“ - but have you ever considered, I don’t know, not sucking all the time? Just a thought.”
It takes the combined grips of Nuisance and Hound to keep the wriggling, snarling body beneath Fox from throwing him off its back. With three years’ practice of having to fix his own rickety desk chair over and over again, the movement merely ruffles the proverbial fringe on his helmet.
“And I don’t mean that as an insult, necessarily. Well, I do a little bit. But also I have some amount of empathy for the no doubt immense amounts of trauma that had to go into the creation of something so dysfunctional as you, on a very personal level, so have you considered going to the root of that in a way that’s like… useful? Instead of wasting it all on kriffing Kenobi, I mean. Look at the guy. All he does all day is drink tea and commit warcrimes. I bet he knits for fun. Bit of an embarrassing nemesis, don’t you think?”
“I”, says Kenobi, then pauses. The space between his eyebrows is creased with uncertainty, and he looks deeply torn between continuing rocking the shaking Duchess of Mandalore against his chest from his corner of the throne room and re-activating his lightsaber to continue losing his fight against the Darksider Fox is currently sitting on. “I feel like I should object to some part of that, but I’m not entirely clear on what. Or how this happened, again. Isn’t Mandalore a few star systems from your purview, Commander?”
“Probably the warcrimes”, mutters Nuisance underneath his strained breath.
“About as far from my supposed assignment as yours, General”, says Fox a little louder.
Kenobi twitches. Fox cannot claim to know which of them does it. Both, maybe. Probably.
“I will - taste - your - flesh!”, heaves out Darth Maul, snarling and hissing.
“Oooh, kinky!”, calls Grids, from the corner where she’s got her stun-setting aimed at the other Zabrak, currently passed out cold. Fox sighs deeply. He knew he shouldn’t have taken those three - any combination of Grids, Hound and Nuisance in a room together usually spelled chaos.
Unfortunately, it also spelled competence. The Basic alphabet can be funny that way.
The point being: as of some months into the war, one of Fox’s assigned tasks is the surveillance of all GAR-wide communication. All command-class staff theoretically got that memo, but no one seems to have read the fine print where that includes both professional and personal communication, as well as any and all comm devices registered or suspected to be registered to that person. Especially not one Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala.
The point further being, if that sounds both immensely impractical and sort of terrifying in a democratic supposedly non-surveillance state, you’d be bang on the credits, and to Fox’ eternal chagrin the singular person in this whole useless army who’s spent the second of thinking necessary for that conclusion.
The final point being, when one frantic General’s mad dash across the Galaxy to rescue his teenage sweetheart from the spectre of his supposedly dead nemesis crosses his desk on its way to the Chancellor’s inbox, it doesn’t take much time for him to block any and all trace of it across the digital space of the GAR commboard and take matters into his own hands.
“ - which is why I told Thorn to suck it up and be in charge for a few days, and also why you’re still alive, your Highness, very welcome, was no trouble at all”, he concludes, drily. The Duchess stares the wide-eyed look of someone attempting to reconcile clones with ‘sentience’ or perhaps ‘personality’ in her head, but won’t say it outright.
Or the look of someone who’s just been violently overthrown and nearly murdered, perhaps, Fox allows.
“Um -“, Kenobi hedges, blinking rapidly.
“And the reason you’re still alive, probably. You’re welcome for that too, by the way”, Grids calls from the back of the throne room, cheekily.
“Alright”, says Kenobi, loudly. There’s color back in his deathly-pale cheeks, Fox notes, even if that color is a lot of red. It doesn’t fade very gracefully into his beard. “Opinions on whether or not I had everything under control notwithstanding -“
“You really didn’t”, Hound supplies helpfully.
“ - opinions notwithstanding, I am admittedly still lost on why you’re now sitting on Darth Maul and attempting to, to - jeer at him, Marshall Commander!”
“We’re not jeering, we’re trying to create a safe space and lay the groundwork for more open communication”, Fox says, primly.
Maul screams into the ground, attempting for the umpteenth time to rear up and visit great violence upon Fox, which admittedly has him rattling in his crosslegged seat atop his back.
Kenobi raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow. “Safe space?”
“He’s restrained and not stabbing anyone, I personally feel much safer than before”, Grids muses. “Watch the teeth though, Hound. Little biter.”
Indeed. Fox’s right greave will have to be replaced posthaste.
