#Wedge Wire Panel

[wiremeshes]

Wire conveyor belts, Barbed Wire, Rubber Conveyor belts: versatile, durable & essential for various industries. Discover their advantages & applications. For more information visit: Wire Conveyor Belt

[fineholeindia]

Wedge Wire Screen Manufacturers in India

The premium quality and reasonable prices of parabolic screens, welded wedge wire screens, hydropower screens, wedge wire pipe screens etc outclass ISO 9001:2008 certified Fine Perforators among the wedge wire screen manufacturers in India.

[ourunwiremesh]

Support types of wedge wire screen panels

According to the support rod types, the screen panels are divided into 4 types

Triangle wire.

Round bar.

Rectangular bar.

Wedge wire.

[helenwei001-blog]

[ichorai]

would that i ; din djarin.

track twelve of WASTELAND, BABY!

pairing ; din djarin x gn!reader

synopsis ; din didn’t consider himself a very jealous person. no, he wasn’t affected at all when the kid seemed to want to spend more time with you than him. not even a little bit.

words ; 1.5k

themes ; fluff, mild pining, kinda sunshine & grump trope

warnings / includes ; grogu eats a frog, mando gets v flustered, reader jokingly calls him daddy lol

main masterlist.

Bag hitched over your shoulder, you tugged on your hiking boots, bending over to double-knot the laces. “Hey, I’m going out to the market to grab some spare parts for the ship,” you called to the brooding Mandalorian in the cockpit. You were met with a quiet grunt in response. Finished with your shoes, you straightened yourself up and peeked your head into the front of the ship, watching Din work on some frayed wires by the control panel. “I’m taking the kid with me.”

This made him halt in his ministrations, and he turned to you. “Isn’t it easier if he just stays with me? Keep him here.”

Crossing your arms over your chest, you nodded stoutly. “Alright, lemme ask him. Hey, bub,” you cooed, picking up the tiny creature from his floating carrier and setting him on the ground, equidistant between the two of you. Grogu peered at you with wide eyes, before rounding his head to look up at Din, then looked to you once more. He let out a garbled noise of confusion. “You wanna go to the market with me or stay with Mr. Grump over there?”

Silent, Din watched as Grogu began waddling towards you, seemingly excited at the prospect of going out to explore. 

With a hum of satisfaction, you scooped the kid up into your arms, shooting the masked man a victorious smirk, before striding towards the exit. 

“Be back before sunset!” he barked out, earning him a mock salute from you, then proceeded to incoherently grumble under his breath about how going to the market was really a one-person job, whilst fixing up the banged up ship definitely required more than a single pair of hands.

Clementine flames licked at the air greedily, crackling as Din tossed another wedge of wood into the fire. The setting sun cast long shadows over the secluded, wooded area your little group was hunkering down in, sparsely lit with the heated glow of the fire and the cold luminescence of the distant stars in the sky. You sat on the opposite end of the fire, blowing warm air into your palms to ebb away the numbing cold sewn into your skin.

The kid was snuggled up to your side, cooing as he tried to grab floating embers of the fire that drifted past him, carried away with the frigid night breeze.

Din studied the two of you, his mask betraying no expression whatsoever. Though Din was a man of few words, he was also a man of keen observations, always entirely aware of his surroundings. He noticed the way the orange of the fire tinted your skin with a near angelic glow, how the rustling of leaves behind him seemed to perfectly accompany your tinkering laugh as you smiled at the kid’s ministrations, how your eyes brightened with all the galaxy’s light within your irises. 

His attention was reluctantly drawn away from you when the kid waddled off to the side, having spotted a bulbish frog—which, presumably, looked like a tasty snack to him. 

With a gentle smile, you got up and circled around the fire to sit beside him, foliage crunching beneath your haunches as you settled down. 

“What’s on your mind?” you asked, just audible enough to hear over the pops of the flames. “You’re thinking so loudly.”

There was a moment of silence, the quiet weighing heavily over the both of you.

“It’s nothing,” he replied finally. “Nothing to worry about.”

Not wanting to pry, you hummed in thought, about to tell him that you’d be all ears if he had something to say, but promptly held your tongue when you caught sight of the kid swallowing the poor one-eyed frog whole.

“Spit that out!” both you and Din ordered at the same time. You glanced at each other, and your shoulders shook as you began to laugh, the corners of your eyes crinkling with such genuinity that was rare to find these days. 

You couldn’t see it, but a trace of a smile slowly appeared behind Din’s helmet.

The kid had finally fallen asleep—it took hours of you setting him firmly on your lap and telling him to shut his eyes until he began to relent, curled against your stomach and stealing your body warmth. Sleep was tugging at your own sleeves, whispering gentle static into your ears and weighing down your eyelids. 

Din had passed by the two of you multiple times as he tended to the many laborious upkeeps of the ship, silent as a ghost, but his mere presence was loud enough for you.

It was only when the ship’s door slid open did you startle out of your half-unconscious state, blearily rubbing the sleep out of your eyes. You glanced down at the small form on your lap, gently patting his little wrinkled head. 

Carefully, you got to your feet and lowered Grogu into his floating carrier, tucking him into a mottled brown blanket with nimble fingers. The kid stirred mildly at the jostling movement, but settled down when you hushed him quietly.

Satisfied that he wouldn’t spring awake and scamper out of his carrier to swallow down more frogs, you left the ship, sliding the door shut behind you.

The night’s chill was stronger than it had been a couple hours ago, the cold steeping into your muscles and freezing your bones. The moon bathed the forest in a hazy, pearl-hued luminescence, reflecting softly against Mando’s armor. He was watching the vast, dark forest, broodingly quiet. You came to stand beside him, shivering slightly.

“Done with all your little errands?” you asked, trying your best to keep your teeth from chattering. You took his silence as an affirmative. “You really like keeping yourself occupied, huh?”

More silence. In the distance, a frog croaked.

“I would’ve been more than happy to help you if you’d asked, by the way. You didn’t have to do all that by yourself. I used to be a mechanic, you know?”

Din risked a glance to you, holding his breath for reasons unbeknownst to him. You looked awfully serene basking in the sweet cold of the night, which made his chest ache with a tender kind of longing he couldn’t quite put his finger on. A life he knew he couldn’t have, perhaps.

He tore his eyes away before he could dwell on that thought too much.

“What are you doing out here? It’s real cold out,” you murmured, angling your head to look at him. It sometimes frustrated you just how unreadable he was—not even considering the mask, he rarely ever gave anything away with his body language. You wondered what went on in his head. “Are you okay?”

For the first time since you came out, Din spoke. It was tentative and slow—fittingly cautious in nature. His voice sent a thrill up your spine—it wasn’t often that the two of you would genuinely converse about something other than the ship’s upkeep. “The kid likes you.”

A surprised look splintered through your expression. Of all things you expected him to say, that most certainly wasn’t one of them. “Well, yeah, I’d hope so. I love the little guy, even though he eats like a starved wampa.” You narrowed your eyes at him, the beginnings of a smile painting across the corner of your lips. “Oh, maker, you’re jealous, aren’t you?”

Before he could formulate a proper response, you stepped closer to him with a teasing glint to your eyes that he misliked. You patted his chest in mock-comfort.

This close, he could see the fine details of your features much more clearly—he noticed the small, faded scar across the bridge of your nose, slightly darker in color than the rest of your complexion, he noticed the soft curve of your cupid’s bow, and he noticed the slight arch to your eyebrows, as if expecting him to say something.

Oh, right. He should probably say something.

Din flushed hotly beneath his helmet, finding himself at a loss for words. 

“I’m sure the kid loves you just as much, if not more than, he loves me,” you surmised, still with a teasing lilt to your words. “After all, we both know he considers you his guardian—if he could talk, he’d definitely be calling you father. Or, actually, that might be too formal for him—maybe daddy, or something. Pops, even.”

Din huffed, amused. “The kid wouldn’t call me daddy,” he deadpanned, finally finding his tongue. 

You beamed devastatingly gleeful, and he could just about feel his heart disintegrating into sand and spilling through the crevices of his ribs. 

“Why not? I think it suits you.” You shrugged, still grinning so wide it was a wonder your face hadn’t split into two. Oh, you were going to be the death of him one day. “I’m gonna head back in—I’m freezing my ass off out here. Good night, Din. Or should I say daddy?” You barked out a laugh, clearly pleased with your little joke, before trudging away from him, chortling to yourself along the way.

Din watched as you slipped back into the ship, your words ricocheting in his head over and over again. He exhaled heavily. 

He was digging himself a deep hole here—and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to stop.

[drunkenskunk]

Meanwhile, somewhere on Hell's Gate...

A a hiss of displaced gas preceded a hatch swinging open, and an extremely inebriated redhead stumbled her way across the threshold and into the Hell's Gate mech bay. Scarlet, ostensibly part of the militia and one of five mech pilots on the “Strategic Response Team,” had spent the last several hours attempting to drink herself into oblivion. The rest of the team had been celebrating a successful operation at GMS_Generic_Bar, getting round after round from Bartender Motherfucker, and they were entirely right to do so: the SRT's first time out wasn't just a victory, it was a complete walkover. The moonlighter pirates trying to make a quick buck from the “unarmed freighter” had no idea what hit them.

By all rights, Scarlet should've been celebrating with the rest... but she didn't really feel like it. While everyone in the bar had been busy watching Agarin show off his karaoke skills, she had quietly slipped away while no one was looking. For the last hour or so, she had been nursing a particularly large bottle of razbo – some Ol' Smokey's Reserve – and eventually wandered her way into the station's mech bay.

The bay was eerily silent and still. Usually, the place was buzzing with technicians running around, doing some kind of maintenance of some sort or another, but... no. No one else was here. Even Calamity Havok was nowhere to be seen, which was extremely odd. Scarlet had never seen the retired Hell Hound anywhere else on the station, and just assumed she lived here.

She downed another slug of raspberry infused liquor and staggered over to the alcove where her mech was currently housed: a truly ancient GMS Everest, covered in dozens of shades of red paint, hand-lettered slogans, and artwork designed to cover up the myriad scars and bullet wounds from centuries of combat. The mech had been built, stripped down, and rebuilt so many times over the years that it possessed a very haphazard quality to all of it; it was the kind of machine where you could pick any panel at random, open it up, and see more splices than wires. It had an “official” name (at least as far as anything on Calliope could be said to have one of those) registered in some file somewhere that she always assumed was a pun based on its serial number: R4GE MACHINE. But thanks to the paint job, everyone just called it Big Red.

The mech stood immobile, surrounded by a mess of cabling, powered-down diagnostic systems, and catwalks to give the technicians access. She stared up at the machine, her gaze drawn to the wedge-shaped “head,” and the distinctive spiderweb of cracks radiating out from around the left optical unit. She grumbled in frustration, taking another drink.

Scarlet kept thinking about the operation against the pirates from earlier. During the fight, she'd tried to disable the pirate ship the moonlighters had arrived on by attaching a HEX-B explosive mine to the ship's cockpit, but it hadn't gone exactly to plan. Right as she armed it, the mech controls briefly became unresponsive, and instead of attaching to the enemy ship, the electromagnets kicked in and firmly attached the mine... to her own torso.

It didn't matter that the ship was disabled immediately after her blunder: when the ship tried to disengage, she felt a tug at her cranial socket, and Big Red plunged the heavy combat blade it carried directly into the enemy cockpit. The whole front end of the ship had practically exploded, both from the impact and the sudden depressurization.

