#hydroswfic

[hydrospanners]

DARK ROMANCE

an interview with @meonlyred​‘s Lucwayn Tal Sivron for Port & Planet Magazine

(click images for full size; full text of interview under the cut) Thank you to @meonlyred for collaborating with me on this project. She is responsible for the character, and posing for the pictures, and the answers to all the interview questions. I had the time of my life making this with you.

You may know him as a Wrath, as a warrior, as the handsome shadow behind the Alliance Commander -- Sith Lord Lucwayn Tal Sivron is all of these things, but as I learned in the peculiar intimacy of a hangar bay photoset one early autumn afternoon on Odessen, he is not only these things.

 The secretive Alliance base is a place where legends come alive, and Lord Lucwayn is no exception. Shrouded as he is in stories of battle and bloodshed and some of the most salacious gossip this side of the Perlemmian, it’s easy to be surprised by the raw, seductive humanity of the man who met me in that hangar bay with a lazy smile and a bottle of Zakuulan wine.

 Already styled for his later photoshoot, Lord Lucwayn arrives to our interview harnessed in gold and draped in luxurious scarlet, a tantalizing garment perfectly designed to accentuate the hard planes and ripe swells of musculature across his exquisitely sculpted form. He is a vision of temptation, a forbidden fruit you can’t help wanting to taste, and the coy glint in his eye suggests he knows it.

 He is a man who drips with confidence, whose every languid movement is full of promise--a promise that could be for pain just as easily as for pleasure. I am immediately captivated by him, as is everyone on the set that day..

 For a Sith, Lord Lucwayn is patient with me as I remember how to form words so I can ask about the human being and his very human (or Twi’lek, as it were) connections beneath the glamor and the legend. The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

 PORT & PLANET: It’s been a busy couple of months here on Odessen. Do you and your wife have big plans for the Festival of Love or are you going to keep things lowkey this year?

SIVRON: Vette and I take every opportunity we can to have celebrations. The Festival of Love is a particular favorite of ours. Since we had to be apart for so long, there is a lot of celebrating to catch up on.

 PORT & PLANET: How are the two of you planning to celebrate?

SIVRON: [Smiles devilishly] Music, wine, and fine food. Then a very long evening privately, maybe with an extra friend or two.

 PORT & PLANET: So the rumors about you two having an open marriage are true?

SIVRON: It's funny how many people assume we're kidding. It's been part of our relationship since the beginning. Something we have communicated with each other extensively. I might have been with many but I have only ever loved one, my wife.

 PORT & PLANET: Do the two of you have any… frequent guests?

SIVRON: Not as many as you might think. And not the ones you might think. Usually it's one time appearances.

 PORT & PLANET: Anyone in particular you’re courting for The Festival of Love?

SIVRON: [Winks] That remains to be seen. Have to talk it over with Vette first.

 PORT & PLANET: There are lots of rumors that you’ve had the Commander of the Alliance in your bed. Any truth to that?

SIVRON: The Commander is a lovely and bold woman. Anyone would be lucky to be invited to her bed. But I won't sully the reputation of a Jedi or that of our leader by answering that.

 His words may be coy, but the smile that creeps across Lord Lucwayn’s face as he speaks of the Commander is so genuine I’m almost moved by it. It’s clear to see where the rumors of their sexual relationship come from--there’s a deep fondness there, an even deeper respect--but it seems he would be playing a different kind of coy if there was any truth to them. If the Commander is sleeping with someone on her staff, it probably isn’t Lord Lucwayn Tal Sivron.

 PORT & PLANET: Then what about her rumored lover? People say you’ve had him in your bed too.

SIVRON: [Mutters into his wine glass] Not for lack of trying. [Aloud] Our spymaster seems to be too in love with his work to have time for extracurricular activities.

 He gives the spymaster’s “work” such a particular emphasis, with such a twinkle in his eye, I can’t help wondering if this is yet another thing Lord Lucwayn is trying to say without saying. I can’t help wondering if he cultivates this air of secrecy for his own protection, for the Alliance’s protection, or merely because he knows how much more irresistible the air of mystery makes him. I find the reasons don’t matter; I’m drawn in by all the things he isn’t saying and desperate to hear him not say more.

 PORT & PLANET: Any names of note you can drop that have been guests in your bed? Before or after your marriage. You’ve got quite a reputation.

SIVRON: If you know my reputation then you probably already know that answer. Some like to brag and some like to lie. Allow them to keep their boast.

 PORT & PLANET: Alright, alright. Point taken. But I’ve been speaking with some of the former Imperials around the base and they tell me you were married once before Vette. Is that true?

SIVRON: Not entirely correct. I was engaged to be married. My family was very traditional even among the Sith and arranged a marriage between the Sivrons and the Novarrs for political and lineage purposes.

 PORT & PLANET: But then you met Vette?

SIVRON: I met Vette on Korriban. She was instrumental in helping me complete my trials there. I don't think I would have succeeded without her.

 PORT & PLANET: That’s a pretty powerful statement for a Sith. When did you first realize you loved her?

SIVRON: As with all good things it took time. It was a gradual realization that came from a thousand little things.

 PORT & PLANET: When did you tell her you loved her?

SIVRON: Short answer: when the moment was right. With the position I'm in, I wanted to make sure it was something I was ready to say and she was ready to hear.

 There is a weight to his voice as he tells me about the history of his romance with his wife that suggests yet more being left unsaid, both things that trouble him and things that delight him, but pressing Lord Lucwayn for details doesn’t make him any more forthright. And there’s probably a reason Vette declined to join us for this interview.

 PORT & PLANET: Did you ever worry about your relationship being used against you?

SIVRON: Within the Empire there are many things that can be used against you. I didn't get in the position I’m in by being unable to circumvent or quell such obstacles. I also know that Vette is more than capable.

 PORT & PLANET: Which one of you proposed? Did either of you have cold feet? What was your wedding like?

SIVRON: [Chuckles] I proposed but it was Vette who told me to do so. No cold feet, only swept ones. As for the wedding, Vette wanted a traditional Twi'lek wedding. It's a long ceremony that took most of the day, consisting of a ritual bathing, tea service, and a sermon given in Ryl. Truly I think the Twi'lek take the honor of having the most elaborate weddings.

 If the sudden sincerity in his smile when he discussed the Commander was a surprise, then the way Lord Lucwayn seems to melt when he speaks about his wife is downright shocking. His words about Vette are tender, but cannot even begin to capture the softness in his eyes or the earnest affection in his smile. It’s an incongruous sight on a man who ripples with barely restrained power and drips with sexual energy, but it’s no less magnetic than anything else he does. I can’t look away.

 PORT & PLANET: So what are your favorite things about Vette? What makes her the match of a Sith Lord?

SIVRON: [Grins] Vette is as adventurous as I am both in the bed and out. I can always count on her to get us into the most delightful trouble.

 PORT & PLANET: And if we asked Vette, what would she say she loves most about you?

SIVRON: I think she would tell you that I have the best ass in the galaxy.

 PORT & PLANET: The two of you spent five years apart while you were held prisoner by Zakuul. What was it like seeing each other again after so much time?

SIVRON: [Smiles fondly] I had tried to be romantic, launching into something about crossing the span of stars and time to be by her side again. But my love had other plans for me.

 PORT & PLANET: So you like making grand gestures. What’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever done for Vette?

SIVRON: Vette has a passion for reclaiming Twi'lek artifacts. There have been many times I have helped her "persuade" art dealers to part with some of their ill-attained collections.

 PORT & PLANET: What’s the most romantic thing she’s ever done for you?

SIVRON: I'd like to give a vague answer about everything she does being romantic to me. It isn't too far from the truth. It is a wonder that she has chosen me.

 PORT & PLANET: It sounds like the two of you have a really great relationship. Any advice for the newlyweds out there?

SIVRON: Communication is always the key to any relationship. Talk and be honest with each other about every preference you have, from food to sex. They say the Force brings people together, but it takes work to stay together.

 It isn’t until the interview is long concluded and the dazzle of watching him pose for the holocams has finally faded that I realize how little new information I actually got out of Lord Lucwayn Tal Sivron. He is a master of half-truths and distraction, wielding that charming smile and alluring gaze as expertly as he wields his lightsaber.

 All his powers of misdirection and secrecy still are not enough to overcome his passion for his wife. I can’t know if he meant to let me see the depth of his love for her, but it was impossible not to see it as he spoke of Vette. It was so present, so apparent in his every look and gesture, I could swear I fell a little bit in love with her myself.

  It’s reassuring to know that beneath the power that swirls around him like a storm, beneath the stories and the gossip and the duties of his position in the Alliance, Lord Lucwayn Tal Sivron is a man with a heart that beats for love, just like the rest of us.

[hydrospanners]

a little help from a friend

the one where theron must choose between death or sharing body heat with his friend/nemesis. theron will wonder what he did to deserve this punishment. emotions will be tossed back and forth like a hot potato no one wants. friendships will be affirmed. nipples will be flicked. everyone will (probably) make it out alive. 

swtor; post-jedi under siege. slight spoilers. genfic; humor with a dash of friendship fluff. mostly f!jedi knight & theron friendship; f!jedi knight x doc discussed. 1800 words. ao3.

“This,” Theron says, shimmying out of his soaked trousers, “is your fault.”

  Rea’s top hits him in the face. “You’re welcome for your life.”

  “My life wouldn’t have even been in danger if you hadn’t--”

  “You have to take those off.”

  Theron, holding open the cover of the sleeping bag to step in, blinks at her. He only has one thing left to take off.

  “No,” he says.

  “You can’t warm up in wet fucking clothes, Theron. Don’t they teach you anything in SIS?” She gives him a look that tells him just how much she thinks of SIS training before throwing her wet bra in his face. Being that it’s at least as saturated with her blood as melted snow, it’s slightly warmer than her top was.

  “I’m not doing it, Rea.”

  “Stop being a little bitch and get naked with me.”

She strips out of her underwear and this time, he catches it before it slaps him across the face. “You’re a starsdamned menace,” he says. “Don’t look.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Like you’ve got anything I want to see.”

  Still, she keeps her eyes on the sleeping bag as she peels it open and slips inside. Theron keeps his eyes on literally anything else. Objectively attractive though she might be—and he’s gone through the personal messages of enough Alliance personnel to know she is—the idea of looking at her naked body turns his stomach. It would be like… looking at Satele. Like looking at a sister, he supposes, if he had one.

  It just feels wrong.

  “Will you get in the fucking bag already? I promise I’m not gonna look at your shriveled dick. And if I see it by accident, I promise not to laugh. It’s cold. It’s not your fault.”

  “I’m not—“ Theron stops himself. She’s just trying to provoke him and he’s not going to let her. After the shit she’s put him through today, he refuses to give her the pleasure of seeing him annoyed. “Scooch over,” he grumbles, and dives into the bag next to her.

  It is not, at first, very warm.

  Rea’s skin is cold as ice and slick with half-frozen blood and sweat.

  He forgot about blood loss.

  This is the thing about Rea that makes her so completely unbearable. Every single time you get angry with her, it turns out she was just pissing you off to distract you from your own hopeless misery, and that she did it while she was bleeding out from a blaster wound you didn’t even know she had. It turns out you’re the one being a fucking toddler while she’s over there sucking up a life-threatening injury like a champ.

  It’s hard to stay mad at her after that. Even if she is being an ass.

  So Theron grits his teeth and does the most he can for her: he wraps her in his arms.

  He’s petulantly satisfied when Rea goes rigid in his grip, clearly as uncomfortable with this arrangement as he is, no matter what she pretends. Blood loss or no blood loss, hypothermia or no hypothermia, this is just as fucking weird for her as it is for him.

  He wonders sometimes if he should be more offended that Rea, a woman who would put the moves on a lamppost in the right lighting, is so totally uninterested in him. But mostly, he’s too busy being relieved. The idea of her being attracted to him is nearly as repellent as the idea of him being attracted to her.

  It takes hardly a second for Rea to recover, to relax back into the bravado she wears like armor. Her tension releases and she snuggles into Theron’s embrace like they do this every day.

  It doesn’t bother him as much as he expected.

  He isn’t what you’d call an affectionate person. He can’t remember the last time he touched someone outside of trying to either save their life or take it. Or sex, but sex isn’t the same as this. Not the way Theron does it anyway.

  He can’t remember the last time he touched someone for comfort. For closeness.

  Rea wouldn’t mind it, he knows. She’s already touchy feely as hell with everyone else. She might not even give him shit for it. Terrible as she is, she seems to know which of his boundaries can be pushed and which can’t. She might spend twenty out of the twenty-four hours in a day giving him shit, but she almost never puts her hands on him if she doesn’t have to.

  He’s halfway to considering the possibility of allowing himself the smallest sliver of affection from this, the unlikeliest of sources, when she opens her mouth and fucks it all up.

  “Your nipples are like fucking knives.”

  It’s one of the worst sentences he’s ever heard. And then, one of her ice-cold fingertips pokes at his frigid nipple and that is easily one of the worst things he’s ever felt, which altogether makes this possibly the worst day he’s ever had.

  He hisses, and arches away from her as far as the sleeping bag they’re zipped into together will allow.

  It’s not very far.

  “Don’t touch my nipples,” he snaps.

  “You ever heard of moisturizer?” Rea asks, totally ignoring him and flicking his nipple with her finger.

  He would fight her if he wasn’t absolutely sure he’d lose, blaster burns and all.

  “You might have a condition,” she goes on, blithely. “When we get back to base, I’m sending you to Doc. He can at least give you a cream.”

  “I am not letting your husband touch my nipples,” Theron says. “And I’m done talking about it. Keep your hands to yourself.”

