounced up in excitement, “Our last mommy used to be a boy.”

“Jimin was a great mommy and I’m sure he misses you all dearly. Jimin is my roommate/best friend/ex-cobabysitter,” Taehyung explained.

The game of house was more hands on from your end. The kids demanded you to carry them and read them stories like a real mommy would. It was mainly the girls who wanted to play with you, while the boys took turns wrestling with Tae or riding on his back. You were braiding Lucy’s hair when the doorbell rang.

“Kota! Your mom is here!” Taehyung called from the front.

All the kids trickled out one by one as their parents arrived. Taehyung introduced you to each parent; their reactions were all positive, especially when their kids raved about you being the new Jimin.

“If she’s anything like Jimin, then I have nothing to worry about. I trust your judgement, Taehyung,” one of the sterner looking parents said (Sam’s father to be exact).

“Congrats! You got the job,” Taehyung congratulated you once all of the children were picked up, “We get paid on Fridays. I’ll basically just split what we earn 50/50, cool?”

“That’s fine by me! I’m looking forward to working with you,” you bow graciously.

“Ah! No need to be so formal. We’re partners now! I’m not your boss or anything,” Taehyung gave you a friendly pat on the shoulder, “See you tomorrow!”

Summer was about to get rather eventful. All of the children warmed up to you surprisngly quickly, even timid Lucy (who had arguably grown the most fond of you). As the days went on, you couldn’t help but admire Taehyung’s kindness and patience when it came to the kids. From firm to understanding, he was everything a caregiver should be. He handled spats between kids with ease, often by making them forgive each other then laugh at some silly joke of his.

One afternoon, the kids voted to watch a Disney movie. All seven of you curled up on the couch together with you and Taehyung in the middle. Lucy sat in your lap while Bel sat in Taehyung’s. Halfway through the movie, Taehyung fell asleep. The kids didn’t notice since they were so engrossed in the movie. You however, DID notice. Mostly because he rolled his sleepy head onto your shoulder.

Your heartbeat quickened as you slowly turned to take a peek at the handsome man sleeping beside you. He looked angelic, and you realized that he smelled pleasant too. He had a sweet scent that was uncharacteristic for a young man. You took a deep breath and pretended not to notice him. He didn’t wake up until the doorbell rang near the end of the movie.

He seemed to be confused and perhaps even slightly flustered when he lifted his head from your shoulder, but quickly shrugged it off to go answer the door. The incident (and the drool on your shoulder) was never mentioned.

It had been a month since you started babysitting with Taehyung, and it honestly had been a lot more fun than you expected. The kids are wonderful silly little beings and Taehyung is...well...Taehyung.

You were cleaning up the living room on a late Friday afternoon after all the kids had been picked up. Taehyung was somewhere splitting up the week’s paycheck. Once all the toys were back in their respective bins, it was time to gather your stuff and go.

“Great work this week,” Taehyung commended as he handed you your cut.

“Thanks! Same to you as always. I’ll see you on Monday,” you wave as you open the front door.

“Actually um--” Taehyung cleared his throat.

“Yes?” you whipped around with almost too much eagerness.

“My friend is part of an art gallery showing tomorrow night and I was wondering if you’d like to go with me? I heard there will be drinks and finger foods…” Taehyung trailed off, presumably due to imagining what kind of snacks will be served.

“I’d love to! I’m not an expert on art or anything, but it sounds cool,” you smile.

“No worries, I’m no expert either. I’m just a guy who appreciates neat expressions of creativity,” he nodded humbly, “I can pick you up at your place, if you’d like.”

“Sure, I’ll text you my address. Oh uh, what’s the dress code like? I don’t really attend these things,” you ask shyly.

“I’d say a step down from formal? Like no t-shirts or jeans. Pretend like you’re going on a date to some restaurant that isn’t a michelin star but is still classier than Olive Garden,” Taehyung tried to explain.

“I’ll do my best,” you smile at his peculiar way of describing the appropriate attire.

A smile never left your face as you drove home. A chance to hangout with Taehyung one on one without any kids around? All of his attention will be on you? Yes please. You love the kids and all, but you finally have a real chance to get closer to Taehyung. To be honest, you might have the teensiest little crush on him, but who could blame you?

The next day was spent preparing for your night out with Taehyung. It probably wasn’t a date (90% sure it’s not), but you wanted to look irresistible anyway. You put on a purple dress with flowy sleeves that made you feel like a princess. It was on the dressier side, but being slightly overdressed never hurt anyone.

You usually only had time to slap on mascara and a lip tint in the mornings before babysitting, but now you had abundant time to play around with your makeup. You settled for a soft yet glamorous look with shimmery eyeshadow and eyeliner. Sparkly lip gloss tied the whole look together and made your lips look tempting (or so you hoped). You decided to leave your hair alone since you were having a miraculously good hair day.

“Wow are you sure this isn’t a date?” Hyuna whistled when she walked into your room.

“It’s not! This is just the first time Taehyung will see me actually trying to look good,” you say defensively.

“You’re cute even in ratty t-shirts, but I get what you mean. Have fun tonight!” your roommate gave you a tight hug.

A strong knock on your front door indicated Taehyung’s arrival. Hyuna tagged along as you went to answer the door; she wanted to see the guy you’ve been gushing over for the past month for herself.

Your mouth hung open in shock for a split second when you opened the door. Taehyung also dressed up. He was wearing a bright sunflower shirt paired with a black blazer that perfectly combined fun with sophistication. He wore a red silky bandana looking belt for an added pop of color with his black pants.

“Hey Taehyung!” you greet him happily.

“Good evening, Miss ____. You look spectacular!” he complimented you immediately.

“So do you! It’s funny seeing you not in a t-shirt, though I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing,” you say.

“You’re charming even in your graphic tees, but this is a nice change of pace too,” Taehyung agreed.

“Hi! I’m Hyuna, ____’s roommate,” Hyuna butted in to shake his hand.

“Hi, I’m Taehyung, ____’s babysitting partner,” he introduced himself.

“We should get going,” you say politely before Hyuna could start to get chatty.

Hyuna mouthed an exaggerated “oh my god” coupled with a double thumbs up as you waved goodbye after Taehyung was already out the door. You playfully rolled your eyes but blew her a kiss anyway.

“I didn’t realize you lived so close to me,” Taehyung said as he pulled away from the curb.

“Yeah, it made the job even more appealing,” you nodded.

“I really am glad that you applied,” Taehyung said softly, as if to himself.

“Sorry, what was that?” you couldn’t hear him properly.

“Nothing! I said I’m glad you agreed to accompany me tonight!” Taehyung quickly stated.

“Thanks for inviting me out! I’m actually pretty excited,” you admitted.

The gallery was somewhere in the swanky part of downtown. You gazed out of the window at all of the high end stores Taehyung drove by. Everyone walking around the stores looked like supermodels, which was actually pretty intimidating. What if the people at the gallery looked like that too?

“We’re here!” Taehyung announced, interrupting your thoughts.

There was a decent amount of people wandering around the venue when you both entered. It was basically one big dimly lit room with spotlights on pieces scattered around on the walls plus some sculptures in the middle. Thankfully, the patrons already inside looked like normal people, most of them probably students like you.

“Taehyung!” someone called from the side of the room.

You both made your way towards the voice, only to find a man who was just as handsome as Taehyung greeting you with a bunny like smile. He had long hair that almost covered up his assorted dangly earrings. He definitely had art student vibes mixed with a dash of bad boy. The boys greeted each other with a ferocious hug, indicating that they’re probably good friends.

“Oh! What’s up, I’m Jungkook,” the boy shook your hand once he noticed you.

“She’s my babysitting partner this summer,” Taehyung said proudly.

“She’s replacing Jimin huh?” Jungkook laughed, “Taehyung and Jimin are like my brothers. We were all pretty close in college and are batchmates, even though I’m younger than them,” he stuck his tongue out at Taehyung.

“Yeah yeah okay whatever. Skipping grades in elementary school and bringing in a ton of transfer credits will help you do that I guess,” Taehyung shook his head even though he was still smiling.

“Are these your pictures?” you asked Jungkook, motioning to the mounted pictures behind him.

“Yeah! I took most of these in Madrid, I’ve been working abroad for my dream company,” Jungkook answered you proudly.

“Who’s this?” Taehyung pointed to a picture of a girl laughing by a giant tree.

“Yeah, she’s gorgeous!” you added.

“She’s um...a good friend. She was the perfect model,” Jungook said with a faraway look in his eyes that told you there was more to the story.

“Tell me more about her on our next phone call. Tonight is for celebrating you!” Taehyung picked up on Jungkook’s sudden change of tone.

You enjoyed listening to their old college stories as the boys reminisced about their past together. Jungkook relished telling you all of Taehyung’s embarrassing moments at various parties. Taehyung returned the favor by recalling Jungkook’s past run-ins with women. Despite his natural charm and god like looks, apparently Jungkook gets really nervous around girls.

You and Taehyung were on your own once Jungkook was flagged down by an older patron interested in purchasing some of his work. Taehyung stayed close to your side as you explored the rest of the gallery. Each artist was so incredibly talented as their pictures told stories with just a single frame.

“____ look! They have those fancy charcuterie boards!” Taehyung grabbed your hand and excitedly dragged you over to the snack table. You couldn’t help but smile at his childlike elation.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve been getting tired of being force fed fruit snacks every day,” you laughed as you ate the assorted appetizers.