It didn't matter, because after the smoke had cleared, everyone could see the armed mine still attached to her mech. It had been removed after the fight, of course, but the carbon scoring on the hull of Big Red was still visible for everyone to see. Her teammates had given her shit for it the entire flight back to Hell's Gate. And rightfully so, far as she was concerned. A phrase had been swimming around in her head, ever since the fighting had stopped. They were words that had haunted her for the better part of a decade:

You're not good enough.

“Why y'gotta emb'rass me like that, huh?” she slurred. Scarlet stood there, staring up at her mech with drink in hand, and downed another slug.

A noise began to echo in the otherwise silent mech bay. It was a low, persistent clicking, almost like a purring animal, steadily growing in volume. Scarlet recognized the noise immediately. It was one of Big Red's many peculiar quirks; every so often, it would just start clicking like that, and nobody knew why, because nobody could find a source of the noise, no matter how hard they tried. When Calamity had tried to fix it, she said it sounded like a damaged hard drive moments away from catastrophic, unrecoverable failure... but even her considerable talents were at a loss.

Scarlet snorted and began to shake her head. Why'd she even come here? She didn't know. She sighed heavily and started to walk away...

“Because you are holding Us back.”

The words echoed in the empty mech bay, and seemed to hang in the air above her head. Scarlet stopped immediately, and her blood ran ice cold. She'd never heard that voice before. It was synthesized, utterly inhuman, and spoke the words with a curious inflection. The mechanical purr had grown louder, turning into an angry growl. Very slowly, Scarlet turned back around to face Big Red.

A trio of glowing red pinpricks stared at her from inside the darkened crack in its metal wedge of a head. The mech was very clearly looking down, directly at her.

“You tried to be clever,” the voice bellowed from speakers buried somewhere in his chassis. “So We taught you a lesson.”

The war machine – which should have been completely cold and powered down – began to shudder in the harness keeping it tethered in the maintenance alcove. It was as if the mech was a wild animal, caged against its will, struggling to break free of the restraints shackling it so. Metal hands balled into fists, and everything in the bay seemed to shake.

“We are not a tool,” it continued, as Scarlet remained rooted in place, staring at the machine in bewilderment and terror. “We are a weapon. You need to act like it. You must never forget what We are.”

The cables, pistons, and servos connecting the wedge-shaped head to the torso should've looked like a neck... but it didn't. From where Scarlet was standing, it looked like Big Red was grinning: a wide rictus grin, with teeth that weren't teeth made of metal, and sharp as kitchen knives. The machine continued to stare at her, left optical unit glowing with malice, and metal not-teeth glinting in the dim light of the mech bay.

“Do not deny Us our purpose again.”

Scarlet gulped hard to try and steady her breathing; she really hadn't been prepared for this at all, and wasn't doing the best job of disguising her terror. She looked down, and began to vigorously rub her eyes with her free hand, shaking her head. She could barely hear anything with so much blood pounding in her ears. This wasn't real, it couldn't be real...

She gulped once again, and looked up.

The noise had stopped. The clicking had stopped. The mech was looking straight ahead, and its metal hands were no longer balled into fists. Everything in the mech bay was exactly like it was when she'd first arrived: completely silent and still.

Scarlet looked around with wide eyes, uncertain of anything. She looked down at the empty bottle of razbo in her hand. She looked back up at her mech, still and cold as the metal plates beneath her feet.

Without another word, she turned on her heel and left as quickly as she could. She grabbed the edge of the pressure door, and pulled it shut behind her.

But just before the seal around the hatch could engage, that same clicking started up once more...

[inkformyblood]

i lose all (but not him) #1 CWW2023

Kamino, First Meetings, Slow Burn. Cody x Obi-Wan @codywanweek Day 1 prompt: Cody with a lightsaber. Ao3 link here.

It’s raining. Again.

CC-2224 jams his thumb into the door controls, forcing them open once more with a rush of frigid air that sends the hair on his arms prickling, the sensation crawling over his scalp in a bygone evolutionary tick that does nothing but irritate him. It had been several rotations since the pipes on the lower levels had broken and sent a tidal wave of coral and tiny lost insects into the corridors but the feeling of something crawling over his skin had yet to entirely fade from his immediate memory. It possibly never would. CC-2226 still woke screaming on occasions about the crash from sixteen rotations ago.

The treated canvas hood would do nothing against the rain but CC-2224 still pulls it over the thin fabric of his blacks, double knotting the trailing cords beneath his chin and tucking them away. His boots are soaked through already, but he still leans down and secures his laces. He can no more stop himself than he could pluck the moon from the sky and rearrange the constellations on a whim. He has been trained, sculpted, made for this. 

Query: is it going to stop raining soon?

Answer: no.

The thought isn’t his and yet it is, wired into his thoughts like an additional comm line. CC-2224 nods regardless, swallowing against the copper tinge that spreads over his tongue, and presses the door control once more. Water flicks against his face and he blinks, pulling in a deep breath through gritted teeth, and steps outside.

He regrets it immediately. Well, not regret it. The word doesn’t quite fit and CC-2224 turns it over and over in his thoughts to try and smooth over the ragged edges, to make it flat and smooth and as routine as everything else. He’d seen a piece of equipment fall from one of the higher platforms and become wedged between a barrier and the window it was attached to, too unimportant to warrant the slight inconvenience of lowering a magnet to retrieve it and so it had been left. He’d stopped by the window during his patrols, not for long and not with enough regularity for it to be a pattern and noticed, but enough times to track the decay of plastoid components to expose the fragile wiring beneath. That had only lasted a cycle before it had been torn free and lost, the outer casing following soon after. CC-2224 doesn’t regret having to perform maintenance on the filtration unit. It is a necessary task to prevent costly breakdowns in the future. It is a necessary task to keep the nutrients in their ration blocks from becoming altered due to their negligence. It is a necessary task to keep CC-2226 from being decommissioned. 

There is no room for deviations, no room for error, but CC-2224 will try for as long as he can. 

He is made for this task, just as he had been made for every task before. His genetic sequence had been meticulously hand-crafted, every base chosen and lined up where it was needed. He isn’t as much of a person as he is a tool, a weapon, whatever is needed for the situation at hand. He had been made for the Jedi.

ERROR.

He had been made for one Jedi.

ERROR.

CC-2224 raises his hand to his face, smudges at the sudden spike of pain in his nose. He’s already dripping, every step squelching through the scattered puddles that are only disrupting the rain in that they’re stopping the rain from immediately drenching CC-2224 to his skin, but he can see the dark stain of blood by the distant gleam of the landing pad lights from the platform above him. There’s no sky visible amongst the heavy press of the stormclouds, and the air is heavy with salt amongst the copper gleam of blood with every breath. 

He needs to move quickly. He has wasted enough time already and the unit needs to be fixed. 

The panel is clearly marked, the edges outlined in a mixture of scavanged armour paint by a previous batch and CC-2224 crouches next to it. He shivers, steadying himself on the slick metal and bares his teeth at the unforgiving sky. It doesn’t stop raining, but it makes him feel a little better. Stringing together a collection of scavenged curses at the panel as it refuses to budge also helps. CC-2224 stands, tugging at the tied cords of his hood. The outside is drenched through and there isn’t enough fabric for him to use it as leverage while he is still wearing it. Rainwater cascades over him as he pulls it free, his jaw clenched tight to try and keep his teeth from chattering. He is shaking and he will never be warm or dry again. He will rust and decay and the tiny nonexistent things that are crawling over him will eat his bones.

The panel moves. 

Somewhere, a door hisses open. 

Query: where?

Answer: Landing bay 4

CC-2224 stares up at the distorted lights above him. He can’t keep his eyes open long enough to pick out details, rain impacting against his cheeks and necessary instincts force him to blink. That landing bay is off limits for a reason. Jango had laid it out in his contract amendments when it had been decided for him to stay on Kamino. CC-2224 had heard whispers about how that had been decided, rumours passed between batches like treated water, only gaining speed with every retelling. The version he had heard first was the least fanciful and so the most likely to be true. There had been another man at the meeting, someone tall and dressed in a dark cloak with white hair, his hand heavy on Prime’s shoulder like he was steering him.

ERROR. NO. REDIRECTING. 

There are two, no, three people clustered on the landing bay. Their shadows bounce off of the walls, distorted as the rain floods over the bay lights, and CC-2224 frowns, cupping his hands over his brow as he tries to make out their size. He had done this training, passed it in record time, but the chill the rain brought with it is entirely new. He won’t mention that to the trainers, however, in case they decide to implement it to the extreme. Two are fully-grown trooper size, one standard and one possibly from an alpha batch, head and shoulders taller but not as broad as he would expect. Slight variations are expected so it must be factored in, but the final figure is cadet-sized, scurrying across the landing bay, and CC-2224 tracks his movement closely, mindful of the dual facts of a restricted area as well as the lack of barriers around the edge of the platform. Cadets think they know too much and could do everything, their confidence matched only by the shinies until they trip on their still-too-large boots. 

They’re one plan, one blueprint. Deviations are not tolerated for long. 

CC-2224 turns his head just enough to check the positions of the cameras, one above the door on his level and one above the door on the upper level. They wouldn’t be active, not at this hour, but he still swallows against the burn of acid in his mouth. It must be what one of the scuttling creatures that swarm over the lower levels feels like when a larger fish comes swimming past, infinitely too small with a blade hanging over his head, preparing to drop. The sounds of the ocean shift into something hungry, something focused on him with the salt tang of intention, and CC-2224 stands to the sound of a blaster.

Single shot. Deflected. (Deflected how? Something itches at the back of his mind, right next to wired-in thoughts.)

Second shot. Third. 

What the fuck is going on?

CC-2224 steps forward, cupping his hands over his eyes as he stares up at the platform. All three of them will be decommissioned, possibly himself as well just for being nearby in case he is involved somehow. So, he’ll get himself involved. 

The control panel for the camera is locked just inside the door controls, a neat little bypass loop to let CC-2224 take a peek and try and find spot any markings, maybe a batch symbol if he’s lucky. 

(What’s that sound?)

He doesn’t manage to make it back to the door before the ground trembles beneath his feet. Not a quake nor a wave. Not a test either. It is rhythmic, building, the slow roar of a ship beginning to take off. There is only one ship on Kamino that sounds like that, loud and insistent and demanding to be noticed because fear and notoriety are half the job, as Jango said during a training session. He had left recently, circling back a few cycles ago and now he was leaving again? The cadet should be Boba if the standard trooper is Jango. 

He hopes it’s Jango. If there is a trooper stealing his ship, they’ll all be culled, just to be safe. 

(There it is again. What is it? It sounds so familiar, like something he heard once in a dream.)

CC-2224 breaks into a run, heading for the railings between this platform and the next. The surface is old, pitted, with heavy data cords that run up the inside along with the structural supports. It’ll be difficult, but he should be able to climb up that way if he braces himself correctly so that he doesn’t immediately fall into the starving sea beneath him. It is a stupid plan. It is one of the worst plans that CC-2224 has ever come up with. It is the only plan that has a chance of working. 

He hopes CT-7567 will be okay, whichever outcome befalls him. 

(Catch it.)

CC-2224 obeys. He is a good soldier, afterall. He’s created to follow orders. 