  He feels her shrug--she’s one to talk about sharp nipples, isn’t she?--and says, “Your loss. Most people don’t complain when I touch their nipples.”

  “If you say the word nipple one more time, I will kill you.”

  “You can try.”

  “We should’ve left you in carbonite,” he grumbles.

  His words are answered with silence. It lingers between them, the moment drawing out for endless seconds, growing heavier with every quiet breath, until finally Rea sighs. Until she whispers into the space between them, so quiet he almost doesn’t hear her say, “Probably.”

  And again he’s the asshole.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Theron tells her, a little gruffer than he means to be.

  He’s not good at comfort at the best of times, and having to get naked with the woman he reluctantly considers his best friend to combat hypothermia in the galaxy’s tiniest sleeping bag is not what he’d call the best of times.

  “I don’t know any other way to be,” Rea says. “Ask anyone.”

  “Rea…”

  “RonRon.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “SIS.”

  “Rea.”

  “Doc is so much more fun to get hypothermia with,” she whines, trying to snuggle closer. Like there’s any closer she could get without unzipping him and climbing into his skin.

  “Trust me, we would all be happier if he was here instead,” Theron agrees.

  What wouldn’t he give to be toasty warm and fully clothed in the medwing on Odessen right now? It sounds like a dream.

  “I almost brought him with us,” Rea says.

  Theron raises a brow. “To do recon?”

  “Stupid right? Best doctor in the galaxy and I’m gonna drag him away from the lab to the frozen asshole of space for what? So I can look at him?” She shivers, and Theron doesn’t think it’s from the cold. “I just keep thinking… What if he’s not there when I get back? What if he’s finally done waiting on me? Every single time I leave him behind, I get so scared about it I almost can’t breathe.”

  It’s not something he thinks she would ever admit in the light of day. But there’s something about the night, something about the yawning, too-quiet darkness of it that has a way of drawing truths out of people.

  Or maybe it was their shared brush with death.

  “Have you, uh, talked to him? About it?” Theron can’t imagine a worse person to be giving relationship advice, but there’s no one else here. And he has a sneaking suspicion he’s the person she’d talk to even if there was. He has a sneaking suspicion Rea reluctantly considers him her best friend, too.

  “Kind of? We always get distracted.”

  If Theron is translating right, ‘get distracted’ is Rea-nese for ‘feelings are complicated so we fucked instead’.

  “I’m not really an expert, Rea, but it seems like if he was going to run out of patience, he would’ve done it years ago.” If he was going to run out of patience, he probably never would’ve married Rea in the first place, but Theron doesn’t say that part.

  “I know,” she sighs. “Archiban said the same thing. That’s what’s so fucking annoying!” She knocks her forehead against his shoulder in frustration. “He says he wants to be here. He says he wants to be with me. And I believe him! He wouldn’t lie about it, and it’s not like he’s one of those people who don’t really know what they want. But none of that stops me from freaking out every time I get on a transport without him. It’s totally irrational and I just… I have no fucking clue how to stop it.”

  If Theron were a good best friend, he’d come up with something comforting to say. He’d tell her it’s going to be okay, tell her it’s normal, tell her it’ll all work out in the end.

  Theron laughs at her instead.

  “Hey,” Rea scowls, poking him hard in the gut. “I’m trying to talk about real shit like a normal fucking person, you asshole. Stop laughing.”

  “I’m sorry,” Theron says, not meaning it. “It’s just… You’re mad cause you can’t control your feelings.”

  “So?”

  “It’s a pretty Jedi thing to be mad about.”

  “You are such a dick.” Rea kicks him as well as she can with both their legs trapped together in the narrow taper of the bag, but it isn’t long before she’s laughing too.

  It’s nice to be on the other side of this equation for once. To be the asshole for a good cause. He understands, a little, why she works so hard to put herself here.

  “I hate you,” she grumbles at him, once their laughter fades.

  “Sure.”

  “You’re supposed to be nice to your friends, RonRon. Don’t they teach you anything at SIS?”

  Unbidden, Theron’s mind drifts to Jonas. He shudders. “The SIS isn’t big on friendship,” he says.

  “Well fuck the SIS,” Rea says. “You’re Alliance now.”

  “Yeah,” Theron says. “I am.”

  “You know what else you are?”

  “A dick?” He guesses.

  Theron can feel Rea’s smile against his shoulder. “Yeah, but you’re my dick.”

  “I wish you hadn’t said that.”

  She just laughs, that stupid deep belly laugh she does when she isn’t laughing to cover something else. It feels good to hear it. Feels like a win.

  He might not be so bad at this friendship stuff after all.

[hydrospanners]

fic masterlist: swtor

at the request of literally no one, i’ve created a masterlist of all my swtor fic. first is a chronological collection of all the swtor fic i’ve written in my “canon”. it’s broken up into snippets of time relative to the events of swtor. aus and gift fics are at the end. this is more for me than anything else, but if you have a bunch of time on your hands and want to read some fic--enjoy!!!

i am the most self-indulgent author known to man so there are numerous fics that don’t feature any canon characters in any significant way. i’m not sorry, but i did mark them with an asterisk for everyone’s edification. i also wrote actually vaguely descriptive descriptions instead of whatever bullshit i put in the descriptions on ao3. all links go to ao3 because tumblr was not designed for reading and it shows.

53 fics below the cut... what a trip, y’all.

backstory these fics are about things that happened before the opening of the class story. 

* a very velaran life day - snippets of different life days in the velaran family history. no canon characters in it yet, but maybe this christmas i’ll get to some fics that aren’t solely about my own ocs.

* the shape of things to come - the story about how rea finally joined the jedi at the ripe old age of sixteen.

* a dimming star - the first steps on rea’s jedi path. they aren’t fun ones, lads!

* necessary sacrifice - like three years down the timeline and still no canon characters! rea continues to struggle with this whole being a jedi thing, and it continues to struggle with her! this one features a haircut as a symbol of a turning point in the story.

bars and stripes - canon characters??? in my fic????? its more likely than you think. this is a shameless ripoff of an episode of m*a*s*h masquerading as doc backstory. does it have cameos and/or mentions of other healer companions? maybe!!!

prelude these are fics set during the prologue of the class stories, everything that happens between the start and completing the capital planet missions. 

* memories - rhese? do you finally get a say in all this??? this is the moment rhese and rea finally see each other for the first time since they were recruited to the jedi, set at the very start of the class story.

attachments - kira and rea talk about rhese. that’s it. that’s the fic.

act one all the stories set between killing tarnis and beginning preparations to capture the emperor (everything after coruscant ending and pubside balmorra starting). rip orgus. one day ill finish all those wips about how sad it was when he bit it. in the mean time, can i interest you in some gifsets?

lessons - now rea’s padawan, kira reflects on how bad rea is at teaching, though maybe without as much clarity as i just implied.

a tangled web - so stupid it’s basically crack, kira has to rescue rea from an embarrassing situation.

of flowers, failure, and the virtues of friendship - kira and rhese start to bond over the shared torment of having to be around rea. rivals to friends (one day i’ll write the “to lovers” part that comes after).

act two all the stories during the time when the knight is prepping for the assault on the emperor’s fortress and then assaulting it. everything between pubside balmorra starting and breaking free from the emperor’s fortress after that super successful plan to bring him in alive. great job jedi!

filling the table - is that shipfic????? the reason i started writing swtor fic in the first place??? this is rea being thirsty disguised as me sewing seeds for the eventual doc x rea romance. pazaak themed for some reason? (doc x rea)

when the wicked play - this is me being obsessed with the translation of video game violence to vaguely realistic circumstances posing as doc feeling some kind of way about rea murdering a whole bunch of dudes who wanted to hurt her but weren’t powerful enough. not primarily romantic but definitely some setup for their relationship.

night shift -  everything is doc x rea and nothing hurts. rea’s got work to do but who can work when there’s a horny mustachio’d doctor trying to persuade her back to bed??? it’s not love it’s just good sex!!!!! honest!!!!(doc x rea)

these nights never seem to go to plan - rea isn’t yearning for affection, she’s just too tired to get out of doc’s bed after so much boning. okay maybe this is about slightly more than good sex after all... doc x rea TENDERNESS.

somewhere we’ve not been before - this is the good shit lads!!!! doc x rea!!! first dates!!!! shenanigans!!!! honest to goodness falling in love between all that fucking that do!!!!!!!!!!!! (doc x rea)

no better taste - a sequel to the last fic featuring the morning after!!! some post-horniness introspection!! tenderness!!!!!! hints of yearning!!! god i miss the days before the mind control and the carbonite when the problems were normal things like commitment and abandonment issues. (doc x rea)

heart - rea sends doc a rocking “thanks for the great sex” gift!! rhese is disgusted by every part of it! this is comedy folks!!!! (doc x rea... i guess)

interruptions - rea takes a work call while she’s boning doc. that’s the whole fic. i think this was my first spicy fic?? i can’t remember. (doc x rea)

* where you go to rest your bones - sibling tenderness!!!! their relationship is super complicated, but rhese is reminded that underneath all the bullshit rea really does love him a lot.... it’s both sad and not sad at the same time. schroedinger’s sadness.

gifts - the crew tries to plan a gift for rea, but what do you get for the woman who’s banned from everything?? so dumb it’s basically crack and i’m not sorry for it.

crapshoot - the crew takes bets on what rea’s next Bad Idea TM will be. she shows them you can’t predict chaos. basically crack but i don’t care.

spoonful of sugar - vignettes about the jedi knight crew dealing with sickness. almost entirely comedy and/or fluff. doc x rea content is present and rhese x kira content is suggested.

a little eggstra - grocery shopping gone awry, based on an old tumblr text post. hella stupid, yet hella fun. doc x rea is in the background.

to break our bones for kindling - you thought we were just having good times??? you’re a fool. doc’s job is to heal people and rea’s job is to break them. sometimes they have work-related disagreements!!! be sad with me. doc x rea.

* when a problem comes along, you must whip it - i can only stop being stupid for so long, so here’s the story about how rea came to possess her lightwhip, the stupidest weapon known to man. these events do not go well for rhese.

things unsaid - a dumb doc x rea drabble about stupid shit rea says when she’s been mortally wounded. if doc were to just let her die, no one would blame him.

* the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one - a bit of a character/relationship study about what rhese is willing to sacrifice for love of his sister, no matter how complicated things are between them. a second chapter about what rea sacrifices for rhese is in my wips and will be completed... .eventually. 

lovesick - doc x rea ship content. my interpretation of that one conversation where doc’s like “hey would your jedi powers tell me if im going crazy also do you love me? check yes or no. i will not elaborate.”

* the things we left behind - oh no lads.... we’re building up to the fortress shit.... our good times are over. rea does some underhanded shit to make sure her brother doesn’t go on this mission to capture the emperor cause the plan does not seem like a great one.

act three wow wasn’t act two fun??? so much silly nonsense and love. now get a drink assholes it’s Time To Be Sad. act three covers everything in the class stories after coming back from that super successful assault on the emperor’s fortress (great job jedi!) to finally stabbing the bastard in the dark fortress and hoping that gets the job done at last. (spoilers: it doesn’t!!!!!) aka stories from belsavis to the final assault on dromund kaas.

everything we left there - it’s trauma time!!! rea’s fucked up from the fortress and feeling the pressure (thanks for the prophecy scourge!!! love that!!!!) so she hurts people she cares about to protect them. it’s her signature move!

the only thing that’s real - rea continues to be fucked up from what happened on the fortress but hey... at least she isn’t fucked up alone??? sad doc x rea content.

into the jungle - the gang is on belsavis and no one is having a good time! since rea isn’t herself, doc tries to pick up the slack and reassure kira that it’ll all be okay! it goes about as well as you’d expect.

interlude now that i’m looking at it, there are some serious gaps in my fic coverage. anyway, sad hours are over, the emperor is (kind of but not really) dead and there may still be a war on but things are looking up! this covers everything between the emperor’s death and the beginning of kotfe, including forged alliances and the shadow of revan.

hands too hungry - doc finally takes rea on that honeymoon she didn’t really care about in the first place! tragically, rea is way too horny to be impressed by what an amazing vacation he planned for himself them. peak rea x doc content.

no kind of romantic - it’s doc and rea’s one year anniversary but they are both working on opposite sides of the galaxy. sad! it’s doc x rea fluff disguised as angst.

a little help from a friend - rea and theron are worst/best friends and i recycle romance tropes into annoying friendship ones. this is the least sexy sharing body heat fic you’ve ever (not?) read. bite me.

retirement - rea has some feelings about her very violent, stressful job and how it interferes with her husband doing things that actually help and heal. doc x rea content.

the dreaded kotfe content these are sad hours!!! this is everything from arcann’s invasion on, cause i’m not breaking it up by post-carbonite storyline you bastards. i don’t know why i’m being so hostile no one asked me to do this.

every doubt we had - after watching what may have been his sister’s death by exploding starship, rhese is having trouble sleeping. no one is more surprised than him when seeks out doc for comfort! doc & rhese brothers by marriage solidarity. carbonite angst...

love is a waiting game - rea’s been MIA for six months since the ship she was on bit it and her crew is finally making some changes. doc is sad about it. doc & rhese brothers by marriage solidarity again. doc x rea angst.

waiting - some time has passed and now rhese is the sad one again!!! grief is so funny isn’t it??? hahahaha haha hahahaha why is no one else laughing? doc & rhese brothers by marriage solidarity yet again.

the greatest distance - rea’s back baby!!!! oh but this isn’t a celebration. she’s taking a tour of her long lost ship now that all the people she loved aren’t in it. it’s a sad one, fellas. 

