#grav shut up challenge

[waitingongravity]

Don't let U-Official distract you from Zima's Hardbass YouTube channel

I like to imagine that the MVs are either really badly filmed cityscape shots or various clips of the Ursus girls being absolute idiots. Istina is standing on top of a lamppost (how she got up is never shown). Rosa joins Zima in dancing and is Atrocious. Gummy poses next to a blacked out Leto whose stillness is starting to get concerning. Absinthe is the cameraman.

[isobel-thorm]

For Old Times’ Sake

An old friend and a stranger walk into Mos Pelgo, with varying results. AKA: BoBF Chapter Six Semi-Fix It, bc the Kenobi extended family and friends circle is broad, and Raza only knows so much. 

Ships: Robb, mentions of @geronimo-11′s Mina/Din, pre-Mazacobdi if you squint ;)

Raza sighed heavily to announce her presence the moment the Sheriff’s office door slid open. 

Cobb glanced up at her and leaned back in his chair, setting the datapad he had been examining aside.  “False alarm again?” 

“Couple of the Tusken kids were out that way playing with that anti-grav ball setup Pilos got them and tripped the sensor. Water reserves out there are fine. Ari fixed them up, we should be all good.” 

Cobb hummed in acknowledgment, then scooted his chair back so she could pick the datapad from the desk and check that even off the list. Things were getting busier around town now that anything and everything could be Pyke presence, so she had volunteered her services to help him and the new Deputy, Ari, out when Baer continued to run the bar. Though she did have a few ulterior motives, as did Cobb himself. 

True to that statement,  when she drifted close enough, he reached up in order to pull her into his lap, dropping a kiss on her shoulder when she more than happily settled there, then moved so they could both take a look at what else needed to be addressed. 

“I can take a swing by Meelo’s, see what’s up with his converters.” 

“What, so I  can go see what Ira saw the other night? You and I both know she didn’t see a damn thing.” 

“She could’ve. We have to be careful now.”

“Darlin’, I’m the first person who knows the danger of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. But she’s got an in for me, I’m telling you. You can do that.” 

“An in for you? She’s just short of in love with you.” 

“Exactly. Her and her damn wandering hands.” 

“Oh, so now wandering hands are a problem?” she countered, setting the datapad down in order to loop her arms around his neck- but not before running one thumb across his collarbone and across his neck. 

“Yeah, when they’re hers.” 

“Fine, then I’ll go. I’ll protect you from the little, completely non-threatening widow who’s going after what’s mine.” 

“Yours, huh? Now who’s the possessive, jealous type?” 

“Still you?” she countered.

“Yeah?” he leaned in- a challenge, though the lopsided grin growing on his face. 

“Yeah.” She met him halfway and hooked her fingers into his scarf when he closed the remaining distance between them, returning the kiss he gave her. 

Cobb practically tossed the datapad back onto the desk and got a better hold on her when she moved to straddle him. He sunk his fingers into her hair, tilted his head up to deepen the kiss, and- 

The telltale screech of the door opening again doused the fire that had started and the pair scrambled to look presentable again. It ended with Raza nearly falling clear out of his lap, and Cobb had shot his arm out to steady her. They looked up at the doorway, fully aware they probably looked like deer caught in headlights briefly. 

Ari was on the other side of the door, looking half sympathetic, half mortified. The poor man did have the unbridled talent of interrupting them during any moment alone they had- whether it was an ill-advised, very much non- professional moment at work, or even just a moment at the corner table at the cantina.  He opened his mouth, shut it- opened and closed it again. He finally settled for turning on his heel so he was facing the doorway again to give them some semblance of privacy. “Trouble. Got some sort of fancy speeder coming in, straight into town. Ain’t attacking, just… landing,” he reported before promptly heading out. 

The couple was silent for a moment before they both straightened out to fix their clothing that had gotten just disheveled enough for them to not notice til then. 

“Fancy speeder?” Raza wondered aloud. 

“Can’t be Pyke, then. Ain’t their style,” Cobb replied. He opened the desk drawer in order to get his gun and tossed her one of his backups. “Got your saber in case it is?” 

“Yeah.” 

They left the building, then promptly stopped short upon recognizing the figure currently climbing out of the fancy speeder. 

“Ain’t no threat at all,” Cobb mused. 

Their Mandalorian was back. 

Raza beamed and jogged down the steps, straight passed Ari who was already giving Din parking directions of all things. She reached Din, almost jumping the last foot of distance between them before she tossed her arms around him in the tightest hug she could muster. 

Din, to his credit, only floundered a moment before returning it- or his version of returning it, which was more just holding her sides awkwardly. She released him and squinted playfully. “Still not a hugger, huh?” 

“Don’t think I’ll ever be.” 

“Raza, you know this guy?” Ari asked, sounding as incredulous as ever. 

Raza sent him a stern look before looping her arm around Din’s elbow. “I don’t go around hugging random strangers, Ari. He’s a friend. The man can park anywhere, considering he’s the reason the town was even still around for you to get this job in.” 

Ari stared at her for a while. 

Cobb came up behind him and nudged him with his elbow. “He’s the Mandalorian the whole town talks about. One who took out the krayt with us.” 

Recognition dawned on Ari’s face and he nodded. 

Raza nodded back towards the office. “Go on. We’ve got it.”

Ari seemed more than happy to be rid of them. He made quick work of making himself scarce.

Cobb walked over to Din, clapping him on the back. “Sorry ‘bout the new guy. We’re working on the jumpiness.” He examined the speeder. “That a Naboo speeder?” 

“That’s what it started out as,” Din confirmed. 

“Peli?” Raza wondered. 

Din sighed, but nodded all the same. “Peli,” he confirmed. “Things in town alright?” 

“As alright as can be with spice runners on the rise. If you’re planetside, have you heard about them?” 

Din nodded. “That’s why I’m here. Among other reasons. I’m going to need lodging for a few days, if you have the room in town. I don’t want to impose if you don’t. I can figure something out.” 

“ ‘Lodging’?” Raza repeated and crossed her arms over her chest. “You hear that, Cobb? Lodging. Doesn’t want to impose.” 

Din looked away, feeling mocked, but Cobb merely offered a grin that was pure fondness. 

“The nerve of Mandalorians these days!” Raza finished.  before she got up and exited the bar. 

Din stared after her. “Uh…?” 

Cobb laughed, then nodded out the doorway to indicate to leave as well. When Din did as he was told, he spoke again. The pair of them stopped in front of Din’s speeder. “She means you ain’t stayin’ anywhere else but with us, Partner. She’s had the spare room in our place made up for you specifically since we got off Gideon’s ship.” 

“ ‘Our’ place?” Din asked after a moment. 

Cobb’s grin widened and held up his right hand, and sunlight glinted off a gold and blue band around one finger. “Basically moved in together a couple of days after we got off the ship.  Made an honest man outta me a couple of weeks after that.”

Din hummed, though he did sound pleased. “You don’t waste time anymore.” 

Cobb laughed and put his hand down. “Yeah, well, I’m getting old, we… were something far longer than we’d both care to admit, before you even talked some sense into me, so there was no sense in putting anything off again. Not to mention it’s amazing how your life can go topsy-turvy when some mystery man in a fancy tin can crashes into your life and makes you go through multiple near death experiences. Puts a lot of things into perspective.”

“I’d apologize, but…” Din trailed off. 

“Don’t you dare,” Cobb agreed. “Was supposed to a small little to-do. But this is a small town. Once word gets out, everybody knows. Next thing we knew Leia was just getting settled to start the ceremony n’ the whole town showed up to wish us well. Sent out an invite to you too, but you never responded.” 

“Invite must’ve been lost with the ship,” Din replied drily. 

Cobb’s grin grew again, assuming it was a joke, but when Din didn’t move a muscle or shift like he did when he was waiting for an answer the last time, Cobb’s smile faded. “The ship too? I thought Fett was just giving you a ride because he owed you something last we saw you.” 

“It’s… been a long few of months.” 

“Fine. Then you’re staying as long as you need. Even if my people say no to all this.” Before Din could protest, Cobb took the pack Din had stashed behind the speeder’s seat and headed into his house. 

Din followed behind, pausing in the doorway to take in the entryway of Cobb’s house as the man set his things inside somewhere. 

Cobb hadn’t been joking. He had been in his house briefly before, but even he noticed the place looked more lived in now. More like a home. A certain longing hit him in the chest at the thought, but he shrugged it off.  “Can I buy you both a drink?” 

“I wouldn’t mind one, but you ain’t paying for yours. Ever. Always on the house. Come on,” Cobb instructed. He headed for the cantina. 

Din hesitated, not exactly sure how to go about how to ask for what he needed. Still, if it was anybody who would hear him out, it was them. 

______________________________________________________________

Things had gone from amicable and light to business right quick. Din had caught them up on all they had missed since they last saw each other- and then the growing problem with the Pykes and how he needed the town’s help. 

Raza hadn’t exactly been thrilled to hear that Din seemed to be  just one step away from  in Boba’s pocket, but she trusted him to be smart about it. Most of the time. That said, she was less than thrilled that Cobb was deadset against it after everything they had been through. Even Baer had made his disapproval known. Raza had leaned over towards Din halfway through his pitch in order to show some solidarity, and the way Din leaned towards her in return made him figure that he had picked up on it. The absurdity of the subtle little team-up made her want to laugh. If the Jedi and Mandalorians from a few generations back could see them now. 

Cobb had left the table promising to think about it. Ari had followed him, and Baer had left for the back room to do inventory, leaving the pair of them alone. They were silent for a while until Raza shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sorry about him. I want - we want to help, whether he says it here or not, it’s just-” 

“You’ve got people to protect, I understand,” Din cut her off, and she took comfort that he sound like he wasn’t saying it just for her benefit. “Don’t think me ungrateful about the help, either. You lost people. You sacrificed. On a whim of mine, no less. This… has the chances of being bigger than the Dragon. Town like this could get wiped clean out, just like it could’ve then. But this one’s got more lasting consequences.” 

“I know,” Raza replied quietly. She reached for his shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Give him a bit. Maybe I can talk to him.” 

“Please do,” Din nodded. After a few seconds of silence, he glanced at his hands. “I… that wasn’t all I came here for. There’s… another thing. A Jedi thing. I was wondering if I could talk to you and your mother about how… Jedi things… operated.” 

“Jedi things?” Raza cracked a smile. “Come on, Din. I know you can do better than that by now.” 

“Laws, or… rules or… something. I just…” Din trailed off again. “I went to visit Grogu. Your friend Luke…there was the other Jedi there, Ahsoka. She wasn’t exactly thrilled to see me. Apparently she and Luke have this... guideline. He said Grogu- and I had to choose. The Jedi way or the Mandalore way, and I just… something they said stuck with me.”

“What was it?” 

“Jedi forgo attachments. It makes them weak. That’s… apparently why I can’t see him.”

Raza opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, considering. What was that her father used to say? Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. And it all started with love. Or so that ancient saying went. Still, of all people Luke should know that was hardly a decent argument anymore. “Well, between my existence, my parents loving me, me loving Cobb, I’m walking talking proof that isn’t the case anymore,” she pointed out. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got for Din, though. “So is Luke. The only reason why he was able to bring his father out of Darth Vader was through love. The only reason they overthrew the Emperor is love. He loves Leia, he loves Han for some godforsaken reason-” 

“I have no idea who these people are,” Din cut her off. 

“I - not even Leia?” 

When Din didn’t even move, she sighed. “Just… important people. Loved ones. So that’s bullshit, and don’t let Luke tell you different. Forget talking to Cobb, I’m gonna talk to Luke first, what is that, what the Hell is he thinking about?” 

Din shrugged again. “That’s the modern take. Didn’t you say your mother was part of the Old Ways? What would she say?” 

“Probably the same, but she was the one who saw it from all sides. She’s out of town for a couple of days. You want to talk, you’ll have to wait. Guess it’s just as well considering you’re probably gonna need a day or two to get through Cobb’s thick skull.” 

Din laughed, but it sounded - off. A little too forced. The first and only time she had ever heard him laugh it was far lighter. Raza hesitated before reaching out with the Force to feel his mind, and sure enough, the man’s head was an ocean of emotions. And all of them bad. “Din, what else is going on?” when he merely tilted his head upward- his usual when he was trying to feign ignorance, she covered her hand with his to anchor him.  When he went to pull back like her touch burned, she relented, and her humoring him must’ve bothered him about his own reaction, because he stopped short when he would’ve been free of her so they were still making contact. He went quiet and still again, and Raza reached out to his mind a second time out of sheer frustration at his downright emotional constipation that was worse than Cobb’s.

Grief. Confusion. Little bit of hopelessness. And then there was a sudden break in the emotional tempest because of… pain? Physical pain?

The reassuring smile she had plastered on for his benefit dropped. “You’re hurt,” she accused. 

“What?” Din asked- feigned ignorance all over again. 

Raza gave him a Look to show that she had other-worldly reason to know about it and reached out a third time to locate whatever was hurting him enough to derail his thoughts. His left thigh. She leaned back to check it and saw the clean, messily sewn-back-together straight cut in his pants leg. She would know a lightsaber burn anywhere by now. Whatever he’s doing must’ve reached the skin.  “How did that happen? Did you fight someone?” 

“Technically he started it,” Din replied, startlingly honest. He must’ve figured the jig was up. 

 Her frown deepened. “Who did-” her eyebrows shot up. “Luke?!”

 “No, not him. I didn’t even talk to him. I saw him from a distance. Highly doubt he’s the type. I got it before I saw him. That was from this thing.” Din motioned at the Darksaber hilt at his belt. “One of my own people. Or... former people.” 

“What? Why?”