The weapon is still warm, holding onto the touch of an unknown person. CC-2224 looks up, one boot resting on the decaying railing, his hand still outstretched over the scant gap between the landing bays. There is someone looking down at him, backlit as the ship roars into the atmosphere. 

“Hello there!” The stranger calls. Their accent is new, clipped at the vowels and made to carry. Even so, CC-2224 has to focus to hear them, blinking against the rain.A new trainer? Someone else? 

He knows who they are. He knows the weapon he’s holding. (He knows how to kill with the weapon he’s holding, knows how to fight the wielder.) ERROR. 

CC-2224 raises his hand in greeting, holding the tube between thumb and forefinger as he splays his fingers. He points towards the door, knowing that there is little use in calling back and forth and trying to make themselves heard over the storm. 

The stranger mimics CC-2224’s wave, their skin paler in the brief pulses of light from the emergency lighting than CC-2224’s. They are already beginning to shiver, their hand wavering before they drop out of sight. Blankets are stashed in a reclaimed supply cupboard, two corridors over with a right and a short left and CC-2224 pins the location in his mind as he turns his attention back to the open panel. A quick patch would keep it functional until the next cycle, nowhere near the full repair he was hoping to perform but it’ll do. 

The lower levels are quiet this time of night, but they aren’t deserted. CC-2224 slips into one of the supply room and knocks on the top of a crate. There is a moment before he hears the sleep-slow shift of fabric and a similar face appears in the slight gap between lid and side.

“We have a Jedi on Kamino. Have you still got your comm patch links to update everyone?”

CC-2224 barely waits to receive a nod and the fledging beginning of a question before he is moving away. There isn’t time for the endless supply of questions he would have to wade through once they start and there is already a headache pulsing on the left side of his head at the thought of all the curiosity to come. He taps the lightsaber — because what else could it be, documented in a thousand training sims and another thousand more forms and techniques they had learnt (but why, why did they need them ERROR) — against his thigh. The metal gleams beneath the pale internal lights of a sleep cycle, heavier than he would have expected for something so innocuous, and CC-2224 brushes his thumb over the switch just beneath the port. It is a slight stretch for him to reach, suggesting the Jedi is taller than himself or, at least, has a slightly wider grip. 

He’ll need to be mindful of the extra reach this could mean.

The thought is forgotten as quickly as it arrives, tucked away amongst the nest of wired-in instincts that haven’t been taught or bound into him but were somehow there.

The blanket he collects from the supply closet in one amongst thousands of the same grey material, the same durable weave, and he slings it over one shoulder as he walks, barely breaking stride as he leaves a trail of damp and squelching footprints behind him. They all knew of the Jedi (they had been made for them) but soaked to the bone and shivering is not how he thought he would ever meet one. In his half-constructed dreams, the ones that were usually filled with a nebulous future of things he had never experienced but they could be out there, somewhere, maybe, CC-2224 doesn’t dream of battle. He thinks about a street, about a blue sky above his head and walls that are stone instead of metal. He thinks about a chance encounter, about hands fumbling on a stack of forms or an accidental encounter with a mug of caf. He thinks about his Jedi and what they will look like. He wonders who this Jedi is.

Rounding another corner, CC-2224 hears a matching set of wet footsteps, an unfamiliar voice grumbling in a cascade of syllables that seem to be bundled together in a roll for easy transport only to be unfurled at what sounds like the weather outside, the ocean below, the walls for looking too similar and somebody named Quigon for somehow being responsible, ultimately, for all of this. 

“Sir?”

The Jedi begins to look over his shoulder before he catches himself and turns to face CC-2224. He is pretty in a soaked to the skin kind of way, the water shining beneath the flare of lights as they hum into life at CC-2224’s approach. His hair is dark, made darker by the storm, but it is the shade that captures CC-2224’s attention first, red like the distant glimpses of sunset he can make out from the higher levels of the facility whenever the speciality training overran. 

“Hello again,” the Jedi says, his grin immediate and a little rueful. He bows, one shivering hand pressed into his chest. The leather bracelets around his wrist shift with the movement and CC-2224 flexes his free fingers with the urge to unfasten them. They could move and catch, irritating the skin beneath, and no other reason. None at all. 

CC-2224 holds out the lightsaber, flipping it easily so the handle is extended towards the Jedi. He is aware of the potential blade within in the same way he would be aware of the possible humming energy field of a vibroblade, the prospect of danger and death. “I believe you dropped this, sir.”

“Yes. I did, didn’t I?” The Jedi steps forward, tapping his boot behind himself as he reclaims his lightsaber and snaps it back onto his belt. “Thank you for catching it for me.” 

CC-2224 flexes his fingers, chasing after the scant memory of the handle still warm from another’s touch, and settles back into the correct stance before holding the blanket out. “For you as well, sir.”

“Thank you. And call me Obi-Wan, please. I don’t believe I’ve caught your name?”

CC-2224 twitches at the question, a momentary break in composure and his fingers bump against Obi-Wan’s. It is the barest instance of contact, gone in the same heartbeat, but he focuses on it regardless, something new to distract his racing thoughts with. He can’t answer. He has to answer. He—

“Jedi Master. I have been looking for you.”

Ice shears down CC-2224’s spine, stopping his heart and kickstarting it at the same time. His breath remains steady, his hands still as he drops into a waiting position at the Kaminoan’s approach. They didn’t venture down this far, preferring the drier floors high above, and she ducks her head beneath the sag of a broken strut before moving next to Obi-Wan. She doesn’t look at CC-2224. 

“I see you have encountered one of our units.”

“I have.” Obi-Wan glances at CC-2224, his expression unreadable. All warmth that CC-2224 had been basking in has been carefully hidden, akin to shoving everything that could be considered contraband into an air duct and pulling the paneling back into place leaving it sheer and blank once more. “He showed great initiative, I’m very impressed.”

The target slowly lifts from between CC-2224’s shoulderblades, a box in a system he’ll never be allowed to access remaining unchecked. He doesn’t move, keeps his face blank. He hasn’t been dismissed yet; one of the little games the long-necks like to play and some of the trainers too, the wait-there-because-I’ve-told-you, the pick-this-up-put-it-down, the go-stop-go-stop. 

He hopes the Jedi will be different. 

He is prepared if they aren’t.

“Do you require him for anything further?” 

“No.” Obi-Wan turns away from the scientist, his mouth still pressed into a thin line that speaks a rage brewing behind it, tightly leashed and called to heel, but his eyes soften as he looks at CC-2224. “You’re dismissed. I hope our paths cross again.”

“Sir.” CC-2224 salutes, regimentally perfect like he has been pre-programmed with the gesture, and turns on his heel. He’s been a drowning man often enough to recognise an escape when one is offered. 

Query: Who is Jedi Master Obi-Wan?

Answer: He is a Jedi. He is a target. (He has been made for you just as you have been made for him.)

Too many thoughts. 

ERROR.

Just one. 

Their fingers brushed. CC-2224 would like it to happen again. 

[anxiousgaypanicking]

Fucking Machine

Loceit (Logan x Janus) Kinktober 2023 Day Ten: Fucking Machine Warnings: robot porn, wire play, electrocution, overstimulation, premature ejaculation, grinding

"Forgive me if I don't exactly trust you to check my hardware," Logan states, as Janus leads him through the house and up a flight of stairs. "Typically, I run an analysis on myself, and - if I need human assistance - I ask Virgil. You, on the other hand, have never been that... mindful of technology." 

Janus shrugs off Logan's concerns. "I'm more trustworthy when it comes to technology than Patton." 

"That's not hard to accomplish," Logan refutes, as Janus guides them into Logan's own bedroom. It's decorated to look human, but the metal table donned with a singular pillow clashes with the dresser, closet, and framed photos quite a bit. 

Still, it was what Logan had requested. He had no need for a bed; he didn't much like laying on his front, and his charging port was on his lower back. If he needed to sit at all, he'd rather do it on a table akin to the one he was created atop of. It also meant he could sit straighter while charging. 

Janus guides him to the table and encourages him to sit, before sitting criss-cross behind him. Janus finds the cold metal to be rather harsh and uncomfortable, but he keeps quiet about that for now. 

"I don't understand why you're doing this anyway. According to my recent self-scans, I've been running perfectly fine." 

"Isn't it nice to double check, though?" Janus asks, as his fingers slide beneath Logan's polo. 

Logan's skin is synthetic - it's made to feel human, but lacks warmth. Janus can even press his fingers into Logan's sides or arms and they'll sink a bit into the fake flesh, but it's just an outer layer designed to protect his wires and circuitry, the same way the skin is just an outer layer made to protect muscle and bone. 

Logan frowns. "It won't be nice when your unskilled prodding causes a server shutdown," he argues, as Janus slowly pulls his shirt up and over his body. 

He's able to process each touch to his body due to an array of microfibers built into the synthetic skin. He's been told it should feel identical to the way a human would feel when being touched the same way, but Logan had no way to compare the two. So Janus's fingertips brushing against his soft back makes his internal nerves spark, with Logan stiffening and straightening his posture. 

"If you're going to pull out the panel, I'd suggest you get on with it. I'm not here to entertain you." 

Janus chuckles softly. "Aren't you made to be patient?" 

"I can tell you that I'm definitely not made to be tampered with." Logan turns his head to the side, and gives Janus a cold glare. "Especially by someone already acting so unprofessional." 

"Such a snarky tongue. Is that programmed, or just preferred?" 

"Preferred." 

Janus grins. "Hm. I like it." 

"I'd like for you not to damage my hardware." 

"Relax," Janus soothes, as his hands push into Logan's back in two specific spots parallel to each other on his left and right side. The pressure causes Logan's skin in a rectangular shape to sink a bit, before it springs out with a soft hiss. Janus dips his hand underneath the left-hand opening, just barely able to wedge two of his fingers under it, and undoes a latch. This allows him to fully swing the panel open like a door, and reveals Logan's innerworkings beneath. 

There's a metal spine down the center of his back that allows Logan to turn and bend like a typical person, but Janus is able to reach his arms into Logan around it, which immediately has Logan clicking in disapproval. 

"Anything you'd need to look at would be on the screen on the inside of my back panel," Logan states,  though Janus is fully aware of this. "There's no reason for you to be sticking your hands into my body." 

"Physical checkup," Janus reasons, before sitting up on his knees. He places his chin on Logan's shoulder, with his hands sliding up Logan's spine. "You can't exactly see inside your back; how sure are you that everything's still in order? It seems to me that every time Virgil's worked on your system, he's only paid attention to your digital data or reports. When was the last time he made sure there were no exposed wires, twisted circuits, or dented metal?" 

Logan hesitates, before claiming "I think I'd be able to feel if things were damaged." 

Janus's fingers reach back into his innards, and his fingertips lightly caress the thick, black wires braded around thin metal rods, which all formed together into a makeshift ribcage. The action makes Logan bite his lip, an artificial - but incredibly noticeable - flush spreading over his cheeks in an almost cartoonish manner. 

"Careful," Janus murmurs. "We don't want you to overheat, now do we?" 

Logan's fingers tap against his thigh. "No. No, I suppose not." 

"Good. May I check?" 

Logan glances at Janus, knowing full well what Janus means by "check." And yet, he nods. "Only if you're careful." 

"I'll make sure you're still functional afterwards," Janus assures him, before adding "but I can't promise much more than that." 