“I completely understand. Unfortunately, the kids are too sweet when they want to share. I don’t have it in me to turn them down,” Taehyung agreed.

Once the food was eaten, you resumed walking through the gallery. It was fun making up stories to go with each picture. Taehyung seemed to gravitate towards adding a romantic twist to each story, while you opted for a bit of mystery. At the end of the event, Taehyung met up with Jungkook once more to say his goodbyes.

“Thanks again for coming with me, I had fun! I hope you enjoyed yourself,” Taehyung said as he drove you back.

“It was really neat! I liked hanging out with you outside of work,” you nodded.

“Would you say it was a successful date then?” Taehyung raised an eyebrow with curiosity. Your heart skipped a beat as your eyes widened with surprise.

“Was...was this a date?” you asked quietly.

“Did you want it to be?” Taehyung teased.

“I wouldn’t have gotten so dressed up otherwise,” you said defensively, taken aback by his sudden cheekiness.

“I realized I should’ve clarified that after you had already left. My bad,” Taehyung shot you a boxy grin, “But then I figured maybe you would be more relaxed if I didn’t mention it.”

“That’s odd logic, but I guess it worked,” you admitted begrudgingly.

Taehyung walked you back up to your house. He sweetly kissed your cheek and bid you goodnight, leaving you frozen in place.

“S-see you on Monday!” was all you were able to stammer out, to which Taehyung just smiled and waved back.

Hyuna happily freaked out with you once you were back inside. She was watching you from the moment Taehyung pulled back up. She shrieked with excitement once you told her that Taehyung confirmed that it was a date. Hyuna didn’t let up with grilling questions about how your night went. She even asked if the Jungkook guy you met was single, to which you truthfully answered that you didn’t know.

“Besides, he told me himself that he’s scared of girls. You’re scary enough as is,” you teased her.

“Oh shut up. So is Taehyung like, your boyfriend now?” Hyuna asked the million dollar question.

“I don’t think so. I think it was just a date, but that’s a good start!” you declared optimistically.

Babysitting on Monday went on like normal. Taehyung didn’t act any differently, which was both concerning and relieving. You were in the backyard pretending to eat whatever dirt concoction the little kids were serving you.

“This one is for you,” Lucy quietly offered Taehyung a clump of dirt sprinkled with blades of grass, topped with a dandelion.

“Oh, how pretty! What is it?” Taehyung played along.

“It’s a love potion. The next person you hug will fall in love with you,” Lucy smiled.

A smirk crept on Taehyung’s face as he pretended to eat Lucy’s love potion. He made a satisfied “Ahh” sound that made Lucy giggle.

“Tae has to hug me now! He loves me the most!” Sam yelled as he ran over to latch onto Taehyung.

“No, Tae loves me!” Bel argued as he pulled on Taehyung’s shirt.

“That’s not how it works!” Lucy huffed as she yelled at the boys.

You watched with delight as the little kids chased Taehyung around the backyard, demanding that he has to hug them. It was easy for him to juke them out as they constantly ran back and forth. You were content with just watching them until Taehyung began to make a beeline for you.

“Oh no no no,” you cried as you got up to run.

Taehyung (and the kids) chased you around for a little bit. The backyard was on the smaller side, so there wasn’t much space to evade all of them coming for you at once. To make matters worse, Taehyung actually started to try and catch you. His speed was no joke; he was much more agile than you gave him credit for.

With one pounce, Taehyung tackled you to the ground. Somehow he managed to whip himself around while you were falling, so you ended up falling on him. Now wrapped up in his arms, Taehyung smiled up at you with a shit eating grin.

“I guess you have to fall in love with me now,” he smirked.

“You wish,” you laughed as you pulled yourself up.

“Aw now he loves Miss _____,” Sam pouted.

“No, now Miss ____ has to fall in love with Tae,” Ava corrected him.

“That’s dumb,” Kota shook his head.

“Tae! Kota said a bad word!” Bel immediately tattled.

“Kota, remember what I said about bad words. No one wants to play with someone who says mean things,” Taehyung chided him.

“Sorry,” Kota mumbled.

“Let’s play go play inside. Who wants juice?” Taehyung patted Kota’s head.

The kids followed Taehyung inside like little ducklings. You loved that sight, you always thought it was the cutest thing. The rest of the day went by without a hitch.

The topic of favorite movies came up during lunchtime the next day.

“I like Frozen 2,” Ava stated, and Lucy nodded furiously in agreement.

“Detective Pikachu was better. Pikachu is funny,” Sam interjected. The other little boys then began to argue about which pokemon was better/stronger.

“I’m not really a big movie watcher,” Taehyung confessed as he took a bite of a dino chicken nugget.

“Have you at least seen the classics? Harry Potter? Lord of the Rings? Star Wars?” you listed with concern.

“I’ve seen Harry Potter and Star Wars. I think I saw the Lord of the Rings? I can’t really remember. I know I wanted to watch the newer Lord of the Rings movies,” he chuckled at your growing disbelief.

“Newer Lord of the Rings? You mean the Hobbit series?” you were disgruntled.

“Yeah those. I didn’t realize you were a nerd,” he nudged you.

“What of it? All of those are great movies. I have copies of the Hobbit series if you ever wanted to watch them,” you offered.

“Do you wanna watch them with me?” he perked up.

“Sure, I love them! You wanna do a marathon? It’ll take up a full day though,” you warned.

“I’m down. Are you free this Sunday?”

“I believe so.”

“Great! I’m excited to see you geek out over hobbits. Okay kids, naptime!”

You drove up to Taehyung’s place Sunday morning, you weren’t kidding when you said it would take all day. Taehyung said to dress comfortably so you showed up in your sweatpants and oversized college tee. He answered the door wearing gray sweatpants and his favorite CELINE shirt. His dark fluffy hair fell over his forehead and was almost long enough to cover his eyes.

“Good morning! I hope you’re hungry. I made some waffles to eat while we watch the first movie,” he greeted you.

His humble abode smelled heavenly as the scent of dough tinged with a hint of cinnamon wafted through the air. The soft belgian waffles were delicious as they practically melted in your mouth. Taehyung asked a ton of questions with nearly every scene, but you didn’t mind. You were happy to flex your knowledge of Tolkien lore.

Hours later, you found yourself cuddled up with Taehyung as the final credits of the Battle of Five Armies began to roll. Taehyung was still trying to process everything that happened as he asked you clarifying questions about each character.

“Well crap, now I’m sad,” he pouted.

“Yeah, the ending is kind of a downer, but that’s what makes it so good! The Lord of the Rings has a happy ending if that makes you feel better,” you look up at him from his chest.

“You look cute like that,” he observed.

“Like what? Tiny from your angle?” you tilted your head.

“I guess so? Tiny, maybe submissive,” Taehyung’s voice lowered with his suggestion.

“Submissive? Is that how you see me?” you sit back up completely with defiance.

“Not at all. You’re pretty feisty, which is why making you be submissive is even more alluring,” he raised his eyebrow in a suggestive manner.

“Do you want me to be a damsel in distress for you? Not happening,” you smirked.

“Pretty princesses are good for one thing,” Taehyung hopped off the couch.

Before you could say anything, he promptly grabbed you and swung you over his shoulder. You were too shocked by his boldness and physical abilities to retaliate.

“They’re perfect for kidnapping!” he let out a dramatic evil laugh as he carried you off to his bedroom.

Once there, he roughly threw you on the bed. You couldn’t help but look around curiously since this was the first time you’ve ever seen his room. It was surprisingly neat; his bed was made and there were no messy clothing piles in sight.

“Are you an evil dragon then? Capturing princesses and such?” you teased.

“Evil dragon, dashing captor, I can be anything you want me to be. Just please not an orc,” he let out a chuckle before getting back into character, “Just know that you’re trapped here with me. No one is going to rescue you.”

“Oh no! What a terrible situation to be in! What on Earth is this extremely handsome dragon going to do with a poor defenseless princess like me?” you taunted.

“Ok this is all very hot but before we go any further, are you okay with this?” Taehyung asked sincerely.

“I can’t think of anything that I’ve wanted more,” you nodded.

“Perfect. Safe word is red,” he winked at you, “Now strip for me, princess.”

“And if I don’t?” you challenged.

Taehyung grabbed a fistful of hair on the back of your head and forcefully brought you up to his face, “I suggest not making me angry,” he sneered.

You didn’t think you were one for being manhandled, but god damn that was hot. There was already a tingle between your legs and he hadn’t even really touched you yet. You complied with his request, and quickly tore off your shirt and pants. Though you weren’t wearing any fancy lingerie, you were wearing a gray bra and gray panties that could pass off as matching.

“Mmm what a pretty treasure. It would be a shame to let it gounappreciated,” Taehyung stretched out that last word as he gently ran his fingers from your torso up to your neck before firmly grasping it.

Taehyung straddled you as his long fingers were wrapped around your neck. Slowly, he leaned down to kiss you. Though apprehensive at first, he gradually got more bold with it. His tongue dipped into your mouth the instant your lips parted. His other hand crept under your bra to fondle your breast.

“You take your clothes off too,” you said as soon as the kiss broke.

“You don’t get to make any demands, silly princess,” Taehyung shook his head.

You pouted and reached out to tug at his pants anyway. Big mistake. Taehyung slapped your hand away and slammed you back onto the bed.