 “It used to be his ancestor’s. Apparently, people with Jedi lineage take their laser swords being passed down very seriously,” he countered, tilting his head pointedly, and then he saw her own passed-down-lightsaber at her hip and instead straightened out to look her in the face again. 

She shot him a warning look, then leaned bac toward in order to pick up the basket in the corner. She turned it over and dropped it down on the ground. She pointed at it. “Leg up.”

 Din obeyed with a grunt of pain. He knew there was no arguing with her.  

Raza knelt in front of him and held out her hand. Din hissed when his wound thrummed for a moment, then an odd feeling passed over it- not pleasant, but not outright painful. After a few seconds, the pain was ebbing away slowly. “What’re you doing?” 

“Force healing. Guess you could call it whipping your cells back into shape so that heals faster.” She looked back at his leg, watching “You said one of yours did this?” 

“No. It was me. Brought it back too close to my leg in a fight.” 

“It’s a learning process,” she offered. “I had a few close calls when I was starting out.”

 “Your father let you use yours as a child?” Din asked, and he felt bad at how scandalized he managed to sound. This Obi-Wan person had sounded wise- a little strange, but he wouldn’t have figured he was the type to give a child such a dangerous weapon. 

 “Not initially. We used wooden swords until I could avoid, well, that.” She motioned at the wound.

Din hummed in acknowledgement, wondering if he should tell her all about his troubles with the Darksaber, too. Maybe she had the same problems. Did all lightsabers get heavier by the second? Still, there was another bantha in the room - figuratively, thankfully, though judging by the Krayt ribcage that now decorated the room, he wouldn’t put it past any of the townsfolk to try.  “He’s not mine.” 

“Hm?”

 “The man I fought. He’s not… he’s not one of mine anymore… or I’m not one of them.” 

Raza’s hand stilled as she waited for an explanation.

 “The Armorer renounced me. I went against the Way. I’m no longer Mandalorian. I took my helmet off in front of people.”

 “Me…?” Raza asked after a moment. 

Din’s heart clenched at the memory of her watching him wearily as he took his helmet off in front of her after they had left Gideon’s ship. She had trusted him with her secret of being a Jedi and he had kept it, and at the time, he needed someone to see him, not the helmet as his world was crumbling around him. And considering his company at the time, she had been the best bet.  It had been an even trade back then- a life-threatening secret for a life-altering secret. Still, she hadn’t been the first, and probablu wouldn’t be the last. And of course he had worded it so she felt guilty. “No. There were… a couple of times before you. I was in a bind shortly after we met. And then Gideon’s ship.” 

“Din, I’m so sorry.”

 “I’m… not. I think that’s what’s bothering me the most about this.” He went quiet again, and Raza squeezed his knee nearest hers reassuringly. 

Then, from the other side of the window they were sitting beside, Cobb cut in: “Y’know this is the second time I’ve seen you two in a compromising position. Should I be worried?” 

They looked at him, and when he offered a teasing grin, before nodding pointedly down. And well, yes, maybe Din facing the interior of the place and her kneeling precariously on her knees and just out of view was compromising - and worse than the last ‘compromising position’ where they had just been talking quietly, shoulder to shoulder. Idiot. 

“Jealous,” Raza accused again, and Cobb winked before looking towards the outskirts of town. His smile dropped and he walked out of view.

Din looked back at Raza. “You’re married now and he’s still like that?” 

“Think it’s just with you and me, honestly. Only person I ever made friends with as quickly as I did with him is you.”

“Well, with all due respect, I’m not interested. And he should know that by now,” Din added, loud enough for Cobb to hear the last bit. 

Raza slapped her chest overdramatically .”Ouch, that hurts my very happily married ego.” Then, as only she could: “Speaking of, how’s Mina?” 

Din took the sudden arrival of a small crowd of townsfolk as a blessing and a reason to mull it over. He hadn’t lost her now, had he? He wasn’t certain. He began to reply, only to see a reflection of somebody off the side of his speeder just outside the window. And the someone wasn’t Cobb. Further investigation had him noticing that the entire square was suddenly empty. He leaned over to check for Cobb. The other man was standing just a few feet back, staring at something - the owner of the reflection, by the look of it, hand set firmly over his gun- waiting like he was about to draw. “Something’s wrong,” he reported before bolting for the door. Raza followed him. 

The pair of them reached the doorway at the same time, and Din caught the red glint of laser fire out of the corner of his eye and caught Raza around the shoulders and yanked her back to keep her from getting hit. 

Ari, directly on the other side of the door wasn’t so lucky. The rounds hit him and he crumpled to the ground. 

Once Raza heard another round of gunfire go off and that same red light headed straight for Cobb she threw one hand out to Force push him back. It had been a second too late and the round caught him on the shoulder, and the Marshal hit the ground hard with a yell. 

There had been an indignant “What?!” from the other side of the square. 

Raza drew her lightsaber and ignited it, closing the distance between her and Cobb, then faced the direction the gunfire had come from -and froze the second she set eyes on the newcomer’s silhouette.  She knew that silhouette. She used to know it well. “Cad?” When she saw Din come up behind her and level his gun for a shot at the invader, she moved the blade into his eyeline. “Hold on.” 

“He just shot Cobb!”

“I’m well aware,” she hissed. “Cobb, you okay?” 

The man hissed around a groan, but that was better than nothing. “Ow?” 

“Help him,” she instructed Din, and Din did as he was told, keeping his gun trained on the gunslinger all the while. He got Cobb to his feet, hardly surprised when Cobb tried to stumble upright on his own. Din retrieved Cobb’s gun from the ground and pressed it into the man’s free hand. 

The gunslinger across from her who had been focusing very intently on her lightsaber and looking visibly more angry by the second paused, squinting at her face for a few loaded moments. The snarl on his face immediately dropped once it came into focus. “... Torchbug?” 

“Raz…?” Cobb murmured, the obvious question going unasked.

Cad turned his attention back to Cobb. When it looked like his hand twitched towards his gun, so Raza stepped closer to Cobb and brandished her saber again. 

Cad took the hint and looked at her. “What’s a Kenobi doing out in the middle of nowhere, Kid?” 

Din looked between the pair of them. He had learned several things during his visits in town, and one such thing was that only a small tiny handful of people knew that was Raza and Selene’s true surname. Because apparently, that name came with a lot of risk on top of the risk from being a Jedi.  “If he knows you’re a Kenobi is that good or bad for us?”

Raza shushed him, then looked back at Cad. “Probably the same thing you were since we’ve seen each other last,” Raza pointed out. 

“Been a long time,” the gunslinger mused, then nodded at Cobb. “You putting your lot in with nobodies like that?” 

“That’s my husband you just shot. This is my town.” 

The bounty hunter’s snarl changed in favor of looking full-on confused. “Husband? You’re old enough to get married now?” 

“Been a while,” she parroted him. “I’d love to catch up the second you put your gun away.” 

“Can’t do that just yet. Trigger Happy over there’s your husband?” 

“Other one.” 

“Might’ve known. Sweet talker. Seems more your type  Ain’t he a little too old for you?” 

Cobb groaned again, and Raza wasn’t sure if it was from pain or the comment. 

“How the Hell do you know what my type is?” Raza asked. 

“Kept tabs on you for a few years. Bounties on your heads were good for all of you.  Not quite good enough, though, with all the trouble your father caused me.” 

Well, that was just vaguely threatening enough. She made a show of getting a better hold on her lightsaber. 

Cad looked from the saber, to her, then at Din when he sidled up beside Raza to line up a better shot with his gun, waiting. He looked him up and down, clearly noting the Mandalorian armor, then looked back at Raza. “Where is your old man,  Kid? You all laying…” he looked around at the buildings. “This low?” 

“Didn’t you just say you kept tabs?” 

“As I said, money wasn’t good enough the last few years. More important targets. I lost track.”

Raza froze and stared at the bounty hunter, looking for any trace of that statement being a low blow meant to distract her. His kind had a hell of a poker face, but he always ended up giving himself away. His face remained neutral, waiting. He didn’t know? She asked as much to test the waters.

“Figured with all that went down with your people you’d be long gone. With our history, I thought that was a good thing. For the both of us. He in town?” 

“Why? Did the price go up?” 

“Not yet. I’m only here for business with the town. And there’s no prices on your husband’s head yet either. So long as your husband listens to our offer. Just would like to see your old man. Have a chat for old time’s sake.” 

Raza didn’t like the implication there. If there even was one. She could never be sure, even as a teenager. Cad was a lot of things, but someone who would use her father against her probably wasn’t one of them. She de-ignited her lightsaber and let her hand fall to her side. A serious risk, but Din was as good of a shot as any if he tried anything, and he hadn’t put his weapon down when she did.  “He’s dead, Cad,” she replied. “Died helping take out the Death Star. Darth Vader killed him.” 

Cad’s face fell. 

She had seen Cad angry, antsy, skeptical- this was the first time she had seen him look conflicted. He was still for a moment, but then his shoulders slumped, and he took his turn to holster his gun.  He was silent for another few seconds, taking a very vested interest in the rock at his heel. Then: “Vader? Anakin? After all that?” 

Her heart lurched. She had forgotten Obi-Wan had been honest with him one of the last times Cad had been in Tatooine. She had just been a little girl then. Cad had strolled into a shop, ready for an argument, ready to taunt and had noted Anakin’s absence, and Obi-Wan had told him he had joined the Dark Side. Maybe it was to throw him off, maybe it was just because her father had needed to say it out loud himself. Still, leave it to Cad to simplify the worst part of that entire ordeal. Cad didn’t move for a while, apparently still thinking the news over, and she and Din took the moment to help Cobb to his feet carefully. She crossed to his injured side in order to hover her hand at his shoulder blade to try to start the healing process. 

Cad remained unmoving for another few moments, and the silence grew deafening. He looked around, then spotted the bar through the cantina window.  “I need a drink,” he announced before heading into the bar. 

Raza watched him go, then went to follow him in, but Cobb caught her elbow, shifting enough in his effort that Din had to stumble to catch him without hurting him. “Raz, you ain’t goin’ in there. I- shit, Ari.” He looked towards the Deputy, who was out cold at the steps of the bar- or worse. “Who the Hell is this guy? How do you know him?”

“It’ll be fine. We go way back.”

“And how the Hell can you be certain of that after he just tried to gun us down?” 

“He knew my father-” 

“Everybody in the goddamn galaxy knows your father-” 

“No, not just knew of.  As in knew directly. They were… I don’t know. Enemies. Rivals. Something. He saved my dad’s life once. Tried to kill him a few more than that. Called himself my uncle back in the day but it was just to annoy my dad. It’s a whole thing. But if that stops post-humorously, well…”

“Then all the more reason for you to follow him in-” Cobb went wide-eyed in a panic. “Baer. Everybody. I just told everybody to get in the bar. Is he-” 

“Cobb, calm down. Cad’s only gonna go after the one he’s getting paid to go after. Right now, that doesn’t seem to be any of us, or we’d all be dead.  Din, get Cobb out of here, and get Ari help.”

“You sure?” Din asked. 

“Positive, go.” 

“Din, do not-” Cobb hissed, but Din was already hauling him away, motioning at Jo and a couple of others who had heard the exchange and had scrambled to get Ari up. “First sign of trouble you holler.” 

“I will.”

She walked into the Cantina, where Cad had sat dead center at the bar. Baer had apparently already poured him a drink, but when she looked the bartender’s way, he shot her a panicked look. ‘Go’ she mouthed, and he was more than happy to follow the order. The others who had been inside followed suit.

Good. At least now people were safe. She wished her racing heart would get the picture though. 

Cad waited for him to leave before he spoke again. “His own apprentice. That’s what you people called it, wasn’t it?  What a way to go. Thought for sure your father would’ve outlived me.”

“For what it’s worth, he probably thought the same.” 

“You’ve inherited his sense of humor.” 

She allowed a smile, then squared her shoulders. “What’re you doing here, Cad? You work for the Pykes now? What, they’re sending you after people who don’t fold for them?” 

“They pay nice.” 

“Come on. Spice? Doesn’t seem your speed.”

“Times change, Torchbug.”

“Not enough for you to drop the nickname, though.” 

“I said times. Not habits. You’ll always be that golden-haired little runt stuck to your father’s side in Anchorhead.” 

“Then out of habit, you know I can’t abide those people trying to take over my town. We’ve been through enough.” 

“I’m just the messenger for now.” 

“Don’t make us your enemy.”

“I ain’t doin’ anything yet.” 

“So don’t. Work for us instead.” 

“Don’t know about that. Working for a cold-blooded killer with Empire ties ain’t my speed.”

“Says the cold blooded killer,” Raza answered without a second thought, and Cad snarled at her,, but said nothing. She continued. “ They’re a gang. Play your cards right for us, you can have Tatooine’s bounties all to yourself. One’s a temporary gig with good money. One’s constant money til you’re all set to retire.” 

“I just shot two of your people.”

“One’s been through worse. And the other one was a loose cannon, it was bound to happen.” It was a far colder response than she felt, but at this rate, she knew what to say. “Might have to make a case for yourself if he doesn’t pull through.” 

Cad continued this. “And your Fett man will… be willing to do business? Never was the entertaining type to me.” 

“If he’s not, I can rig the game, remember?” she waved her hand pointedly. “So, a temporary arrangement with a gang who’ll just have infighting in no time, or a planet where you’re the top dog? Besides, money wasn’t entirely everything to you, if I recall. You like usefulness. You’ve got a Jedi, probably the second best sharpshooter aside from you if you didn’t just wreck his arm, and a Mandalorian. You ever need muscle for a favor, you’re in good shape.”

“Compelling argument. You didn’t get that skill from your father.” 

“That one’s all my mother. Well, and the guy you just shot.” She straightened out. “So, what’ll it be?” 

“How do I know I can trust you?” Cad narrowed his eyes. 

