#im not gonna be able to finish them for a few weeks but i wanna post them NAOW :(

[snowaftermidnight]

what do you mean i have to work on my ideas for weeks and i cant just broadcast my mental image. sick and fucking twisted

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[no-droids]

Another Rough Day

gif credit @chrishemsworht

Part Twenty of the Rough Day Series

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 13.7K

Warnings: Angst, violence, canon-typical blood and gore, language, hurt/comfort

A/N: i wanna thank yall for sticking around during my hermit era, in the time ive been gone i am now officially a junior at a university majoring in aerospace and it’s a fuckin nightmare and i hate everything and god help us all literally kill me and I will be posting INCREDIBLY slowly because of that (I’m talkin weeks or months in between updates yall, im sorry I can’t dedicate more time to this but I am going to finish this fic within the next handful of chapters idk maybe 5 or 6 so you shouldn’t have to wait too too long).  As a heads up there will be hard angst as we enter the final arc, there will be hurt and it’ll get dark but everything is gonna turn out alright so thanks for sticking with me and continuing to stick with me. im sorry if you dont like it or your expectations were subverted or if this isn’t what you’d hoped it would be after following and waiting around for so long but this was planned a long time ago and it took me a good year or two to recognize that I started writing this fic for me and now I’m going to end it writing for me and I hope yall can respect that

ALSO I asked my best BEST FRIEND in the entire world @cptnbvcks to collaborate with me for this after we both took a very long break from creating and she drew some GORGEOUS artwork for this chapter so it will be posted at the end, everyone please go follow her and say hello

ps brittany girl you’re a fuckin menace i had to use my own two ears and listen to ethan literally say the words “the mandalorian cums, hard” what the fuck was that im actually suing

anyways chapter below the cut lets get serious yall

---

You take two of them down before they even realize they’re being attacked.

Your aim is as swift and steady as if Din were behind your shoulder right now, calmly pointing out which stationary tree to hit next in rapid succession.  You’re positioned perfectly at the bottom of the ramp to take full advantage of the ambush, the only thing running through your mind is strategy and the constant calculating of angles and ricochets.  The other three troopers are trapped inside the open Crest and you’re right next to a large boulder that you can step behind for cover, but it proves unnecessary as the rumors were apparently true.

They’re… awful.

Not a single blaster is even fired in your direction—you think you see maybe one panicked red shot bounce around in the hull, but that’s it.  The troopers fumble for their guns and trip over each other at the unexpected attack—a few scream like children through the modulators, but you’re temporarily deaf to anything besides the screech of your weapon hitting its target and the crumpling of armored bodies.

Later on, if someone were to ask you to describe exactly what happened—who died first, who ran for cover, who cried out for help—you don’t think you’d be able to.  You don’t even really feel like a person right now.  The entire thing is cold, robotic survival instinct, pure ruthlessness rising in your soul for the first time in your life.  It feels sick.  Wrong in your bones.  Born from preemptive defense in fear of your life, but that doesn’t mean you stop.  Not until all of them stop moving.

You empty the entire fucking canister for a handful of stormtroopers, firing plasma and char marks across every square inch of the pristine hull even after the last one drops.  Your heart is beating too fast, your finger keeps pulling the trigger multiple times even after the blaster clicks uselessly, completely empty and beeping a warning that it must’ve begun emitting ages ago.  Being out of ammo scares you—you suddenly feel vulnerable, even though the very far away logical part of your mind reminds you that they have to all be dead at this point and no physical threat was ever able to graze you.

Regardless, you quickly spin behind the boulder and grab another canister from your belt, giving it a spare check for leaks while the empty one slides and drops to the rocky ground.  It’s the first time you’ve ever had to reload this weapon instead of just pointing and shooting, but the mechanics are relatively simple and your brain makes up for your lack of coherent thoughts with lightning fast perception.  What's difficult is that your hands are starting to shake now that you’re not aiming, you’re not breathing correctly because you’re not really breathing at all.  You can’t tell the difference between the adrenaline-fueled dissociative silence that muffles everything around you or if it really is just that quiet now.  No more clatter of armor, no modulated voices or terrified screams.  No blasters, no footsteps along the ramp, no birds singing.

You quickly pause to lift your elbow and check the enormous eyes blinking up at you, tiny claws still holding tight to the fabric of your tunic and completely unharmed, and then you force yourself to move.  The blaster is held out in front of you while you walk forward and your finger rests on the trigger, begging to be pulled again.  It’s suspenseful and terrifying in a different way than before—now it’s less about psyching yourself up for confrontation and more about the fact that any sudden movement could mean your very swift end.

Silence.  Silence.  You’re numb and raw at the same time, walking up the ramp as your eyes fly everywhere, not even registering the blood or gore, just searching for movement.  You don’t know if you feel like a predator or prey, you’re that much more brutal and inhuman because of how fucking terrified you are.  You count four stormtroopers in the hull laying crumpled and still on the metal floor, but the one in the far corner only has blood on his shoulder.  You quickly swing the blaster around to remedy that, but then—

“P-Please don’t kill me!”

His words remind you of something.  Reality, maybe.  A world outside yourself and the kid’s survival, the living beings behind the bloody armor your enemies wear.

It’s a miracle your finger stays hovering over the trigger, and you watch him throw the blaster at your feet with a clang and scramble to show you his empty hands.  “Please don’t kill me, please don’t kill me—I’m not loyal to the Empire, I don’t want to be here, please, I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die—”

Behind the mask, your expression furrows.  Stormtroopers are loyal to the bitter end, what is he saying?  They embrace their expendiality, it’s the only thing that makes them any sort of a real threat.  Kuiil told you horror stories about them during your childhood, the cloning facilities and the propaganda they’re force fed since infancy.  It’s nearly impossible to find one who hasn’t been raised from birth to serve the Empire, no matter how crumbled and trace its remaining authority may be.

No, this is a trap, it has to be.  Your expression twists with dread after hearing him speak, readjusting your aim with the blaster and preparing yourself for the years of nightmares that’ll follow—but then he cries out, “Wait!” and then removes his helmet with trembling hands.

You pause, staring down at him in shock.

It’s him, you recognize him immediately.  It’s the same face from a hologram puck you bore into your memory, spent multiple days staring at so you’d be able to spot him under any disguise or circumstances.  Oshua Ryler.  Your quarry, the fifth puck, the one Din was out Maker knows where searching for before this entire mess happened.  A stormtrooper?  His puck said nothing about the Empire, this doesn’t make any sense.  What is he doing here?  Stormtroopers don’t have pucks, they don’t have bounties or relatives or loved ones searching for them.  They’re brainwashed, replaceable, faceless soldiers in suits of armor and they don’t even have names.

“Please don’t kill me,” he begs again, staring at you with wide eyes even as he cowers.  “I have a family, I-I just want to go home, please—”

“Shut up.”  You can’t think straight with him crying like that and you’re wasting so much time just standing here trying to process when your brain had to literally shut itself down to even do the things you’ve already done.  You have to kill him and escape, you have to—you can’t trust this complication, not with the tiny claws currently digging into your back and reminding you of your purpose, but it was so much easier when he had on a helmet.  You hate looking at his face.  It’s going to haunt your dreams now, just like the man you stabbed on Corellia.

“Please don’t kill me—please don’t kill me,” he screws his eyes up and breathes over and over instead, and your stomach wrenches with disgust.  His posture and expression are so fucking pitiful, you can barely keep your eyes on him through the overwhelming nausea and aversion that climbs up your throat.  He’s with the Empire, and they’re looking for the baby.  You know what needs to be done.  Pull the trigger, just one small movement from you and it’ll be all over.  It would be the easiest thing in the world, it would be so easy.

But then instead, you ask, “Why are you a stormtrooper?”

“I’m n-not—I hate the Empire—”

“The Empire is ashes.”  You don’t know if you’re yelling or whispering with how much blood is roaring through your ears.  “They hold no power anymore.  Why are you with them?”

“Because the one thing they have left is money!”  The quarry shrills the words at you, ghostly pale to the point of turning green.  “Th-They buy troopers now—they opened up a whole new market for the smugglers, there’s a base nearby that’s used for training and…”  He stares wide eyed at you and gulps.  “C-Conditioning.”

Your brain is already going a trillion lightyears an hour and it doesn’t have the capacity to empathize or understand anything beyond the child’s survival and the relevant details right now.  “Were they expecting the baby?”

“W-What?”  He squeaks up at you.

“Was the bounty put out on you a trap set by the Empire?”  You ask him, lifting your free arm just enough to flash him the tiny child clinging to your side.  “He said they’re coming after the baby, so tell me if this was planned from the beginning.”

“Who is ‘he’?”  The stormtrooper asks, furrowing his eyebrows and looking around.  “What are you talki—”

“Tell me if the bounty on you was a trap to take this baby!”  You roar, your blaster shaking as you aim it down at him.  Your mind is acutely focused on the tiny claws hanging onto your tunic, the continued safety of the kid and the life or death situation facing him that you were given absolutely no information about.  “Now—”

“If it was I didn’t know!”  He quickly cries out, pleading with you and clamping his eyes shut in terror under the barrel sight.  “I don’t know anything about a b-baby, or a bounty!  They just put blasters in our hands and told us to search for a ship and to bring back anyone we find alive, I swear!”

You’re silent for a moment, biting your lip under the mask and caught halfway between discerning and stalling.  You could still kill him.  You should still kill him, time is ticking down and more troopers could be heading this way any second.

Shit.  “Who put the bounty out on you?”  You ask sharply.  It might not be a completely fair question, but he can’t exactly blame you for not feeling completely fair right now.

“I—I don’t know,” he gasps, clutching his bleeding shoulder.  “Could’ve been anyone—my mother, Cyra, o-or my dad, Obediah, or Thia, or Benja, or S—”

“Thia,” you interrupt his rambling, catching the slurred word and repeating it back to him.

“Yes!”  Oshua jerks his head up, tears and hope immediately filling his eyes at the sound of her name, “Yes, Thiadura Celi Ryler, that’s my sister!”

Maker, if he’s lying, then he’s fucking brilliant at it.  You look towards the cockpit of the ship, biting your lip under the mask.  Get to Nevarro, tell Karga and he’ll… something.  Din was cut off before he finished.  Help?  Know what to do?  You’re lost, but you have a clear directive and the precious seconds are sliding by.  The controls are right up there, two steps to the ladder and less than a minute until you’re rising into the atmosphere.

But then you think back to the terror in Din’s voice.  The blistering panic that made him speak faster and with more urgency than you’ve ever heard from him.  Get to Nevarro.  Tell Karga.  Get to Nevarro.  Tell Karga.

You look back at the quarry.  “How many of you are there?”

“At the base?  Around three hundred,” he immediately spills.  “Half of us are in the hole right now getting brainwashed, they do it in shifts, but they can be mobilized in a few hours.  There were a lot of bodies outside when we were ordered to split off, maybe a third of our squadron, but the rest were still shooting at whatever was—”

“So around a hundred left,”  You finish breathlessly, almost wanting him to speak faster and cut to the chase so you can calculate quicker.  “How many were dispatched on the search?”

“Uh, there were eight groups of five sent in each major direction,” he informs you, still trembling on the ground.  “Told us not to come back until we covered the entire sector.”

Of which, four you’ve already taken care of.  In other circumstances, you’d be nauseated at the thought, but right now, it’s just another number to subtract, just more panicked math in Din’s frightening absence.  That leaves at least sixty troopers left wherever the base is, minimum, and likely a couple more hours before they’ve combed the sector.  If this wasn’t a preconceived trap purposefully set for the kid, then that means reinforcements haven’t arrived yet but likely will soon.  And if this is a base meant for training and conditioning, then that also means there’s a chance not all of them will be loyal yet.

You make the decision immediately.

“Okay,” you announce, clicking the blaster’s safety switch and holstering it, sounding lightyears more certain than you feel.  “Then you’re going to help me carry out a rescue mission, and I’ll take you back to your sister.”

“You…”  He looks uncertain, blinking at your blaster and slowly lowering his hands.  “You want to rescue the men?”

Ideally?  Sure.  Realistically?  You don’t say anything in response.  Instead, you kick his regulation firearm at your feet further away from the quarry just in case your judgment is flawed, and then turn around and grab one of the bodies behind you.

Your adrenaline is still blaring so fast that you only just barely note the severity of what you’ve just done and what you’re continuing to do.  The corpses aren’t real to you right now, they’re inanimate things that you need out of your ship before you can close the doors to it.  They are, however, heavy as fuck, but the only other adult here has a wound in his arm from the gun on your hip.  Regardless, you have experience with lifting dead weight without a big, strong, capable man to do it for you.

“Help me out here, kid,” you mutter over your shoulder, and in response, you feel his claws dig in and climb up just a little bit until he can peek out in front of you.  Thankfully, the burden is suddenly lifted and you can quickly slide the dead troopers down the ramp with ease.  It takes hardly any time at all—you just yank and haul and release and all four of them tumble the rest of the way all by themselves.

When you stand back up, Oshua hasn’t moved and he’s looking at you with a pale, queasy expression.  Glancing down, you see that your white robe is now stained with streaks and patches of rusty blood.  Instead of swallowing back bile at the sight and bolting to the shower to scrub off every last remaining trace, you breeze past it, noting nothing more than a change of color.  Dirtying your white, pristine clothing with the consequences of protecting this baby—you’d rather have blood-soaked fabric with an unharmed kid clinging to you than any other combination of those things.

“Can you make it up to the cockpit?”  You ask the quarry, kicking his rifle off the ship before closing the ramp and then gesturing up the ladder.  Your voice is calm and steady but your hands are beginning to shake again.  “I need as much information as possible about the base.”  You know that’s where Din is, judging from the wall of blaster screeches that drowned him out through the comm.  Logically, you know you could be headed right into a trap, and every instinct inside you wants to find safety, but… you just cannot imagine flying the ship away from this planet without Din onboard.  It isn’t fucking happening, you’ve made your choice.

Without waiting for a response, you climb the ladder and plop down in the pilot’s seat of the Crest.  While Oshua finds some way to clamber up the steps behind you in bulky stormtrooper armor with one good arm, you hold the kid closer on your lap and begin flight checking.  Din will be fucking furious, but the scolding you’ll be sure to get is the least of your worries right now.  Following his instructions and going back to Nevarro is just making shit infinitely more dangerous for him, turning what could be a potential rescue mission into an undeniable suicide mission.  Even if Karga somehow decides to send a few guild members along to infiltrate the base, it’ll be a war you want to avoid.

Besides.  What did you always tell him about running away from him, even when he instructs you to?

It’s just… not really your thing.

---

They’re everywhere.

They crawl like flies out of the base, and for every single body that falls, three more spill from the open doors.  Rapid fire plasma beams launch from the end of Din’s blaster, melting white armor with every twitch of his gloved finger.  Their aim is terrible, as is to be expected, but the sheer number of them more than makes up for it, as is by design.

Din’s heart pounds with exertion, his breath comes in ragged huffs through the modulator as his helmet identifies and isolates which body is closest to him, which body he needs to bring down next.  His blaster is so hot it nearly burns his hand, even through the thick gloves he wears.  When he runs out of ammo, he holsters the pistol and swings his rifle from around his shoulder, spinning to catch a handful of troopers behind him in the obliterating blast.