“You don’t listen, huh? I’ll have to do something about that. Stay still or else you’ll make things worse for yourself,” he ordered.

You reluctantly obeyed, partly because you were curious about what he was going to do, and partly because you were actually intimidated by him. He returned back to the bed a few seconds later, but with a familiar silky red belt in hand.

“Give me your hands. Good girl,” he smiled deviously as he bound them together, “Remember the safe word is red, okay?” he gently reminded you.

He looked down at you with a satisfied grin as he began to take off his sweatpants. He had an obvious bulge in his underwear that outlined his massive dick. You were further entranced by his physique when he took off his shirt. He wasn’t ripped, but he was still fit, as you could plainly see when his chest was finally revealed.

“Open wide, princess,” he demanded.

You opened your mouth, and even flattened your tongue out a little bit for him. He pulled his cock out of his underwear, finally exposing his full length. You doubted you could fit even half of him in your mouth, but at this point it wasn’t up to you.

Taehyung lowered himself down to you, and teasingly tapped the tip of his cock on your tongue. He slowly eased himself into your mouth, forcing you to open your mouth even wider to account for his girth. He made his way back out once you gagged. He grabbed your head to hold you steady as he fucked your mouth once more. He got closer and closer to the back of your throat until he finally hit it. All you could focus on was breathing as tears welled up in your eyes. Taehyung thrusted a couple more times before he pulled out completely.

“Good girl indeed. Well done, princess,” he softly stroked your chin before wiping your tears away. All you could do was smile meekly back at him.

“Don’t worry, it’s time for your reward,” Taehyung smiled down at you as his hand slipped under your panties, “Oh you’re so wet. I can’t wait to taste you.”

He positioned himself between your thighs after he tore off your panties. His thumb fiddled with your clit, causing you to squirm. He placed a strong grip on your thigh to hold you down as he circled your clit faster. Your helpless whimpers were music to Taehyung’s ears.

Without warning, he easily stuck two fingers into you. He didn’t even let you adjust as he rapidly fingered you, his fingers curving to graze your g-spot with every stroke. His tongue swirled around your clit, adding even more toe curling sensations.

Him adding a third finger was the catalyst for the strongest orgasm you’ve ever had in your life. There wasn’t even a build up, everything just hit you at once. Suddenly you were crying out even louder as you violently came. Did it occur to you that you were squirting all over Taehyung and his bed? No. Were you doing exactly that? Absolutely.

“Delicious,” Taehyung said as he licked his lips, “Look at the fucking mess you made.”

“I-i’m sorry,” you managed to stutter, you were still recovering from your orgasm.

“It’s only fair that it’s my turn to make a mess now. Do I need to get a condom, princess?” he cooed.

You weakly shook your head. You needed to feel all of him, right now. Taehyung chuckled at your neediness as he aligned himself with your pussy. He slowly inserted his entire length into you until the base of his cock touched your soaked pussy. You moaned together as he stayed still for a second. You looked up to see Taehyung’s face lit up with pure bliss.

“You’re still so fucking wet,” he growled as he began to mercilessly buck his hips into you.

You moaned with every thrust as Taehyung shook the entire bed. Taehyung placed both of your legs on his shoulders, allowing him to hit you even deeper from this new angle. He leaned over to plant his lips on your neck as he fucked you. What started as a gentle peck took a violent turn as he harshly sucked on your neck. He left dark spots wherever his lips touched, and soon you were covered in dark blooms.

“Do you want me to soil your back or your chest?” he asked in a guttural tone.

“Back?” you answer dubiously.

You were immediately flipped over. You were laying flat on your chest waiting for him to prop up your ass, but he never did. Instead, he simply spread your legs wider and fucked you flat against the bed. Taehyung grabbed your ass and spread your cheeks to get a better view of your sopping pussy. You could feel another orgasm brewing as he fucked even deeper into you, and his cock was continuously dragging against your g-spot.

“Taehyung, I--”

“I know, princess. Let it all out. I want to feel you come on my dick,” he demanded.

A few more strong strokes was all it took for you to go limp under him as your orgasm took over. Seconds after you hit your high, Taehyung pulled out and came all over your back.

Once you were all cleaned up, Taehyung untied you and kissed your forehead.

“How was it, princess?” he asked as he stroked your hair.

“I’ve never been fucked by a beast before, but now I don’t want anything else,” you admitted before kissing his neck.

“Good. I was worried about going overboard. As I told you before, I really like getting into character,” he laughed.

“I’ve never been into roleplay but I’m willing to change for you. Oh shit, it’s late already,” you noticed the time on his alarm clock.

“Just stay the night. I don’t think the kids will care if you’re wearing sweatpants or not. I can lend you a turtleneck to cover up those hickies though,” Taehyung yawned.

“Are you sure?” you questioned.

“Yeah, I don’t mind. Be warned, I’m a cuddler,” he pulled you closer to him.

“I guess I can sleep in a little later then,” you reasoned.

“Perfect. Goodnight, princess,” he quickly kissed your lips.

“You’re sleeping like that?”

“Like what?”

“Butt naked?”

“I can put clothes on if it makes you uncomfortable. I just figured it would make things easier for tomorrow morning,” he said sleepily.

“Tomorrow morning?” that got your attention.

“You’ll see! Be patient, princess. Night night.”

Never in a million years would you have guessed that applying for a babysitting job would result in this, but you weren’t complaining.

#bts smut #kim taehyung smut #bangtanarmynet #btswritingcafe #ksmutclub #btscreatorscorner #bts fanfic #kim taehyung fanfic #v smut #v fanfic #bts fluff #kim taehyung fluff #kim taeyhung #v #taehyung x reader #kim taehyung x reader #purplearmynet

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saurexhas · 3 years

Text

Love is Blind - Part 1

So I’ve been hanging out with @studionovella and the team for @nightmare-castle, and the sheer talent in their discord server is so amazing. It led me to be inspired, and while I’m typically more of a Sanscest writer, I figured that it’d be fun to try something new considering the source of my inspiration! So have some Nightmare x MC (Nightmare x Reader).

Be warned, this story handles blindness and... probably some other sensitive topics considering it’s me. So just watch the tags for any relevant triggers!

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You didn’t think that it was possible, but somehow you had fallen for Nightmare. On the surface he was cold, cruel, and calculating, using everyone he could to advance his goals. But if you could tolerate the coldness, get past his clinical treatment of those he believed were beneath him, then there was so much more to him. Nightmare was a scholar, a brilliant mind with a vision for a world all his own. He appreciated the arts, often enjoying his downtime with a good book and a calming cup of tea. And believe it or not, there was a small part of him that genuinely cared for the skeletons under his charge. You’ve seen that side of him more than most, managing to open even his eye to what was hidden beneath the centuries of anger and hatred.

Even if negativity was still a large part of who he was, you found yourself able to accept that darkness, because it only made the small lights within him shine brighter. Just like the stars the two of you were gazing at. Though as your gaze shifted to the skeleton currently dominating your thoughts, you found that piercing cyan eye of his locked onto you instead of the sky. If there was ever any doubt in your mind that your feelings were reciprocated, one look at his gaze would sweep it all away. There was a tenderness to him, reserved only for you as he would say. It was only in these moments where the two of you were alone that he would let his imposing demeanor slide.

Getting moments to yourselves was easier said than done though. Despite the sheer size of the castle, the others always seemed to be around. They knew how Nightmare favoured you, how he treated you special and wasn’t as harsh. You were pretty sure that they’d managed to piece everything together on their own, even if none of them ever said anything for fear of angering their king. That said, some of them, namely Killer, seemed to delight in getting in the way of your fleeting moments alone. And there was always no shortage of work to be done, not when your partner was as ambitious as he was. Nightmare aimed to create an empire, and you were doing what you could to further his goals. Even if all that work and Killer’s interference left you and Nightmare fleeing to other worlds in order to have some semblance of a relationship.

Outertale was a favourite destination of yours, the beauty of the cosmos always taking your breath away. It always seemed so far removed from the chaos of the multiverse, or the chaos of the castle.The peace and quiet out here made it perfect for when both you and your partner just needed a break. You could stand out here for hours, watching the subtle shifts in the sky or mapping constellations.

But for now, you were seemingly locked in a staring contest with the lord of darkness, neither willing to look away or break the silence that had fallen. Unsure of what to do, you simply reached out with your finger and booped the tip of his nose. The look of utter surprise on his face left you giggling, only for his own rich laughter to mingle with yours.

“You dare to lay a hand on the God of Negativity, hmm?” He teased, pulling you close with his tentacles before wrapping his arms around your waist. “You are either very brave or very foolish… maybe a bit of both. How shall I deal with your crime, my little moon?”

You couldn’t help but swoon a bit at the pet name he called you, grinning up at him like a fool as you took advantage of the close proximity to snuggle close. “I could swear my love to you, would that appease the great Nightmare?”

“Perhaps,” he chuckled, the distance closing between the two of you even further as he ducked his head down to be level with your own. Nightmare opened his mouth, perhaps to say something else or to move in for the kiss you were anticipating. Before either option could happen though, the dark skeleton froze for a split second. There wasn’t even time to ask what was wrong before you found yourself hefted into his arms, the two of you dodging a volley of bright blue arrows that had speared where you’d been moments ago.