“You don’t. Same as I know I can’t trust you.”

Cad looked away. “It would bother your father something fierce that we’re working together…” 

“Right now, I think I have to make that sacrifice.” 

Cad eyed her again, though she could see he was thinking hard about something. She knew when a man was running numbers in his head. “Then you’ve got a deal. For old time’s sake.” He reached over and took the bottle of liquor and the couple of glasses Baer had abondoned on the counter, poured the pair of them a shot and slid one her way. He raised his own a moment later. “To your father,” he had announced before towning his, and she followed suit, but not before one thing came to mind: and may he forgive me. 

—--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Of course, the news that they had teamed up with the very person who had just shot the Sheriff and Deputy of Freetown had made quick work around town. 

Din hovered near Raza nonstop after Cad had left with the promise that he’d be in touch ‘and know if you crossed me.’  He knew more than anybody what teaming up with such an enemy did to people in dire times, and he wanted to be there as much as possible. Even if that just meant staying nearby when Raza had stayed in the medbay as the doctor patched up Cobb and ‘did what they could’ for Ari. Cobb had a good chance of pulling through, the Deputy… less so. 

Rumors had already been flying in the few hours since. ‘Did you hear what Raza did?’ ‘She’s supposed to be the brains of that operation.’ ‘She just doomed us all the rest of the way.’ ‘Now we’ll definitely be taken over.’

Raza had taken it all in stride, ignoring everything, and if anybody had confronted her, she’d promise to handle it.  It was nightfall by the time Raza had assured Din enough that she was safe and could handle things if Cad showed up again. She had suggested he get food, and Baer, who had also been eager to check up on her, had volunteered his cooking for the job. He had accepted the meal, and then headed right back to Cobb and Raza’s house, where the town doctor and a few people had set Cobb up. It occurred to him then that he hadn’t been beyond the living room of the place, and so when he went searching for them, he felt like he was intruding. 

He followed one hallway til there was light reflecting off one wall and followed it to a doorway.

The other two were there, and the sight to behold was just a swap of what it had been months ago. Raza had nearly died helping him on Gideon’s ship, between the fight with Gideon himself and her volunteering to take as many Darktroopers on as she could to buy time before Luke had come in to save the day. She had been an exhausted, bruised and bloodied mess, more so than him by the time the ordeal had finished. He remembered checking up on her that night on the Slave I, hardly surprised to see her out cold in her bunk, with Cobb crammed up into the tight space between her body and the inner corner of the bunk, head propped against the wall at a weird angle like he had been holding himself up before he lost the fight against sleep. Because he had been. At the time, Cobb was vaguely aware that the Kenobis and Fetts had some sort of bad history and he didn’t trust Boba not to come after Raza at her weakest.

The sight that met him was just about the same, but the roles were reversed. Cobb was out cold and she was all but wrapped around him head facing towards the door, and her lightsaber was on the nightstand beside them, just a hair out of reach. 

That same yearning hit him square in the chest once again. He really did need to check up on Mina, if only for his own peace of mind. At least the rich and powerful didn’t have some law against doing so. 

Raza stirred, and Din announced himself so she wasn’t in for a shock when she found him hovering. “He okay?” 

“He’ll be fine. It’s the ‘be’ that I’m worried about. I healed him as much as I could so he should be in good shape, but rest is key to keep it that way. You want a motivational speech to get our people on the job, you’ll get it, but that’s as far as I’m letting it go for now.  He’ll probably try to get back to work by tomorrow if he had his way, especially now that we got a direct threat. Go figure. Cad showing up might’ve been the motivation, as much trouble as he was.” 

“You sure he’ll play nice?” Din asked. 

“No, not at all, but… I know him enough. If we look competent enough, he’ll stick with us. If not, well, a word to your friends and he’ll be done within the week.” 

“Not if I get him first.” 

“Hey now, there’s a line, and I’m up front,” she countered. When she heard Din huff out a laugh through his helmet’s modulator, she smiled, but it faded. “I just.. I do know what I’m doing with him. I’m not trusting him, I just… Cad’s a dangerous man, but he does have a code… somewhere under that stupid hat of his. If he was entirely sold on being on the Pykes’ side, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did just now.” 

“You don’t have to defend yourself.  I trust you,” it was nice, Din realized, finally being able to say that out loud and meaning every word. “Fett and Fennec trusting you and this plan might be another story.” 

“Yeah, well, being like my father might be a selling point for Cad. Not being entirely like him might be a selling point for Boba. They both essentially want a throne. We’re just lucky it’s not the same one.” 

“And what happens when it is?” 

“Not Cad’s style, but if it ever did come to that, not our problem. They can kill each other off for all I care.” 

“Hell of a thing to say about your uncle.” 

“I never called him that. He did. No relation at all. Think it’s just a mock spiritual title.”

“Your family makes less and less sense the more I hear about them.”

From beside Raza, Cobb grunted and cracked one eye open. “Try marrying into it and having to get the low-down that way.”

They had all made small talk after that, occasionally fussing over Cobb, and the marshal himself repeatedly announced how he didn’t need to be fussed over, all while physically all too pleased about it. 

The next morning, Selene had returned to town. Within a few minutes, the local gossips had filled her in on all the goings on, and she had all but marched to Cobb and Raza’s place. She immediately went to work scolding Cobb once the man had practically sprung up out of bed and started to show just how capable he was of getting back on the job by finishing a few odd-jobs around the house and then arguing that he absolutely had to do rounds this morning if they all had a fight to be prepared for. Selene had practically cornered the man in his own house to the point he had stumbled back straight onto one of the couches, and she had gone on about how a rested marshal was far better than a dead one, a burdened daughter was much better than a widowed daughter, and other comparisons. 

Din had also filled Boba in about the details with Cad, and while the former bounty hunter was less than thrilled, he was more than happy to have another decent player in their ranks, and he would agree to sending jobs entirely his way- with the added clause that he could put Cad down at the first sign of trouble, which was wholeheartedly agreed on with the others.

Din had loved every second of it, and he was hardly surprised. Toughest man this side of Tatooine could keep calm staring down a deadly bounty hunter, but would immediately fold to the orders of a mother figure. It was… very Cobb.  

It wasn’t until the evening that Cobb had negotiated just what Raza assumed he would- a conversation with the townsfolk to see if any of them were up for the fight with the Pykes. 

Things had gone from promising to rocky the moment Cad had come strolling into the bar, at Raza’s request, unbeknownst to anyone else. The townsfolk had been deadly quiet at the sight, and Cad had made his new outlook known: “Your Lady Leader here and I made an arrangement. I’ll be in your corner. Just don’t get in my way.” 

The townsfolk had been extremely skeptical, but Cobb and Din had recalled their fight with the Dragon, and it had been enough to bolster them. 

By the time the meeting had cleared out, it was just Din, Raza, Cad and Cobb still in the bar. 

Din had taken Selene aside to ask his questions, Raza had gone to help Baer close up, and that had left Cad and Cobb. The bounty hunter had sidled up to Cobb, who went borderline rigid at the presumed conversation to come, making a show of putting his hand over his gun. “Hey, no hard feelings about the…” he made a gun motion with his thumb and pointer finger. “Just business, you see.” 

“Oh, hard feelings absolutely felt and not relenting anytime soon, Pal,” was Cobb’s immediate response before he had taken a bottle of whiskey and walked back over to Din. 

Cad shrugged. He didn’t mean it anyway. Still, that was his part done. He pushed off the bar and turned to leave, only to nearly collide with another woman entering the bar. 

She was older, human, golden hair was greying. Almost looked like…  he couldn’t help the crooked smile that grew on his face. Of course. Raza had said ‘we’ for a reason. “Selene Rand. “Of all the cantinas in the galaxy, you walk into mine.” 

The woman looked his way, and offered a look that matched his own. “Cad Bane. I  heard you were in town. And it is Kenobi. It has been for all the years you’ve known that fact. I’m a widow, not a divorcee.” 

“Eh. it’s apparently been a while. Man can dream, can’t he?” 

“You never did know when to quit.  Is there a reason you’re back in my daughter’s bar?” 

“Your daughter’s?” he repeated. “This is hers? Willingly? You sure she’s Kenobi’s kid?” 

“He wasn’t always the stick in the mud you made him out to be.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re dodging the question.” 

“Seeing as your husband’s gone, your family name still owes me a Hell of a favor. I trust you and the kid to honor that. Seeing as this might just be the way to keep it, here I am.” 

“That sounds far more like you. And here I was thinking you were doing it just for old time’s sake.” 

“You give me far too much credit, Selene.” 

Across the bar, the other three were staring at the exchange with extreme apprehension. Cobb was finally the first one to speak: “Raz, this could just be the bloodloss talking here, but I’ve got no idea what the Hell is going on. Is… is your Ma flirting with the guy that shot me, or is she about to stab him? Because I’m really hoping for the latter but I can’t tell, and that’s concerning. And I’m fairly sure I should be insulted.” 

“I’ve got no idea, and it passed concerning for me the second he said her name.” Raza admitted. “Hey! Closing time!” she called. “Especially for people from out of town.” 

“Message received, Torchbug,” Cad replied. He backed up, tipped his hat at Selene, then went on his way. 

“I hate him,” Cobb announced after a moment. 

“He’s not entirely terrible so long as you’ve got something to offer him,” Selene replied as she approached them. She was met with two skeptical looks and a very precarious helmet tilt. “Oh stop, he’s still rotten regardless. And you.” She hooked Cobb’s good arm, relenting only a little bit when he hissed and flinched like the movement had traveled to his other side. “Are out far later than promised, and it’s my turn to take a look at that shoulder.”

“Aw come on, Selene, I’m fine. Maybe I just need to be on my feet to get the blood flowin’ right-” 

“Now, young man.” 

“I - yes, ma’am.” Cobb shot the others a defeated look before he let Selene pull him out of the place. 

That left Din and Raza, and Din followed her to the door, and the pair watched as Cad disappeared into the horizon. 

“I hope this works. For all your sakes,” Din pointed out. 

“It’s gonna be a damn mess, but… we’ve got a pretty good team so far. I think it will.” 

“Any other family connections we should know about?”

“I mean, I could get Leia involved in the whole thing, that would shut it down right quick, but… that’s bound to cause an interplanetary incident. And she’s got a lot more to worry about.” 

“... Which one is she again?” 

When Raza turned to look at him and he gave a half-hearted shrug in response. “Leia? Princess Leia? General Organa?” 

Din looked away pointedly. 

“You’re hopeless.” 

“I’m starting to learn that’s a good thing.” 

She laughed then, then nodded back towards the house. “Come on. Let’s get some rest. Got a feeling that we’re going to have a very long, angry holo-chat with Luke in the morning.”

Well, he hardly found any fault in that.

[incognitajones]

I managed to delete the original ask somehow, but @englishable sent in a “trick or treat” request (which turned into a full-sized candy bar).

“And keep an eye on Ben!” Poe’s mom shouted after him as the two of them took off down the terrace, toward the stairs to the Mirror Garden. 

Ben couldn’t laugh in public today, but he rolled his eyes at Poe, who smirked back.

They couldn’t run, either, so they kept to a fast-paced, bobbing lope as they weaved through the crowd of dispersing mourners. Until they got out of the main crush, it was like navigating through an asteroid belt: darting from side to side, buffeted by elbows, lekku, tentacles and other appendages. There weren’t many kids, and hardly any were younger than him. Every year, his mother sighed over the aging survivors of Alderaan.

Most years, people held their own private memorials, like his family did. But even then, as the last Princess of Alderaan, his mother had to be seen honouring the dead; she let the holonet drones record their annual ceremony for broadcast. She’d explained to Ben when he was little why that was necessary, and so he tried hard not to show how much he hated it.

Now he was eleven, which meant it was the sixteenth year since the destruction. And since eight was a Great Number, that meant instead of a small family ceremony there’d been a huge public commemoration with thousands of survivors and Senators and planetary envoys and a full-length, formal mourning service.

At least that part was over now. But as he and Poe passed the memorial stone the looming masked figures of the Silent Ones remained in a circle around it. They’d stand there without making a sound all day until they faded into the darkness of night. It creeped Ben out and he averted his eyes, even though he knew they were really just ordinary people on stilts hidden underneath the long midnight blue robes.

“Vader’s balls, these clothes are hot. I don't know how you stand it.” Poe pulled at the high collar of his tunic, stretching it out of shape. “You sounded good, though.”

“Shut up, I wasn't singing that loud. There’s no way you could hear me.” Ben could feel his ears firing up. He shook his head, trying to hide them under his hair, but the braids his mom had put in were too tight and nothing moved.

Ben had been roped into the children’s choir for the service, made up of survivors and descendants of survivors. He understood why he couldn’t be left out but he’d spent weeks sick to his stomach at the thought of being at the centre of attention onstage. In the end, it could have been worse. They’d stuck him in the front row, of course, but among a hundred other kids he hadn’t stood out too much.

Besides, concentrating ferociously on singing in tune and in time helped with the biggest challenge of the day: keeping all the feelings that pressed in on him out of his head.

“You know it was just because of mom,” he reminded Poe. “And because my voice hasn’t changed yet.”

“Honestly, that’s not so great.” Poe frowned. “It’s humiliating, the way I squeak every time I try to say something important. I sound like a droid half the time.”

“At least you’re growing.” Ben hadn't put on a centimetre since last Life Day. He was sick of looking up at everyone he knew. If he was taller, they’d have had to let him stand in the back row of the choir.

He led Poe under the archway into the Mirror Garden. It was quiet now; the tourists from earlier in the day were gone and all the mourners were headed in the opposite direction, toward the Senate chambers for a reception. Something Ben hated as much as his father did, because it meant hordes of people, trays of tiny delicacies he wasn’t allowed to take more than one of, and his mother talking to strangers for hours until her voice cracked, while her back stayed laser-straight but the corners of her eyes drew into the microscopic creases that meant she was exhausted.