He’s not thinking much.  He can’t think, even though your safety and that of his son is currently dangling by a thread.  If he focuses on that, he’ll be dead before he can even picture your faces.  He just reacts, he maims and kills without a single thought in his mind.  Blood splatters, screams and sirens blare as he becomes surrounded by more and more troopers.  Din can hear the sound of plasma colliding and ricocheting off his armor; every single one of them is a potential injury he could currently have but might not even be able to feel right now.

His helmet starts beeping rapidly and he turns just enough to see, highlighted in bright red on the screen, two enormous artillery turrets slowly rising up out of the roof of the imperial base.  He feels a fierce flash of anger burn in his chest, it’s like a lightning strike to his veins.

Din needs to go.

And yet… if he was another man.  If he wasn’t a father, or a husband, if he had no family and no attachments like the creed declared he should, he would go.  With just a twitch of his fingers, he could be launching into the sky and retreating as far away from this battlefield as he could reasonably get.  He’s never been the type to run from a threat, but this isn’t just a threat.  Dozens of troopers are gaining on him, they’re trampling their own dead to get within range.  Plasma pings off his shoulder, another one hits his back as they flank from behind.  He can feel the heat through the sizzling beskar, he can see them surrounding him on all sides, and the propulsion trigger for his jetpack is right there under his wrist.

Din holds his ground and continues firing, he plants his feet firmly to the dirt with only one thought in his mind.

Run, sweet girl.  Run.

---

You type in commands to scan for Din’s signal, quickly locating it through the Crest’s computer onboard.  Not far from here, three minutes or less.  The ship rumbles to life beneath you, slowly lifting off the rocky ground and rotating in place as it hovers.  It’s not on autopilot but you feel like you are, you can barely feel your hands as they move the yoke forward and the Crest takes off in the direction of Din’s blinking frequency.

“Tell me about defenses,” you instruct Oshua, restlessly bouncing your leg while the baby coos.

“Two plasma turrets on top of the base,” the quarry quickly answers.  “There’s usually guards stationed around the perimeter, but everyone who’s capable will be outside right now.”

Your mouth twists downwards under the mask.  Blasters don’t scare you much from this high up, but Din’s armor doesn’t cover every inch of his body, he’s not completely invincible.  Doubt churns in your stomach, but you have to stay focused on one task at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed.  The turrets, then.  “Are they automatic?”

“Manual,” he corrects with a shake of his head.

“Radar?”

“Old.  Only engages above fifty meters.”

You eye your altitude and dip the Crest considerably, beginning to weave through the rocky canyons and dodging crumbling cliffs while you travel.  “What about ships?”

“None,” Oshua says, “except for a passenger shuttle used for transport.  TIEs are flown in the Vesta sector, this base is remote and used for basic training only.”

“Anything else?”  You ask, stomach twisting with the knowledge that barely four questions is all you’ve got.  You’re planning to drop into an imperial base to save the man you love and you can’t think of a single other question?  

The quarry shrugs, and your heart slams, does somersaults in your chest at the mere notion that you could fucking die here.  Today, in two minutes or less, you could die here.  The child in your lap looking over the ship’s front panel with a quiet determination in his eyes could die here.  Din could already be dead—that signal broadcasts his location to this computer regardless of whether he’s still breathing or not.  He could already be gone and you’d be flying the baby right into a trap without knowing any differently.

Whelp, you think while taking a deep breath, some strangely calm existential acceptance beginning to flood your soul.  If he isn’t dead, he will be soon if you don’t make it to him on time.

You immediately lift your wrist and speak into the communicator.  “Mando?”  You have no idea if he can hear you, but you need to try anyway.  Your voice is still firm, there’s a strength to it you don’t feel in your chest, but it certainly sounds convincing.  “I’m coming to get you.  Less than a minute to your location, do everything you can to get outside.  If you can’t, I’ll just… uh.  Try to figure something else out.”

That’s it.  That’s it, improvise until you don’t have to.  Even if you’re lacking confidence, you can at least scrounge up some conviction.  Your arms gain feeling again while you veer the Crest through the stony terrain, the familiar reverberations under your feet begin to fill your body with a powerful sense of purpose.  Your breaths begin to come steady, every falling rock you see through the transparisteel feels like it drops in slow motion, allowing you to evade them easily.  It would normally be stupidly dangerous to fly this low with so many unexpected obstacles and hazards narrowly missing the ship, but considering what you’re flying into, a few boulders seems comical.

“Where’s your helmet?”  Oshua asks out of nowhere, and for a second, you don’t think you heard him correctly.

But then it strikes you all at once what he’s attempting to imply, and the sheer lunacy of the thought is enough to make you laugh while you clutch the controls.  “I’m not a Mandalorian.”

“You wear the armor of one,” he points out… rather fairly, you have to admit.  “You cover your face like one.  You have a blaster that fires Philithiorium, a rare and expensive gas native to Mandalore’s stratosphere, and you’re a bounty hunter—”

“I’m not a Mandalorian.”  Your words are short and cutting, you have a daunting task to focus on and don’t feel like having small talk right now.  “I’m not a bounty hunter, either.”

But then again, Karga made you a member of the Guild, didn’t he?  He handed you Oshua’s puck and said this one is for you to find, and you are technically part of a Mandalorian clan.  All of this seems like it happened without your knowledge.  You may be marrying a Mandalorian, you may wear his armor and mother his child and shoot a blaster with his signet branded into it, but war isn’t in your blood.  This robe was a costume when you first made it, this armor was a relic that was restored as a hobby.  In a sense, it still feels that way.  The mask covering your face lended itself to a temporary surge of bravery earlier, but beyond that, the only thing that’s keeping you moving forward now is your family.  The man you love that may or may not be alive right now, the baby holding tight to your leg while the ship sways and weaves through the stony landscape.

Your eyes quickly flick down to the child in your lap, both of his three fingered hands clutching onto the stained fabric of your knee without moving a single inch.  He’d know, you tell yourself.  If his father is gone, he’d already know somehow.  Din is still alive, and he’s counting on you.

---

There’s too many for Din to handle.

They swarmed him, overpowered his endless artillery with massive numbers and there’s nothing he can do anymore.  The backs of his knees are kicked from behind and he slams down to the ground with a clatter, his sizzling hot blasters are ripped from him, and Din folds his hands calmly behind his back even as one of the stormtroopers barks out, “Binders,” to another one, who disappears quickly in response.  In the meantime, a few of them apparently decide to just attempt holding his arms in place, and their measly combined grip is almost enough to make him roll his eyes under the helmet.  These imperial soldiers are even more pitiful than they usually are, but his silent resolve to stall to ensure your escape is enough to keep him stationary and compliant for the time being.

Eventually, a few voices call out from beyond the crowd and there’s some movement from the back.  Dozens of troopers with their blasters all pointed at him begin to shuffle to make way, careful to keep their barrels aimed at him while a path slowly forms.  The crowd of white parts and a stormtrooper with a singular red pauldron on his right shoulder saunters confidently towards Din as he kneels on the ground.

An officer, he assumes.  Conveniently missing from the firefight, the scanner inside his helmet would’ve caught the change in color and Din would’ve made sure to kill him first.

“Well now, what do we have here?”  Comes his thin metallic voice through the tinny filter.  The officer studies him curiously for a few moments, before slowly looking down by his feet, reaching out one cheap, plastic covered foot to gently nudge the body of a dead trooper on the ground with a sigh.  “What a shame.”

Coward, he thinks, his lip curling with disgust under the helmet.

“This is an imperial training base,” he turns his attention back to Din to inform him when he doesn’t immediately respond, rather stupidly he might add.  “How were you able to find us?”

Silence.  The grip on hands held behind his back is even looser now.  He just tilts his chin up slightly in defiance, the scanner inside his helmet locating each weapon strapped to the man’s body and highlighting it red.  Small text boxes blink into existence under each one with a manufacturer and classification—a BlasTech E-11 rifle, a Merr-Sonn thermal detonator, a Kolvo vibroblade—and Din is severely unimpressed with the quality.  The detonator is the only weapon that even catches his eye, and that’s only because the chamber inside that houses the explosive baradium has a release mechanism that’s completely dead.  Useless, then.  Good to know.

After a long moment of quiet tension where Din refuses to speak and the officer continues to confidently scrutinize him, in some strange sort of silent battle of egos that only one seems to have a genuine interest in, another stormtrooper makes his way to the front, shoving past his fellow soldiers to address the superior in charge.

“Commander, we’ve sent out an alert for an intruder,” he tells him, slightly out of breath from running through the crowd in the lightweight armor.  Din wants to roll his eyes, but what he says next makes him snap to immediate attention.  “The fleet informed us that Moff Gideon is currently on route.”

Gideon.  The last time someone spoke that name, it was a quarry on Coruscant and you just barely managed to stop Din from suffocating the bastard for even saying it aloud before freezing him in carbonite.  It would’ve meant half the return on a hunt that lasted nearly a month but he saw red and his hand was crushing his windpipe before he realized what happened.  But he’s dead, Din thinks with a clenched jaw and fists tightening behind his back, he watched that TIE fighter explode and slam into the ground, crushing the man inside it.  The wreck was unsurvivable, he can’t be alive.

“For what?  This Mandalorian?”  The trooper in charge scoffs in response, and Din remains completely mute.

“Yes, sir,” the other one confirms.  “Orders were to capture him, alive.”

“Hm.”  The officer turns his attention back to him, less analyzing and more musing while he tilts his head.  “I see,” he eventually says, and he sounds like he’s grinning, before strolling slightly closer as Din stays completely still on his knees.  “He must want the beskar.  I’m sure it’s worth more than this entire battalion combined.”

All of a sudden, a gloved hand carelessly catches the rim of his helmet and tugs, and Din’s movement is explosive.  He launches off the ground, arms easily slipping from the pathetic grip they were being held in and his fist colliding with the side of the officer’s flimsy white helmet, the plastic making a deafening crack against his face.

Multiple hands immediately rush forward to grab him and yank him back down again while the commanding trooper stumbles backwards in shock, and Din amicably drops to his knees and folds his hands behind his back once more like nothing happened at all.

“Binders!”  A trooper behind him roars loudly once more, and a few men surrounding him begin trotting away this time.

The officer in red stands a few feet away from him now, grabbing his helmet and twisting it back to its proper position on his head where it was skewed.  There’s a shattered hole near his jaw where the material splintered and busted like the cheap piece of banthashit it is, and while he might normally feel pleased with himself for being able to see his skin peeking through, it just fills him with more righteous fury.  It’s such a punchable jaw.

After a few awkward moments of silence, the other one clears his throat and continues.  “He… has inquired about the location and status of a child that should be accompanying him.”

Din inhales deeply through his nose and grinds his teeth.  He wants to snap their necks one by one for even just mentioning his son, but there are just too many, more than even his whistling birds can neutralize.  Still, he gave you as much of a head start as physically possible.  You should be rising into the atmosphere right now, making the jump into hyperspace towards safety.  Karga will know what to do—he’ll protect his family, separate you and the boy so the threat is evenly dispersed instead of collected all in one place, and arm dozens of trained hunters to keep watch over you both individually.  It’s the best Din can do, and it’s the only thing keeping his knees planted on the ground and his body completely motionless while they continue speaking.

“We are combing the sector for a ship with as many men as we can afford to lose,” the trooper in red says, but his voice filter is shattered and now sounds like a puny little droid with a broken voice box, “but our numbers are unimpressive.  Assistance may be required.”

It’s too late, Din thinks, mouth twitching under the beskar with a satisfied smirk.  They’re wasting their time, looking for a ghost.  You’re both long gone by now.  They’ve got no idea you even exist—

“He also spoke of a girl.”

And then he feels his heart stop in his chest.  Every single cell in his body turns to fire, it’s a fucking miracle he doesn’t move a muscle in response.  His sweet girl, the one so far removed from the nightmare of the Empire that she made best friends with the orphans of it.  How the fuck did he know?  He shouldn’t even be breathing, let alone gathering information about you, how did he know?

But then Din thinks back, remembering your makeshift bed on the floor, your panicked eyes and heaving chest as the quarry taunted him with a sick little smile.  Who’s this, Mando?  She’s just darling, isn’t she?  Does Gideon know your crew has a lovely new addition?

“A girl?”

The trooper nods.  “Moff Gideon insisted that if the Mandalorian did not have a child with him, then a girl would likely be protecting him instead.”

He’s going to kill them, Din decides.  Every single one of these imperial pigs, every single soldier standing right now is a dead fucking man.  The blood pumping through his body suddenly turns to acid, deadly black hate poisoning his soul.  His heartbeat morphs into a war drum, the armor strapped to his limbs is the barrel of a gun.  He’s going to fucking kill them and leave an imperial base full of bodies to greet his old nemesis upon his return, and he’s going to enjoy every single second of it.

Except, then—

“Mando?”  The sweetest voice in existence suddenly crackles through the earpiece under his helmet.  “I’m coming to get you.  Less than a minute to your location, do everything you can to get outside.  If you can’t, I’ll just… uh.  Figure something else out.”

And, as Din kneels there in surrender, surrounded by a crowd of enemies he thought he destroyed long ago, all the anger—all the fury and defiance and murder surging through his veins—suddenly morphs to fear.

The emotion is so foreign and old to him, it feels like a face he barely recognizes and a name he can’t remember.  He’s panicked before.  He’s been in situations where a threat has made him blind with rage, he knows what it’s like to look death straight in the eyes and say that he’s busy and to come back another time.  This is different.  This is ice cold that freezes over beskar.

He can’t speak out loud to warn you—he can’t move his hands to press the button on the back of his helmet and allow him to talk without detection.  There’s plasma turrets on the roof of the base, he can see them right now.  The helmet’s scanners say they’re manned and engaged, and though he is outside and this is how you retrieved him before whenever he needed a quick escape, he has fifty fucking imperial blasters trained on him and you know absolutely nothing about this threat.  You’re flying right into a war zone and if either you or his son dies, he won’t ever be able to forgive himself.

Behind the helmet, his eyes fly to each and every trooper, wondering which blaster will be the one to do it.  Which weapon is going to be the one he can’t block in time when you descend, the one that’ll kill him right in front of you.  Which turret will be the one to obliterate the Crest with you and his son inside of it.

“Maker, where are those fucking binders—” he hears someone behind him snarl, but the white noise of pure terror roaring through his ears drowns them out.  His chest starts heaving against his will, sheer panic begins to blur his vision.  For the first time in his life, his armor feels too heavy, his lungs feel like one of these boulders are sitting on them instead of beskar.

All too soon, his helmet starts making a familiar sound that signals quietly in his ear, alerting him of an incoming ship, and the only thing he can physically do is count down the seconds to prepare himself for what is to come.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…

Like lightning, Din breaks the grip of multiple troopers and surges up, tackling the officer in red to the ground.  There’s a clatter as they both slam into the rocky floor, but in the ensuing scuffle, he easily snatches the thermal detonator from his side holster and holds it up for everyone to see, before pressing the red button on the front and hearing it begin to beep rapidly.

---

You’re right on time.