* when the stars are the only thing we share - rea tracks down some people from her past to help her track down her brother since he went missing while she was having a nap. no canon characters were used in the making of this fic.

leave her sleeping a little longer - rea has a dream and wakes up missing doc even more than she was before. sad hours. doc x rea angst.

take back what the kingdom stole - after theron pulls some Shenanigans (you know the ones) his friendship with rea is in peril. they both break character and actually talk shit out for once.

a wish your heart makes - rea dreams a dream. so does doc. it’s a wet one. this makes it sound lighthearted but actually it’s angst with a side of porn. doc x rea supreme spicy/sad content.

overserved - back to crack baby!! rea gets drunk and acts a fool based on a joke made in a discord server. this is the best shit i’ve ever written.

thrusting back into my skin i feel anew - the band is back together again and everything is fine!!!! just kidding -- actually people change a lot in six years and rea and doc are having some trouble fitting back into the marriage they had back then. doc x rea angst but with a hopeful ending!

non-canon fics i’ve written a couple of things with my dumb characters that are too stupid even for me to put into their canon story or are otherwise aus. these are them, listed in no particular order.

the lies we tell ourselves - a sadder (yet possibly more realistic) take on the ossus reunion and what follows. a bit experimental. doc x rea angst au.

archiban frodrick’s kennel - a romance au where doc is a vet and rea has a pet with a health issue, inspired by my own stupid dog whom i love very much. doc x rea. spiciness suggested but not detailed; sorry horndogs.

fallen - a fun au where rea’s shittiness as a teacher and everything being bad leads to kira falling to the dark side... its angst lads.

the new recruit - rusk’s squad adopts a kitten. that’s the fic.

cruel - ever wonder how things would have turned out if rea was never smuggled off eriadu and got plucked up by the sith?? no??? well i have and i wrote about it. the self-indulgence never ends.

fill my lungs with sweetness - a gift fic for @hoiist; flower-themed vignettes about doc expressing his love for hoiist’s knight, vii. this is some real soft shit, lads.

remember me, love - another gift fic for @hoiist; this time some ossus-flavored angst about doc seeing through vii’s eyes in his dreams. what he sees is not comforting!!! all aboard the angst train--choo choo!!

[hydrospanners]

no better taste

an ordinary moment after a very extraordinary first date; or, doc and rea experiment with tenderness. a sequel-of-sorts to somewhere we’ve not been before; can stand alone. swtor act two. f!jedi knight x doc. fluff. no spoilers.1100 words. ao3.

By the time he slips from the blackness of Rea’s quarters, the night has turned to morning has turned to day. Shafts of light slant into the hallway from the large viewports of the cockpit, and it would be beautiful if the light wasn’t mostly neon and flashing.

  Maybe it’s just the night he had, but Doc thinks it might be beautiful anyway.

  He gathers his shoes and jacket into one hand, attempting to fasten the button of his pants with the other. He isn’t what you’d call modest, but he’s in a generous enough mood to tuck away anything Red or Junior would be really upset by. He’s got no idea where his underwear got off to, but he doubts he’ll ever see it again. Or his shirt. Or his socks.

  It was a hell of a night.

  A hell of a night that saw him waking up in Rea’s bed for once.

  He’d have a good time with her anywhere--they’d had a good time just about everywhere last night--but stretching out in the captain’s bed is a hell of an upgrade from the complicated knots they have to tangle into below deck, down in his cramped little cot in his cramped little room. He doesn’t know why she insisted on it before, just like he doesn’t know what’s changed her mind now, but he’s got a good feeling about it. A really good feeling. A feeling so good he’s not gonna ruin it by looking at it too closely and finding something he might not be ready to see yet.

  “Hey.”

  Doc jumps nearly out of his skin.

  Rea is leaning against the door behind him, her arms stretched overhead, crossed at the wrists and resting against the frame, looking six kinds of languid and twelve kinds of sexy. She’s wearing nothing but an oversized, threadbare tanktop--stolen from Junior if he’s any guess--that dips across the tops of her breasts and skirts along the crease of her thighs in the most tantalizing fucking way.

  His mouth goes dry, and even though he knows--he absolutely, unequivocally knows--the fuel in that particular tank is all used up, there’s a part of him that wants to reach for her anyway. To slip his hands beneath the hem of that shirt and run them up her sides just as slow as he can stand, to devour, just one more time, that cut statue of a body he’s done nothing but worship all morning and all night.

  His eyes rake up and down her body, up and down the lightyears of leg, of taut muscle and warm, brown skin. His eyes make her body a million promises that his hands and his mouth and his cock are all too tired and aching to make good on.

  For now, anyway.

  “You trying to sneak off on me?” Rea asks, and he finds her smiling one of those knowing smiles once he manages to bring his eyes up to her face again.

  (Not that her face is any less tempting, with those plush, bruised lips and bright, laughing eyes; with the kind of smudged makeup and mussed hair that just screams sex.)

  “Wouldn’t dream of it, Gorgeous.”

  He doesn’t say how he didn’t want to wake her cause he knows she needs the rest. That kind of thing is doctor talk, and right now he’s just the man shuffling from her bed, barefoot and commando after a marathon night of mischief and sex. The kind of man who notices the exquisite sculpture of her ass, not the dark circles under her eyes.

  The line between the two, he’s found, is important to Rea. It’s not a balancing act Doc is good at, not one he even likes--he’s always been more of an all in or all out type--but he’s not about to teeter over the edge now. Not after a night (and morning and afternoon) of perfect, simple pleasures.

  Rea laughs, dropping her hands from the doorframe to his shoulders, her thumbs caressing the sharp edge of his clavicles. Her smile is warm and easy as ever, but there’s something about the way she’s looking at him that he can’t quite read. Something new.

  She runs one hand along his shoulder, settling it in the nape of his neck, her long fingers toying with the downy hairs at his nape. It’s so gentle, so light, so different from every way she’s touched him before--a shiver runs down his spine. A sweeter kind of tingle than he’s used to, more pleasant heat than electricity.

  “I had a good time last night,” she says, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  “Me too,” he says, a little stupidly.

  It just feels so absurd, having such an ordinary exchange with a woman who couldn’t be more out of the ordinary if she tried. To be having it about a date so unusual, so delightfully and deliciously abnormal, that most people wouldn’t even recognize it for what it was.

  He wants to laugh. And from the look on Rea’s face, so does she.

  Instead, she leans in, eyes fluttering shut, and presses the sweetest of kisses to his lips. A kiss so soft, so brief, so chaste--the kind of kiss normal people share after a normal first date. A kiss that’s all tenderness and promise.

  The surprise of it, of tasting such gentleness on Rea’s lips, nearly brings him to his admittedly already-kind-of-trembling knees.

  He’d be more embarrassed by it if she didn’t pull away looking just as winded as he felt. If he couldn’t see her skin puckering up in gooseflesh to match his.

  The moment stretches out between them, languid and warm, and Doc just lets it. It never even occurs to him to make a joke, to say something vulgar or ostentatious that will warp things back into a more familiar shape. It just doesn’t feel like the kind of tension that needs breaking.

  Rea steps back first.

  Once the moment is stretched thin and the quiet starts to bear weight; once her throat starts to close around a feeling she can’t even begin to describe.

  Rea steps back, and reality snaps back into place. Her smile turns coy and her eyes glitter with mischief and Doc likes that so much he can’t even be sad it cost him whatever had just been growing in the space between them.

  He can’t be sad about anything right now.

  Rea runs her thumb along his jaw one last time before she takes her hands off him completely. Before she steps back across the threshold of her door, before the shadows of her room flow across the dips and curves of her silhouette, seeming to swallow her up.

  The last smile she gives him is pure playfulness, raising her hand to her ear in a gesture he’s seen a million times before on a million dates with a million different people. “Call me,” she mouths, just before the door swishes shut between them.

  Doc spends the walk back to his bunk wondering how soon he can do just that.

[hydrospanners]

when a problem comes along, you must whip it

when an explosion rocks the palace where they're staying in the night, jedi siblings rhese and rea handle the situation with their usual grace and efficiency. this is a very serious fic. swtor act two. genfic; f!jedi knight x doc mentioned. no spoilers. 2700 words. ao3.

Crack that whip Give the past the slip Step on a crack Break your momma's back When a problem comes along You must whip it Before the cream sits out too long You must whip it When something's going wrong You must whip it

-- whip it by devo

In the end, Rea does more property damage than the bomb.

  A year ago he might have let himself shoulder some blame for that, but now--Now Rhese is older. Rhese is wiser. And Rhese knows that his sister would’ve found her way to bringing the place down whether he’d done what he did or not. He has no bearing on Rea’s destructive inevitability, and he sleeps better at night now that he’s made his peace with it.

  He doubts if the Duke will ever get a good night’s sleep again. Not everyone is used to being stirred from sleep by explosions in their rotundas.

  Rhese can’t remember the last time he went more than a week or two without having his sleep interrupted by an explosion of one kind or another. He isn’t sure what that says about his life except that Rea is back in it.

  The building was still trembling from the blast when his feet hit the floor, and he barely took the time to slide his lounge pants on before he went chasing after that familiar pulse in the Force, the powerful thrum of Rea’s presence, knowing she would already be wherever the trouble was.

  He has regrets about that now. You’d think he’d know by now to never go anywhere Rea is without his lightsaber. You’d think he’d know to at least put on some underwear. But he was sleeping deeply and he’s always been a little slow to wake up. It’s the only defense he has for himself, for running into a clusterfuck like that half-dressed and unarmed.

  When he found Rea in the great hall, he could see she wasn’t any better prepared than him. She was messy-haired, empty-handed, and naked from the waist down, wearing nothing but a shirt too clean and too tight in the shoulders to be her own. It was pretty clear what she’d been up to; Rhese just hoped her evening’s entertainment didn’t rush down with as little consideration for appearances as she had. The situation was bad enough without trying to avoid eye contact with Doc’s erection.

  A dozen or so mercs and their assault cannons filled the hall with blaster fire like a driving rain, forcing them both to cover on opposite sides of the room, tucked behind the huge pillars that dotted the room. Normally a pair of Jedi wouldn’t even be inconvenienced by some hired muscle and a bit of blaster fire, but normally Jedi had lightsabers and plastoid armor.

  “Rhese!” He could hardly hear Rea’s voice over the torrent of blaster bolts screaming through the hall between them. She started pointing at him. “Rhese! Behind you!”

  He looked over his shoulder, muscles tensed for a fight, but no one was there. Nothing was there except the display case on the wall. The display case with the--the hilt of a--

  Shit. She couldn’t be serious.

  “I don’t know how to use that!” He shouted back.

  Even through the haze of red, he could see her rolling her eyes. He could feel her rolling her eyes, somewhere deep in his soul. “Throw it to me, dumbass!”

  Of course she was fucking serious.

  “You don’t know how to use that either!” He shouted.

  “Rhese!”

  Stars fucking dammit. He looked at the case then back to Rea, hoping he had somehow misunderstood what she wanted, but she was just gesturing for him to hurry it up. Because of course she was. Of course this was her actual, entire plan. Of course this was going to happen.

  Was one night of peace in a large, comfortable bed really so much to ask for?

  “Don’t look!” Rhese shouted, then dropped his pants.

He wrapped the fabric around his fist, cursing himself for forgetting underwear, and crept toward the case in a crouch. He didn’t see any obvious security measures and there wasn’t time for a more thorough check. The mercs were closing in. There was nothing to do but take the gamble and hope the Duke hadn’t installed anything more serious than a burglary alarm.

  Rhese punched the glass.

  It shattered, exploding in every direction, lashing his skin, leaving tiny cuts across his face and his arms and his chest and his legs. His fist burned as shards of it buried themselves deep under his skin, even with the fabric of his pants to protect it.

  He ignored the pain, too high on adrenaline and annoyance to care. The hilt of Rea’s No Good Very Bad Idea came free from its mount with a tug.

  It seemed to quake under his touch. There was something stirring inside it, something wild and alive. The feel of it coursed up his arm, racing across his skin like electricity, calling to something inside of him, to some dormant part of his--

  Fuck.

  Rhese tossed the thing like it burned him. The hilt hardly left his hand before he felt the tug of the Force pulling it away from him, drawing it into Rea’s waiting palm. Part of him wanted to pull it back, to feel the cool, unyielding metal against his skin, to be the one with his thumb on the switch.

  He smothered that part with a feather down pillow. Let her have it, he thought, a tremor running down his spine. I’m not the crazy one in this family.

  Maybe he should have warned her. Maybe he could have saved the Duke a few million credits and all of them a lot of grief if he’d just mentioned what he felt.

  But probably not.

  Rea’s never let things like total ignorance of what she’s dealing with or the threat of possession by a potentially evil incorporeal entity stop her before, and he doubts she would have started today. He doubts anything would have kept her hands off that thing once she realized she had an excuse to try it out. He remembers how she’d looked at it on their tour, with that hungry glint in her eye, the gears of her scheming little brain turning so fast you could almost see the smoke pouring from her ears.

  Things would’ve turned out the same, no matter what Rhese did or didn’t do. It was already too late for them the moment Rea laid her eyes on that thing.

  She barely closed her fingers around the hilt before the blade was igniting in a shower of sparks.

  If you could call it a blade.

  It was a rope of electric blue light that fell from the hilt in long coils, graceful and deadly, crackling as it melted through the carpet and into the marble floor beneath.

  Rhese had heard of lightwhips before, but never expected to see one with his own eyes, much less one that still worked. He hadn’t thought any still existed considering how badly the stories about them always end.

  And now they have another story for the list.

