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fairydxll · 3 years

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𝐏𝐫𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐉𝐨𝐲

𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐒𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧

↳ 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 | uh fighting? Lmk if anything.

↳ 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭 | 2124

𝐚/𝐧 ~ sorry I haven't updated this story in a while. But I'm back now!

masterlist | series masterlist | taglist

<- previous chapter

After a couple of days, Rory kinda got used to her new "home." Since Tony didn't know how long it would be before they went back to California, and with Pepper gone, they decided it was best if Rory just took a break from school.

Rory did eventually grow to like her new room. She was not allowed to leave the current floor, so she basically just spent all of her time there. Tony was gone all day and didn't get home until very late at night, meaning Rory had to have food delivered. She didn't mind, though. She figured that if they end up staying, she'll be able to tell Tony what all the good restaurants are.

Tony never told her anything about why they were here with the exception of, "Daddy has business."

So in order to pass the time, Rory would read or watch movies. She even took up drawing which turned out to be something she isn't too bad at.

This morning, Tony was already gone by the time Rory got up, so she got dressed and migrated to the living area. She sat on one of the couches near the large window and began sketching the tall buildings surrounding her.

As she finished the shading on one of the skyscrapers, she peered back up to see a tall man with long, black hair dressed in what looked like a Halloween costume standing on the terrace. Rory put down her sketchbook and looked closer. He was very tall and had large, golden horns that decorated the top of his head. She had no clue as to why this man was standing outside of her window on her father's building.

Rory looked to her right and noticed her father, in the Iron Man suit, land on the landing pad. The man just stood there, watching as machines swiftly removed the armor from Tony's body.

The strange man made his way into the room from the balcony. The room she was in. Rory didn't know what to do. She was frozen, scared. Instead of running away as any sane person would, Rory remained in her chair.

The large man entered the room. He studied his surroundings, his eyes eventually landing on Rory. "Who might you be?" He asked with disdain.

Rory could do nothing but blink at him, too afraid to speak. He opened his mouth to say more, only to be interrupted by the presence of Tony. "Rory, come here," Tony said blankly.

Rory immediately dropped her things and ran to her father's side. Tony wrapped his arm around her protectively, hoping to shield her with his body.

The man watched this all happen before finally speaking, "Please tell me you're going to appeal to my humanity." He spoke as if she weren't there.

"Actually I'm planning to threaten you," Tony responded. Rory couldn't sense any different emotions other than his natural sarcastic tone.

"You should have left your armor on for that," the man bantered, walking closer to Tony and Rory.

"Yeah," Tony pushed Rory behind the bar. "It's seen a bit of mileage, and you've got the glow stick of destiny." Rory crouched down below the bar and pulled her knees into her chest. She couldn't help but let tears stain her cheeks, afraid of what was happening. "Would you like a drink?" Tony asked the man as he walked behind the bar, actively trying to ignore you in hopes you wouldn't become a target.

Rory heard the other man laugh. "Stalling me won't change anything," he said. If Rory knew what it meant, she would describe their conversation as passive-aggressive.

"No, no. threatening." Tony began making himself a drink. "No drink? You sure? I'm having one.

"The Chitauri are coming. Nothing will change that." His words sounded like gibberish to Rory. "What have I to fear?"

Rory watched her father casually make a drink as if nothing was wrong. "The Avengers. That's what we call ourselves. We're sort of like a team." Rory had no idea what he was going on about. ""Earth's mightiest heroes"-type thing."

"Yes, I've met them."

"Yea," Tony's smile helped calm Rory down. He had to have the situation under control, right? "It takes us a while to get any traction, I'll give you that one. But let's do a headcount, here. Your brother, the demi-god," demi-god? "A super-soldier, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend." He secretly slipped a metal-looking band on each wrist.

"A man with breathtaking anger-management issues, a couple of master assassins, and you, big fella," none of his words were making any sense. "You've managed to piss off every single one of them."

"That was the plan."

"Not a great plan," Tony walked past you and out from the bar. "When they come, and they will, they'll come for you."

"I have an army."

"We have a hulk."

Rory finally gathered enough courage and stood up carefully. She peeked her head over the bar to watch the men while also trying to stay out of the way. Tony was approaching the man as they spoke; the man keeping his ground.

"I thought the beast had wandered off," the man said.