Grownups rarely felt one clear thing. It was confusing and frustrating, the way they could be soaked in misery and still burning with rage; they loved his mother (our Princess) and hated her (why is she alive, and not my Jalna) at the same time. And he didn’t understand why she felt stabbing shame every time someone greeted her with the Alderaani phrase “Our sorrow is shared.”

So he was glad Poe was here, even if they weren’t really friends, because the other boy was an excuse to escape the overstuffed, ornate halls with voices and thoughts bouncing off the high ceilings until he could barely think. When Poe mentioned that he’d never seen the Mirror Garden, Ben had thrown his mother a pleading look, and she’d nodded and told them to go ahead even though his dad didn’t agree, judging from the scowl on his face. “It’s safe, Han,” he’d heard her hiss. “Security’s been ramped up all over the quarter. They’ll be fine.”

“Whoa.” Poe stopped short, staring.

Ben looked around. The Mirror Garden was one of Coruscant’s most famous sights; every tourist stall on the planet sold holos and threedee projections and enough flimsies of them to wallpaper Ben’s bedroom three layers thick.

He’d never understood why. The Garden wasn’t anything really interesting, like the ruins on Jedha, just a white stone plaza filled with reflective pools and fountains and waterfalls stretched and pulled into gravity-defying forms. Some were so perfectly still you’d swear they were real glass, until your hand felt the cool moisture. Some moved in ripples that turned the figures standing around them into wavering columns of colour and shadow.

Poe leaned closer to one vertical wall of water, peering at his reflection until his nose almost parted the smooth liquid surface. “How do they get it to do that?”

Ben shrugged. “It’s just grav manip fields. Don’t they have those on Yavin 4?”

“Yeah, no.” Poe snorted. “We’re a rural backwater. Some of the heavy farm equipment might have them, but basically, if it can’t grow turnips we don’t get it.” He lifted a hand, his fingertip a millimetre away from the shimmering plane. “Can I touch?”

“Sure, people do it all the time. It’s not like you can break them.”

Poe grinned and pushed his hand straight through the sheet of water. It flowed seamlessly around his wrist, making his arm look chopped short, like Uncle Luke’s when he took off his prosthetic.

The unending murmur of trickling, falling, running, dripping water surrounded them in a soothing rush of noise. Ben wandered over to his favourite, a rippling pillar of water locked in stasis one drop away from toppling over onto the white pavement. He liked the way his reflection looked in it. You couldn’t tell that blurry, indistinct face was Ben Organa-Solo; it could be any more-or-less humanoid youngling.

But he had a shadow that wouldn’t go away no matter how he moved, and it was in the wrong position for the direction of the light. It looked like a huge dark figure standing behind him. Had a Silent One left its place early and come into the Garden? Ben glanced at the entrance, but there was no-one else in the whole plaza but him and Poe.

Ben turned his back on the fountain, trying to ignore the unease leaking into his head. Why was he so scared? Was it his own feeling, or someone else’s?

He couldn’t stop looking back over his shoulder. Something shadowy and indistinct still hovered in the wavering column of water.

Don’t be such a baby. Think about what dad would say. It’s just a trick of the light on the water.

Ben shivered and closed his eyes. If he couldn’t see it, he could tell himself it wasn’t there. “Poe?” he called, ashamed of the quaver in his voice. “Let’s go back.”

He wanted to be with his mom, Uncle Luke, even his dad. Anyone he could convince himself was strong enough to protect him...

From what—his own head? He shivered again.

[rinskiroo]

Shut Up and Dance

This is for my sad anon, I hope it makes you smile.

Poe x Reader / T / 2k words / Reader is a little awkward (and maybe a little thirsty...) and just wants to take a nap, but good-at-everything Poe Dameron has other plans.

A party.  They were going to have a party.  A celebration before the real work of tearing down the D’Qar base and escaping into the stars.  There was going to be food and drink and loud music and dancing.  Dancing.

You had rolled your eyes when Poe had mentioned it and asked if you’d be there.  “What?  You don’t know how to dance?”  Before you could answer, he rushed off to the debriefing.

When he came back to the hangar later, you were sweaty and exhausted and just wanted a shower and a nap.  But you were proud of the work you and the other grunts had gotten done--packed up crates, loaded them onto grav carts and then onto shuttles to be transported to the star cruiser in orbit.  The hangar was now mostly empty except for one fighter undergoing emergency repairs and a few droids rolling about.

“Hey.”  Poe poked you on the shoulder.  “Are you ready?”

“For what?”

“I’m gonna teach you to dance so you don’t embarrass yourself at the party later.”  His lips and eyes were grinning, not a hint of malice in any of his words.  He was always like that--joking, playing.  Oh, he could be serious when he wanted, when it came to missions, sometimes.  Not flying, flying was for fun.  Not getting stabbed either, that was just “not ideal.”  “You’re going aren’t you?”  he asked when you didn’t respond and instead just stared at him like he had grown a second, very attractive, head.

“I might stop by for some food.  I hear they cleaned out what was left in the canteen.”

“Come on.  Send this old base off with a bang.”

His arm was extended, waiting for you to take his hand.  Months of casual flirting that you had decided was never going to come to anything was right there in front of you offering something more.  Maybe.  Maybe it was just a kindness of a man who really did think you couldn’t dance and that’s why you didn’t want to go to the celebration.  He was being kind, helpful Poe Dameron, not the I want to drag you off into a supply closet and--

“You’re not scared, are you, Sergeant?”

So it was going to be like that then.

You turned to face him fully and saw that quirk in his brow.  Yep, he was definitely throwing down a challenge.  His fingers wiggled, beckoning you to come closer.  You glanced around, checking to see if the hangar was still empty.  You needed witnesses for--

“Don’t look away.  Come on.”

“Okay, Dameron.”  You gave him a half-smile as you placed your hand in his.

His face broke into a wide, almost excited grin that you were giving in.  He placed your left hand on his shoulder; his right hand went to your shoulder blade, just under your arm.  With his left hand, he took your right.  Somehow, you hadn’t noticed that he’d changed.  Instead of his usual orange-red flight suit, he was wearing the thick, green Resistance uniform.  Lucky bastard had already had his shower and change of clothes.  He’d gotten some more ointment for his face as well--the swelling had gone down since the last time you’d seen him.  The cuts on his face were healing nicely.  He didn’t talk about what had happened to him while he’d been missing, not that it was any of your business.  You hoped that he was okay, that he wasn’t just putting on a brave face.

Poe was explaining the steps.  Feet together.  Step forward, rock back--you could listen to him talk like this all day.  Talk about absolutely nothing.  Just drone on and on.  You’d like to fall asleep to that noise.  He was so warm, too.  His hands were calloused, but gentle.  His body was firm, but nimble.  There was a skill and grace he seemed to carry into everything, whether it was the important work he did for the Resistance or just dancing with someone in an empty hangar.

“Keep your eyes on me, not your feet.”

Speaking of falling asleep.

Poe’s hand moved to tuck a finger under your chin and lift it up to look at him.  You weren’t watching your feet, but your head had drooped because you were exhausted and all you could think about was snuggling up next to him and nuzzling against his throat and--

“I really should--”

“Shh, you’re doing great.”

“Did you just shh--”

“Shh.  Okay, now step back with your right foot and rock forward on your left.”  His hand moved back to your shoulder and guided you through the movements of the dance.

Suddenly, you realized, he was a lot closer than he had been before.  His arm had curled you in towards him and you stepped on his foot.  He chuckled and apologized.  Apologized?  You’re the one that stepped on his foot!  He kept being so damn reassuring and nice and funny and--UGH.  His stupid face with the stupid dent in his nose and the little crinkles at his eyes and how he bit his stupid lip when he was happy.

All you wanted to do was mash your lips into his.  Put your tongue in his mouth.  Run your fingers through the curls in his hair.  Make him tell you all the dirty things--

“I really have to go,”  you announced abruptly, and loudly.

Startled, Poe stepped back, releasing you from his grip.  Aw.  Yeah, forgot you couldn’t take him with you.  He looked more than a little startled, maybe even hurt or sad.  Ow.

“I just really need to change out of this uniform,”  you said, trying to explain.  You could just be an adult and tell him how you felt.  How you were practically in love with him, but that was silly because you’d hardly had a serious conversation.  Just back and forth banter and a few lewd jokes.  Once he had taken you to the infirmary after you’d sliced your hand with a multitool and sat with you until the doc could see you--that was nice of him.  You talked about his home planet and yours.  Okay, so that kind of counts as a serious conversation and actually getting to know a person.  But still.

“Oh, yeah, right.”  He almost looked relieved and laughed.  Maybe he didn’t realize you’d been here literally all day working without a break.  You really hoped he couldn’t smell it on you.  Because that was not attractive.  At all.  “But you’ll be there tonight, right?”

Before you could stop yourself:  “Of course!”  Because as much as you just wanted to lay in your bunk and ignore the world and pass out for a few hours, you knew you’d never get any sleep thinking about the Commander with his arms around you trying to teach you salsa steps.

The celebration was as loud as you expected.  You didn’t fault them at all for their exuberance.  Friends, people they knew, loved, people you had known and loved, had died in the Hosnian System and in the battle that followed.  You just preferred a quieter celebration and not so many people all hugging each other and slapping each other on the back.  So you sat on a crate outside with your small plate of finger foods the cooks had whipped up out of what was left in the mess hall.  You could still hear the music and the loud talking from inside, but it wasn’t overwhelming.  The night was nice--just a bit of a breeze.  No clouds, so the stars and moon shone brightly.

“What are you doing out here?  Party’s inside.”

And there he was.  Stupid head Poe Dameron.  With the tunic of his uniform undone and hanging open.  His hair tousled and maddenly floofy.  Was that even a real word?  Floofy.  He settled next to you on the crate and picked one of the fruits off your plate and plopped it into his mouth.  How dare.

“They’re all a bit intense.”

He chuckled and nodded.  He didn’t try to make excuses for their behavior.  Didn’t try and convince you to go ahead and come on back inside.  He just smiled and agreed and ate the food off your plate.

“Which ship are you assigned to?”

“Ackbar’s.”

“Oh yeah?  Me too.”  He grinned.  And winked.

That little shit.

He wiped his hands on his trousers and hopped off the crate.  Before you could ask him if he had a hand in personnel assignments, he had jumped to another topic.  “Do you think oridum will replace selenium?  It’s got some interesting conductive properties.  Maybe not for small droid use--but larger automated systems.”

You cocked your head and squinted at him.  You almost asked him what the hell he was going on about because there was no way oridum production was going to keep up with demand like selenium.  And then he looked…. embarrassed?  His hand came up and scratched at the back of his head and he laughed lightly.  He shrugged his shoulders and turned back towards the party.  He muttered something, sounded almost like he was just gonna go and leave you alone now.

“I think you promised me a dance?  I mean, that was the reason you were bothering me earlier, wasn’t it?”

It never really occurred to you that maybe he was as unsure about what to say to you as you were to him.  It was easy to joke and make momentary small talk, but talk about things that mattered--feelings?  Yeesh.  That little thought made you grin, though.  That maybe you had this one little awkwardness in common.

You set aside your plate and hopped off the crate.  This time, you were the one holding your hand out to him.  You both smiled when he took it and once more put his arm under yours and pulled you in close.  It was fortuitous that the music from inside changed into something suited to the steps you had been practicing earlier.  Or perhaps Poe had a hand in that as well.

When he started to remind you of the steps, you shook your head at him.  You watched his eyes because not only were they gorgeous rings of deep brown, but you wanted to see the moment that he realized there was something he didn’t know about you.

“You were holding back on me,”  he said as you spun around before he folded you back into his arms.

“Mmhmm.”

“Are you gonna let me lead?”

“Can you?”  You grinned at him as you pulled away, twisted, and again he pulled you back next to him.

Before you could react, there was the warm press of his lips against yours.  His hand had moved across your back and pressed you closer to him.  He was all hot mouth and tongue and tasting of those sweet fruits he had stolen from your dinner.  That was one way to lead.  He was very good at leading.

Masterlist

[blackbackedjackal]

So here’s something that got me incredibly agitated today...

I’ve been seeing vids like this pop up more and more on my yt feed and it’s getting so annoying. The tl;dr is that if you’re a one trick Mercy main you don’t deserve a high rank (Diamond or above) because you don’t have or haven’t developed the mechanical or tactical skill set to be in those ranks. I.e. If suddenly in a comp match your Mercy is being hard countered by the enemy team and you have to swap off, being a one trick Mercy will cost you the game because your secondary hero (if you have one) will not be able to keep up at that rank and you’ll lose.

So my question is, if there’s one trick Genji, Hanzo, Widow, Soldier, Tracer, Ana, Lucio, etc. mains in Diamond and above, why is a one trick Mercy such a HUGE problem all these youtubers have to spend hours bitching about it? If the Hanzo or Widow is being constantly shut down by the divers, or the Soldier can’t out-class a Pharah or Tracer on the enemy team, why is it that there aren’t any angry ‘one trick yt vids’ on those mains? Why just Mercy?

I can tell you why. ‘Mercy doesn’t require aim or skill. She can’t get punished for bad positioning as much as other characters because she can fly. She’s a low class hero that’s easy to play and anyone can pickup.’ SHUT THE FUCK UP.

