#also…I know this is NOT the point of the panel…but I am suddenly confused on how the Moon Knight pants work???

[fox-guardian]

[ID: An eight page digital comic featuring Sam, Celia, and Alice from The Magnus Protocol on a gray background. The characters are all colored with a single color each. Sam is red, Celia is green, and Alice is pink. Sam is a fat Arab man with short curly dark hair, a mustache, and a small goatee, and he is wearing small black earrings, a cardigan, a turtleneck, trousers and loafers. Celia is a taller Korean woman with short dark hair and she is wearing rectangular glasses, piercings including an industrial piercing, an x-shaped earring, and snakebites, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a vest, trousers, and black wrist cuffs. Alice is an even taller white woman with long fluffy hair and crooked teeth, and she is wearing cat eye glasses, three pairs of earrings, snakebites, a flannel shirt, a hoodie tied around her waist, a patchwork skirt, bracelets, and a lanyard.

Sam and Celia are stood at a table covered in papers. Celia urgently turns to Sam. Celia: Alice is coming! She can't catch us researching, we need a diversion, QUICK! How can we make her think we're not doing what we're doing? Sam, shrugging really hard: UHHHH she thinks I have a crush on you?? Celia, sweating, turns back to where Alice is coming from, panicked, and turns back to Sam, shrugging and reaching for him. Celia smiling a bit manically: Yeah, that'll work, sure!

Sam, with Celia's hands grabbing his cardigan: Wait whaAAAA- He is pulled out of frame. Alice walks in: Hey Sam, working hard or hardly woOOOAA She leans on the doorframe as she holds a hand to her chest in shock.

The next panel is rendered with soft pink shadows and "shoujo sparkles" in the now pink background. Sam is sitting on the table holding onto Celia, whose face is buried in his neck as she wraps one arm around his back and the other holds up one of his legs under his knee. Neither of their faces are visible. The rest of the page fades back to gray from there. Sam and Celia look over at Alice, hair ruffled, Sam is now blushing. Sam: ALICE!! He pushes Celia away and they look at each other for a moment, panicked. Sam: It's- .... exactly what it looks like! Celia: Aw, you've caught us! He rests his hands on her shoulders and they both look in opposite directions as though embarrassed. Celia is also blushing lightly. There are red and green neon signs pointing to them reading "Totally Ham-Slammin'" and "GAY! (in an M/F way)" respectively.

Alice looks to be in shock with a vacant expression and a computer pop up over her forehead reading "Alice.exe has stopped responding". In the next panel she is fine again and back to smirking. Alice: WOW SAM, didn't know you had it in you! Now I'm no snitch, so I didn't see anything, BUT- you lovebirds should cut it out before Gwen catches you. Celia and Sam look at each other anxiously, cheeks pressed together as she speaks. Alice: You KNOW she'd tell Lena. Celia, pulling back and smoothing her hair out: Oh, for sure. Sam: Th-Thanks, Alice. Alice: Don't mention it! I'll give you crazy kids a minute to straighten up, TA-TA~ She waves as she leaves.

Sam and Celia listen to her steps fade before going "phew" and finally pulling away from each other, now holding hands at an arms distance. Celia: You alright? That was kinda sudden.... Sam: It's fine! Just a bit caught off guard. Celia: I can't believe she actually bought all of that! Sam: Me either! Works for me, though.

Celia: Did you want to get down- Sam, pulling away suddenly, blushing again: NO! He crosses his legs and looks away sheepishly, scratching his head. Sam: I wanna stay here another minute or so.... Celia, concerned: You sure you're alright? Sam: Yeah! Just, er.... Celia looks at him, confused. Sam, blushing increasingly harder: Ahem. (He folds his hands in his lap politely.) I am not immune to being thrown on a table. Celia, smiling and politely stepping away: AH! .... Noted~

She walks away casually, still smiling. Celia: I'll give you a minute to collect yourself. Sam, head down in his lap, embarrassed: Thanks.... He looks up after she leaves. Sam: Wait. He straightens up, slightly panicked, face entirely red. Sam: What do you mean by "NOTED"?!

end ID]

~~~~

i am SO glad this episode didn't entirely debunk the silly headcanon that birthed this comic. initially i wasn't convinced sam actually had a crush so i made this like "well if he didn't before, HE DOES NOW" so.... here's this silly comic thing <3 i just think they're neat <3

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

Trimax Thoughts Vol. 5 Pt. 2

I want to talk about Knives for a sec. Up to where I've read in the manga so far, we really don't have much of an understanding of him yet. I think I may have a slight advantage in having watched one of the shows before starting (I've watched Tristamp) because otherwise I don't know if I would quite get what to make of him so far.

I won't say anything about Tristamp here since I'm not going to assume everyone in book club has seen it, but I did draw a conclusion from it that, after reading volume 5, I am almost positive applies to the manga version of Knives too.

Knives treats Vash as if he were an extension of himself.

[ID: A panel from Trigun Maximum volume 5. Knives stands casually, holding a cup and smiling as he greets his brother in Vash and Hoppered's shared flashback to July. Hoppered thinks "It's him..." as Knives says "Hey Vash." End ID.]

Ok so first off I need to establish something because it's important. Listen. I have no doubt that Knives loves his brother. I do not doubt that. But his behaviour towards Vash is actively and deeply cruel. Knives is friendly up until Vash disagrees with him, and then his mood suddenly changes for the worse - he has gone so far as to specifically target people Vash loves just to break the ideology he disagrees with, shifted culpability from himself to solely on Vash several times, violated his autonomy, and has on a few occasions physically restrained him. <- That's. Really bad. I would argue that these behaviours are in keeping with uh... pretty textbook manipulative/abusive behaviours.

However, here’s the thing: these kinds of behaviours are typically perpetrated because the person wants power over the victim. I think it's easy to read that into it, but I honestly don't think that's Knives' intention at all. He wants Vash with him. If anything his little "Watch it!" when Vash shoves him away just after the colony ships fall reads as genuine confusion. He's incredulous every time Vash points his gun at him. After all, as Knives puts it: they're brothers. They only have each other.

If Knives wants power over anything, I'd argue it's power over Rem, not Vash. He sees Vash's suffering and believes it was her who "made him like this", disregarding his own accountability in both Vash's continued pain... and her death. I do have to wonder if his attempts to break Vash's pacifism is also an attempt to make Rem's ghost leave them both for good, because there is no way Millions "I thought I'd spare her but now I see she was just as flawed" Knives felt no sadness or remorse over her death.

[ID: A screenshot from Trigun Volume 2. Knives sits in the escape ship with most of his face shadowed. He is hunched slightly, with a difficult to read, rather blank expression. End ID.]

^He is totally not bothered by this, definitely a-ok with her death. /j

But here's the thing: I really do think Knives believes that without Rem's influence, his brother will think and act exactly like him; that she has "corrupted" him somehow. This plays out in the way he's almost eager to show Vash their Plant abilities, apparently completely ignoring that Vash is confused and terrified - there's a serious dissonance to their interactions, where Knives seems less uncaring then oblivious to Vash's obvious distress. A good first indicator is directly before Fifth Moon, where Knives realizes that Vash has blocked out the memory of July, and is more intrigued than alarmed by this. Idk man if that was my brother I would be. Concerned.

See, if you read Knives as wanting power over Vash, then it's kind of reminiscent of the older sibling who thinks they know what's best for the younger. Indeed, that is the role Knives seems to take on at times.

But Knives is not actually older. They're twins.

Zazie also has an intriguing line after seeing the lengths Vash will go to in order to protect those he cares for: "It definitely isn't in Knives' nature to fight for anyone." <- This is an odd conclusion to come to for someone who is supposedly doing everything for a new world that's safe for all Plants, including Vash. I'm choosing to take Zazie at their word since I don't think they would have any real reason to lie or really see the point in lying.

So, what this implies is exactly what I stated earlier - Knives makes little, if any distinction between him and Vash. The world is divided into "same" and "different", "family" and "threat". It unfortunately allows Knives to continuously undermine Vash's autonomy - it's fine to forcibly activate Vash's angel arm because it's "our" power. It's fine for the doctor to poke and prod at Vash's arm to get readings because Knives is supervising it. Vash will stick with him because they're brothers, right? Of course he will. And if he doesn't... well that can't possibly be Vash. It's Rem's corrupting influence. And that makes him violently angry as he attempts to destroy any last trace of her that persists in his brother. Because surely, without her, Vash would be just like him, right?

One last note I'd like to make is the way Knives keeps obscuring Vash's face when he forcibly activates Vash's angel arm.

[ID: Two screenshots from Trigun and Trigun Maximum. The first image shows Knives grabbing Vash's face as he forces him to activate his angel arm during the Fifth Moon incident. The second image is of the same during the July flashback. End ID.]

The thing is, you can't argue this is necessary to activate the ability. In the July flashback, Knives actually has his hand placed rather gently on the side of Vash's head... up until Vash tries to resist. That's when Knives slams his hand down over his face instead and shoves him onto the floor.

In the context of Knives seeing Vash as an extension of himself, it could take on a few different meanings. If he muffles Vash's screaming and crying, perhaps he doesn't have to see the clear distress on his brother's face. Maybe it's representative of stripping Vash of his personal choice in these scenes. Maybe because this is the truth of the matter - Knives does not want to see the person Vash is if that person is so wildly different from himself, to ruin the illusion of twin as extension instead of a separate person.

Meanwhile, Vash is trying so hard to be everything Knives isn't. Knives' face is shadowed in flashbacks to create distance between them until July reveals the destruction they both caused and Vash can no longer deny the harm he too is capable of causing. The twins cause me emotional damage man.

[thewebcomicsreview]

souper-slingsubmitted tothewebcomicsreview: Could you have a look at my friend’s webcomic and give your opinion of it so far? https://frankyfierro.thecomicseries.com/

Okay, let's take a look.

Not super fond of this first page having a big text dump. It is good that the text dump is broken up into paragraphs instead of being a brick, but maybe if you're doing a wall of text you don't need the pretense of all the word balloons, since the dialogue makes it obvious Franky is speaking in the first person here. That's me being nit-picky, though. I do like the actual text itself, which establishes Franky's character very fast.

Actually, y'know what? I'm kind of coming around to the text dump opening. It's not what you're "normally" meant to do, but it's short, it's flavorful, and between that opening and this title page I feel like I have a impression of what this comic is about already: Jimmy Neutron meets Serenity Rose. Let's see if that impression is accurate!

I like this art, and I like that the narration box is passive-aggressive (since it's established that Franky is the narrator), but man I do not like that lettering. The pixelated font may or may not be a fit for a comic about a machine-maker, tbd, but there's no excuse for left-justifying the text.

Like, this art is really expressive and charming in a cartoony way, but the sterile artificial lettering kind of doesn't support that tone. I presume "Frank ,let" is a typo, but...what's with all the ellipses? Am I meant to read it as "I thought I told you (pause) not to call them toys!!!"That's kind of weird and doesn't seem appropriate to the scene? Is that intentional?

The dialogue generally has this slightly surreal feeling, which I feel uncomfortable criticizing since I'm not sure if the creator is a native English speaker and maybe I'm the asshole here.

So I'll just note to maybe run your dialogue through a spell check at least, because there's a lot of typos, like "figth" there.

Like, I'm pretty confident that the principal is meant to sound wacky, but I'm not sure if Frank is or if that's just typographical errors.

Lest I sound too negative here, by the way, the art is very strong for what this comic is doing. There's actually a lot this comic is doing right, it's just the dialogue that's hurting it.

"I seem to have hit you with the doors again this month" is weird but in a funny way, and I laughed at it. Why "this month"? That's so weirdly specific, like she's accidentally hit him with the door once a month for the last eight months or something. I'm not sure if that's intentionally the joke or not, but I did laugh.

Because, like, this announcement doesn't make sense. "The president of our wonderful student council...Simona Garfunkel Stradivari" and then suddenly the next word balloon has an entirely new sentence even though the old one didn't finish. I'm confused. Is that the joke? Is it weird on purpose? What is this? I don't understand. Is it modern? Or is it just a mistake?

(Also, it should maybe be "The wonderful president of our student council" instead of "the president of our wonderful student council", since the story is all about Simona the villain getting undue praise, and none of the other council members matter)

(Also also that's a pretty expressively drawn speaker, with the scrunchy lines look. I like it)

This is a good panel that demonstrates the point I'm trying to make by harping on the grammar. Here, the ellipses in the second balloon "She's gonna be fine...maybe" reads like she is pausing. Except there are a million ellipses all over the place so I don't know if that's intentional, I just kind of have to assume that's what the author means. (Also "Shorty" is improperly capitalized, which I presume doesn't mean something)

So, here's the thing with this comic. The art is good. It's very good, it's wacky and expressive and cartoony for a wacky and expressive and cartoony comic. The plot, which I've skimmed over here, is perfectly cromulent. The characters are strong. The stakes are clear. It has a lot of mid-2000s anime energy, which is what your friend seems to be going for. The comic's really only got one problem, and I feel a little bad harping on the one thing the comic is doing wrong instead of what it's doing right...but that problem is omnipresent. Cleaning up this dialogue would make a massive difference. My recommendations are:

Run the dialogue through a spell check to make sure there are no typos

Read the dialogue out loud after writing it. If it's supposed to sound wacky, fine, but if it's not meant to sound weird it shouldn't. Have someone else read it out loud if you need someone to check it for you.

Just a little bit more attention to making sure the dialogue works, and this comic could actually be pretty solid! It's so close, there's just this one last layer of polish that's needed!

[makima-s-most-smile]

Trigun Maximum 3 Part 1

Tumblr hit me with a You're-too-naughty-label for my Trigun Maximum 2 Part 2-Post, so here have a link to it, because you can't find it otherwise. (There is nothing sexual in there... Tumblr, wtf! I reblog naughtier pics than what I wrote about the manga) *cries*

Trigun Ultimate: 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4

Trigun Maximum: 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1, 5.2, 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, 9.1, 9.2, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5

01: Reservoir Dogs

Oh, this page! The situations with Vash that are the most impactful for Wolfwood, the ones where he felt with him (blue) and the ones where Vash was explicitly inhuman/above human to him (red). All coming down to the panel in the lower left where both of them share a nonverbal quip, in which Vash most likely appeals to Wolfwood to not kill the people who made him suffer so much. And Wolfwood has to make a decision! Again. From how Wolfwood starts the fight, yeah, he tries to keep Ninelives alive by disarming him. He tries so hard to find a compromise between them. All while being in fucking freefall, btw. 

Ew, human body parts scorpion puppets! (The grammar program wanted to desperately change this outcry to “human body parts are scorpion puppets…” Thanks for making it worse!)

I think it is interesting that nearly everyone around them has problems dealing with the twin’s humanity. But still the glaring difference between Knives and Vash is obvious to them.

I think it is also interesting that Leonof’s point of view is based on how they deal with suffering. He suffered in the past and broke from it. His real body starts to inflict self harm upon itself at the mere mention of that, while the puppet he controls states the plant’s resilience as a glaring example of their inhumanity. And he reasons that he wants Vash in his collection for that very reason. Maybe to learn from him how to be that resilient. 

Such a bitter outlook. While Leonof has his little ideological crisis just by Vash existing, Wolfwood fights for his life, again, and again internally against his deeply rooted cynicism. 

I love how so much of Wolfwood’s inner beliefs are directly contrary to his existence. The nihilistic bastard says nothing changes, all good is for naught and ideals don’t matter. Without giving us much context, we can confer much about his life. He had no one to really look up to, even if he was in a safe place it was in constant danger of disappearing or he had experience with that just happening, he has seen good people die and their goodness being for nothing in the long run. But then here he is, still willing to dirty his own hands so he can make sure that orphaned kids have that safe place that he didn’t have. He changes their future. But he is completely unable to see it.

And Vash does. I love how the panels drive that down. Vash is not deterred by Wolfwood’s cynicism. Vash is not deterred by his own experiences. If it is the right thing or not remains to be seen.

WHY ARE THE TOMA CRYING?! QQ BABIES! NOOOO! Meryl, what did you do to them? (And while they are the horses of No-Man’s-Land, we now know they can barf. I’d like to see the No-Man’s-Landers reaction to the German idiom: “Well, horses have been seen throwing up.” Which kinda means: You never know. All is possible. And I just want to know their reaction to it! They don’t know horses and they don’t know the idiom and they would know even less likely that horses are unable to vomit. *cries* I am suddenly emotional about this scene. AHHHHH! I wanna see Meryl and Wolfwood being completely confused, Milly just accepting it and Vash being like: Huh? But Horses can't vomit...)

02: Cement

“This is my business.” What do you mean, Wolfwood? Your decision and you standing by it? Or you being unforgivable? 

*sees Ninelives opening their mouth* I am not gonna say the whole thing but it ends with dentata… Thanks, Freud.

I have problems following the whole action, but damn. It is bloody, gory and feels so personal. And it fits Wolfwood’s state of mind, battling with the feeling of dread by Vash, his own mortality and his struggle being trapped in a No-Win-Situation. All odds are against Wolfwood and are towering over him. David against Goliath. Wolfwood is so small.

Nightow is able to give us that sense of Wolfwood being small and a punching bag. But he still is able to add those moments that show how fucking quick Wolfwood’s deduction is and how fast he acts to it. 

I love the way Nightow draws Wolfwood here. He seems to be less there than Ninelives with how part of his body is not drawn. And it reminds me so much of the page of Wolfwood’s past where he was shot the first time.

“I don’t want to die!”

And that is what it comes back to again and again with Wolfwood.

Sassy!

Did I mention that I love the way how Nightow draws body language? You really do get the feeling that Wolfwood is barely able to stay on his feet.

Well, Wolfwood said he’d disarm him. And, look, that way he didn’t have to kill Ninelives! Even though Wolfwood desperately fought for his life, he was able to hold up Vash’s ideals here. He tries so hard, man. I feel for him.

“The rest of them will come... That's for sure... Like demons risin' from hell…” While Wolfwood enjoys his (earned) victory (too early), he is already thinking about the consequences of his decision and what further strife it will bring him.

Oh, fuck, I didn’t realise the arm was moving! I needed to take a double take when I saw it holding the up button in the next chapter. Ew! Ew! Ew! Maybe it is me not being able to take in all the detail that Nightow draws. Good that I am reading the manga in discussion mode.

3: No Escape!

Damn, the chapter title. No escape from what? No escape for Nicholas from his fate? Is it an omen that Nicholas’ struggle to escape his bloody lifestyle is doomed and that he has to kill again and again? That though he tried his best to upkeep Vash’s ideals that he has to decide between Ninelives’ and his own life? Is this foreshadowing that he will be unable to escape his place between a rock and a hard place and end up squished? 

Nicholas’ third gun, the fucking rocket launcher.

Vash hears Wolfwood’s struggle, but we don’t get any insight into what he thinks. Worry for Wolfwood? Surely. But what more? Does he reflect upon their talk here? Is he considering that Wolfwood is risking his very life for Vash’s home right now? For him? How that explicitly contradicts Wolfwood’s very reason to be at his side? As a traitor to be and follower of Knives.

As another user said, Wolfwood’s fight is a close combat one, all dark and claustrophobic. It is David against Goliath. Vash is in open space. His struggle is not for his life, not really, his struggle is to reach Leonof and get through to him. By switching between their fights, Nightow stresses the difference. That's such a brilliant way to story tell.

Please correct me. I have a really big problem reading Wolfwood here. Why is he grinning? I read it as defiance and a dare against the thought of something being immortal and thus being unable to be reached by a mere mortal like him. It is as much a challenge towards Ninelives as it is towards Vash. But I am not sure and I need other perspectives!

And just a quiet, little panel between Wolfwood spearing and shooting Ninelives, shows him being drenched in blood, looking weary and tired. And the way the blood smears under his eye, looks like he is crying. The panel is so full, you barely see it and you barely see it on the page. You need to pay attention to see it. And damn, if that doesn't summarise Wolfwood's plight and arc perfectly. I think it is my favourite panel out of the volume, there are so many cool ones, but this is so quiet and sad between all those loud and cool fighting ones. Wolfwood is drowning, someone please rescue him!

And while Wolfwood’s fight is bloody, explosive and incredibly loud, Vash’s is quiet and dreary. It plays with our feeling of foreboding and your knowledge that what he fights is the corpses of close ones.

Baby with a gun!

“I see beneath that cold, calculative expression of yours.” Interesting, Leonof. A chapter ago you said that his cold stare hides a void full of suffering. What more do you want to see? Are you mocking him? Or are you trying to relate?

And the chapter ends with Vash declaring Leonof’s real name and that the game ends. No escape for Emilio, either!

04: Emilio the player

Hi, Brad! Those aren’t only puppet parts! :3 Those are body parts of the people you grew up with. Joy!