Your heart hammered in your throat, adrenaline pumping through your veins as you tried to get a grip on what was happening. Nightmare still had you cradled to his chest, dodging arrows and… was that paint? Following the paint’s trajectory, you could see your partner’s enemies had managed to crash your little date.

The Star Sanses stood on the other end of the floating chunk of rock you were on, the portal they’d used to arrive closing behind them. Blue was just coming through the portal, his gaster blaster hammer in his grip. Dream had another arrow ready to fire, though he hesitated upon seeing you staring back at him. Ink on the other hand wasted no time in splattering more of his paints everywhere, a tentacle raising to block you from the oncoming attack. The paint hissed and fizzled on contact, a growl leaving Nightmare as he jumped to another nearby rock to escape the barrage.

“Night, are you okay?!” You look up to see him trying to hide his pain, showing you that those paints are far more than something to be smeared on a piece of paper. While you’d heard stories from the others about the chaotic creator, you’d never met him in person or seen him fight. Seeing that paint flying towards you was way scarier than the guys’ stories had led you to believe.

“I’ll be fine,” Nightmare insisted as he set you down, even if you knew that attack hurt. “Look, you need to remain here where you’ll be safe. I don’t care what kind of training you’ve been partaking in with the others; I refuse to let you endanger yourself by fighting them. Ink especially is dangerous, keep away from him at all costs. If you cannot dodge his attacks, make sure to shield your face. His paint can burn like acid if he wishes, and while liquid negativity protects my body, you have no such defenses. Give me your word that you will remain safe while I deal with these pests.”

As much as you wanted to argue that you could help, even you couldn’t muster the confidence to speak against him with such a stern glare directed at you. It was clear that Nightmare wouldn’t take no for an answer on this one, so you had no choice but to nod your head meekly. “I-I’ll stay here,” you promised, glancing up to see him seemingly satisfied. Without another word, he rushed off, preventing Blue from getting any closer with his large hammer.

Watching Nightmare take on all three of the Star Sanses by himself was both awe-inspiring and terrifying, much like the first times you’d joined sparring sessions with the guys. But there wasn’t the assurance in the back of your mind that nobody would be out to kill you. While it might not be the goals of all of the Stars, there was very much mortal danger in this fight for both you and the one you loved. Staying on the sidelines like this was painful, leaving you feeling useless as Nightmare struggled to hold off the onslaught.

Were they not essentially your enemies, you’d be impressed by the coordination and teamwork the Stars possessed. All three of them were capable of both melee and ranged attacks, and wordlessly organized themselves so that one of their own was never in danger of being hit by their own attacks. Dream’s precision with his arrows allowed him to stay primarily a ranged fighter, while Blue’s blasters and Ink’s attacks were a bit too widespread to risk while one of them fought in close combat. Nightmare was the only one without a specific ranged attack, which probably explained why the others rarely got close to attack. Your lover’s tentacles gave him reach though, and the ability to hit multiple targets at once, so he was somehow able to hold his own against all three.

The battle looked to be a stalemate… until one of the Stars suddenly switched tactics. While Blue rushed in with a hammer and bones at his side, Ink actually turned his back on the fight. He seemed a little lost, like he was trying to remember something, only for his eyes to light up as he locked gazes with you. Instant panic seized you as the one skeleton that Nightmare warned you about came straight for you, manic glee plastered over his face as he quickly crossed the distance between the two of you. A glance back at the battle proved that Nightmare had seen what was going on, but Blue was keeping him from coming to your aid. So it was up to you to think fast and avoid the creator, hope bubbling in you that this might actually make things easier. If you could keep Ink busy by dodging his attacks, then Nightmare might be able to take on the remaining two with better success before coming after Ink.

With this admittedly crazy plan in your head, you began a game of cat and mouse with Ink, jumping from one place to the next. If you didn’t have a splash-happy maniac chasing you, it would’ve been cool to enjoy the low gravity of Outertale. For now though, it was all that was allowing you to escape most of the attacks directed at you. You were far from unscathed though, small splashes of paint eating away at your arms and legs. It burned, but was nothing you couldn’t deal with as you continued to dodge and weave the bulk of the attacks. So long as none of it touched your face, you would be fine.

Glancing back at the main battle going on, your hopes of Nightmare doing better against two targets instead of three were steadily being crushed. He seemed distracted, constantly looking up to watch you kite Ink around the area. Instead of focusing on the two he had to deal with, he was so worried about you and Ink that he was now losing. It wouldn’t be so bad if he was facing off against Ink and Blue, because there was little the two could do beyond superficial damage. Dream on the other hand was still very much a threat, his arrows of pure positivity being about the only thing that could seriously hurt. And you could see several piercing the ground, coated in the black negativity that Nightmare relied on for protection. It was a surefire way to see when he’d been hit, and the staggering amount of these soiled arrows made it clear that your partner wasn’t holding his own anymore. Guilt welled up in you, because you were the reason he was now losing this fight. While there wasn’t much you could honestly do to shake Ink from your trail, reason did little to quell the negativity rising inside you. All you could hope for was that your own despair could give Nightmare just a bit more power, enough to keep himself safe at least.

As time dragged on, both you and Nightmare were running out of stamina. Your legs cried for rest as you continued to run away from the creator, while your lover’s movements were growing noticeably sluggish. More arrows seemed to connect than not at this point, and he had barely any time to recover from one attack before dealing with another. The two of you were badly losing, and it was quite clear now why Nightmare rarely let anyone from the castle venture out on their own.

The Stars seemed to sense this sudden weakness in their target, Dream finally stopping his barrage to call out to the one going after you. “Ink! Stop playing around, I need your help!” Help? What help could Ink possibly be? Even his corrosive paints couldn’t breach the surface of Nightmare’s negativity, the only thing that could was Dream’s… oh… oh no.

As the realization hit you, Ink finally gave up his pursuit. “Woo! Looks like my plan actually worked… at least I think this was my plan. Whatever, let’s do this!” Laughing at some untold joke, Ink hopped away from you to return to the large rock that most of the battle had been on. At the same moment though, you felt your legs moving as the horrific reality of their plan hit you. Ink purposefully went after you to distract Nightmare, allowing the others to weaken him enough so that their special attack would hit. The creator might not be able to damage the surface, but if Dream’s arrow ripped through first, then there’d be a narrow window where Nightmare’s greatest defense would be gone. In a single spot he’d be vulnerable, which is why they needed to slow him down enough to ensure their hit would work.

You weren’t going to let that happen. Promise be damned, your soul was screaming at you to protect the one you loved, and you were going to heed its call. The ache in your legs went completely ignored, adrenaline pushing you forward with more speed than you thought you could muster. You needed to be faster though; Ink was already there, and Blue had set about corralling Nightmare to keep him still.

Only a few floating chunks of rock were between you and your beloved now, but you still weren’t fast enough. Panic rose once again as you watched Dream draw back his bowstring, the arrow glimmering faintly in the surrounding darkness. Ink stood ready beside him, the paint coating his brush a dangerous shade of red. That same paint had left such horrible burns along your limbs, and you could only imagine the damage it might do to the weakened god of negativity. With Blue running interference and drawing Nightmare’s attention, it was only a matter of time now.

As your feet touched down on the large space rock, several feet from everyone else, you knew that you were out of time. Nightmare was too absorbed in his fight to hear your warning calls, and it would only alert the two and likely cause them to reset before trying again. This attack would only work once though, because once Nightmare knew of their plan, he wouldn’t let it work a second time. That meant that you had one chance to stop them, especially when you saw that Dream was aiming towards his twin’s soul.

Courage and determination welled within your soul, driving you forward despite the risk you were running straight into. Any number of things could go seriously wrong, but… you couldn’t risk them killing him. Nightmare was the bane of the multiverse to many, but he was everything to you. Gritting your teeth, you timed your steps so that you’d only enter Dream’s field of vision after he fired, preventing them from stopping you and trying again. The second he saw you, the god of positivity’s expression changed from one of grim determination to one of shock and horror, his hand reaching out as if he could stop his attack or stop you. His hesitance once again wasn’t present in Ink, the creator wasting no time in flinging the red paint directly after the arrow.

With mere seconds to spare, your outstretched hands made contact with the cool goop that covered Nightmare’s body. All of your momentum and might went into a push, knocking the deity away from the incoming attack. Your lover turned back to look at you the second you made contact, his eye conveying the same shock and horror as Dream’s had when he saw you. All you could do was smile, knowing that you’d managed to save him no matter what danger you’d put yourself in. Nightmare reached out for you just as the arrow whizzed past, its trajectory leaving it slicing past your eyes. Pain bloomed as the minor cuts scratched the outsides of your eyes, but it was nothing compared to what came next. You’d been so concerned about the arrow that you temporarily forgot about Ink. His attack followed as per the Stars’ plan, splattering over the both of you with its acidic effect. The scratches to your eyes had left you temporarily blind, so you weren’t able to see that red paint as it splashed all over your face. The last thing you saw was instead Nightmare, reaching out to you as if to save you from this pain.

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angryschnauzer · 3 years

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Distraction

Summary: As a junior CIA agent you are added to a mission to help with scientific analysis, but when half the team are hospitalised you have to suddenly become a hands on field agent, alongside August Walker and Will Shaw. When the final part of the mission at a tropical plant glass house has an unexpected side affect, you have to work as a team to survive the night.