"You're missing the point. There's no throne," Tony's voice rose slightly. "There is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes and maybe it's too much for us, but it's all on you. Because if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damn well sure we'll avenge it."

Tony took a sip of his drink while the man took a few steps closer, a scowl spreading across his features. "How will your friends have time for me when they're so busy fighting you?"

For the first time since this scene began, Tony looked scared. The man brought his scepter-looking thing up and tapped it against Tony's chest with a clang noise. The man's face dropped for a second before he tried a second time, and then a third. "This usually works."

Tony didn't look scared anymore. "Well, performance issues, it's not uncommon. One out of five--" his sentence was cut short when the man forcefully grabbed Tony's throat and threw him onto the floor. Rory squealed and then immediately covered her mouth.

The man turned his head in Rory's direction with a puzzled look. He turned away from her as soon as Tony stood up and went for his neck again. "You will all fall before me," he said.

"Deploy!" Tony called before the man threw him out the window, shattering the glass. Rory screamed with all her might. Did she just watch her Dad be murdered? What was he going to do to her?

Rory hid behind the bar once more, watching and listening closely to her surroundings. A loud sound rippled through the room causing Rory to throw her hands over her ears to block out the noise. She peeked over the bar and saw nothing but more shards of glass and broken furniture.

The man stared Rory down. "Who are you?"

Rory gulped, "who are you?"

He chuckled. "I am Loki, of Asgard. I'm surprised you have not yet heard of me." His tone was a lot softer with her than it was with her father. "What is your name, little one?"

"Rory," she nervously answered his question. "My name is Rory."

"Let me guess; Stark's child?" She didn't say anything. Rory simply nodded. "Ah I see," he gave you an almost heartwarming smile. "Come here, Rory."

Fearing she had no other choice, Rory walked over to Loki and he crouched down to meet her gaze. He smiled at her. Rory watched her father fly up behind him. She was more than thrilled to see her father alive and more tears fell from her eyes.

"And one more thing," Loki's face dropped and he spun around to face Tony. "Get away from my daughter!" Tony shot at Loki, sending him flying backward. Rory jumped out of the way, too stunned to do anything else. With Loki knocked out, Tony looked towards his daughter, "Rory go hide, now!" He flew away into the sky, and Rory wasted no time in running to her bedroom.

She slammed the door shut and locked it. She looked around her room for anything that she could put in front of the door to make it harder to reach her. Rory tried to move the couch, but it was no use. It was too heavy for a ten-year-old to manage. She tugged on her roots as she spotted her desk chair. Once it was securely tucked under the knob, Rory ran over to her window to watch what was unfolding.

Rory couldn't help herself as she began to sob. She was afraid and she was alone. There was nothing she could do to help. Tons of thousands of aliens flooded the skies and streets of New York as Rory sat up in her bedroom, watching. She was sobbing uncontrollably as she pressed her face and hands into the large window.

More loud noises were flowing from the living area into Rory's bedroom and Rory could do nothing to stop them. She hoped that the man who called himself Loki was gone and that her Dad was alright.

At this moment, Rory really felt like a child. She felt small and helpless. Lonely and afraid. There was nothing else she could do except watch. She had no clue as to what she was watching either, which was not making her feel any better.

At long last, the aliens seemed to dissipate and things seemed to calm down. It looked to Rory like the fight was over. But who won?

Rory was drawn away from her thoughts by the sound of her father's voice calling her name. She nearly sprinted out. She ran up to Tony and engulfed him in the tightest bear hug she could manage. He was still in his suit and covered in dirt, but neither seemed to mind.

"I was afraid," Rory murmured into his neck.

"I know, bubs." They pulled away from the hug and Rory got the chance to really see the other people in the room.

There was a giant-sized man with green skin, a man with a shield, a man with a bow and arrow, a man with a red cape and long hair, and what looked like Natalie, only with shorter hair. They looked odd. As if they were straight out of a movie. She noticed Loki in handcuffs. He looked angry and sad at the same time. Rory didn't really know what he did, but she knew he lost and her dad won.

─── ･｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Tony held a silver case in one hand and Rory's in the other as he walked alongside the other Avengers waiting to send Loki away. Tony had made it very clear that from now on, Rory would not be leaving his side.