The Crest rises up through the rocky cliffs surrounding the base and you spot the turrets you were warned about.  Weapons controls are already engaged and you’re too low to be detected by radar—you fire once, twice, and blast both of them to smithereens from behind before they can even rotate around to target you.

Alarms start wailing but the guns are destroyed.  It’s not comforting, though; blasters won’t touch you up here, but that doesn’t mean they can’t fire at Din on the ground.  Your eyes dart across the sea of white, looking for a flash of silver anywhere, and then you spot him instantly in the chaos.

For some reason, the troopers in his vicinity all seem to be bolting away from him.  Their rifles are down, clutched in their hands while they nearly fall over each other to run away as fast as possible, and your heart soars when you spot his jetpack firing up.  Din launches into the sky while another trooper is revealed underneath him, seeming to juggle something in his hands and then throw it into the crowd of retreating soldiers, but the sight of the man you love rising into the air while a flurry of blaster shots from the far edges of the imperial structure follow him gives you the confidence to immediately turn the guns down towards the horde of troopers.

“Which ones are in charge?”  You ask Oshua breathlessly, who leans forward and points out the transparisteel.

“Red pauldrons—” he barely has time to say it before you aim and fire at one of the troopers wearing red that was closest to Din, the plasma beam launching from the Crest so powerful and devastating that it outright obliterates the surface he’s laying on.  Pieces of shattered armor fly and a smoking crater of rubble is all that’s left behind, but your mind is whirling and you’re already onto someone else wearing red at the edges of the complex, and then two more near the doors, and then another—

To their credit, you think the sixty or so soldiers in training seem to figure out that you’re not aiming into the enormous collection of them.  If you were, the damage would be catastrophic and spraying everywhere, but you’re precise and meticulous with your shots, and the only ones who are loyal enough to the cause to hold still and raise their blasters at the incoming threat tend to be the ones you need to mow down anyways.  The rest of them scatter in all directions, scrambling over each other to escape and then disappearing into the distant boulders surrounding the base—but you notice that not a single one of them runs back inside the safety of its open doors.

The hull dips with the weight of Din dropping in, and relief floods your soul even as you continue raining hell down on the superiors in charge.  Any flash of color you see is a target, your eyes lose focus of everything, your vision blurs and turns monochrome as you just search for red.

“Lift up!”  You hear Din’s voice roar from the hull.  You can hear his rifle unloading through the open door.  “Now!  We have to go now!”

You press the button to shut the hull door with Din inside and punch it, rising so fast that the shove of gravity makes it difficult to keep your head up.  Through the sudden surge of downward force, you just barely manage to raise your incredibly heavy arm to push the button that pressurizes the Crest and ignites the launch boosters, preparing the vessel for space travel.  Outside the transparisteel, the gray sky begins darkening as the atmosphere eventually disappears.  The ship’s engines roar, burning so much fuel at once that you’re actually accelerating through the climb, you’re boosting through the gradual ease of gravity as the planet’s curvature and glow becomes softer and softer below you.

As soon as the blackness of space begins to fill the windows, the slight subsiding of force allows you to plug in the coordinates for Nevarro with less difficulty, but you’re still moving, still rising, still escaping.  You can’t find it within yourself to slow down, but then something catches your attention.

Claws suddenly dig sharp into your thigh, sharp enough to sting and cause you to wince, and you look down to see that the kid has gone incredibly tense.  Deadly tense.  Your heart is still pounding even though you’re away from danger, you’ve got Din in the hull, everyone is safe, and yet—

It flickers into existence all at once.  One second it’s just space, just the endless depths of nothingness spread out for light years in front of you, and within the blink of an eye it’s suddenly there.

A star destroyer.

Your body freezes in horrified awe, having never seen a ship so fucking big in your entire life.  It looks like a massive satellite, the size of an enormous asteroid instantly appearing in your vision and dwarfing the vastness of space around it.  All the stars you used to dream about are suddenly blotted out within a fraction of a second, terror so immense seizes your soul that you stop thinking.  You stop calculating, you stop being yourself for a split second that lasts an entire lifetime.

Before you can move a single muscle, the computer beeps quickly and lurches the Crest into hyperspace.

---

The stars streak across the transparisteel like so many times before.  Utter silence nearly deafens you with how abrupt it is after so much noise, but the peace it used to bring does nothing to quell your fear.  Everything is the same as it always was, same bursts of light as you hurdle faster than it towards Nevarro, same quiet, same rumbling hum of the ship.  But now, everything has changed.

You hear the quarry next to you suddenly inhale and exhale loudly, and it shocks you a little bit, reminds you that there’s a person next to you and another is on your lap.  Other people exist outside of the vision of death that just flickered out of existence just as quickly as it appeared.  They’re breathing, Oshua is shakily unbuckling his seatbelt, life is continuing on in the quiet cockpit but you can’t seem to move like he is.  You can’t seem to breathe like he is.  It’s only when the baby slowly maneuvers himself around on your thigh and blinks up at you, placing a tiny hand on your stomach that you finally feel air enter your lungs.

After a moment, you reach down and click open your seatbelt with trembling fingers, scooping the kid up in your arms and slowly attempting to stand.  Everything feels wobbly and dreamlike, you have to brace yourself on the headrest to prevent yourself from falling back into the chair again.

“That was…” Ryler mutters, his voice sounding foggy and distant, “uh.  A close one.”

You look over at him, recognizing that he’s speaking but not quite able to understand the words right now.  Red catches in your vision, and you blink down at the way he’s clutching his left shoulder, the smear of blood darkening the white armor he’s wearing.  You blink a few more times at the sight of it, and though it feels like you normally would be sickened at the wound, somehow shocked out of your state of shock, it does nothing to you.  When you look back up at his face, his expression seems strangely grateful, even when it’s screwed up in what you know must be excruciating pain.    You did that, a quiet voice whispers in your mind, even though the rest of it seems incredibly blank.

Instead of responding, you stumble a few steps over to the ladder, spinning around and hesitating for a moment.  You’re severely lacking in coherent thought, but one thing seems to break through.  You’re not sure if you have enough coordination to do this safely right now.  However, when there’s movement in your peripheral and you look to see Oshua gently offering his right arm to you, seeming to understand you’d like to use both hands for this, you snap back to your senses just the slightest bit and hug the baby tighter to your chest.  Carefully, you begin making the slow climb down the ladder with the kid, still trembling with the aftershocks of adrenaline.  Your limbs feel extra heavy, but eventually the floor meets your feet.

Din is standing there when you slowly turn around, armor gleaming and still as a statue, but he has his back to you.  His helmet is tilted down at the ground, and when you follow his gaze, you’re met with the sight of the bloodstains of dragged bodies that leave dark red streaks all the way up the ramp.

You feel something this time.  It’s… cold.  A burning, searing cold that creeps into your skin.  Like your heart decides to pump nitrogen through your chest instead of warm blood.  You did that.

There’s a sudden urge inside of you to speak, to address him and inform him of your presence, tell him everything is okay, everything worked out, but you can’t find it in yourself to say a single word.  You can’t find a single word to say.  The kid twists as best he can in your clutch, his ears drag against your chest to greet his father, but for some reason, there’s still a strange sense of fear in your bones.  It’s enough to wake you up slightly, it’s enough to tell you it’s not over yet.  There’s a terror in your heart that hasn’t left since he first called over the comm and begged you to run, a crippling dread that you thought climaxed after seeing that star destroyer appear, but it’s somehow only increased after laying eyes on him like this.

You watch as his helmet turns, slowly meeting the pauldron on his shoulder, and for some reason, you feel yourself harden.  Your feet brace against the metal floor like this is another threat you have to face, you let its unyielding metallic strength transfer up through the souls of your boots to your heart in your chest.

But the second you hear cheap white armor clatter as the quarry steps down the ladder behind you, Din bursts into movement.  He suddenly spins and storms up to you in one single step while catching your holstered blaster on your hip.  It’s out and aimed in the blink of an eye, and it’s a miracle you remember how to speak before he remembers how to kill.

“Mando—” you warn, just in time for the quarry to land on the floor of the hull and turn around to reveal his face.

Din holds there for a second, his helmet locked on Oshua’s features.  His gloved fingers twitch wildly on the trigger of your gun held over your shoulder, like he has to remind himself multiple times not to.  You hear Oshua’s armor clack while he likely raises one good arm in surrender, but then Din’s helmet moves a fraction of a millimeter to your face and holds there.  He just stares down at you, and the air feels heavy, your body feels heavy, the feather light child in your arms feels heavy.

Slowly, he lowers his arm, lets it fall while he continues looking at you from behind the visor.  You look back at him, unblinking, unfeeling, and there’s a few seconds that last an utter eternity where nobody moves.  Nobody speaks, nothing happens, but then a soft coo comes from your arms before you can finally break eye contact, knowing there are still some things that need to be done.

You eventually turn around and lift your chin to address Oshua.

“You have to go into carbonite,” you inform him quietly.  Your voice sounds strange, like it’s coming from outside of yourself.  “We’re taking you to Nevarro, and then you’ll be transported to your home planet. When they unfreeze you, your sister will be there to collect you.”

He looks uncertain, one hand still raised while the other hangs uselessly at his side, and you don’t blame him.

But you also don’t feel like saying anymore, not unless he decides he doesn’t want to go in willingly.  Normally you might’ve tried to empathize, offer him further reassurance beyond just a couple short sentences, but you don’t.  Speaking feels difficult, thinking feels difficult.  You’re still in survival mode, not active but reactive.  There’s also no reason for you to lie to him about this, and you can see him glance at Din standing silently behind you, who hasn’t moved a muscle.

He eventually nods and you walk him over to the chamber without another word, watch him turn to face you as he backs into the opening while you reach up towards the control panel.

But then there’s a moment.  One where you hesitate slightly, one where your vision flashes back to the sight of those bloodstains on the floor, and that burning cold fills you again, so cold it feels completely numb.

“I’m… sorry,” you whisper quietly to him, though your voice sounds so empty.  There’s so much emotion that should be there but isn’t, so much regret and pain that should break through but can’t.  “I’m sorry I… killed your friends.”

Later, you’ll think about how you felt absolutely nothing saying it.  Your heart doesn’t constrict with remorse at the mere words leaving your mouth, guilt doesn’t flood into your soul, pain doesn’t wrack through your bones.  You could’ve been saying anything at all and nobody would be able to tell the difference.

He blinks at you, flicking his eyes between yours for a second or two, but then you press the proper button and watch the gas quickly freeze him where he stands.  He’ll be conscious the entire time, but Karga will send him to the correct location and you have no doubt that this elemental purgatory is leagues better than where he just escaped from.  It’s a benefit being the last quarry to be retrieved—he’ll only have to spend a few days trapped in here before being reunited with his family.

When that’s done and Oshua is a complete statue in front of you, bulky white armor now colored a dull metallic gray and frozen in time, you will yourself to finally turn around to face the enormous mountain of a presence behind you.  The baby gently reaches out for him, but Din doesn’t move from where he’s stood.  Your blaster is still clutched tightly in his hand, and he isn’t looking at you.

Slowly, you walk over and stop directly in front of him in the middle of the hull, blinking at him while the helmet subtly moves to lock onto your face.  The kid begins wiggling in your arms, making soft impatient noises while you both stand in complete silence across from each other.

After a few moments, you hear him flick your blaster’s safety on by his side and then toss it carelessly to the ground.  It skids along the floor, light enough to be mostly quiet.  Gloves reach out as he carefully takes the kid from you and settles him in the crook of one arm, and then he looks you up and down, still not saying anything.

Your eyes follow his movement, watching his arm slowly reaching out to you, and you think he’s going to cup your jaw, or brush your hair back.  Give you some sort of physical reassurance since he hasn’t spoken a single word of it.

Instead, Din suddenly grabs the armor clinging to your chest and starts ripping it off you with one hand.  It clangs to the floor so loudly in the silence of hyperspace, the kid’s ears twitch and flutter with each shattering bang.  You hold still while he does it, you barely respond except the unavoidable movement your body experiences as the pauldron is yanked from your shoulder and thrown against the ground.  The ammo belt is tugged over your head and hurled away, the thigh braces are snatched from your legs and they clang to the floor, and the pearly, opalescent fabric revealed underneath is stained in dead man’s blood, rusty and in such great quantities that it shows up as brown instead of red.

“Are you hurt?”

He sounds… dead.  So monotonic that you can’t possibly gauge his emotional state.  He doesn’t move.   His fists don’t clench, he says every single word like it means the same exact thing as the last.  If nothing at all was a person who could speak, they’d use his tone of voice.

“No,” you eventually whisper.

The helmet nods once, and then he spins around and walks away without anything else.  Without saying anything, without touching you, or double checking you for injuries in case you were lying.  You stand utterly still while Din climbs the ladder with the kid cradled in one arm, and you don’t even flinch when the door to the cockpit slides shut behind him.  You have no idea how long you stand there in the splitting silence afterwards, numb and unmoving.

You feel… nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

The hard defenses you strapped to yourself today to reconcile the things you had to do are still high and strong, guarding your soul even if he stripped away your physical armor.  Self preservation is still animating your body, and your facial expression barely changes.  Your first thought, as soon as you remember that you can have one, is that there are things that still need to be done.  Tasks to complete.

Alone, you shower the lingering traces of blood off your body, the normally clear and refreshing water running a sickly, toxic brown.  Alone, your stomach rolls and suddenly decides to empty itself of the very little that was in it as the scalding drops rain down over you—mostly liquid and bile that easily rinses down the drain.  The water is too warm, it beats down on you like blazing hot sand pelting your skin in the desert.  You feel like you did those first few months with Din, where the silence was suffocating, where you’d only interact with the baby if he was on a hunt or if you could tell he didn’t know how to calm him when he was fussy.  If you were in hyperspace, you usually spent time by yourself in the hull while he lived in the cockpit, and if he decided he needed to be in the hull for whatever reason, then you’d trade places with him.  It was… isolating.  Lonely by yourself.  The quiet used to haunt you before it became your cherished friend, but now it’s a betrayer, a ghost that whispers memories and nightmares in your ears.

When you finally finish rinsing the blood from your skin and get dressed, you see the sheets that used to make up your bed now have fried holes in them from your charred plasma marks, the inside of the hull is covered in them and the trails of dried blood where you dragged the bodies down the ramp.  Your armor is still strewn about the hull, the kid’s hovering shield lays dead in the corner.  Everything you meticulously cleaned and organized and collected and created, now the scene of a bloodbath.  One committed by your hand, your blaster still laying uselessly on the floor forever linked to this atrocity.

You spare a glance towards the ladder, but you don’t want to come face to face with Din yet.  You already knew he’d be furious, but… you had hoped that he’d at least…

What?  At least what?  Comfort you?  Coddle you after you deliberately ignored his instructions?  What exactly, in the past year or so of learning Din’s inner workings and intricacies, would ever give you the impression that he’d come give you a big hug after you purposefully defied him?  You flew the kid directly into an imperial base after being told to protect him, you ignored every order he gave to you in the moments he thought would be his last, and though you did it to save his life, you have a feeling that Din has never valued his life even a fraction of what you do.