He kisses Logan's bare shoulder, before leaning back down to poke at Logan's autonomy. Logan's mostly still as Janus's hands explore his insides yet again, but he knows it's only a matter of time before Janus is determining what looks the most fun to play with and decides to pull and push at it. 

And seemingly, the first thing that seems to interest him are the coloured wires, which he runs his fingers over. 

He decides to tease the yellow one first, and pinches the cord lightly, before sliding upwards, and then dragging his fingers downwards, tugging briefly on the wire and making Logan jolt suddenly. 

"Careful!" Logan insists, but his voice glitches as he rubs his hands over his thighs. 

"Trust me," Janus responds, pressing a kiss to the back of Logan's neck. He hears a click, followed by a soft whirring sound as Logan's fans begin, with his outer layer heating up ever so slightly. Janus smiles against Logan's skin.

"Do you secretly like it when I pull on that wire?" Janus asks, as he tugs on that very cord again. This time, Logan hisses, but it's not the reaction Janus wants. So he hums, and runs his fingers over a few others, before stroking the red cord. That has Logan moaning and jolting, his hands gripping the edge of the table they're seated on. 

"Ahh," Janus muses, "I see. You were just waiting for me to find the right wire. This one is fun, but I wonder what the blue one does..." 

Janus again switches wires, and tugs a lot more harshly on the blue one, with something becoming unplugged and Logan's innards sparking. Logan lets out a glitchy cry as Janus rushes to pull his hand out of Logan's back, not wanting to injure himself. 

"Fuck," Janus curses quietly, before setting a hand gently on Logan's upper shoulder. "Are you alright?" 

Logan pants. "You just... unplugged my ethernet port." 

Janus chews his inner cheek. "Do you... do you need that?" 

Logan huffs, turning to glare at Janus over his shoulder, who smiles prettily at Logan's narrow eyes. "You're going to dismantle me someday." 

"I'm going to take that as a 'no.'" Janus grabs the loose cable and ducks a bit to try and figure out the plug the small, cylindrical plug into. He sees the silver ring clear on a small black box up inside Logan's body. Janus reaches up to rub over the port with his finger, making Logan moan softly. "However, I'll be nice. I'll plug it back in for you, so you can... connect to the ethernet." 

"It allows me to tap into the local network in order to access speedy data transmissions," Logan murmurs, his eyes fluttering shut as Janus circles the hole with his plug, teasing the very tip of it at the plugs entrance. Janus pushes it in just enough for it to be noticeable, and then pulls it out again, making Logan shudder and stutter as he attempts to continue. "It doesn't... it doesn't do much for me at home, but it's useful for when we're out." 

"Oh yeah? So should I just..." Janus slips the cord in just enough for it to be noticeable, but not fully, edging Logan out of that satisfying click, "not plug this back in, then? It doesn't do anything anyway, right?" 

Logan whines, taking in a shuddering breath that lets Janus watch as small pistons nestled in his faux ribcage pump the air back out. "Please. Plug it in, please." 

Janus smirks, and does just that, and while normally plugging something in wouldn't feel this intense, something about the way Janus speaks or the way he teases his outlet makes it such, and so when Janus fully plugs the ethernet cord in, Logan jolts and sparks, eyes briefly flashing fully white, and moaning outright. Again, Janus has to rush to pull his hand out, before huffing. 

"If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were trying to electrocute me." 

Logan pants, arching his back and reaching behind him, as if trying to dig his fingers into his open panel and play with his cords himself. "I'd just be electrocuting us both, in that scenario. I spark because this is unnatural; it's not my fault I wasn't built to be played with."

Humming, Janus's hands circle around Logan's body and run his hands down between Logan's thighs, feeling the straining bulge in his jeans. "What's this for, then?" he asks, while grinding his palm over the area, making Logan squeeze his legs together, unintentionally pushing Janus's hand further against his crotch. 

"Anatomical accuracy," Logan weakly explains, but he knows Janus doesn't care. 

Janus blindly undoes Logan's jeans, struggling briefly with the zipper before he can get it down, and pulls out Logan's cock. 

He was built to be average in terms of size, but sensitive in terms of touch. The purpose of that feature was so that he could touch distinct surfaces and identify what they're made of, but it meant he was also incredibly sensitive to touch from others, especially in areas which weren't normally stimulated. 

Janus strokes his fingers over Logan's cock with little hesitation, before pulling his hands away and peering into Logan's back. 

"Your... fluid compartment... does that connect to your shaft?" 

"Of course it does." 

As Janus's eyes find the small, round-shaped, bag-like compartment, he's delighted to see it's full of a milky white liquid. "Is that for anatomical accuracy as well?"

Logan swallows the nonexistent spit in his mouth. "It is." 

Janus reaches out to touch the compartment, and cringes with fascination and disgust at how it feels. It's like a ball made of nano-tape; just thick enough to hold firm, but malleable when squished. And so, out of morbid curiosity, Janus squishes it.

Perhaps he wasn't thinking about where that fluid would go when squeezed out of its compartment, or maybe he wasn't aware that such an easily overlooked piece of hardware was essentially created to be similar to a human prostate, but either way Janus is incredibly startled when Logan's body jolts as pleasure rushes through him, and he lets out a warped cry as an orgasm is quickly forced out of him before he's ready. 

The sudden excitement has Logan sparking with delight and surprise of his own, and despite having previously been careful to avoid the loose electricity, Janus couldn't possibly have seen this coming. 

A loose wire comes into contact with the back of Janus's hand, and before he can even gasp electricity is coursing through his body, and sending an overload of electricity through Logan's as well as he conducts it through his flesh and back into Logan's hardware. 

The shocking, the pain, and the pleasure last for mere seconds before Janus is pulling away, but it's just long enough for them to both fall of the table in opposite directions. 

Janus falls onto his backside near Logan's wall. Logan falls forward onto his chest across from him. 

Struggling to catch his breath, Janus holds his hand and turns to look at Logan, who's laying limp. Immediately, he freaks out. Sure, he's human, and that much electricity could be dangerous, but Logan was a fucking machine. He's not supposed to be electrocuted; Janus could have seriously damaged him!

As Janus moves to stand up, he realizes he's hard in his pants, and curses at the poor timing as he circles the table and drops to his knees beside Logan. His pants land in a sticky mess of Logan's artificial come, and he cringes, but attempts to ignore his disgust in favor of flipping Logan over, closing his back panel in the process. 

Logan's eyes are shut, but when Janus slides his eyelids up, he sees that his eyes are completely black. 

Filled with a rush of anxiety, Janus reaches his hand around to the back of Logan's neck, and feels a button at the base of his hairline, which he presses and holds down, praying that it starts to glow. 

And thankfully, it does.

There's a small power-up tune that plays as the button on the back of Logan's neck flashes, before Logan's eyes are slowly blinking open. They shift from solid black to bright wide, and then with a few more blinks blue irises are forming, swirling around like a loading screen before solidifying with a black pupil. 

Logan stares blankly for a minute, before his face heats up into an embarrassed flush. 

"Sorry," he mumbles, as Janus helps him sit up. 

"Sorry?" Janus repeats, in disbelief. "I'm the one who should be apologizing! Are you... hurt in any way?" 

"No."

"Are you sure?" 

Janus's hands reach for Logan's face, but Logan grabs his wrists and causes him to stop short. Logan's eyes flicker away from Janus, before settling back on him as he admits "I shut myself down." 

"What?!" Janus frowns and smacks Logan's shoulder. "You're not funny. The others would have never let me hear the end of it if I'd damaged you!" 

Logan clears his throat. "I could feel a server overload coming due to the electricity and so shut myself down in order to reprogram myself and install better hardware. It's still processing, but it should finish in a couple minutes." 

"Better hardware?" 

Logan stretches his arm out, wiggles his fingers, and then circles his arm around, testing his mobility. "Yes. Better hardware. Obviously a surplus amount of electricity can cause physical damage, but I'm fairly resilient. My main concern would be my hard drives or servers becoming overwhelmed and either corrupting or frying them altogether. So... I installed a few failsafes." 

"Such as...?" 

"I lowered my electricity output temporarily," Logan begins, listing items off the top of his head, "both for my benefit, and yours-" 

Janus looks away at the implication he'd be reaching back into Logan's insides. 

"I downloaded some protection agencies that increase my server's abilities to withstand extreme stress, I copied and uploaded some of my most important assets to the cloud, I ran a diagnostic and made sure no permanent damage was done, and reprogrammed myself to shut down in the event of extreme electric damage so that neither of us would be killed if that intense of a shock were to happen again." 

Staring blankly at Logan, Janus clasps his hands together. "So... we're good to resume?" 

Logan sighs, but a smile tugs at the corner of his lips. "Yes; if you so desire." 

And Janus does so desire, and so flips Logan back over without warning, where Logan obediently stays on his hands and knees. He lets Janus push his chest against the ground and flip his back panel open once more, and tries to keep his body from overheating when he feels Janus's bulge push against his clothed ass. 

"Your fans flicked on again," Janus comments, as his hands plunge back into Logan's innards. He feels wind blow over his scales and shivers, but is more than amused at how quickly they were activated. 

"It's a precaution," Logan murmurs, visibly embarrassed. 

Janus leans over Logan, grinding his hard cocks over Logan's backside and groaning into his ear, before Janus searches for a new item inside of Logan to play with. He pokes the small compartment, though now it's lacking fluid. While that means no more mess, Janus suspects that Logan won't mind having a dry orgasm or two. 

Logan lets out a shaky breath as Janus's fingers rub over his ribcage, his spine, and then back down to his wires, some hanging looser than others. Briefly, Janus's fingers rub over an unused outlet - fit for a hard drive, if Logan ever needed to transfer outside information to his servers - and it makes Logan moan outright. 

"I've heard of plugs being used during sex, but you take it to a whole new level," Janus teases, as his other hand tugs firmly on an intertwined group of wires, which makes Logan suddenly cry out, arching his chest against the floor. Janus grinds his thumb more purposefully over the empty socket. "Maybe I'll download some of Remus's porn onto a hard drive and plug it into you without warning. Would you like that? If I overwhelmed your intellectual technology with graphic, defiling content?" 

Despite Logan's typical stoic behavior, he actually pushes his forehead against the floor as he moans out "yes." His voice is glitchy and quiet, and it causes Janus to let out a shuddering breath of his own as he ruts his hips against Logan's ass. 

As Janus's hand continues to slide against the open plug in the lower right hand side of Logan's back, his other caresses the wires up to where they disappear into a black box. And so, he slides it back down to a circuit board, which he is gentle when touching despite Logan beeping in surprise as Janus's fingers tap against it.

"Careful!" Logan again exclaims, though he sounds more excited than anything. "That's fragile!" 

Janus grinds harder against Logan's ass at just how cute he sounds. "I am careful," he assures Logan, while pushing his longer thumb nails into both the plug and the circuit board. 

Little flickers of electricity bounce off the circuit board, shocking Janus once or twice, but it's significantly tamer compared to what he's already experienced. And with Logan's little jolts and whimpers, Janus can assume he's feeling the shocks too.

But what Logan's really amazed by is how foreign and obviously wrong the protrusion of Janus's nail is into his outlet, and the scratching of his circuit board, and yet... he's getting off on this technological malpractice. 