Rory let go of her Dad's hand to let him deal with the case. Thor, as he had told Rory to call him, led Loki a few feet away from everyone else. He waited for Loki to grab hold of the glass container for the Tesseract. Before she knew it, the pair had disappeared in a storm of blue.

Once everything else was settled, Tony reached for Rory's hand again and walked her over to the rest of the Avengers. "Rory there's some people I'd like you to meet," he motioned to the team. "That's Capsicle, Legolas, Jolly Green, and the Triple Imposter. This is Rory." The others shook their heads at Tony's nicknames.

"Steve," the tall, blonde man smiled and Rory shook his hand.

"Bruce," the shorter man with grey hair politely smiled and waved.

"Yea," Nat showed you a friendly smile to which you returned. "Nice to finally meet you, officially."

"And I'm Clint," the last man with spiky hair and sunglasses introduced himself.

"Hi," you said, shyly and waved at them all.

"Bubs, you go wait in the car I'll be there in a sec," said Tony.

"Okay. It was nice meeting you all!" You said as you walked to the car.

"You ready to go, kiddo?" Tony asked as he got in the car and fastened his seatbelt.

"Are we going home? Like, back to Malibu?" you asked as he started the car and pulled out.

"Yea," he smiled. "I think we deserve a break."

"What about the tower?"

"We're working on it. It'll be fixed in no time."

"Good," you sighed

"Good?"

"I don't mind it anymore. I don't think it would be so bad if we moved here."

"Really?" He raised his eyebrows.

"Really."

Next chapter ->

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🏷 ↴

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amiedala · 3 years

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SOMETHING DEEPER

CHAPTER 2: We Have a Problem

RATING: Explicit (18+ ONLY!!!)

WARNINGS: sexual content

SUMMARY: Nova swallows. “Din—”

“This,” he starts, resting one gloved hand against her cheek, “is what Mandalorians are made for. We’ve got this.” When Nova tries to interrupt, he gives her a swift shake of his head. “Go. Be a Jedi.”

If you're a newcomer, my fic "Something More" is the first installment of this story! <3

AUTHOR’S NOTE: hello my loves and happy Something Deeper Saturday!! i hope you love this chapter (and that you'll forgive that it's only about 9,000 words, i've had a hectic week)! this chapter was such a joy to write, and i hope you enjoy reading it just as much. more notes, as always, at the end!

When Nova wakes up, the bed is empty.

She rubs sleep from the edges of her eyes, digging her thumb lightly on the ridge between her eyebrows, trying to chase the groggy feeling away. Din’s not here, and his armor is gone, and Grogu’s crib is missing, too. Slowly, she makes her way into the fresher, pulling on the silver knob until water starts running down from the shower, filling the room with steam.

It’s so much more lavish than the one back on the Crest, and certainly years better than the old, stubborn one on Kicker, but the amount of space in here feels like almost too much. “Soap,” Nova mutters to herself, not even aware that she’s speaking until the word slips out of her mouth. At least the kind the two of them use, the bar that smells like crisp air and starlight, is sitting on the dish right to her left. She takes her time lathering up her hands, dragging suds in circles down her aching body, trying not to notice how roomy and empty it is in here without Din.

This whole placeis so empty without Din. The palace is huge, a Mandalorian fortress, and even though it’s outfitted with the absolute best technology and beskar that exists in the galaxy, there’s something eerie about it. Like most of it is standing empty, ornate and gilded for a reason no one can speak aloud. Nova knows the palace has more functionality than it seems, that the tunnels that run into the training stadium and the holding cells have purpose, but the fortress is over-fortified for a planet that barely has anyone left. She felt the same way when she went back to the base on Yavin, she reasons with herself as she wrestles the stubborn nozzle back into place, stepping into the fluffy towel hanging just outside, but at least the emptiness of the building made sense. The Alliance had accomplished almost everything they needed to, and a giant, communal space wasn’t practical after the fall of the Empire. It stood both as a testament to what the Rebels had accomplished and as a reassurance that anyone could come back and fight the good fight. Castles and temples and bases across the galaxy had all fallen into a state of disuse, Nova bargains, looking at her reflection in the foggy mirror. This wasn’t abnormal.