The misery stabs at your soul, but your mind is finally beginning to process things logically.  He’s alive, the kid is alive, the quarry is secure, and you’re all onboard the safety of this ship hurtling through hyperspace where nobody, not even the Empire, can touch you.  You weighed the consequences before making your decision, you did what you had to do.  If he wants to be mad, then he can fucking well be mad and you’ll find some way to comfort yourself.  At least he’s here being mad, at least he’s alive and safe and breathing and mad, and your rare act of disobedience is to thank for that.

Somewhere in the back of your mind, you realize it’s probably easier than it should be to reconcile the punishment.  Right now, you welcome the exclusion, the negativity and sorrow beating itself into your soul.  Four innocent people died today on this ship, gunned down under your blaster while they panicked and ran for cover.  You keep hearing their screams.

So you start to clean up the hull, needing another task to focus your thoughts on.  You work to erase every inch of the evidence of your deeds, make it disappear like the pool of blood Din once cleaned up while you were sleeping and never acknowledged again.  You only allow the bloodstains to fuck with your head for a single moment, and then you swallow back the nausea until you’re a blank slate again and sink to your knees with a rag in your hand.  After that, your vision stops focusing and it just becomes red contrasting against gunmetal gray, and you work tirelessly to get rid of all remaining traces of it.

Then you start on the blaster marks, you need them gone.  After a few informed attempts at mixing cleaning chemicals, you find one concoction that allows you to wipe them away like they’re nothing more than dirt that got tracked in.  The Crest’s oxygen recycling system works overdrive to constantly purify the air so you don’t get high or pass out, but your nose still stings.  It’s fine, it’s sterile, it burns a bit but it smells sharp and metallic and keeps you hyper focused on the task at hand.

After that’s done, you pick up the charred blankets and ball them up to throw into the trash vent.  You don’t feel anything as you do it.  You don’t think about how long it took you to collect these over months and months of being stuck on this ship, how comfortable they were when everything else was industrial and rigid, how many nights you spent with Din curled up in their softness while he breathed easy and warm.  Sheets are just luxuries, they can afford to be lost.

Next, you gather your armor and wipe it down with the rag, put it away along with your blaster.  The stained robe goes in the trash, along with the sheets and the blood soaked cloth you used to clean everything.  They’re all ruined, you’ll never be able to make them right again.

The hull is sparkling clean when you decide to take another shower.  Nothing on you is dirty except your hands, but you feel filthy.  Wrong, cold, numb, cold, stained, cold.

After scrubbing your skin raw under the water and changing clothes again, since you don’t really know what to do with yourself anymore, you slowly climb the ladder to the cockpit, keeping perfectly silent.  When you reach the upper platform and come face to face with the closed door, you can just barely hear Din’s whispered voice speaking quietly to the baby beyond it.

You raise your hand for a moment, hovering your knuckles over the metal, but then it eventually falls.  Instead, you look over and spot the corner, the same corner Din bunched himself into when he snapped at you for even suggesting going on a hunt with him, blew up at you for the mere notion of something happening like what happened today.  You back yourself into it in defeat and slowly sink down on the floor, resting your head against the metal and hugging your knees to your chest since you don’t have a tiny baby to take their place.

You can’t sleep.  You don’t even try, it’s pointless.  The concept feels foreign the longer you sit here by yourself.  You don’t hear Din or the baby anymore, but you feel… so fucking awful that it’s fitting that you don’t knock or go looking.  You don’t want to hold that sweet child with hands that were covered in blood just a few hours ago.  You killed more people than you can count on your fingers today, and of the ones who had done nothing wrong…  They screamed like younglings, ducked for cover and were able to fire off one single useless shot in the mayhem before you closed their eyes forever and left their bodies to rot in armor that wasn’t ever their choice to wear.

You didn’t know they were kidnapped and smuggled and forced into that situation.  You couldn’t have known, but that isn’t the point.  In this case, knowing doesn’t make one bit of difference.

You also can’t face Din yet, not like this.  You don’t want him to see you cowering, shattered with guilt over the decisions you made under pressure.  How will you ever get him to forgive you for not listening to him when you can’t even forgive yourself for the result of your choices?  Din is a hardened man who grew up in blasterfire and bloodshed, just because you love him doesn’t mean he’s going to magically become someone he isn’t.  You’re here letting guilt sink sharp claws into your chest over four dead men when he had a good fifty or more corpses scattered on the battlefield around him.  You decided to wear that armor, you decided to fly into an imperial base with the kid on your lap, and this is now your penance.  You’ll accept it with your back straight and your chin held high.

Figuratively, of course.  Physically, you’re smaller than you’ve ever been.  Crumpled up into a ball, taking up as little space as possible, curling up as tight as you can like an animal protecting all your vulnerable parts during a brutal attack.

So, since he isn’t here to comfort you himself, you just try to think about what he would tell you.  A long time ago, what would he tell you?

Din would tell you… that you killed someone.  Multiple people, this time.  He’d also tell you that it doesn’t matter what he tells you, what you could have reasonably foreseen or what you should have done.  The end result won’t change.  You own this now.  You’ll carry their deaths with you.

You take a few deep breaths, self-soothing with the undeniable truth that would be murmured matter of factly from his quiet voice.  He wouldn’t argue with you.  He wouldn’t deny the decisions you made or the consequences of them.  It happened, and at the end of the day, you either learn how to handle that, or you don’t.

And, for the four you did shoot, you were responsible for freeing ten times that amount.  You’re responsible for reuniting Oshua Ryler with his family, even if your place in yours is momentarily shunned.  You’d rather be out here alone than in there with the kid, wondering where his dad is or if he’s even still alive.  You rescued Din and now he gets to be here to shut this door on you, hold his son, and whisper calm reassurances to him.  If you listen really hard and imagine, you can pretend they’re for you, too.

That’s it.  Focus on them both, alive and well together.  Focus on the bodies wearing white armor that were moving, the ones that were bolting away from the imperial training base as fast as they could, free from the torture of imprisonment and conditioning.

Finally, you close your eyes and slip into unconsciousness.  It’s not a testament to your exhaustion, but rather just how long you’ve been left to sit here by yourself.  Hours, maybe.  Time is strange in hyperspace.

You dream of a faceless man ringing bells.

---

When you wake up, a small baby has been placed in your arms, and you’re being dragged into a strong, secure beskar hold on the floor.

“Din,” you suddenly lift your head as soon as you’re conscious and nearly bonk it into solid metal, apologies rising in your throat before you even remember where you are.  You did what needed to be done to keep your family alive and together and you’d do it a thousand times again if necessary, but that doesn’t mean you won’t apologize anyways.  After the deeds you’ve committed today, regret feels as natural on your lips as speaking your own name.  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I know you’re mad at me but I—”

“Shh,” he whispers, running his gloves through your hair.  He’s still wearing his helmet, he hasn’t taken anything off yet.  “Don’t say anything.  Just… stay here, stay right here with me.”

“I tried to save you,” you croak, tears instantly flooding your eyes.  You did save him.  You saved him and the baby and yourself but you’re so physically and emotionally exhausted that all you can recall is your intent.  “I tried.  Wasn’t gonna leave you there by yourself.  I tried to be brave, like you—y-you wouldn’t have left without me.”

His arms tighten around you, cradling you in such a strong embrace that you burrow into him, you find a place for your head on the hard metal strapped to him and bury yourself there, wishing that you had shovels of dirt being piled on you to justify the death you still feel staining your soul.  Your heart is starting to pound now that you’re remembering, your body is starting to shake with tremors of shock now that you’re aware of your own skin again.

“I was so sc-scared, Din, I didn’t—didn’t know what was happening,” you lament through watery eyes, gasping it out in hopes that it’ll relieve the slightest bit of the gut wrenching guilt just mercilessly crushing you.  It caught you before you could protect yourself against it, that armor you built around yourself isn’t on when you first wake up.  “I-I didn’t want to kill them, but they were already on the ship and y-you said—you said they were coming after the kid s-so I had to, I had to—”

“Stop,” Din whispers, voice so quiet that you can barely hear him.

“I-I cleaned up the blood,” you turn your face against the cold beskar to let all the positives you listed for yourself before scrape across your throat.  They don’t sound comforting anymore, they just sound like excuses.  “It’s gone, it’s like it never happened, everything is okay now, I got the quarry, I protected the baby, I saved a bunch of people, you’re both safe—”

“Stop,” he chokes out.  The modulator cuts off before you can hear his next breath, but you feel it shudder under your body.  “St-Stop it, please.”

Your eyes clench shut so tightly you feel like the streaking stars outside are behind them, tears drop down against his pauldron and you press your face tighter to it like it’s a wound, like the pressure will somehow ease the bleeding.

“Listen to me,” he says very quietly, and you instantly brace yourself.  The walls you just let down shoot right back up, your body physically tightens in preparation for another pain, another trauma, another scar you’ll carry, and you stop shaking.  You stop breathing, even when his hand comes up to ease your face away from his armor.

“You,” he whispers, holding your chin so you’re staring right at him, and your eyes flick fearfully in between his behind the visor, “are a sweet girl.”  Din’s leather thumb brushes along your skin, dragging over the tears below your puffy eyes.  “Not,” his voice catches, “a Mandalorian.”

Your heart goes cold.  Again, everything turns numb.  It doesn’t matter that you already said this yourself out loud earlier today.  It doesn’t matter that you acknowledged this fact, verbally insisted it more than once to hammer home the truth and felt some sense of comfort in it.  For some reason, hearing the words from his mouth is a fucking knife to your chest.

“I taught you how to fight, how to shoot a blaster,” he murmurs, thumb catching every single tear that continues to fall as he speaks.  “I taught you everything I know, everything that’s been taught to me.  I taught you how to defend yourself, how to protect yourself when you’re in danger.  I gave you your blaster, I gave you my armor, I gave you everything I could give you to keep you safe.  And when I thought you were ready, I let you loose on Sanctuary II.  Do you know why I did that?”  The helmet tips forward the slightest bit at the question, probing deep into the most shattered part of your heart.  “After all those months of fighting, and shooting, and training, do you know why I told you to run?”

You blink silently at him, a shaky breath quaking through you, and your expression wants to crumple under the reprimand.  You’re so fragile right now, taking hit after hit after hit to the softest parts inside you, and you want to just give up.  Let the guilt and remorse take you, let it wash you away.  But then, instead…

There’s a flicker of something inside you.  Something strong, endlessly strong, and it makes you want to revolt against what he’s saying.  It replaces the hurt and fear and desperation for comfort with a strange sense of insurgence, like it did earlier when you were hiding behind a boulder, cowering and trembling and not wanting to die.  You’re filled with a quiet urge to defend yourself in the face of this, stand up for yourself and refuse to be beaten down any longer.

“Because you needed to know how to escape danger,” he answers himself when you don’t.  “You needed to know how to disappear, how to outsmart any pursuer and find safety, even the trained ones.  Especially the trained ones.  Anything else was meant to be your last resort.  Not your choice.  Not something you chose.”

“I couldn’t leave you,” you admit to him quietly, voice shaky and tears still coming even as you try to speak up for yourself.  The regret you carry has nothing to do with this, and you decide right now that you won’t feel bad for saving him.  Your hurt comes from the meaningless things, the ones without any need whatsoever, not the necessary ones, and you tried.  You repeated his words to yourself over and over again, told yourself to run, told yourself to get to Nevarro, and it wasn’t going to happen.  “I couldn’t do it.  It wasn’t a choice.”

“It was,” he tells you.  He says it softly, whispers it like it’s the gentlest thing in the world, but the power and inherent distance of the armor strapped to his body finds its way into the words.  “And it was the wrong one.”

“What was I supposed to do?”  You ask, just a hint of that rebellion swimming to the surface now, rising out of the waves of self doubt, the one that feels like a spine growing in your back, an energy coursing through your veins that makes your heart start to beat faster.  Din’s hand slowly drops from your cheek but you don’t care.  “Was I supposed to run away and just let you die?”

“Yes.���  It’s quick and blunt and completely emotionless.  Delivered like a punch to the vulnerable parts of yourself he taught you how to protect, and the utter silence following this single word is comparable to the physical pain you learned to defend against.  It jabs hard against everything good and sweet and tender inside of you, and you’re left speechless even as he continues impassively.  “That’s exactly what you were supposed to do.”

It takes a second, but then that unfamiliar feeling suddenly surges up, breaches with the power of an entire ocean.  Your voices may be nothing more than whispers in the dark, you may be clinging to each other, holding each other with the softest, gentlest love in your hearts, but the strength of your conviction on this would rip metal apart.

“No.”  The word holds the might of your entire being, and it stands alone and defiant in the face of everything you fear, everything that threatens you, him, and this child.  Never.  You’ll die before that happens.  “I love you, and there’s nothing in this galaxy that would ever make me do that.  Not fear, not danger, not the Empire, nothing.  Not even you.”

Din stares at you.  His visor reflects your hardened expression back to you, the force in your soul and the purpose in your eyes, and you don’t even realize the gravity of what you just said because like your love for him, gravity is a constant.  It’s a fundamental truth cemented into the rules that govern your actions and it stays true no matter where you are, no matter what terror you face, or how scared you become.  You have him, you have this little boy in your arms, and if that’s all you have, then you have everything.

After an eternity of this, of feeling his eyes pierce deep into you from behind the helmet while you refuse to wither under his stare, you watch him slowly turn and look down, landing on the sleepy child tucked between you both.  He holds there for a long time, before finally whispering, so quiet that the modulator barely picks it up, “It was the wrong choice.”

You stay quiet.  It happened.  What’s done is done, you can’t change the past.  He can scold and reprimand you about this as much as he wants, but you did the right thing and that decision is the only reason he’s even here to be able to do so.  This exhausted child was reunited with his father because of your choices, and this exhausted father was reunited with his child.  You won’t argue anymore, but it’s a certitude that lives deep in your heart now, builds a home there right alongside the both of them.  Din eventually looks up, his eyes find yours again behind the visor, and his hand rises once more to gently cup your jaw.

“I… thought I’d enjoy seeing you in my armor,” Din finally whispers.  It’s not what you expected, but his voice sounds… weak.  Broken.  “You wore mine once before, and it was…”  He brushes his thumb along your cheek, and then his head shakes slightly, pushing the thought away.  “It wasn’t real.  It didn’t fit.  It dwarfed you, it made you look out of place, it made everything soft and innocent about you stand out.  I liked it because it wasn’t real.”

“Was it… really that bad?”  You whisper back, partially to ease the tension just slightly but quickly breaking eye contact with him when you realize it doesn’t land correctly, it just sounds self conscious and sad.  You try to find that conviction again, that strength and assurance that propped you up so sturdily before, but…  Not a Mandalorian, he’d said.  Of course not.  Of course not.

“It wasn’t the armor.”  Din gently tugs up on your face so that you look at him again.  “It was you covered in blood.  It was you purposefully putting yourself in danger.  You killed multiple armed soldiers of the Empire, you dragged their bodies off the ship.  And then you flew into an imperial base, where you killed the officers, too.  You…”  He shakes his head slowly at you while speaking, and although you can’t see his face, you don’t need to in order to hear the horror in his voice.   “You… collected a quarry… in the middle of a massacre, sweet girl.”