The puppet master reacts to the name. Leonof registers the name as his own, but his puppet seems to deny it! His puppet is his way to keep a distance from himself and reality.

Vash knows the name of everyone he has met. (I cannot even remember the name you just told me. Vash superpowers! Well, that, but it also makes him so incredibly inhuman for me. He knows everyone, but connects to no one. It reads like such an artificial bond. He loves humanity, but like I love Pokemon. (without the fighting system)) But damn, Leonof’s breakdown is so creepy. 10/10 sleep paralysis demon. Good work, Nightow.

Hi, Doc. ;C

“All according to keikaku!,” is what I think about when reading that sentence.

But seriously, I read up guignol and was kinda shocked that it is comparable to the German Kasperle theatre and had a bit of a culture revelation. *hugs their French brethren*

The same page has Vash connecting the dots and forming a plan on how to defeat Emilio without killing him. I love how we get the foreshadowing without realising it.

Gosh, I have a thing for wet hair Vash. He just looks so much better with his hair down! 

I know that No-Man’s-Land doesn’t have the best dentistry, but, Emilio, your teeth shouldn’t shatter like this.

Sorry, Brad, but that is no puppet. :/

[littlefroginthegarden]

Sold to Heartsteel 3/24

look at part 1 for tags (also you should obv start there with reading)

Part 3

At the top of the stairs, we enter a spacious hallway, still built from the same white stone, laid out with a red carpet. How clichée, I think to myself. Mr. Mundo turns to the left and follows the hallway, until he stops at a white door. A glowing red lamp above the door catches my attention. Mr. Mundo presses a small button next to the door and waits. After a few moments, the lamp turns off and he opens the door, gesturing for me to enter. As I walk in, I realize I’m in a studio. The room is full of mixing panels, computer screens and meticulously ordered cables all over the walls. There is so much happening in this room that I nearly miss the person sitting in front of one of the computer screens. They turn around when I enter and get up, coming towards me. I can see their tall and slender silhouette against all the different-colored little lights in the background. As they come closer, I see fluffy turquoise hair and a silver necklace glinting over their dark blue turtleneck.

Suddenly I realize who's standing in front of me. “Aphelios? What the fuck?”

Aphelios just looks at me for a moment, curiosity sparking in his eyes. He turns to Mr. Mundo and rapidly signs something, which the large man translates.

“He says welcome and asks for your name.”

I barely manage to answer even this simple question, I am still so shocked about suddenly standing in front of my idol and realizing that he bought me.

“Hwei. My name is Hwei.” At this, a questioning look briefly shows on Aphelios’ face, before he answers.

“He says it’s nice to meet you, Hwei. I’m going to show you to your room now and bring your suitcase and he will come knocking a bit later when he's done with his project for the day.”

Aphelios gives me a smile and a small wave before going back to his workstation, putting his headset back on. What am I even supposed to feel now? I’m at the house of one of my idols but the situation is super fucked up and I’m really quite confused right now. I just follow Mr. Mundo to the other end of the hallway. The last door to the left opens into a spacious room, furnished with a large couch, drawers along the back wall and a huge screen with a console in front of the couch. I am stunned but Mr. Mundo doesn’t give me time to take it all in, he opens one of the two doors that are on the left-hand wall and when I peer into the new room I see a huge double bed with a perfectly smoothed blanket on it. The room itself isn’t too big, a cute little bedroom. I don’t dare to open the second door, scared of accidentally breaking rules that I’m not aware of yet. My curiosity gets resolved just moments later when he opens the door for me. It’s a small bathroom with a shower, toilet and a huge mirror above the sink. Mr. Mundo turns around and looks at me.

“This is your room for the foreseeable future. If you need anything, just text or call me.” He hands me a card with his name and a phone number on it. Then he reaches into his pocket again and pulls out a keyring with two keys on it.

“This one–” with this he points to a larger security key “is for the entrance door. Always keep it locked! The other one is for your room.” With this, he turns around and leaves before I can even answer.

I don’t even know anymore.

I let myself sink onto the couch and try to order my thoughts.

[tobiasdrake]

Some miscellaneous thoughts about where I am in DG3.

I theorized basically right at the start that we were in space. Orbiting the planet, on a spaceship, perhaps even a colony on another world. Somehow, in some way, this feels like a sealed environment with panels displaying the sky where we think we're seeing the sky through the bars of the birdcage. I've been leaning most heavily on the idea that we're on a satellite in upper Earth orbit.

I'm a little less sure of this hypothesis following the extremely vague discovery of the Secret of the Outside World. Gonta saw something that didn't confuse him, but instead broke him.

It was described as the Killing Game being Hell, and the world beyond the walls also being Hell. It was so horrific, so unimaginably spirit-shattering, that Kokichi could then persuade the kind and courageous albeit dimwitted Gonta that mercy kills were the only salvation for all of us.

Gonta saw some shit that simply can't be explained by the visible curvature of the bright blue Earth, the barren red of Mars, or an endless starry sea. And that's pretty much taken a crowbar to my space theory.

I genuinely don't know what's out there. I feel less certain about what's happening here than I have at any point from the first act onward.

With regards to the Mastermind, I've been kinda circling a thought for a while that I now want to express. What if Rantaro is the Mastermind? What if Kaede actually got him, and nobody even realized because Monokuma and/or the Monokubs are able to self-sustain? What if the Mastermind's been fucking dead this whole time?

See, Monokuma's said some shit that filled me with alarm. When he was mourning the Kubs, he wondered aloud where they even came from. And that was a really weird thing to say. I. Uh. I thought he brought them.

But that got me thinking. Remember that first botched attempt at the Killing Game, way back at the start of the game? Where the Kubs revealed their Exigals too early, nobody had their Talent memories, etc.? And the Kubs needed to take a do-over on the whole thing.

I was laughing at the time because this was the most slapdash attempt at a Killing Game ever. Junko would be spinning in her grave over how badly they'd botched their attempt. This was Killing Game Amateur Hour.

But then, on the second try, suddenly Monokuma shows up. And the Kubs seemed as surprised to see him as anyone else.

Well. What if. Just spitballing here. What if Monokuma wasn't supposed to be here? Even his rules are different; He has an endless supply of bodies but the Kubs don't. It's as if they don't share a manufacturing source.

What if this is a copycat Killing Game? Or was, until Monokuma hijacked it? The Mastermind behind the Monokubs may legit be a different person than the Mastermind behind Monokuma. The latter of whom is still probably going to be "Junko Enoshima, somehow".

If I'm right, then you'd need to be awfully familiar with the Killing Game in order to set up your own bootleg version. And Rantaro was the only one among us who seemed to understand what was going on....

[windmaedchen-oceanhorn]

Dinner for Two

After the recent loss of his family, Pierre Corbin sits alone at home, the dinner table set for two. He doesn't want to be disturbed but when he receives an unexpected visit from a certain young boy, he cannot bring himself to send him away.

Even though the table was set for two people, Pierre sat on his side alone, staring blankly over the cold and untouched food. He might have felt hungry earlier when he was cooking, but now it seemed as if there was no point to eating. He wondered why he had gone through the trouble to cook dinner again in the first place. It was the third day now and he should know better, knowing that she won’t come to join him.

It is a scary thing to love what you can lose to death. The family they always wanted – it was about to be reality, but unexpected difficulties turned this dream into a nightmare. He was thrown into this loss so harshly. While everyone and everything else kept turning with the world, he felt stuck and afraid of being left behind.

Pierre listened to his thoughts in the silence of his home. He was off duty this week to get some space. Other members of the Corbin family dealt with the funeral arrangements and for that he was very thankful. At the moment, he was glad he still knew how to dress properly. Or cook, even if he hardly ate.

Suddenly, the short sharp sound of something heavy hitting the wooden panels of the floor startled him. No mere second later, Pierre heard a faint “Oh no”, followed by some footsteps.

Surprised he turned his head towards the open door to the hallway. There shouldn’t be anyone else in the house, but since he hadn’t locked either door, anyone could enter.

Pierre braced himself against the unwanted attention and prepared to send whoever there was away as quickly as possible… but then he saw a very young man peeking into the room. He knew that face and never expected to see HIM here, of all people.

“Mesmeroth. What are you doing here, and so late?”, he asked surprised.

The boy tread in place for a moment, hesitating to approach. “Err… Mister Corbin, sir, I just came to give you this.”

Mesmeroth then quickly stepped across the room towards Pierre and placed a metal box on the table. It was an older radio model, one of Archimedes’s inventions that had found its way into all households across Arcadia.

Pierre carefully observed the radio and knowing the boy’s passion for malfunctioning robots, he expected it to start moving any second now. He wasn’t sure if he could deal with the boy’s reckless inventions right now.

Mesmeroth seemed to have noticed his suspicious stare and quickly reassured the knight. “It’s not going to do anything, because it’s not a ‘real’ robot but… it’s still my favourite… thing.” He gazed at the radio with a sad smile.

Pierre looked from radio to boy and back in confusion. Why on earth was that kid here? They knew each other to some extent, after all he had to deal with Mesmeroth’s rogue robots on occasion and he also had to drag the kid to school from time to time, as his father left the boy to his own devices most of the time. Yet, despite all of Pierre’s reprimanding and scolding, the boy was here now, standing at his dinner table, as if they were… friends.

“What is it then?”, asked Pierre carefully.

“A radio! But it’s a special one. It was broken and when I repaired it, I made it so that when you hold THIS button it can record a message and then, when you press THIS button, you can listen to it again.”

Mesmeroth became excited telling Pierre about his favourite object but when he was done he became his more timid self again.

“And … what shall I do with it?”, the knight inquired.

“Listen to it, when you’re all alone.”

Pierre moved to ask what’s on there but Mesmeroth continued to talk, gently holding the radio between his two hands.

“I know you cried, I can see it. I cried a lot, too. I missed her a lot, that’s why. Listening to this always made me feel a little better, though. I am a little too old now to still cry, I think, and … I don’t want you to be sad so that’s why I decided that you should have it.”

Pierre leaned heavily on his arm observing the boy as he realised that Mesmeroth, a kid 10 years of age, came to express his sincere condolences. He knew that the boy had lost his mother 3 years ago. Unfortunately, it was the talk of the village back then. The way the boy looked at the radio now, nearly tenderly and longingly told Pierre that he must have loved his mother very much. The fact that this neglected boy from the streets felt inclined to share a means of comfort with him, touched him deeply. A very unexpected gesture, Pierre was stunned that Mesmeroth cared about him.

He felt his throat clench and he swallowed a couple of times to reduce the tension. He didn’t know what to say.

Luck was on his side, as the change of subject came in form of an aggressive growling. Hastily Mesmeroth turned away to hide his hunger but it was too late.

Pierre raised his eye-brows and smiled gently. “Are you hungry?”

“Hmmm.” Mesmeroth didn’t seem to want to admit it. Again he moved about a bit.

“Have you not yet eaten at home?”

The boy’s gaze fell onto the food laid out on the table. “Err… well, there wasn’t anything left for me today”, he admitted embarrassed. Then he hastily continued. “Why haven’t you eaten yet? Don’t you like it?”, he asked.

Pierre’s question was stifled in his throat as he rushed to answer Mesmeroth’s questions. But his mind wondered, why was there no dinner left for the boy?

“Oh, I- haven’t felt like eating, I’m afraid.”

“And will you feel like eating it soon? Who will eat this if not?” With open, curious eyes Mesmeroth had turned back towards the knight.

“Maybe you would be interested in having a bite?” Pierre offered warmly as he gestured towards the chair on the other side.

“Oh yes, I do! I can tell you if it’s any good, too!”

“Yes, please do.”

Without another second lost, Mesmeroth took a seat and watched intently as Pierre took the serving spoon in his hand to give the boy a small serving.

“I’m afraid it’s cold already, but it should still taste just as good.”

Eagerly Mesmeroth put a full spoon into his mouth. He had not yet swallowed when he exclaimed ��Shit, that’s really tasty!”

“No swear words at this table”, Pierre responded sternly. Mesmeroth quickly looked over and then, without stopping to munch simply replied “Okay, sorry, sir”.

“Why haven’t you eaten this, it’s so good!”, he continued.

“Is it really, eh? I guess I should try myself then.”

Pierre was still not exactly hungry but at least he wasn’t alone. He finally helped himself to a small portion and hesitantly took a spoonful himself. He had lost his thoughts, his feelings and his taste in the last couple of days. Yet, somehow in this strange boys presence, who was rather excited to have such a basic meal, taking in nourishment became actually bearable.

Until now Pierre hadn’t thought much of this peculiar young man. But now that Mesmeroth had… approached him on such personal level, he felt curious about him. Pierre pondered for a bit. Mesmeroth came from a poor family and his living conditions weren’t exactly the best. Unfortunately, the boy’s interest in magic and machines rubbed the villagers the wrong way and it caused minor annoyances at best but had also incited a tragic incident in which even the valuable life of a human was lost. Pierre was certain the boy didn’t act out of malice… but without guidance, he feared for the boys future. Why couldn’t his father care for him properly? Where there no friends Mesmeroth could connect and play with? Why do even children have to suffer already from the world’s trials and tribulations?

Pierre’s somewhat miserable thoughts were interrupted and uplifted by more of Mesmeroth’s fantastical praises for the food. Amidst this sorrowful time they managed to amuse Pierre and he felt glad that he had cooked after all. Mesmeroth had a big appetite and Pierre’s efforts were handsomely rewarded.

They were nearly done when Pierre decided to ask. “What do you mean, there was no food left for you today? How so?”

Mesmeroth looked up at first, then evaded Pierre’s gaze.

“I don’t really have dinners at home. Sometimes I get to have dad’s leftovers, though!”

Pierre was a little stunned by that answer, but couldn’t say he was actually surprised. It’s just not what he would have liked to hear.

“Your father is not cooking for you?”

Mesmeroth thought for a bit. “I think he did but… not anymore. I am not really allowed inside the house either. Not that I want to go there anyway, it smells.”

The boy proceeded to lick the final remnants of the dish from the cutlery. Pierre shook his head in disbelief. “Goodness Gracious. But you do get lunch at school, right?”

“Yeah. It’s not as awesome as THIS, though. Other kids often leave like half their meal so I wait till they’re gone and eat that, too! Then I am late for class but that’s okay, it’s mostly boring stuff anyway. Oh, and I do get snacks for sharing my homework!”

Pierre had never chatted to Mesmeroth so casually and he was very pleasantly surprised, despite the heavy topic, that the boy answered so frankly. “I am glad to hear that. It may not be an ideal situation but you sure know how to help yourself.”

“Hm, yeah, I suppose…” Mesmeroth sighed a little. “I’ll be fine and… I am sorry for… for making you work so hard.”

Pierre sighed as well and nodded in gratitude. “I know that you are. I know.”

Then, Mesmeroth picked up his plate and stood up. He questioningly stared at the plate and gazed over at the door to the kitchen. Pierre extended a hand and gestured him to place the plate back down.

“You don’t have to worry about that for today. I will clean it all”, responded Pierre warmly. The boy had enough to sort out and Pierre had to clean the rest anyway. Albeit he’d probably do it tomorrow.

“Oh, really? But what if I would like to have food again?”

Pierre understood the boy’s desire to eat again but what did that have to do with the dishes?

“How do you mean?”, he asked.

“I mean, what if come ever again and then, at that time you happen to have made food that you don’t feel like eating, then I would like to be allowed to eat it for you.”

Pierre looked at the boy in amused astonishment. “How nicely put. Well, let me reassure you, that if you ever came by again and I happen to have just made dinner then you are very certainly allowed to have a share.”

Mesmeroth grinned widely at him and put the plate back down. “Oh, okay. Thanks, Mr. Corbin.”

“Hmhm”. Pierre sighed and smiled at his guest, who now walked back around the table to look at the radio again. He even reached out to turn it around a little and brush over the corner with which it hit the floor earlier. Mesmeroth murmured something Pierre didn’t understand and just as he began to ask about it the young man turned to him abruptly.

“Be good, okay?”

“O-Of course, Knight’s honour!”, Pierre replied surprised, once again. Wasn’t that something he should have requested of Mesmeroth instead?

Mesmeroth showed his teeth in a large grin. “And you should eat your food, it’s super great! See you, Mr. Corbin!”

Then he sprang around and dashed towards the hallway. Pierre half-way rose from his seat as he shouted after the boy, but he was already out of sight.

“Be careful on your way home!”

“Ye-hes! Bye!”, came the answer from somewhere around the front door. And then, there was silence again.

What was going on in the boy’s head, thought Pierre. He was perplexed, but very pleasantly so. Children could be so demanding it distracts from anything else and they also manage to bring down any possible defence in seconds.

He had wanted to be alone but still, he was glad the boy had come. He had finally eaten and maybe, it dawned on him, he had allowed this boy in difficult circumstances to have a proper meal, also.

Pierre’s eyes now fixated on the radio. He was curious to find out what was recorded on there and he extended his arm to reach the button. His finger rested on there for a moment. He leaned forward and rested his chin on the other arm, then pressed the button down.

The radio first emitted a few cracks and noises of it being moved around. Two voices were audible, that of Mesmeroth and that of a woman. “Okay, I am holding it down, see? Now you can sing. Closer, right there…”

Mesmeroth gave instructions, presumably to his mother, who then sang a common but beautiful lullaby for her son. The recording ended with another short conversation between the two.

Pierre hid his face in the fabric of his sleeve and pressed the button again. He was listening to his own, lost dream: a mother singing a lullaby to her beloved child. His eyes teared up and his throat clenched. In his thoughts, his wife was walking up and down the bedroom, rocking their baby, singing this lullaby. Then the same kid came climbing into their bed at night and again, his wife sang a lullaby. More and more scenarios flooded his mind and Pierre cried for all the lost moments he had hoped to experience in the future.

When the worst was over, and his body had calmed down a bit, Pierre allowed Mesmeroth to enter his mind again. The radio was a precious item to the boy. For an instance Pierre wanted to return it but then he reminded himself of something he had learned becoming a knight: Presents are not to be made OR accepted lightly. The boy didn’t bring this important keepsake lightly. And so, Pierre would honour the gift and keep it.

In fact, there was something else he wanted to do. Tomorrow evening, he would cook again, and even though he was alone, he would cook for two. Yes, his wife wasn’t there anymore to dine with him but… a certain troubled boy might just be hungry enough.

THE END.

(or is it a beginning?)

[age-of-moonknight]

“Endgame,” Marc Spector: Moon Knight (vol. 1/1989), #40.

Writers: Terry Kavanaugh and Ron Garney; Penciler: Gary Kwapisz; Inker: Tom Palmer; Colorist: Ian Laughlin; Letterer: Ken Lopez

[l05t1nth3v01d]

JSE (1/?)

ANTISEPTICEYE/JACK

I'm aware Anti was present in other videos but I chose to connect videos such as "KILL JA̶CKSEPTICEYE" and "CHASE" to the other egos.Anti will be mentioned there too obviously. I hope you know what I mean lmao.

TW:mention of Antisepticeye,su!cide and blood

[Not mine I got it from pinterest]

×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×+×++

Antisepticeye(Anti/Knife-Lover/Glitch Bitch)

• Dark/evil version of Jacksepticeye/inernet-virus demon

• Is fighting for control over Jack's body and/or power

》usually demented,strong desire to harm others,mood changes from anger to seriousness to insanity in an instant

• Foreshadows his appearances with camera,voice and/or video distortion

》Jack describes feelings of queasiness,excessive eye/neck twitching,prolonged staring at the camera,laughter,static

• Anti leaves hints in video titles and/or descriptions leading to his arrival

》when he appears he usually speaks harsh about Jack,occasionally likes to mock the viewers or the other egos

• Halloween(oct2016)"SAY GOODBYE"

{Watch whole video^}

》Jack caves pumpkin,hears stomping and leaves to check on it,Anti appears briefly,Jack comes back and his nose starts bleeding and he leaves again,comes back and continues like nothing happened,towards the end of the video Anti takes over Jack's body,making him stare into the camera and slit his throat causing him to bleed out and collapse on his pumpkin

》Anti jump-scares the viewers,the whiteboard that read 'happy halloween' read 'help me' now,Anti blames the viewers for Jack's death and that they(us) could've prevented it but they just watched,he also said that Jack is "gone forever",tells the viewers to say their goodbyes

• East2017 panel "ALWAYS WATCHING"

{No need to watch the video}

》Anti tell audience that they thought he was gone and that they stopped paying attention,that he replaced him with Jack,warns them(the audience) that he wasn't going anywhere and that they will never get rid of him

• Anti appeared here and there and hijacked dec15th-16th 2017 a stream,dubbed as "Overnightwatch"

[ link: ]

{Watch full video or skip through it}

• March 9th 2018|Anti's voice "Where is he?"