Except it was. Mandalore was a ghost town. Din was the ruler of a world that had long since fallen, and she was royalty in a place that barely had anyone left. And the way that this place operated was just as eerie and strange—she always had fresh towels, clothes were laid out in her closet, they both had feasts made to feed dozens more people than the two of them—but Nova had no idea where they all came from. She’s only seen Bo-Katan at intervals—usually in the late night, when her voice carries all the way up the stairs after she and Din have argued in the war room—and the two other Mandalorians that seemed to be attached at her hip are even scarcer than Bo-Katan is. There’s not many Mandalorians left, Nova knows this, but the way this entire place could fit thousands more people than just a handful makes everything seem heavier, somehow, or sadder.

Nova looks at herself in the mirror. Most of the reflection is still fogged up, and she drags a hand through it to reveal her face. She studies herself, focusing primarily on her pink, chewed-on bottom lip. There’s something wild in her eyes, something deeper than her everyday fears and worries. She knows that every day that slips by the closer the First Order—whoever the hell they are—gets to wounding Mandalore and the surviving Alliance. But with her heart in one place and her body in another, everything in Nova’s body feels like wire snapped taut, like if she moves the wrong way she’ll fracture off into pieces. Slowly, she blinks away the intensity of her gaze, brushing her long fingers over the spot where she knows her scar is reflected. The skin always looks raised after she showers, an angry rash of a still-festering wound. It’s easy to forget when Nova’s thinking about anything else, but any time her mind drifts away from whatever she’s focusing on, she feels the impact of it. It wasn’t just a flesh wound, after all, the lightsaber that Jacterr dragged through her stomach was meant to kill. And it’s still somewhat of a miracle that she survived it.

The very tips of her fingers ghost over the old wound, and Nova tries her best not to wince at the touch, the burning way it still sears when she touches it wrong or she’s wearing something that brushes uncomfortably against it. If Din were standing behind her in the mirror, he wouldn’t even have to touch it—or her—to take Nova’s pain away. But Din’s not here, he’s downstairs in the war room trying to lead a planet he never even wanted, and Nova scrunches her face up sourly in the mirror, attempting to chase away the inner, selfish longing for being back out alone together in the crush of space.

But even if it were just the three of them—Novalise, Din, and Grogu—there were always threats just a half-step behind them. Space was cold, foreboding, and no matter how warm the light and company was on the Razor Crest or on Kicker, the very real threat of being behind enemy lines they couldn’t ever seem to find was constant. It was eternal. But there’s something nostalgic about missing the consistent chase of it all, something that kicked Nova’s fight-or-flight response into high gear, something that neither of them feel here on Mandalore. No matter how rich and long the history is here, it’s also suspiciously empty, and Nova knows that everyone here, regardless of how skilled they are as warriors, is a conspicuous target.

The bedsheets are still all tangled as Nova exists the fresher, piling her wet hair on the top of her head as she wrestles the towel around herself, shivering a little in the vastness of their suite. In the wardrobe are hundreds of outfits—gorgeous dresses, ornate jewels, top-of-the-line everyday wear—but all of them have a distance to them. Nothing in these drawers feel like hers. Nova rustles through the shirts and trousers, all in varying neutrals or that strange shade of pale Mandalorian blue, looking for something functional, comfortable, and most importantly, inconspicuous. It was going to be a harrowing trek back to Ahch-To to return her baby and borrowed lightsaber to Luke Skywalker, and Nova didn’t want her reputation of Novalise Djarin, wife to the reigning Mand’alor, to be announced and heralded across the journey from the Outer Rim to the Unknown Regions. She just wanted to be Nova—human, mother, and Jedi.

Maybe. Maybea Jedi.

That part was still a lingering question mark, one that hung over her head more than it excited her. For years, growing up, Nova excused her Force sensitivity away as just something more that she was tapped into, something deeper, something divine. It was hers and hers alone, because the Jedi were mostly legends and myths, with only the current story of the famous Luke Skywalker told in whispers from people in the Alliance. Now, though, she knows it’s real, her ability to use the Force. She knows since she met Luke Skywalker, went head-to-head with the incredible Ahsoka Tano, and became a mother to Grogu. It’s beyond just what’s in her blood—beyond lineage and beyond chemistry—it’s something ancient and pulsing. Something that’s hers.