Not a Mandalorian.

“You don’t chase down bounties,” he tells you.  “You don’t fly into war zones.  You don’t kill imperials, you don’t collect quarries, you don’t sacrifice yourself, or our son, to save me.  You said you tried to be brave… like me.”  His fingers tighten against your cheek, he dips his helmet to make sure you understand.  “I’ll never ask you to be brave.  I’ll ask you to survive.”

“I’m… sorry,” you finally whisper, and his arm drops from your cheek to join the other in wrapping around you and holding tight.  They hug you and squeeze, encasing you and the baby in a beskar shield and staying there for a long time.  Long enough for you to tuck your head back into its proper place under his helmet, long enough to start to feel okay with the silence again.  It brutalized you the last time you were surrounded by it, it made you feel alone and desolate and barren inside.  You greet it warily now, settling into it for an unknown amount of time until it’s forgiven once more.

After a while, Din quietly breaks it.

“How many?”  He murmurs to you.  You already know exactly what he’s asking, there's no more clarification necessary on his behalf.

You slowly close your eyes and think back to the smoldering craters, the blood soaked ramp, the fear in Oshua Ryler’s eyes as he begged you not to kill him.

“That didn’t deserve it?”  You ask, clenching your eyes tighter at the memory.  “Four.”

And maybe, maybe six or eight months ago, you would’ve begged for some guidance on how to reconcile that.  Hell, maybe a few hours ago, you could’ve used his arms around you exactly like this, his low voice repeating the same things he’s already told you before, over and over again, if only for some semblance of stability when everything feels turbulent and uncertain.  You’ll never be able to change it, though.  This belongs to you now.

This time, all Din says is, “I’m sorry, too.”

And that covers everything.

The silence envelops you both again, but… there’s something else.  Something that still sits deep in your worries, an image that isn’t a scar of what’s happened but a dread of what’s to come.  You need to tell him.  You don’t feel like saying it, you don’t want to speak it aloud for fear of bringing it into existence, but you need to tell him.

“Din?”  You breathe out, and he makes a soft noise in his throat while cuddling you on the floor.  “I saw…,” you whisper, every word sitting tight and reluctant in your throat.  “Right when we made the jump, I was looking through the window and I-I saw…”

“A star destroyer.”  He says it like… like it’s the worst thing in the world and also completely expected at the same time.  He says it like he already knew, yet can’t even imagine.  You lean every bit of your weight against him since you can’t hold him in return, squish him as best you can against the small corner and curl up even tighter in his arms for comfort.

He takes a deep breath, a shuddery sound you don’t think you’ve ever heard him make before.  It holds untold anxiety, unsaid conflict, uncertain action, an unknown path forward.

“I don’t know what to do,” Din eventually whispers to himself, to you, to the baby in your arms.  His voice is barely a breath through the modulator, his fingers digging into your skin with how many emotions he’s repressing.  “What do I do?”

He sounds so distressed that you automatically feel your soul find the floor—instantly, you become steady and calm and you locate all that rationality that kept you going today.  All your worries still twist deep down, all the guilt and the turmoil wrestles with your soft, easy nature until you can only find bits and pieces of it in the most vulnerable places inside you, but if he’s struggling this terribly, then the least you can do is offer some good, true, unwavering faith in times of uncertainty.  You’re in hyperspace, everything worked out, and it’s going to stay that way for right now.  If he doesn’t know how to talk about it yet, then you trust him enough to wait for him.

“It’ll be okay,” you tell him with a newfound confidence and purpose, carefully easing the baby into one arm so that the other can find its way to the other side of his helmet and pull him closer.  Din tucks his head and allows you to brush your lips against the metal, whisper the words soft and steady to him.  “We’ll figure it out together.”

---

@cptnbvcks thank you so much for the incredible art!

[charliemwrites]

I humbly request Gaz being a soft dom with Researcher. 🥺

Oh hmmmmm yes let’s see……

The two of them are in the researcher’s bed because let’s be honest, it’s wayyyy better than a barrack. They’ve been on a Science binge all day - all week, really. This is the first that Gaz has been able to pull them away from their work bench in hours.

They’re mumbling about not being done yet, needing to put the finishing touches on a design - and Gaz is letting them ramble. He’s listening, of course. Or, well, listening for the stutters and pauses when his lips and tongue and teeth find a good spot on their neck. They are slowly but surely melting into him, all insistence on work fading off into happy hums.

“We can get back to it tomorrow, chickadee,” he murmurs when they’ve run out of steam. “I want to spend time with you tonight. Think you can make a little time for me?”

“Of course,” they breathe, nuzzling at his cheek to get proper kisses. “All the time you want.”

“All the time I want, eh?” He chuckles. “Sure you can spare that much?”

“Mhmm.”

“So sweet for me,” he smiles against their cheek. “You’ll be good and patient, won’t you?”

“Mhmm”

He rewards them with slow, lingering touches through their shirt and pants, lets them grind absently against him while he licks into their mouth. They deserve worship and a chance to turn their brilliant brain off. The best way to do that is make them wait, make the building ecstasy the only thing they have room for.

“Ky, I wanna…. I’m so close….” They gasp.

“I know, I know,” he soothes, playing with their nipples. “Can you be good and wait just a little longer? You’re doing so well, I know you can, baby.”

They whine, high pitched, but nod and grip at him tighter, clenching down and writhing, making him see stars.

“I’m gonna count you down, alright?”

The moan. They simultaneously love and hate countdowns and he knows it.

“5…. C’mon, darlin’ arch your back”

They shudder and squeeze their eyes closed.

“4, looks at me? Cmon, I wanna see your pretty dazed eyes.”

They flutter their eyes open but they can’t focus their vision, pupils blown out.

“3… so close, love, you’re holding on so well. That’s it, let me hold you here…”

They whimper his name between their teeth, trembling and desperate, flushed everywhere.

“2…. Can you ask nicely? You sound so lovely when you say-“

“Please, Ky, please, wanna cum for you!”

“That’s my love. Well done, so lovely.”

He holds them there just a moment longer, just to see them desperately holding back for him.

“1 - cum for me, baby. That’s it, ride it out.”

Their eyes roll back in their head as they squeeze down, milking his cock, screaming as they cum in overwhelming waves. Hes not far behind, burying deep within and cumming only a few rough thrusts later.

As they catch their breaths, he leaves absent kisses all over their face and shaking hands.

“Alright, darlin’? Didn’t make you wait too long?”

“It was perfect,” they sigh. High praise indeed considering the ‘statistical impossibility of perfection. “You’re perfect. Thank you, Ky.”

“No need to thank me, love. I should thank you for being so good. Im so proud of you.”

They hum and snuggle in. He’ll have to get them up before they doze off too much… but for now he could use a break too.

[choccy-milky]

1. your fic is absolutely amazing. Have been bingeing it and I’m literally obsessed. The way you write just itches my brain in such a good way, literally cannot contain my love and appreciation for your work👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 cheers to you!!! Can’t wait to keep reading

2. As I was reading I found out you also deadass drawing the art to go w/ the fic?? Literally you’re living my dream 😭 plus your art is so so so well done!!!!! It’s added so much joy to my reading experience

Cannot wait to see what else you have in store!!’ Hope you have an amazing, AMAZING day, week, year, etc.!!!! 💞🙌🏻🫶🏻

OMG IM GONNA CRY 😭😭 BAHAHA U SENT THIS AT SUCH A CRAZY MOMENT cuz i just checked my ao3 comments and was down about a rude comment i got, and then i come to tumblr and like, a few mins later/literally AS i was venting about it, u send this BAHAHA your choccy senses were tingling. IM SO GLAD U LIKE IT THO AND THAT YOURE ENJOYING IT (and my drawings, even if youve defs seen spoilers by now BAHHA) hope u have a good day too, u defs brightened mine!! THANK UUUU💖💖💖

@kaviary-blog this looks so funny bc i censored u just to keep it (mostly) spoiler free BUT AW THANK U DAMN IM HONOURED THAT MY FANFIC WAS THE ONE TO MAKE YOU CRY?? IM SO HAPPY HOW INVESTED YOU ARE 😭😭💖💖 im also super happy with that chap and its so satisfying like you said to finally be able to tie of all those threads so IM GLAD IT WAS WORTH IT💖

@lovesicklovermia ONE DAY???? OMG. FIRST TWO DAYS NOW ONE?? ITS JUST GETTING SHORTER AND SHORTER. next thing i know someones gonna be like yeah so i took some highly experimental drug that lets me read at 1000% the pace of a normal person, and i finished ur fic in 2 hours 😍omg loved it!!!😍😍 BAHAHAHA but omg i totally see what u mean, they do HAHA. AND THANK U💖💖 IM GLAD UR LIKING IT💖

YEAH so in my fic fifth years are 16, and by the time things get....explicit....clora and seb are 17. im not against consuming media with teenagers depicted in sexual situations like euphoria or riverdale or w.e else bc i get that its fiction and these are just real things that happen so its fine to write about them, but their canonical ages of 15 was still too young for me and i wanted them to be 17 before it got the E rating (which is why clora and sebs birthdays end up being so close, bc i was RUSHING for them to turn 17 BAHAHHAA)

BAHAHA clora and seb secretly being together is like the most poorly kept secret in my fic, like im sure her parents technically KNOW, but due to old fashioned traditions and whatnot (and it being 1891) seb wants to be able to propose properly and with a proper ring, bc clive is intimidating and he doesnt wanna just be like "yeah so im dating your daughter and weve already fucked and i plan to marry her" LOOL he wants to do things properly and be with her with her dads permission(even tho its a bit late for that HAHA) BUT WE CAN JUST PRETEND. tldr its basically just out of some sense of chivalry on sebs side, a fear of her dad, and wanting to do things right LOL

ALSO WAIT OMG STOPPPPP I WAS LITERALLY JUST ABOUT TO POST THIS BUTI HAVE TO INCLUDE THIS NOW

YOU SAW MY POST AND IMMEDIATELY DREW THIS AS A RESPONSE WHILE IN CLASS?? BAHAHAHA IM ACTUALLY SO TOUCHED RN IM TEARING UP WTF THATS SO SWEET OF YOU WTFFFFFFFFF THANK YOU SO MUCH😭😭😭💖💖 (NOW PAY ATTENTION IN CLASS!!🤬🤬)

[the-kipsabian]

BRACELETS!!

(i have made more than these but heres a few of my favorites for example ~)

im not asking to get paid anything for these btw, as long as youre comfortable giving me your address and youre asking something i can make its all good! i do have a ko-fi linked in the pinned post if you feel obligated or want to help pay for stamps lmao, but that is entirely optional. i just wanna make stuff that would make people happy, they are friendship bracelets after all 💜

but yeah feel free to yell at me in dms or in my ask box or in discord or twitter or wherever if you'd like one or two or whatever! i know im mainly talking about making wrestling themed ones but im open to anything as long as im able to make it lmao

//soft edit, i now have more letters and even more good shiny beads to work with, so these are definitely on the table again if anyone wants anything 💜 im trying to get stamps again next week when i get paid on wednesday, so if you hit me up before then i'll get them in the mail by then hopefully! in the meantime im just gonna be making more blorbo bracelets that might be up for grabs at a later date when i finish some of these sets im planning, but if you want something specific the best thing is to just hit me up for a request 💜💜

and again money is optional but tipping on ko-fi helps to pay for stamps and such 💜💜💜

[gettinshiggywithit]

!Highschool AU chuuya x reader whose best friend lied to them!

pairing:- chuuya x gn!reader

scenario:- chuuya comforts his s/o when they find out their best friend lied to them.

genre:-comfort/fluff

type:- oneshot A/N:- Hi hi!this is just a vent piece mostly but i hope its perhaps a little relatable? im tryna put some stuff out while i write the requests i have! so this is a few weeks old~

It was the day before your business studies exam and you’d scheduled a study session at your house with your best guy friend turned boyfriend;chuuya nakahara

(Also i hc him havin the subject combo of business studies,economics and physics)

Buddy was ready to get down to business! He’d bought along some of your favorite drinks and snacks and after saying hi to your parents,who absolutely adored him, he headed to your room.

He knocked on your door and was met with sniffles.

This set off sirens in his head but he thought he knew what the root cause of this could be.

He slowly opens to door and sets the snacks,drinks, and his notes down before joining you at your spot on the floor.

He wordlessly wraps you in a hug which startles you for a second before you realize its him.

But once you do,you pull him closer and it makes you cry just a little harder,your cries muffled by his hoodie.

He slowly begins to rub your back in an attempt to calm you down while whispers sweet nothings in your ear.

Once you calm down enough you look up at him and exhale.

“Sorry...”

“Nope. Dont be...now,you wanna talk about it?”

He always knew how to respond and it was honestly always such a relief.

You knew he’d never offer to help if he didnt want to and when he did he always meant it.(and he’d make a little mental note to be there for you no matter what,because you’d always done the same for him)

But once you nodded and opened your mouth to speak,the reasoning behind your current state wasn’t at all what he’d imagined.

“F/N lied...”

*insert confused gingi boi*

You noticed his look of confusion and began your explanation.

To be quite frank,Your best friend,whom youd known since elementary, had lied to you and it all seemed to be over a boy.

Chuuya was honestly dumbstruck.this was the girl who’d been there for you even before he knew you,

and she also happened to be the one who’d introduced the two of you...

And what was even stranger was how this seemed to uncharacteristic of her...she wasnt the type to go after boys and had always been focused on her studies.and the thing that kinda pissed chuuya off was that the boy in question wasn’t even that great a guy.he was a nice enough kid sure,but he wasn’t great...and certainly nowhere near her standard...

After you finished your explanation you looked to him for his verdict before saying your final statement,

“...and im not sure if im overreacting or not because sure its just a small thing but the fact is that she lied when id have been okay if she just told me the truth...i dont know Chuu....this all just hurts i guess...and this plus the paper tomorrow has me so fucking drained!”

You groaned in frustration and he saw this as his opening to step in.

“Okay first of all,it’s kinda messed up that she did that but have you tried talking to her?”

“No...I thought id just talk to her after exams were over,otherwise who knows maybe she’ll say the reason she got a B or a C was cos I started shit...”

“Okay yeah fair...but do you see yourself being friends with her after this? Especially if her justification is as shitty as what she did?”

“I dont know...the thing is she means so much to me...i trusted her and this is what she did??? I know ill never be able to trust her ag- actually who am I kidding im gonna trust her again and get hurt all over again....i dont know what to do ‘Yaya”

He nodded thoughtfully at that,the gears in his head turning as he tried to come up with the perfect solution.

He know you valued honesty and loyalty above all,it was one of the things you had in common and also one of the things that had made you as close as you were,so he knew this wouldnt be easy.because truthfully even he wouldnt have been able to deal with this and woulda probably turned to you for help...

“Okay then,try to focus on the exam,as best you can and talk to her after? I know its gonna hurt like a bitch but just try?”

“And ill be here okay?,” he said taking your hand in his, “no matter what.”

“Thanks chuuya...Youre probably the best thing that came from my friendship with her.” You said with a soft half-smile.

“Likewise.” He said returning the gesture.

You then looked back to the notes sprawled all around you.