  Rea gave the thing an experimental crack, sending sparks flying as the thong streaked wildly through the air, a blur of electric blue that lashed across pillars and walls before snapping against a statue of the Duke’s great-grandmother, neatly severing the top half of her marble head. It shattered against the floor as the whip fell limp, leaving trails of lime scarring in the marble as it slid slowly to the ground.

  The flow of blaster fire stuttered, some of the mercs evidently asking themselves what the streak of light scorching its way across the hall might mean for their plans. He doubted any of them were scholars of esoteric plasma weapons, but you don’t survive long as a mercenary without some sense of when the winds of fortune have turned against you.

  Rhese ducked back behind his pillar before Rea made another crack. His night was bad enough without a firsthand lesson on the relative effectiveness of an ancient lightwhip against bare human flesh. He tried to shake the shattered glass from his crumpled pants, but it was no good. Tiny slivers were tucked so deep in the fabric he doubted he’d ever get them out.

  He wondered if he shouldn’t just put them on anyway; he wondered if a little pain wouldn’t be worth sparing himself the humiliation of going hand-to-hand against a dozen armed and armored mercs while his dick flapped in the wind. Then he remembered whose hands would have to dig all that glass out of his balls later and thought better of it.

  With another sharp crack, Rea brought the whip twisting back toward them, lashing wildly between walls and statues and--

  “Fuck!” Rhese swore, rolling out of the way just in time as the tip of the thong sparked against the pillar where his head had been not even a second ago. “Can you maybe try not to kill me?” He shouted.

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist,” Rea laughed, then paused, narrowing her eyes at him. “Where are your panties?”

  Rhese glared back, determinedly ignoring the blush creeping from his cheeks down to his chest. “You focus on the guys trying to blow us up. Let me worry about my panties.”

  “You want my shirt?”

  “No!” The only thing worse than going into a fight with his dick in the wind would be going into a fight with Doc’s shirt wrapped around him like a diaper.

  Rea shrugged.

  And then she was gone.

  She soared through the air, bare-assed and gleeful, cackling as she spun the lightwhip into a whirlwind of a shield. Blaster bolts bounced off it in every direction, blue and red blurring together into a haze of purple light that surrounded Rea like a halo.

  He’d had every intention of helping, of taking advantage of the distraction to drop some of their attackers as mercifully as possible, or at the very least without having to bisect them. But then Rea landed among them, whip lashing, and he watched in abject horror as it tore through their bodies and the walls as easily as if they were flimsi. He watched it snap and whirl and crack with abandon, striking like lightning at anything within twenty feet of his sister.

  Before Rhese could decide if saving people who’d come here to kill him was worth the risk of Rea cutting something from his body he’d much rather have attached, a terrible crack echoed through the hall. A column, gouged and abused by the slashing of the whip, crashed to the floor between them.

  The columns, as it turned out, were not entirely decorative.

  The ceiling groaned where the column had stood just moments before, large cracks splintering out like a spider’s web from the place where the column broke away. Dust and debris poured from the crack, and the alarms finally began to wail as other cracks echoed through the hall, the other columns straining under the load.

  Rea’s laughter and the sharp snap of the whip grew distant as the columns crumbled, and Rhese knew what was left of the mercenaries had tried to run. He knew she was giving chase.

  He dodged chunks of marble and bits of gilded metal as he scrambled through the collapsing room, columns and pieces of ceiling smashing against the floor in turn. His nakedness was forgotten, and he hardly even felt the shards of glass and broken rock buried deep in the soles of his bleeding feet.

  The nakedness is the thing he’ll regret most later, when he sees himself in the holos, dusty and bleeding and wearing nothing but a too-small censor bar over his genitals.

  He follows the path of destruction, hardly noticing the household staff and other guests scrambling past him to escape the building. Definitely not noticing the way they were noticing him, running through the halls with his wang in the wind, screaming bloody murder at his sister.

  It is not one of his finest moments.

  He thought it wasn’t one of Rea’s either. As he was running through the halls, deflecting crumbling chunks of stone and durasteel with the Force, he was so sure she’d been possessed by the sweet pull of chaos he’d felt inside that lightwhip. He was sure that this time, she needed to be saved.

  As usual, he’d been wrong.

  Rhese heard a second explosion just moments before he spilled out into the palace’s rear garden, where the mercs and all their reinforcements were trying to clamber past each other through a hole in the outer wall that had not been there that morning. Rea was there too, strolling toward them almost lazily, snapping her whip in arcs so graceful she might’ve been making them her whole life.

  It’s only then Rhese notices how there aren’t bodies and bits of bodies littering the yard. Only then that he realizes he hasn’t seen a single cut up corpse since the mercs she dropped at the very start of the attack.

  It’s only then, standing in the courtyard ass naked and bleeding, with household guests and staff pouring in from every direction, their holocams live, that Rhese realizes what a complete and total dumbass he is.

  Rea was never possessed by some dark force of chaos trapped inside a lightwhip. She wasn’t murdering mercenaries left and right in a fit of uncontrollable bloodlust. She was putting on a show. With her lightwhip and her crazed laughter and bare-assed acrobatics, she was just trying to scare them off.

  And he fell for it.

  “Fuck,” Rhese swore. Again.

  Rea turned to him, a satisfied smile on her face as the lightwhip fell to the ground beside her in perfect coils “You okay?” She asked, the triumph in her eyes turning quickly to worry.

  “I’m fine,” he lied.

  A voice from the growing crowd shouted, “Yeah you are!”

  Rhese felt another blush rising, setting his chest and the tips of his ears on fire. Laughter spread through the courtyard as he stood there, paralyzed by his own embarrassment.

  Rea, taking pity on him for once in his life, stripped out of Doc’s shirt and tossed it to him. No one would ever laugh at her nakedness. He wasn’t sure what the difference was, but it probably had something to do with how she would never blush about it.

  Rhese’s entire body was flaming red by the time he managed to cover what remained of his dignity.

  And then, as they stood there together, filthy and bloodied and naked, the entire east wing of the Duke’s palace finally collapsed.

  Rea watched it crumble with a smile on her face.

  “You know,” Rhese observed, thinking of how gracefully she’d lashed the lightwhip back and forth when she was menacing the mercenaries out through the wall, “you didn’t have to destroy the whole thing.”

  “Don’t you wonder why the mercenaries came to kill him in the first place?” She asked.

  “To kill him?” Rhese stared. “I thought they were here for us.”

  Rea rolled her eyes. “They would’ve brought bigger guns if they were here for us.”

  That was probably true. Mercenaries didn’t stay mercenaries very long if they were stupid. “And you think they were after the Duke?”

  He was a foolish, frivolous sort of man who was easy to dislike, but Rhese had difficulty imagining what he might have done that would be worth killing over. He didn’t even have much of value to steal outside of the palace the mercenaries had clearly planned to destroy anyway. That and the lightwhip they likely hadn’t even known about.

  “You remember what he said this morning on the tour? About his family owning this place for centuries?”

  The Duke had bragged about that quite a lot, and the fact that he’d doubled the palace in size during his time at the head of the family. Rhese nodded.

  “He’s selling slaves,” Rea said, watching the Duke stare at his wrecked home in abject horror. “He used his own product to build the east wing. But our friend there’s not a very good salesman, and his supplier isn’t happy with him. This is what a negative performance review looks like in the slaving industry.”

  Rhese thought for a moment, frowning. “We were never here to negotiate for a listening base on his land were we?”

  Rea just grinned. 

[hydrospanners]

every doubt we had

"the force flows through all things. it surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together."

it's been years since he last saw his wife, but when doc starts experiencing strange sensations and having odd dreams, he knows it's the force bringing them together somehow. but trapped on ossus with no communications and no way out, seeing her again may bring as much pain as it does joy. SWTOR. Established F!Jedi Knight x Doc. Angst. Hurt/Comfort. 2400 words. AO3.

written as a gift for @hoiist featuring her knight, viios.

At first, he thinks it’s a cramp. Doc wakes from sleep with a clenched jaw, an echo of pain shooting up his thigh, and thinks maybe he needs to lay off the energy pudding for a while.

When it happens again, he figures it’s time to accept he’s not as young as he used to be. He figures he might need to work more muscles than the ones he’s building for the extremely athletic sex he hopes to have with his wife again some day soon.

Time waits for no man, he figures, so he makes changes. He eats whole foods, straight from the pilgrims’ fields, and he stretches with the Junior Jedi at dawn. He cuts back on the caf, drinks more water. He spends some quality time with his bunk. And after a few weeks, he thinks the problem is solved. He might not be immune to the effects of age, but he won’t be crippled by them either.

Then it happens again.

It happens again and it’s worse than before, liquid fire pouring through his veins that leaves him gasping for breath when he jerks awake. Awake, but blinking up at a ceiling that isn’t his, hearing the low murmur of voices he doesn’t recognize, with the feel of sheets softer than anything the Jedi have against his skin. Awake, but somewhere else. Somewhere different.

Someone different?

Doc drops back into his quiet, scratchy reality with no warning, and he barely has time to grab the bin before the wretching starts.

It goes on for a long time. Over and over and over until his muscles ache and his vision blurs and his throat’s scraped raw from the acid. Until he’s collapsed on the floor of his bunk, sweating and exhausted with nothing left to heave and echoes of a burning pain still pulsing through his leg.

He pings Nadia from the floor, too tired to get up. He might not know much about the Force, but he recognizes these symptoms, knows them like the back of his own hand, and he knows they don’t belong to him.

He must really look like shit because Nadia doesn’t tease him at all when she shows up at his door, clutching her robe against the cold and blinking sleep from her eyes.

Stars, but he hopes Force visions don’t go both ways. He hopes she didn’t see him like that, hopes the first glimpse she’s had of him in five years wasn’t sweaty and pallid with hair stuck to his forehead and bile crusting on his lips.

He tries not to think about how she has bigger problems right now than the relative sex appeal of her errant husband.

“I saw her,” he croaks, his throat raw and burning. “Vii. I saw her.”

Nadia does him the kindness of not looking at him with pity. It’s why he called her. She’s not going to give him that look the other Jedi sometimes do, the one that says he’s an object lesson in the dangers of attachments. She’s not going to doubt his sanity because of his heart. She just gets him a wet rag and a glass of water and asks for every detail of what he saw.

He tells her. All of it, every color and every sound, every agonizing sensation. He tells her everything he experienced and every worry it awoke in him. He tells her about Vii’s cybernetics, about the poison and the failures, about what he thinks it all means.

Nadia doesn’t have any answers; Jedi rarely do.

Doc figures he won’t need their answers if he can get them from Vii herself. If he can get to wherever she is. But no amount of pleading or threatening will move the Jedi to open communications. They won’t let him leave, either. They can’t risk the safety of the whole colony because he had a bad dream.

He’s trapped. Helpless. Vii needs him and all he can do is wait for her to reach out. Wait for her to sneak into his dreams and share her pain with him again.

He sleeps as often as he can. He gives up caf and energy pudding and every other stimulant that’s ever helped him get through the day. He meditates with the Jedi and when that isn’t enough, he medicates too. He sleeps more than he’s awake, always thinking of Vii, always waiting.

Days pass, then weeks.

Nadia starts looking at him with the same knowing pity as the rest of them, her eyes flicking from his too-long hair to the beard covering his jaw. To the streaks of grey at his temples and the bags under his eyes. No one who sleeps so much should look so tired, but here he is.

And none of it matters.

There are no more cramps. No phantom pains, no voices he doesn’t recognize. No dreams. Nothing.

It’s just him and the weight of all his knowledge, all his skill that feels so fucking meaningless when he can’t use it to help her.

“If she isn’t reaching out to you,” Nadia tries to tell him, “it could just mean she isn’t suffering anymore. It could mean she’s fine.”

There’s another way her suffering could have ended, but Nadia doesn’t mention that.

“She wouldn’t want you to tear yourself apart like this,” she says. “Take care of yourself, Doc. Think of the good times.”

He does.

It hurts, like the way too-sweet food stings your teeth. It hurts, but it feels good too. It feels like relief, like warmth and sunshine and happiness he hasn’t felt in years.

They used to be so happy.

On the beach that day, one of the few perfect days in his life, no one had ever been happier than they were. Sand on their shoulders and salt in their hair--Doc closes his eyes and he can almost feel the heat of the sun warming his skin, can almost hear the crashing waves.

He opens his eyes and he can see it, can see everything just like he’s back there, like he’s living the moment all over again. Vii’s legs draped over his, ice cream cones in both their hands, the galaxy’s problems a million lightyears away. She looks just like he remembers, hair loose and tangling in the breeze, that ridiculous pineapple shirt falling off her shoulders. They bought a matching pair, but even the smallest size swallowed her. He made that hideous thing look good, but Vii--

Vii makes it almost unbearably sexy. Almost unbearably cute, too. It’s so unfair how she can be both at the same time. It’s more than a man can take.

He watches as her tongue slides along the curve of her ice cream, as the top scoop starts to slip from its perch. He watches her face, savoring every moment as she realizes what’s happening, as her expression pinches in utter betrayal, as the ice cream plummets right into the--

Into--

--her hand?

Doc blinks.

Vii smiles at the half-eaten scoop of ice cream melting in her sandy palm. “Not getting away from me this time.”

“Vii?”

She looks up at him and her smile melts into shock. “Doc?”

She reaches for him without thinking, her hand still full of ice cream when she rests it against his cheek. He can feel the cold of it just like it was real, like all of this is real and not just some distant dream. Like this isn’t just a memory warped by longing and sedatives.

He leans into her cold, sticky fingers. “Vii,” he sighs.

She’s looking up at him with her eye wide and her mouth gaping open, her perfect, plush lips rounded in a way that’s just begging to be kissed.