• May 5th 2018|Jack is disrupted by creaking noises and his door opens,his surprised face briefly appears for a second on the old in-game computer monitor,as from antis point of view from the door

• May 6th 2018 "BARRY HAS A SECRET"

[ Link: ]

{Timestamp: 12:20-13:13}

》possibly Jack finding a small hand in a closet and Anti telling him he wasn't supposed to find that(idk if its really Anti and Jack I just guessed)

• May 8th 2018 "IT WAS ALL CONNECTED"

[ Link: ]

{Timestamp: 45:07-45:35}

》Jack asleep tossing and turning,suddenly wakes up and looked at the camera saying "I remember what he did to me"(probably referencing the "SAY GOODBYE" incident)

• May 9th 2018|Jack didn't do his usual in- or outro,leaving many people to believe that it wasn't Jack recording

• May 16th 2018"EXPLORING AN ABANDONED HOSPITAL"

{No need to watch the video}

》At the beginning of the video Jack enters seemingly out of breath and confused,glitches on the screen

》near the end of the video it cuts to Jack staring at the camera,crying blood and whispering "it's all your fault."

》outro is red instead of green

• Aug 5th 2018| after outro,played in reverse:"I will return when you least suspect it" and the word "DEATH" in morse or some other code(I can't remeber)

• Sep 25th 2018|few Anti glitches and the word "HELP"

• Oct 14th 2018|distorted voice "Time to take off the mask"(possibly anti)

• Dec 1st 2018|Jack asking "Do you remember?"

• Dec 7th 2018|Jack tells the viewers that they must exit to end the video

》morse code at the end:"ANTIWINS"

• May 22nd 2019|Whiteboard '101610' could be a reference to Anti's first appearance

• May 23rd 2019|'Jack' shouts "It's all coming together" and "time is all broken" and "I am here"

• June 3rd 2018|Jack says he's alive and his heart is still beating

》(in-game)heart rate monitors show 0,screen glitches

》Jack lookd down and slowly up asking"Do you ever feel like there's something more?", smiling eerie

Jan 2nd 2020| cryptic message "not long now" and "He's coming"

》titled with 'A',likely referencing Anti

• Jan 16th 2020|Anti saying "it's all easy when no one knows you exist"

》Jack bangs head on whiteboard with static-like overlay

》morse code at the end:"IM HERE FRIEND HI"

• Feb 26th 2020"3 SCARY GAMES"

{No need to watch}

》all games had to do with obeying higher-ups or following orders

• April 19th 2020| someone saying(?)"Jack can't come to the phone right now."

》robotic voice can be heard as Jack leaves the screen:"help they've broken me"

》transcription of the voice at the end:"Who’s this then?" and "it never ends will it?" and "please save my friend" and "Phase Two will happen"

• May 1st 2020|in comments "OFFER ACCEPTED"

》may come from Anti,accepting an offer from another ego

》Jack says "I'm the offer.I was the sacrifice."(game reads"offer accepted,expect call soon")

•  Anti is prolly(very likely) aware of the other egos and he despises if not hates them fully for the most part

I just want to gather stuff and I think best thing to do is to upload it and if you have other information or theories (about the other egos as well) and if you'd like to enlighten me then pls do.

Tomorrow I will post about Chase Brody.

[cafeacademia]

His Favourite Gal | Part 1

Mob!Bucky x Shy!Reader

Summary: You begin working as a waitress at Bucky Barnes’ favourite club in town. Little do you realise that working on mob territory owned by the infamous King of New York, Bucky Barnes, comes with its quirks and you’re slowly pulled into the mobster life.

Warnings: Fluff, some mentions of drunk people, mentions of crimes (though nothing happens, it’s just mentioned).

Word count: Approx 3700

Navigation

A/N: Hi loves!! This is a remaster of my own original fan fiction that I’ve decided to take from my old blog and (hopefully) improve. I’ve been slowly remastering fics that I am particularly attached to and I worked quite a lot to get this one overhauled and rewritten!! There’s actually very little of the original writing left, it was interesting to see how different my style is now compared to three years ago! This was also my first ever series I’d ever written on my old blog, so aside from the fact that I love the story, it’s special to me in that regard. Enjoy! 💕

If you’d like to join my taglist, you can do so using my taglist form HERE

It was raining when you finally finished your shift three hours later than when you were supposed to be off for the night. It was tiring working for the dingy old bar, it looked just as sad on the outside as it did on the inside, the old brick discoloured, old panelling slowly peeling off the sides of the building. It was a wreck and so was your boss too. He couldn’t have cared less if you worked yourself down to the bone, as long as he had staff doing a job, he didn’t care.

“I’m expecting you tomorrow, we’re opening early.” He had told you on your way out and it took everything in your willpower not to groan and roll your eyes and tell him so eloquently to fuck off. It was almost a relief when you heard the heavy metal door slam behind you as you stepped out of the back entrance. The air was just as bad. It was thick with smog and cigarette smoke and something pungent, an overflowing bin or perhaps an unfortunate street animal, you thought.

You were glad when it began to rain harder. At least it seemed to make most of the drunkards along the main strip try to find shelter instead of bothering you on your walk home.

Pulling your jacket hood up, you stepped down from the doorway and made your way out of the alleyway and onto the back street. It was never good to walk home alone, especially at night and especially in the part of New York you lived and worked in. It was on the edge of mobster territory and while Bucky Barnes, the King of New York owned it, it didn’t mean it was safe at all. It was quite the opposite, the district was prone to all levels of crime, from pickpocketing all the way up to armed robberies, arson and shootings.

But, you realised as you walked up the street, spotting a group of drunk men up ahead, drink men with rifles too, that never ended well, that perhaps mobster territory might not be a bad idea, especially when there were people working for Barnes along the entire street and they were known to keep the peace.

You heard the casino before you saw it, but as you rounded the corner you saw the lights, the late night rain distorting some of the huge party lights that lit up the sky above the building. Stark’s was not the most prestigious club in town, but it was the most respected and most feared. And funnily enough, for a place called Stark’s, the billionaire did not own his own named club. As far as you remembered, you’d seen it in the papers a few years ago that Barnes had won it off Stark in a game  of poker. You’d never know if that was really true, but it definitely seemed plausible.

As you passed the casino, you glanced over towards the dark tinted windows, watching as people came and went, mostly men in suits. But you noticed a sign from across the road that was taped onto one of the windows, huge bold letters making you stop in your tracks for a moment.

Waiting staff needed. And you stared at it for a moment, contemplating. You… A bar waitress, surely it was not wise for you to sign up to work in mobster territory. That would definitely land you in more dangerous places than you were already in.

But the longer you stood there and thought about it, you began to wonder if it was actually a good idea. You could at least try, what did you have to lose? And before you could even come to a full decision, it was as it was made for you, because a group of rowdy men walked towards you and you immediately took the decision to cross the road, putting you right in front of the casino.

How bad could it be? The worst that could happen was that you just had to return back around the corner to your miserable little bar job. So, with a sigh, you grabbed the flyer and walked towards the entrance.

The bouncer was huge and intimidating. Of course, you had expected as much with the club having the notoriety that it did. It wasn’t long before you were allowed to enter, the bouncer telling you, “speak to Natasha at the bar”, and as you headed through into the casino, you assumed the absolutely stunning woman behind the bar right ahead of you was Natasha.

The club was bustling with people, though it was not as stuffy and loud on the inside as you had expected it to be. There was a clear divide between people dining and drinking at tables around the bar and the casino side of the club which appeared to be behind a velvet rope and deep burgundy red curtains at either side of the bar. It was far more high end than you had expected, seeing as the outside of Stark’s resembled a kind of fancy nightclub, but you supposed the King of New York did happen to own it.

“Are you here about the job?” The woman at the bar asked as you approached her. You wondered if it was your very casual clothing in such a formal setting that gave you away or the flyer in your hand. Either way, you suddenly felt very intimidated and very underprepared. Perhaps this had been a bad idea. You were a girl dressed in the dregs of your wardrobe while trying to get a job in the most respected club in the entire city. Not likely.

“I saw the advertisement outside, I hope that’s alright.” You said as you lifted the flyer in your hand and she held out her hand to take it from you. “Are you sure? We haven’t had many applicants because of certain activities.” She told you, but you knew what she meant, it was obvious. This part of town, even outside of mobster territory was swimming in crime. “I’ve got nothing to lose.” You replied. And it was true, you did have nothing to lose. No family, no responsibilities outside of your current job, which this would replace, no children, no pets, no side hustles. Nothing. And that probably made you a good candidate.

The woman smiled at you, her lips curving up into a smirk as she took a moment to look you over before she extended her hand across the counter. “Natasha.” She introduced herself, smiling as you shook her hand. “Nice to meet you.” You mirrored her smile and gave her your name before she let go of you. “Let me just get someone on the bar and we’ll talk.” She told you.

And moments later, you were following Natasha through the casino, passing by all of the business men, mafia family members and rich men and women who were chancing it at gambling games. Suffice to say, you felt even more out of place than you had done just moments beforehand.

“Where do you work right now?” Natasha asked as she let you pass her into an office near the back of the building. “I work in an old bar just around the corner called The Rabid Dog.” It was not a pleasant name, it always made you cringe whenever you had to tell people where you worked and you didn’t fail to notice the way that Natasha seemed amused by the name of the bar too.

“So you’ve done bar work? What about waitressing?” She asked as she gestured for you to sit down on one of the chairs in front of the desk. Natasha didn’t sit behind the desk, instead she just dropped down into the chair next to yours and rested one leg over the other as if she was having a casual conversation with a friend. “My bar serves food, so I do it on a regular basis and I also used to work in a restaurant a few years ago.” You explained, but before either of you could say anything else, the door swung open and you nearly fell out of your chair.

“Who’s this?” Bucky Barnes, the King of New York himself asked as he walked through the doorway. What had you walked into? You knew he owned the club, but you’d never expected to actually meet Barnes. “This is our new waitress.” Natasha said proudly as she stood. You knew better than to interrupt, but you gathered that someone must have noticed the look of confusion on your face because just as a second man entered the room, he said, “Does our new waitress know she’s the new waitress?” The second man asked. He was blonde, just as tall and muscular as Barnes, though he looked at you with less of a poker face and more of an amused smirk.

“Really? You just hired her like that?” Mr Barnes asked as he approached you. “I like her.” Natasha countered, both men giving her pointed looks, though Mr Barnes raised his brows and nodded before turning back towards you. “She likes you.” He repeated what Natasha had said. You couldn’t help but send Natasha a questioning glance. She had just met you minutes ago and she’d already analysed you enough to know that she liked you and you wondered if Natasha was much more than just a bar girl.

“Have you done waitressing before?” Barnes asked. “I just asked her that.” Natasha huffed. “Yes sir, waitressing and bar work.” You responded. “And do you have any family?” He asked next. “No sir, none at all.” You replied. “And you know this isn’t the type of job cut out for ordinary people, right? This club sees a lot of things.” Mr Barnes went on. “I do, sir.” You nodded.

“Buck, maybe we should consider-.” But Mr Barnes casually held up his hand to silence his friend. “You’re hired.” He announced, the entire room falling silent and all you could do was stare at Barnes for a moment, stunned that he had just hired you right there on the spot. “I am?” It came out a little more hushed than you had intended, Bucky nodding as he smirked at you. “Whatever your pay is at your old job, I’ll pay at least double, more if it’s not enough. Natasha will contact your old boss and get you ready for your first day.” And with that, Bucky Barnes and his friend left the room and Natasha looked over at you, watching as the astonishment slowly dissipated.

“I’ll let you know when you start work.” Natasha broke the silence and you glanced over at her. “Just like that?” You asked, still surprised. “Just like that.” She responded. “Don’t worry, Barnes wouldn’t keep me around if I wasn’t a good judge of character.” She winked at you and you wondered again if she was something more than just a bar girl.

The job, you realised after your first couple of days working at the club, was far more interesting and a lot more rewarding than your previous job at the old bar. The club was a scene for all kinds of happenings and while nothing nefarious really went on, especially under Bucky Barnes’ nose, you did overhear an awful lot of conversation.

You learned as well in those first few days, that while this was not where Mr Barnes resided, he used the club as a place to carry out some of his business meetings and discussions as well as a place to relax.

Barely a week into your new job, you were getting ready for your shift in the little back room. Lockers lined the walls with a mirror at the side of the door and comfortable benches in the middle of the room. Dressed in a simple, but pretty black dress, you tied the strings of your little demi apron at the back, though you paused, a little startled when the door was abruptly pushed open and Natasha stepped in.

“Barnes needs you.” Nat announced with urgency and you frowned at her. “He does?” You asked. “He needs someone to waitress him and the family tonight, he’s asking for you.” She informed you. “I thought-.” “Yes, I know normally we have security taking orders to the waitresses, but he’s personally asking for you to waitress them tonight.” Nat told you and you paused with a slight air of confusion about you. “Alright, I’ll waitress Mr Barnes then.” You nodded, quickly fumbling with the ties of your apron before you shoved your jacket a bit more firmly into the back of the locker and shut it properly, letting Natasha walk you through the club towards the private dining space they were occupying.

Nat rushed you into the room and closed the door behind you, leaving you to stand rather flustered in front of a cosy looking dining room with a round table in the middle. Bucky was sat at the furthest end of the room, his chair seeming to have a higher back than all of the others. At his left was Steve, who you’d been properly introduced to on your first day at work and on his right was Sam Wilson, who you understood was a very close friend of his.

“Sugar, you made it.” Bucky enthusiastically greeted you as you approached the table. You hoped that you didn’t appear too flustered and intimidated, but you were aware that there was only so much you could play off with smiles when you knew your eyes might give you away. “Good evening Mr Barnes, gentleman.” You nodded, finally taking a step into the room and approaching the table, receiving polite hellos and smiles from all of them. “Are you looking after us tonight?” Steve asked, sitting forward in his seat and casually leaning his elbows on the table. “I am, Mr Rogers.” You nodded, lifting your notepad and pen as if it were proof. “Allow me to introduce you to everyone.” Bucky waved you over to him and you took a few steps towards him as he went around the table naming everyone. It was quite easy to distinguish that the people sitting closest to Bucky were of more importance to him as he listed Clint and Scott, who seemed to be his security and Pietro who appeared at first glance to be a mentee as well as the rest of the group.

“C’mere sweetheart.” Bucky motioned you to come and stand next to him once they were all done ordering food and drink. You stood where he’d pointed to and he turned in his seat to face you. You felt your cheeks warm intensely as Bucky smiled up at you, his eyes so soft and sweet and you questioned for a moment how exactly this man was the King of New York. He was incredibly sweet looking and for a moment you found yourself melting on the spot. “Is that everything, Mr Barnes?” You asked. “Not quite, sugar. Add whatever you’re having to the list, it’s on me.” He grinned at you. “I – uh, sorry?” You asked, a little confused. “Are you sure, Mr Barnes?” You hesitantly met his eyes though you immediately broke eye contact. “Absolutely, please eat with us, doll.” Bucky’s voice went soft as he tilted his head back a little to see you better, his lips pouting ever so slightly. “As you wish, Mr Barnes. Thank you.” You smiled at him, speaking softly before jotting your meal on the notepad and rushing out of the room.

You nearly bumped into Natasha as you made your way towards the kitchen. “He wants me to eat with them.” You blurted out before even making your presence known. “He what?” Nat frowned. “Mr Barnes wants me to order my food and drink and eat with them.” You repeated, more calmly this time. “Really?” She looked at you wide eyed. “Does he not do that with other waitresses?” You questioned, ripping the order out of the notepad and handing it to the kitchen staff. “No, he’s never done that before, never requested it either.” Nat shook her head. “Are you sure?” You surely couldn’t be the only one he’s ever asked. “I’ve worked here every night for three years and not once has he ever requested that.” Nat said with a single raised brow. It was definitely unusual. “I’ll get someone to call for you when the food’s ready. Let me get their drinks together.” She told you, waving you away before she went to look at the order you’d brought in.

You waltzed into the private dining room with a large round tray balanced expertly on one hand. The glasses on top gently clinked together as you walked. Handing out their orders, you took your drink last. You noticed quickly that all the men around the table had shifted and there was now an empty seat next to Bucky. “Come and sit with me, doll.” He patted the empty chair. Steve hopped up to pull it out for you and you obliged, gently sitting yourself down in the chair and turning slightly to face him. You didn’t want to assume you could speak unless spoken to, so you politely kept quiet while Bucky noticeably studied your face. “Tell us about yourself, sweetheart.” He smiled, sitting back in his chair as he picked up his drink and took a sip.

“I’ve been around and lived in a few different places. My parents passed several years ago and it’s just been me ever since, so I moved back to Brooklyn.” You did appreciate the soft look on Bucky’s face as he listened to what you said, almost like he felt sorry for you. Before you could continue though, Bucky rested his hand over yours and squeezed gently. “I’m sorry about your parents, truly I am.” He spoke just above a whisper. “Thank you, Mr Barnes.” You gave him a tight lipped smile. “Call me Bucky. We’re with family, which means we’re all on a first name basis, alright?” Bucky gripped your hand gently. “Alright, Bucky.” You nodded, mirroring his smile.

You told him more about yourself and for a moment, Bucky seemed anything but a mobster. He asked you about the books you liked to read and talked to you about the subjects that seemed to make your eyes light up and your smile a little wider. As the evening drew on, you became comfortable enough to share a few timid little jokes, which elicited chuckles and laughs from even some of the most scary looking men around the table. One of them, Drax, who was terrifyingly huge and angry looking, clapped his hand over his chest and roared with laughter the first time you told a joke, which completely took you by surprise. What surprised you more was how easy it was to make Bucky laugh and how down to earth and sweet he was.

By the time everyone had eaten and spent some time drinking and chatting and enjoying themselves, you had warmed up to all of them, especially Steve, Sam and Bucky. All of them though, were soft and charming on the inside, showing you a side to them you were unsure anyone else in the club was ever going to see. They were intimidating on the outside, exuding a terrifying confidence, but on the inside they were all sweet and gentle and caring and it absolutely melted you.

And after you had said goodbye to all of them and made your way back to the locker room, Clint, one of Bucky’s closer family members, followed you in. “Barnes wants me and Scott to make sure you get home safe.” He told you. “He’s requesting we give you a lift back in his SUV.” Clint added, leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed over his middle. It definitely seemed unusual, especially to be personally driven home. As far as you were aware, not even Natasha, who seemed very close to the family was ever given a lift home. But then again, judging by her reaction to Bucky wanting you to dine with them earlier, you supposed this was all rather new for them, just as much as it was for you. “Alright.” You nodded as you opened your locker, pulling off your apron and putting it away before you took out your jacket and bag, quickly getting them both on before letting Clint escort your towards the back exit.

“Hey doll, hope you don’t mind the spontaneous ride home.” Bucky grinned, far too pleased with himself that he was having his men not only drive him, Steve and Sam home, but also you. Of course it meant he had a longer way home, but Bucky didn’t care. Seeing you all off to your houses was important to him and why seeing you off specifically was important, Bucky was starting to wonder why.

After sliding into the SUV and getting comfortable on the soft, plush seats, you were driven home with gentle, quiet chatter between Bucky and Sam, Steve joining in occasionally until you arrived at your apartment building.

“See you the day after tomorrow, sugar.” Bucky smiled, leaning towards the open door to speak to you as you got out of the car. “Thanks for the ride home.” You waved at all of the men in the car, Scott getting out to escort you up to the front door of the building, the car waiting until they had seen you safely into the building and the door shut behind you.

Sitting down in your bedroom, safely back in your apartment you laid down in the soft blankets, replaying the evening in your head, realising you were smiling to yourself when you remembered that Nat had said no one had ever been asked to dine with Bucky and his family before. It brought warmth to your cheeks as you settled in for the night, looking forward to your next shift at Stark’s.

Bucky Taglist (OPEN):

@losers-official @barneswidow​ @megantje123​ @anchoeritic​ @struggling-bee​​

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 313: Deku VS Lady Nagant

Previously on BnHA: Hawks’s super-hot badass murder senpai Lady Nagant showed up to fire a cupid’s arrow into my heart, and a bunch of literal bullets into my son. Deku was all “oh shit it’s Hawks’s super-hot badass murder senpai, what do I do, let me think back to Hawks’s advice for a sec.” Flashback!Hawks was all “anyway Deku so if my super-hot badass murder senpai ever shows up you’re basically screwed so you’d better abscond the fuck out of there.” Present!Deku was all “lol idek why I flashed back to that conversation since I’m just going to do the exact opposite of what Hawks said” and charged directly toward Nagant because WHY NOT. Overhaul was all “waah I need to get back to my boss who I put in a coma out of love” and Nagant was all “jesus christ why did I even bring you here” and had a flashback to AFO who was all “ILU NAGANT IMMA GIVE YOU AN EXTRA QUIRK SO PLEASE CAPTURE DEKU FOR ME PLEASE AND THANKS” and yeah. Shit is all over the place right now and I love it.