Everything that Janus is doing to him is unique. New. And so Logan desperately tries to record and memorize the strange way it feels. However, the light touches also allows Logan to breathe - both metaphorically, and artificially. In this brief respite, Logan's reminded that he's pathetically hard due to the weight of his cock hanging between his legs. He knows his fluid compartment is empty, but that doesn't negate his ability to have an orgasm, and he knows Janus will going to push him to his limit again and again and again if he so desires. 

Embarrassed, Logan hides his face in the floor, picturing how lewd and unprofessional he's being. He must look like some sort of sexbot! But before he can complain, Janus is dipping his face into Logan's panel, and lightly blowing air over his circuit board, causing Logan to gasp as his head shoots up in surprise. 

He tries to crane his head back to look at Janus, who just grins at him in response and grinds a little harder, reminding Logan that Janus is also getting off on toying with him like he's some sort of do-it-yourself robot kit. 

Logan opens his mouth to complain, but nothing comes out. Still though, Janus playfully explains "I thought I saw a speck of dust," lying right through his teeth. His words however have Logan whining anyway, and Janus draws a particularly loud noise from him when he begins to snake his fingers around a couple wires. 

Even the faintest of touches make him moan and shut his eyes, submissively pushing his face back into the ground as Janus messes with him. 

"What-" Logan starts, but his voice abruptly glitches and cuts out, making him flush and focus for a moment on steadying himself. After clearing his throat, he tries again, and asks "what are you doing?" 

Janus just smiles. "I think I see a few tangled wires..." he says, as both of his hands move to a cluster of them. Feeling Janus's fingers caress the cords makes Logan gasp, only for him to moan when Janus begins to carefully pluck and untwist a set that were indeed wrapped around each other. They're guided out of sockets in order to be looped through the meshed cables, and then re-plugged in such smooth tandem that Logan's never given a break to catch his breath. 

He's touching multiple wires for a prolonged amount of time, gently maneuvered back to where Janus believes they should be, even if it doesn't affect their ability to function at all. 

And Logan repeatedly moans and groans as Janus continues to slide the wires past each other, rubbing them against other cords and in-between his own warm, fleshy fingers. Logan's noises increase in pitch the longer Janus touches, and raise in volume the firmer his caresses get. 

And while Janus takes his time initially in playing with Logan, he can't help but become impatient at the lack of pleasure he's feeling himself, and so grabs Logan's wires more tightly - almost as leverage - while he grinds harder against him, moaning into Logan's back panel and breathing over his sensitive hardware. 

A click is heard followed by Logan's internal fans whirring slightly louder, as though they've increased in intensity and kicked into high-gear, and Janus can't help but laugh softly as he rests his forehead against the side of Logan's back - teetering on the edge of his synthetic flesh and Logan's exposed innards.

"Feeling hot?" Janus teases, before his forked tongue licks across the rim of the panel's opening. That has Logan crying out; the power button on the back of his neck flashing excitedly. Janus raises his eyebrow as he looks at it. 

"Is this draining your battery?" he asks, and watches Logan slump in humiliation, as pleasure rushes through his body as Janus continues to twirl his wires around like they're fidget toys for his amusement. "My, we might just have to leave you plugged in all night to recuperate after this!" Janus's fingers pull out of Logan's panel, sliding over his inner walls before leaving entirely, and instead move to circle around his charging port on his lower back. 

Lightly, Janus rubs his pointer finger over it, and that's all it takes. 

Logan's gasping, crying and glitching - his moans a stuttering cacophony of different sound bites and start-up noises, all mixed in with his artificial breathing and the differing noises spilling from his back. His charging port sparks and the electricity catches Janus again, shocking him more intensely this time, but he moans against Logan and just presses his finger harder against it, rubbing it feverishly against the outlet as Logan's worked through a dry orgasm before he lays limply on the ground, wonderfully overstimulated and burnt out (literally). 

Janus smiles as he moves his hand away from Logan's port, and spends the next minute or so humping against Logan's ass before he comes in his own pants with a soft moan, and then closes Logan's back panel before falling against him. However, the constant light from Logan's flashing power button bothers him, and so he pulls away. 

"You really should plug yourself in," Janus comments, as he helps Logan to his feet. 

Logan struggles to stand for a moment, mumbling "hold on... recalibrating balance settings..." while trying to get his loose cock back into his jeans, before he falls over onto his metal table chest-first.

He lays against it limply, and thanks Janus after the latter struggles to lift Logan's heavy form fully onto the surface. 

Janus circles around Logan to his wall outlet, where he takes Logan's charger into his hand and promptly plugs it in. Logan whines, as though he's still sensitive, but his power light glows happily at being plugged in. Janus leans against the table and sighs. 

"How are you feeling?" 

Logan turns his head to the side, so he can speak without sounding muffled. "Fine. I don't think anything's permanently damaged." 

Janus huffs out a laugh. "That's a relief." 

"Knowing you? I agree." 

Janus smacks Logan's lower thigh playfully, before focusing on his breathing for a moment. Logan's rhythmic, synthetic breathes contrast greatly to Janus's more irregular exhales, but there's both visibly pleased, albeit a tad messy. He'll get himself cleaned up after catching his breath, and he supposes that when he's done with a bath he'll come wipe Logan down. He'll even be extra careful! He's sure Logan will appreciate it. 

[borrowedtimeandspace]

Little Dipper

27. Jewelry

From this list of gt prompts

AU: Undefined Thirteen AU

Note: Finally watched Power of the Doctor, and I already miss Jodie. I do love the idea of these two together, and I hope I can write more for them. Very very excited for Fourteen and Fifteen though! Soon...