So he kisses them. Gently. Tenderly. His lips on hers, all sweet pressure and soft caress. All delicacy and longing.

Vii sighs his name into his mouth and he can taste the sweetness on her breath, feel the heat of it on his tongue. He shivers, his mouth opening for her as she pulls him closer. Closer and closer, their noses crushed between them, breathing as one, moving together, touching, tasting…

He’s never tasted anything better than Vii, salt on her lips and sugar on her tongue.

Her kiss isn’t as delicate. It’s hungry and urgent, all nipping teeth and gasping breaths and long strokes of tongue. She’s devouring him, desperate in a way he rarely sees her, her hands all over him, sticky and gritty where they drag across his jaw and through his hair, where they slide down his throat and his chest, where they dig into his shoulders and his arms.

She kisses him until he’s dizzy, until he’s breathless and burning, hard for her though she’s barely even touched him.

Vii’s fingers cup his jaw, drawing his forehead down to rest against hers as she brushes her nose alongside his, shallow breaths mingling in the narrow space between them.

Doc doesn’t realize he’s crying until she kisses the tears from his cheeks.

“I’m here,” she whispers. “I love you. I’m here.”

His thoughts are so hazy, swallowed up with lust and longing and love, but there was something he needed to ask. Something important. Something--

“Your leg.”

He looks down, his throat closing up as her leg changes before his eyes, as warm, supple flesh melts into unyielding durasteel. “Gorgeous,” he chokes. “Gorgeous, your--”

Her thumb brushes the tears from his cheeks as she shushes him. It’s absurd that she’s trying to comfort him when it’s her leg, when it’s her pain, but--

“I wasn’t there.”

“It’s okay,” she whispers back. “I’m okay.”

But Vii’s never been good at lying, and she didn’t marry a fool. “If you were okay, you wouldn’t be here,” he says. “Gorgeous--” He gasps as phantom pain pulses in his hip, and Vii gasps with him, sagging against his chest, her hands clutching at his shoulders. It burns and it aches, stronger with every beat of her heart.

“Vii. Look at me, Beautiful.” She does. Her eye is glistening with tears, the color draining from her skin as she trembles, gasping shallow little breaths of air. He doesn’t need her to describe what she’s feeling because he can feel the echo of it, but he needs her to know what it is. He needs her to hear him, to tell whatever dipshit slapped this thing on her--”Your body is rejecting the implant, Vii. Something’s wrong and they need to--”

“I know,” she gasps, not quite looking him in the eye. “We waited too long and it’s not taking. I know.”

His heart clenches.

“I’ll be fine,” she insists, but the tremor in her voice does not reassure him.

“Tell me where you are, Gorgeous,” he pleads. “Let me fix this.”

“I can’t--” She winces, her lips pinching together. “I can’t think. I can’t remember.” Then another lance of pain strikes, and all she can do is bury her head in his chest, her fingers clutching at his shoulders tight enough to bruise.

He holds her. One hand on her back, gently stroking the places where hard metal meets soft skin, the other in her hair, fingers on her scalp, kneading and rubbing. He feels hot tears against his skin and presses kisses to the top of her head. It’s all he can do. All he can give her with so many lightyears between them.

“I’ve got you,” he murmurs. “It’s okay. I’m here.”

She trembles and she gasps and he keeps holding her, keeps whispering soothing nothings as the pain comes in waves like the water that laps at his feet. He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, doesn’t know if the rules of time work the same here as they do in the waking world. But he holds her and she clings to him and eventually, the pain passes.

Eventually, Vii slumps boneless against him, drawing in a long, shuddering breath, and there is nothing but the two of them and the memory they share, nothing but melted ice cream and the ocean and the sand and the sun.

“I just wanted to see you,” she whispers, once she has caught her breath. “Everything hurt and I just wanted to feel--”

“Happy?” Doc finishes for her. He smiles despite himself, despite everything, and he can feel her smiling too.

She presses a sweet kiss to his chest and looks up at him, her face so full of longing he almost can’t stand to look at it. “Did you think of this too?” She asks.

He nods. “It was a good day.”

“The best.”

He wants to kiss her again, to run his hands and his tongue all over her body, to give her as much pleasure as she’s had pain, but there’s clouds starting to cover the sun and he knows, somehow, that their time is running out.

“We’ll have good days again,” Vii says. And this time she isn’t lying. This time she isn’t just trying to take away his pain.

This is a promise.

“We’ll have good days again,” he says.

And Vii kisses him. Sudden and hard, her lips pressing hard enough to bruise, her eyes screwed shut. His eyes are still open, surprised, when the clouds move in front of the sun and--

Darkness.

Darkness and quiet, a sliver of moonlight coming through the window of his bunk, his sheets scratchy and hot against his skin.

Doc sits up in bed, throws back his quilt and swings his feet to the floor. He rubs the sleep and crusted tears from his eyes, the wisp of a dream dancing at the edges of his mind. Something about the ocean…

He limps to the fresher, his leg aching again, and curses the Jedi for trapping him here, for not having answers and not letting him find his own. He flicks on the light and stares at himself in the mirror, not recognizing the man who stares back. Not recognizing the swollen lips or the bloodshot eyes or the purple bruises blooming on his shoulders. He touches his fingers to his cheek, to the tacky, blue something that’s stuck to his beard, that he can’t remember being there when he fell asleep. It smells sweet, and against his better judgment, he licks it from his fingers.

It tastes like ice cream.

[hydrospanners]

thrusting back into my skin i feel anew

time can be a thief if you let it. nirea and doc try to find their footing with six years of time, distance, and damage between them. spoilers for onslaught. swtor. f!jedi knight x doc. angst with a happy ending. 1800 words. ao3.

She’s so still.

  Doc isn’t sure why it keeps him up like it does, all the little movements she isn’t making. By all accounts he should be sleeping better without Rea doing gymnastics in their bed.

  He isn’t.

  He’s lying awake, blinking tired eyes at the exposed rock she calls a ceiling in this dank little cave of hers. He’s clenching his fists and grinding his teeth and opening his mouth to ask what the deal is and then closing it again because that’s a stupid fucking question, isn’t it? He knows what the deal is. The deal is the Emperor coming back from the grave  again  and more Sith magic no one knows anything about and that new softness in Scourge’s voice and that new steel in Kira’s eyes. The deal is Corellia burning again and Malgus and the Empire and slavers and Jedi Padawans and Jedi Councils and probably three dozen other things she hasn’t had time to catch him up on.

  He knows what the deal is. He just doesn’t know what to say about it. He doesn’t know how to get back to the way things used to be, to their easy understandings and wordless conversations. He doesn’t even know if she wants to be touched right now.

  But Rea--

  Stars shine on her, Rea’s never needed to know how a thing should be done before she just did it.

  “Do you think I made the right call?” She asks, like they haven’t been laying in tense silence for the last hour.

  You’re the Jedi. How should I know?  The words jump to his tongue, an old, familiar joke, but it doesn’t feel funny anymore. Nothing much feels funny about this day.

  “I’m not sure it matters what I think, Beautiful.”

It’s not like he’s insecure. If he isn’t the  best  doctor in the galaxy--and considering the life expectancy of a half-decent doctor these days, he’s pretty sure he is--Doctor Archiban Kimble is definitely top three. He’s damn good at what he does, the shooting and the scheming just as much as the healing, and he knows it. He works hard to make sure everyone else knows it too.

  He isn’t insecure. But he isn’t stupid, either. He can’t just  not notice  the big fucking gap between the galaxy’s most valuable doctor and the galaxy’s most valuable person, period. He can’t not notice that, as much as he carries life and death in his hands, entire empires rise and fall on Rea’s shoulders.

  The gap was always there before, but it’s so much bigger now. He doesn’t know how to get across.

  “It matters,” Rea says, and finally moves. She rolls onto her side, her cheek pillowed on folded hands as she stares at him with this intensity he doesn’t even recognize. “It matters to me.”

  And because he’s a helpless idiot who can’t do anything but follow her, even after all this time, he rolls onto his side too. “That’s kind of a big deal these days.”

  “It was always a big deal,” she says, but she can’t quite manage a smile. “I’ve been waiting all day to ask, you know.”

  Waiting is probably a strong word, but he likes to hear it anyway. He likes to hear that it matters to her what he thinks, even if her opinion is the one that counts. He likes to hear that it’s something she considers, when she’s out there shaping the galaxy. That  he’s  still something she considers.

  (She promised she still loved him. Promised she never stopped, that there was no one else and nothing else and she looked for him for a year and he believes her it’s just that--it’s just that everything’s so  different  now.)

  “I don’t know any better than you what the right call is, Gorgeous.”

  She moves her hand into the space between them, fingers curling like she wants to reach for him, but she doesn’t. He wants to reach out too, to touch her and tell her it’s okay. He wants to know what’s holding her back.

  He’s too afraid of the answer to ask.

  “What would you have done, then? In my shoes.”

  “Got some smaller shoes?”

  She smiles finally, a small thing but real, and the tight coil of something in his gut starts to relax. “Jackass. I’m having an existential crisis here, okay? I need your advice.”

  “No you don’t,” Doc says, finding himself smiling right back. “You don’t need me for shit, Gorgeous. I always said so, and the last six years prove it, don’t they? You can get by just fine without me.” He takes the hand that had reached for him in his, feels the flutter of her pulse under his thumb and draws it to his lips.

  He meant to give her space this time, to let her come to him on her own, but he’s no better at staying away now than he was the last time. Doc can’t help pushing, even if he can’t tell which direction he’s pushing her in.

  He kisses her wrist, her palm. He kisses the pads of her fingers, never looking away from her eyes, so wide and so blue in the dark of their room. “You’ve never needed me,” he says, smiling. “But I like that you  want  me.”

  Her hand curls around his and she’s moving again, wiggling her way across the gap between them, pressing closer and closer until their bodies are flush together and her toes are caressing the backs of his knees.

  “Of course I want you, Dumbass. I never  stopped  wanting you.” She takes a deep breath and her eyes fall shut as she brings their joined hands to her lips, dragging kisses across his knuckles. “I never stopped,” she whispers, her voice tight. “I’m sorry if it doesn’t seem like it. If I forgot how to show you--”

  Doc feels the heat of tears against his hand. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay, Gorgeous, you didn’t--”

  But he has stop himself. Because she  did . Because she’s Rea and he knows her, knows her better than anyone in the galaxy knows her, knows her better even than her brother, better than her new pet spy. He knows her instinct when she’s hurting is to close up and pile the armor high. He knows how much it scares her to lean on another person, to  want  something that could easily be ripped away.

  He knows these last six years have torn all those old wounds open and left her raw and aching.

  “I’m trying,” she whispers, more solemn than sad. “I hate that I have to. It used to be so easy. I  wanted  this to be so easy, just like old times, but…”

  “I get it,” Doc says, because he does. Because she’s not the only one fighting battles that were supposed to be already won.

  Rea squeezes his hand, drawing it against her chest as she opens her eyes to look at him again. There’s tears there, but strength too. Determination. “Things have changed so much. I keep being terrified you’re gonna look up and realize none of this is what you signed up for, that  I’m  not what you signed up for anymore. And I just--I’m so scared of losing you again that I can’t even enjoy being with you while you’re here.”

  Stars. He isn’t surprised, but hearing her say it is still-- Stars .

  “I’m not going anywhere,” he promises. “I’ll be right here with you for as long as you still want me.”

  He sees the little furrow in her brow, the little twitch that tells him she heard exactly what he said and exactly what he meant and she’s not about to forget it.

  “Besides, I couldn’t leave if I wanted to, Gorgeous. I’m an Alliance citizen now.” He nudges her with his knee, grinning. “Not saying I’m not flattered, but you really didn’t need to blow the Republic off just to keep me on Odessen.”

  Rea doesn’t smile. “So you think I made the wrong call? You think I should’ve taken the offer?”

  Doc sighs, his own smile fading quickly. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to balance on a razor’s edge in the minefield between the Republic and the Empire if I could help it, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s you Rea.”

  “Are you just saying that to make me feel better?”

  It hurts a little that she has to ask, but he can’t say he blames her. “I know how to make you feel better, Gorgeous, and it doesn’t usually involve words.” This time, she does smile. “I  mean  it. Don’t know what the Alliance is gonna do when I finally convince you to retire, but as long as they’ve got you they’ll be fine. There’s no one in the galaxy who can stop you when you’ve got your mind set.”

  “It’s a big gamble,” she says. “I know it is. The whole thing is riding on me and Force fucking knows I need more of that like a hole in the head. But--” She swallows, letting her eyes drop to their hinds, still wound together and pressed against her chest. “I promised these people I’d take care of them. They trusted me with their lives and I just wasn’t sure I could keep my word if we got tangled up in Republic bureaucracy again. You know what it’s like, how easy it is to slip things through the cracks.”

  He nods. He does know. Probably better than anyone except Rea herself. “But what about you, Gorgeous? You’re not making your job any easier here.”

  “When have I ever done anything the easy way?”

  “You do prefer things hard.”

  Doc laughs shamelessly at his own joke and it’s enough to make Rea laugh with him. She presses her lips to his and laughs right into his mouth, sloppy and easy and so very  her  it makes his heart stutter. Then she’s sliding her toes along the back of his leg, just as limber and just as eager as she used to be and suddenly his joke is not a joke at all because this-- this  is just as easy as it always was. Because their bodies always know just what to say and how to say it.

  “Let’s have sex,” she mumbles, already kissing her way down his throat, her hand already teasing him through his shorts, and he can only hope the sound he makes in answer sounds adequately like a  yes .