Today on BnHA: All Might gets attacked by a pair of discount assassins and is all “Call an ambulance! ...BUT NOT FOR ME” and it’s really badass but also I really wish he would stop tempting fate like this. Lady Nagant is all “[casually flies around town shooting shit]” and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t read an entire chapter of just that. Deku is all, “[gets shot (≥_<)]” and releases a giant Smokescreen which prompts En to show up. En is all, “( •᷄⌓•᷅ ) (⌣̀ Δ⌣́) ( •̀_•́ )σ (¬､¬) (눈_눈)” which I consider to be a high point of both the chapter and of my life. The chapter ends with Deku using the Third’s quirk to launch a bunch of random objects at Nagant so that he can jump up and grab her arm all sneaky-like, and I’m sure this is going to prompt another week’s worth of discourse that I don’t care about at all, but fuck it, I’m having a good time.

OH WE’RE CUTTING BACK TO ALL MIGHT WELL THAT’S NICE I GUESS. CONGRATS ON NOT BEING DEAD

you named your car??

you named it Hercules??

I love you so much??

please marry me you giant fucking dork???

lmao speaking of huge fucking dorks

who the fuck are you clowns. la dee da we’re gonna murder All Might with our synchronized spear attack!! I mean... they’re clearly trying their best... maybe I should just be nice and politely hype them up like All Might is so clearly trying to do

like okay, but we all agree that this is actually the least intimidating attack any of us has ever seen, right?? these guys zipped up their hoodies all serious-like and are trying to attack All Might and Hercules with their Walmart tiki torches, but just, no?? right?? like the only way this could possibly be effective is if they were trying to kill All Might with secondhand embarrassment

“those are assassins” this is a VERY generous assessment, All Might

OH MY GOD THE TIKI TORCHES ACTUALLY KILLED THE FUCK OUT OF HERCULES

[slaps roof of car] this baby can fit so many weaponized festive backyard lighting solutions in it

and yet, even after watching this with my own two eyes, I still can’t take these dudes seriously. idek what it is. anyways r.i.p. Hercules, I loved you a lot but I guess you weren’t actually a very good armored car were you

omg they didn’t know it was All Might??

okay 1) for a moment there I was like “oh hey maybe they’re not so bad after all” but then a moment later it was like “ah nope, they are.” like, that was an interesting .06 second emotional journey there. anyways 2) All Might you have my permission to kick their asses for this disrespect, and 3) anyone else all of a sudden getting “wouldn’t this be an interesting time for Stain to suddenly show up” vibes?? no?? just me???

(ETA: hmm tbh I’ve still got those vibes and they haven’t gone away lol. Stain?? you out there buddy?? do you want to be cool for just once in your life. ball’s in your court pal.)

OH SNAP ALL MIGHT ARE YOU REALLY GONNA DO IT ARE YOU GONNA KICK THEIR ASSES

PROTECTIVE DAD MODE ACTIVATED?? BECAUSE YOU KNOW I’M HERE FOR THAT SHIT, SO YEAH, FEEL FREE

omg he’s shouting at them about how much Deku has suffered lmao and they’re just like falling over from being scolded

so they have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about though, right? “SIR THIS IS A WENDY’S” well whatever, you killed his pet car so he’s in a bad mood now

OH MY GOD

LIKE, JUST SO WE’RE ALL CLEAR, THESE FOUR PAGES SO FAR HAVE MADE ALMOST ZERO SENSE. LIKE MAYBE 2% SENSE TOPS. BUT ASK ME IF I CARE. GO AHEAD AND ASK. I SAID GO AHEAD, IT’S OKAY. ...NO I DON’T CARE AT ALL THANK YOU FOR ASKING

(ETA: also, the more I look at this panel, the more I’m just like, why the hell would you phrase it like that though, sob. way to doubly tempt fate?? are you trying to give Horikoshi a challenge??)

and now back to Deku who is randomly bouncing around the city and narrating it to himself just in case he was confused about why he was doing this

who are you talking to Deku. but thanks we appreciate it

man you gotta love that overconfidence. the smartest guy in the world warned you away from this lady, so SURE, LET’S RUN RIGHT UP TO HER. “I APPRECIATE YOUR INPUT, FLASHBACK!HAWKS, BUT I’LL TAKE IT FROM HERE” well okay then!!

I think it would be funny if RHA.com put little Buzzfeed-style polls in between the chapter pages so they could survey people at random intervals as they read their way through the chapter. like, you finish this page and then there’s a little poll there asking “do you think Deku’s plan of catching up to Lady Nagant and finding out where Shigaraki is will work?”, and you click “no” just like everyone else and then nod as the results show that 97% of your fellow readers also picked “no”, and you chuckle to yourself wondering how many of the 3% accidentally clicked on the wrong option by mistake, and then you keep on reading

ANYWAY, SO

HOW’S THAT PLAN WORKING OUT FOR YOU SO FAR DEKU. nice kick, though!!

omggggggg

ouch

update: Deku’s plan not really working out. sources tell me my boy has been fucking shot. this is an ongoing story and we will keep you posted with the latest developments as they come in

wait what

feel free to explain to the rest of us what all of this “UNLESS...” and “THAT POSSIBILITY...” shit means anytime, Deku

oh lol did he realize she could fly??

BREAKING NEWS UPDATE, CNN’s John King reports that Deku is still fucked. eyewitness reports now coming in that Nagant is doing no-look shots and basically not even giving a fuck. sources described her mannerisms and expression as “sexy, but in like an effortless sort of way.” we will continue to bring you the latest

so now there’s basically an entire page of Deku being all “ah fuck so she’s basically closing in and she could already hit me with impossible accuracy even from Far Away, so if that’s the case then her being Up Close is probably going to be even worse!” making good use of that Big Hero Brain there, Deku

so now what, you’re doing some kind of spiraling kick thing?? how is that going to help

oh lol he’s using Smokescreen to create some cover. aww, good for you Deku you named one of your Smokescreen attacks

OH NO LADY DON’T TELL ME AFO DIDN’T EVEN FILL YOU IN ON THE BASICS

seriously, AFO?? you basically told her what Deku’s exact strategy was going to be but then couldn’t be assed to drop that little, small, barely notable piece of knowledge that Deku is rocking multiple quirks?? is it supposed to be a secret or something?? you dropped the ball here man

damn this is getting intense now

(ETA: the way En is poking Deku’s head in that first panel is fucking sending me, I love this guy so much omg.)

well then what are you planning, Deku?? I’m actually really curious!! I am genuinely starting to be invested in this fight scene not only in the “wanting to see who wins and how that impacts the plot” sense, but also in the “wanting to see how it happens because the choreography and strategy is actually pretty cool” sense, which honestly hasn’t happened for quite a while now! this is fun

anyway so what’s up Deku, are you going to use another quirk?? I’ve been speculating that he hasn’t actually unlocked the last two yet (since Two and Three didn’t exactly seem convinced when we last saw them), but maybe I’m about to be proven wrong

(ETA: well he clearly has Three’s obviously, but Two’s is still MIA, and that’s the one I am of course the most curious about. that’s the one we’re all curious about, let’s be real.)

OH SNAP???

AHHHH I’M HYPED LOL. ANOTHER SHINY NEW QUIRK LOL SHOULD I PUT UP THE USUAL DISCOURSE DISCLAIMER

(ETA: so yeah, after thinking on it, I’m not gonna say “please no Deku discourse on my blog” this week, but I probably will ignore any discourse that does come my way though, just because I don’t have much interest in getting involved in what would probably be a pretty repetitive discussion. like, I can just sum up my opinions (which is what they are) here instead. in fact here they are lol:

1) I like the SIXQUIRKS and I like seeing Deku be a badass.

2) I also don’t think Deku is too OP. more like he’s exactly as OP as he needs to be at the moment, given that we’re approaching the end of the series. I expect the other kids will also be pretty damn OP when we see them fight again. we’re just at that point now where they’re all badasses (as well they should be; they’ve grown a lot and they deserve it). it’s just that Deku’s the one we’re getting to see right now.

3) of course I miss Kacchan and the others, but for me this vibes much closer to the MVA arc where even though I missed them, I was still having a blast (as opposed to the dark days of the Basement arc where I was pretty much losing it lol). like, even though Kacchan’s my favorite, I still love Deku a lot and this arc has been amazing for him getting to shine on his own (for like the first time, really).

4) y’all know I love the OFA plot and I’ve never been shy about that lol. I like all of the Vestiges a lot. Banjou and his over the top personality; En and his “guy you thought would be serious and :| all the time but is actually hyper-animated and ALL OVER THE PLACE” energy; Shiro who actually is a :| sort of guy lol; Three who I still expect will be fleshed out in a more detailed flashback at some point; and of course Two, who, well. you know what I think about him lol. Bakuverse is still on the table and I’m still hyped. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we still have yet to see Two actually talk to Deku (as opposed to talking to the other Vestiges while Deku is distracted). did he lend him his power yet?? or is he still holding out?? either way it’s definitely going to be a Big Thing when it finally happens and I can’t wait to see it.

5) Lady Nagant is Everything and just because Deku grabbed her arm doesn’t mean the fight is over yet lol. Overhaul hasn’t come into play yet either. not to mention that even if the fight is over, the “where do we go from here” part still has me excited either way. her connection to Hawks and the HPSC is very intriguing and we’ve barely touched on that as of yet; she definitely has more of a role to play in this.

6) last but not least, I feel like every week the discussion is all about how much focus Deku’s getting, and how OP he is or isn’t, and OFA this and OFA that, but meanwhile I’m actually so invested in the character development here though?? the way Deku has distanced himself from everyone (except for the Vestiges, because of course they’re already dead so it’s not like they can die again lol)?? the way he’s pushing himself far too hard and we can see the shadows in and under his eyes, and the fact that he never smiles, and even All Might has remarked on how he isn’t taking care of himself at all?? the fact that he’s so single-mindedly obsessed with focused on stopping AFO?? the fact that he’s still the same sweet old Deku despite everything and was so kind to that fox lady with the umbrella, but there was also something so sad about that scene because it felt like a reminder of the type of hero that he wants to be, but that he’s not allowed to be right now?? because the stakes are too high and the world is falling apart?? and he feels like he’s the only one who can do something about it?? and that he has to be?? and that he is putting so much pressure on himself right now, and it’s absolutely too much pressure for any one person to bear, and I feel like no one is fucking talking about this lol goddammit.

anyway so yeah. I have feels about this, and every week that slow-burn angst is getting more and more intense behind the scenes, and I feel like it’s all going to hit a breaking point eventually. sooner rather than later. it really feels like a mirror of Katsuki’s post-Kamino arc. where all that angst was just churning below the surface for like twenty chapters and then it finally was like “okay it’s time” and it all came bursting out and we got the best five chapters of the fucking series (in my admittedly biased estimation lol).

basically, I know that most of fandom is billing this as either the “villain hunt” arc or the “solo Deku SIXQUIRKS fighting arc” or whatever. but for me, it’s always been and still is the Deku Angst arc lol. the cool fights are a sexy bonus (the worldbuilding less so because even though it’s interesting to see society at such a low point, it’s also very depressing and gets old pretty fast), but for me the thing that’s really keeping me engaged chapter after chapter is seeing Deku like we’ve never seen him before. seeing him all quiet and withdrawn and brooding and focused on AFO, AFO, AFO, and seeing that “he just doesn’t take himself into account” mentality taken to extremes. I am invested in that. I’m soaking up that angst each and every week, and I’m invested in seeing what comes of it. it’s a big picture thing. week to week this arc might just seem like a bunch of villain fight scenes, sure. but Deku’s emotional journey is the thread that’s going to carry this arc through from beginning to end, and for that I’m willing to be patient.

anyway that turned into a BIG OL’ RANT there but yeah! so those are my thoughts on the disk horse as it currently stands. and like I said, I’m open to discussion, but tbh I will probably just wind up repeating these same talking points endlessly so just a fair warning lol.)

anyway so Three says Deku has yet to use his quirk at ALL but now he’s trying to combine it with another quirk?? damn. also please check out En’s face here you guys

En launching a sneak attack up my favorite character list by the sheer power of his expressions alone. he really knows how to make the most of his screentime

OH DAMN DEKU

at this point the 3% from that hypothetical poll earlier are starting to feel prettttty damn smug, I’ll bet. well shit

what in the fuck

?? so like releasing his chi or whatnot?? isn’t that basically just like base OFA all over again?? also Deku did you seriously just apologize to Gran’s cape

update: Nagant has turned her eyeball into a gun

hm. hmmmmmmm. ...okay yep, still somehow sexy

anyway so she’s just floating up there building suspense, as one does. lord I sure hope she has good reflexes because something tells me she’s going to need them

OH SNAP HE THREW GRAN’S CAPE AS A DECOY WHAAAAT OKAY THAT’S SOME SMART SHIT DEKU

LOL SHE’S MAD NOW

JESUS CHRIST SHE JUST NEVER TAKES A GODDAMN BREAK FROM BEING AWESOME HUH

DEKU ARE YOU JUST THROWING EVERY DAMN THING IN YOUR INVENTORY

but without the cape and the hood how will you continue to look like an enigmatic badass. you really can’t. which means we might finally be moving on from the wandering nomad part of this arc, stay tuned

LOL YOU MANIAC

I hope he went full Kacchan with the dialogue there. his face sure looks like it lol. popped out of a building all mad fdskljlkj omg

well this was fun, shit. I still have basically no idea what Three’s quirk does though lol. like, can he use it to charge up objects with kinetic energy or something?? but then what was all of that talk about combining it with one of the other quirks?? or was that just because he was using Smokescreen at the same time??

(ETA: having seen and read an additional half-dozen explanations of Three’s quirk, I can say with confidence that I still have basically no idea what it is or does.)

anyway so!! Deku is a badasssssss but something tells me not to count Nagant out just yet even so. also I really enjoy seeing Deku flip out on people like he doesn’t have a fucking hole in his torso because it reminds me of A CERTAIN SOMEONE and I always love to see him channeling that feral energy; I feel like it’s been a while

anyways good luck to you both!! I truly wish that both of you could win. but if not, then maybe you can at least become friends instead. you have so much in common, you both can fly and have multiple quirks and you’re both badasses, and plus it would just be really funny to see the look on Hawks’s face lmao

[dirty-brainrot]

(What is this)

I FOUND THIS IN THE DARKEST CORNER OF MY DRAFTS.... I do not remember writing this probably made this when I was half asleep at 2 am and thought it was funny lol. So uhm, enjoy this embarassing thing.

Pairing: Kakyoin Noriaki x Reader

Warning: Perverted thoughts, Tentacle hentai but nothing happens,

"Hey, Y/N-chan! What are you reading?" You hear footsteps approach you. You only hummed in response knowing it was Kakyoin.

Since Jotaro was a long friend of yours, a mystery on how that even came about, Kakyoin instantly became your friend as soon as he and Jotaro came back from the 50+ day trip to Egypt.

Hearing Mrs. Seiko (Holly) falling ill because of DIO, you wanted to help them on their journey but Jotaro wouldn't let you. Not only that, your parents would absolutely kill you if they found out you went on an adventure with 4 men— well, 5 and a dog. Also, missing classes would badly affect your grades. You could only help and guard Mrs. Seiko against any stand dangers.

You were sitting alone on the school rooftop while waiting for the two bizarre boys until the other one had arrived. Peeking up from your book, you only saw Kakyoin and Jotaro was nowhere to be seen.

"A manga?" He mumbles sitting beside you, interested in what you were reading.

"W-wait... Th-that's not any ordinary manga.." Kakyoin's voice was almost a whisper but you still heard it.

You were not reading a normal manga, it's more of an erotic manga. You were reading hentai to be precise.

"A-ah, I didn't think you were the type to read this, Y/N-chan..." His cheeks were tinted slightly with pink. "You don't know a lotta thing about me kak~" You snickered, enjoying the sight of a slightly flustered kakyoin.

"I wouldn't choose tentacle hentai but the art style just draws me in, you know?.. plus it'll be good material for my book..." You spoke the last part quietly while flipping to the other page. "Normally I would just go for the hot futanari stuff. Buuut~" You stretched the word "but" before continuing. "Good plot and, again, good style." You made weird gestures to the page and then tapped at it for drawing Kakyoin's attention.

"Oh, so you read hentai only for the plot and style?" Weirdly finding this interesting, the red-head cherry boy asked.

"And material for my book." You mumble, getting invested into the manga as it was getting into the good part.

"Ah..." Kakyoin nodded thinking about..stuff but he quickly shook them off. Hearing your giggles, he leaned to take a peek a the page, curious to see what you found funny.

"Look at this kak, they made an accident here." You pointed at the creature's tentacle. "In this panel, the monster has 12 tentacles, and now look at this panel."

Dragging your finger on the soft yet rough texture of the paper, you pointed at the 4th panel. "The monster suddenly gained some more tentacles and the girl lost her earrings." Kakyoin chuckled at your attention to details.

You babbled further but Kakyoin's thoughts started to drift away. 'Hm, tentacle hentai huh... [Hierophant Green] can do that..maybe they would want to...!'

His mind is now quickly being filled with nasty hormonal thoughts. 'What would it feel like doing it while using [Hierophant]...'

He glanced at you, you were still busy rambling about hentai. 'Would they-- NORIAKI! NO!! GAH!!!' He shook the nasty thoughts forming in his brain away by thinking about something else and refusing to look at the manga.

"Oh hey, Isn't one of [Hierophant Melon] powers' to make tentacles?" The cherry boy looked at her with wide eyes, dumbfounded at her question. Y/N only looked at him with innocent (eye color) orbs.

"Well, yeah... [Hierophant] can make his limbs into tentacle." He rubbed the nape of his neck, his cheeks reddening.

"Is this getting too weird..? I'm sorry.."

You quickly averted your gaze from kakyoin and focused on the erotic manga at hand. "I tend to ask the weirdest of things.." You let out an airy, nervous chuckle.

"It's ok, it just...took me off-guard."

You closed the manga, not before putting a bookmark. "Ok so this may sound weird and...kinky but can I... see and touch [Melon]'s tentacles?" Like how Kakyoin reacted to you reading the erotic manga earlier, your voice slowly getting shy and turning into a whisper.

Kakyoin has never seen you act so bashful, he found it adorable, even in the bizarre situation he's in. "Strange request but sure, why not." He gave you a small smile and called out [Hierophant Green]'s tentacle. It was in front of you, moving like a serpent.

"Interesting... This is a good material for my book..." You mumble before setting down the manga beside you and began petting the tentacle. "So it's like a snake but no mouth and kinky." You stated while observing its reaction to your touches. Kakyoin giggled at the last part.

Gently petting the tentacle, you turn your attention to Kakyoin who was now watching your every move. "Can you feel it?"

"Yeah, it feels like you're petting me"

Humming back in response, you looked at the tentacle and back at the redhead. You had an idea, feeling a little mischievous, you maintained an intense eye contact with him and slowly bend down to peck the tentacle.

Surprised at the unexpected gesture, Kakyoin's noodle hair flew up, his face crimson red.

You giggled at his reaction, trying not to laugh. He quickly retracted back his stand. "Very cute."

Jotaro had finally arrived on the rooftop and looked at Kakyoin with a confused expression. "What's up with him." Asked the emo boy, curious about what had happened.

You smiled, standing up, you grabbed your unholy manga. "Dunno. Anyways, I'm gonna go grab a drink because you took so long." And then you began to walk away trying not to burst out of laughter.

Kakyoin was still beet red and he tried his best to cover up his face not wanting Jotaro to see the state he's in.

⤷ Reader is kinda like Rohan, the "oh this will be good for my thingy thang" and being attentive to details anddd Reader can also touch stands because of this. :P

'That was a...bizarre experience...'

[cosmicjoke]

(insert Adele song) Hello, its me.

It wasn't actually an ask, it was more like I wanted to reply normally, but Im scared of that aggressive anon to get at me, so I am hiding as Anon.

I was basically trying to school that mofo. It was as if Anon wanted another mental breakdown from Yashiro, and till then it's obvious he regrets it all, and not with a smug smile? That Anon to me felt like they read the manga in one night, and focus only on what they want and not what they should.

They forget Yashiro IS a natural liar. Lies are his shield. Lies has been one of the things that made him survive. He lied for decades about his masochism, his love for pain. DECADES of lies. You cant expect him to suddenly tell truths to someone he meet again for days.