Nova sighs, picking the most functional clothes in her wardrobe—deep tan trousers with a pocket deep enough to hold the lightsaber, a long-sleeved black shirt that hugged her curves but didn’t irritate her scar, and a shawl in that shimmering Mandalorian blue. She pressed a thumb to her necklace, the one that Din offered to her alongside his heart, biting down on her lip. It was long past sunrise, because the hazy blue atmosphere was full of color, and as she opened up one of the gigantic windows, a gentle breeze wafted into the suite from the outside. Mandalore smelled like dust and loneliness, she decided, which wasn’t entirely fair, but it holds her at arm’s length. Nova looks back at the rumpled bedsheets, eyes glazing over the clothes hanging in her open wardrobe, trying to find a sign that she belongs here, that she’s more than just a figurehead, that this role that she married into has significance deeper than looking pretty on an unyielding throne.

It doesn’t come. She exhales, tears starting to well up at the edges of her eyes, and she sits on the edge of the bed. It smells like Din—cleanness, metal, woodsmoke, cinnamon—and even though it’s far more comfortable than any of the makeshift ones they crafted on the starships they used to call home, it feels empty in the same way that this room does, that this planet does.

“You’re being selfish,” Nova chastises herself quietly, her whisper coming out much louder than intended, filling up the hollow air of their gigantic bedroom. This was what she wanted. This was what she wheedled both of them into, this small little slice of a life beyond killing and running. But so much of this planet felt empty, like everything holy here had long since left. There were only dozens of people that still inhabited Mandalore, and it was a ghost of itself in a cruel, unfair way.

Ironically, Nova muses, walking back over to the open window, letting the breeze tousle and dry the long, thick waves of her hair, Mandalore, the home to a legion of warriors, was the least confrontational place that she’d been in years. And the kicker is, after over a decade of running, all she’s itching to do is get back out there in the stars. She looks upward, wistfully, trying to catch any of them through the hazy, foggy, blue sky, but she can’t. So she turns back towards the mirror, grabbing fistfuls of thick hair, pinning just the top layer away from her face. She adjusts the shawl in the mirror, marveling at the shimmering strands that catch delicately in the light, and right before she’s ready to walk out the door, the lightsaber starts burning a hole in the door.

She gasps, wrenching it off its hook. The blade isn’t even ignited, and when she grabs it, it pulses in her hands, once, twice, and then the air is pierced with a vibrant green light. Nova stares at it, inspecting it from every angle. It was just a vision—a realistic one, at that—but now that she’s holding the weapon in her hand, the fear that raced through her just a second ago has evaporated. The fact that she’s holding a lightsaber is sacred enough, but the knowledge that it’s Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber feels like it’s beyond something holy. It holds her there until Nova lets the blade slide back into the sheath, dropping it into her pocket. It still feels like it burns, even though that’s not possible, and she ignores it as she makes her way out of the ornate door and down the marble steps to the war room to her husband and their baby.

It's still jarring to see Din without his helmet on in a public space. Like Nova’s walking into a trap of some kind, or that she’s breaking a divine rule. It was different when she was the only person allowed to see his face, to map across his features as a vow, but now that the rules have changed, she doesn’t quite know how to act when she looks at him. He’s alone in the war room when she pushes open the door, a heat rising in her cheeks when she catches light of the beskar throne, vivid memories at how indescribably soiled it was from their desecrating tryst the night before. The holotable is lit up, glittering out in that deep, vivid blue, maps of the galaxy intercut with Alliance bases and safe houses, Din staring up at it like he’s looking for a sign of the Maker. His gaze is intense, electric.

“Hi,” Nova chances, softly, and she hears the baby babbling from the corner as she strides across the luminous room, sidling up to Din as he continues staring, his armored body cold to the touch. Quickly, he kisses her temple, and Nova’s tummy flips over as he holds her there, even though he’s done this a thousand times, even though this is far from new.

“Hi,” Din echoes, leaning forward against the rim of the holotable, squinting intently at something that Nova can’t quite sort out. “How did you sleep?”

She bites her lip, trying to decide if it’s worth lying, but before she can come up with a suitable one, the kind that can cover up all of the crushing loneliness she feels in a bedroom that doesn’t seem to belong to them, Din’s gaze is on her face, thumb hooking her chin upwards so that Nova doesn’t have a choice but to meet his eyes.

“Don’t lie to me,” he says, and even though his voice is gentle, she knows the intent of his command.