  Their voices echo against the exposed rock of what passes for a ceiling in the dank little cave Rea calls a bedroom, and if it isn’t quite like old times… Well at least they aren’t lying still.

[hydrospanners]

a very velaran life day

every 3 years, wookiees across the galaxy come together to mourn what they've lost, honor what they love, and celebrate the plans they have for the future. and maybe it's a bit weird to be so invested in a holiday mainly meant for wookiees, but no one ever said the velarans were normal. these are the thinly-veiled holiday vignettes about jedi knight nirea velaran's family and those who orbit them throughout the years. chapter 2 of 17. swtor genfic. character background/origins for my jedi knight nirea velaran who is not actually in this chapter but her dad and aunt are. 1039 words. ao3.

counting down. just as the seconds tick by before life day begins and nirea velaran gets her first turn lighting the tree, so too do the days before she will be sent away from her little family in their little home on imperial-occupied eriadu. she just doesn't know it yet.

10 BTC — Eriadu City, Eriadu

23:59:11.

23:59:12.

Nirea shivers with anticipation.

Her father’s hands settle on her shoulders and she can feel the warmth of his laughter against her cheek as he presses a kiss to her temple. “Just a few more seconds, Turhaya. Almost there.”

23:59:15.

Rhese squeals from their mother’s lap, a sound that almost sounds like “tree”, and claps his chubby little hands together.

23:59:16.

“Yes, sweetie,” Mama coos, wrapping her hands around his so they can clap together. “We’re going to light up the tree.”

23:59:19.

“Everyone smile!” Kieres points the holocam at them, gathered around their little tree in the darkness, no light except what peeks through the cracks between the heavy shutters on the windows. Rea smiles wide, tilting her head against their mother’s lap.

23:59:24.

23:59:25.

“Say ‘Life Day’!” Their father tells them. A bright light floods the room.

23:59:27.

“Got it!”

Their faces are illuminated by the blue haze of the projector as Kieres shows them the picture, three faces smiling at the holocam and Rhese staring at some point off to the side, one of his fists in his mouth.

Nirea looks back to the chrono.

23:59:36.

“Turn it off! Turn it off!” Her finger returns to the button on the tree’s base, hovering just above it, wavering with the excitement. It’s almost time!

23:59:39.

Kieres turns the holo off, bathing them in darkness again.

24:59:41.

“Not long now,” her father whispers. His hands squeeze her shoulders as Nirea rocks back and forth on her toes, the thrill of it all too much for her little body, filling her up and pouring over.

23:59:42.

23:59:43.

“It was you in my lap at the last Life Day, Nirea. Do you remember that?” Her mother’s voice is soft in the darkness, flowing through the heavy, waiting silence like water through the rocks.

Nirea rolls onto her toes again.

“Rhese wasn’t even born yet,” Kieres points out. “I got to light the tree!”

23:59:48.

Something in Nirea’s belly pulls, cold and tight, as her mother hums agreement. Something is wrong in her voice when she says, “And maybe next Life Day, Rhese will get to take a turn.”

23:59:50.

“Let’s enjoy this Life Day before we start thinking about the next one,” her father says, and there’s something wrong in his voice too. Something secret and heavy that doesn’t feel like Life Day at all. She can feel him smiling when he kisses her cheek but she knows, somehow, that there’s no happiness under his smile. That he’s lying to her. She feels something inside of her that’s dark and yawning, that twists her stomach into knots, and she knows it’s coming from him, from her father and her mother and the future and—

23:59:54.

Rea jabs the button for the lights.

Nothing happens.

23:59:55.

She presses the button again. Again and again and again.

“Nirea!” Her mother is laughing, but nothing is funny. “It isn’t time yet!”

23:59:59.

“It isn’t working!” Rea wails. Tears are pricking in the corners of her eyes.

Her father shushes her, his chest warm and solid against her back, his hand heavy on her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he tells her, and she thinks he isn’t talking about the tree.

00:00:00.

The chrono flashes zeroes, and Life Day begins in the dark.

Rea punches the button one more time, and her chest gets tight when nothing happens again. It feels like something heavy is pressing down on her throat, squeezing it closed, and it’s getting hard to breathe and she wants to be sick--

Then her father’s hand is wrapping around hers, sparking something inside her. “I’ve got you, Turhaya,” he says. “Trust me.”

The spark is warm and strong, and it fights back against that heavy feeling, against the thing turning her stomach into knots. It dances through her, coursing down her spine and her legs and her arms; it courses all the way to her fingers and her toes.

And then it surges out of her, leaping from the hand joined with her father’s to the base of the Life Day tree.

00:00:02.

Bulbs of every color flicker to life around the tree. They’re brighter than she’s ever seen them, almost buzzing with new power, filling the whole house with cheerful light.

Rhese gasps and claps his hand against the fist still in his mouth, gurgling as he tries to talk around it.

Kieres starts to sing.

00:00:05.

Nirea’s father pulls her hand away from the tree, his fingers stroking hers in all the places that still tingle with electricity. His heart is pounding against her back and without the spark, without its light and its warmth, she can feel that dark weight coming back, twisting her up and suffocating her.

The lights are on now. Why does she feel so afraid?

00:00:08.

Kieres is still singing, loud and full and happy.

She’s singing alone.

The fear weighs in Rea’s belly like a cold, heavy stone and when she turns around in her father’s embrace, when she looks into his face, she knows somehow that it belongs to him. To him and to her mother, watching her with their wide, frightened eyes.

Safety is secrecy, her father always says. Hold your spark inside you, Turhaya. I know it’s hard, but we could get hurt if anyone sees.

She made a mistake. She made a mistake and she doesn’t know what’s going to happen but she knows it’s bad and she knows it’s her fault. She let herself get so scared she couldn’t keep the spark in and now--Now--

The darkness inside her is building, like the spark but colder. Slicker, like oil. Rea shivers, trying with everything she has to push it back down. To think of something else so she won’t get in trouble again. So no one gets hurt.

Rhese starts to wail.

The chrono flashes 00:01:00 on the worst Life Day Nirea Velaran has ever had.

[hydrospanners]

a very velaran life day

every 3 years, wookiees across the galaxy come together to mourn what they've lost, honor what they love, and celebrate the plans they have for the future. and maybe it's a bit weird to be so invested in a holiday mainly meant for wookiees, but no one ever said the velarans were normal. these are the thinly-veiled holiday vignettes about jedi knight nirea velaran's family and those who orbit them throughout the years. chapter 1 of 17. swtor genfic. character background/origins for my jedi knight nirea velaran who is not actually in this chapter but her dad and aunt are. 2283 words. ao3.

25 BTC - Coronet City, Corellia

The twelfth time A Day to Celebrate starts to play, Ranna flings the transceiver against the wall. It flies through the holotree still clinging to life by the window, leaving the neon branches flickering, its motor whining as it struggles to regen the projection.

She hopes it fails, but even her misery is a disappointment today. The tree solidifies into a standard, jolly tree shape and the busted transceiver is just whole enough to keep playing that stupid fucking song.

A day to celebrate, she thinks, bitterness dripping from her thoughts. What the fuck have I got left to celebrate?

Her knee hurts so much she can’t even hobble to the kitchen for a beer to numb the pain. Not that it matters; she drank the last beer hours ago, and it’s not like there’s anyone around to run to the store for her, is there?

“Happy fucking Life Day,” she grumbles, glaring at the transceiver like that might be enough to finally do it in.

It isn’t. Joy to the Worm starts playing and it’s somehow even worse than A Day to Celebrate.

Pain pulses through her leg, her buzz finally wearing off enough that she can feel her legs again, and Ranna desperately wishes she’d given up and gone to bed hours ago. Her parents won’t be back from work until morning and Raad is--

Who the fuck knows where Raad is? She hasn’t heard from him since she washed out of the Academy. He’d been annoyingly optimistic about it--“It’s not washing out,” he’d tried to tell her. “It’s a medical discharge. That’s different.”--but then he’d vanished into thin air and she’d had to take a public transport back home, alone with her beat up go-bag and the enormous contraption meant to be healing her knee. Not exactly the cutting edge of medical technology, but it was the best they could spare for a useless, busted nugget. Anything for the fucking war.

Stars, she needs a beer.

No. Not a beer. She needs a whiskey. She needs six whiskeys. Six whiskeys and maybe a very limber young lady with a nice smile and nicer--

“Happy Life Day!”

Like she summoned him with her thoughts, Raad bursts through the front door. His face is flushed with cold and his are eyes sparkling with excitement, an almost-beard she’s never seen before sprouting across his jaw. He’s aged six years in the six months since she saw him.

Ranna wants to punch him square in his handsome fucking face.

She wants to throw her arms around him and never let him go.

“Where the fuck have you been?” She demands, reaching for the anger because that’s what she always does. Because tonight is not the night for personal fucking growth.

Raad just laughs. “I missed you too,” he says, grinning like everything is just the way it used to be. Like the galaxy’s still full of possibility and adventure. Like her life didn’t just end before it even got started. “You ready to see what I got you for Life Day?” His smile slips, just for a second, while his eyes search for the missing chrono, now one of the six different pieces of shattered transceiver scattered across the floor. “It is still Life Day isn’t it? I know I was cutting it close, but--”

“Oh, it’s Life Day alright.” Joy to the Worm finally ends, but it’s followed up with a static-y Bingle Bells which is even worse. “All fucking day.”

Undeterred by her mood as always--both his most charming and most annoying trait--Raad just beams at her. “Great. Then let’s go see your present!”

Ranna snorts, gesturing to the sixty pounds of metal caging her stupidass leg. “Not fucking likely.”

“You can still ride in a speeder. C’mon Ranna, it’ll be worth it, I swear!”

It’s a tired line by now and she’s never known it to be true, but Raad looks down at her with those big, brown eyes so full of earnestness and excitement and it doesn’t matter how sideways his promises always go. She’s gonna go right along with anything he asks cause she’s a damned fool who could never say no to that pleading look. Cute fucking asshole.

She scowls up at him half-heartedly. “You want me to go, you’re gonna have to carry my ass.”

He’s supposed to laugh--a year ago he would have--but things have changed while she’s been at the Academy. Her little string bean is tall now, half a head taller than her, and that lanky frame of his has filled out. He reaches down, all earnest excitement, and lifts her out of the chair like she weighs nothing at all. Of course, he bangs her caged leg on the door twice trying to maneuver her out of it, but she’s so proud he can carry her now she doesn’t do more than hiss at him when he does it.

And, of course, grab her blaster from the holster hanging by the door. She learned a long time ago not to go anywhere with Raad without proper precautions.

The speeder is not one she remembers, but it looks just like every other ride he’s ever had. The chassis are a thousand years old and beat all to hell, patched in a dozen places with pieces from a dozen different machines, looking like the only thing holding it together is spit and luck. And if it’s anything like his other rides, under all that rust and despair is a pristine fucking engine that looks and flies like it was lifted directly from the speeder of the most corrupt Senator on Coruscant.

“Where’d you get this hunk of junk?”

Raad shrugs, trying to ease her into the passenger seat without much success on the easing part. “She’s a loaner. My friend Telo’s.”

“You? Without a speeder? Never thought I’d see the day.”

Once Ranna’s in, trying very hard to hide how much her leg hurts after he banged it against everything coming and going, Raad swings his legs over the side of the speeder and drops into the pilot’s seat. “Some things are more important than speeders,” he says, smiling that smile he always wears when he’s trying to hide something. He’s the worst fucking liar in the galaxy.

“Not to you,” Ranna says.

“Might be I’ve learned a thing or two since you left.”

Ranna snorts. “We’ll see about that.”

Seeing as how the speeder isn’t actually Raad’s, the shabby exterior isn’t actually disguising tens of thousands of credits’ worth of exquisite machinery under the hood. It’s a rough, stuttering ride to the spaceport. Ranna tries her best not to swear every time her leg gets knocked around by the damn thing, but she knows she isn’t succeeding.

Raad takes it all in stride. He’s in one of those moods where he’s so happy nothing can touch him and it’d be annoying if it wasn’t so damned contagious.

Happy fucking bastard.

Once the speeder is parked and Raad comes round to haul her useless ass out, Ranna throws up a hand, looking at him suspiciously. “I’m not gonna get arrested for this, am I?”

The trouble is, she can’t figure what he could possibly have gotten her that would have to stay in the spaceport. He can’t afford anything big and he’s gotta know she’d have nowhere to store it even he could. Which basically just leaves smuggled shit. Either that or he finally convinced Kalinski to let her have a free swing. She’s been waiting half her life to nail that smug little motherfucker right in his prissy motherfucking nose and she doesn’t want to get her hopes up or anything, but punching Kalinski would really turn her Life Day around.

All Raad says is, “I guess that depends on how you use it. Let’s go.”

Not exactly comforting. And probably not a free swing at Kalinski either. But it’s not like she’s got a military career left to ruin so what’s another fucking arrest?

She sacrifices her dignity on the pyre of his excitement and lets Raad wrap an arm around her waist, half-dragging her through the port. It’s crowded just the same as it always is. Doesn’t matter if it’s Life Day or Election Day or Invasion Day; someone always needs to get somewhere and there’s always credits to be made taking them, so the spaceport is always crowded. Over the noise and bustle, she thinks she can hear the faint sound of fucking Bingle Bells playing on the loudspeaker.

Thankfully, it isn’t far before Raad’s steps start to slow. “Okay,” he says, “time to close your eyes, Ran. We’re almost there.”

“Close my eyes?” She snorts. “I’m already crippled. You want to blind me too?”

He rolls his eyes. “Just do it, okay? I swear it’s not much farther.”