Your AA (aggressive anon) also seem to forget Yashiro is starve of love, to the point he doesn't know what that is. How that feels. Obviously he doesn't know how to react when he received that, or when finally he understands that, or when he is slowly accepting that. Yashiro right now is still in an accepting phase.

Remember he lived in a love-less environment and was only done violence since 8yo. Imagine living in that kind of life... cause I cant. Even Misumi treats him that way, I hope AA didnt ignore that. Least not forget he has lived under the care of Yakuzas since his teenage years? Living and breathing that kind of life is only natural to expect him to exhale violence as well, like shooting Doumeki or hitting that Hirata crew with a stick.

It was a shocker to him to realise that 'thing' that we normal people call love exists. In referencing the forbbiden fruit panel, which is Doumeki. He he has known it just cant admit. Not without self-loathing attached.

Yashiro is confusing? of course he is, thats the point! Doumeki confuses the hell outta him? Didn't you (AA) see how he acts differently towards Doumeki compare to everyone else? Doumeki scares him. And still is! I dont know if this is obvious, but to me Yashiro is flustered whenever Doumeki is around. He doesn't know what to do with himself, that he may seem cold or casual, but he's really terrified.

And yes, this is Yashiro's story of self-healing. It's slow but then when have you seen a BIG wound that healed over night?

The cage bird is Yashiro and he will always be cage and in the dark for as long as Misumi has him bound to this world and Doumeki is that shimmering light that attracted him...so yeah be kind to Yashiro and let him have that glimpses of light. ( Im referencing those glitters when he thought of Doumeki. It was kinda cute. ) Lets all wait and celebrate now he's slowly healing. So much of himself he has admitted.

AA should study and broaden their understanding of trauma. How that affects people. Watch documentaries of real people. Grow some human sympathy. Saezuru must be so overwhelming to them compare to other BLs that focuses on smut. It irk me when they pass the word "suicidal" so easily like a comedy skit. In case it's not obvious, AA, this is also tag as psychological.

Anyway... that's basically it. Saezuru is not for everyone. I never have thought I would see someone like AA strolling in here, thought they only crawl in twitter and mangasites. lol

I wish you a good day, Cos. (:

Hi anaon, and thank you so much for sending in your message again! I'm really sorry I deleted it the first time, as you obviously put a lot of thought and effort into it.

And everything you said, is 100% correct.

With Yashiro, it's imperative, in order to understand his character, to also have a grasp on his background, the way he grew up, the environment in which he was raised, the abuse he suffered, and continues to suffer. You can't ever understand his character, or why he is the way he is, or why he does the things he does, without first understanding those other things. And it seems painfully clear to me that that other anon doesn't understand any of it.

And yes, exactly, lying and deflecting are tools with which Yashiro has learned to defend himself. Truly, the ONLY way he's ever had of defending himself. It's HIMSELF he lies primarily to, in fact, as a means of coping with the horrific abuse he's suffered in his life. By convincing himself he's always wanted it, that he's always liked it. It isn't out of some malicious intent, it's out of self-preservation.

And yes, again, Yashiro was raised in an environment of violence, being sexually and physically assaulted by his step-father starting at eight years old, and lasting until he was, what, 16? That kind of horror isn't even conceivable to most of us. We can only look at it at a remove, and understand objectively that it's awful. But we can never know the true pain and terror and misery of that kind of abuse unless we ourselves have experienced it. So when I see these kinds of idiots like this anon going off about how unfair Yashiro is being to Doumeki, or how he's "using" Doumeki, or whatever other tripe they were spouting, I get seriously pissed. It's just a breathtaking lack of compassion on display. And indeed, the violence of Yashiro's world continued on into adulthood. He was taken in and entrapped in the world of the Yakuza, and it was either adapt or die at that point. His entire life has been filled with violence. The only example he's ever been set in terms of solving problems, or getting out of situations, is through violence. It's all he knows. It's one of Yashiro's great tragedies, that he's a genuinely kind and compassionate person who, through no fault of his own, was born into and then later further trapped in a world of cruelty and violence. And you make a great point, when you say that for someone who's grown up knowing only cruelty and violence, it's absurd to expect them to know how to react or deal with it when someone, for the first time in their life, shows them genuine love and affection. Yashiro has never know the like. He's never been treated as anything but a punching bag and a joke. Of course it would befuddle him, to be treated, for the first time in his 36 years of life, like an actual human being. And of course it scared him, because he was also being forced, through that love, to face the reality of how he'd been treated before. To face the truth, that what was done to him was wrong, and irrevocably damaged him.

Also, this anon acts like Doumeki is the gentlest soul to ever walk, and has never engaged in or displayed violent behavior in his life. lol, okay. Doumeki is way more violent than Yashiro. For one, Yashiro hasn't, that we've ever seen, killed anybody. But Doumeki sure as hell has. He killed an entire group of men, in fact. The one's who kidnapped Niki. He beat his father nearly to death (not that it wasn't deserved), he routinely attacks and assaults people with no hesitation. Doumeki is a pretty violent person. That's not to say he's a bad person, because he's not. He's a good person. But he isn't some wilting flower that Yashiro has been oh so mean to. They whine about Yashiro shooting Doumeki without taking into any consideration the mental state Yashiro was in when he did that. The fact Yashiro was suicidal, that he was going to try and make a serious attempt to end his own life. Like you said, they toss that word around like it's some kind of joke, like it's not a big deal. It exposes just how bereft of compassion for psychological suffering they are, that they couldn't see or just didn't care how much pain Yashiro was in at that point in his life. He wanted to DIE. He genuinely did. He shot Doumeki because he was desperate. He needed to keep him away, because he knew Doumeki would intervene and prevent him from being killed, and possibly get himself killed in the process. Doumeki wasn't listening, wasn't going away, words weren't working at that point, despite Yashiro's best efforts to drive him away with them, and so he fell to the last resort of violence. He was trying to protect Doumeki, and give himself the chance to end his own life. But, again, this anon clearly doesn't understand ANY of that. As you said, this manga isn't just BL, it's a psychological study of the affects of trauma and child abuse. It deals in a serious manner with very serious subjects. If they can't handle that, then they should stop reading, right now.

Anyway, thank you for resending your message! I really appreciate it!

[todomitoukei]

English vs. Japanese Shouto - A 298 Comparison

Welcome back to another comparison between the Japanese version and the official English translation. This chapter has caused a lot of confusion as soon as the spoilers came out, particularly in regards to the last line in Shouto’s monologue. Does he want to kill Dabi? Is he going to fight him?

Aside from the confusion, this chapter is important for both Shouto’s character, as well as his and Dabi’s storyline, moving forward.

The scene starts with a panel of Shouto in his hospital bed, surrounded by his classmates who by now are also aware of the situation. As we find out at the end of the chapter, Shouto’s throat is burned, so he currently can’t talk. Regardless, he has a lot to say or rather a lot to reflect on, starting with an obvious fact:

“His flames are stronger than dad’s.”

An obvious fact and a simple sentence. But what about the original?

「あいつの炎は親父よりも強かった。」

「あいつ ; aitsu 」-> he; that guy

「の ; no 」-> possessive particle; similar to an apostrophe

「炎 ; honou 」-> flame

「は ; ha 」-> topic marker particle

「親父 ; oyaji 」-> dad

「よりも ; yori mo 」-> in comparison to; more than

「強かった ; tsuyokatta 」-> was strong

= “His flames were stronger than dad’s.”

The difference here is the tense. While the original text has Shouto say that the flames “were” stronger, the English translation has him say they “are” stronger. It’s not really an important difference, but I think the past tense was him reflecting on the one fact he knew about Touya before all this. The first time we, the readers, heard about Touya in chapter 202 -

was during Shouto’s early training days, where Endeavor brought up Touya and the fact that “his fire was greater” - so this is a fact Shouto was raised with, someone he was essentially compared to. Touya set the bar high, but Endeavor expected Shouto to raise the bar even higher.

“I couldn’t win with firepower alone. So strong… Those flames full of hate.”

While Shouto had so far only been told about Touya’s strength, this is the first time he got to actually experience this himself. Now, Touya’s flames being stronger isn’t just something Endeavor said, but something Shouto knows.

「火力で勝てなかった強い。。。憎しみの炎だった。」

「火力 ; karyoku」-> firepower

「で ; de 」-> with

「勝てなかった ; katenakatta 」-> couldn’t win

「強い ; tsuyoi 」-> strong

「憎しみ ; nikushimi 」-> hatred

「の ; no 」-> possessive particle; similar to an apostrophe

「炎 ; honou 」-> flame

「だった ; datta 」-> was

= “I couldn’t win with firepower. Strong… it was a flame of strong hatred.”

Again, not a big difference, especially since the English translation made sure to split the text the same way as the original, but tsuyoi (strong) is an adjective that attaches to the noun, nikushimi (hatred). Sure, his flames are strong, but more importantly, his hatred is strong and that is the bigger problem here.

Not only does Dabi have a stronger flame, but his hatred grants him even more power as he’s not held back by any rational thought or feeling. Like a forest fire, you can’t just extinguish it. Instead, it keeps spreading and growing larger and larger.

“And he’s… been watching us all this time.”

Next, we get the flashback to the first time Shouto met Dabi back in the summer arc. Maybe Dabi’s “How sad, poor little Shouto Todoroki” didn’t mean that much to Shouto - who might have just assumed that Dabi knew his name from the sports festival - but now he understands that this had been planned for a long time. Touya “died” around ten years ago and during all that time, Dabi had been thinking about this moment. 

「あいつはずっと見てたんだ。」

「あいつ ; aitsu 」-> he; that guy

「は ; ha 」-> topic marker particle

「ずっと ; zutto 」-> continuously; the whole time

「見てた ; miteta 」-> was watching

「んだ ; nda 」-> explanatory particle

= “He was watching the whole time.”

Again, not much of a difference except for the tense. Another thing that this is implying is that Dabi is incredibly patient. Instead of just being filled with rage and letting it out all, he waited in the shadows for years, even when being so close to Shouto he chose to keep his composure, even though he could’ve just killed him right then and there if he had wanted to.

Something that got lost in translation is the nuance of the nda at the end of the sentence, which can have multiple meanings. Here, it expresses reason and discovery, as Shouto understands his first encounter with Dabi now. Sort of like saying “Oh, so that’s why he knew my name. That’s what he has been up to the entire time.”

“All… to bring down dad. Wrecking his own body along the way… and not giving a damn whose lives get ruined in the process.”

「親父を貶めるためだけにその身を滅ぼしながらあらゆる人の人生を巻き込んで。」

「親父 ; oyaji 」-> dad

「を ; o 」-> direct object marker

「貶める ; otoshimeru 」-> to look down upon; to cause to fall

「ため ; tame 」-> purpose 

「だけに ; dake ni 」-> being the case; precisely 

「その ; sono 」-> that

「身 ; mi 」-> body; oneself

「を ; o 」-> direct object marker

「滅ぼしながら ; horoboshi nagara 」-> while destroying

「あらゆる人 ; ara yuru hito 」-> all kinds of people

「の ; no 」-> possessive particle; similar to an apostrophe

「人生 ; jinsei 」-> human life

「を ; o 」-> direct object marker

「巻き込んで ; makikonde 」-> involving; dragging into

= “For the purpose of causing dad’s downfall, he destroyed his body at the same time and dragged other lives into it.”

I find the additional “not giving a damn” in the official translation interesting (= I hate it)… since he literally doesn’t say that, but sure let’s just add this to make it seem like Shouto is judging Dabi here when he is not doing that at all. This is merely an observation, stating the fact that his older brother’s mind was so clouded by hatred that he involved other people’s lives in their family business. This isn’t to say that Shouto doesn’t see this as wrong, but it’s not the point and not something he is focusing on. He’s connecting the dots, making sense of the situation, and understanding the reasons that led to Dabi’s crimes rather than just stating the obvious of “this is wrong.”

On to one of my favorite lines this chapter: “He’s basically... me.”

「あいつは俺だ。」

「あいつ ; aitsu 」-> he; that guy

「は ; ha 」-> topic marker particle

「俺 ; ore 」-> I

「だ ; da 」-> be

= “That guy is me.”

So, I’m not sure why the “basically” was added in the official English translation since Shouto doesn’t say it like that. He just says “Touya = me.” It’s a fact. Obviously, Shouto isn’t actually Touya, but the “basically” isn’t needed unless you suddenly think that maybe Shouto hass two separate bodies at once somehow. This might be nitpicking, and there have definitely been bigger changes before, but to me the “basically” distances the two, even though the sentence is supposed to show that they are the same. Yes, one is on the hero side and the other on the villain side. Of course there are differences. But again, it’s not about the crimes Dabi has committed or how these two brothers differ. It’s about what’s going on in their minds, what feelings control their every action. They come from the same place, physically and mentally. The way they reacted to their pain is the same, with the big difference being what Shouto points out next:

“I was also burning with rage… up until that day.”

That day, as the panel shows, being the sports festival, the day Shouto began to see clearly. But Dabi didn’t have a moment like that (yet) and so he continues going down that path, while Shouto managed to leave that mindset.

「あの日までの俺がこの身を焼いたんだ。」

「あの ; ano 」-> that

「日 ; hi 」-> day

「まで ; made 」-> until

「の ; no 」-> nominalizes the preceding phrase

「俺 ; ore 」-> I

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「この ; kono 」-> this

「身 ; mi 」-> body; oneself

「を ; o 」-> direct object marker

「焼いた ; yaita 」-> was burning

「んだ ; nda 」-> explanatory particle

= “Until that day, I burned this body.”

As mentioned earlier, the nda is an explanatory particle. Here, it again expresses discovery. Shouto draws a conclusion here: Just like he used to burn his body, Dabi is still doing the same to his.

Again, his focus is not on Dabi, the villain, but Touya, his older brother, and someone just like Shouto. While other people might just see a mentally unstable criminal, Shouto sees how self-destructive Dabi is. And because Shouto hadn’t realized how clouded his mind was, he understands that Dabi most likely doesn’t quite realize this either. Dabi ignores his own pain, all in order to destroy Endeavor. A cry for help that others aren’t capable of comprehending.

“Dad can’t do it…”

「親父じゃやれねェ。。。」

「親父 ; oyaji 」-> dad

「じゃ ; jya 」-> casual particle

「やれ ねェ ; yarenee 」-> can’t do

= “Dad can’t do it.”

[EDIT because this part originally had a different explanation: As pointed out by this anon here, the jya in this case is a casual particle to mark the topic/subject, and the nee part is the casual form of nai, which negates the verb. The translation is the same but the explanation is different!]

And now, for the last line:

“I have to be the one… to handle… my brother Touya.”

Handle him…

「燈矢兄は俺がやらなきゃ。」

「燈矢 ; touya 」-> Touya

「兄 ; nii 」-> suffix for older brother

「は ; ha 」-> topic marker particle

「俺 ; ore 」-> I

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「やらなきゃ ; yaranakya 」-> must do it

= “I am the one that has to take care of Touya-Nii.”

So this is the line that caused confusion and panic, due to the yaranakya part. As you can see by the meaning of the word, similar to how “must do it” can have multiple meanings in English, the same logic applies to the Japanese word. It’s also important to note that the word here consists of the two parts yaru (to do) and nakya (must do). Nakya not only expresses that you have to do something, but, in this case, also shows determination. Shouto really has to do it and will do it. But do what exactly? Again, the problem with yaru is that its meaning depends on context, but sometimes context itself isn’t super helpful. One of the definitions of yaru is “to kill” and that might be what some people think it means here? But context tells us that this makes zero sense. Why show how much he understands his brother only to turn around and decide “well, I got help but he hasn’t so I’m just gonna have to kill him, I guess” - no.

More importantly, right before this line, he says “dad can’t do it” - what can’t he do? If we were talking about killing him, then why would Shouto be able to do it and not Endeavor? Of course, there are the... funny people who suggested that only Shouto can fight/kill his brother because unlike him, Endeavor has an emotional attachment to Dabi (I’m just not gonna comment on this). Anyway, to answer the question of what Endeavor can’t do but Shouto can, we have to look at what Shouto said before that, which is talking about him also having burned his body until the sports festival. This is the key moment where Shouto’s and Dabi’s similarities end and only because someone was reaching out to Shouto. So obviously, in order to have Dabi stop being self-destructive and fueled by hatred, someone needs to reach out to Dabi. And that’s the thing that Endeavor can’t do. After all, Endeavor is the root cause of this, which in turn brings this scene to a full circle since right before Shouto’s monologue began, we got this flashback to what Starservant said in chapter 244:

“That one is the root cause,” accompanied by a panel showing Endeavor.

For reference, here’s the Japanese counterpart:

「其奴こそが元凶じゃ！！」

「其奴 ; soyatsu 」-> that guy

「こそ ; koso 」-> for sure (emphasizes preceding word)

「が ; ga 」-> subject marker particle

「元凶 ; genkyou 」-> culprit; main source

「じゃ ; jya 」-> sentence ender often used for old people in fiction

= “That guy is definitely the main source!”

Shouto remembering this is just stating an obvious fact that he hadn’t fully understood before: Dabi’s existence is Endeavor’s fault. His actions drove Touya to become Dabi, someone whose sole purpose for existing is to destroy Endeavor. So Endeavor couldn’t possibly save him. No matter what Endeavor would say or do, it would be meaningless. But Shouto is different because Shouto was Dabi. The big obstacle Shouto has to figure out how to overcome is making his big brother understand this, too. Regardless, Shouto is the only one that can reach out to him and the only one that fully understands him.

Another important to point out with this line, and many others have already talked about this, is that Shouto now refers to Dabi as Touya-Nii, whereas on the battlefield a few days prior, Shouto only called him Touya, without the “nii”. He is now actively acknowledging that this is, in fact, his big brother. He isn’t Dabi, the villain. And he isn’t just Touya, either - some abstract idea; someone Shouto has heard of but never met or talked to (not confirmed, but likely). This is now his big bro, just like Natsuo is, and just like Fuyumi is his big sister. They’re family.

Overall, this chapter was actually pretty accurate in terms of translation; though granted, Shouto isn’t a villain so the bias isn’t there… but anyway, this marks a very important turning point in the story and gives us a rough idea of what’s in store for Shouto from here on out.

He recognizes where Dabi is coming from. He doesn’t just see him as a villain, but rather someone who has been so full of hatred - for good reasons - that he ended up dragging innocent people into this. The focus, though, is entirely on that one fact: “That guy is me.”

Shouto understands that he could have turned out the same way, he understands hurting his own body just to spite his father.

The key concern with this chapter was that Shouto said that he’s going to kill Touya. I have no idea who started this rumor, but as mentioned, there is a possible confusion regarding yaru, which has multiple meanings. But although he doesn’t explicitly say “I will save him” it’s obvious from everything else he says during this chapter. If he recognizes that they’re the same, his conclusion won’t be “I have to kill him.” Especially when taking into consideration the fact that Shouto also pointed out that he couldn’t win against Dabi with his fire. And no, that doesn’t mean he can beat him with his ice or that that’s what he intends on doing. It’s not clear what he will be doing exactly, but that is partially due to the fact that Shouto is currently not in a state where he could possibly figure out the answer, either. 

But he has a goal: saving Touya-Nii - not so much from Endeavor, but from Dabi.

Next week’s chapter will hopefully focus on the Todofam conversation about to take place and will maybe give us some more hints as to what to expect. So far, though, it’s very obvious that Shouto will try to reach out to Dabi and save him, much like he was also saved from his hatred during the sports festival. He might not have a relationship with Touya the way he has started to build one with Natsuo and Fuyumi, but they have a much deeper connection because they are the same person.

[pro-fangirls-unsocial-life]

HEAR ME OUT: KIX BUT WITH MORE TATTOOS, I WANNA TRACE THEM 🥺👀🥵

DUDE YOU ARE SPEAKING MY LANGUAGE. (Am I going to become the tattoo blog cause I am totally ok with that lmao) Also sorry that this took so long to finally get to you. Things have been so crazy the past few weeks and I needed a bit of time to sort stuff out (and move hooray!!) and I just want to thank you so much for your patience❤ Also... this kind of got away from me. So instead of the drabble I originally had planned you are getting a 4131 word fic. I hope you enjoy!! (Also a bit of a side note, I plan on doing a smutty sequel to this in the future so... say what you will about that lol)

Also a HUGE thank you to @captainrexisboo for all of your help on this. I never would have gotten this finished without your unbelievable support.

Medical Canvas

Kix x Reader

Warnings: brief mentions of injury and the first half is just packed with ✨sexual tension and steamy stuff✨

How Kix had talked you into sparing with him, you had no idea. Five minutes ago, you had just been doing your stretches to warm up and now here you were. A sore side from missing an easy block and a small crowd that you could see betting on who would win between the two of you.