“Fuxk...business tomorrow..”

“Mhmm...wanna start?”

“Dont really have a choice,” you wiped your tears and blew your nose on a tissue before saying, “lets do this!”

“Attagirl!” He said giving you a fist bump.

You studied well into the night and he stayed at your place.

And the next morning,you set off to the exam center hand in hand,giving eachother a single good luck kiss before making your way to your seats.

All rights reserved © 2023 gettinshiggywithit . Please do not repost, modify or claim as yours.

[asexualzoro]

it's december 9th, meaning today is my 23rd birthday (which is my favorite number!), which means it's time for...

Lew Writes Wrapped 2023!!!

im including anything that happened after my last bday, so we have some works from december as well. this one's a bit of a weird one for the total word count, you'll see why

it's all treebark from my sideblog / alt ao3. i cannot change. i will not change. for these im just gonna specify the relationship that's the main focus bc thats easier than fandom bc all but like one are third life

dandelion wishing

(Dec, 2.4k, treebark, oneshot) (link)

op movie 6 au for dogwarts in which Martyn is the baron and Ren doesn't know he's dead

id actually plotted out a whole third life au for this movie like months prior and really wanted to write it, so i took it for treebark week and focused it just on these two. it's my fave movie of all time and i obvs had to give it to my fave completely dead team <3

i will admit tho. it did make me back search martyns twitter to see if hes ever posted abt watching this movie. bc i know he likes One Piece and i realized this would bring me into the danger zone (he hasnt ever posted abt it if hes seen it)

A Romance Route for the Doomed Villain?!?

(Dec, 5k, treebark, oneshot) (link)

treebark dating sim isekai parody that spiraled out of my control made in a day-long possession

im still baffled by this one. why was the response to this one so insane?? there was smth in the water the day i posted this bro. a 1:2 kudos to hits ratio for the entire first day is literally fucking unbelievable. 70 comments?? what hold did this fic have on you people. i got fic written about this one?? my friends goncharov'd me in front of my face

really fucking fun to write and the insane response was smth im always gonna remember. i appreciate you guys so much

treesekai also turns a year old in a few days!

Until the Angels Realize You're Not One of Them

(Feb, 7.2k, emerald duo, oneshot) (link)

a traitor phil au which was mostly just me talking about all the reasons i love technoblade

this one... wasnt actually written this year for the most part? i didnt want to not acknowledge it, since it's on my ao3 in this year, but i wont be able to count it toward the total

still. traitor phil au my beloved. hearing him say on his stream he and techno wanted to do a betrayal arc made me feel insane bc i already had this written at the time

missing or obstructed

(2022-present, 12.9k, Grian & Ren, ongoing) (link)

post 3L fic about Ren and Grian seeking out closure with a lot of funny little sleep metaphors

same deal as the last fic, i, uh dont think i actually wrote anything new for missing or obstructed this year either? just uploaded chapters i wrote last year,,, i didnt wanna now acknowledge it, but i wont count this in my total later

i miss her. one day ill actually sit down and write more missing or obstructed. in my doc im JUST at introducing Martyn and i havent written it yet

to reach my mangled debut

(Sept, 4.2k, treebark week, ongoing) (link)

it wouldnt be me if i didnt have an execution somewhere in here. another op au!

THIS. I LOVE HER. when rev and i were plotting out the whole storyline for smop renchanting i was begging please give me this scene i need it and i had so much fun writing it. i rlly need to finish soon but i haven’t had time but please. please check out smop. she’s top of my priority list to update

Three-Dog Night

(Sept, 6.7k, treebark week, oneshot) (link)

BIG DOG. beauty and the beast au!

god im so fond of this au. there’s some rlly good scenes written for this and unposted bc i just need to link them together. honestly i think if i took a month and focused it on this fic alone i could fucking finish it but i don’t have the time ;-;

that said i’m so enamored w this au genuinely. o dunno what else to say i just think. puppy

Cover Me In Roses

(Sept, 3.3k, treebark week, oneshot) (link)

lamplight roleswap! put Martyn in a flower pot

i don’t feel as motivated to work on this one when i have lamplight unfinished so it’s lower on my priorities but know i have like an entire arc of this written and unposted. we just have a few paths for this one and i have to decide which one to use

it’s so wild to me lamplight has like. aus. like this isn’t even the only one? a roleswap. that’s insane? it’s wild that you all like lamplight enough i can even get away with this

First Sign of a House Fire

(Sept, 2k, treebark week, oneshot) (link)

i love superhero stories for two reasons: plots about secrets and adapting the characters to give them powers. this had smth fun for both of them

yellow rose isn’t super high on my list of priorities to update (i think the oneshot is interesting on its own) but one day,,,, it’s part of the many aus cherri and i have but it’s the longest for sure. the doc for just this au is like 100k words long on its own. at the time i draft this cherri and i are actively writing smth else for it in another tab. theres like 4 offshoots and im obsessed w all of them. we had to make ocs about this one. i’m excited to eventually add more to this series

actually that’s one of the scenes i’m most excited for and most dreading adding. we made a backstory oc and im SO attached to him and im excited to post a thing out there w him but. ough. whatever cringe is dead i’ll get there eventually and brute force my way into attaching you to our funky little robot guy

also love that this fic forced me to be decided on a docv characterization that i have to stick to. he may be a canon guy to martyn’s vtuber lore but he’s my oc now too

Blindsided

(Sept, 2k, treebark week, ongoing) (link)

pirate au and royal au based on a big secret and also stuffing a guy in a box and it's all stupid dramatic literally what else do you want or need in life

this is my wife. my favorite. my most beloved. blindsided gives me new illnesses and diseases. i have just one scene to write before i can update it and then i can continue unleashing her. god i love this fic the drama of it is SO fun.

the funny thing abt blindsided is i know all the plot chronologically but now how to Present it which is part of why i haven’t continued too much. eventually i will but until then know that one of the scenes im sitting on which has been fully written is one i think about constantly. hopefully when i post it cherri’ll let free the comic she did for it

i actually have the ending of this fic written i just need to get there lmfao. second on my priority list after smop i think

Cradle of the Leviathan

(Sept, 1.5k, treebark week, oneshot) (link)

i just love mer aus man. whats the point of it all if you cant have mer aus. just get a big ol fish

i have the ending of this au written as well and literally so little of the lead up. but this is pretty low on my priorities. i think this one stands just fine on its own. mer aus are nice like that

we actually have a few mer aus but for now i’ll be focusing on this one. i do have a few sweet post story things written for this one. maybe one day i’ll write enough to post em lmao

Lamplight AU

(2022-present, 47k, treebark, ongoing) (link)

renchanting dnd/fantasy au, martyn's a paladin and ren's a lamp

so i started this au last year. my wrapped last year said my total was 20k, so that means this year's total is.... 27k!

and… it was just lamplight’s birthday and i did all my appreciation for the fic and its readers then, but god. i love this fic so much and i love you all who have read it and been so kind about it. the amount of popularity it has makes it a bit nerve wracking to work on, but i still really want to see it finished. i hope to see the bulk of it done by this time next year!

Six Sentence Sunday

six sentence sunday is a challenge where i try to post six sentences i wrote that week every sunday, to keep me writing every week of the year! i do it over on my writing blog, @driflew

i did not keep up on my six sentences,,, i had a lot of sunday fencing tournaments. i did for ~33 weeks this year! thats a pretty good amount! i’ll have to be more on top of it next year tho

unpublished work

the last few years i havent included unpublished work, but with the extreme bulk of it, i wanted to note it down. cherri @/cherrifire and i have been writing a lot back and forth at each other in discord dms this year, and i wanted to include those in my count! bc holy fucking shit is there a lot of them

i didn’t include collab pieces, just pieces i wrote alone. i also only included the renchanting aus i share w cherri and scarian aus i share w flowey, nothing else—no unfinished lamplight or other independent pieces or oneshots, no original fiction for class, nothing. i also missed a few u haven’t moved to docs yet. so i’m lowballing by a few. thousands. of words

the total for those is...... 135k words! there is,,, something wrong with me

total and end notes

our total this year is...

187512 words!

that might be my highest word count yet! because i caught treebark disease. wild.

something really fun about this year to me is i really loved everything i wrote.

if you want to get me a gift or support me on my birthday… maybe try reading my work and reblogging it or leaving a comment! you can find my writing at driflew or skelew on ao3, follow my writing blog at @driflew, or even consider tipping my kofi!

thank you for sticking with me and supporting me this year! i really appreciate it! hopefully i can break 100k next year too!

[blkkizzat]

Hey lovely. Long time no anon! I've had a shitty day. Not from anything in particular. I'm just PMSing real fuckin hard and my body fuckin hates me so! The excellent news is that my book is almost finished (about 4 chapters left til major editing). The better news is that I am about to get myself wine drunk, watch a few episodes of the boys season 4. The most absolutely horrendous amount of smut in one night. That being said...

I'm thinking.

Which JJK man is the most sensitive to you having a shitty day? Like no real reason. Nothing happened. The day just sucked.

We all know it's Nanami. Buuuuutt I feel like Geto would surprise us. Like he seems like he doesn't really care about shit. And maybe he doesn't but he's phenomenal at faking it. Like Geto wants to relax with us. Make the day feel less shitty. So he runs a bath for two. With episom salts cause he knows how to make you feel good. When we get out. He puts lotion on us first. Helps us through a nighttime routine. Tells is it'll all look better in the morning. Wakes us up with cunnilingus and a smirk that said 'I told you it would look better in the morning'

- a very drained 🧠

awe 🧠, babie doll im sorry you are feeling worn down. we moon cycle twins though cause im pmsing too. had a bad headache yesterday, feeling better today tho so i hope you are too!!

omg i just finished the boys s4 like a week ago! be sure to tell me what you think once you're done, shit is poppin AWF lmfao.

but yas you know nanami has a sixth sense to our needs, that goes without saying. he already knows our favorite everything and has a plan on deck to make the remaining hours of the day wonderful for us.

Also i love your hc on geto because to me he also gives twin energy in the sense of he wants to relax and experience things with you, so y'all also have matching robes and pjs for after the bath.

choso will have puppy energy. so he will def notice almost as quickly as nanami but his way of making you feel better is to cling to you, reassure you, very vocally expressive and will totally lift you up in that way. he's also an empath so if you are crying he will cry with you and hold you so you just feel very much seen, understood and validated.

gojo i think he would be rather clueless. like it would take a few lackluster responses for him to notice but once he realizes hes definitely trying to cheer you up. no one can make you laugh like him so he's doing or saying something stupid and you're now crying from gut busting giggles fits rather than whatever went wrong that day.

toji is actually likely more perceptive than nanami tbh. the reason for that is because of body language shifts which he notices because of the uber enhanced perception from heavenly restriction. however the problem is he doesn't know what to do from there. he doesn't wanna come off crass and piss you off more. and if he makes a crude joke at an attempt at humor and you cry more that would be even worse. i think though sense he would be able to sense the tension in you and as his love language is definitely physical touch—he would likely wordlessly just pull you into his arms and give you a huge bear hug. you know how weighted blankets soothe people? like that. he's like a huge weighted blanket and he's not gonna let you go until he feels you completely relax in his arms. trueform!sukuna is just as perceptive tbh, he just doesn't care. i feel like he expects everyone to be as self-sufficient and self-regulate emotions by not expressing them (lol toxic) like he does. however he also knows everyone falls short of him so he will give you your space to mop, cry, etc. thinking you are weak so you just need to let it out. However, i do imagine if you'd been moping longer than usual or to the point that it annoys him, he will try to comfort you in his own way. i feel that would be the way of giving you something to do for him. sukuna probably figures you must be bored if you have the time to waste being sad. i imagine he'd make you read to him or maybe even have you draw him a bath which he'd consequently would just drag you into. or perhaps he'd just blend ur guts up on his two cocks... you wanna cry? he'd give you something to cry about.

tail floofs to make you feel better babes <333

[feuqueerfire]

Wandee Goodday Ep 7 Live Blogging

Whoop whoop 2nd week in a row that I'm managing to watch the show right after it airs. Although I did consider not watching it for 1-2 days so that I can finish my binge watch of Unknown (I'm so excited to see petty Yuan in ep 8 heh) but thought I should just watch this one before I find out everything that happens through tumblr and twitter posts.

I'm in sort of an angsty mood, esp after the last few Unknown eps that I've watched, so I'm expecting some angst here too. Eps 5-6 of Wandee have been happy and fun while they ignore their feelings and problems, so I need some of that to burst and cause issues.

Ep 7 (June 15)

7-1

showing a little support for psychiatry, though idk how helpful it is to make somebody go when they don't really wanna go

Does Yak want a mouth kiss if he wins?

Yak finds a photo of Ter and Dee in a book and it casts doubt in his mind ig

ohhh Dee was planning on throwing it out but in the end kept it and he had even written "love Dr. Ter the most" on the back

pls Kao's frustration as the audience stand-in

"...might lead to losing them"

Did Ter hear the part that gives away that they're not real bfs

well, he knows they're not dating fr anyway but still the audacity to confront Yak like this

Ter using his knowledge about Dee gained for the past 8 years against Yak, agh. like you knew him all this time and must have known he liked you and yet now that he's finally moving on, you can somehow take action? piss off

both Unknown and Wandee have boxing

what is up with these grown ass adults not being able to live without seeing each other for a few days T.T you shouldn't even be thinking of not going to Japan bc you won't see Yak for a couple days

Why is Dee basically he sniffing Yak's armpit in the gym showers

7-2

Yei just watching Yak sneak out lmfao

fuck I think Ter's gonna somehow be here? I didn't watch the preview but I saw a screencap of Ter and Dee while Dee was in the tiger outfit or whatever, though I think somebody mentioned it was at Ter's place

speak of the devil...

oh, Yak's got a keycard to Dee's place, did we know that?

why is Dee at Ter's bruh

let's fucking kill Ter, I actually cannot anymore

I do think it's funny how neither of them are commenting on Dee's literal tiger sex roleplay costume lmao he's even got a headband!

Dee needs to snap out of it, get up, and leeeeeaaaave

now Kao is here too?

the costume isn't for you to appreciate, Ter stoppppp >:((((

why the fuckkkk did Ter start leaning in, I actually need this man dead and gone, get off my damn screen

and then spilling wine on himself and wanting Dee to help cleanup and now he's practically naked in his fucking boxers, I wish I could be normal about just disliking Ter but I am immature about my hatred for him the same way he's immature about his ways trying to get Dee

TER IS OPENING THE DOOR IN HIS BOXERS?!?!? AND DEE'S ALSO IN HIS TIGER COSTUME IM GONNA LOSE MY SHIT AGHHH

[Linguistics] oh damn Yak uses meung with Ter in anger

aw man T.T I get Yak, why did Dee say Yak always uses violence? I don't recall Yak being violent before this???