Making a show of her reluctance, Ranna lets her eyes fall shut. It’s disorienting as hell, but Raad is taking so much of her weight he’s practically carrying her over the last few steps to what she guesses is one of the hangar bays. She’s tempted to have a look, just to see if she’s right, but Raad wants to surprise her and she can’t let him down.

“No peeking!” He warns.

“I think you’re overestimating my curiosity,” she teases, and he laughs right in her ear.

They shuffle to a stop and she can feel the way his hands tighten on her waist, the way he’s almost trembling with anticipation. She can hear the faint countdown he’s doing under his breath as he blows out a long, steadying exhale.

“Okay,” he finally says. “Open your eyes.”

She does.

Her good knee trembles beneath her, almost collapsing under the weight of what she sees.

Ranna can’t see his face, can’t look anywhere but straight ahead, at the impossible thing she can’t be seeing, but she doesn’t have to look at him to know he’s beaming like a thousand suns.

“She’s The Golden Gizka,” Raad says. “And she’s all yours, Ran. Right and legal and everything.”

For the first time in months, Ranna forgets her pain. The weight of everything lifts from her chest, and when she sucks in a deep breath of air, it doesn’t even matter that the air down here is stale and stinks of oil and unwashed bodies. It’s the best gulp of air she’s ever had, because it’s her first breath as a motherfucking captain.

“Well fuck me sideways,” she says.

Raad laughs.

“Karking shit, Raad. H--” She starts to ask how he’d done this impossible thing, but then she remembers the borrowed speeder, the way he vanished right after she washed out.

“Now before you go being impressed my noble generosity,” Raad says, “you should know I’m changing the engine codes if you don’t make me your first mate.”

She laughs, trying to ignore the way tears are stinging at the corners of her eyes. “Who the fuck else would I pick?”

They don’t talk about it, but they both know all her bridges here got burned before she left. And maybe that’s why she’s staring down a glorious hunk of junk with her name on the title; maybe Raad figured out why she burned those bridges. Why she left Corellia in the first place. Maybe he feels like he owes her.

She wants to ask, but she doesn’t. Maybe one day she’ll be brave enough to wonder why.

“You keep stroking my ego like that,” Raad says, “my head’ll be too big to fit up the ramp.”

“Shame.”

He laughs, and then he’s dragging her forward, to the lowered boarding ramp of the ship that is, unbelievably, hers. “I know she’s not much to look at--”

“--but she’s got it where it counts?” Ranna finishes for him.

He hesitates. “Uh, no. Not really. She’s pretty much junk on the inside too. But I know this mechanic...”

He gives her a sheepish look, like she’s going to be upset with him for giving her a garbage ship. Like the condition of the thing matters at all when he just gave her a motherfucking starship.

“Raadris Velaran, I know you aren’t out there hiring my crew before I’ve even boarded my ship.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Captain.” He grins one of those shit-eating grins she loves best. “But as your first mate, I’ve got some suggestions.”

“If it’s Daeleth you’re about to pitch, don’t waste your breath.”

Raad’s face falls. “Really?”

“He’s the best starsdamned mechanic on Corellia, Raad, and that’s saying something. Save the sales pitch for him. Stars know we’ve got fuck all to offer.”

“Oh you don’t need to worry about that. I got a plan.”

Raad having a plan was the very definition of something she needed to worry about, but worry could wait until tomorrow. Today, for the eleven glorious minutes left in the best Life Day she could ever remember having, Ranna Velaran wasn’t going to worry about a damn thing.

“Can she get off the ground at least?” She asks.

Raad waggles his brows at her. “Only one way to find out, isn’t there?”

Ranna’s no expert, but she knows enough to know that The Gizka is in rough shape. Maybe rough enough shape that just cranking the sublight could be the end of her, and possibly the end of everyone in a half-mile radius.

But what’s the point of living without taking a risk every now and again?

Head held high and walking under her own power for the first time in days, Captain Ranna Velaran hobbles slowly up the boarding ramp of her very own starship.

“Happy fucking Life Day indeed.”

[hydrospanners]

every doubt we had

like a scene from a nightmare he'd never admit to having, darth marr's ship goes down and takes his sister with it. rhese velaran has never had to live in a galaxy without nirea, and he's not sure he knows how. he leans on an unlikely shoulder while he figures it out. SWTOR genfic. M!Jedi Knight & Doc friendship (fraternity?) fic. Background Established F!Jedi Knight x Doc. Grief & angst. 3300 words. AO3.

The chrono reads 0300 hours. 0400 hundred until their arrival on Coruscant. 17 minutes since he checked last.

 Rhese turns his eyes back to the ceiling. Landing prep starts at 0600. He could still get three full hours of rest if he could just get to sleep.

 He draws in a slow, deep breath, willing his racing heart to slow. There is no emotion, he reminds himself. There is peace. No emotion. Peace. No emotion. Peace.

  Peace, peace, peace.

 Peace is a damned lie. There’s only war, constant and consuming. War, where the players may change but the game never does.

 He’s fucking tired of war. Tired of running and killing and being too little, too late. Tired of leaving people behind.

 Marr’s flagship explodes in his mind’s eye. Again and again, a bloom of sparks and flame stretching up and out until it’s nothing, fizzled out. Until the space where she was is nothing but dust and cannonfire and distant winking stars.

 Blood rushes in his ears, the pounding of his heart the only sound in the heavy quiet of simulated night.

Dammit. Rhese taps the comm by his bed, wincing away from the bright blue-white gleam of the indicator light. Teeseven answers immediately, chirping a greeting that’s no less cheerful for having possibly lost his master. His friend.

 “Any communications?” Rhese asks, and the comm terminal flashes, hundreds of messages flooding the screen. From the Council. From the Senate. From SIS. Saresh. “Anything from--” Even if she had survived, she would have had no way to send word. Not yet. “Any new information on Nirea?”

 “Jedi = still missing,” the droid reports.

 It’s what he expected, but knowing the knife is coming never made the cutting hurt any less. He swallows his disappointment. “Keep an audio sensor to the ground. Let me know the second you hear anything.”

 “T7 = Looking. // Jedi = Still alive.”

 “I know, Teeseven.” He’s reasonably sure, anyway. “Thank you.”

 The indicator light blinks out, leaving Rhese alone with his thoughts.

 He remembers a time when he would have killed for this kind of quiet. A chance at sober reflection. Isolation. When he believed peace could be achieved from structure. When a steady heart and an ordered mind were still his best chance at salvation. Or absolution. He’s still not sure what it was he spent all those years looking for, but he’s pretty damned certain it’s gone now.

 Ringing fills his ears again. Someone’s talking shit about you, Ranna used to say. An old Corellian superstition, or maybe a spacer’s. She had so many superstitions it was hard to tell which was which.  Either way, he didn’t inherit Ranna’s penchant for mysticism and the only person who’s ever cared enough to talk about him anyway is--Well, the point is that it’s just a symptom of his hearing giving out. He’s been meaning to have Doc look at it for a while now, but there never seemed to be any time.

 Rhese glances at the chrono. 0321 hours. 21 minutes since he checked last.

 He gets up and dresses quickly, trying not to think of all the shit Rea would give him for picking the robes. The ship is dark and silent, the passageways empty this deep into the night. Not that anyone is actually asleep. Rhese can sense the crew in their quarters as he passes them, all awake despite the hour, all pretending not to be.

He senses Kira’s restlessness. It’s familiar to him as his own anxiety, and he can almost see the defensive hunch in her shoulders as she paces back and forth in the too-small space of her bunk. He can see the little wrinkle between her brows as she kneels, trying her damndest to meditate. He can see the tremble in her hands as she opens up her saber, taking it apart and putting it back together as many times as she has to for the adrenaline to fade.

 Rea would have gone to her. Would have laid upside down on her bed while Kira ranted, absorbing all her rage and being the soft place to land once it was spent.

 Rhese keeps walking.

 He senses Rusk’s tension. How tightly he’s coiled, primed and ready to strike at the first actionable target. He pictures Rusk standing at his worktable, the lines in his forehead cutting deep as he methodically disassembles his cannon. He pictures his hands, rough but nimble as he cleans every part, as he sets the chrono to time his reassembly. He pictures the way he keeps glancing at the comm, twitching at every noise like it might be the news he’s waiting for.

 Rea would have offered to spar. She would have worked him until his muscles were loose and warm and tender, and then she would have worked his mind, cracking open some shitty beers to swap stories about the stupid shit they did when they were young and green. He would have laughed like only Rea could make him laugh. He would have slept a little easier.

 Rhese keeps walking.

 He senses Scourge’s fury. It’s a raging wildfire, consuming everything it touches and Rhese can almost hear the groan of metal bending beneath Scourge’s fists as he burns, feeding everything around him to the furnace of his anger. He is hungry to destroy, to quench the flames in his heart with carnage and violence. He wants a fight.

 Rea would have given it to him. She would have poked and prodded until he lashed out, swinging his lightsaber at full limb-severing power, nothing held back. She would have let him. She would have matched him blow for blow until his fury burned itself out and when it was done, she would smile and complain at the scorchmarks in her deck.

 Rhese keeps walking.

 He senses Doc. Alert and focused, thrown completely into some project or the other. There’s none of the usual thrill he feels from Doc when he’s working, none of the anticipation or pride. The purpose of his work doesn’t matter right now as long as the work is consuming him, leaving no room for other thoughts. For worries.

 He feels clear and steady in a way the others don’t right now, and Rhese sees, just for a moment, what it is that Rea must see in him. What it is that draws her to him.

 Rhese enters the medbay without knocking, his left ear ringing.

 “You should be asleep,” Doc says, not looking up from the viscous green liquid he’s measuring. Beneath the goggles Rhese can see his eyes are puffy and shot through with red. “Got a long day ahead of you.”

 “And you don’t?” Rhese raises a brow, folding his hands in front of him. He tries not to think what jokes Rea would make about his posture. Something about the stick up his ass.

 Doc just snorts. “I’m not a Jedi. Nobody cares what I think. Here.” He puts the green liquid down and pulls a small metal tube from his pocket, tossing it to Rhese. “Take one of those. It’s a low dose; should only put you down for an hour or two.”

 “You carry sleeping pills in your pocket?”

 “You’ve met my wife, right? About this high--” Doc raises his hand a foot over his own head “--brown hair, blue eyes, great ass. Only sleeps if you make her.”

 Rhese smiles, feeling none of the usual discomfort and inadequacy he feels when he has these chats with Doc. For once he doesn’t mind being reminded what a giant Rea is in everyone’s mind, how much taller she seems despite being shorter than him by four inches. For once he isn’t embarrassed and annoyed by the reminder of his sister’s very active sex life. For once, he just feels… fond. “I may have seen her around,” he says.

 “Well if you see her again, you tell her to come home. Her family’s worried.”

 Do you hear that Rea? Your family is worried. Rhese wonders if she can feel their concern. He wonders if she can feel anything at all. He can’t feel her. She’s always been good at hiding, and there were years on Tython when he couldn’t separate the feel of her from the rest of the Force, but he could still feel that she was out there somewhere, could still feel their connection. This is the first time she’s ever just been gone, a hole in the Force where the tingle of her warm, fervent energy is supposed to be.

 He reaches for her on instinct, and the void he finds in her place leaves him cold. For the first time in his life, he feels really alone. Careful what you wish for, Liss always warned him. You might just get it.

 “You okay, kid?” Doc, with his bloodshot eyes and exhausted pallor, is watching him carefully, his brow furrowed in concern. Rhese can only think how he’s going to get wrinkles, scrunching his face up like that. How Rea’s going to kill him for aging her husband prematurely. ‘I only married him for his looks,’ she’ll say. ‘Now I’ll have to trade him in for a younger model.’

 Rhese laughs a short, humorless laugh. Is he okay? “I’m going deaf,” he says. “In my left ear.”

 Doc sighs. “Sit down.”

 Rhese does as he’s told, climbing onto the exam chair and pushing his shoulders back, trying to keep his chin up. Trying to hold it together because someone has to now that Rea’s gone.

 But there’s no point. That pinch in Doc’s brow says he isn’t fooled, that he knows too many of Rhese’s secrets, sees too much through Rea’s eyes. It says there will be no fooling him and Rhese can’t find the energy to try. He tips his head back against the chair and lets his shoulders sag, only a little embarrassed by his ragged sigh of relief.

 “Ringing?” Doc asks, wheeling over one of his scanners. He pulls a headset with an alarming number of wires from the drawer.

 Rhese nods. “Started a couple months ago, but things have been--” He thinks back to Ziost, to Tython, to Manaan. To all the blaster fire and running and death. “Well, you know how things have been.”

 “No kidding. I’m surprised your ears lasted this long, the way you Jedi go on.”

 “You mean the way Rea goes on.” She’s had cochlear implants almost as long as she’s been a Jedi. Went in for her first operation the day the treaty was signed, not even a year after Marefka scooped them up on Corellia. He’d been on Tython at the time, but he’d read the reports from her surgeries. It had taken six. “Most Jedi don’t spend so much time getting blown up.”

 He sees the explosion again. Marr’s flagship consumed by inferno, sparks and flame spitting from the cracks in the hull, a ring of fire expanding slowly around the whole fizzling mass. The only sound the static of the comm crackling over the speakers, the echo of her last words ringing in his ears. His own voice, shouting Rea’s name.

 Rhese flinches.

 Doc’s hand settles on his shoulder. “She’s gonna be fine,” he says, and there’s something in his eyes, in the warmth and certainty of his voice, that makes Rhese turn away. It feels too familiar. Too much like--Rhese can’t feel her in the Force, but he can feel her in the tender way Doc is looking at him, in the way Doc is caring for him, gently and thoughtfully, like family.