I’m a Zarya main. Zarya has a high skill ceiling right under the snipers and flankers (imo). To be even a half decent Zarya, you have to land clutch bubble timings, be able to track AND utilize projectiles very well, know what a high value grav is depending on situation, and have incredible game sense of knowing when to tank, support, and dps all in the mid-fight. But I /chose/ her as my main. No one forced me to play a high skill ceiling character, so I don’t find it fair to say that people picking up characters with low skill ceilings, being good at them, and achieving a higher rank than me is bad. It takes longer to be a decent Zarya then it does to be a decent Mercy, but that’s how those characters are fucking designed. But now the Genji mains stuck in Plat and the Hanzo’s stuck in Diamond and upset because the Mercy’s are getting carried by the ‘skilled’ players, when they’re just too sorry to admit they need to get better at their own one trick characters if they want to climb.

I picked up playing Mercy in the middle of last season. My game sense as a Zarya main translated well into Mercy and I can say it’s not easy to play her. Her toolkit is fundamentally easier than Zarya sure but that doesn’t make my Mercy games any less challenging than my Zarya ones. Sometimes being in the backline making calls, counting ults, and organizing my team is of a higher value than tanking for them because let’s face it people in solo/duo queue can be stupid as shit sometimes. Zarya relies on a good team in higher ranks, while Mercy can still carry pretty heavily if she knows when to hide with res and how to get in and out of the mid-fight.

I also find it a pretty hefty statement from the 'Top 500 Straight Male’ that you ‘have to have mechanical skills at the game to be considered a good player.’ Considering the game not only has a canon lgbt poster child, and a canon character with a disability, it’s wild that Blizzard would make heroes that everyone can play, that don’t require perfect aim or tracking and allow players to win games in more ways than one. Who cares if they’re a one trick? If they got to that rank on that hero then they prolly deserved to get up there. If they can’t stay at that rank, they’ll drop, simple as that. And considering the matchmaking system is based on pure luck and chance who cares? Just play the game. If you win you win, if you lose you lose and move on to the next game. Any one trick main can potentially ruin a game for you, whether the character that the person is a one trick on requires skill or not. And if you’re so good at playing the game or flexing and talking so much shit, then fucking carry the one trick and move on :/

I guess I just don’t understand all the hate one one trick Mercy’s since like I said, ANY one trick and ruin a game purely to having bad team composition or the one trick being shut down by an enemy counter. This is just people bitching to bitch and I hope Mercy mains don’t start getting witch hunted in the community because of shit like this. Play the character you like, play the character you enjoy, play the character you get the most satisfaction out of because at the end of the day it’s just a fucking game.

[star-trekkin-across-theuniverse]

Floating, Pt19

Word Count: 2403 Author’s Note: I didn’t realize I was this far into posting this! ACK! I’m gonna have to start writing again soon!! Tags: @medicatemedrmccoy​, @from-kitten-to-kitsune​ @suzen23smith​ @outside-the-government​ @sistasarah-sallysaidso​ @nymphadora-blurryface​ @bluebird214 @flirtswithdanger, @to-pick-ourselves-up-7

Katie proved to us that her childhood had not been bereft of fun by completely destroying us at bowling. Every time she got a strike, there was a dance and some good-natured gloating. Paradoxically, Leonard proved he’d been an old curmudgeon by guttering almost every ball.

“It’s a damn good thing that you’re so good at poker, Bones,” I laughed as I turned back from knocking down most of my pins. He grimaced.

“There’s a reason I said it was a bad idea when we were on Proxima B,” he complained. “I could lose money to an infant playing this.”

“Don’t worry, Uncle Bones,” Katie reassured him. “We’ve only got a few more frames left, and then you can go back to your room and lick your wounds.”

I couldn’t help myself. I laughed. Leonard scowled at me and took his turn. I saw him take a different stance and he slowed down, like he was intent and focussed. The ball still went in the gutter. Katie cackled. I bit my lip trying not to laugh. He wagged a finger at me.

“Did you know there’s a zero-grav amusement park on this starbase? Wouldn’t that be fun?” He raised an eyebrow in challenge. Katie squealed in excitement.

“Are you serious? That would be amazing!” She looked between Bones and I for an answer.

“He’s lying.” I called his bluff.

“Your mother doesn’t like floating,” he told her. Katie laughed. “Besides, sweetheart, it’s just about your curfew.”

“Can we go tomorrow then?” She asked, throwing the ball down the lane without paying attention. And getting another strike. Leonard made a disgusted noise and threw up his hands in defeat.

“There isn’t a zero-grav amusement park, Katie-cat,” I laughed. “But nice try, Bones.”

“Besides, tomorrow is your presentation,” Leonard pointed out. “Can’t miss that.”

It was close enough to curfew that Leonard decided to wrap the game up quickly by just throwing balls down the alley until all the frames were finished. Katie still won, although he did finally manage to get a strike. Katie was all laughter and jokes at his expense on the walk back to the quarters the kids were sharing. She stopped at the door and threw herself into my arms.

“Thank you for coming to see the project tonight, Mama.” She bounced from my arms into Leonard’s. Surprised, he threw his arms up, looking at me. I shrugged, and felt my chest tighten as his arms settled around her. “Thank you,” she breathed. “I love you, Uncle Bones.”

Leonard let out a sigh, and his shoulders slumped. His arms tightened around Katie, and he pressed his lips to the top of her head. “You need to get some sleep, sweetheart.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, right?” She asked as turned back to her door. I wasn’t sure which of us she was talking to.

“Yes,” we said in unison. Leonard winked at me, and took my hand. Once we’d stopped at the turbolift, I turned to look at him. His eyes were still a little misty from Katie’s impulsive pronouncement.

“You okay?”

“I think Joey would love Katie. They have the same silly sense of humour.” His smile was sad, and it broke my heart. I squeezed his hand and leaned against him. The turbolift opened and Jim stepped out, talking with Scotty. He saw us standing together, holding hands and smirked.

“Well, of all the turbolifts in the starbase, look what we’ve bumped into, Scotty,” he laughed. I fought the urge to drop Leonard’s hand, but couldn’t stop myself from flushing. A quick glance at Leonard showed he wasn’t the least bit embarrassed, which made me feel less concerned.

“You should join us for drinks,” Scotty suggested.

“We’ve got an early morning tomorrow,” Leonard excused. “Katie’s holographic simulation project is amazing, and she and the other kids are presenting on it early in the morning.”

“Oh?” Jim asked. “I’d love to see that too. When is it?”

“Oh-eight-hundred, Jim,” I answered, pulling Leonard onto the turbolift. Scotty looked back at us as the door slid shut.

“Are they holding hands?” I heard him exclaim. “Is that a doctoring thing?”

I looked at Leonard. “Are you sure you don’t care about gossip?” He turned to face me, and leaned forward to kiss me. Something inside me snapped, and my arms came up around his neck, and I dragged him against me, losing my balance and crashing into the turbolift wall. He laughed against my mouth, and braced his hand above my head, returning my enthusiasm with his own fevered response. His free hand came up under my ribs and held me against the wall. I broke away, breathless.

“We really shouldn’t be doing this in here,” I gasped. He nodded. When the turbolift door slid open, he dragged me down the hall to our quarters, and pressed me against the wall as soon as we were inside. His lips trailed down my neck and came to rest on my collarbone. He traced his tongue along the bone, pushing my shirt off my shoulder to follow it to the sloping curve of my arm.

“Leonard -” I breathed.

“I didn’t realize I’d been waiting so long,” he murmured against my skin, his voice all wonder. My skin tingled everywhere his lips had touched, like the residual sensation left by the transporter. I pulled away.

“This isn’t too soon?” I asked, uncertain.

“Is it? You’re overthinking this.” His lips found mine again, and I could feel the burn of the stubble on his jaw across my cheek. His hands traced up my back, the fingers digging into the tense muscles of my shoulders. “Relax.” His voice was barely a whisper. His hands traced back down to my waist, and slid under my shirt, spread wide against my ribcage as he pushed my shirt up. There was no way I was relaxing. I wanted to memorize every sensation as his skilled surgeon’s hands caressed me. He broke free of me long enough to pull his shirt over his head, and then pull mine off as well. He crashed back against me, every spot our skin met branding me. He pressed my arms into the wall above me, lacing his fingers in mine. His tongue tangled with mine, pulling me deeper into him.

I pulled a hand free of his, and traced my fingers down his sternum, through the scant dusting of hair on his chest. His free hand slid across my ribs, across my belly, finding the flesh of my hip and digging in. I moaned against his mouth.

“Bryn,” he breathed, breaking the kiss. He sounded hesitant suddenly. I ran my fingers through his hair, drawing him back to me.

“Who’s overthinking now?” I asked, dropping a string of kisses along his jaw, following his carotid artery, and then trailing the tip of my tongue along the same path my fingers had traced down his sternum. He drew in a ragged breath.

“Damnit, woman.” The words made me smile, and I tilted my head to look up at him through my lashes. Leonard let out a feral noise and pulled me to my feet, hauling me over his shoulder. He marched us to the tiny single bed in his room, and dropped me on it, tugging his jeans off quickly. I struggled with my leggings for what felt like mere seconds before he pulled them down my legs and tossed them across the small room. He knelt between my legs, and dropped his hands beside my hips, dipping his head to kiss me just below my belly button. His thumbs traced the faded scars at the edges of my hips, and I writhed away, self-conscious. “Don’t.”

“They’re -” I paused. “Katie -” I explained, trying to cover the loose striations.

“They’re beautiful,” he murmured, his breath hot against the pale streaks.

“Leonard,” I protested. “They’re awful. I don’t -”

“There’s nothing I’ve seen so far that I would call anything but stunning,” he interrupted, resuming his worship. I closed my eyes and felt a tear trace down my temple into the hair above my ear. It felt stupid and ridiculous to be so moved by that acceptance, which made my breath catch and more tears spring to my eyes. Leonard paused when I dragged in the unsteady breath, and he shifted his weight so he was facing me. “Darlin’, what did I do?” He smoothed my hair with his hand, and moved so he was laying on his hip beside me. I shook my head, flushing.

“I always seem to cry when I’m with you,” I accused with a weak laugh.

“Well, that certainly wasn’t my plan, sweetheart.” He dipped his head and kissed the tears at my corner of my eye. “At least, not before we started.”

I turned my head away, embarrassed by my tears, and by my blushes. “I must seem like some immature child,” I complained, my voice barely above a whisper.

“Not at all.” He shook his head. “A woman who hasn’t been loved honestly,” he countered.

“Loved?” I asked, my eyebrows furrowing. He couldn’t possibly be saying what I thought I’d heard. He laughed and turned my chin to force me to look him in the eyes.

“Loved,” he replied simply. “Like it or not, kid.”

“How could you possibly love me? Already?” I asked, surprised.

“How could I not?” He laughed. “You’re clever, and funny. Smart. A good mother. Compassionate and brave. Not afraid to be vulnerable. You’ve got the soul of a warrior and the hands of a surgeon. It’s like you were put in this galaxy just so I could find you.”

“You make it sound like I’m special,” I laughed. “I’m just -”

“Every single being in our universe is special, Bryn. And there’s a lot of universe out there,” he interrupted.

“So in all that universe, how did I luck into you?” I asked. He kissed my forehead and gathered me into his arms.

“Did you ever think that maybe I’ve lucked into you?” He murmured against my hair, smoothing the tangles with his fingers. I tucked into his side, and listened to the rhythm of his breathing until I felt his heart rate slow under my hand, and his breathing became deep and even. My eyelids grew heavy and just as I was drifting off to sleep, he began to snore lightly.

“Oh my god. Is this why you call him Bones?” The familiar voice was like a bucket of cold water. I was instantly awake, and sitting, holding the blanket up to my chest. Kara stood at the end of the bed, her jaw gaping. “I thought you were banging the captain?”

“Kara!” I hissed. “What the fuck are you doing here? Am I hallucinating?” I heard a low chuckle from behind me, and whipped my head back to look at Leonard. He had one arm under his head and was smiling at Kara.

“Katie told me about her science fair, and I thought it would be fun to check it out. When the fuck did,” she gestured vaguely at the tiny bed Leonard and I were sharing, “this all start?”

“You’re the friend from the bar!” Leonard suddenly exclaimed, sitting up beside me. “I remember you. How did you not know an Orion girl would give you a headache? That’s first year interspecies relational anatomy knowledge.”

“She was gorgeous. You thought so too!” Kara protested. Leonard laughed.

“I did, but even I know better than to tangle with Orion girls.”

“Nice deflection, by the way.” Kara winked, “but that doesn’t answer my question about you and my best friend.”

“It’s not what you think,” I started.

“Right, so just tripped? Fell on his penis?” She demanded, eyebrow arched.

“Actually, no. Just fell asleep, unfortunately,” I admitted.

“With no clothes on?” Kara demanded. I narrowed my eyes.

“How did you get in here? How did you even know how to find us?” I asked, changing the subject. Kara grinned.

“I may have used the medical override.” She winked and turned to leave the room. “So you might want to get dressed before the emergency team arrives.”

I shot out of bed with the sheet wrapped around me, and dashed through the bathroom to my own room, quickly pulling clothes out of my closet and tugging them on. When I made it out to the living area, Bones was standing at the override panel in his underwear, turning the alarm off. Kara was sitting on the couch, smirking, holding a cup of coffee. I replicated coffee for both Leonard and I and sat down across from Kara.

“So why are you here?” I asked. I knew she’d already told me, but I’d only just wakened.

“Katie told me a few days ago about the science fair, and their project sounds so cool. I was due a few days leave.” She shrugged.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“I wanted to surprise you. That kind of backfired.” Her gaze flashed over to Bones, who was walking toward his coffee cup. He flopped down on the couch beside me. Kara rolled her eyes.

“I thought the captain was the cocky one,” she commented.

“Oh, darlin’, you have no idea.” He stood up and kissed my forehead. “I’m going to hit the shower and get ready for Katie’s presentation while you catch up.”