“And anyways, the point isn’t to jeer at him, it’s to make clear that he’s focusing his energy in the wrong places and could be doing much better things with his admittedly not-great life”, Fox adds, shifting to cast a pointed look down at Maul. The Sith is panting open-mouthed into the durasteel floor, sharp teeth gnashing wildly as his piercing yellow eyes shine with barely restrained rage. “I’m just saying - aim higher. You aren’t seeing the forest for the Kenobis, Maul. Can I call you Maul?”
“I will feed you your own entrails”, yowls Maul.
“See, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Right now, I’m an easy target to focus all that built-up rage on, but is killing me really going to help you achieve any of your goals? No! Think about it - when it all comes down to it, who sent you on that mission to Naboo in the first place? Who made sure the Jedi and, by extension, Kenobi would be there to kill you? Who used you as a dejarik piece and then cast you aside the second you outlived your usefulness?”
Beneath him, Maul slowly stills in his struggle, still panting heavily. Hound and Nuisance don’t let it deter them in their vigilance, because they’re damn good vod’e and possess an ounce of common sense.
“And, look, I get it. I could spend the rest of my life punching every civilian who spits on me in the streets and it would even be satisfying. I could hit back the Senators who think of clones as easy targets. Or - I can aim my sights at who’s on top. And I think you know who I mean, because you know as well as I do the same damn man has ruined both our lives.”
Kenobi makes an alarmed noise, and Maul an interested one - not that Fox is going to let him walk out of this place awake. Still, he tilts his head in a way he hopes conveys his helmeted grin successfully to non-vod, as well as the bloodlust behind it. “You’re also welcome for the fact that the Chancellor won’t have heard of your spontaneous resurrection yet, by the way. You’ll retain your element of surprise instead of gambling it away on petty revenge on Kenobi.”
“He cut me in half!”
“He killed my master!”
Fox waves their protests away.
“Also, that’s treason!”, Kenobi adds, sputtering. Fox grins. Kenobi purses his lips, and continues. petulantly, “…do you have any proof?”
“So. Much. Proof”, says Nuisance, dreamily. “Like, do you want it alphabetically or by date?”
Which is when the Duchess, of all people, bursts out into barking, crazed laughter.
“You - you’ve certainly given yourself an edge in that fight, Marshall Commander”, she wheezes, brushing tears from her eyes. Fox raises his eyebrows at her, which she somehow seems to be able to tell, because she gestures at the clunky handle dangling from his belt.
“What, this old thing?” He unclasps the black rectangle from its hook, holding it up in the air. Maul stills strangely beneath him, and Kenobi goes ghostly pale again. Fox is starting to get a bad feeling.
“I took it off Viszla and beat him over the head with it. I figured he’d taken it off a Jedi cadet or something. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
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Prompt: Imagine you get isekaied in Our Life. Only thing is that you wake up as a child and remember everything. You can only save at this point but you can still access the save and load menu and see your previous runs.
Meanwhile your precious neighbor is slowly becoming self aware, getting deja vu with every passing second- as if this has all happened before...
A/N: A few days after I posted this- a few other thoughts came to mind- SO HERE IS MY ATTEMPT AT VOCALIZING THEM
You’re keenly aware of how small and tiny you are the moment you wake up.
For the first few days, you started to acclimate to…the family home.
It wasn’t YOUR family though. It never was. It was MC’s. Not your’s.
You could project all you wanted onto MC but it was never your family or your life to experience. It was theirs.
Even so, you quickly found yourself missing the life you were used to. More specifically:
The cuisine.
It was hard not to draw suspicion to the fact that you were craving different food genres aside from Mom’s Pamela’s mac and cheese and cheeseburgers.
Ma’s Noelani’s Hawaiian food helped quite a bit to hold you over as you started to ponder over how to approach it.
Kind of hard to bring it up to your MC’s parents that you wanted Asian/Middle eastern/Indian/Pakistani/Mexican/etc food when there was none of that for miles around
For the time being, you had to quietly hint and nudge their thoughts into that direction but not enough to make them suspicious. Noelani obviously had her suspicions about Cove getting into the house from Step 2-3 but never brought it up once. From what you could tell, she was scary observant
Another issue was how clumsy your new body was.
Your mind might be able to remember how to do everyday tasks like writing and such but this tiny body didn’t have the muscle memory to match it
Much to Liz’s dismay, you spent quite a bit of your time forcing your hands and legs to train to do things your adult body could do in a snap
Time wise- technology was a huge sucker punch. It made you feel bad for taking your own devices for granted.
That being said, self learning everything was going to be hard without a phone or computer on hand, especially knowing that you’d have to go through the cursed education system all over again- but most likely much harder
There had to be a reason older folk complained about it, right?...