“Not great,” Nova whispers, the sound getting caught on the way out of the hollow of her mouth. “I missed you. I—I hate waking up without you.”

Din cocks his head to the side, eyebrows knitted together, as if he’s trying to pick out the exact right thing to say. Nova watches the expression of frustration reflect across his face, and has to hide an endearing smile as she revels in getting to see Din’s mind working in real time. “Novalise,” he says, finally, and heart does a little flip. It sounds like he’s chastising her, but that’s not Din’s typical modus operandi, and she blinks up at him, waiting for the rest of what he has to say. “Why did we come here?” he asks, finally, and his voice is so quiet, so filled with a plea she hasn’t heard in weeks, that it makes her wince.

“What?” she manages, reaching out one hand to Din’s reflective hip, trying to anchor his armored body against her own. “What do you mean?”

Din sighs, long and heavy. He’s pondering. It isn’t a noise of annoyance, or a noise of frustration, just his typical exhale when he’s trying to puzzle something out in his head. “Why did you want me to rule Mandalore?”

Nova presses her lips together, trying to come up with an answer adequate enough to placate the both of them. “Because,” she whispers, finally, “you’re the type of leader that makes people want to follow you everywhere. Because we were tired of running, and we wanted to fight back. And also,” she tacks on, trying to get Din to echo her smile, “because Bo-Katan wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

Din’s expression is complicated, worried. Nova watches as his gaze drifts back up to what’s being reflected on the holotable, and she can track the places where attacks from the Order have cropped up in the time that’s lapsed since they’ve lived here. The galaxy is still largely intact, most planets benefitting from the defeat of the Empire, but Nova can see the clusters of danger, the places where the First Order found a weak point and applied enough pressure to fracture them entirely. Coupled with the jailbreak in one of the Mid Rim sectors, out of Cara’s jurisdiction, there’s at least ten attacks in the last three weeks. Nova is a staunch believer that everything happens for a reason, that there’s no such thing as coincidences, but a handful of malicious acts could be classified as one. More than three signified something else. Over seven is a definite indication of a pattern.

“You want to be back out there,” Nova breathes, searching for a confirmation on Din’s face. “You want to fight. Hand-to-hand, not from behind a holotable in this room.”

Din looks over at her, his expression clouded, and when he catches sight of the reflected fire in Nova’s eyes, he grabs at the curve of her cheek again, locking his eyes on hers. “You want to be back out there.”

Nova presses her lips together in a thin line, trying her absolute hardest not to give it away.

“You’re a horrible liar, Novalise Djarin,” Din says, shaking his head. “Awful. Worse than I am. Worse than the kid is, and that’s saying a lot.”

Nova sighs, leaning into his touch. “I know. You’re right. It’s driving me up the wall to be here, trying to rule a planet that barely has anything left, when I know that war is coming.”

“Why do you think I’m always in here?” Din asks, pointing up at the virtual starry sky splayed across the room from the holotable. “I don’t sit in the throne. I don’t try to rule. I stand in front of this table for hours, plotting for the inevitable battle that’s going to come, fighting back every single urge to just get back in the stars, chase the enemy down, and start blasting.”

Nova smiles slyly up at him, and when Din’s gaze drifts back over to hers, he does a double take.

“What?”

“I’ve made a Rebel out of you, Din Djarin,” she grins, gently flapping her palm against his cheek. He rolls his eyes, huffing out of his nose, and she just smiles, knowing that his proverbial feathers aren’t really ruffled, but basking in the idea of it anyway.

“Nova,” he continues, voice low and urgent, “so why aren’t we out there?”

The smile fades off her face. There’s something desperate in his eyes, something deeper than the level way he asks the question. She stares, trying to come up with an answer that will keep both of them here, committed and driven, but as she searches Din’s expression, she knows that she’s going to fall short.

Before Nova can come up with anything, though, there’s a sharp rapping at the door, and both of them break apart, Din swiftly pulling his helmet back over his head. He’s already shown his face to Mandalore, and the Creed that he followed for nearly his entire life has fallen to pieces, but Nova knows the security it provides, and she smiles gently at him, watching his gorgeous features disappear underneath the beskar.

“We have a problem,” Bo-Katan announces, her voice cutting straight through the luminosity of the holotable.

“Don’t we always,” Nova murmurs, but the expression on Bo-Katan’s face wipes every inch of humor off of her own. “What’s wrong?”