 Stars. They are family now, aren’t they?

 Doc’s hands are steady as he lowers the headset onto Rhese’s forehead. The nodes are cold but Doc’s fingers are warm as he massages them into place along Rhese’s forehead and around the delicate insides of his ears. And if he notices the way Rhese shivers, Doc is merciful enough not to mention it. “I know you’re worried, Junior, but this is Rea we’re talking about. She’s survived way worse.”

 If anyone knows what Nirea Velaran can survive, it’s Doc.

 “But it doesn’t take worse,” he argues. “One stray blaster bolt. One piece of shrapnel. One mistake.” Force knows she makes mistakes, no matter what she’d have people believe. “She’s not indestructible.”

 Doc says nothing. A stream of rhythmic beeps fills Rhese’s ears.

 He knows she’s alive. This nothing--the gap in his consciousness where she’s supposed to be--it’s not what death feels like. Rhese has felt death before. He’s felt it in strangers and in allies and in friends. He’s felt it in family. In Ranna. In Qarric and Daeleth. He would have sensed his sister’s death. He would have felt a piece of himself die with her.

 Hell, if she was really dead she’d probably be here, complaining about it. She’d be haunting him the way Master Orgus Din haunted her, refusing the peace of death just so she could pester him.

 Rea has to be alive. But for how long? And where?

 Doc lifts the headset, gently peeling back the little nodes as he goes. “How do you feel about implants?”

 Rhese sighs. “Resigned.”

 “I’ve got a friend on Coruscant. She might be persuaded to do it for free.”

 “Persuaded?” Rhese raises a brow, very nearly smiling. “Just what kind of a friend is this, Doc?”

 “Don’t get your panties in a twist, that was a long time ago. I’ve got no interest in persuading anyone but your sister these days.” He pauses, considering. “Well, no interest in persuading anyone without her, anyway.”

 “Ugh.”

 Doc laughs, and it’s an effort to not laugh with him.

 He feels better. No one is more surprised by it than Rhese--if you’d told him back on Balmorra that Archiban Kimble would ever make him feel anything other than annoyance and disgust, he’d have laughed you into the next sector--but here he is, sitting in the medbay and feeling better for having Doc there with him.

 Here he is, sitting in the medbay because it’s where he wanted to be. Because it’s where his feet carried him when he was feeling lost and alone and there was no Rea to collapse into.

 He’ll have to tell her when he sees her again. That she chose well. That he loves this little family she’s built. That he’s grateful and he’s happy and if she ever leaves him again he’s going to lose his starsdamned mind because he can’t keep doing this--

 “Hey.”

 Rhese blinks and finds Doc’s eyes boring into his. Dark and bloodshot and so, so serious. Worried. Scared. For him.

 “Breathe, kid.”

 Rhese realizes he hasn’t been. He gasps, once, twice, until his lungs remember how they’re supposed to work. He tries to recite the Code, but the words keep getting jumbled in his head. It’s like everything he’s been trying not to think and not to feel is breaking free and rushing over him all at once. “I feel like I’m drowning,” he confesses, voice tight like it’s trying to hold onto the words, trying to keep that truth hidden. “I don’t know what to do.”

 “Must run in the family,” Doc says, surprising a small, shaky laugh out of him. “Now c’mere.” He opens his arms and Rhese only hesitates for a second before sitting up and leaning into him, his forehead pressed to Doc’s chest, hot tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. They start to fall when Doc’s arms wrap around his shoulders.

 At least it isn’t blood. Doc’s always complaining about how many shirts he loses to bloodstains; tears should be easier to clean. Rhese doesn’t know why he’s thinking so much about Doc’s shirts, but he can’t seem to make himself stop. And he can’t stop thinking how that’s a stupid thing to be thinking about at a time like this. Can’t stop thinking how he’s blowing this out of proportion. Can’t stop thinking he’s not taking it seriously enough.

 He can’t stop thinking. Thinking, thinking, thinking.

 His breaths are coming too fast and too shallow, desperate, ragged things just barely escaping the tightness of his throat, and his skin feels so hot. Too hot. He wants to climb out of it. He wants to climb out of his whole body and just--He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he wants but he knows everything is too much.

 Doc pulls him in tighter, blunt nails scraping gently at the nape of his neck, and it’s so much like--His mind swims with memory, of nights spent curled into Rea’s lap, of her body wrapped around his like a shield, of her fingers in his hair, her kisses on his forehead, her voice in his ear, whispering how she’ll protect him, how she’ll always be there no matter what, how it’s the two of them against the galaxy.

 Where the fuck is she now?

 “Me too, kid. Me too.”

 “I don’t want to lose another family.” Rhese whispers the words into Doc’s chest, his eyes squeezed tight against the brutal truth of them. A brutal truth he’s been hiding from for years now. Years of keeping people at arm’s length, of reciting Codes and turning his back and telling himself he’s above it all. Years of trying to keep himself from connecting with anyone because he was so fucking scared of having another connection break.

 You can’t lose what you never had, he reminds himself, thinking of the rest all locked away in their cages, drifting to their own orbits in the absence of Rea’s gravity to draw them together. They were Rea’s family. They’re always just Rea’s. Never yours.

 But then Doc is kissing the top of his head, just like Rea would, and holding him just like Rea would and he can’t be doing it for her cause she isn’t here to see it. He can’t be doing it for any reason but--

 “You aren’t losing anything,” he says, with so much conviction that Rhese almost believes him. “I don’t know where Rea is or what she’s doing, but I know her. I know she loves you more than anyone in this galaxy, and I know she won’t let anything keep you apart for long. She’s coming back, kid, and we’re all gonna be here when she does.”

 Rhese thinks of Tython. Of ten years’ worth of secondhand reports and unanswered messages. Ten years of lonely nights and insecurities. Ten years of waiting.

 “It could be awhile,” he says.

 “We’ll wait.”

 “I waited for ten years last time.”

 “We’ll wait.”

 Rhese lets his eyes fall shut, tilting his face up to the ceiling as breathes a long, shuddering breath. “Okay,” he says, his throat a little looser, his chest a little lighter. “Okay.”

 He sits like that for a long time, listening to the slowing rhythm of his heart and the quiet gurgle of Doc’s equipment, bubbling away on some experiment he doesn’t want to know the particulars of. Listening to the distant ringing in his left ear. He flexes his hands against the exam chair, feeling the cool, smooth fabric shift beneath his fingers, and with each slow breath he feels the sharp sting of chemical cleaner burning his nose.

 Doc is still standing there when Rhese opens his eyes, the little tube of sleeping pills back in his hand. “You’ve got a long day ahead of you,” he says again.

 This time, Rhese takes the pills.

 He curls onto his side on the exam chair, and when Doc lays his lab coat over his shoulders, Rhese pulls it up to his chin and breathes deep of the cologne that always seems to rub off, just a little, onto Rea’s clothes. It makes him feel warm and the drugs make him feel hazy and Doc, steady, certain Doc, shuffling around the medbay behind him and never leaving him alone--Doc makes him feel safe.

 By 0430, Rhese is finally asleep.

[hydrospanners]

the lies we tell ourselves

they say you never really appreciate the things you have until you lose them. that's a mistake nirea velaran doesn't intend to make twice, but old habits are hard to break. SWTOR F!Jedi Knight x Doc Post-Ossus Reunion Fic. Angst. 2nd Person POV. 800 words. AO3.

You say things will be different. In the smallest hours of the night, when the darkness weighs on you like a lead weight and the empty pillow beside you feels cold as ice, you promise yourself. You promise him. You promise the universe. You promise up and down and left and right and in and out and every other direction you know. You promise in directions that haven’t been discovered yet. You promise with everything you are and everything you were and everything you’ll ever be.

  If I get another chance, things will be different.

  It becomes a prayer. A better Code than any the Jedi ever gave you. Every time you reach for his hand or start to nudge him with your elbow. Every time you search out his eyes, knowing he’s thinking of the same joke you are. Every time you wake up expecting to feel his warmth between your arms. Every time you make a cup of caf for a man who isn’t there to drink it.

  If I get another chance, you swear, things will be different.

  You get your chance. You drop into his life for the second time just like you did the first, riding the waves of disaster, the only blade between him and death. You don’t know if it’s luck or fate that brings him back to you, and for once you don’t care. How it happened doesn’t matter with his hands on your body and his tongue in your mouth. With your tears on his cheeks and your fingers in his hair.

  Things are going to be different , you tell him. You mean it. You’ve given enough of yourself to the war; this time you’re giving yourself to him. To all those vacations he always talked about, to spa days and cheesy theme parks and romantic cruises and spending every night for the rest of your lives tangled up in him. You’re giving yourself to loving him the way he ought to have been loved from the start.

  Things are different this time.

  Until they aren’t.

  Until the call comes through that no one else can answer. Until innocent lives are on the line again and this time it has to be you.

  He tells you to go. He tells you he never wanted you to give up your life. He tells you he loves this about you too, how much of yourself was never yours to give. He tells you this is what he wants and what he chose.

  You don’t really believe him. You know, deep in your bones, there’s a seed of resentment in his heart and every time you leave, every time you can’t give him what he deserves, what he waited so many years for, the roots of it dig a little deeper. You know it’s only a matter of time before they strangle his love. Before you lose your second chance at this too.

  You know it will happen--everyone leaves, no exceptions--but you swear to yourself you won’t let it happen yet . You swear he still comes first, you swear you’ll spend your time making memories to keep you warm when you finally lose him. You swear this job is a one time thing.

  It isn’t.

  Time flows over you like water over stone and smoothes the edges left jagged by those years, by carbonite and heartache and loss. The pain of it dulls, the memories of those nights alone fade, and your prayer doesn’t feel quite as urgent as it used to.

  You’re still making more time for him, you reason. You have a job to do and you do it but not at the expense of him. Not at the expense of your time together. You tell yourself that this is different than before.

  You’ve always been an excellent liar.

  Time flows and flows and flows. Your wounds close up into scars and you forget what all that hurting felt like. He calls it healing, but you can’t hold on to the joy of him, the relief of having his life wrapped up again in yours, without holding on to the way you ached and burned without him. It’s the pain of loss that reminds you to cling to him with everything you have, to treasure him and cherish him the way he deserves, the way you never did before. It’s the pain that reminds you to make the most of the time you have. Without it… without it you forget.

  Things were supposed to be different this time, but you still find yourself waking up to a cold, empty pillow half a galaxy away from him. It’s been weeks since you touched him, days since you heard his voice. He sent a message yesterday but you haven’t had time to answer. There’s a war on, after all. People are counting on you. What can be more important?

  If I get another chance, you swore, things will be different.

  You’ve always been an excellent liar.

[hydrospanners]

a dimming star

New Jedi recruit Nirea Velaran grapples with her losses on the way to a new life and an old war. SWTOR. Genfic. Jedi Knight Backstory. Grief & Angst. 550 words. AO3.

turhaya: old corellian for 'bright star'

Rea braids her hair.

  Over, under, through. Her fingers are clumsy with inexperience. Over, under, through. Rhese is supposed to do this for her. Rhese or Liss or Ranna. Sometimes Deerin.

  Deerin.

 His blood is dried in the tangles of her hair. She can feel it, tacky and stiff beneath her fingers. She still thinks she sees it sometimes, crusted in the beds of her nails and the creases of her knuckles.

  Over, under, through. Wisps of hair slip from the curve of every loop she makes. They’re all irregular, too fat or too thin or too loose or too tight. Over, under, through. A sloppy braid isn’t the kind of thing she would normally care about, but what else does she have now?

 Rea stares at the clean, blank walls of her new prison. At the neatly pressed robes lying folded and untouched on the desk. At the sleek, unadorned hilt of the lightsaber lying next to them.

 This is her life now. Over, under, through. Empty and clean. Over, under, through. Straight lines and silence. Over, under, through.

 The quiet bothers her the most. The stillness. The hyperdrive she can’t hear humming and the vibrations she can’t feel in the plating beneath her feet. The yawning, hollow void where warm voices and laughter ought to be.

  Deerin . Rea sees his face so clearly in her memory, swollen and red, battered almost beyond recognition. Her hand tingles with memory of his bones breaking beneath it; her ears ring with the dull crunching sound. Over, under, through.

 Why did he do it? When had his love turned to hate? Why hadn’t she noticed? Had he just hated them all along? Was none of it ever real?

  Over, under, through.

 She tries to feel sorry for what she did, but she can’t. Over, under, through. She doesn’t feel angry anymore either. Over, under, through. She doesn’t feel anything at all.

 A perfect Jedi already.

 She hopes it’s everything Rhese dreamed it would be. She hopes he’s sleeping peacefully in a little cot with scratchy sheets at some enclave far away from anywhere that matters. She hopes he’s healing and learning and reading histories and meditating in waterfalls. She hopes he’s safe. She hopes he’s happy.

 Marefka will only say that he isn’t suited for the front lines. That he isn’t like her.

 Rea has never been more grateful for that.

 She twists the final knot in the braid—over, under, through—pinching the frayed ends between her fingers. She looks at herself in the small mirror. At the fading bruises on her face and wrists, at the places where she can still feel how the blood had gathered at her temple, at the corners of her mouth. At the sharp edge of her father’s cheekbones and the hard line of his jaw. At the cool blue of her mother’s eyes. At the braid of long, dark hair swept over her shoulder just like Ranna’s.

 Like Ranna’s used to be.

 It’s funny how nothing can feel like so much something. How loud the silence can be in the space where a voice is supposed to go. Take care of your brother, Turhaya. You’re all he’s got.

 Rea tugs the loops of the braids loose and starts again.

  Over, under, through.