Kara said nothing until the bathroom door slid shut and then she pounced. “What the ever-loving fuck, Bryn?”

“Uh -”

“When did this start? What happened with Kirk? Why didn’t you let me know?” She looked genuinely hurt with the last question. I sighed and looked at my feet before looking back at her.

“Jim and I, uh, that ended a while ago now,” I paused. She looked like she was going to interrupt and I held my hand up to stop her. “Long enough ago that you’re right, I should have told you.”

“And McCoy?” She pressed.

“I guess that really started a couple of days ago?” I thought. “Maybe even just yesterday. Depends on how you look at it.”

“First kiss,” she decided.

“On the mouth? A few days ago then,” I admitted.

“He’s kissed you other places?” She leered. I rolled my eyes.

“On the forehead a few times.” I nodded. She raised an eyebrow.

“You’d best be careful, Bryn,” she warned. “He is your direct superior.”

“I’m aware of that, Kara.”

[chrisaldrich]

Domains 2019 Reflections from Afar

My OPML Domains Project

Not being able to attend Domains 2019 in person, I was bound and determined to attend as much of it as I could manage remotely. A lot of this revolved around following the hashtag for the conference, watching the Virtually Connecting sessions, interacting online, and starting to watch the archived videos after-the-fact. Even with all of this, for a while I had been meaning to flesh out my ability to follow the domains (aka websites) of other attendees and people in the space. Currently the easiest way (for me) to do this is via RSS with a feed reader, so I began collecting feeds of those from the Twitter list of Domains ’17 and Domains ’19 attendees as well as others in the education-related space who tweet about A Domain of One’s Own or IndieWeb. In some sense, I would be doing some additional aggregation work on expanding my blogroll, or, as I call it now, my following page since it’s much too large and diverse to fit into a sidebar on my website.

For some brief background, my following page is built on some old functionality in WordPress core that has since been hidden. I’m using the old Links Manager for collecting links and feeds of people, projects, groups, and institutions. This link manager creates standard OPML files, which WordPress can break up by categories, that can easily be imported/exported into most standard feed readers. Even better, some feed readers like Inoreader, support OPML subscriptions, so one could subscribe to my OPML file, and any time I update it in the future with new subscriptions, your feed reader would automatically update to follow those as well. I use this functionality in my own Inoreader account, so that any new subscriptions I add to my own site are simply synced to my feed reader without needing to be separately added or updated.

The best part of creating such a list and publishing it in a standard format is that you, dear reader, don’t need to spend the several hours I did to find, curate, and compile the list to recreate it for yourself, but you can now download it, modify it if necessary, and have a copy for yourself in just a few minutes. (Toward that end, I’m also happy to update it or make additions if others think it’s missing anyone interesting in the space–feedback, questions, and comments are heartily encouraged.) You can see a human-readable version of the list at this link, or find the computer parse-able/feed reader subscribe-able link here.

To make it explicit, I’ll also note that these lists also help me to keep up with people and changes in the timeframe between conferences.

Anecdotal Domains observations

In executing this OPML project I noticed some interesting things about the Domains community at large (or at least those who are avid enough to travel and attend in person or actively engage online). I’ll lay these out below. Perhaps at a future date, I’ll do a more explicit capture of the data with some analysis.

The largest majority of sites I came across were, unsurprisingly, WordPress-based, which made it much easier to find RSS feeds to read/consume material. I could simply take a domain name and add /feed/ to the end of the URL, and voilà, a relatively quick follow!

There are a lot of people whose sites didn’t have obvious links to their feeds. To me this is a desperate tragedy for the open web. We’re already behind the eight ball compared to social media and corporate controlled sites, why make it harder for people to read/consume our content from our own domains? And as if to add insult to injury, the places on one’s website where an RSS feed link/icon would typically live were instead populated by links to corporate social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. In a few cases I also saw legacy links to Google+ which ended service and disappeared from the web along with a tremendous number of online identities and personal data on April 2, 2019. (Here’s a reminder to remove those if you’ve forgotten.) For those who are also facing this problem, there’s a fantastic service called SubToMe that has a universal follow button that can be installed or which works well with a browser bookmarklet and a wide variety of feed readers.

I was thrilled to see a few people were using interesting alternate content management systems/site generators like WithKnown and Grav. There were  also several people who had branched out to static site generators (sites without a database). This sort of plurality is a great thing for the community and competition in the space for sites, design, user experience, etc. is awesome. It’s thrilling to see people in the Domains space taking advantage of alternate options, experimenting with them, and using them in the wild.

lol, I agree #domains19 pic.twitter.com/aMdwJlhogr

— Lauren Brumfield (@brumface) June 10, 2019

I’ll note that I did see a few poor souls who were using Wix. I know there was at least one warning about Wix at the conference, but in case it wasn’t stated explicitly, Wix does not support exporting data, which makes any potential future migration of sites difficult. Definitely don’t use it for any extended writing, as cutting and pasting more than a few simple static pages becomes onerous. To make matters worse, Wix doesn’t offer any sort of back up service, so if they chose to shut your site off for any reason, you’d be completely out of luck. No back up + no export = I couldn’t recommend using.

If your account or any of your services are cancelled, it may result in loss of content and data. You are responsible to back up your data and materials. —Wix Terms of Use

I also noticed a few people had generic domain names that they didn’t really own (and not even in the sense of rental ownership). Here I’m talking about domain names of the form username.domainsproject.com. While I’m glad that they have a domain that they can use and generally control, it’s not one that they can truly exert full ownership over. (They just can’t pick it up and take it with them.) Even if they could export/import their data to another service or even a different content management system, all their old links would immediately disappear from the web. In the case of students, while it’s nice that their school may provide this space, it is more problematic for data portability and longevity on the web that they’ll eventually lose that institutional domain name when they graduate. On the other hand, if you have something like yourname.com as your digital home, you can export/import, change content management services, hosting companies, etc. and all your content will still resolve and you’ll be imminently more find-able by your friends and colleagues. This choice is essentially the internet equivalent of changing cellular providers from Sprint to AT&T but taking your phone number with you–you may change providers, but people will still know where to find you without being any the wiser about your service provider changes. I think that for allowing students and faculty the ability to more easily move their content and their sites, Domains projects should require individual custom domains.

If you don’t own/control your physical domain name, you’re prone to lose a lot of value built up in your permalinks. I’m also reminded of here of the situation encountered by faculty who move from one university to another. (Congratulations by the way to Martha Burtis on the pending move to Plymouth State. You’ll notice she won’t face this problem.)  There’s also the situation of Matthew Green, a security researcher at Johns Hopkins whose institutional website was taken down by his university when the National Security Agency flagged an apparent issue. Fortunately in his case, he had his own separate domain name and content on an external server and his institutional account was just a mirrored copy of his own domain.

If you’ve got it, flaunt it. —Mel Brooks from The Producers (1968), obviously with the it being a referent to A Domain of One’s Own.

Also during my project, I noted that quite a lot of people don’t list their own personal/professional domains within their Twitter or other social media profiles. This seems a glaring omission particularly for at least one whose Twitter bio creatively and proactively claims that they’re an avid proponent of A Domain of One’s Own.

And finally there were a small–but still reasonable–number of people within the community for whom I couldn’t find their domain at all! A small number assuredly are new to the space or exploring it, and so I’d give a pass, but I was honestly shocked that some just didn’t.

(Caveat: I’ll freely admit that the value of Domains is that one has ultimate control including the right not to have or use one or even to have a private, hidden, and completely locked down one, just the way that Dalton chose not to walk in the conformity scene in The Dead Poet’s Society. But even with this in mind, how can we ethically recommend this pathway to students, friends, and colleagues if we’re not willing to participate ourselves?)

Too much Twitter & a challenge for the next Domains Conference

One of the things that shocked me most at a working conference about the idea of A Domain of One’s Own within education where there was more than significant time given to the ideas of privacy, tracking, and surveillance, was the extent that nearly everyone present gave up their identity, authority, and digital autonomy to Twitter, a company which actively represents almost every version of the poor ethics, surveillance, tracking, and design choices we all abhor within the edtech space.

Why weren’t people proactively using their own domains to communicate instead? Why weren’t their notes, observations, highlights, bookmarks, likes, reposts, etc. posted to their own websites? Isn’t that part of what we’re in all this for?!

One of the shining examples from Domains 2019 that I caught as it was occurring was John Stewart’s site where he was aggregating talk titles, abstracts, notes, and other details relevant to himself and his practice. He then published them in the open and syndicated the copies to Twitter where the rest of the conversation seemed to be happening. His living notebook– or digital commmonplace book if you will–is of immense value not only to him, but to all who are able to access it. But you may ask, “Chris, didn’t you notice them on Twitter first?” In fact, I did not! I caught them because I was following the live feed of some of the researchers, educators, and technologists I follow in my feed reader using the OPML files mentioned above. I would submit, especially as a remote participant/follower of the conversation, that his individual posts were worth 50 or more individual tweets. Just the additional context they contained made them proverbially worth their weight in gold.

Perhaps for the next conference, we might build a planet or site that could aggregate all the feeds of people’s domains using their categories/tags or other means to create our own version of the Twitter stream? Alternately, by that time, I suspect that work on some of the new IndieWeb readers will have solidified to allow people to read feeds and interact with that content directly and immediately in much the way Twitter works now except that all the interaction will occur on our own domains.

Seeing good examples of existing domains is crucial for showing students what is possible in creating their own domain, says @CassieNooyen #domains19

— Mo Pelzel (@MorrisPelzel) June 10, 2019

As educators, one of the most valuable things we can and should do is model appropriate behavior for students. I think it’s high time that when attending a professional conference about A Domain of One’s Own that we all ought to be actively doing it using our own domains. Maybe we could even quit putting our Twitter handles on our slides, and just put our domain names on them instead?

Of course, I wouldn’t and couldn’t suggest or even ask others to do this if I weren’t willing and able to do it myself.  So as a trial and proof of concept, I’ve actively posted all my interactions related to Domains 2019 that I was interested in to my own website using the tag Domains 2019.  At that URL, you’ll find all the things I liked and bookmarked, as well as the bits of conversation on Twitter and others’ sites that I’ve commented on or replied to. All of it originated on my own domain, and, when it appeared on Twitter, it was syndicated only secondarily so that others would see it since that was where the conversation was generally being aggregated. You can almost go back and recreate my entire Domains 2019 experience in real time by following my posts, notes, and details on my personal website.

So, next time around can we make an attempt to dump Twitter!? The technology for pulling it off certainly already exists, and is reasonably well-supported by WordPress, WithKnown, Grav, and even some of the static site generators I noticed in my brief survey above. (Wix obviously doesn’t even come close…)

I’m more than happy to help people build and flesh out the infrastructure necessary to try to make the jump. Even if just a few of us began doing it, we could serve as that all-important model for others as well as for our students and other constituencies. With a bit of help and effort before the next Domains Conference, I’ll bet we could collectively pull it off. I think many of us are either well- or even over-versed in the toxicities and surveillance underpinnings of social media, learning management systems, and other digital products in the edtech space, but now we ought to attempt a move away from it with an infrastructure that is our own–our Domains.

[keaalu]

Keeping it

Setting – Deixar, Cybertron. “Blue” AU. Probably about 8 years (deci-vorn?) before the missing Skywarp finally reappears. TC gets a cameo here but this is mostly OCs. (Whitesides and Pulsar)

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It was getting late. Not that you could really tell.

Most of the day had already drained out of the sky, leaving only a thin rind of surly orange at the horizon, but lurid night-cycle advertisements bled unreasonable colours up into the dark and turned everything confusing shades of pink and cyan.

That was one of the drawbacks of this whole ‘urban renewal’ thing. Pulsar preferred it when the dark cycle was… well, dark.

Deixar central police station was quiet and calm; a little island that the vivid neon hadn’t quite invaded yet. The grav-bike traipsed heavily past the front desk, dragging her feet and leaving dirty scuffmarks on the tiles of the foyer. She’d pulled a double, as a favour to her sister, and now had a head full of data and no space to think.

“Hey, Pulse?”

A voice bumped into her thoughts; she glanced up to see the desk sergeant watching her.

“You’re late back, tonight. Problem shift?” he prompted.

She realised she was trying to get into a storage cupboard instead of the lift, and vented a small sigh at herself. Maybe she was more depleted than she’d thought. “S’fine.” She found a smile for him. “Just need to defrag. Pulled a double, covering for Beemer.”

He bobbed his head in a single nod. “That's the second time in ten orns. You know you can say ‘no’ when she asks you?”

Pulsar spread her hands, and offered a little shrug, smile and roll of the eyes before stepping onto the lift. The instant the doors sliced him away from view, she sagged back against the wall, and let her head bonk down onto the mirrored surface.

That’s what siblings were for, right? Bailing you out if you got in a jam. So why was it always her that seeming to do the bailing?

’Cause you’re a fragging doormat, Pulse; that’s why.

She covered her face with both hands and sighed into her palms. There was a difference between bailing someone out because they were a mate, and shamelessly preying on a femme’s good nature because you knew she was a mug who’d always cave if you laid it on thick enough.

The lift ding!ed softly and the doors opened on the office. She stared out at the first row of desks, with their high partitions and banks of computer terminals, and for the count of ten thousand, wondered whether she’d end up on disciplinary proceedings if she just… turned around and went home, scan data be damned?

No. She had to upload it all at some point. Better to get a clear head than attempt to defragment this almighty mess. She slipped out between the lift doors just as they began to close, and headed into the maze of untidy workstations.

The upper floor offices were quiet; this time of night, no-one really wanted to head all the way to the top of the station just to upload their sensor data. A handful of officers were spread among the desks, but she didn’t know any of them very well, and none of them acknowledged her. Suited her just fine.