Yak breaking up, returning the keycard, taking the necklace back, ouchhhhhhhhh

Yak leaning on Taem

Aw man, Dee being sad at the necklace being gone

I think I would like it if for the rest of the ep + some of next ep, they're separate about doing their own stuff and missing each other and spending time with Ter & Taem only to realize they don't feel the same as they used to and when they come together again (hopefully sometimes next ep, I don't want it to be solved this ep tbh), it's with real feelings and confession. I think I also want Dee to confess/start the conversation since he's the one who fucked up (I know I ragged on Ter but how did Dee even let it go through all those steps omg)

fuck I saw 1 second of the preview and aghhhh I hate Ter, who could've guessed. I have some stuff to do so I'll be back for the next 2 parts later, though they're quite short compared to the first two parts.

7-3

back to watching but I'm having lunch so I probably won't type much

T.T

Ter realized his feelings alright. i don't know that i believe you lol, though maybe it's true since Ter's drunk while he's saying it

okay Ter accidentally fell, I thought he was gonna attack Dee from the 0.2 sec preview

dang, Yak's the one who leaned back and didn't kiss Taem. It seems like Taem wouldn't have been opposed to it?? Did she fall for him some time in the past few eps

7-4

oops was checking at the bottom timing bar how many minutes the show actually is before previews start (9mins) but got spoiled for the last scene of the ep

Damn, Yak's imagination of Dee and TEr really has him facing a humiliating defeat against Luke's character

I get P'Yei like despite everything going on in Yak's life, this is still his job and him winning was necessary for himself, the gym, money, etc. or at least put up a fair fight, not whatever that was bc of a fight with his fwb-fake bf that he has real feelings for

Aw, Wandee came back immediately and found Yak at his favourite place or whatever

Yak crying nooo

why am I suddenly paranoid that this is also Yak's imagination lmao

ah, indeed Yak had asked for Dee's first kiss

and Dee kisses him even though he lost

the kisses are mid but it's fine

damn, a hospital ball next ep? and how is Ter even in the show still wtf

I wanted angst and sadness and I got that but the way we got there was fairly contrived. Ter's sliminess I understand but Dee going through so many steps without just... leaving is like ?? I get that he may still have feelings for Ter that makes him not think straight or whatever but c'mon... am I supposed to believe Dee would actually go to Ter's place and have dinner there in his fucking sex roleplay clothes that he put on to have a candlelit dinner with Yak? and the violence comment was like... no? Yak's pathetic fight was also like... why.

The first kiss was also not impactful because we've established for 7 episodes that it's something very monumental to Dee + it's something that he wants to do with only somebody he really likes, so to have it 1) be a "consolation prize" and 2) come before they discuss their feelings or anything is resolved feels incomplete. It's not a grand or romantic moment the way their first kiss should have been. I don't wanna go back to goofy dance show or whatever next ep...

idk, this ep was a bit of disappointment in terms of storytelling and the way we're exploring emotions, I hope they can turn it around. They have 5 more episodes and so theoretically they have time to do stuff well but also... they have time to drag everything out lol

The necklace though T.T

[hekkoto]

Friend! :D would you like to pet this lil bby? ^^ I definetelly do [poor insects and animals I find, Im always petting them >XD even if its some spider, moth or frog ;D] Hi darklings, here I come with another update! Sorry you had to wait, I wanted to manage to do everything before saying more ;p so, I got my meds for ADHD! I hope it will help me focus more on arts and such ^^ honestly just after one pill I can say its better! I have lowest dose right now as Im just starting but I have appointment in like 2 or 3 weeks and we will talk if Im feeling fine and if its enough for me. I guess I will be getting higher dose and I really hope it can change my life. Honestly, for now I can say it will – I have 0 side effects and even this small dose help me think more clearly. Maybe I will be able to finally do stuff? ;p there is some issue with aviablity of this med but when I will be taking them regularly I will be able to plan how I gonna get it [huge thanks to my husband's friend help who bought it cause only pharmacy which had it was on the other side of Warsaw >XD] Oh btw, Im getting a lot of financial support from my parents so I can go on therapy also my fridge isnt empty ;p Im super grateful for how supportive they are, they are really trying help me as much as possible <3 its really making things easier as I dont need to worry so much for surviving ;D hopefully I will be able to be more chill thanks to it, financial struggles were really fucking up my head I plan to go back to regular posting stuff, both arts and videos; first I gonna finish everything commissions and Patreon print/mail related so just a few days and I will finish this all ^^ I really much catch up on stuff! Im feeling really good, its such nice feeling to not feel like shit ;p wanna support my evil dark empire? Im accepting souls on Patreon and Ko-fi! -> Hekkoto Huge thanks to all of my Patrons and people who donate <3

[vtoriacore-rbs]

rant rant rant rant rant rant rant

tw: su*cide + OD mention

having (diagnosed so don't @ me) bipolar disorder and being on your period is so funny cause one hour ago i was violently fucking crying like i couldn't breathe and wanted to actually kill myself like i was gonna OD on sleeping pills (insomnia gang wya) for no reason at all like nothing happened but now im feeling very happy happy happy and im getting back to writing i just finished taking a relaxing shower life is so good again but this gonna be ruined in a few hours i just know™ ive also been in a shitty "im not particularly feeling anything right now" mood for the past WEEK and i gotta pretend like my mental health is A* in front of my parents and friends bc I don't wanna concern them and it's so draining but fuck all that I am now THRIVING RAHHHHH I can do ANYTHING 🗣️ im so happy i cried too bc i wasn't able to for the past week and it's so nice to just cry loving life again

[arkhamknightz]

may i request andrew proposing to the reader (mayb they are walking by a lake @ night and it’s snowing)

love grows !

↳ in which andrew proposes to u ^_^ (ask above)

pronouns used: they/them

warnings: not proofread , lowercase intended , bad writing

notes: i hope u all enjoy this! tbh im really proud of it, and i think it turned out really cute :)))

it was cold, you and andrew had just finished eating at one of your favorite restaurants and he wanted to take a walk, he held your hand in his as you walked through a local park.

"what was the occasion, love?" you looked up at him, curiosity packed in your gaze. andrew looked down at you, brushing away the little snowflakes that had fallen on your jacket and he smiled at you. eyes full of nothing but love and admiration.

"can i not take my partner out on a nice dinner date?" he let out a small chuckle, pulling you into his arms and resting his head on top of yours, slowly rubbing your back.

"are you leaving to go film again soon?" you felt him shake his head no and you held onto him a little tighter. "i love you" he looked down at you and smiled. "and i hope you know how much i do." you looked back up at him, a wide smile on your face. "i love you too, so so much."

he took your hand in his and you both silently walked around the lake, watching the snow fall at your feet. "here's the little bench we used to sit at during the spring" you brushed away the snow that had fallen onto the bench and you sat down. the cold hitting your senses but you stayed sat down anyways and watched as andrew smiled at you, brushing away the spot next to you and sat down.

"can i talk to you about something?" he asked quietly, much so that you almost couldn't hear him if it wasn't for the quiet night.

"of course, you can always talk to me" you laid your head on his arm, feeling him open his arm up and letting you curl into his side. as well as giving him the change to rub your side.

"how often do you think about the future?" you sat for a moment, confused with the question, although you answer nonetheless. "a lot, why do you ask?" he let out a small sigh of contentedness, his heart swelling with nothing but love and anxiety. "i've thought about it a lot recently, what it would be like for us." he looked down at you. "what do you think our futures gonna be like?" he asked in a quiet voice.

"well, for starters i see us getting out of our apartment, as much as i love it i wanna get a pet, maybe a dog," you let out a small laugh, "maybe a kid? in the future perhaps, i just know i want a future with you." andrew smiled and stood up.

he held out his hand and pulled you up from your seat. he walked over to one of the street lamps in the park and got down on one knee in front of you. your eyes filling with tears. "i've been planning this for the past few weeks, not really being able to gather the words i've wanted to use, there's a billion things i could say to you right now, explaining how much freer i've felt since i met you, and how happy i've been."

"but, kneeling in front of you i'm losing my mind, i wanna tell you everything and more, i wanna spill my guts about how much i love you, and how much i wanna spend the rest of my life waking up in bed next to you, kissing you good morning. or how many mornings i wanna have in the future where we have a mini us running around, jumping up and down on our bed on christmas. i want it all, i wanna be able to experience the rest of my life with you beside me." you wiped a tear that had fallen onto his cheek, smiling down at him with tears in your own eyes, falling down your cheeks.

"so, y/n y/l/n, will you marry me?" you nodded your head vigorously, tears running down your face as andrew slid the ring on your finger, picking you up suddenly and spinning you around, the sound of laughter filling your ears. "i love you so so much" you cupped his cheeks and kissed him, snow falling to the ground around the both of you. it felt as if you were the only people in the universe. just you and your fiancé.

[userholland]

look at me | t.h.

kinktober prompt ⌁ mirror sex + masturbation (f)

pairing ⌁ college!boyfriend!tom x fem!reader

summary ⌁ trying to unwind after midterms, you tend to your needs when your roommate is gone, but your boyfriend comes by to congratulate you on a tough week. instead, he walks in on you eagerly getting rid of your stress－ in his own ways, he can help you with that.

warnings (?) ⌁ 18+ smut, minors dni!, tom being super cheeky, reader being super shy, teasing and lots of teasing, smut warnings below cut !

word count ⌁ 2k

a/n ⌁ not sure if this will keep up while i have school, but i hope to post as many prompts + tropes as i can! this is not a request series so please do not send any to my inbox. but, hope y'all enjoy and remember to love yourself <3 im turning my blog into more nsfw, i think i am comfortable with it, but im filtering out my nsfw content on @bitemetommy !

⌁ masterlist

smut warnings ⌁ sub!reader + dom!tom, not using protection, use of sex toy (vibrator), spanking, nipple play, fingering, being caught masturbating, begging/praise kink for one another, cream-pie, cum play

It was difficult to not close your legs, barely letting your knees touch then forcing yourself to spread them wide open once more. Breaths left your mouth, so heavy and whiney.

Begging, moaning, mumbling to yourself, "C'mon... I wanna cum so bad... Fuck, I'm gonna cum."

Your baby-blue vibrator fit perfectly in your tight hole as your fingers from your opposite hand worked your swollen clit. Cum trailed down your pussy, lubricating your asshole that clenched as you inched closer to your orgasm.

Eyebrows pushing together, your mouth slowly gapping, legs shaking and sweat coating your chest and forehead-- you were ready to cum. So ready that you let out a small grunt, curling your toes as the coil in your stomach tightened.

"Ah, Ah! Yes, fucking cumming... I'm gonna cum!" You said under your breath, your fingers swirling against your clit as you pushed the vibrator in and out of your wet slit. It was the high you were searching for after this week, all you wanted was to let go and feel yourself release in just a few seconds.

So close. So fucking close.

But, just at the brink of your orgasm, there were two knocks at the door. Before you could gather yourself, waves of pleasure coursed throughout your body. Whiny while you pulled away the vibrator, you quickly pulled the blanket over your body half, as you were still clothed on your top half.

"Babe?"

You huffed, "Y-Yeah?" You grasped the blanket, the orgasm quickly fading.

Tom, your boyfriend of 2 years, walked in with a cheeky smile painted on his freckly face, "What was going on?" He asked, putting his backpack by the door.

There was a warmth in his brown eyes, the loose curls pushed back on the top of his head. That pearly white smile that could make any bad day a good one. Well, ironically in this situation, you wanted to mark this day as the worst moment in your life.

He knew what you were doing, but he wanted to watch you heat up when you were too shy to admit it with confidence. It was cute to him, how you would stumble over your words and get flustered. While it had been two years of dating, finding out each other's sweet spots and kinks, you still couldn't expose everything-- and he loved knowing there was more to you.

"N-Nothing, nothing." You cleared your throat, making sure your vibrator was hid under your blanket. The tingling between your thighs bothered you, barely able to sit still from how the orgasm still stuck with you.

He smirked, "Really?"

Fuck.

Your heart raced, feeling the side of the bed sink as he sat on it, and just as the blood came back to your head-- the vibrator slipped off the bed and fell into the carpeting on the floor.

Teeth sinking into your bottom lip, you kept in any excuse you could think of as he reached down to grab it.

Tom chuckled, amused at the fresh cum on your toy.

"Did you get to finish, babe?" His voice getting lower.

You shyly nodded, too embarrassed to get out a verbal response.

"Do you want me to help you cum?"

A few seconds of silence, but you nodded again.

You gulped, "Yes... yes."

He didn't think anything else than to make you cum. However way and any amount of times until you were satisfied. You liked when he pushed your limits, testing your stamina when he got rough and the overstimulation took over your body like you were a puppet and he controlled the strings.

As Tom moved up on the bed, he put the vibrator on your side table before taking his fingers to move your hair out of your face. Sweat still covered your forehead, but he knew you were just working yourself hard.

His lips tasted sweet, always soft.

Gently laying you back down, you ran your fingers through his curls, but you gapped your mouth when you felt his free hand move the blanket from your legs and the cold air in the room hit your skin.

You closed your lips on his finally, kissing him again and concentrating on his tongue trying to enter your mouth. Your nose brushed against his, but you gasped once more when you felt his two, thick fingers enter your pussy.

"Still fucking wet... fuck me." He groaned.

Whimpering, you nodded, hungry to meet his kiss again, "I love your fingers, baby... I love when your fingers fuck me so good." You whined.

Tom smirked on your lips, giving a playful bite to your bottom lip then slipping his tongue back to press on yours. While his kiss was slow, his fingers thrusted in and out at a faster pace. He took them out to rub your clit, aching to be touched.

"You like when I rub your clit, baby?"

You struggled to response, "Y-yes. Yes, rub my clit... just like that."

"Better than doing it yourself, huh? You get to sit back and I get to watch you cum on my fingers..." He said, sliding his two fingers back in. You held back your gasp, but your eyes were screwed tight before opening wide. He lowly chuckled, the speed of his fingers moving faster and the spongey texture rubbing on the tips of them.

"Ah, I'm gonna cum, please let me cum!" You whimpered between your teeth, so eager and naive that he'd let you give in right now.

"Not yet, baby... just hold it." He groaned, the wet sounds from your pussy making him harder, "But, I bet you'd rather cum on my cock, right?" He trailed－ still fucking your pussy with his fingers... just his fingers.

"Y-yes. Yes, please!" You yelped.

Tom stopped, "What do you want? Tell me, baby."

"I-I wanna cum on your big cock. Please... make me cum." You whimpered, your pussy clenching around his fingers as he stilled them once more.

He was satisfied, helping you up on your feet and you glanced down seeing his hard push against his grey sweatpants. You stood, your knees like jelly, and watched him suck your cum off those same fingers.

"Turn around, babe." He asked nicely, as nice as he could get right now.

You smiled, doing as he said, then noticing you were faced toward your body mirror by your closet door. You watched Tom, shifting behind you and he leaned against the bed so just his butt was against the mattress.

In the reflection, his hands trailed up your body as you felt his kisses on your shoulder blade. He carefully peels your t-shirt off, your nipples already hard and goosebumps raising on your skin. Then, he leads his hands down your hips, hooking his fingers around sides of your panties.

Suddenly, you were completely naked-- seeing your body in the reflection with Tom's hands roaming from behind it. You turned around to him, pushing against him to meet him for a heated kiss.

Just like he did to you, you pulled off his shirt from the bottom trim, exposing the hickies you left from the previous week. Your fingers traced over them, the love bruises, then your hand slid into his sweats.