Bo-Katan sighs, running a hand uncharacteristically through her short red hair. “We are under attack,” she deadpans, looking upward through the clear dome, pointing as ships come out of the fog.

Alarms starting blaring from somewhere, and Nova darts over to Grogu, clinging him tight against her chest. “Who—”

“Nova,” Din says, evenly, tossing her shawl through the open air, “you need to take the kid and get back to Luke.”

She stares at him in disbelief as Bo-Katan pulls her helmet back over her head. “No,” Nova starts, “we need to stay and fight, you might need our help—”

“We don’t,” Bo-Katan interrupts, but there’s no fire in her voice. She’s busted open the small armory in the corner, hurling weapons at Din without giving him a second glance. “It’s not the Order. Or Empire leftovers. There’s no TIE fighters. Whoever they are, they’re not after you or the kid.” She turns around, finally, striding over to Nova. “Besides,” she says, rather sourly, “I already called for backup.”

Nova lifts one eyebrow. Before she can say anything, though, she’s interrupted by the infamous shape of Slave I entering the atmosphere, and she winks at Bo-Katan, who’s still hidden behind her mask, but Nova would bet every credit she’d ever owned that Bo-Katan is emphatically rolling her eyes.

Din presses his forehead against the baby’s, and Nova only gets a flash of his expression before his helmet’s back on. He’s tense, trying his hardest to let Grogu disappear from his watchful eye for the second time. “Go out through the amphitheater,” he whispers to Nova, his voice gruff. Under the beskar, he’s electric, like he was praying for a conflict to let the lightning out. “Don’t take off until we get out there and preoccupy them so that no one follows you back to Ahch-To.”

Nova swallows. “Din—”

She links her hand in his, squeezing once, and then she’s holding the crib open for Grogu, knitting the shawl around her head, a makeshift hood obscuring her telltale dark hair. She nods, just once, and when Din’s hand leaves her grip, she runs with the baby, heart pounding in her chest, heading back into the stars.

Space is cold and quiet. It always is when Novalise is out here alone, but this time, it seems like the silence and the chill penetrates even the warm hull of Kicker. The baby is sleeping in the copilot’s chair, and Nova coasts through the stars, popping in and out of warp periodically to check that they’re not being followed.

Her hand goes to her necklace, fingertips tracing over the outline of the Rebel symbol and the perfect star notched in the back of the beskar. She doesn’t even realize that she’s doing it until she pulls her thumb away and it’s embossed with the image of it. Kicker is being uncharacteristically obedient, coasting through the Outer Rim with determination, and Nova almost misses the distraction that the constant wailing and failing that Kicker used to give her, because with Grogu asleep and Din back on Mandalore, she’s bored out of her mind.

Nova sighs, stretching her legs out as far as they’ll go, the toes of her boots scraping quietly against the dashboard. They’re old and worn, with so many scuffs that she’s long forgotten what they were supposed to look like, and the sole of one is threatening to pop off any day now, but she’s had these boots since she was in the Alliance as a teenager. Before her parents died. Before she was subject to Jacterr’s awful hand. Before Din walked into her life and made her believe in something more, something deeper.

As quietly as she can, she eases out of the pilot’s seat, leaning over the navigational system to ensure that she’s following the right coordinates. Wedge had given her the location of the general area that Luke was located in the Unknown Regions, but Luke had given her explicit—albeit confusing—directions when he promised he’d see her again soon. Nova settles against the floor of Kicker, where the one window outside of the cockpit that’s directed towards the sky is located, and lays down in the nest of blankets and pillows she used to call her bed.

Being out here feels colder, somehow. More distant. Nova watches as the sky moves through warp, billions of tiny stars shooting and reaching across the galaxy as she and the baby make their way to Luke Skywalker. She pulls the lightsaber off her belt, squinting at it in the low light. She doesn’t try to ignite it, doesn’t call forth the green blade, she just studies it. Across the handle are grooves for grip, and the alloy of the metal is so different than the beskar she’s surrounded her life with. Nova tries to hold onto it like Luke does, effortlessly and easily, and even though it feels like she’s been made for this her whole life, there’s something in the way. A distance between the pulsing and beckoning, maybe.