Pairing: August Walker x Female Reader x Will Shaw Fandoms: Mission Impossible: Fallout (Movie), The Cold Light of Day (Movie), Henry Cavill - Actor.

Warnings: NSFW, 18+, Sex Pollen, Threesome, Oral Sex, Unprotected Sex, Vaginal Sex, Blowjob, Cum Play, Double Penetration, Anal Sex.

A/N: This is my first time writing the Sex Pollen trope, so i hope you like it. Fic is unbeta’d; only the finest free range organic typos for me. I do not run a tag list, but if you follow @angryschnauzerwrites and put that blog onto notifications, you will then get an alert when i post something new.

Back catalogue can be found on AO3 Link Here, or you can follow my facebook page HERE.

Distraction

If there had been someone narrating a movie of this mission, the first line would have been ‘it was a simple mission’. However, they would have been lying. The mission was far from simple, it was convoluted, complicated, and the team fucking hated each other.

The team were scheduled to arrive via two flights, from opposite directions of the globe as not to arouse suspicions that a large team would do if anyone was picked up on facial recognition. You had been brought on board because of your scientific and tech background, and as the team were tasked with retrieving the formula for the most dangerous biological weapon in the world, you were the one that would check they had the right thumb drive before the mission was able to be called a success. There would be multiple extraction points, numerous undercover assignments that would all lead to the final extraction at the gala dinner.

That was the plan. What actually happened was the half of the team coming in from Dallas ended up with severe food poisoning and were currently being hospitalised in a local treatment facility. That left just your half of the team, and the senior agent now in charge was none too happy about it;

“I’ve got a fucking chemistry nerd and a number cruncher for a hands on mission that requires multiple scenes where infiltration and distraction are needed, and neither of you have any fucking field work!”

August Walker hated everyone and made sure he did everything he could so that everyone hated him in return. The other member of the team quietly ground his teeth, Walker never once let him forget that he came into this agency completely by accident following a rogue faction and a situation that started with the death of his CIA Agent father, and resulted in smashing up half of Madrid’s traffic in a 24 hour long series of car chases;

“I was a stockbroker, and i didn’t hear anyone complaining when i discovered the currency discrepancies that found us the targets insider trading”

Will Shaw was so similar yet so different to Walker it was startling, you even thought they looked similar enough to be long lost brothers, but never dared to mention it.

The hotel suite had all the facilities you needed to set up a small command post, with enough counter space to set up the laptops and work-stations, whilst not getting under each other's feet. However it was still small enough for the two men to continually bicker and make snide remarks at each other, and you had to push the earpiece of your surveillance equipment closer to your ear to hear, finally you heard what you needed to, holding your hand up and clicking your fingers at the two men who immediately silenced and crossed the room;

“They’re going to be at the MMA Gym in thirty minutes”

“Okay” Walker huffed; “We need to extract the codes from his device that will give us access for the holding location. You and Shaw take the gym and cause the distraction, i’ll get the codes”

Will shook his head;

“Not gonna work”

“It's not?” you were surprised

“The gym is men only, the only women are administration and janitorial”

“That’s fucking antiquated” August spat out in disgust.

You had to hide the smirk that tugged at the corner of your mouth, that August Walker of all people would be an advocate for equal rights, but nonetheless started to prepare for the first distraction.

Walker and Shaw had entered the building separately but within 5 minutes of each other, signing in under false names and keeping it simple and silent as they started training on the weights and cardio machines in the gym. You had already entered through the basement deliveries door which you’d been able to pick the lock of, finding a staff uniform t-shirt in the storeroom and pulling it on over your top. You could hear both men through their hidden comms, and within a couple of minutes pretending to sort out a cleaning kart that you knew the morning crew had finished with, you heard the code word that the target had entered the weights room.

Seconds later you were tentatively pushing the door to the locker room open, calling out;

“Housekeeping!”

You had no idea if they called themselves housekeeping or janitorial staff or whatever, but when you didn’t get a reply you quickly entered the room and did what needed to be done.

Through your ear piece you could hear the first stage of the distraction starting, with your two fellow agents starting to challenge the other to out lift each other, and from the muffled background noise you could tell that they were drawing a crowd of onlookers.

Tapping your comms you alerted Walker and Shaw that you’d been successful, and that it was time for them to leave. But as you got no response you quickly made your way out of the locker room through the other exit, only to find yourself in a glass walled corridor, the gym on the other side of the glass. What surprised you however was that there was now a huge crowd of spectators as they watched your two agents try to pull out more reps on the bicep curl machine. Scowling you grabbed a cloth and bottle of spray cleaner and squirted the glass, glaring at the two of them before they finally saw you;

“Its time to go, dumbasses. Finish the contest. I’ll be in the car in the street behind the building”

Pushing through the door of the hotel suite you scrunched your nose as Will pushed past you, August not far behind;

“You two need a shower… did you really need to get that sweaty?”

“Well… you wanted the distraction to look convincing, didn’t you?” Will shot back, stripping his t-shirt off, already halfway to the bathroom.

A quiet cough behind you drew your attention away from Will’s sculpted back muscles;

“When you’re done staring at Shaw…”

“I...I wasn’t stare…”

“Whatever sweetheart, either way; you two need to change”

Looking down at your outfit you pulled at the gym t-shirt;

“Yeah, i can just find a utility shirt or something…”

“No, you’re front of house with me. Will’s taking the extraction of the thumb drive”

“But...I didn’t bring an outfit…”

August nodded to a pile of bags in the corner of the room from the agents that hadn’t made it to the mission but their luggage had;

“So check Marianne’s, she is about the same size as you. Either way its you and me sweetheart, now get dolled up, you can’t go to a gala looking like that”

Twenty minutes later you took a deep breath; you’d found Marianne’s bag and had found that although she was a similar size to you, it was one size smaller. She also had a completely different taste and style to makeup and you were now way out of your comfort zone. The red lipstick however seemed to work, a touch of gold bronzing powder across your shoulders and chest made the red silk dress really work for you. Adjusting the straps so they sat over the top of your bra, the pretty floral pattern hopefully not too noticeably jarring against the sultry silk. Taking a deep breath you stepped out of the small dressing room and came face to face with Will;

“Oh hey” he looked you up and down before clearing his throat; “Looks good”

“Yeah?” you smoothed the dress down over your stomach

“I mean… the bra kinda takes away from the look… but yeah, it looks really good”

“I...I didn’t have anything suitable for a gala, this is Marianne’s… from her bag…”

Will stood in front of you, reaching his hand around your back and with a quick snap of his fingers he’d unfastened your bra;

“It really will look better without the bra… trust me…”

Without another word he turned and crossed the room, pulling his tie from his bag, fastening it as August emerged from the other room;

“Agent. Bra off, now”

Shimmying the offending garment down your arms you pulled it out of your dress as he crossed the room;

“I don’t see why…”

“Because the people at this gala have got so much money they flaunt what they’ve got. You’ve got to fit in” He held his finger out and you hooked it over the protruding digit.

“We’d better get going… the gala is about to start”

With a nod August grabbed the keys to the BMW you’d been assigned and tossed them to Will; he was taking on the role of Driver and Bodyguard to your’s and August’s ‘couple’, the three of you filed out of the room and into the elevator.

The ride down the highrise hotel was slow, and you could feel both men’s eyes on you as they stood behind you, before the doors finally opened to the basement parking. You struggled to keep up with them as they strode out with their long legs, the heels of your stiletto sandals clicking on the cement. Finally as you reached the car you were surprised as August opened the door for you, not uttering a word as he watched you climb in before he rounded the car and slid into the back seat beside you.

You’d barely had time to fasten your seatbelt before Will was peeling out of the hotel parking with a squeal of tyres and you were heading to your destination.

“Panties, off” August’s words surprised you

“W-WHAT?!”

“Panties. Take them off”

“Agent Walker…”

“They dig into the meat of your hips and take the attention away from the sexiness of the dress. You need to fit in tonight”

“B-b-but…” you attempted to stall, but without another word August pulled your knees towards him and slid his hands beneath your dress. He grasped the thin elastic straps that ran over your hips and pulled hard, snapping the fragile pieces of fabric and pulling the now ruined undergarments. Glancing at Will he had a brief smirk on his face but quickly looked away, concentrating on the road ahead.

The gala was amazing, and it was hard not to get absorbed into the evening as if you were a real guest. You could hear everything through the hidden comms units in your ears, and apart from the occasional grunt as Will silently passed the guards as he made his way further into the underground chambers that ran below the massive glasshouse the gala was in, it seemed to all be going exactly to plan. The host had announced for everyone to celebrate, and you had found yourselves being swept onto the dancefloor, and suddenly you were in August’s arms as he held you close, the music thankfully loud enough to drown out your conversation from the ears of others;

“Do you think he’s getting on ok?”

“He’d say if he wasn’t” August assured you as he moved in time to the music, his hand on your lower back pulling you closer to his body. At that very moment you both heard a guttural cry through the comms, your eyes wide in panic as he grabbed your hand and you quickly made your way through the crowd;

“Shaw, come in… are you ok?”

You heard gurgling on the comms and watched as August pulled out his phone and activated the trackers that you all wore, the two of you coming up together on screen, but the third - Will’s - showing as on the level below and not moving.

The stairs had been hell in your heels, eventually you’d kicked them off and had run barefoot behind August, chasing him around corners and along corridors, before he’d finally come to a halt in front of a sealed door, his phone showing that Will was in the room behind it.