She made her way over to the corner, and her favourite terminal, furthest from the dirty white street-lighting pooling in from outside. It was a glitchy piece of slag that really needed replacing, but it was also the most comfortable, being closest to both a decent air conditioner and the tower’s main ground rod, and she’d got the hang of exactly how to get its flaky connectors to respond. She scrambled inelegantly up onto one of the high desk chairs, and delivered a single sharp blow to the top left of the terminal screen.

After a second or two where the screen just flickered, ominously… it hummed to life and chirped a saccharine greeting that made her want to punch it for real. It extended a cable for her to hook up with.

Next time, she told herself, accepting the handshake and slumping back in her chair, one of her sibs could do it.

If she could actually find either of the lazy fraggers. Her two siblings must have precognition in their skillsets, because they always managed to slope off right before Longbeam came along, pleading for cover. Surefire had conveniently been called back to Earth, ostensibly to work. Whitesides had gone completely off the grid, unannounced as ever; she was trying not to worry about him. You know the mech’s in a relationship, Pulse, because the whole station is abuzz trying to work out who with.

-you owe me- she pinged Longbeam, and glared when the only response was a smiley face.

Trying to swallow her irritation, Pulsar turned her attention onto the deliciously cool air pouring down from the venting, leaning her stool back into it. Maybe she could get a few minutes defragment while it was quiet? She shut off her optics, relaxed back in her chair, and let her free arm dangle.

Pit, it was nice to just ground for a while. It didn’t take long to ease into a pleasant doze, letting her higher awareness slip into idle while her head-full of data slowly cleared.

Something small and light bounced off one of her antennae. She rebooted her optics and watched as a scrunched-up candy wrapper rolled to a halt next to her outstretched hand.

She frowned. Why was someone throwing things at her when they (presumably) had a perfectly functioning communications array – or vocaliser, for that matter – that they could use to get her attention?

She stretched up to peer over her terminal, trying to spot whoever had thrown it, but no-one looked back. Instead, she leaned forwards and picked up the ball of glittery cellophane, and smoothed it out between her thumbs. It was disappointingly blank.

“Psst!”

The voice came from one side. She turned to look, and in the gloom of an unlit storage alcove, finally spotted two dim blue lights; the optics of someone trying very hard not to draw attention to himself. A small yellow hand emerged briefly from the shadow to wave her over.

“Whitesides?” She frowned at her sibling. “Where have you-”

He interrupted with an urgent little ssh! and beckoned more emphatically.

Her frown deepened, but she obediently unplugged from the terminal, and made her way over to him. She’d uploaded enough data to have regained a clear head – the rest of her scans would have to wait.

“So you’re not too good to be seen with us, now?” she challenged, arms folded.

Whitesides managed a nervous giggle and shooed her behind a shelving unit.

“Where have you been?” Pulsar had to fight off the urge to shake him. “You couldn’t even ping us a hello to let us know you weren’t stuffed in a dumpster in a back alley somewhere?”

“Sorry.” For someone who’d made a name for himself as the master of the gossip around the station, his voice was unusually soft. Shaky. He met her gaze for only a few uneasy seconds. “I-I would have, but-… I wanted to skate under the radar, for a breem or two. Didn’t want anyone else spotting my signal just yet.” He shifted from one foot to the other, brought one hand up to rub the opposing arm. “I sneaked in through custody.”

Pulsar had heard the babble about Skyshout wanting extra hands to help quell a riot in the cell block, at the rear of the station, and could imagine one little bike managing to slip past the ruckus without attracting much attention.

He twisted his hands together and drew a short, steadying intake of cold air through his core. “Listen, I’m in a spot of bother. Could I-… could I ask a tiny favour off you?”

“A favour.” She tried to swallow it, but the sigh slipped out anyway. “Sure.” She threw up her hands. “Why not. Why should Beemer be the only one allowed to monopolise every last astro-second of my spare time.”

Whitesides almost flinched, and shrank back on himself. “Sorry! Sorry. I-… I mean, it’s-… All right. Never mind! It doesn’t matter.” He cast a furtive glance around the alcove, as if hopeful of finding a helpful person among the cluttered shelves. Or maybe looking for an exit. “Sorry. I knew you were busy, I shouldn’t have barged in. I’ll, I’ll… think of something-”

Pulsar vented a sigh of stuffy air through her pursed lips and put out an arm to stop him slinking away. “No, no. It’s all right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just… feeling a little taken for granted, right now. And not by you. It’s made me fractious.” She managed to find a tired half-smile for him that didn’t come across as a complete snarl. “What kind of favour.”

He shifted his weight back onto the other foot, unable to keep from fidgeting. “Maybe I should start over. Could we go and, um. Talk in private somewhere?”

“How bad is the trouble you’re in?” she intuited.

He gave another of those funny nervous little laughs that wasn’t mirrored in his expression. “…I try not to make it too obvious, and I might as well just paint it across my chassis. It’s… complicated.”

“It’s always complicated, with you. Who was it this time?”

“It’s not that. Or rather it is that as well, but it’s more than just that.” He laced both hands over the back of his neck. “Primus. I practiced what I was going to say the whole way up here and then you asked something I wasn’t expecting and the words are escaping me and-… I’m just making myself look an idiot. Give me a moment?”

“Sure.” She stood and quietly took in how scruffy the mech was – dusty, dirty, with little dents and flecks of someone else’s paint scuffed into his pale enamel, and such a dramatic kink in one of his antennae, the whole unit would probably need replacing. He rarely got so bumped around when he was actually on duty.

Must have been a pretty sustained attack. “Was it them that roughed you up?” She reached out a hand to see if she could straighten the bent aerial somewhat, but he ducked back out of reach.

“Oh, that – no, it was my fault.” He covered the long silver stems spreading from behind his audio venting with both palms. “Wasn’t watching where I was going. Took a wrong turn somewhere. You’ve ended up in districts that aren’t friendly towards police; you know what it’s like?”

It wasn’t remotely convincing, but Pulsar didn’t push. “...right.”

His unusually-shifty manner was setting off a whole cacophony of alarm bells in the back of her head. Whitesides’ lack of guile – and inability to lie convincingly – was what tended to get him in trouble in the first place. Who had he lied to? And – mercy – what had they done when they’d seen through it? A hundred terrible scenarios had already invaded her thoughts.

“So, um.” Whitesides twisted his hands together and took another long stabilising draught of cold air. “I have to go to the hospital. Would-… would you come with me? I’ve got an appointment, and, um-” His voice stuck, briefly. “I’m scared to go.”

The terrible scenarios all immediately stopped, only to be replaced by terrible scenarios of a slightly different flavour. He didn’t look badly hurt. Maybe that was the problem. “…Was that the favour?”

He nodded, silently, just once.

“Of course I will. But why don’t you wait until you feel better, though?” She held out a hand for him, but he declined to take it. “Give yourself a chance to stop and think. You might decide you don’t want me there, after all.”

She almost added, because you don’t look that bad, you vain little mech, but swallowed the words at the last moment. At least nothing looked life-threatening. He was a bit bashed around, but a trip through the washracks would deal with the dirt, and the bent antenna might be distracting but it wouldn’t hurt.

She gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile, although she couldn’t quite shed the frown tightening her brows. She gestured an arm towards the office. “Or, if it’s easier, we could just go see Spotweld? He’s on duty downstairs and he’s pretty good at being diplomati-”

Whitesides jumped as though stung. “No-! No, uh.”

Pulsar gave him a funny look.

“I-I mean. I’ve already got an appointment. Uh. Out in Tysta.”

“Tysta? That’s a whole district over! Why ever did you want to go all the way out there?”

“Privacy. No-one knows me, over there. Plus, uh, this is the second time I’ve made the appointment.” His voice was little more than a whisper; so unlike him. “I don’t want to annoy them by cancelling again. I went once already, but, uh…” He shrugged. “I got spooked and came home, instead.”

“What’s wrong, Whites?” She took both of his hands and refused to let them go, leaning closer to meet his gaze. “Please. You’re scaring me. Is someone threatening you? Has someone hurt you?” She strained to catch any flicker in his expression that might betray his confidence. “Is someone trying to blackmail you? If they’ve tried to embarrass you, or something… Look, we’ll sort something out, it’ll be fine-”

He jerked his hands free, and choked the words out: “I’m sparked, Pulse.”

Silence yawned up between them like a monstrous black hole. He looked like he wanted to suck the words back in, or have the ground swallow him, or perhaps both.

For several seconds, all she could do was stare at him.

“Yeah. I’m-… I’m sparked,” he repeated, shakily.

“Sparked?” she finally managed, and he flapped his hands, frantically shush!-ing her. “How?”

He spread his palms. “Well, see, when two people love each other very much…” His voice broke and the words strangled off, and he forced out a laugh or maybe a sob or something to cover it. “Careless, I guess? An accident? Maybe my baffle slipped, I don’t know." He gave her a loaded glance. "You know better than me that accidents happen."

Her optics narrowed and he looked away.

She gave him a long, wary look. “…this… is a good thing… isn’t it?” She tried for a small smile; the mech always got a funny wistful look about him when the idea of children came up. So why doesn’t it look it? “Have you told your partner?”

This time, the noise was definitely more of a sob. “Yeah. I’ve… explained. I think.”

Okay; it definitely hadn’t been a good thing. She squeezed his hands. "I've been worried spare about you, mech. Why did it take you so long to come talk to me?”

“Needed a few orns to myself. To-to… brace myself for the gossip, I guess?”

Whitesides’ loose plating wasn’t precisely a secret. Making his way up the chain of command, one berth at a time. It never took much to win his affection, and he might not be too fussy who he shared sparks with – or where, or how often… -- and current opinion held that it was a miracle he hadn’t got himself in this kind of a mess three times already.

But he’d always been a bright, passionate, generous little mech, too, who never asked for much except to be loved back, and it made her furious to see him so shaky and broken.

“Did they do this to you?” She ran her thumb over the kink in his aerial and gently tried to press it out.

“No!” Too fast; he hastily added an ineffectual lie that the expression in his optics said he knew she didn’t believe. “No. Just-… ended up in a rougher part of the district, where policebikes don’t usually go on their own and certainly not in uniform.” Another of those horrible little attempts at a self-deprecating laugh.

“Through your own choice?”

“Of-… of course through my own choice. Why else would it have been?”

“Nobody perhaps encouraged you to go, to make sure you knew to keep your vocaliser offline?”

“Of-of course not. It’s not like I’d have said anything unless they wanted-… I wasn’t trying to blackmail anyone-!”

“…When did I ever mention blackmail, Whites?”

He shook his hands free of her grip, but she’d already felt him trembling. “I’m sorry. Primus, I’m sorry. What a mess.” He paced out a tight circle in the alcove’s limited floorspace. Heat already made the air around him shimmer. “I should have made sure I could get under control before talking to you. What a mess.” He groaned and clutched at the shelves for support. “Primus. Is it meant to always hurt like this?” His knees wobbled underneath him.

“Shh, shh, it’s only feedback,” she soothed, holding his shoulders and supporting him while he shook. “You’ve got hot and stressed and your core pressure has gone up.” She straightened and looked briefly out into the office; the few officers still around didn’t even spare her a glance. “Let’s not hide in a cupboard, eh? We’ll go and find somewhere nice and cool. The mess down the corridor should be empty this time of the orn.”

She shepherded him through the empty washracks, to rinse off the worst of the dust and maybe cool him down a little, then retreated to the quiet staff break-room next to the Superintendent’s office. Officers of her grade weren’t strictly allowed access, but she knew a few strings she could pull if anyone gave her a hard time.

Not as if two bikes quietly huddled up together in the slouchy cushions in the corner by the big window would raise many eyebrows. They gazed out over the city together; watching life go on under the intense dark of a sky turned starless by the riot of colour in the streets below.

“Come on.” Pulsar let him snuggle closer, curling an arm around his shoulders and trying to extend her electric field enough to support him. He felt so prickly, it was like trying to comfort a small magnetic storm. “You’ve got to give me the details, now. How long have you known?”

The words were still quiet, but Whitesides didn’t sound quite so shellshocked as he had. “About… five orns, give or take. It started to hurt, but I wasn’t injured, and-… I remembered what you said happened with yours. Why you went to speak to Sepp that time.” He let his helm rest against the front of her shoulder. “I went to a doctor in Tysta. Somewhere no-one knows me, just in case. He says it’s not very old yet, probably only about twenty orns.”

“You’ve already got it checked out? Why do you need me, then?”

“Because I’m a coward.” He laughed, miserably. “It all seemed so big. I didn’t- didn’t want to rush into something I hadn’t really thought about and couldn’t undo.” He gave her a hopeful glance, although he still couldn’t quite meet her gaze. “You don’t have to actually do anything. I-I’ve got the appointment, I just…” His voice dwindled, fracturing into a whisper that she struggled to hear. “Need someone with me. Don’t want to go and… stare at the door for half an orn then run away, again.”

She managed a small smile. “I never said I’d changed my mind. You’re still going to have to put up with me tagging along behind you.” She stroked his antennae, gently. “Just wondered why you needed to go back.”

“To, uh.” He couldn’t force the words out, and had to reboot his vocaliser. “To get rid of it.”

She stayed silent, to let the words sink in.

He struggled on, in the silence. “It’s. The doctor said, uh. Not very stable yet. Uh. If-if… I wanted to get rid of it, it won’t… it’ll be quite straight-forward-”

“Why?”

“Might forgive me, if I dissolve it.” He wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Might even want me back.”

Anger surged inside her, and Pulsar had to work surprisingly hard to keep her field even. “Oh, Whites. Primus. Look. Whatever you want to do,” she said, in a soft, stilted voice. “You have my support. All right?”

She felt him nod against her shoulder.