p.s. TIL that 'dipper' is British slang for a pickpocket. Go figure.

~~~

“Zepheera!!”

The Doctor’s voice bounced off the jagged metal surfaces around her as she called out for her diminutive companion. She watched every step and peeked around and under every single thing in her path through the wrecked ship to be absolutely certain the four and a half inch tall woman wouldn't be overlooked.

Everything had gone to plan. …Mostly. Sure, being captured and separated from the TARDIS was never ideal, but they had an ace up their sleeve! Or to be more accurate, the Doctor had a borrower down her coat hood, completely undetected by their captors.

Like usual, they played to their strengths to get out. The Doctor ran distraction, letting her motormouth run free while Zepheera snuck around in the ship's nooks and crannies to find ways to sabotage the craft. 

It was a calculated risk. They were still within the atmosphere of a planet and not that far from its surface, and the Doctor insisted there was very little that Zepheera could mess with that wouldn't have some sort of emergency backup that would kick in eventually. It was simply a matter of throwing enough out of whack to cause a little chaos and give the Doctor a chance to gain her freedom and an upper hand. Worst case scenario, the ship got a little bumped and scraped if nobody could stabilize it before they hit the ground. 

And, well…

In the aftermath of the crash, the crew were now more concerned about the ship's status than keeping an eye on the Doctor, so long as she didn't run off on them. That left her alone in her search for her friend, desperately listening for any reply.

Finally, as she approached the bridge, she finally heard it. A faint but familiar voice ringing out distantly over her head.

“Doctor…!”

Blonde hair whipped around as the Doctor craned her neck to find the borrower calling back to her. It was all a bit of a mess to say the least, but she'd been traveling with Zepheera long enough to have really honed her keen eye for the tiniest movements. Up in what used to be the ceiling, a maintenance panel had come off and what looked like several rolls of wire had come undone. A tiny figure waved for the Time Lord’s attention in the hole the missing panel left.

“Oh, you're okay!” the Doctor beamed, beyond relieved to see Zepheera in one piece. She had no doubt that her friend was clever and hardier than she looked, but the crash had been a little more intense than anticipated and she couldn't help worrying. With a wave back, screwdriver in hand, she added, “A-plus work! Got my sonic back, and now we can figure out what's going on here, and how to get back to the Tardis!”

Zepheera gave an exaggerated shrugging motion with her arms as she looked down on the completely knackered bridge. “Got a bit carried away, I guess! Thought you said they had ways to keep it from crashing!”

The Doctor winced. “I may have got the model numbers muddled up. Ooh! Try saying that five times fast. Anyway, let's get you down from there! Can you climb these?” She gestured broadly toward the wires, which were long enough to make it all the way down to the bridge floor. 

The ceiling was quite a substantial height, and at a bit of an angle thanks to the ship being slightly wedged into the ground. That put the panel hole about thirty feet above the Doctor's head. Borrowers, as Zepheera had demonstrated on a number of occasions, were excellent climbers. The Doctor had no doubt in her skills, only the precarious nature of this particular circumstance. The wires all seemed rather slick, and wouldn't be likely to offer much in the way of purchase.

Zepheera seemed to be following the exact same train of thought as the Doctor, having gone quiet as her shape shifted slightly in the opening. Then she piped up, “Actually… I'll be down in a jiff. Get ready to catch me!”

The Doctor didn't have time to wonder what the plan was; Zepheera disappeared completely from the panel, leaving the Time Lord to hurry and get into position near the wires.

To her surprise, Zepheera leapt out of the hole, catching her fall on something draped over one of the wires to slide down like a zip line. The Doctor hadn't seen her use something like that before, and was certain that she would have by now if this was something Zepheera kept on her.

As the borrower slid further down the wire and closer to the Doctor, realization struck her. What little sunlight came in through windows and cracked seams of the ship glinted off the silver material of Zepheera's sliding device, the shape of which was awfully familiar. One of the Doctor's primed-to-catch hands snapped up to her left ear.

Her jaw dropped, and she shot an affronted glare to her rapidly descending companion. “Oh, you cheeky little–!”

She didn't have time to finish her grumble before it came time to actually catch Zepheera. She landed in a heap in the Doctor's right hand, breathing hard after such a leap.

The Doctor's earring chain lay across her lap, having done its job of carrying the borrower all the way down the wire.

“When did you even have time to nick that??” demanded the Doctor.

“Oi!” Zepheera shot back while she gathered the jewelry up in her arms and pushed herself up to stand on the Doctor's palm. “I didn't nick it. I borrowed it.” To illustrate her point, Zepheera took the two studs at the ends of the chain in her hands and held her arms out long for the Doctor to take it back. “Easy to forget when it doesn't come up much out in space, I know, but I am very good at it.”

The Doctor snatched the earring with a flat look at Zepheera before she deposited her to a shoulder to free up her hand. “Smart move,” she admitted. “Ask nicely for it next time, and you might earn bonus points.”

“On top of my A-plus?” Zepheera prodded teasingly.

Rather than rise to the bait, the Doctor simply started to replace her earring. This meant both her hands encroached on Zepheera's space, and she was lightly shoved off of the Doctor's shoulder to slide harmlessly into her hood.

Though she pretended not to notice, the Doctor listened for the telltale muffled “Oomph!” and the light squirming against her back before she started walking. She could already feel Zepheera starting to climb her way back up to the opposite shoulder.

“Right,” said the Doctor decisively on the way to one of the ship's numerous newly opened exits. “Back to business.”

[mail-me-a-snail]

(i hope this isn't overstepping in some way but the image came to me and i wanna share so)

clearing my throat

idk if vance would just let anyone dig around in his cyberware and inner workings but i think tiger would be very fascinated by the high tech he's going on in there.. all fancy and packed full with more cyberware most anyone could handle

he may be no ripper or even an expert in netrunning cyberware but you'd have to be a gonkbrain to not recognize the beauty of all this tech

oh no worries you're perfectly fine !! i always love it when people tell me they (or their ocs) wanna dig around in vance's mechanical guts :3

tiger...he's got a soft touch. even with his physical prowess and heft during his and vance's friendly scuffles, there's a gentle side to him. it's cautious; it's especially careful when it comes to machinery.

(gotta be, if you're working on less than preem truck engine's bits and kibble with such big, beaned paws)

trade in a mechanic's tools for a ripper's kit. i think vik would lend tiger his, so long as he brings them back clean.

vance's tattoos conceal the realskinn seams on his torso; even if he had unmarked skin, you'd have a hard time finding the seams just by looking. touch him--gently, of course. notice how goosebumps rise in the wake of your touch. how he watches your every move, not out of fear--but interest.

he's used to being studied; poked; prodded; adjusted.

this soft appraisal...he's not sure how to feel about it yet.

so, keep going; make him forget how to decide.

there's a specific tool in a ripper's kit tiger's gonna need. it's a flat-headed wedge; vik uses to pop open the panels of his patient's cyberware.

wedge it here, in the line where vance's torso ends and his arm socket begins. do the same on the other side. easy now. don't brute force it; it'll open if it's meant to open.

congrats! the front of his torso should pop off now. yes, it should come off--it's gonna look weird. don't think about it too hard.

you have now peeled vance back to the first layer of his machinery.

his biomonitor hums red and organic-like from within his titanium ribcage. his pulmonary implants--which are vaguely lung shaped and black, covered in a white, hexagonal cooling mesh--start rising and falling that much faster.

apart from his mechanical biological necessities, his guts are a mass of thick, red, braided wires; open and occupied ports and free data shard storage units; white biolights blinking almost sleepily; arasaka's name and logo embossed or carved or branded into each individual piece of tech.

if tiger pressed his paw pads against any of those parts, they'd hum, warm, in response.

if tiger ran his fingers up and down the wires that constitute vance's central nervous system, vance would shiver.

the layers of his machinery go two more, up to his spine. tiger would find more wires, lights. vance's cyberdeck, also, a spidery, kitbashed thing comprised of golden microchip lines and little silver messages for arasaka techie eyes only.

he's less than comfortable with people accessing him that deeply, though, so the first layer will have to do for now.

he is a beautiful piece of technology, that much is true. he's top of the line; the be-all-and-end-all of arasaka's dedicated netrunning tech; horrifically unique.

while messing around in there--unplugging shit willy nilly, slotting random shards and cables into his free ports, that sort of thing--is extremely dangerous, a little curiosity would never hurt vance.

if anything' he'd encourage it; he's a big nerd for tech, especially of the netrunning kind. he could go on for hours and hours about efficiency and cyberspace and deep diving (even if he can't do that last one anymore).

if tiger wanted to lean over vance like he was another engine in need of observation, box him in on a ripper's chair, or wherever they're doing this appraisal, if tiger thought his parts beautiful...

keep looking; make him remember how to preen under close examination.

[insomniamamma]

The Shallow: Din Djarin x f!reader

A/n: written for @oonajaeadira &  @yearofcreation2023 's challenge, my Year of Kisses. This prompt is a kiss before dying. This is set post s2 of The  Mandalorian. In this story Din and the reader have a ship called the Mudhorn.  Did I name a hyperspace phenomina after a Lady Gaga song? Yes i did.

Warnings: Angst for days. Implied main character death. References to sex but nothing explicit. Helmetless Din.  Grogu is safe with Luke so at least there's that. Also I have given up trying to make this stupid webbed site format things properly.

You know what the jump is supposed to feel like. You've been mechanic crew on plenty of small outfits before hooking up with the Mandalorian. There's usually a sliding sensation, a feeling in the inner ears, sometimes you can see it almost, the nearest surface bending down in a curve to oblivion, the tricks that hyperspace plays on a person's nerves, but it doesn't let up this time, that feeling that the world is bottoming out into an endless arc into nothing, the hyperdrive housing jets sparks overhead that burn sharp on your exposed skin, but it snaps you out of it some, reminds you that no matter how things look, there is still the here and now of the Mudhorn and she is wallowing-- Your coms crackle to life--

"What's happening down there? She's fighting me--" And you can hear the hyperdrive and sub-light engines surging intermittently, like they're fighting with each other and you go cold all over. This isn't supposed to happen. "What can you see out the window?" "This is no time--" "JUST TELL ME--" "Lines. Twisting lines. Are those stars?" "Kriff, we're tumbling." You feel the hyperdrive surge, that feeling of falling, the straight lines and struts of the Mudhorn curving away from you into angles that are impossible, the ship groans around you.

"We're in the shallow," you say, "Stop fighting it! We're going to break up!" They call it the interstice, the nowhere, the not-place. The place between real space and hyperspace, a film that you punch through like the surface tension on a water drop. You slap the control panel to your left and fire-suppressant foam dumps from above, dampening the sparks. The fire's out but the sublight-engines and hyperdrive still push and pull against each other like the chambers of a diseased heart. The Mudhorn groans around you but holds. For now. You plug your data-pad into the boards and start running diagnostics.

"We're in the shallow," says Mando. You startle and hit your head on the panel you've wedged yourself under. Lay back on the creeper and press a hand to your forehead to make sure you're not bleeding. "Dank Farrik! You scared me--" "What does that mean?" You haul yourself from under the panels and peer up into the nothing of his T-visor. "It means that the primary boards are slag," you say, and you feel tears prick hot in the corners of your eyes, "Your nav computer and your joystick are trying to work through a fused brick. So I would appreciate it greatly if you'd stop touching things--" You go to slide yourself back under the panels and Mando jams his foot beneath the creeper's wheels. "What does this mean?" "I don't know yet," you say, "The main control conduits are fried. Long range nav's down. Guidance is down. Computer interface is down. I don't know if I can get any of it back up. If I can get the computer back up I might be able to talk to the engines." "Might." "Look, that's the best I've got. Either lend a hand or get out of my way."

It doesn't help that every so often your visual field curves down in an impossible arc, while your inner ear tells you that the ship is moving violently up and to the side. You took a stim shot and have an anti-nausea patch slapped to your neck. We're going to be stuck like this forever, a traitorous voice pipes up as your fingers fly over the boards, splicing wires and sucking at burns, trying to puzzle your way around a half-slagged electrical system, all the while giving Mando instructions. There's no forever on a spaceship, a second, equally traitorous voice has it's say. Battery power runs down. Consumables run out. Scrubbers saturate. Fuel burns up. Best not to think of it. Work the problem. Solve one problem and the universe might hand you another one. You hear Mando's footfalls and haul yourself from underneath, swiping at your gritty eyes with equally gritty hands.

"When did you eat last?" "What? Why?" At the mention of food your stomach rumbles like a sleeping rancor. "Come on," he says and offers you a hand up, "You've been down here for hours." "The conduits--" "Aren't going anywhere. Neither are we." You take his hand and he leads you to the tiny galley.