“Stand back”

You took a couple of steps back and watched as August kicked the door, the deafening bang as it broke from its hinges and splintered in was immediately forgotten as a sudden rush of air came out of the room, covering him in a dusting of strange grey-pinkish powder. He fell to the floor coughing and you rushed to his side;

“Check on Shaw! I’m fine!”

Quickly entering the room you looked around, finally seeing Will laying on the floor, he too was covered in the powder. Kneeling at his side you checked his pulse, relieved to find one as he opened his eyes and groaned.

“What happened? Are you ok?”

“Stop fussing, i’m fine… we gotta get out of here. Security will be on their way…”

At that moment August appeared at your side;

“Did you get it?”

“Yeah, i got it”

Will held out the thumb drive and pushed it into your hand as August pulled him to his feet, and they attempted to dust themselves off as the three of you staggered down the hallway and out of the fire exit.

Pushing into the hotel room, both Will and August had already shed the majority of their clothing, now dressed in just their smart dress pants and under shirts, still coughing from the dust cloud that lingered in their airways. You’d run the briefest of tests with the tiny blood monitor that you’d kept in the car to ensure it wasn’t a known nerve agent or poison before you’d even left the extraction point, thankfully the results being negative, but both men needed to wash off whatever it was as soon as possible. But first, you needed a proper sample;

“Agent Shaw, i need to take some blood, hair and saliva, run it through the test software, to see if whatever it was has synthesised into your bloodstream” you nodded to the small scientific station you’d set up at the end of the table, the case having contained tiny gadgets that amounted to a microscope, a mass spectrometer, and other testing equipment… the whole point of why you in particular had been placed on this mission.

A minute later you’d collected the samples, trying hard not to get flustered as Will had stood in front of you bare chested and in just his underwear, heat radiating from his body;

“So what do you think it is?”

“I have no idea”

“Well i’m burning up, i need to take a shower”

Quickly loading the samples into the rapid mass spectrometer you turned to Agent Walker to check his vitals and let out a tiny squeak of surprise when you saw him sitting on the edge of the bed in just his underwear. His chest was flushed and he had a sheen of sweat over his entire body;

“I guess i’m next?”

Pressing your hand to his forehead you could feel he was burning up;

“I’m going to check your temperature first”

Quickly using the thermal reader you could see that his core temp was heading towards fever;

“I’m going to take the samples then as soon as Will is out of the shower you need to get in there”

“Yes Ma’am” he chuckled, closing his eyes as you pushed your fingers through his hair to pluck a sample strand. The powder had caught in the strands and it was only as you combed your fingers through the dark locks did you realise he had soft curls. As you tried to separate them he let out a groan as you stroked his scalp. He swayed a little even though he was sitting down, and before you could do anything his hands were on your hips to steady himself, the heat almost searing through the silk of your dress.

Finally having got all the samples you needed you reluctantly pulled away, not saying a word as he simply flopped back onto the bed with a smirk on his face. You busied yourself preparing the test samples from Agent Walker, the machine finishing with Shaw’s. You were vaguely aware of the shower being turned off and the men moving around the room, before the shower was on again and you presumed it was August in there.

Peering at the saliva samples through the microscope you frowned, the particles present completely organic and very familiar.

“So what is the diagnosis Doc?”

Will’s voice surprised you, and as you jumped and turned your eyes went wide when you saw he was in just a towel, tied low on his waist as he drank from a bottle of water.

“Y-You don’t want to put some clothes on?”

He looked down at himself, almost surprised to find he was only wearing a towel and shrugged;

“No point, the way i’m burning up i’ll be naked soon” he nodded to the screen; “So?”

Turning your attention back to the screen you swallowed hard, your throat suddenly dry;

“Well… it seems organic, spores of some kind. Its hard to tell what they are from, but their chemical make-up is unique. The only time i’ve seen anything similar is in isolated microclimates that are cut off from the rest of nature… there was this one… in a volcano… a pollen from a plant that grew in tropical climates…” you trailed off as you sensed another presence now flanking your other side, glancing away from the microscope, taking in the sight of August in an identical outfit to Will, his broad expanse of chest at eye level as he bent down to look into the microscope.

“Hmmn… so, how’s it gonna affect us? The gala was in a fucking giant greenhouse; you saw the plants they were growing there, some of them were 20ft tall and looked like they’d come from another planet. Do we need to pop an antihistamine or something, what’s it gonna do?”

Standing you quickly slid out from between the two barely dressed men, checking the mass spectrometer and frowning;

“It seems to be elevating your testosterone levels…” you peered at the saliva results; “...and pheromones… your bodies are heating up where your body is fighting against the pollen, its affecting all your hormones...”

“Pheromones…” Will mused; “... that’s the sex hormones, right?”

“Urrr…” you faltered, looking up at the two men who were now looking at you like hungry wolves.

August stepped closer;

“Sweetheart, i think you’d better get yourself tested too…” he paused, his finger hooking beneath the thin strap of your dress, making you acutely aware you were completely naked beneath it; “... cos’ i could smell you from across the room… and you smell so sweet right now…”

You went to take a step back, only to bump into the hard expanse of Will’s naked chest, his hand curling around your arm;

“C’mon, lets get you tested…”

You were suddenly putty in their hands, your head swimming and it was only then that you realised you were burning up. It felt like you had a core of lava within you, and the only thing you could liken it to was a hot flash, your body flushed with heat. You recalled the time you’d overheard a much older agent talking to her friends, unaware you had been in the room and she’d spilled the beans on how she would recover from an episode and calm her hormones down... with the help of her husband.

As your head had been swirling, Will had taken your blood sample and had loaded it into the mass spectrometer, having watched as you’d shown him before the mission. But you could barely concentrate;

“I...I know how to counteract the affects of the pollen…” you panted out, unsteady on your feet as you swayed and August caught you in his arms

“Oh yes?”

“En… Endorphins… they counteract… they burn off the pheromones…”

You felt hot breath on the back of your neck as Will pressed against you;

“I’m not a scientist, but i know how to create endorphins…”

His lips made contact with your neck and you turned to jelly, your head resting against his shoulder and your eyelids drooping, barely open, yet you had enough of your senses to be aware of August in front of you, pulling the straps of your dress down your arms, you pliable in his hands as he stripped you of your only remaining garment, pressing his lips to your over heated skin as went as the silk pooled at your feet;

“So beautiful…”

“Absolutely” Will agreed from behind, his lips grazing over your jawline as his arms reached around you and cupped your tender breasts; “We need to work as a team to get through this… what are the hazards of hot flashes then Doc?”

“Y-Y-You can over heat your brain… your heart could give out…”

“Uh-huh… and endorphins will help stop this?” August enquired, his breath hot on your naked chest

“Y-yeah…”

That was the last word spoken for a very long time. From that point on the only sounds in the room were hums of pleasure combined with the carnal soundtrack of three bodies moving towards the inevitable. By the time you got to the bed both men had lost their towels, hard naked bodies pressed against your soft curves, sculpted hard muscle available everywhere you touched, and oh did you touch… and caress and stroke, the second you’d reciprocated their affections they had softened to your touch, sighs of pleasure as your fingertips gave them just the slightest relief.

You found yourself sandwiched between the two men on the soft covers of the king-size bed, each taking turns to capture your lips for searing kisses, each having their own unique talent and style with their tongues. When you were deep in August’s embrace you felt Will move down the bed, his hands pulling your legs apart before he pressed kisses up your inner thighs and his mouth made contact with your soaked folds. The cry of pleasure that erupted from your mouth broke the kiss, yet August didn’t seem to mind as your hand had found its way to being wrapped around his weeping shaft, tugging him sloppily as you struggled to concentrate;

“That’s it Sweetheart, you don’t need to be gentle… i like it rough…”

You tried to answer, but Will’s tongue had found your soaked entrance as his hand curled around your thigh and sought out your clit, the pleasure he was giving you was too intense to allow you to form coherent words. August claimed your lips again for another searing kiss, humming his appreciation as you worked your hand over his heated flesh.

Before you knew it you were coming hard, your orgasm tearing through your body as you ground your core against Will’s face, his eyes sparkling from between your thighs, and as you were floating on the high of the afterglow you could feel the two men moving you, adjusting you to suit their needs.

On all fours on the bed you were faced with August’s dick, opening your mouth instinctively to take him deep, the heavy weight on your tongue a welcome feeling. Saliva spilled from the corners of your mouth as you struggled to stretch around his girth. At the same time you felt Will’s powerful thighs pressing against the back of your own, the velvet touch of his bulbous crown pressing to your still trembling hole before with a grunt he thrust into your soft body.

There were only grunts and gasps of pleasure, the two men rocking your body between them as they defiled you in the basest of ways, but that you were eager to participate in, the mixing of pheromones in the room removing your inhibitions, knowing that it was an act of survival. You could feel your body climbing again, your orgasm imminent. You felt the first salty tang of August’s seed on your tongue, the tensing of his muscles as his body prepared to release into the welcome warmth of your mouth. His massive hand cupped your chin and pulled your head up to look him in the eye as he finally reached his peak, grunting curses as he pumped thick ropes over your tongue, raining praise upon you as you swallowed everything he gave you.