“But it’s got to be what you want, Whites. Primus, please.” She cupped his cheek and forced him to look her in the optic. “This has to be your decision, spark! Don’t you dare do this just because some overbearing, jealous… slagmunch… doesn’t want to take responsibility for their actions. They gave up their chance to have any input on your decision when they left you feeling like you didn’t.”

He actually flinched and averted his gaze. “It’s not about what I want, though, is it? It’s something I don’t have any choice about. I’ve got to be sensible about this. P-practical. I can’t just be… selfish. I-I… have no idea how I’d even afford to look after it.”

It didn’t take a psychologist to work out exactly what must be going on. Someone was embarrassed; probably someone much more important than a lowly policebike.

Well if they hadn’t wanted to feel ashamed of sparking up one of the juniors, they shouldn’t have led the poor spark on in the first place!

She could feel her field starting to bristle, angry – furious – on his behalf.

He could feel it, too, and was actually cringing away from her. “Please don’t do anything stupid, Pulse. Please please-… I can’t lose this job, I can’t-!”

“Is that what they said to you?” Her spark hurt, hot and constricted.

“Is-… is what?”

“Keep your mouth shut or you’re on the streets. Get rid of it or you’re out of a job.”

“N-no. No! I just-… I didn’t do it on purpose. I thought they’d be happy-! I-I-… I don’t know what to do, Pulse.” His words dissolved into static.

Pulsar curled tighter around him and pressed her cheek against the top of his helm. “It’s all right,” she whispered, humming softly. “It’ll be fine, we’ll think of something.”

For someone who never normally needed an excuse to snuggle, Whitesides clung to her like a mech who’d been starved of friendly contact for millennia, arms so tight around her chassis she thought her plating might actually buckle. She tried not to fantasize about what she’d do if she ever caught up with the sparkless scrapheap that put her friend in such a state.

“S-said-… thought I was t-trying to blackmail,” he tried to explain. His vocaliser was hitchy and discordant; most of the words came in fits and starts between the static. “Poisonous, treacherous little whore-”

“Oh, Whites-… who cares what they think, when they clearly can’t even see what’s right in front of them?”

He made a funny strangled little noise, and shut his vocaliser off altogether.

She swallowed any further words, and just hummed softly for him instead.

After what felt like a very long time, he finally began to calm – his deathgrip began to ease, his field began to smooth out, his shaking began to ease. “Thanks,” he croaked, faintly, sitting forwards and wiping his face with one hand. “Sorry for dragging you into this.”

“Don’t apologise, mech. Who else could you have got involved?” she chastised, gently, and he finally found a more genuine flicker of a smile for her. “So. What do you want to do? I’ll still come with you to the hospital, if you’re sure that’s what you want.”

He remained silent, for a few moments; lifted his hand and flattened the palm over his spark, almost absent-minded. “I don’t know.”

“I think you do.” She set her own hand over the top. “It’s why you didn’t just go and do it in the first place.”

He let his hand slip back to his lap. “How will I afford it? My salary doesn’t precisely make me affluent on a normal day, let alone looking after a newspark.”

“You afford it the same way that I afforded it – and I had two hungry monsters to keep in fuel.” She offered a small, sheepish smile. “You’re not the only one to have ever had an affair, you know? Or an accident. Besides, you helped me drag my twins up to be mostly-responsible adults without even being asked, it’s only fair for me to return the favour. You know the rest of the guys will help out.”

“I can’t take you all for granted like that-”

“It’s not taking someone for granted if they offer to help in the first place.” She watched as he scrubbed a palm over his antennae, trying to wake himself up a little. Poor mech looked exhausted. “You need to get some rest, because you look almost flat. When’s your next shift?”

“Uh.” He had to think about it for a full few seconds. “Not for an orn and a half?”

“Good. That means you can come home with me and get some proper down time. Infinitely more comfortable than dealing with that flock of gossips down in dorms.” She grasped both his hands in both of hers, and leaned backwards, encouraging him to his feet. He responded heavily, but at least he was still responding.

Large families were mixed blessings. Pulsar had never quite got used to the noise… but the benefits vastly outweighed the annoyances.

She pinged Footloose, asking her sparkling to meet them on the roof, then boldly marched through the superintendent’s empty office and up the short flight of stairs to the air gate. Whitesides followed, clinging to her hand, looking like a lost turbopuppy – small, silent, emotionally exhausted.

Footloose scooped them both up and gave them a lift to Pulsar’s suburban home, and although you could see the worry in her optics, she didn’t push; just wrapped her uncle in a hug and held him for a few moments before whirling away to attend her next trauma case.

The house was empty and dark; thank Primus for small mercies. It meant she didn’t have to figure out how to explain with Whitesides and his frazzled emotions right there, listening in.

By the time Pulsar had got her brother settled in her room and ensured he was recharging, and gone down to the storage unit to fetch a flask of something well-filtered and ice-cold, she felt half-grey already; dead on her feet. Making it back upstairs to her room just wasn’t going to happen.

She folded a thermal foil around her shoulders and plopped down on the enormous couch at the rear of the atrium, then pressed the heels of her hands against her optics. “Ugh.” So much for that downtime she’d been looking forwards to. Wasn’t that long until her next shift was due to start. She hoped she’d get the chance to finish her upload before then, or she’d be the one conked out in a back alley.

She glared briefly at her flask, and drained it in one single long gulp. It didn’t make her feel even remotely better.

It felt like she’d stared at the reflection of her own optics for a very long time before the thunder of jet engines shaded subtly into her awareness. Sounded like her housemates were on the way home, at last; she’d not seen either since yesterday, when they’d headed out to New Vos, to discuss the ongoing rebuild-…

She caught herself scanning the sky for the familiar pinpoints of paired running lights, and realised just how much she was looking forwards to having a trustworthy audio to unload on. (Assuming she could stay awake long enough to do so. Or figure out how to even start the conversation.)

The two jets touched down in their comparatively-luxurious front yard. Leaving his wingmate outside, discussing something with Nightsun, Starscream was first through the door in the huge glass front wall, his arms loaded with plant samples. He did a brief double-take at seeing Pulsar on the couch… then stood and stared more suspiciously at her, as if to ask why she was on the couch and not in the chaos of her own room. When she failed to volunteer anything, he muttered something she didn’t catch and carried on his way without further challenging her.

Thundercracker was more forthcoming. He hesitated in the centre of the atrium, and just frowned at her, for a few seconds, waiting for her to speak. “Everything all right?” he coaxed, when she didn’t take the invitation.

She opened her mouth to speak, and realised that she didn’t actually know how to broach the subject. After a few seconds where his brows perked higher and she felt like even more of an idiot, she finally managed to clarify; “there’s going to be a new addition to the family.”

He… froze… for just long enough that she realised the implications of her words.

“Not me,” she hastily added, sitting straighter in alarm. “Primus! Haha, no, Primus, not me.”

The dark head perked briefly to one side. “Whitesides?” he guessed. She figured he must have picked up the mech’s frequency, and added the two together. He lowered his bulk to perch elegantly on the arm of the couch. “…is he all right?”

“No.” She laughed, sourly. “And for once he’s not even trying to pretend everything’s fine.” She covered her optics with one hands and vented a huff of hot air in a short, frustrated sigh. “I swear, if I ever find out who’s been treating that poor mech like a dirty little secret?” She stabbed a finger at him, as if to drive home the point. “I will yank their spark out, through their damn exhaust.”

“All right, firecracker.” He rested a giant hand on her shoulder. “I’ll even hold ’em down for you. But maybe you should wait until you’ve got some rest, eh?”

“Rest! Pit. That’d be nice,” she groaned, and let her arms flop out to either side. “But I’ve got to be back at work at any time. Talk about Beemer’s bad timing.”

“No you don’t. I’ve already organised cover for you.”

She looked up at him and frowned.

“Why do you think I was talking to Nightsun? Nice though it is to actually get the chance to talk to my deputy every now and then…” The blue mech smiled in a way that Pulsar took to be a subtle telling-off. “When the junior officers invite themselves into the senior lounge, then leave the building via the superintendent’s private air-gate, people take notice.”

“…oh.” She hunched her shoulders and glanced away. “Iiii didn’t think anyone had spotted us.”

“That much was obvious.” He flicked a finger gently across her antennae. “Get some rest, eh? I think we’re all going to need it…!”

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Crossposted to http://keaalu.dreamwidth.org/33224.html and http://keaalu.livejournal.com/470242.html for people who prefer those platforms...

[waitingongravity]

No, you don't get it, the love of my life is in the Arknights friend list she's somewhere in there I just know it please I PROMISE-

[waitingongravity]

Just a glimpse into my dark reality. A full stare into my twisted perspective would make most simply go insane lmao

[waitingongravity]

Alright, so. So there's PLENTY of unfinished business in the Abyssal Hunter storylines.

Let's look at what we know of already and what that could mean:

First off, the stuff that has already been established in previous events: There were three big leaders in the Church of the Deep: Quintus, Amaia, and some other dude who has only been referred to as Him. This Him is acquainted with Specter during her time as an experiment subject. We can pretty safely assume that much like Quintus and Amaia, He will be the one orchestrating the events of next uhhh... event. Besides that, we have Ulpianus and the Last Knight. Those two swam off into the sunset at the end of Stultifera Navis, and we can only assume that they are still hunting seaborn to this point. The curious thing with the Last Knight is that we got to see him plenty in IS3. We know he's a powerful piece of work, and that in true Don Quixote fashion he is unreasonable with. The real question for me is what the hell he's going to do in a world where Ishra-Mla hasn't taken over yet. Will he be more helpful? Proooobably not. Speaking of: ISHRA-MLA. I've seen a lot of speculation over whether Skalter is fully non-canon to the main timeline, or if she is merely an eventuality. Skadi's condition is not looking good, and we haven't really been presented with any possible solutions. Specter is fighting off infection and insanity through her seaborn blood, but Skadi's issue is seaborn in nature. That being said, I'd like to stay optimistic. Skadi's arc has been an upwards one, even if it's only slightly. I'd like to believe that the difference between IS3's timelines and the Canon is that Skadi had more time to grow stronger mentally and emotionally to resist the pull of Ishra-Mla. Or at least stall long enough to find a solution. Of course, this transformation is also affecting Specter and Gladiia. Much like oripathy, they may be doomed, but maybe there's hope for a comfortable life.

AEgir is a nation we know next to nothing about since they're all the way in the Water. An unknown settlement of AEgir was spotted right under the Stultifera, and we know Ulpianus preventing the Hunters' return to AEgir is one of the reasons why the fish apocalypse didn't happen. Whether that is just proximity to the ocean or something in AEgir itself, I think we'll be diving out of Iberia and into that AEgir colony. I doubt we'll go into AEgir proper, but that doesn't mean AEgir won't send its own people out. Okay, now for the operators relevant to all this: The obvious one is Andreana, our lonely cuttlefish. She is essentially a cheap walmart knock-off Abyssal Hunter, so many think that she'd be getting an Alter or some story focus as she goes full fledged (full scaled? Whatever.) While I see that as a possibility, a lot of Andreana's character is just NOT CARING about any of that. She outright rejects the opportunity from Kal'tsit to learn more, and wants to leave her mysterious past behind her. Honestly, I can respect it. My guess is that Andreana might get involved but stay out of it, unless someone (like her employer Incandescence who we've yet to see in-game) gives her a reason to care.

So who else do we have involved in this? Well, Deepcolor is pretty sus, and the only other AEgir operator besides Skalter. I'll be honest, I always thought she was up to no good. Do NOT trust her >:I. There's also the chance she's some loose AEgir agent or something that lost contact after the Great Silence. But I still don't trust. Here's the sleeper pick: Blue Poison! The curious thing about Anura, besides how cute they are, is that they were enslaved by AEgir and brought to Iberia in hopes that their toxins could be a new weapon against the seaborn. This puts Bloopy in an interesting position as both someone with a vested interest. Hell, she could truly be the secret weapon in the event.

With all this in mind, here's my idea for what the event could/should be. Ulpianus can be the new 6 star, whatever he's a loser I don't care about him. More importantly, BLOOPY ALTER as a limited unit. That's right, Andreana can keep her gun, we all know she loves that thing more than anything. Let Bloopy be the first 6 star Arts Defender or something! Or a new Fighter since we know she boxes. I dunno, just make her busted so I can feel vindicated in my love for her. and finally, 5 star... I dunno, some AEgir girl from the settlement under the Stultifera. Give me a manta ray girl! Flat friend. Or angler fish? Hmmmm. As far as the plot, I think it'll be a two-pronged threat. On one end, He and the rest of the Church of the Deep implement a final plan, either relying on the super advanced tech AEgir have, or simply being the culmination of the evolution which has been a running theme for these events. Under Tides saw the seaborn evolve to talk, Stultifera Navis saw them evolve to be incredibly powerful and adaptive. Who knows what we'll see next? As for the AEgir settlement's conflict, I think we could see a next step in the other relevant issue in Iberia: the persecution of the AEgir peoples and the role of the Inquisition in the fight against the sea. I doubt the settlement will be safe for long, so perhaps over the course of the story we will see them integrated into Iberia, and offer their own tech/abilities in exchange for a stronger frontline. Of course, all this is assuming that the settlement isn't just an long-abandoned ruin. I'd also like it if the Doctor actually got involved in this event. Kal'tsit is a given of course, but I think the Doctor's presence might be appropriate for the conclusion of this trilogy. Much how like Lone Trail concluded the story started by Mansfield and Dorothy's Vision, there might be big story turning points at the end of this. And given the forces involved? This wouldn't be surprising. Anyways this was a super disorganized ramble I typed mid-ttrpg session so I'm sure I missed a lot or messed stuff up. I'd love to hear any more speculations, this stuff is very fun to think about.