 In all honesty, you thought that you had a fair shot at winning. You had managed to get a couple of good hits in and after working alongside the medic for so long, the two of you could practically predict what the other would do.

 “Getting tired yet?” he asked with a smug smile and heavy breaths.

The two of you kept rotating around each other, fists raised in front of your faces and sweat covering your bodies as occasional cheers came from the edge of the mat.

 You let out a sharp laugh. “Not on your life, pretty boy.” You returned his smirk and lunged in, flinging your fists out just for them to be blocked.

 Jumping back, you kept your eyes on him, trying to gauge what his next move would be. “Oh! Well, if you find me so pretty, let’s try to avoid the money maker, shall we?” He gestured to his face, giving you a wink.

 Oh, you knew this game. You and Kix had been playing it ever since you first laid eyes on each other. Teasing and flirting shamelessly with one another while avoiding actually addressing the tension and want that had steadily grown between the two of you.

 The rest of the 501st could see it. How teasing jabs had turned into lingering touches and stolen glances. It was the reason behind the biggest betting pool in the 501st. When would the two of you finally stop being so oblivious to the others obvious pining and just do it already?

 Jesse was the one who would change his bet the most. Every time he saw the two of you interacting, his timeline would change, and this time was no different. He had taken one look at you and Kix on the mat and immediately commed Rex to change his bet to within the next thirty minutes.

 All of this was unknown to the both of you of course. You simply saw it as the guys trying to make some easy money off of each other while you and Kix spared.

 “Ha! The money maker? I’d say those gorgeous hands of yours would be good enough to get the job done for you.” You laughed mischievously as you saw more credits being passed on the side of the mat.

 Squaring your stance, you took a deep breath, readying yourself for your next move. Might as well make it interesting.

 Kix chuckled. “Sweetheart, if you want to see what these hands can do—”

 You spun around, bringing your foot to Kix’s side in an attempt at a roundhouse kick. But he was too fast. He grabbed your leg and wrestled you to the floor, straddling your waist. The wind was knocked out of you as your back hit the mat and before you knew what was happening, Kix had your wrists pinned above your head, his face just centimeters away from yours.

 He angled his brows at you and gives you a smooth look. “—all you have to do is ask.”

 His heavy breathing fans over your face, alerting you to how close he actually was to you. You could smell him. The earthy musk that all troopers seemed to carry that mixed so perfectly with the sterile scent of the medbay to create an intoxicating aroma that you just had to breathe in, replacing the dingy smell of the gym that you had grown to ignore.

 The weight of his body is keeping you flat against the mat and your eyes go wide as you feel your face start to heat up. Your skin burns under his touch, sending sparks flying through your nerves and not letting your eyes break their lock on his face.

 He stops smiling and his eyes go wide as he realizes the position that the two of you are in. The cheers and curses coming from the edge of the mat are all muffled, not breaking through the trance you had been thrust into as your heart rate spiked into your ears.

 You don’t know how long the two of you stayed frozen against each other on the floor and you didn’t care. All that mattered to you in that moment was Kix and how much you wanted to feel his soft lips against your own. You glanced down at them, immediately bringing your eyes back to his and hoping that he hadn’t noticed your slip up. He was one of your best friends. Surely, he didn’t feel the same way. You didn’t want to ruin what the two of you had.

 You heard him let in a sharp gasp before his eyes bolted to your lips and then back up to meet your eyes. Suddenly, all of your thoughts were halted when he lunged forward, hungrily capturing your lips with his in a burning kiss that had your heart leaping out of your chest.

 The room fell silent as all eyes turned to stare at what was happening in front of them, but the two of you did not care. For all you knew, you were the only people in the universe at that moment. All you could see, all you could hear, all you could feel, was him.

 Something in him broke, causing him to let out a deep moan as his tongue dragged across your bottom lip, begging to get more of the sweet cherry taste of your chapstick that had almost been overpowered by the salty sweat that covered both of your bodies while your hands fought against the hold he had on your wrists. You wanted to touch him, to feel the way his muscles moved as he was pressing up against you and to get more of the buzzing sensation of his skin against yours.

 Kix lets out a deep groan that vibrates throughout his chest, keeping your wrists pinned with one hand and sliding his other down your arm until he is cupping the back of your neck.

 “Stars you two, get a room.”

 Gasping for air as Kix pulled away from you, you turned your head to see Jesse standing over the two of you. A smug, satisfied look plastered across face and his arms crossed against his chest.

 Kix whips his head back to you, his breathing still heavy.

 “My quarters?” you breathe out.

 His eyes darken as a lustful smirk makes its way across his features. “Oh, absolutely,” he growls, pressing a kiss to your jaw.

 He releases your wrists and crawls off of you before running off to get his things from the other side of the gym. You rush over to the edge of the mat, picking up your bag as Jesse trails behind you, the arrogant and knowing grin still displayed on his face.

 “I should thank you. You just made me a lot of money.”

 You turn to him confused. “What?”

 Kix runs back up to you, taking your hand in his and gently pulling you toward the door.

 Jesse starts laughing, bringing his hand down to hold his sides. “I’ll tell you later.”

 With that, you shrug and start walking as fast as you can back to your quarters. As you pass by other troopers on your way there, you see eyes widen as they catch a glimpse of your hand entwined with Kix’s. Faces rise and fall and you see credits being exchanged between a few of the men you pass. You glance at Kix as you lead him through the halls toward your room. “I think that there was a betting ring on when we would get together,” you say with a laugh.

 He chuckles. “Yeah. I was thinking the same thing.”

 You round the corner and finally make it to your quarters about halfway down the hallway. Letting go of his hand, you quickly input the code and the door whooshes open. Pulling him inside by the collar of his blacks, you both immediately drop your bags to the floor as your lips collide.

 Kix reaches behind him, feeling around until he finds the door panel. You hear the locks click and feel his hands trail their way down your body, gently squeezing whatever part of you he can reach as they make their way, until they stop on your thighs. His fingers tap you twice and you jump up, wrapping your legs around his waist and your arms around his neck.

 The kiss never breaks as he walks forward, stopping once your back has hit the wall and you let out a small sound at the force of the freezing metal meeting with your hot skin. He breaks away, leaving you gasping for air and missing the subtle minty taste of him as he starts trailing kisses down your neck, stopping at your pulse point to lightly bite at the skin there.

 A small, breathy whimper of his name falls from your lips as his teeth continue to drag across your sensitive skin. You can feel him smirking against you as his hands dip under the fabric of your shirt and slowly slide it up until he gets it off and throws it across the room. “You’re so impatient mesh’la,” he growls as he starts aggressively marking your now exposed collarbone, desperate to push more pleading sounds out of you. His fingers start teasing your waistband sending sparks shooting up your spine as he presses delicate kisses against the tender spot he had just finished making.

 Clawing at his shirt, you start pulling it up, exposing the tanned skin of his stomach. “Off.”

 Chuckling, one of his hands comes up to cup your face, his thumb traveling along the line of your jaw, while the other travels down to your hip, placing it in a tight hold. He fiercely kisses you as your hands continue to try and pull his shirt off. “Very impatient,” he snarls out between kisses. He rolls his hips against yours, pushing a whine out of you. “Patience cyar’ika,” he murmurs against you. “I want to take my time with you mesh’la.”

 You let go of his shirt, bringing one of your hands up to grab his jaw and force his dark eyes to meet with yours, giving you a brief moment of dominance. “Stop teasing.” Your lips crash into his, a lewd moan escaping you at the way his breathing speeds up. You take his bottom lip between your teeth before pulling away and looking into his lust filled eyes. Giving a small tug to the fabric you bat your eyes at him. “And take this off.”

 “Alright,” he teases. “But only because I can’t deny a gorgeous thing like you.” He reaches his hands up and starts pulling the fabric at the base of his head up, exposing his stomach and lower back once again as your lips collide in another bruising kiss. Suddenly, a high-pitched beeping comes from Kix’s bag. Neither of you pay it any attention, too caught up in each other’s desperate panting and shameless moans as you continue to kiss each other until a muffled voice comes from the bag.

 “Hey vod, I know you’re probably busy making Jesse a rich man, but I need you in the medbay. Hardcase and Echo accidentally blew themselves up again and have some legs that need to be set.”

 Kix groans and pulls away from you, his head falling back to look at the ceiling. “I’m going to kill those two.” He gives you an apologetic look before stepping away from the wall, holding onto your midsection as you lower your legs back to the floor.

 Giving you one last kiss, he walks over to his bag and digs around until he finds his comm. “Rex, those two better be dying by the time I get there, or I am going to kill them myself,” he snaps, his jaw clenched in frustration.

 You chuckle, walking over and picking your shirt up off of the floor where Kix had thrown it.

 “Based on how out of breath you sound, I don’t blame you.” He lets out a small laugh. “See you in a minute vod.”

 Kix tosses his comm back in his bag and straightens up before turning to you and pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry. Those two—”

 You bring your hand up to rest over his still rapidly beating heart and place a light kiss on his lips. “It’s fine Kix.” You reach behind him and unlock the door, letting it whoosh open. Leaning forward, you settle your lips right under his ear and whisper against his neck. “I’ll be here waiting for you when you finish.” You playfully bite down on the skin under your lips, pressing a kiss on the newly formed mark you had just made before pulling back to face him.

 His eyes widen, and a playful smirk overtakes his features. “Well then, I’ll see you later cyare.” He takes your hand in his and presses a kiss against your knuckles before heading off toward the medbay.

 “I can’t wait,” you call down the hallway after him, smiling at the glance he throws over his shoulder before he rounds the corner and is out of your sight.

 You turn back inside, picking up your bag and starting to put stuff away while you mumble to yourself. “If he doesn’t kill them, then I sure will.”

 *******************************************************************************************

It was about five hours later when a knock came at your door. For some reason, today was the day that everyone decided to get injured so the medbay had been constantly busy once Kix had gotten there.

 One of the mechanics had his arm pinned under a ship when the jack he had it held up with snapped (thanks to the Republic buying cheap equipment). Someone at the gym got a concussion after a spar got a little rough. Some poor shinie had slipped in the mess and cracked his head open on one of the tables.

 Luckily, it was your day off as the on-call medic, so the only things you had to worry about were the reports that were coming across your desk from all of these medbay visits. But that also meant that Kix was getting all of the hard work in the medbay.

 When you opened the door to your quarters, you were met with a Kix that looked dead on his feet.

 “Long day?” Reaching up to trace his features, you gave him a light kiss and gently pulled him inside.

 He nodded, bringing a hand up to rub his face. “I’m so sorry mesh’la but can I take a raincheck? I’m just so kriffing tired and just want to rest right now.” He was tense. His shoulders were pulled up toward his ears and he stood stiffly in front of you.

 You hummed, pulling him toward your bed. “I thought you might be, so I had a better idea.” Giving him a soft smile, you pushed on his shoulders until he was sitting on the edge of your bed. “Take off your shirt. I’ll be right back.”

 He looks up at you in confusion. “Cyare, I don’t think—”

 Pressing a kiss against his lips, you grasp one of the hands he has in his lap and rub your thumb over his knuckles that are rough and dry after a full day of constantly washing his hands. You bring your forehead against his and look into his eyes. “Trust me.”

 Turning away from him, you walk into the small refresher that is attached to your room and pull out a bottle of lotion that smells like fresh honey. You begin walking back out into your room, rolling up your sleeves to your elbows. “I thought you’d be tense so I—”

 You stop dead in your tracks, seeing Kix stiffly sitting on the edge of your bed, his shirt laid out next to him.

 “Cyare? You ok?” Kix stands up and walks over to your frozen form, placing his hands on either side of your arms and rubbing small crescent shapes with his thumbs.

 Your eyes stay fixed on his chest, not leaving it as he stands in front of you. “I didn’t know you had more tattoos,” you squeak out, barely above a whisper.

 Kix looks down at the red medic symbol that covers the entire left half of his chest over his heart before meeting your eyes once again. “Do… Do you like it?” He begins to worry his bottom lip between his teeth, waiting for your answer.

 Your hand comes up and lightly starts tracing the symbol, outlining it and then brushing your fingers over the parts that are filled in, leaving goosebumps on his skin in the wake of your gentle touch. “Very much.”

 He clears his throat, it suddenly becoming dry as you trap him under your stare. “Oh. Y-yeah. I got them not long after I joined the 501st.”

 Whipping your head up, your eyes go wide. “Them?”

 “Um. Yeah,” he stutters hesitantly, bringing his hand up to the back of his neck. “I have a couple on my back too.”

 His back. You shook your head and brought your hand down from off his chest, remembering what you were doing. “Oh. Right. Um, how does a massage sound? You seem tense.”

 He sighs, bringing his hands up to hold your face and lightly kissing your forehead as he angles it forward. “Honestly? That sounds amazing.”

 Pressing a kiss to the tip of his nose, you take a step toward the bed. “Good,” you beam. “Lie down on your stomach and get comfortable.”

 Kix walks over to the bed, slipping his boots off before he crawls up so that his head is near the pillows close to the wall. He grabs one and crosses his arms under it before letting his head come to rest there. He lets out a deep sigh and shimmies a bit before settling.

 You gently press on his lower back. “Is it ok if I sit here?”

 His eyes are closed and for a moment, you think that he has fallen asleep already before he cracks his eyes open and gives you a small smirk. “You can sit anywhere if it means those pretty hands are gonna touch me.”

 Rolling your eyes, you quietly laugh, straddling his waist and squirting some of the lotion into your hands. As you rub them together to heat it up, you let your eyes travel over the smooth expanse of his toned back. His midsection steadily rises and falls with his breath, and there are scars that occasionally disrupt the path your eyes follow up his back. Then, your eyes fall still when they look between his shoulders.

 A grey, Republic cog that sits between his shoulder blades, taking up almost all of the space there and blue geometric markings that come down either side of it and angle away from his spine once they reach the bottom of the symbol. They stop about halfway down his back and break off before a small blue dot ends the lines.

 You begin rubbing the lotion onto Kix’s lower back, kneading the muscles there.

 The sweet smell of the lotion combines with his irresistible scent and the bacta that inevitably made its way onto his pants as you work it across his warm skin, causing you to have to suppress a shiver as you take in as much of it as you can in a single breath.

 He lets out an obscene groan and his eyes flutter shut the second your hands start working their way across his skin.

 You giggle, still working your hands over his back, feeling the tension disappear with your work. “Feel good?”

 He groans again as your hands work their way up his back. “Feels amazing,” he sighs.

 For a while, you work in silence, the only sound being your steady breathing and the occasional groan from Kix when you work over a particularly tense area.

 You squirt more of the sweet-smelling lotion into your hands, making sure to warm it up before running them over Kix’s back once again. “Kix?” Your voice is questioning and soft, not wanting to disturb him if he has fallen asleep.

 “Hmm?” he hums out.

 Trailing your hands over the tattoos on his back, you tap your fingers on them, letting Kix know what you are about to ask. “Jesse and Hardcase?”

 “M-hm.” He lets out a relaxed sigh as your hands begin tracing over the markings like they had with the medic symbol on his chest.

 “Mind if I ask about the story behind them?”

 He cracks an eye open, peering over his shoulder and meeting your stare before settling back down and closing his eyes. “Not at all cyare.”

 You begin to massage the muscles around the tattoos, occasionally stopping to just trace over them.

 “It was pretty early on in the war when I joined the 501st.” He breaths out a short laugh. “Commander Tano wasn’t even here yet. But because I was trained on Kamino as a medic, and because things were pretty rough at the beginning, all of my batchmates were sent to different battalions, so I didn’t really know any of the troopers in the 501st. But Jesse and Hardcase, well, they made me feel welcome and always had my back. We all got here at about the same time and just… clicked. Always knew exactly what the other one needed.” He laughs. “Hell, I probably wouldn’t be here now if those two hadn’t saved my ass more times than I can count.”

 For a brief instant you stop your movements, gazing at the soft smile on his face.

 “They’re my best friends and I know that they’ll always be watching my back, no matter where any of us are.”

 Your fingers lightly trace the tattoos one more time, gracing over every outline and filling in every shape. “That’s… That’s so sweet. I never knew that. I-I mean, I knew that you guys were close, but I just assumed that it’s because you joined the 501st at the same time.”

 He hums. “They have the same tattoos you know. Jesse has me and Hardcase and Hardcase had me and Jesse. We’re all watching each other’s backs. Makes us feel safer, you know?”

 You sit up, trailing your hands down until they are resting on Kix’s lower back. “Well,” you say leaning forward, “I’m glad that they do.” Then, you begin pressing gentle kisses against his skin, outlining the tattoos one final time. “Because it makes me feel better knowing that you’ve got such amazing people looking out for you.” You feel him shudder lightly as your breath fans over his skin and as your lips trail over the tattoos. You start at the blue marking on his right and trail up until you’ve traced the cog between his shoulders, and then back down the left blue marking.

 Placing one final kiss at the base of his neck, you climb off of him and lie down at his side. He turns his head to look at you as he opens his eyes. “How do you feel?”

 His hand comes up to the side of your face, brushing a lock of hair behind your ear. He looks at you with pure admiration as a blissful smile overtakes his face. “Perfect.” He draws you in, brushing his lips over yours and speaking against them with a grin. “I can’t believe that I didn’t ask you to spar sooner.”

 Laughing, you push forward, fully capturing his lips with yours. “Yeah!” you tease. “What took you so long you di’kut?”

 “Shut-up,” he smirks, flipping onto his side and wrapping his arms around you as he pulls you close to his chest. He presses his lips to the crown of your head as your curl up into him. “Would’ve done it sooner if I knew it would have gone so well.”

 You brush your lips over his neck, snickering at the brief shutter it caused before burying your face into his chest. “I’m glad that you did even if that sparring match was unfair.”

 You can feel him smile against the top of your head as he places another kiss there. “You’ll get me next time cyar’ika.” His chest thrummed as a chuckle made its way past his lips. “Who knows, maybe I’ll let you pin me down instead.”

[no-droids]

The Floor is Better

Part Eight of the Rough Day Series

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 9.4K i am. appalled.

Warnings: SMUT, very vague attempts at sprinkling in hints of an overarching plot, language, the slightest bit of angst, TONS OF FUCKING FLUFF WOWWWW

A/N: This is by far the softest smut I’ve ever written.  I will say that there is a hint at butt stuff tho (just a HINT—THERE IS NO ACTUAL BUTT STUFF IN THIS GUYS) so brace yourselves

***

Alright so this bed is, like.  Atrociously uncomfortable.

It’s not even a bed.  It’s a cot.  Just a bare minimum place to sleep, shoved into the wall and taking up less space than the ship’s armory.  Like a… like a really shitty gurney almost, except no padding.  So not even a gurney then, just a fucking.  Piece of metal.  Just a piece of fucking metal to sleep on.

There’s surprisingly a bit of space to maneuver yourself when you’re pulled into the cubby completely like this, and yeah, it’s quiet and dark in here but man does your back hurt.  Is his spine made of metal, too?  Is that why he prefers this?  The floor isn’t a feather mattress by any stretch of the imagination, but at least there aren’t any uneven support bars digging into your side.

You’re on Coruscant, and Mando’s been gone for over three weeks.

It.  Fucking.  Blows.

You’ve literally run out of ideas to occupy your time.  You’re far enough above Coruscant’s dangerous underworld to not worry about any potential… mishaps, like what happened on Corellia, but the only issue with the ground being so far below you is that it’s not like you can just stroll down the road and buy yourself a deck of cards at the nearest merchant.  The only shop within walking distance of this hub contains the bare essentials; things like food, medical equipment and bacta, spare electronics and parts—all of which you purchased without hesitation.  Other than that, you need a ship to travel anywhere in this massive galactic capital, and while you just so happen to have a ship, what you don’t have, at least right now, is a Mando.

Fuck, but you did.  Before he left, you had Mando all to yourself for at least a full hour.  After he landed the Crest in a long-term terminal and turned his attention back to you, for some reason, he was insatiable.  It didn’t really make much sense back then, but in hindsight, it’s like he knew good and well how long he was going to be gone this time, attempting to search for a quarry on a planet with a population that broke a trillion last year.  It makes sense.  With this many people, a biometric tracking fob would be almost useless, and sure, you realize he set the ship down in the long-term terminal for a reason, but long-term with Mando typically means a week or two.  You suddenly realize that in a handful of days, he’ll have been gone a full month.

You suppose you probably could fly the ship somewhere else and send him a coded coordinate set of your new location, but for some strange reason, you can’t seem to reconcile going to all that trouble just because you’re bored out of your fucking mind.  You don’t want him to have to travel another however many miles out of his way to get back to you just so you won’t have to twiddle your thumbs for weeks on end.  You don’t want to run the risk of trying to make a quick trip there and back without alerting him of any change in location, either, especially on a planet this size.  He could return to the hub at any time, and if he comes back to a different ship parked in this lot, you’ll probably never see him again.