No boxers.

You giggled, his hardening cock was warm, but you could barely make your fingers meet around his base. When he was hard-- God, you wanted him in your mouth.

Sharing another slow kiss, Tom accidentally let a low groan slip into your mouth when you moved your thumb over his red tip, pre-cum dripping down his cock. He quickly slapped your ass, echoing the small room, and you bit his lip from the harsh hit on your sensitive skin.

"You wanna watch me fuck you, baby? Huh? So, we can both... watch you cum?" He whispered, kissing you in-between his dirty talk.

You nodded, your noses brushing once more, "Yeah, baby... Yes."

He slapped your ass again, but it made you giggle this time.

You turn around, facing yourself again in the full mirror. You tilted your head at your bodies pressed together, the clothes scattered on the floor as well. Tom sat back on the end of your bed, pumping his cock in his hand and melting at the sight of cum trailing down your slit.

"So fucking needy for me..." He said, another slap.

You ran your hands over your breasts, groping them-- squeezing then pulling on your nipples. Tom positioned your hips perfectly above him before sinking you onto his cock, very slowly, but bottoming out.

Your nails grazed his legs, spreading more as he lifted you enough to see the full base of his hard then pushing you back down.

"Fucking feel amazing... Fuck－" Tom hissed, "Want my cock, baby?"

Another thrust.

"Keep fucking me, baby. Your big cock fucking me... I want you." You slowly trailed, whimpers in-between and moans following.

Tom ran his hands up your body, straightening your back and replaced your hands on your breasts with his. He lightly grazed his thumbs against your nipples, keeping them hard and stimulating you even more as he kept pushing you down on his cock at a pace.

Your eyes fluttered, already edging yourself, but holding back by clenching around his cock. Nothing left your mouth-- that's how amazing he left, the slapping of your skin pushing you further.

"Look at me fucking the hell out of you, babe. Fucking beautiful." He groaned against your ear.

Rolling your eyes back, you struggled to focus back on the image of the two of you having sex right in front of you. It got you off even more, seeing his head buried in your neck and his thumbs still working your nipples.

"Moan... fucking moan for me." Tom commanded, forcing another thrust deep.

It's as if you were free, yelps and high-pitched whimpers leaving your mouth one by one, all of it a mess and at once. Motivating Tom, he pushed and pulled on your hips harder, his thrusts becoming sloppier.

You couldn't catch your breath, your vision foggier and a coil wrapping in your lower stomach-- like a spring ready to pop out.

"Tommy, I-I wanna cum." You grit your teeth, "Let me cum for you-- Fuck! I'm gonna cum on your cock!" You huffed, leaning back even more. Just enough of an angle to feel his tip hit your g-spot.

He waited until the last second, pound after pound, just holding on until the pressure between you was too much.

"Cum inside me, baby. Please!" You practically cried out, enough for anyone passing in the hall to hear.

Hearing a simple yet whiney 'please' was enough to send Tom over the edge, stilling himself fully inside you as pumps of cum settled within your walls. Cum dripped down your thigh, on your tippy toes while Tom held your waist tight-- his fingers still pressed into your skin, losing his grip as the seconds went by.

Your body's were hot, sticking to each other from the sweat, but Tom sat back down for both of you two be able to relax. Huff after huff, with his head leaning on your shoulder, the two of you caught your breathes, his cock warm from remaining inside your cunt from standing still.

While everything was still cloudy to you, Tom's kisses trailed up your neck and you found your hand at the nape of his neck to lightly pull at his soft curls. Just in this moment, everything became ethereal and you found a strong sense of comfort as Tom wrapped his arms around your body like velcro to felt.

You nuzzled your nose against his, taking a few moments of silence and the blissful feeling settling in like a warm, fuzzy feeling in your chest. Giggling and your legs still on fire; tracing around the light freckles across his chest.

This is all you could ask for, held perfectly tight by your boyfriend and all your stress that once filled throughout your body out of your mind.

[spicy-tomato]

Can i pls req dream being reader's sugar daddy :O - 🌼

sorry this took a hot sec ive been working on this one for a while cause i really liked the idea, so here you go :)) it ended up being like 2k words so im sorry

You had it all, anything you could want and more. Wanted to go to rome? Done, your plane leaves tomorrow. Dream absolutely spoiled you and you couldnt be more happy about it. It started off as a thing to help you with rent, but the longer you did it the more you enjoyed being able to get what you wanted when you wanted. Today was your weekly lunch with dream, you had both agreed that at least once a week he would take time off to get lunch with you, it made you smile to see him take time for you. As the tease you were, you decided to wear something a little revealing to tease him since he had cancelled your shopping trip with him the day before. You put on a low cut crop top and some shorts that show a little too much before fixing your hair. You hear you phone ding, getting a text from dream,

Daddy dream <3

Hey baby, i'm out front whenever youre ready to go

You smile and put your phone in your pocket before walking out to his car and getting in. you kiss his cheek quickly “hi daddy” you giggle and smile at him

“Hi sweetheart” he looks you up and down before smirking “like the outfit, all for me?” you giggle and nod before he starts to drive to the restaurant, one hand on your thigh. “Do you know what you want? You know the rule, anything you want no matter the price. And after that we can go shopping to make up for my cancelling yesterday.” you smile at him

“I know, and we dont have to dream, we can just hang out. Its been a while since we did that. Maybe we can go somewhere for you to make it up to me instead” he smiles and squeezes your thigh as he pulls into the parking lot of the restaurant.

“Anywhere you want baby, only the best for you.” you look down and blush, moving over to lean your head on his shoulder as he moves a hand to pet your hair. “Ill take you anywhere anytime and get you anything you want.” you cant lie, at times you had thought about being more than just his sugar baby, having a real romantic relationship, but he was always so busy that it made it seem almost impossible. Sure he took time out to be with you but it was never a lot unless you were traveling. He didnt tell you a lot about his job either, just knew that he had a large following and that he didnt want anything serious and put his partner in a bad situation, but damn if you havent thought about him coming home to you and calling you his.

“Baby? You okay? You zoned out.” he waves a hand in front of your face and you blink back to reality.

“Yeah, sorry i just got a little distracted. Lets go get some food!” you pull away from him and he gets out, walking around to open your door for you and holds a hand out to help you. “Thank you” you smile and take his hand as you step out, he closes the door behind you and puts an arm around your waist, pulling you into his side as you both walk up to get a table. You get seated immediately and he pulls your chair out for you. “Is there a single flaw with you?” you ask genuinely, he just laughs and shakes his head.

“Theres a bunch you dont know about me, sweetheart.” you roll your eyes as the waitress comes back with your mimosa and his water, asking for your orders. He orders for you and him before she walks off to put them in. He always knows what you want and orders it for you. It makes you smile that he likes to take care of you. You shake that thought away and go back to mindlessly talking with him, waiting on the food. It comes shortly and you both start to eat. “Where do you want to go? Japan? Italy? Oh we havent been to paris in a while, maybe there.”

“I think paris would be great, its always so pretty this time of year, maybe we can have dinner on the eiffel tower again!” your eyes light up at the thought of going back to paris. Last time you went was last spring, you both walked around and had the most wonderful time people watching and shopping. You take another bite and he looks like hes about to say something before he stops himself and looks down. “What is it? Is something wrong?” you look at him concerned, scared you messed something up.

“Its nothing darling, dont worry.” you both finish up lunch and he pays before helping you up and leading you back to the car. “I have something id like to ask you when we get to paris if thats okay, its nothing bad i promise its just something ive been meaning to ask for a while is all.” you nod as he opens the door for you and helps you in. “now, a pretty girl like you needs pretty new clothes for the trip, lets go get you some.” he smiles at you as he gets in, resting a hand back on your thigh as he starts the car, leading you both to the mall.

You spend hours in there going to different stores and trying things on, him getting you whatever you wanted without any hesitation. You walk back to the car with armfulls of bags and a couple new suitcases. “Thank you so much daddy, youre the best.” you kiss his cheek and he turns a little red.

“Its no problem baby, why dont you stay over tonight and we can leave in the morning to head to the airport. I can help you pack and we can watch a movie.” you smiles and nod, putting your bags in the back of the car and your new suitcases in the trunk.

“Id like that…” you think for a second about how nice it would be to wake up next to him every day and how nice it is to fall asleep next to him when it happens, even if when you did wake up after he wasnt next to you. The cold bed always made you remember that you would never be more than this, not that this was bad in the least its just sometimes you wish you could be more. He drives you both back to his apartment building and helps you out, grabbing most of your bags, only leaving you to grab the suitcases as you enter the building. He lived on the top floor in the penthouse, expected for how much money he had. You set your stuff down in his room, your new clothes already laid out nicely thanks to him. He walks up behind you and hugs you from behind.

“Youll look so good in all of those baby, gonna be the prettiest one in paris.” he kisses your neck softly before pulling away and taking your hand, leading you to sit on the part of the bed not covered by clothes. “Let me go run you a bath and you can pick out a movie.” you nod and he walks to the bathroom, leaving you alone on the bed. You turn on the tv and start scrolling through netflix looking for a movie, finally deciding as he walks back in and picks you up. You giggle and wrap your arms around his neck, moving your head to rest on his chest as he carries you to the bathroom. He sets you on the counter and takes your shirt off carefully, leaving kisses down your neck and chest and he moves down to take your shorts off. You lift yourself gently to help him take your shorts off. He takes them off quickly before nipping and kissing your inner thighs, ghosting over your core. You whine and try to move closer to him before he presses your hips down into the counter.

“Stay still baby, dont wanna have to punish you. Daddy just wants his desert.” you nod quickly and stay still, his head diving to softly kiss your clit, causing you to whine. He chuckles and starts to slowly eat you out, almost at a teasing pace. You whine and grip the counter, trying to keep from pulling his hair. He pulls away and smiles, “good girl, being so good and not pulling my hair. Just letting daddy eat you up.” after he says that his hands move down to your thighs open as he starts to eat you out like a man starved. You let out a loud moan and throw your head back, your hands moving to his hair and tugging closer. At this point he didnt care about you pulling his hair, to blissed out by hearing your sweet moans and tasting you. Your cries became louder as he dragged you closer to the edge. as you were almost there he stopped, causing a loud whine from you as he moves up to face you. He looked like heaven like this, face covered in your slick with eyes dark from lust.

“Now my good little girl, i want you to get off the counter and bend over for daddy.” you quickly move off the counter and do as your told. “Such a perfect little girl, i want you to watch as i make you feel good, got it? You look away and i stop,” he chuckles and grabs your neck after you nod. His hand moves from your neck to your hair to hold you in place, making eye contact with him through the mirror.

“Such a precious little pet for me, arent you?” you whine as he lines up with your entrance, teasing you, causing you to press your hips back against him. He smacks your ass roughly and pulls you against his chest by your hair. “Thats not very nice bun, its almost like you want me to leave you all worked up.’’ he smirks at you before pulling you roughly back against him, ripping a scream from your throat. He sets a brutal pace, leaving no time for you to adjust to him. He keeps the pace, your legs starting to shake as he brings you back to the edge of your orgasm before quickly throwing you over it. You let out a cry of his name, trails of tears starting to run from your eyes as he keeps going.

“Pretty little bunny, always so good and tight for me. Gonna breed you so good. Fuck you until i know it takes.” he tugs your hair roughly and starts to bite and suck at your neck, leaving marks in his wake. You whine and cry, moving your hands to tug at his hair. “So close princess, gonna fill you up so good.” he moves a hand to your clit to punctuate his statement, causing a louder cry to come from you as you tip over the edge once again. His hips start to stutter as he fills you up, riding out his high with shallow thrusts letting out a few more quiet moans before pulling out of you carefully. You whine and tug at his hair as he does so. He picks you up carefully as he pulls away.

“i figured we could take a bath and then cuddle before we pack and figure out what time we should leave for the airport.” you nod and he carries you carefully over to the tub, setting you down carefully in it before getting and sitting behind you. He starts to wash your hair as you slowly drift off to sleep. You wake up briefly as he lifts you from the tub and carries you to the bed. He moves the blankets back and sets you down gently before crawling in next to you , pulling the blankets back over you.

“Be my partner,” he says as you turn towards him

“Only if we can still go to paris” you giggle and he nods, kissing the top of your head before you both drift off.

[rinstars]

hey is everything alright??? you kinds disappeared on us. hope everything’s okay

hiiii everyone! everything's fine. now. at the very least, everything is starting to be okay. i'm sorry i disappeared for a while without saying anything or giving u guys updates about why and if i was ever coming back. there's probably a lot of questions you guys have so ill just break it down in a single post, making it easier for u guys to find what you wanna know.

1. what happened and where were u?

thing is, the last time i was here i mentioned something about being sick and that was originally the only time i needed off. i was just waiting to get better and it wasn't supposed to stretch into a month. however, a very unfortunate incident happened where i had to be hospitalized and monitored as i sustained an injury to my already very weak knee. growing up, my right knee has always been very prone to dislocation but it wasnt too serious to the point that i could still join cheerleading and excel in it. it wasnt until i was doing a dance required for one of my classes and my knees knocked and snapped that i fell so hard crying when i realized this time it was.. bad. i had a surgery that wasn't anything too crazy and got put in a cast until i was fully recovered bc simply popping it back to place like they always did stopped working. that, too, was fine. but finding out i'd have to take it easy on dancing and possibly cut off anything that has to do with the hardcore dancing i was used to for the rest of my life to make sure it wouldn't get any worse than it already was literally depressed me and put me in a slump and i just didn't want to answer anyone and tell people all about it yet. especially not on tumblr where i know people were waiting for something ive promised to finish. i was just very out of it and wasn't sure if i was even in the right mindset to ever continue being here at the time. so there's that but now that im able to tell u all about it, it means it's gotten a lot better and u dont have to worry about my knee bc it's healing fine :") im very thankful for all the messages and i read and appreciated all of them. im sorry it took me so long to respond.

2. what's gonna happen to cfm?

the very short answer to this is im not abandoning it and will continue writing the remaining 3 parts! dont worry! you can rest easy. however, ill take this in my own pace. ill work hard to post it in 2 weeks time but it's not a promise and i'm still wrapping my head around my whole knee thing and the start of my semester. but i love the series and it means a lot to me. i want to see it finished probably more than any of u do that's why you can count on the ending that will surely come. i know ive gone so long without updating and idek if any of u will still be reading it when i post it in a few weeks! but it's a risk im willing to take because we're so close to the end! and i am so excited for all of u to see how suna and yn end up living after where i left act x on hehehe

3. im not leaving and im sorry

i feel really horrible leaving u all in the dark for like more than a month now i think. that was a dick move. if an author i follow suddenly disappeared after what happened in act x i wouldve been mad and worried too so im really sorry. i didn't want to ignore any of u. i was just in a place where i didn't feel like moving. thank u to everyone who has been very understanding with me despite not knowing what was happening. to my friends on discord that i wasn't replying to, to all my followers and readers, to everyone who reached out to my friends hoping to know if im doing well, thank u sooo much and i love and appreciate u all so much.

im sorry this got so long but i hope i answered everything! if i missed anything, please just send me more asks, ill be happy to answer them hehe. love u!