Mando makes you eat two ration bars and drink a bowl of broth before he will even let you explain to him. And then he makes you say it twice. "We're stuck between," "Between?" "Hyperspace and real-space. The shallow." "That's not possible." says Mando. "Then I guess we have nothing to worry about." Anger flares bright, but it's short lived. It's hard to maintain anger at a featureless helmet, "Look. When we jump to hyperspace it just happens right? It happens so fast that we can't even think of it. The computer can see it a little bit--" "The ratty data," says Mando, "Right after a jump you get a bunch of nonsense. The nav-comp just logs it as noise--" "You've noticed! Most people don't give it a thought!" And you feel yourself smiling despite the situation you're in, "It's not noise! That's when you pass through the shallows. There's real space and there's hyperspace but there's a membrane between them--" "So we're caught in this membrane." "Yes. I think so. Kriff. I honestly don't know how we haven't just broken up."  Mando nods. "I've got hull sensor warnings going off everywhere," he says, "Shields will only help for so long. We've got to get out of this lurch." "I can't reroute the controls," you shake your head, "The mains are all slagged. Everything overloaded when we jumped." "I still have some maneuverability--" "The secondary thrusters," you say, "It's an independent system. But we've got to save that. That's all we've got control over right now. If I could--" "What do we do?" You bury your face in your hands, and that makes the sideways-upward-nowhere lurch and shimmy seem a little less, your eyes and your inner-ears not arguing for a few seconds. Mando rests his hand on your shoulder. "Cyare. What do we do?" "I don't know."

"Look," you say. Some time has passed. You're not sure how much. "I can force us into real space, but it means cutting the the mains off. You might have to fix the lurch with the secondaries. I think I can bring the mains back online, but the hyperdrive--" "What about the hyperdrive?" "The intakes are fused open," you say, "The only way we can shut it down is to blow the tanks and vent the fuel into space. It'll go into shutdown on its own. It's a hard failsafe." "We dump the hyper fuel and we'll be stranded wherever we drop out," "Yeah." "This is it? This is all you've got?" And you can't look at him, you can't look at the blank of his visor and his hands planted on his hips. You turn tail and run into the bowels of the ship, closing the bulkheads behind you. You fetch up near the main engines, hear them misfiring and trying to spool back up, listen to the drone of the machinery that is going to kill you, bury you face in your hands and cry as hard as you've been trying not to this last endless day. It doesn't even sound like you, what comes out of your throat, the wail of a baby forgotten in it's crib. There's nothing more you can do.

He regrets the words as soon as they come out of his mouth, sees the flinch, the flash of hurt across your face and then your back as you run from him, bulkheads sealed before he can even think to chase you. He uses the manual override on the doors. This ship is big, far too big for two people, he thinks and not for the first time. He finds you in the engine access bay, pressed against the bulkhead, tucked into yourself, curled up tight.

"I can't fix it," you say, "That last shot before we jumped hit just right. Fused most of our avionics up solid. I can't--I can't-- even if I had a bay with all the parts and mech droids-- this is--I don't know what else to do." Mando lays his hand on your shoulder, a light, hesitant touch. "This is a one in a million thing--I don't--" "It's okay," says Mando. "I can't fix it," "It's okay," he curls his hand lightly around the nape of your neck and gives you a little shake. You lean back into him, feel the cold beskar at your back. You're so tired, more tired than you can ever remember feeling, and his arms come up around you, wrap over your own, he rocks you like one would a child. Grogu's not here. Thank the force for small mercies.

"Do we dump the fuel first or cut off the engines?" "Fuel," you say, "If we blow the tanks in real-space it'll just tumble us worse." "How do we do it?" Asks Mando,"We can't spacewalk out there. Not like this." "Belly turret," you say, "Pull up the cannons all the way and you should be able to hit the outboard tank housing." "So we shoot ourselves in the ass." Says Mando. And you feel a smile creeping up your tear-streaked face. "Yep. We shoot ourselves in the ass. Once the pressure drops we'll hear the hyperdrive go into shutdown right before we drop.  I'll kill the mains and then you'll have to use the secondary thrusters to pull us out of the lurch." "This is a bad idea." "You got a better one?" "No. You ready?" "Kriff. I guess."

It worked. You didn't expect it to. The drop into real space was rough but Mando had managed to right the ship. After much cursing and cajoling, the main engines had come back online, and now you sit on the cold deck plating with the guidance board held in your hand, rerouted to back up power via a long, much spliced cable, fed back into one of the few working displays via a slightly less tortured cable. Mando sits like a statue in the pilot's chair as you bring up one star-chart after another, desperately hoping something will line up, anything that can give you a reference, some idea of where you've fetched up. "No," says Mando. "ok now?" "No." "Now?" "No." The guidance board by itself is a dumb data repository. Without the Mudhorn's main computer up you have to bring up one file at a time, and wait for the external sensors to catch up. "Now?" "No." "Now?" "No." The main computer could do this in a couple heartbeats, but the main computer is a useless brick at the end of a slagged cable wired into a half-melted board. There is only so much you can do. You've hardwired a keypad into the guidance board, typing grid-coordinates in manually, squinting at a sheet of flimsi you found tucked behind the board when you'd yanked it out. "Now?" "No." "Now? "No." "Now?" "Stop." "What? You've got something?" "This isn't going to work--" "It will! We just have to keep at it!" "Cyare. It's been almost two days. We need to stop." "If I could just figure out where we are--" "And do what? We're broadcasting our position," he says, "Someone will hear the distress signal or they won't." "If I can figure out where we are we could at least aim ourselves someplace," you say but you know there's no point to it. Hyperspace has made the galaxy feel small, but it is not. This system you've fetched up in is far from habitable, a young star with a broad accretion disk, spewing radiation, nothing to indicate that anyone's ever been here. Traveling sublight? Coruscant could one system over and you and Mando would be desiccated mummies before you ever got there. Still, your fingers move over the keypad.

"Now? Now? Mando, now?" And all you get back is static. You keep punching the numbers and calling over comms until you hear his footfalls, glance up from the board to see his offered hand. "It's time to stop," he says, and you let him pull you up from the cold deck-plating, from the hastily assembled control board and ugly snaked cable, his hand folded around yours. "Are you hungry? Can you eat?" You shake your head. "Maybe some broth," you say and paw at the tears that build up in your eyes. You're not like this. You don't cry like this. You don't fall apart like this and here you are in the space of two days, or is it three? Or four now? Cracking open and leaking out. Mando lays his hand on your back and steers you to the galley. You can't look at him. He presses the steaming cup into your hands. "Mando? I'm sorry." His chest constricts. Death has followed him as far back as he can remember, nearly catching him on Aq Vetina, filling his footsteps through the sands of Tatooine, clinging to his heels across a hundred worlds. He lives and breathes and hunts knowing that death has been his partner in the dance of his life since he swore the Creed.  We burn bright and strong, and when death comes for us we embrace her and let her return us to the Manda. We take her hand. Unafraid. This is the Way. He has lived on borrowed time since he swore the Creed and took up the armor. But you never made that deal. You've fallen asleep with your face in your arms, empty bowl at your elbow. "Cyare," he touches your elbow, and you blink up at him, and you are tired, worn down to your bones. He offers his hand.

He doesn’t say anything. Just leads you through the belly of the ship and to his berth, a steadying hand against the small of your back. You’ve bunked together before. The time when he fell through the ice on Arliss and you warmed him the only way you knew how, pulled all his wet gear off and left it heaped on the deck plating, save for his helmet and curled yourself around him. The time you caught sick after a layover on Kijimi, he kept you close while you shivered, hands warm against your skin in the pitch dark. And then there was the botched job on Florrum. You'd boosted with blaster shots still ringing against the hull and then collapsed into each other, his breath coming hard and ragged through the outputs of his helmet, clinging together, your blood singing in your ears in time, rolling hard and desperate inside, you shattered and then you slept together, wrapped in the glow of hyperspace. Nothing said after, nothing needed. We are here. We're still here.

You understand this for what it is. This need to be close, but when the door shuts behind you he doesn't douse the lights. Instead of the usual stripping of his armor, he reaches up for his helmet and you twist away, cramming your eyes shut. "Mando! Your Creed--" "The Creed is broken," he says, and his voice, unmodulated, is warm and uncertain, and laden with grief, "The Child is gone. But we're still here. Aren't we?" He cups your cheek in his calloused palm, and you lean into him, feel slow tears slip from your eyes. "Yeah. I guess we are." For now, you think but don't say, and turn your eyes up to meet his. And Maker and Force and Stars, he is not how you imagined, eyes deep and beautiful and dark and tired, stitched around with wrinkles, worry lines tracing his forehead, dark grey-shot curls sticking up in every direction. Uneven mustache and scruffy jaw, full lips quirked into a one-sided smile. "Hi," he says, and those dark eyes shine with unshed tears. "Hi yourself," you say, and your impulse is to reach for him as you have in the dark, but you curl back, and his hands find your wrists and circle them, guides your hands to his face. He closes his eyes when you touch him, leans into your palms, stays still as you trace the strong line of his nose, the gentle curve of his lower lip, the lush softness of his curls, sweep the tears away with your thumbs. You press your forehead to his, the same way he's done for you, cool beskar steel on warm skin, and then press your lips to the upturned corner of his mouth and he flinches back. You try to draw away, his hands still circling your wrists, your hands curled into fists, "I'm sorry--" But he doesn't let you retreat, cradles your hands in his, smoothes your fingers open to lace together with his, holds your hands against the armor that shields his heart. "Can you... do that again?" "Yeah," you say, and press your lips to his, "We've got all the time in the world."

[fineholeindia]

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[silverwings22]

Song of the Sea: Chapter 23: Homecoming

Chapter Warning: canon typical violence, generational trauma, mentions of slavery and medical torture Series Warnings: explicit smut, alien anatomy (it's a monsterfucker fic, guys), major character injury, grief, canon typical violence, autistic meltdowns, and my terrible attempts at Mando'a

Previous Chapter:

Next chapter:

Tech was working on getting the systems back online while Shiani and Echo worked on the Marauder's hull. They'd barely made it back to Ord Mantell without combusting, skidding to a landing and leaving half their landing gear across the hangar.

“This is taking too long, Echo! Hunter is in danger! We've got to get back to Daro.” Omega was pacing behind them. 

Shiani's head popped out of a panel she had wedged her entire body into to weld. “In what? The Marauder has more holes than that cheese Wrecker likes.”

Echo nodded, watching her disappear again. “She's right. Until the ship is fixed we can't. Pass me the spanner. Hunter can hold out until we get this repaired. Otherwise we're back at square one, or we're all in Imperial custody.”

Shiani finished her weld and squished back out of the hole. “It’s not the Empire to worry about. Until this is fixed, space is more likely to kill us.” She set the welding torch down and started checking the external riveting. “Even I can’t survive sudden depressurization.”

Echo nodded. “I'm almost done with this. Go check on Tech?”

The siren nodded and headed inside the ship. Her mate was half under the console in the cockpit, working as fast as he could. “Tech?”

“Weapons and life support are functional. Navigation and shields less so. And I'm struggling to find anything on the communications array.”

“I’ll fix the comm system. It needs a reroute through the new power grid you installed.” She sat on the floor and started stripping wire coating and splicing them together. They could hear Wrecker outside as they worked, saying he'd left Gregor with Cid but she wasn't  happy about it. 

“Cid’s never happy…” Shiani muttered as the comm came to life for her. “Uh oh.”

“Uh oh? Why Uh oh?” Tech frowned, getting the other systems up. 

“I got the comm working, but Hunter just activated his locator.” She looked up anxiously. “It’s not on Daro.”

“Where, then?”

Her expression could only be described as haunted. “On Kamino, Tech.”

“... uh oh indeed.”

There was no turning back, though. Shiani got up and waved the rest of the squad in. “We’re operational now. Come in, we plan as we fly.”

Everyone got secure and Tech took off, setting the navi-computer. “The Empire is using Hunter’s locator on Kamino as some kind of trap, though I do not understand the purpose.” Tech muttered.

“No land. It's easy to trap us if they control where we dock.” Echo groaned. “How the hell are we going to pull this off?”

“I know a platform.” Omega said quietly. “It's hidden, and no one will be guarding it.”

Shiani looked at her, eyes widening. “You mean the platform? I know that one. It’s near Tipoca, I could follow the lights from my cave.”

Omega nodded. “I know how to activate it.”

Tech nodded. “Then I will need the coordinates.” He gestured for Omega to set it in the navi-computer, and she did with a grim determination in her eyes.

Shiani’s foot bounced on the floor, anxiety radiating off her. “You okay?” Wrecker asked.

“I didn’t want to go back to Kamino.” She whispered. “... things will be different. Tipoca isn’t your home anymore, we might have to approach in strange ways. But no matter what, you must not go in the water. You have to promise me.”

Echo frowned. “Why?” He was bracing to have to swim up a drain pipe to find Hunter. 

“Other sirens aren’t like me.” She whispered. “They will drown clones if they catch them. They hate everything the long necks make, even if it's good. You can't go in the open water. Only near the cities is safe. Only where the lights can see.”

Tech reached over and took her hand. “We will be careful.”

She nodded, still anxious. They had to do this without running into her people… “I’m marked for death too.” She touched the chains that hung from her arms quietly. “I’m not ready to die. I’m not done with stars, or with you..”