August fell back onto the pillows, but before you could let gravity take hold of you too Will wrapped his arms around your torso, pulling you upright until you were pressed against his chest, his hips thrusting as he filled you so deliciously from behind. Through lust soaked gaze you watched August watching the pair of you as you fucked in front of him, his eyes travelling down your heated body until he was watching where your bodies were joined, how Will’s thick cock stretched you out so well.

“Get your finger on her clit Shaw, i wanna watch you make her come undone”

Doing as the senior agent instructed, Will snaked a hand down your stomach, rubbing tight firm circles against your sensitive bud as he continued to fill you, until you were shaking, hanging onto the precipice of pleasure and that final flick of his finger was enough to set off another orgasm.

The vice-like grip of your velvet walls was the final trigger for Will, and with a sin filled groan he pushed in one last time and you could feel him spilling deep inside you.

Finally he pulled out, carefully setting you down onto the soft bedcovers. Your eyelids felt heavy, but the burning deep in your body seemed to be sated. You felt the men moving around the bed, a large hand cupping the back of your neck before lifting you from the bed a little;

“Drink…”

Opening your eyes, you watched as August lifted a water bottle to your lips, making sure you gulped down the chilled water before pulling away;

“How… how are you guys feeling?”

He turned and sat on the bed beside you, his finger trailing down your neck and between your breasts, and only then could you see the sheen as his skin glistened with sweat, a droplet running down his abdomen to where his cock stood hard and proud from a thatch of dark curls;

“Not… not quite done yet…”

Gently pushing you back down onto the bed he tossed the empty bottle aside before crawling atop of you, capturing your mouth with his as you felt the nudge of his hardened dick breach your body, his wide expanse of chest pressing you to the bed. He didn’t start out gentle and it only got rougher, ploughing into your body as he sought to relieve the effects of the pollen coursing through his veins like fire, burning within him until all that was left was red hot embers of passion. Your body writhed beneath him, begging for more, eagerly taking whatever he could give.

He hit spots you didn’t know existed, your back arching with pleasure as he filled you, your hardened nipples almost too sensitive from his chest hair roughly rubbing against them, the stimulation almost too much until the levy broke and you came hard, your fingers digging into his back to leave dark welts, the pain his trigger for the final thrust as he pumped you full of his seed.

Finally he rolled off you, laying at your side as your chests heaved, struggling to catch your breath when you felt another hand grasp at your wrist;

“Babe… please… i need you…”

Looking to Will you saw a pained look on his face as he sat partially propped up against the pillows, his chest soaked and his dick standing hard and proud;

“Please…” he begged.

Somehow you found the energy to move, your body still shaking but yet you straddled his lap, pushing his sweat soaked curls from his face;

“It’s going to be ok Will, i’ll take care of you… its ok…”

You sank down onto his waiting body, taking him where August had been only a minute before, the comingled seed lubricating you as this new angle found yet more pleasure points that had remained undiscovered until then. Wills hands moved to your hips, his grip tight as he gritted his teeth and moved you on his lap, rocking you to ride him like a rodeo stallion. Sweat dripped down your body, rivulets running between your breasts as you threw your head back and basked in the flood of pleasure chemicals soaking your brain. The haze of lust clouding time and space as you came to another orgasm, Will filling you with another load of his thick cum, your cries of pleasure finally ebbing away as you collapsed on his heaving chest, his hands stroking your back whilst your bodies stayed joined.

A pair of strong arms lifted you off of Will and set you down on the mattress, August’s dark smile haunting over you as he parted your legs and kissed down your thigh, before with a smirk he bit the soft flesh. It wasn’t enough to break the skin but the pleasure pain receptors in your mind were immediately set off again, and you knew that even if you couldn’t see the mark you’d feel it for days to come. He lifted your legs and parted them, his face at your centre, yet where his tongue ended up you let out a squeak of surprise as he circled your back entrance.

“Oh, OH… August…”

“Mmmnnfff” was all that could be heard as he pushed his tongue at your asshole, his thumb pressing against your clit as he worked you open, your body deceiving you as a fierce orgasm washed over you almost immediately. When he pulled away he had a smug look on his face;

“Thought as much… hold tight…”

He quickly disappeared to the bathroom, before returning with a small bottle in his hand. Pouring some of the liquid contained within on his fingers, he worked the oil over your skin before pushing his thick finger into your ass, eagerly praising you as he worked your body until you were ready.

“Walker… hurry up and fuck her… i’m burning up here, i need another round…” Will gasped out as August moved you.

“C’mere then Shaw, we’re never gonna get this out of our systems if we have to wait to take turns…”

Even through the haze of the pollen Will immediately got what August was saying, the pair of them pulling you from the bed before Will took you into his arms;

“Jump…”

With a surprising amount of strength Will pulled you up, your legs hooked over his forearms as he angled his hips to push his dick back into your cum soaked cunt, letting gravity help as he sank deep. Just as you thought you were about to overbalance a hard chest pressed against your back, August stooping behind you as he took his iron hard dick in hand and sought out purchase on your ass;

“Gonna take this as slow as i can Sweetheart…”

Slow didn’t seem slow enough, and you cursed Newton and the laws of physics as the same forces that had pulled you down onto Will did the same with August, leaving you gasping for air as you were filled in both holes. The boys held you up, in place and still whilst they resisted ravaging your body, fighting against the pollen until they could no longer hold back and they unleashed their raw power upon your body. Fucking you in tandem with the thinnest of walls separating themselves inside you, they defiled your body as you begged for more; harder, deeper, faster. It was never enough.

The night ebbed away into the mists of time, each sex act more depraved than the last, the three of you driving the deadly force of the pollen from your bodies in an endless battle of lust.

The last thing you recalled was the sun rising as the two men stood before your kneeling body, spraying your face and breasts with a final load before sleep finally claimed your sated body.

Bright light streamed in the window and you winced as your head pounded. A deep voice could be heard but you weren’t listening. A warm body beside you shifted and a large warm hand pressed to your aching abdomen, soothing the overworked muscles. A soft pair of lips pressed a kiss to your shoulder, and the lack of moustache told you it was Will that was spooning you.

“C’mon Agents, rise and shine” August barked from the bathroom doorway, packing his things; “Got a flight to catch in two hours, debriefing in twelve”

Closing the file you nodded at your superiors, their approval of a good job done ringing praises in your ears as the debriefing ended, people pushing their chairs out and making small talk as they were dismissed for the weekend and a well deserved rest.

Walking to the elevator you didn’t make eye contact, trying hard not to wince as your thighs rubbed together and you felt the bite that August had given you, wanting to avoid any probing questions. You’d skimmed over a lot in your report, mainly the sex-pollen induced orgy that had taken place, but as the thumb drive with the vital data on had been recovered no-one was concentrating on the part between the retrieval and the debriefing.

The elevator dinged as the doors opened, and absentmindedly you stepped in, looking out of the glass windows as you were only partially aware of just a few other passengers. It was only when you realised you were flanked on both sides did you look up and see that August and Will were either side of you.

With a smirk August handed you a file;

“This wasn’t needed for the debriefing”

You flicked it open and saw that it was the mobile test data from the hotel room;

“Yes, probably for the best” you agreed, your throat dry.

As you held the pages Will pointed to a trio of lines towards the bottom. For a moment you stared at the numbers before you recognised what they meant;

“That’s our results…”

You felt August’s breath hot on your ear as he whispered;

“Look at yours…”

You saw the readings of Will and August’s blood count, of the pheromone saturation… then you saw yours;

“But… but that can’t be right…”

“You know that equipment better than anyone else… when has it ever been wrong?”

The elevator reached the Lobby and everyone filed out, August and Will stopping and nodding to the bar across the street;

“We’ll be catching a drink or two… you’re welcome to join us once you’ve taken in the test data…”

You nodded, speechless, staring at the data in black and white. It couldn’t be wrong; it was never wrong. It was clear as day.

You hadn’t been infected by the pollen.

#august walker x reader #will shaw x reader #august walker fanfic #will shaw fanfic #henry cavill

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antebunny · 3 years

Text

never fear, your fairy godmother is here!

(It's Wei Wuxian. He's the fairy godmother)

Wei Wuxian is riding high off a difficult case finally closed when the next call comes through. He’s staring aimlessly into the beautiful delta waters of Lotus Pier with Jiang Cheng when the tingling begins, a familiar sensation somewhere in his chest that tells him that somewhere is a worthy human in need of a guide for their happy ever after.

“–So then I thought, well what am I supposed to do? She doesn’t want a lover or a partner, but her future isn’t fame or riches either.”

Wei Wuxian isn’t sure that Jiang Cheng is actually listening to him, but he’s very proud of himself, so Jiang Cheng can suck it up. He’s used to finding his new charges in difficult and tragic circumstances, but he’s rarely found someone in quite such a sticky situation as poor Qin Su.

“And she insists that she doesn’t have someone in mind,” Wei Wuxian continues. “So you know what I did?”

“Uh-huh,” Jiang Cheng says vaguely, because he’s not listening at all. “Very cool.” He’s not a very good brother, Jiang Cheng. Well, they’re not related, but they also weren’t really born, they just kind of exist, so Wei Wuxian doesn’t worry too much about it.

“I found her a whole team!” Wei Wuxian finishes proudly. “I got a doctor from Qishan, who was looking to get away from her family, and her little brother, and a top disciple from Lanling, and boom! Team of four! That’s a family right there. They’re going to be friends for life.”