Okay, no, that’s not true—he hunts people for a living, and you have his kid.  You probably just wouldn’t see him for at least another month or so, and by then he’d be fucking livid.

So.  You stay here.  The baby offers a distraction, but only to a certain point.  The ship is pristine right now, inside and out.  Fucking pristine.  Almost… almost compulsively so, you reluctantly admit.  The console’s entire motherboard has brand new soldering and connections.  You used ear swabs to clean and polish each individual button, key, and knob in the entire flight deck.  You… may or may not have even labeled and color-coded the heat shrink wrap on every single cable in the Crest’s patchbay, all five-hundred and something of them.  When you pried open the metal paneling that covered all the ship’s interior routing jacks, you remember gasping at the sight of a mechanic’s worst nightmare and wondering if the last person who touched it took even more than a few hours on its installation.  What used to be a horrifying tangle of haphazard wiring is now a lovely set of rainbow snakes meticulously gathered and bound together with zipties, and you’re incredibly proud of it, though you still haven’t decided whether or not you should be.

There’s also a very particular reason you’re in this poor excuse for a bed.  You still very clearly remember Mando’s unfiltered voice in the pitch darkness, telling you he wants to come back to find you in his bed.  To find you in it, so he can fuck you though it.  

Well.  Three weeks ago, sleeping in here sounded like a good idea.  You even have a pillow now, and a blanket you can lay out beneath you while you curl up under the one you brought from home.  It’s thick and warm—probably a shock blanket, to be honest, since you did happen to find in the medical section—but it still doesn’t offer near enough padding to feel like you’re laying on an even surface right now.  Mando could theoretically get on top of you in here and fuck you—there is enough room vertically.  He might break one of your ribs on accident though, just judging from the way this one Maker-forsaken support bar seems to dig into your ribcage no matter which way you position yourself in here.

Stars, your back hurts.  You should just lay on the fucking floor.  If he hasn’t come back by now, what are the chances of it happening tonight?  But then your mathematical hindbrain immediately reminds you that statistically, the chances are the highest they’ve ever been.  The longer Mando’s gone, the more likely he is to come back every single day that passes.

It’s just as well, you figure, grabbing the tracks beneath the bed and slowly beginning to squeak yourself out of the wall.  You try not to let your fingers get pinched between the railing and the slider, but that just means the quickest you’re able to inch out is in intervals the approximate length of your index finger.  It’s dark in the hull—the baby is fast asleep in his crib in the cockpit, and the long-term terminal you’re parked in is quiet.  It would be a perfect time to sleep, if you could.  But here’s the thing—

It sucks that Mando’s gone for this long, absolutely.  It sucks that you slept on this awful fucking bed for three whole weeks when you could’ve done this ages ago.  But most of all, it sucks that you don’t have anything else to do.  Because that means you can’t occupy yourself, and when you can’t occupy yourself, your mind starts to wander.  And then you start to fixate on things you probably shouldn’t fixate on, for your own good.

Things like blood on your hands.  The baby limp in your arms.  A voice spitting, “pretty little bitch like you would sell for at least—”

Your eyes snap to the corner of the hull for the millionth time, the sight of where it happened, before you shake yourself out of it and hop down off the suspended cot.

“This’ll be good,” you whisper quietly in the darkness to yourself, pulling the blankets off and grabbing the pillow.  It’s… it’s something you’ve started to do when you need to instantly snap yourself out of a dreaded line of thinking but you don’t have anything stimulating around you to help.  Talk to yourself, talk about anything, just talk out loud and focus on the sound of your own voice.  If you listen hard enough, it’ll drown out your thoughts.  “The floor will be great.  The floor kicks ass.  I like the floor.”

You spread the fluffiest blanket down on the ground as far away from the offending corner as possible, and then close the much shittier metal bed into the hull wall before collapsing on your clearly superior one, never once ceasing your rambling nonsense about the floor.

Oh, this is nice.  This is fantastic.  Your back is still tight and achy from three awful weeks of sleeping on a “mattress” clearly made for someone with no concept of comfort, but being able to stretch out on a flat surface with a large shock blanket that feels like a fucking cloud under your body?  Your eyes are already starting to droop.

“The floor is better,” you whisper, yawning and snuggling deeper into the pillow.  The terminal is quiet.  The kid will be asleep for a while.  Mando won’t come back tonight.  Mando won’t come back tonight.  “The floor is better.  The floor… the floor…”

***

You jerk awake to something kicking your leg, hard.  

Gasping, you’re instantly pulling the blanket over your chest on reflex and bracing yourself for another impact, except then whatever kicked you is immediately toppling over your shins and stumbling to the floor with an unfamiliar grunt.

You and a man you don’t recognize blink at each other for a few seconds; him taking in the way you’re curled up on your makeshift bed, and you taking in the way he’s got his face squished against the metal ground, apparently not quick enough to use his arms to try and soften the abrupt tumble.

It’s like all your blood suddenly thickens and the adrenaline digs claws into your chest.  Your first instinct is to fucking bolt, but then your eyes instantly flick to the cockpit, where you know the kid is still sleeping.

Only—you can’t move.  You’re frozen in terror, quickly blinking your wide-eyed gaze back at the man on the ground.  You know you could’ve only been staring at each other for a few seconds at most, but with the way your mind is hurtling right now, it’s long enough for you to have just the briefest flicker of confusion as to why he hasn’t appeared to have moved either.

Except then another set of footsteps slowly begin clanking up the ramp.

Your heart is fucking slamming up against your ribcage at about the rate of four beats per footstep, but as soon as you catch a flash of beskar stepping onto the ship, you‘re reaching up to clutch your chest with your palm like you just finished a long-distance sprint and trying to take deep, calming breaths.

It’s just a quarry.  It’s just a quarry.  His hands are cuffed behind his back.  It’s a quarry.

The Mandalorian slowly comes to a stop right in front of your outstretched legs and the sharp angles of his chrome profile silently stare down at them, unmoving.  You swallow thickly and try not to blush as his helmet tilts towards you and follows your knees up to your hips, along your heaving abdomen and chest, before eventually coming to a rest on your face.

He holds there for a second, taking you in.  You bite down your lip and feel your heart thundering under your ribcage, blinking up at him as your cheeks flush in a boiling hot mixture of panic, embarrassment, and relief.

His metallic visor carefully follows the length of your body back down again, pausing once more at your feet.  

And then he sighs heavily through the modulator, loud enough to echo through the silent hull, before slowly stepping over them.

“Well, well,” the quarry says, stealing your attention with a sick smile creeping across half his face as it’s smushed against the floor.  “Who’s this, Mando?  She’s just darling, isn’t she?  Does Gideon know your crew has a lovely new addit—?”

The bounty abruptly cuts off with a strangled yelp when Mando bends down and grabs him by the collar, yanking him to his feet and then shoving him forward towards the carbonite chamber.  

You collapse back down onto the floor with a relieved breath and try not to tremble with the adrenaline comedown.  Maker, you woke up barely a minute ago but almost all of it was spent in fight or flight—or in your case, freeze—mode, and you’re already fucking exhausted again.

“I’ll tell him—” you can hear the quarry snarl just before Mando slams him into the metal frame.  As much as you try to just tune the confrontation out for the moment and focus on slowing your heart rate, you still manage to catch bits and pieces.  “See him again… be interested to know…”

You close your eyes and breathe deeply, counting to three during each inhale and exhale.  Fuck, that scared you.  You almost had a fucking heart attack, and it takes you a few seconds to get your body under control again.  But then you realize you haven’t heard anything from Mando’s side of the hub for an extended moment, and the carbonizing gas hasn’t yet filled the room.

Your head turns and if you squint from this distance, you can make out a leather glove clamped tight around the quarry’s throat, the man’s face a red-purple by this point as he sags weakly against the chamber.

“Mando!”  You bark quite suddenly, and beskar shoulders jerk straight at the sound as the bounty immediately takes in a giant, ragged breath from under a marginally loosened grip.  Mando quickly releases his neck altogether and punches in a few buttons on the control panel to the right, and then freezing gas soon solidifies the gasping quarry into solid carbonite.

He stays with his back to you for a moment, letting the cloud disappear completely before he moves a single muscle.  When he does eventually turn to look at you, he still doesn’t say anything.

He just stares.  The lights in the hull glint off his helmet, and you tug the blankets up your chest a little further on instinct.  Fuck, three weeks is a long time.  You’re defaulting in a way, finding it impossible to not reevaluate him after a long absence.  Before he left, you’d gotten a bit better at gauging his mood and countenance, been more relaxed and friendly around him, but now, after some time away from him, he’s still so… jarring.  Unpredictable, even when standing still.  Especially when standing still.  

You’re just trying to play it by ear, trying to respond to him the way he responds to you.  Only—it feels like he’s either not responding to you at all, or you’re just too rousing of a stimulus to show a response.

“You…” you breathe, and for some reason your heart rate is beginning to kick up again instead of decelerate.  You should be calmer now that he’s here, but he still hasn’t said a word.  “Y-You scared me.”

Mando stays rooted to the spot, just a motionless suit of armor, with the exception of his chest moving with breaths and his fists repeatedly clenching at his sides, and fuck.

Fuck, you’re wet.

You feel like prey right now.  You’re starting to gradually build into another fight or flight mode every second he’s staring you down, refusing to speak, but you also feel a stirring deep down in your floor muscles.  He’s so fucking tall from this angle, so broad and—

He steps a single foot forward.  You flinch at the abrupt movement, practically soaking your underwear now.  Mando takes another step forward, and you wet your lips and start to crawl back on the bed just a bit, staring at him with wide eyes.

Maker, the tension is making it hard to breathe.  You’re silently begging him to come take care of you after such an agonizing three weeks apart, and Mando’s body language looks like he’s more wound up than you’ve ever seen him.  He starts pacing directly to you, crossing the hull rapidly, and your heart thumps furiously with every step he takes.

But then he gets right to the edge of the blankets and suddenly stops short.  He looks down at the neatly made bed at his feet, and then down at his body.

You try not to make an audible huff of disappointment when he abruptly collapses down onto his back with a clatter right there on the floor, just a few inches shy of the blanket, immediately bringing the backs of both hands up to press against the face of his helmet.  It should look weird considering his knuckles are pushing hard against the visor, almost like he’s covering his eyes or has a headache but is rubbing the beskar instead of his forehead, but it doesn’t.  It just makes you want to rip that armor off his body even more and remind him again of what his skin feels like.

“What are you doing?”  You try not to make it sound like a breathless pout as you squirm impatiently under the blankets.  “Come over here.”

“I’m dirty,” is the first thing that comes through the modulator, gravelly and distorted but his voice burning a fucking hole through you after not hearing it for almost a month.  “I need to shower before I touch you.”

You don’t know why, but something about the way he says it makes you throb hard between your legs.

“Will you please just…” you bite your lip, stopping yourself short of saying take your clothes off and go with, “please, just—hurry.  I’m…”

Maker, you don’t know how to say it, and Mando soon rolls his helmet to the side to look at you when you don’t finish your sentence.  Desperate for it?  Hurting?  Feeling your clit pulse right now even though he hasn’t laid a finger on you yet?

“I missed you,” you eventually finish lamely, breathless as you fidget and bite your lip.

“Yeah?”  He breathes, suddenly turning the rest of his body on his side to face you.  “Tell me.”

“I… I want to show you,” you return quietly, scooting closer towards him.  “But you’re being withholding.”

Mando doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, but the front of his visor burns into you, steadily increasing your need for him the longer he silently stares at you.

“Show me, then,” he says after a moment, and the sentence rolls through you with a shudder.

You swallow thickly, and slowly start to pull the blanket down.  It’s unnerving that his helmet doesn’t move, even though you can literally feel his gaze lowering and searing hot along your newly revealed body.  You’re not even naked, not in the slightest, but with the way his shoulders tighten and his spine tenses just slightly, you would think you were completely exposing yourself to him right now.

“Do you want…”  Your fingers waver near your belly button, caught somewhere between wanting to pull the hem of your shirt up for him and wanting to pull the waistband of your pants down.  “What do you want to see?”

A breath comes through the helmet; slow, but shaky.

“I have to shower,” he grunts sharply, suddenly, his fist clenching at his side.  You don’t take offense to the stern tone.  He’s clearly repeating the sentence as a reminder to himself, not to you.

“You can get me dirty,” you breathe regardless.  “I don’t care.”

“I just spent three weeks on Coruscant’s surface,” Mando grits.  “I can’t touch you, I’ll infect you with someth—What are you doing?”

You bite your lip at him as an answer, bypassing your prior conflict altogether by slithering your hand down the front of your pants.

“What are you doing?”  He repeats through the modulator, just as your fingertips wedge underneath the hem of your panties.  

You shiver at the sensation, your eyes losing focus just slightly as you trail down the front of your pussy.  “I… I missed you.”

“Fuck,” Mando barks, and then he scrambles to stand up.  “Stop.  I’m taking a shower, just—just stop.”

You ignore him, turning on your back and widening your knees so he can still see the way your hand is still moving down between your legs, your finger just barely brushing the top of your slit.  “But it feels good.” “Take your hand out of your fucking pants,” he orders tightly.  “Right now.”

Your eyes flutter up at him as you do what he says, slowly bringing your hand out of your trousers.  “Hurry,” you murmur, biting your lip and blinking innocently up at him.  “Please.”

He doesn’t say a word, but his cape does make an audible sound with how quickly he whips around and shuts himself away in the tiny fresher.

***

You forget how long it takes to undo the beskar armor sometimes.  In fact, throughout the entire duration of Mando’s shower, you’re able to quietly sneak up to the cockpit and navigate the ship out of the terminal, pull up the coordinates for the next quarry on the navcomp while rising to a high enough altitude above the galactic capital, make a jump into hyperspace, return to the hull, shut off the lights, and slither back under the covers before the fresher actually turns off.

Soon, Mando raps his knuckles against the door separating the two of you, and you’ve completely wiggled out of your clothes by that point, the blanket resting just below your naked waist.  “Hey,” his unmodulated voice calls from behind the thick slab of metal.  “Eyes closed for a second.”

“I’m not looking,” you agree, draping your elbow across the bridge of your nose and waiting patiently.  He gives you a few seconds regardless before the door is sliding open.  You expect it to quickly shift shut again, plunge the room back into pitch blackness like before, but he hesitates.  It takes another moment for you to realize that he’s probably just staring at your naked chest while he stands there in the doorway, light spilling into the hull and illuminating you waiting for him with your eyes obediently shut.

“I thought I told you not to sleep on the floor anymore,” he murmurs after a quiet second, and you bite your lip and shuffle your shoulders impatiently against the floor, arching your chest out just slightly to entice him to come closer.

“Fuck that bed,” you breathe with your arm still pressed over your eyes, and your nipples feel tight in the cool air.  “Your armory is bigger than that bed, Mando.  Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“Yeah,” he returns, finally shutting the fresher light off and shifting the door shut behind him, beginning to make his way over to you.  “Tells me that there are more guns than people on this ship, as well it should be.”

“Maker, you’re impos—”

You’re cut off by Mando dropping to his knees and slowly crawling over your body, and fuck he’s as naked as you are, he’s naked and his skin is warm and damp from the shower and his hair is still dripping as you slither your arms up his chest and comb your fingers through it.

You can’t see a damn thing but you’re instantly thanking your lucky stars for that fact when his head drops down and a hot tongue drags up the curve of your neck.  Okay, this is better.  This is always better.  Even when you can’t see a damn thing, feeling the hollow of your jaw be caressed by a blazing wet furnace and tugging your fingers through his hair will always be better than when he keeps the helmet on.  Maker, you almost forgot how fucking good his mouth is, how soft and warm it is, and you can’t bite down a whimper when his lips finally trail up your chin and seal against yours.

You moan when his tongue gently slides into your mouth, unable to stop yourself as your cunt fucking throbs between your legs with arousal, and Mando even lets out a short huff of air through his nose and a low noise quietly slips through his vocal cords as he tastes you.  The barely audible sound is enough gasoline to your fire that you wrap your arms around his shoulders and your legs around his lower back before tugging, wanting his cock pressed against your cunt so you can rub yourself against it while he kisses you.

Only, something in the way Mando’s elbows immediately buckle and the hiss of air through his teeth before he unceremoniously collapses on top of you makes you instantly let him go.

“Hey,” you say, letting him bury his head into the crook of your neck and puff a short few breaths of hot air against your skin.  “What’s wrong?”

“Fuck,” he grunts, sounding somewhere between discomfort and legitimate pain, moving to prop his arms up next to your head again but taking a moment before trying to push himself up.  “Back.  Back hurts.  Too—” he winces when his shoulder moves a certain way, “—too old for this.”

“Here.”  There’s just enough space between you and Mando to wiggle out from underneath him, quickly turning around and swinging a leg over his back as he abruptly drops to the floor with the extra weight.  “Let me rub your back.”

“Shit—come on,” he groans against the blankets.  “I haven’t touched you in three fucking—”

Your hands trail up his spine, slow and gentle, and Mando cuts himself off.  He shudders under your palms as they carefully push and roll into the small of his back, and the muscles curving down under your touch gradually rise as he breathes in a lungful of air.  “Let me rub your back,” you repeat softly, letting your voice lull just a bit in a lower register, and all the air immediately releases from under your hands.

“Okay,” he relents, but his spine still holds straight and tight with tension.

“Okay?”  You repeat, dragging your palms back up until they’re roughly in the middle of his spine.  “Tell me if I go too hard.”

Mando barely huffs with a chuckle beneath you.  “Yeah, okay, I’ll tell you if—nghh—”

You dig your knuckles into the dip right beneath his shoulder blades and start kneading, and Mando makes a strangled noise and sags into the floor.  Your smile is almost impossible to hide, but the pitch black hull does the job just fine as you press and roll your knuckles into the hills and valleys of his back.  The noises he makes are a mixture of soft gasps and chokes, but it gives you the perfect opportunity to explore his body in ways you haven’t been able to before.

Your thumbs you dig in and follow the curve of his spine down, squeezing through the tightness in his lower back.  The skin under your hands is soft and giving, even though you can feel massive knots hidden underneath.  You take all the time in the galaxy with it, isolating each ache and pain and then grinding your knuckles into them steady and hard enough to make Mando groan brokenly under the pressure.  You work at it for a while, trailing your fingers up to his neck and massaging the base of his skull, not being able to imagine how much those muscles have to hurt after holding up a heavy beskar helmet every single day.  Your hands explore everything you can from this angle—you squeeze the tops of his shoulders, slide your palms down and squeeze his biceps, the muscles under his elbows, the ones wrapped around his forearms.

“This alright?”  You ask after a while, and you barely get a hoarse grunt from him in response.  His body is perfectly relaxed under yours, almost dead if he wasn’t still breathing, and you slowly walk your hands down the length of his back until you’re braced upright on him once more.  “You gonna make it?”

Eventually, he drags his forearms up so he can prop them against the blankets and slowly roll over underneath you.  You allow the lazy movement, lifting your hips up as he rotates, feeling his smooth skin shift under your palms until he finally comes to a rest on his back.

“My turn?”  He asks through the darkness.

“Your turn for wh—?”  You gasp as his grip instantly tightens, and then he’s abruptly switching your positions until he’s on top of you.  Almost all of your breath is knocked out of you when Mando grabs you and flips you over until you’re on your tummy, and then whatever remains suddenly whooshes out when he straddles you and plops down on your lower back.

“My turn to give you a massage,” he says, and you let out a quiet, “fuck—” when his palms land on your shoulders.

“Wait—” You pant, “—Wait, hang on, I don’t need a—”

Thank the fucking Maker you turn your head quick enough to muffle a loud moan when his fingers begin rubbing hard circles into your deltoids.  Stars, sleeping on hard metal for three weeks was truly a nightmare for your posture.  The knots in your upper back burn under the steady push and press of his touch, and it’s like your muscles can’t decide if they want to relax under the manipulation or tense up against it.

“Maker,” he murmurs, his thumbs frame either side of your spine and slowly drag downwards, and your voice almost cracks as you hide another groan in the pillow.  “Why does your back hurt?  What did you do to yourself?” “I slept—” you gasp when his knuckles roll up the length of your sides.  “Slept—on that piece of fucking scr-scrap metal—you call a—” his fingers press firmly against the valley below your shoulder blades, and then widen apart to start squeezing your arms, “—a bed for three weeks,” you manage to gasp, sparks of sensation shooting down to your fingertips as he rubs the muscles along the length of your biceps.

Soon, Mando’s hands come back down to rest on the small of your back, and he begins digging his thumbs into the base of your spine.  “Why did you do it for so long if it hurt?”