Your MC’s birthday was the same as your own, just that the birth year is 1997. That being said, the current year was 2006… Funny. You were only two in 2006…
…
Back to self learning, you tried to practice what you considered basic math long after everyone had fallen asleep
Usually, your day was filled with entertaining Shiloh and Liz, playing in the park or going along with whatever Liz said. Judging by the giant for sale sign across the street and the date, you figured out that you got isekaied roughly at least a month or two before Cove and Mr. Holden would move in.
Who knew how that would go now that you weren’t subjected to just three choices?
Even after playing around, your body was exhausted and your baby mind was just as pooped out.
The first few days you would wake up early as children do and tried doing your math and remembering as much as you could at that time
Yeah, Liz nearly gave you a heart attack after she barged in and you had to play it off as you scribbling absolute nonsense cause you were bored
After that near collision, you changed your prep time to being at night. Sure, you woke up to Liz shaking you and not getting enough sleep in the morning, but you needed to refresh your memory the best you could
You couldn’t do it every night though and did your best to keep some sort of schedule so you wouldn’t forget - and worry your MC’s moms
They noticed the first few times of how sleepy you’d be when you’d wake up later than usual - granted if Liz didn’t wake you up - and a few nights after, you nearly got caught right in the middle of your review.
Pam was more sneaky than Noelani, so you should’ve seen this coming- but even so, you had everything spread out on your rug when you just barely heard her footsteps come to your MC’s door
You had enough time to shove everything underneath your bed - your room was messy enough but better safe than sorry - and quickly dive under the covers before you heard your door open with the softest of clicks
She was around for a good while before you heard the door close again but you didn’t relax until you were sure her footsteps went back to the master bedroom
After that, you were much more careful about how long you spent studying and when. You haven’t been caught since.
Occasionally, you’d have to sneak in your MC’s parent’s room to grab any books that you needed. Good thing Noelani was a book nerd.
You did have to be careful about your self learning- you didn’t want them getting any suspicions that their kid was suddenly…different out of nowhere.
You had no idea what MC was like as a kid before the events of Our Life so you tried your best to piece together what you could
Speaking of, there were a bunch of things you quickly realized about Our Life, one of which is that game didn’t go over nearly everything that MC went through, let alone before Cove came or others that it only touched on briefly
For example, the tourists that came and went every year happened to be close friends of Pamela’s from her time in university, hence why they were so friendly to you and Liz in particular.
It was also why they knew how to… handle your ever changing moods. At least-
That’s what it looked like to them.
To you- it was because you had to battle MC’s initial responses to these scenarios.
Go figure, this body still had its fair share of emotions inside of it, leaving you to figure out if this sharp pang of fear or worry was your own or not.
It left you second guessing everything you did, especially when you’d be up at night, studying and practicing your writing
It seriously irked you, knowing your writing was sloppy even though you knew this body couldn’t help it. It didn’t make seeing your scrappy writing less frustrating though
Despite how much you tried to hide how YOU felt, not MC, Noelani still picked up on the small shifts in your behavior.
One of these being the irritation you harbored for your writing.
Speaking of emotions, you found your body easily overwhelmed by any stronger ones- your own irritation making you cry- an alien feeling and one that took even you by surprise.
Worse part? The first time happened was in front of Noelani when she tried to help you practice your penmanship
Naturally, she tried to comfort you MC by trying to console you, saying it’d be better with practice and wiping away your tears but no matter how YOU tried, the tears wouldn’t stop flowing
It wasn’t until much later that you realized that MC’s tiny self had their own limits and by pushing those adult feelings and expectations that YOU had onto it sent it into a messy overdrive.
After that, you had learned to slow down- the world wasn’t ending…even if it felt like it.
…
The nail in the coffin for you that made YOU cry. Not MC’s body: Your dreams started to resemble parts of your life.
You’d dream that you were back at your desk job or filling out mundane paperwork but no matter how boring it’d be, it was YOUR life.
The one YOU were used to and familiar with
You’d always feel so relieved to be back where you were supposed to, whether you were happy with that life or not
It was that feeling of having all your choices in your hand and being in control of where you wanted to go, if that made sense.
Nobody made those choices for you except well…you.
Only to have that feeling of familiarity ripped away once you registered Liz waking you up to play while “Ma and Mom snooze the day away!”
…
You just want to go home…
To YOUR home…
-> Part 1.5 <-
⊹ ‧₊˚ Isekai Self Aware Taglist: @lilqi @annoying-mary ˚₊‧ ⊹
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