“Do you ever consider not boasting about yourself?” Jiang Cheng wonders out loud.

“Hey,” Wei Wuxian objects. “I’ll have you know I’m the number one fairy godmother!”

Jiang Cheng merely rolls his eyes. “As you haven’t stopped saying for the past hundred years.”

“Well, it’s–” Wei Wuxian stops mid-sentence and puts one hand behind him on the wooden planks of the boardwalk so he doesn’t collapse when his stomach rolls.

“Another one?” Jiang Cheng demands. “So soon?”

“I’m in high demand,” Wei Wuxian says weakly.

“But jiejie and I have spent all day making a celebratory dinner,” Jiang Cheng says, dismayed. Then he corrects himself. “I mean, jiejie’s spent all day making dinner for us! Do you want to disappoint her? Do you?!”

Wei Wuxian stands up. If he wasn’t still flushed with success, if only he’d listened to the odd, twisting sensation that said this was not a normal case of a damsel in need of true love, perhaps he would’ve stayed. Perhaps none of what followed would have happened. But perhaps it was always destined to happen.

“I’ll be back before dinner,” Wei Wuxian declares foolishly, and vanishes.

He appears in a thematically dark and twisted forest near sundown. The wind is whispering ominously through the leaves. Wei Wuxian pushes aside a branch in order to enter the clearing from which an ugly sobbing sound is coming from. It must be his new client.

By the light of the dying sun, Wei Wuxian can make out a hunched form dressed in fine white robes. The crying is quiet, but the person’s back shudders. They seem to be holding something. Wei Wuxian takes a moment to adjust. A great pair of black and red butterfly wings appear on his back. Humans more readily accept that he’s capable of inhuman feats if there’s something inhuman (but non threatening) about him. He usually goes for crow or raven wings, but he thinks the current setting might be a little inappropriate for that. Many of Wei Wuxian’s fellow fairy godmothers also opt for fancy robes, but Wei Wuxian’s never really felt comfortable with them.

Wei Wuxian clears his throat. “Hello,” he calls.

The man–because it is a man, Wei Wuxian quickly realizes, with a beauty he’s come to expect from his clients, and a cultivator’s sword–whirls around. He hasn’t got a very expressive face, but Wei Wuxian has spent hundreds of years around people. His client’s eyes are wild, disbelieving. He’s got a Lan ribbon on his forehead, one of the inner clan, if Wei Wuxian isn’t mistaken, and he never is. There are two tear tracks running down his cheeks, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

Wei Wuxian steps closer. His new client staggers to his feet and looks away, but whatever he was holding or looking at is gone. When he looks back at Wei Wuxian, there’s an awestruck look of recognition on his face. Wei Wuxian grins, pleased to see that his influence has reached the ears of humans.

The man takes one shaky step forward. He seems to be trying to drink in Wei Wuxian’s presence, soak him in just by looking at him. Wei Wuxian can’t blame him. He is very impressive.

On that thought, Wei Wuxian spreads his arms wide. “Never fear, mortal! Your hour of distress has come to an end!” Above their heads, a cloud drifts away and allows the moon to beam through, bathing Wei Wuxian with soft light. “It is I, Wei Wuxian, your fairy godmother!”

Now his client is just staring at him blankly. Wei Wuxian’s grin falters. He lowers his arms and clears his throat. “Perhaps you didn’t h–”

“What’s a fairy godmother?” The client interrupts.

Really?

Wei Wuxian sighs. “I am in charge of finding you a happy ending, in whatever form that may take,” he answers.

He waits another beat. This is usually where his clients start thanking him.

The man does not look very impressed. “How does that involve butterfly wings?”

“I–!” Wei Wuxian starts, very offended and very taken aback. “I…thought they would be less threatening than crow wings?”

The man stares at him. Wei Wuxian vanishes the wings with a thought.

“Well, if you have a preference, just let me know,” Wei Wuxian grumbles sulkily. “I am at your service, after all.”

“That is unnecessary,” the man says flatly. The tears haven’t dried but he’s composed himself. He turns away from Wei Wuxian deliberately.

“What do you mean?” Wei Wuxian asks, chasing his client through the clearing when the cultivator starts to walk away.

“I am not in need of your help,” the ungrateful bastard says.

“Wh–! Yes, you are!” Wei Wuxian argues. “I wouldn’t be here if there weren’t a worthy damsel in distress in need of my services.”

At that term damsel in distress the man turns and gives him a withering, wintry glare. It’s under-cut by a deep well of loss, pain, and sadness that Wei Wuxian is convinced he can see on his client’s face. And to the rejection of damsel of distress, he can only shrug. It’s true.

“I’ll have you know I am the top fairy godmother,” Wei Wuxian says, in reply to the glare, as pretentiously as he can. “For the past hundred years. I have never failed a client. Whatever it is you want, true love, honor, treasure, a kingdom, I can find it for you. I promise you I have seen it all before.”

His client finally stops running away from him. Wei Wuxian saunters up to him. “If it’s love you’re worrying about, people are less narrow-minded than you think. There’s bound to be someone out there who’s exactly who you’re looking for. Well, most of them. Actually, my clients are sometimes a little narrow-minded. One of them specifically requested that I find a true love for him that had never been turned into an animal. A little narrow-minded, don’t you think?”

At this point, Wei Wuxian is up in his face, and his client is starting to look a little overwhelmed. Wei Wuxian backs up, gives him a little space. The Lan cultivator turns to look at the spot in the clearing where he’d been kneeling before Wei Wuxian showed up.

“Can you bring back the dead?” His client asks abruptly.

Wei Wuxian falters. “That’s–ehhh, that’s a, uh, gray area. Kind of depends. I’m going to lean towards no. Yeah, feels like a no. No necromancy here. I have definitely never done that before.”

The righteous Lan cultivator actually has the nerve to look disappointed in him. “Then I have no use for you,” he says stiffly, and starts to walk away again.

“Okay, hold up!” Wei Wuxian splutters, hurrying after him. The man does not hold up, forcing Wei Wuxian to keep pace through the dark forest. It’s no problem for Wei Wuxian, but rather rude, all things considered. “How rude! Here I am offering to solve your life’s problems and you question my abilities–you know I once created a whole celestial mountain for one of my clients–hey! Think of my reputation,” he begs, when his rude client continues to walk away. “I have never, ever failed a client before. Think of how it would look if one of my clients just walked away! Just give me a chance. Please. Please?”

His runaway client finally stops running away, right in a thicket of trees. Wei Wuxian almost bumps into him.

“This is important to you?” His client asks finally, without looking back.

“Oh yes, very,” Wei Wuxian knows immediately, because that’s the thing about his clients. They’re all good people, whether they’d like to admit it or not. The only people who like to help more than them are the fairy godmothers. “It would make me very happy to make you happy.”

The man’s shoulders relax ever-so slightly. “Very well.”

“Yes!” Wei Wuxian fist-pumps. He glances up at the moon, reminding himself that humans have to do things like eat and sleep. “Okay, first things first, I’ll get you home,” he decides. “Tomorrow we can–”

“I have no home,” his new client interrupts in a dispassionate tone that suggests this subject has one too many emotions for him to handle.

Wei Wuxian raises an eyebrow internally and thinks of his Lan clan ribbon, but says nothing. He merely mentally files this client into the hundreds of lost-their-home clients that have come before him. There’s no telling why his new client lost his home. Usually they tell Wei Wuxian about their woes willingly, without Wei Wuxian having to beg them to burden him with their problems. But there’s a whole host of solutions to the no-home problem, exactly none of which Wei Wuxian can think of when the man reaches up and pulls his forehead ribbon off with trembling fingers.

“Um,” Wei Wuxian warbles. He averts his eyes from the now bare forehead. Later he’ll chalk it up to the difficulty in acquiring this client and the subsequent need to prove his powers that leads him to suggest: “W-what about my house?”

His client turns to face him. He looks a little shocked, but mostly confused.

“I live in the heavenly Lotus Pier,” Wei Wuxian says grandly. Well, he tries to say it grandly, but it comes out matter-of-fact. “I’ve got plenty of room. And you needn’t worry about politics up there.”

Slowly, his client nods, his face unreadable.

“Great,” Wei Wuxian says brightly. He reaches for his client’s hand, ignores the scandalized look he receives, and vanishes both of them to Lotus Pier.

They appear in a pavilion at the end of one of the many boardwalks. Enormous pastel lotus flowers dot the still waters. In the distance, the still waters cascade into a roaring waterfall that pours off the edge of the heavens. Above them, the sun is setting. Wei Wuxian’s client is winded from the sudden travel, so Wei Wuxian doesn’t let go of his hand. The scent of fresh water and spice sets in.

When the client steadies himself, Wei Wuxian tugs him out of the pavilion. The human’s eyes widen as the halls of Lotus Pier come into view, and Wei Wuxian smirks to himself. That’s the only reason why he’s sad that humans don’t come to Lotus Pier. He’d love a chance to show off his home more.

His client is still trying to take in the magnificent sloping roofs, the purple clouds and the dusk orange sky, when Wei Wuxian urges him into a walk.

“Come on,” Wei Wuxian says, still smiling widely. “We’ll be late for dinner.”

#mdzs #the untamed #wangxian #who let me write fic at midnight again #this seems like a terrible idea #my writing #greetings tumblr void #still pushing my damsel lwj agenda #ficlet

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