“You said—” You cut off with a moan into the pillow as he slowly scoots back until he’s sitting on your thighs, his hands moving downwards and kneading the soft flesh of your ass, pressing deep into the sore muscles while you struggle to remember what you were going to say.  “Said you wanted me to sleep in y—”

His thumbs start slowly moving inwards, his large hands butterflying out along both cheeks and squeezing.  He spends a second just grabbing and pulling your pillowy flesh, shamelessly spreading you and manipulating it until you’re throbbing between your legs again.  He’s being so brazen about it, too, gradually moving his thumbs closer and closer together until they’re digging into the crevice.

“Hey, uh,” you pant, starting to tense up a bit as his thumbs begin moving downwards.  “Ma—h-hey, you’re getting really… close to m-my…”

His hands keep steadily moving down, and you’re starting to squirm just a bit at the unfamiliar sensation of someone’s fingers pressing and kneading the unexplored skin between your cheeks.  

“Getting real close to your what?”  He drawls out from above you, low in his throat, and your cunt pulses with need.

Fuck, you’re gasping raggedly into the pillow, wondering if the absence would truly make him this bold.  You’re halfway caught between nervousness and being incredibly fucking turned on, and the way he pauses right above your asshole and just holds there makes your the muscles deep in your lower abdomen twist in anticipation and heat.  Fuck, you’re soaking the blankets beneath you, you can tell.  A thin sheen of sweat breaks out across your body and it’s all you can do to just lay there and wait for it with bated breath.

But then his weight is suddenly lifting from you and sliding down the length of your legs, settling at your feet.  You barely have enough time to let out a deep sigh—half of it relief and the other half… disappointment, maybe?—before he grabs hold of one of them, the size of it only slightly bigger than his hand, and firmly presses both thumbs into your arch.

A groan of approval slips through your vocal cords and you go practically boneless underneath him, not realizing how tense you just were a second ago.

“Fuck, that’s s-so good,” you murmur into the pillow, grabbing the blankets at your sides and fisting them subconsciously as he clamps his large hand around your heel and squeezes.

After spending just as much time and attention on the other foot, you feel him grip both your ankles and start working circles up the length of your calves with his thumbs.  His hands flex against the backs of your knees when they get there, and then your breathing kicks back up again when they gradually drag up your subtly clenching thighs.

But then they come to an immediate halt about halfway up, and you have to bite back a huff of distress when he just holds there.  Fuck, why did he stop?  Why did he stop?

“Sweet girl,” he eventually breathes out, sounding somewhere between chastising and shocked.  Your eyes flutter in the darkness at the tone, the endearment after nearly a month without it, and you wiggle slightly on the bed with arousal.  “Is this…?”  Mando brushes his fingers along the inside of your thighs, and you can feel the way his cock pulses as he presses it tight against your leg.  It’s not until he drags his hand down to your calves that you feel the slick heat coating the tips of his fingers, wiping it off on your relatively dry skin.

The pitch blackness makes it impossible to truly tell, but you’re sure your eyes roll back.  Stars, you are so wet for him, you’re leaking it halfway down your thighs.  It’s been too long since he’s touched you.  You can feel your lower muscles bearing down and coiling tight, your entire pelvic area now cramped up with need.

When his hand carefully moves up and a finger just barely ghosts over the soft flesh of your lips, you can’t stop yourself.

“Touch me,” you hear yourself suddenly beg, goosebumps breaking out along your skin while he begins to slowly trace the outside of your slit, up and down, up and down.  “Oh, fuck—please, Din, touch me, I—”

“Hush,” he tells you softly, and fuck, he’s on top of you and you physically can’t do anything to encourage him to hurry up.  The only thing you can do is kick one leg out as wide as possible and just shudder helplessly against the floor, trying to give his hands more room to work.

You feel desperate, your blood pounding through your ears as he takes all the time in the universe exploring you.  “Stars, don’t do this—I need you to—”

“Hush,” he murmurs once more, before moving both fingers to spread your lips apart ever so slightly, your slick heat seeping out to coat his fingers and the blanket below.  “Relax for me.”

Maker, your lower muscles are tightening down and throbbing in equal parts, and you just can’t relax, you can’t relax when you’re this close to cumming all over his hand even though he’s barely touched you.  You’ve been aching for it this whole time, but now there’s a bite to it, a slow burn that begins to engulf the lower half of you in simmering heat.  “Din, please, I missed you so m—”

You choke when you feel the slightest brush of a fingertip next to your clit, before he’s firmly pushing down and tracing a torturously strong semi-circle around the top of it.

Your toes curl and your body locks up and you gasp his name into the pillow, flexing every single muscle in your body in response to his touch until you’re impossibly rock hard with tension under him.

“Poor thing,” Din whispers, slowly tracing an arch back around the other way, and your entire body trembles with it.  Maker, you’re soaking his hand, slippery and hot and every nerve from the waist-down feels sharp and exquisite at the same time.  He leans down to press his lips to your shoulder blade while starting to rub strong circles around your clit.  “All alone for three weeks, nobody around to look after you.  Make sure you’re seen to.”

You’re not sure which way is up right now, and not being able to see anything isn’t fucking helping either.  You feel dizzy with sensation, shaky as his tongue slowly drags up your skin, and you actually feel water rush to your eyes in torment when he pulls his hand away.

You open your mouth to beg him not to stop, but then he’s already moving.  Grabbing your hips and slowly lifting them until your knees have to shuffle up to compensate.  He still keeps your head buried in the pillow, though, still keeps the upper half of your body firmly pressed against the floor.  You pant into the fabric half covering your face and fist the blanket underneath you, biting your lip and clenching your thighs as two hands carefully settle along the backs of them.

Fuck, he keeps you there for so long.  He drags out the anticipation until you’re downright hurting for it, waiting with your ass up in the air for him to do something—anything to help relieve your stress instead of continuing to build upon it.

“Fuck—” he whispers, “—missed you, too.”

When his hot, velvety tongue finally glides through your slit, something about it makes you moan brokenly into the pillow, spread your knees and arch your back even more in presentation.  Fuck, there’s just something about the mindblowing eroticism of your positioning right now, how you’re bent in half and letting him lick through your folds however is easiest for him, something about it hits just right and makes your orgasm suddenly pull up tight and fast.

“Din—” you breathe frantically, your knees shuffling apart and your hips pushing back against his mouth.  “Din, I’m gonna cum—”

His hands come up to clamp around your thighs and hold them steady.  And then he lowers his chin to seal his mouth over your clit, slowly dragging his slick tongue over it, again and again and again, and fuck, you can’t do anything to stop it.  Everything surges up, searing hot and wet as you go rigid and gasp his name, shuddering your way through the debilitating bliss as it arcs brilliantly up and down your spine.

By the time you’re finished, you’re slumped against the floor in exhaustion.  He pulls away and sits up, and you try to push yourself up too, but a large palm firmly flattening along your spine stops you.  The sound of him spitting and the subsequent slick glide of his hand around his cock makes you groan hoarsely against the pillow and relax back down again.

Din eases his way inside you and the thickness of him as he slowly breaks you open is fucking electrifying.  Your sensitive channel hugs tight to every fucking inch of him, lighting your nerves up from the inside and sending skittering shocks down your thighs.  You melt into the floor and take what he gives you until his hips touch your ass, sagging against the ground as he stands so tall and upright on his knees behind you.

When he slowly pulls back out, you can hear the wet sound it makes echo throughout the pitch black hull.  Maker, he just starts up a slow, steady rhythm, his steel grip on your ass holding you steady as he pushes in and out of you.  It’s blinding, making you writhe against the floor while he gives you his cock at a languid pace, dragging the pleasure out but snapping his hips against yours whenever he does reach the apex of his strong thrusts.

It’s as agonizing as it is blissful, and you moan softly into the pillow the entire way through it.  Except—you’re too full of mindless pleasure, too stimulated to want to remain stationary for this long.  You need to move, you need to show him how much you thought about him while he was gone.  

“Din—” you whimper, breathless and needy, turning your head back slightly to unmuffle your words.  “Turn over.”

“In a second,” he huffs, his cock continuing to steadily rock into you.  You’re bent in half, taking it the only way he’ll give it to you and not even being able to push back into him.  “No—l-later.  After.”

You whine, frustrated, clawing and pulling at the blankets under your arms.  “Please—”

“Fuck,” Din pants, “fuck, what do you need?  You need it faster?”  His speed kicks up the slightest bit, and stars, you have to bite the back of your hand to muffle the ragged noise you make in response.  “This what you need?  Tell me.”

There’s not a good way to phrase it.  Mostly, you just… feel the need to participate in this more directly.  You know from experience that he likes to finish when he’s on top, but after weeks apart, you… you need to be what makes him cum, not what he holds steady and uses to get himself there.  

Your voice comes out frantically, pleading gasps for him to grant you this one thing.  “Just turn over, please—pleasepleasepleaseplease—”

His thrusts falter, until they stop completely.  He sounds like he’s having as much trouble breathing as you are, but his hard grip on you gradually loosens.  “You—do you not—?”

You don’t let him finish.  As soon as he lets you go, you’re pushing yourself up and turning around, grabbing his shoulders and all but wrestling him down to the cushioned blanket.  Din grunts and lets you do it, dropping down onto his back and snaking his hands up your naked chest as you climb over him with weak, trembling limbs.  Once you get his cock into position and sink down though—fuck, you grab his wrists and yank them up until his palms are cupping your tits, and Din hisses below you.  Your hands are barely large enough to wrap around the backs of his, but you force him to squeeze them nonetheless, and then you begin to ride him in earnest.

He curses, bracing his feet against the floor and shifting his knees behind you, and then he starts pushing his hips up into yours in time with your downward rolls.  Maker, he hits something deep inside you at the angle, something that makes you gasp every time your hips meet.  Your palms drag down his wrists and forearms as he keeps groping your breasts, throwing your head back in ecstasy as another orgasm starts to stir somewhere low in your core.

“Stars, I—I think I m-might—” You barely have enough time to gasp it out before he’s releasing your breasts and anchoring his grip tight to your hips, beginning to angle and isolate in on that one spot that drives you fucking crazy.  The strong thrusts pull you forward until your palms are braced on the floor next to his head, and you just moan and push back against it as he fucks deep into you.

“Fuck, I missed you,” Din says again, his disembodied voice sounding tighter and more desperate in the darkness, like it’s coming out against his will.  “I—I missed you, t-too, sweet girl, I f-fucking—missed—”

You choke out a cry as another wave of euphoria all but fucking evicerates you.  Your elbows buckle and you fall into his chest, but Din wraps both arms around your back and keeps fucking you through it, gritting breathless curses at the ceiling as your cunt spasms around his cock.

“Tho—ught about you—” he groans, husky and low next to your ear, “every… fuck, every fucking day—thought about y—”

His body tenses and his thrusts stutter to a halt, and then he grinds up into you, gasping your name into the pitch black hull.  Your body is crushed into his chest when his hips jerk against yours, and you bite his shoulder in satisfaction, squeezing hard around his throbbing cock.

When Din finally settles back down to the floor again, both of you are spent.  Neither one of you fucking move.  You don’t say anything while you catch your breath against his chest, slumping down into him as his knees suddenly drop flat.

“Fuck,” he breathes.  “Fuck.  I’m.  I’m never taking a bounty on Coruscant again.”

You laugh lightly, swallowing and turning your head to settle in the crook of his neck.  Your knees shuffle up slightly until you’re resting all your weight on top of him, his cock still engulfed in your hot center.  As soon as you lift off him, you know you’re just going to dribble a mess all over these nice blankets, so you decide to put it off for as long as he allows it.

Din doesn’t seem to have a problem with it at all.  In fact, his chest shifts just slightly beneath you when he reaches down to catch one of the blankets and pull the fabric over the both of you, collapsing back into the pillow with an exhausted sigh and doing absolutely nothing to encourage you to move whatsoever.

“Corellia was worse,” you tell him instinctually, and he grunts and brings his hands up to trail his fingers along your lower back.

“Corellia was over within a day,” he points out, and.  Shit.  You know he’s just being diplomatic about it, but something in the way he casually brushes it off suddenly makes you go quiet.  He’s right, you probably weren’t on Corellia for more than a few hours total.  Not that you necessarily expected him to, but he clearly doesn’t realize the events that took place there have haunted you for weeks.

When you don’t immediately say something in response, Din stops dragging his fingers up your spine.  You can feel his chin lower slightly, his jaw brush against your forehead.  “You oka—?”

“I killed someone on Corellia,” you whisper, and your words hang heavy in the still air immediately afterwards.  “A man is dead because of me.”

He doesn’t speak.  For a long time, Din doesn’t speak.

By the time his voice eventually does come through the darkness, you’d almost convinced yourself he wasn’t going to say anything at all.

“You’re right,” he tells you bluntly, brushing your hair back from your shoulder.  And, for some reason, you’re not expecting it.  If you were able to get a verbal reply out of him at all, you… you hoped he’d argue with you even just a little bit, if only to make you feel even the slightest bit better.  “A man is dead, and you killed him.”

Though his voice is soft and you know he’s not being intentionally cruel, it’s like he reached through your ribcage and crushed your heart himself.  Your shoulders tense at the feeling, wanting to instinctively curl yourself inwards and make yourself smaller in response to it.  Only, Din’s broad chest prevents it.  All you can do is hide your face as best you can in his neck and let the unfiltered truth weigh heavy on you in the silent hull.

“But you’re wrong about one thing,” he eventually says.  “He’s not dead because of you.  That implies you had a choice.  You didn’t.  He’s dead because of him.  He gave you an ultimatum, and you did what you had to do.  Don’t feel bad that you won.”

“I didn’t win anything,” you whisper against his throat, uncomfortable with the implication.

“He initiated a confrontation, and you finished it,” he asserts.  “You did what you had to do, and you did great, so don’t—”

“Great?”  You close your eyes and try not to sound as upset as you currently feel, because you know this is just him being polite.  He does this for a living.  He’s probably lost count of how many people he’s killed in his lifetime, so what’s one body to him?  You shouldn’t have let the conversation lead here, especially after such a lovely moment.  “I… I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t have brought it—”

“Listen to me,” Din suddenly says, curling the tips of his fingers against your shoulder blade.  “There’s something you need to understand, and I’m not trying to hurt your feelings by telling you this.  But the galaxy will never be as kind to you as you are to it.  You’re tenderhearted, and that’s not a bad thing.  Hang onto it, but recognize that it’s rare.  It’s not something that you’ll come by often.  You’ll never see as much of it in anyone else as I see in you.”

Maybe it’s because you know he’s not used to comforting people that the words actually manage to make you feel somewhat comforted.  They’re blunt and honest, but they also allow an unobstructed glimpse into his feelings for you, specifically because of that.

“I just…”  You bite your lip and snuggle your head deeper into the crook of his neck.  “I just wish I could… somehow…”

His chest expands fully with air underneath you, and then you can literally feel yourself slowly sink down a few inches with how deeply he sighs.  But… this isn’t the normal Mando sigh.  He doesn’t sound frustrated with you, exasperated, or impatient.  He sounds… empathetic.  Understanding.

His hand comes up to cradle the back of your head and comb his fingers through your hair, tugging at some of the tangles at your nape.  “What would you have done differently?”

You don’t answer him, because you immediately see what he’s getting at.  You’ve told yourself these things a million times over in the weeks he’s been gone.  Regardless, he goes on for you.

“Would you have chosen to land the ship in a different spot?  Risked a different person following you onto it?”  He asks, and though the overarching point to this line of questioning is already blatantly obvious, his voice is still kind.  “Would you have taken that vibroblade to a different part of his body?  Given him a slower death?  What else would you have done, sweet girl?”

You stay silent, fluttering your eyes shut.  His fingers lazily trail up and down the length of your spine, goosebumps breaking out on your skin once again.

“Even if there was something you could’ve done—even if his death had been your fault,” Din murmurs, “—listen, do you remember what you said to me?  When I told you my name—before that, do you remember what you said?  You said that some things just belong to people.  That there are certain things that people just own, right?  Fundamentally.  And you can do whatever you want with them.  You can choose whether or not to share them with others, you can hide them, or you can.  Change them.  Burn them away.  Remember?”

You nod as much as you can with your head buried into his neck like this.

“Well, you’re right,” he continues, his voice softening.  “Some things do belong to people.  But some things… some things you can’t change.  Some things you can’t hide, and you can’t just burn away forever.  But that doesn’t make them any less yours, understand?  You killed someone.  It doesn’t matter what I tell you, or what you tell yourself.  The end result won’t ever change.  It can't change.  You own that now, and you’ll carry his death with you.  Just like I carry every single one of mine.”

He’s… he’s right.  You don’t have to like it, but he’s right.

“I don’t like it when you quote me to me,” you eventually whisper, your lips brushing his throat.

“Too bad.  I got another one for you,” Din rumbles, and you can feel his gentle smile against your hairline as he tilts his head and presses his lips to your temple.  “The Way says no take-backs.”

You narrow your eyebrows into this perfect little corner of him, not liking how curt and unapologetic it sounds rolling off his tongue.  “Did I say that?”

“Yep,” he huffs at the ceiling.  “Half-asleep, yet observant enough to be annoying.”

Your mouth twists, trying to appear visibly offended in the pitch blackness for some reason but fighting back a smile.  “Would you rather I be oblivious and adorable?”

“No,” he says immediately, and then you blink a few times in the darkness at the sincerity in his tone.  “You’re smart.  Well—you’re an idiot sometimes, but you’re smart.  That’s good.  That’s your best weapon.  Use it.”

“Use it?”  You ask, your voice quiet but curious.  “For what?”

He takes a second before responding, his fingers continuing to trace gentle, subconscious shapes along the curve of your spine.  “What planet are we going to next?”

The abrupt change in subject is stark and immediately noticeable, but you wrack your memory for the coordinates you brought up earlier when he was in the fresher nonetheless.  “Naboo.”

“I was thinking,” Din says, shifting just the slightest bit under you.  You groan when you realize his cock is still inside you, soft but still gorgeously thick enough to not slip out.  “Might… might be a good idea to show you some things.  Give you a few self-defense tips before I head out again.  Naboo is one of the safest planets in the galaxy.  We can… take a few days.”

“Yeah?”  You breathe, a spark of excitement bringing an immediate smile to your face.

“Yeah,” he repeats softly, the scruff on his jaw rubbing against your temple as he nods.  “Been awhile.”

“Okay,” you bite your lip on a grin and try not to let him hear the happiness in your voice.  Fuck, a few days.  A few days he’s delaying his job to spend with you.  Maybe you’ll be able to sleep on an actual mattress at some point.  You truly can’t fucking wait.

You two stay like that for quite a long time, just resting and breathing with each other in the pitch black hull.

“We just wouldn’t have gone to Corellia, how about that?”  You find yourself saying after a moment of comfortable silence.  When Din doesn’t speak, you elaborate.  “You asked me what I would’ve done differently.  We just wouldn’t have gone to Corellia.  Avoided the whole fucking sector altogether, like I plan on doing for the rest of my life.”  

And then your whole body abruptly jerks up and down exactly once with his genuinely amused huff of laughter from underneath you.

Your expression immediately narrows.  This is the third time you’ve ever made him laugh in all the months you’ve known him, and somehow all three of them have been at your own expense.  “What’s funny?”

“Absolutely.  You could’ve—” he clears his throat, “—convinced me.  Not to hunt down a bounty.”

He doesn’t make a sound beyond that, and had you not been laying on top of his chest as it subtly vibrated with stifled chuckles, you wouldn’t have known at all that he found that to be so funny.

“I could’ve… wooed you,” you try after a second, and nope.  You feel like you’re on top of a silent, quaking faultline now, and you do your best to keep a frown on your face as you rock back and forth on top of him.  His cock almost slips out of you in the commotion.  Almost.

“Get some sleep, you sweet talker,” he eventually sighs when he calms his breathing, kissing your forehead and settling back down into the blankets.  “The kid will be up in a few hours, probably less.”

“He’s your son,” you grumble, still sulking somewhat at his blatant disregard of your seduction talents.  “Takes after you.  For all I know he looks just like you, too.”

“Sleep,” Din tells you, bringing a hand up to cup the back of your head and push it deeper into the crook of his neck.  “That’s enough talking.”

You stomp down the playful urge to bite him and settle into him instead, closing your eyes and breathing him in.  Fuck.  A few days on Naboo.  You’ve only heard nice things about the beautiful planet.  You wonder if it has an ocean.  Could a planet be called beautiful if it doesn’t have at least one?  You’ve seen rivers and lakes on planets Din has taken you to, but there was always land on the other side.  You’ve never seen an actual ocean before, you’ve only heard about them.  Water, as far as the eye can see.  There has to be an ocean on Naboo, right?

“Hey Din, are there any—”

“Stop.”

It’s alright, you’ll ask later.