The cockpit went silent with the weight of the task ahead of them. Omega climbed into Shiani's lap again. “I never wanted to go back. Hunter promised I wouldn't have to.”

“You’re so brave, Baby Mega. And you love Hunter so much.” Shiani said softly.

Omega nodded and let herself get snuggled. “Do you hate Kamino?” She finally asked softly. 

“I hate to be trapped. There was no way out on Kamino, until my new family took me to the stars.” She squished a kiss to Omega's temple. “No cages for us anymore. Chainbreakers, all of us.”

Omega nodded, eyes serious. 

“I do not see the platform you indicated, Omega.” Tech frowned as the Marauder dipped low through the rainy skies of Kamino. There had been three large Imperial Venators hovering just within the atmosphere, but they hadn't behaved as if they'd noticed the Batch. He was confident they'd avoided detection, but Echo was more skeptical. 

“You have to get lower.” Omega stood up to get a better view. “Straight down from here.”

Shiani tapped the ship's scanner, displaying a large structure beneath the waves. “Here. This will help.”

“It is several meters down. We cannot land on that.” Tech frowned. 

“Get lower.” Omega urged. “Trust me.”

He sighed. “Very well.”

They lowered down inch by inch, until the landing gear was almost touching the water. Tech tried not to over-agonize about what Shiani had said throughout the slow landing. He was trusting a child, and if she was wrong they would sink in a tin can to the bottom of the sea full of hostile creatures willing to tear them limb from limb if they didn't drown first.

You must not go in the water.

Just as he was about to abort the attempt and risk landing somewhere else, the platform came rising out of the water to greet them. They settled on it, secure despite the pounding surf. Shiani looked at Omega. “I used to climb on this thing.” She murmured. “I got in so much trouble.”

“How are we going to get to the city if we can't swim it?” Echo frowned when they stepped out, everyone getting immediately soaked to the skin by the driving rain. 

“We'll take the tube.” Omega walked over to the middle of a round marking on the platform and stomped her foot. It opened up from below and a round tram car appeared. The group loaded inside and the lift took them down to a transparisteel railway tube. 

“I could never get close to this before.” Shiani murmured, uncomfortable. Going into the longneck city was the ultimate taboo… but it was for Hunter. For her family, Tech's family and Omega who was her best friend. “It’s electrified outside, I got  zapped a lot when scavenging.”

Tech nodded, glancing at his datapad. “This doesn't appear on any schematics.”

“Kaminoans keep a lot of secrets.” Echo said darkly. Rex had told him what happened to Fives while he was missing, and with the discovery of the inhibitor chips he'd put the pieces together. Kaminoan secrets had ruined more lives than he wanted to think about. And the frightened looking siren clinging to his brother was just another reminder. 

“Nala Se told me about this tunnel. It leads to her private research lab.” Omega explained. “Other ones like it are all over Kamino. 

Shiani visibly shuddered. “Lab.” She muttered with an edge of terror in her voice. Omega wrapped her hand into the siren's, rubbing her purple wrist with a little brown thumb. 

“You two okay?” Echo asked gently. 

“All that matters is that we find Hunter.” Omega whispered. 

Shiani swallowed hard. “Baby Mega is right.” She had to keep telling herself that, as the thought of a Kaminoan lab was the stuff of generational nightmares. But for her family, she'd face it even if her voice trembled. 

When they arrived in the laboratory, it wasn't bloodstained or dark like Shiani expected. It was neat and smelled of disinfectant, but she hung back suspiciously. “Hunter's comm is still active.” Tech muttered. “That is a good sign.”

“I'll get into the system and see where they're holding him.” Echo turned to a console to scomp in. 

Wrecker looked around curiously. “What's so special about this place anyway? Looks like every other lab on Kamino to me.”

“I was made here. And you all had your mutations enhanced.” Omega whispered. “You won't remember, but I do… you were all so little.”

Wrecker looked at Tech. “Really?”

“How could I possibly know that?” Tech sighed. “If it occurred when we were infants, I would have no memory.”

Shiani looked at Omega. “You remember the Batch as babies?” 

Omega nodded, scooting over to cuddle to the siren's side. “Then they sent them to be with the other clones.”

Shiani gently stroked the girl's hair. “Baby Mega really is the big sister, then. No wonder you love them so much.”

“All files have been wiped.” Echo called with a frustrated expression. “We'll have to try tracking the comm and hope Hunter is-” Before he could finish, Shiani pushed Omega into his arms and dove behind a console with an aggressive hiss and bared fangs. There was a struggle before she stood up, holding a droid in her coils. 

“Sneaky.” She snarled, threatening its wiring with her claws. 

“Please do not hurt me! I am a medical droid. I-”

“AZI!?” Omega squeaked. “What are you doing here?!”

“Omega? Oh, I am so relieved to see you are well!” The droid wiggled in Shiani's arms. 

“You know this droid?” Shiani frowned. 

“He's my friend, the one I told you about. Let him go.” Omega nodded, and the siren released him. AZI immediately darted over to Omega. “Now what are you doing down here, AZI?”

“I was hiding. Soldiers started deactivating droids and forcing key medical personnel into transports. Anyone who resisted was eliminated.” He explained. 

“Clone troopers?” Echo frowned. 

“No. All clone troopers were reassigned off world. These were the new TK troopers. There is only one clone still assigned to Kamino,  CT-9904.”

“Crosshair.” Wrecker looked hurt as he realized his brother was probably in on Hunter's kidnapping. 

Shaini clicked her fangs together before she closed her mouth. “Crosshair’s not himself. We rescue Hunter, and maybe we can rescue him too. The droid can help us.”

The droid hid behind Omega. “I am not equipped for combat, Miss sea monster.”

“I’m not a se- you know what, forget it. No time to argue.” She grumbled, looking at Tech. “Track the comm, please?”

 Tech nodded, trying his best not to smile. It was a dire situation and she was genuinely under duress, but her indignation was kind of cute. 

While he worked, AZI looked at Omega. “You must leave. It is too dangerous here, you could be seriously hurt.”

“We're not leaving without Hunter.” She said firmly. 

“His comm is pinging from the central cloning platform of the city.” Tech said after a moment. 

Omega nodded. “Let's go then. AZI, you're with us.”

Shiani pointed a claw at the droid. “What is your primary function?”

“To protect Omega and provide medical care in the event of emergency….” It stared at her nervously. 

“Good. You keep her safe or I will dismantle you for parts.” She huffed, following Tech out of the lab. If she focused on being mad at the droid or worried about Hunter, she could stifle the unrelenting terror this place sent through every cell in her being. 

Coming inside to fight for someone's life wasn't the same as secretly peeking through the windows or sneaking into open hangars. The fact that she was even here was undeniable proof she wasn't the siren who'd left Kamino months ago. No siren would do this… but a Bad Batcher would. 

“The comm coordinates appear to be coming from directly above us.” Tech finally said. “The training arena.”

“We'll be sitting ducks for a sniper like Crosshair if we go through the main door.” Echo countered.

“Then we will take the lift.” Tech pointed up. “The element of surprise should be enough to get the upper hand.”

Echo sighed and looked at Omega. “You and Shiani stay here. If things get bad, I'll contact you with a beacon.” He looked at Shiani. “You can get her back to the ship through the lab and contact Rex.”

Shiani just looked at Tech, who gave her an encouraging smile. “I have no doubt of your capabilities, cyar'ika.”

She watched the three clones get into the lift and ascend, tapping her foot and groaning suddenly. “They forgot crucial information. Their plan won't work, it’s up to us now.” She grumbled. 

“How do you know?” Omega frowned. 

“Crosshair predicted the Batch on Bracca, and didn't fall for diversion on Ryloth. He knows them too well. The only reason we escaped is things he can't predict: Me getting Echo to collapse the weapons’ deck, or the Syndulla family knowing Ryloth better than him. He’s gonna know they would use the lift. They’ll come up into an ambush.” Shiani gritted her teeth. “I love Tech, but he forgets even genius can be wrong.”

Omega's comm device blinked as Echo set off his distress beacon. “You called it. What do we do now?”

“CT-1409 said to retreat to the ship you arrived in.” AZI nervously pointed out. 

“Not gonna leave them. Right Baby Mega?” Shiani started searching the room. There had to be something they could use…

“Right.” Omega nodded. “Hey, what about the training droids?”

Shiani looked at the rows and rows of droids hanging dormant. They wouldn't differentiate between Imperial and clone, but they'd make one hell of a distraction. “Good plan. Set them for live rounds. They did they same thing before Onderan, Tech told me. Imperial troopers aren’t as good as clones, droids might kill them.”

AZI made a pitiful noise. “You frighten me. Omega, this is not an appropriate friend for you.”

Omega just nodded grimly at the siren, and they darted opposite directions to start unleashing the droids. AZI was helping the little blonde reluctantly when Shiani froze. “Someone’s coming. Keep working.” She jumped up and suction cupped herself to the ceiling, hanging upside down as a trooper in black armor walked in.  

“Commander, I found the kid.”

“Put her in a shuttle off world.” The slink of Crosshair’s voice, which she'd only heard when he was threatening to kill her the last time she'd been on Kamino, was unsettling.

She twisted around so her feet touched the top of a storage unit and kicked it over on top of the trooper, knocking them flat. “Enough droids now. We’ve gotta go.” Landing delicately on her feet, Shiani held a hand out to Omega. “That trooper came from this way. The arena access must be there.”

They took off with AZI right behind them, coming through the front doors to absolute chaos as droids came from all directions. “I think you may have activated to many droids.” AZI quipped.

“I can see that.” Omega lined up a target with her bow and Shiani pulled out her pistol. 

“No time to regret.” Shiani shrugged, shooting a droid.

“Crosshair’s hitting Hunter!” Omega yelped.

Shiani glanced down as the sergeant grabbed his brother's arm and threw him over his shoulder. Hunter was more suited to close combat, but it was evident the entire thing was a grudge match between brothers. “Hunter’s hitting back. They’re fine. Cover me.”

Omega shot a droid as the siren dove into the fight, up close and personal where she was better equipped to fight. “Hello Tech.” She chirped as she popped up next to him and kicked a droid away from him.

“Hello, cyar'ika. What are you doing here? We told you to evacuate.” Tech ducked as she used one droid as a projectile, launching it with her tentacles.

“We had a better idea.” She grinned. “Cover your ears.”

Everyone but Crosshair slapped their hands over their ears, and Shiani let out a scream that shook the droids apart and sent the sniper flying. 

“Sorry!” She squeaked apologetically. “You okay, Crosshair?”

He groaned and got upright, leaning on his rifle for a moment. Before anyone could really process it, he turned and shot a droid, fighting with them now.  Hunter recovered his weapons as well, and the brothers tucked into a familiar formation. 

It took a few minutes to fully subdue the droids before Omega ran over to them. The sergeant was holding a pistol, staring at the now outnumbered sniper. “Come with us. We can help you get the chip out of your head.”

“I already had my chip removed, a long time ago.” Crosshair said coldly. 

“What? When?” Hunter's eyes widened. 

“Does it matter?” The sniper drawled.

Hunter flicked the stun setting on his pistol faster than Crosshair could get his gun up, taking him down in a pulse of blue light. “Pick him up, Wrecker. Crosshair’s coming with us.”

Omega's arms wrapped around Hunter's waist and he smiled faintly. “I promised you'd never have to come back here. I'm sorry.”

“You did it for me.” She looked up, eyes bright. “Everyone needs someone to come looking for them when they're lost.”

Shiani gave a proud nod. Wrecker threw Crosshair over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and they headed hurriedly out of the training arena. 

Tech glanced at his datapad. “Three Venators are closing in on the city.”

“Facility’s empty, ships coming down…” Shiani's skin turned pale. “The Empire is going to destroy Tipoca.”

“That is likely.” Tech nodded. 

“With us in it.” Echo blanched. 

“Run. Clones don't breathe water.” Shiani shoved them hurriedly down the hall. If those Venators opened fire, they'd drown or be killed by debris. She'd lose her family, and be alone in the wreckage that her people would eventually come to investigate when the lights went out. 

She'd die in the clone's tomb.

[helenwei001-blog]

[mustdies]

DAY 0, LATE NIGHT. CHASING FATE WITH A HAND ON THE WHEEL AND A FOOT ON THE GAS WITH @angusbyrne

the night yawns lazily, unfurling its wide black maw to cast an awning of clouded stars. few windows blink with warm, amber light. as far as dante was concerned, the house was asleep⸺immovable thing, cast in stone. no vigor since they'd left & far less upon their return. the rose bushes hadn't been trimmed, he could tell. it was beginning to feel as though the estate was already slipping away from them. maybe it hadn't deserved to be under their care. the house that raised them, kept their secrets ... bore their madness. and to think they only saw it fair to return to the grounds when matters became particularly dire. silence befalls and violence wakes, half-dressed in plaid pajama bottoms with a pre-roll tucked behind his ear. he should have been sleeping, or drunk⸺maybe letting his clothes make friends with the floor in some pretty little flat in tribeca but rather, he reverts. retrieves something from one of the many cavities life riddled him with, jostles around with memory until dante can muster a die hard habit. he's no longer a kid but he remembers all the best ways to make his own life ripe with trouble. considers that there's no one else here to catch him so why not fall. in stark lighting of the shared garage he can see fortune laid before him, a white car-cover blanketed over a very special do-not-touch. call it paranoid the way he hasn't stopped checking his six, call him crazy for thinking he'd get away with it. tarp is snatched with reckless abandon. he wonders how many times richard would turn over in his grave if he ever got word of this. despite, he tries for the doorhandle. it's unlocked. dante should be sleeping right now. he glimpses past his shoulder a singular time, screwdriver absently busying itself in his grasp. he wedges the panel in the steering column open, finds himself in the presumable company of another when he's finally located the ignition wire. a beat, to consider what excuse could be made for hijacking his father's car in the dead of night. let them see you for what you are. you're a fucking problem.