Before she can ruminate any longer on the disconnect, though, her comm blinks, and Nova shoots upward, pressing her wrist to her mouth. “Hello?” she calls out, wincing as her voice echoes around Kicker, but the baby doesn’t even interrupt in his snoring.

“It’s me,” Din breathes, and all the coldness and distance between Nova and the stars evaporate. “We’re safe. The second Fett showed up, the ships retreated.”

Nova exhales slowly, fluttering her eyelashes closed. “Who was it?”

“Pirates,” Din says, immediately, and she furrows her eyebrows.

“Pirates,” Nova repeats skeptically. “On Mandalore?”

“We ran into some…unsavory groups of people back on Morak. Before the refinery explosion. Apparently, they tracked us down and wanted to ransack Mandalore for what it has left. They didn’t get very far,” Din continues, sighing. “Boba and Fennec fought them off, and Bo-Katan has been itching to fight someone since I won the Darksaber out from under her nose. We’re fine. Mandalore is fine.”

Nova looks up at the stars again, watching how they shoot by out the front of Kicker, trying to put her finger on the off feeling of Din’s face. “They weren’t part of the First Order?” she asks, her voice low. “Or working for them?”

Din exhales, long and slow. “No,” he answers, finally. “They’ve been quiet, Nova. Almost—”

“Too quiet,” she interrupts softly, eyes landing on the baby. Grogu is already the cutest thing in the galaxy, but when he’s asleep, and tiny little snores come out of his mouth, he makes anything else evaporate. Now, though, with the silent looming threat of the Order that was so eager to kill every Rebel and capture Nova and her power for their own, she’s just trying to memorize his features, one at a time, permanently etching them into the back of her mind. There’s a weight in her chest that Nova has been ignoring for a week, ever since Grogu was allowed to accompany them to Mandalore—her time with him is limited. Even if Luke allows visits—which she thinks he will—it will be far too dangerous to keep following the same path from the Outer Rim to the Unknown Regions, especially considering Nova’s telltale Alliance ship, regardless of the new paint job and the beskar additions, and with the attack today, Mandalore is far from safe.

“Where are you?”

Nova sighs, leaning over the nav system. It’s blinking with the bright assurance that Kicker has crossed, quite unceremoniously, over into the Unknown Regions. She relays that to Din, eyes roaming the seemingly empty sky.

“That was fast.”

“Yeah,” Nova agrees, chewing on her bottom lip. “The new thrusters Bo-Katan put into Kicker are no joke.”

Din offers up a noise somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “What are you wearing?” he asks, finally, and his voice is back somewhere low and dangerous like it was the night before.

“You saw me leave,” Nova answers, giggling, sinking down the wall until she’s hugging her knees against her chest on the floor. “Are you meaning to tell me you didn’t take stock in what I was wearing when you were staring at me? I’m offended.”

“Watch it,” Din volleys back, but this time, she can hear the smile in his voice. “I was just wondering if the ship has gotten you out of any of those clothes.”

“Ah,” Nova allows, her own tone dipping conspiratorially, “I see. However, it is quite difficult to get out of my clothes without you itching to take them off.”

“You’re good at getting out of things.”

“True.”

“I’m good at getting into them,” Din whispers, and Nova laughs, leaning her bead back against the hull.

“I am certainly not arguing with that,” Nova allows. “You know—”

But then, in Kicker’s typical fashion, the ship starts screaming. Nova’s sigh is low and frustrated, a small echo of the ones that Din’s let forth in the past.

“Go,” Din says, amusedly. “Take care of the kid.”

“You know I will,” Nova promises, and the light on the comm blinks off. She sighs, hauling herself to her feet, her head already aching from the indomitable screeching sound that pours out of Kicker the second something goes haywire. It’s startled the baby, and she strokes a single finger over the top of his fuzzy, wrinkled head before she sits down in the pilot’s seat, flipping switches and moving toggles back and forth. “What is it, Kick?” she murmurs, long waves of hair falling in the way as she leans down, squinting at the motherboard hidden underneath the metal sheath.

It turns out, that Kicker was actually screaming for a veryb good reason, this time around—after a very shoddy, embarrassing crash landing on Ahch-To, Nova discovers a fuel leak on hidden underneath the ship.

“Dank ferrik,” she seethes, and Grogu babbles. She turns on him, pointing a finger. “Not a word to your daddy about all the swearing. You promise?”

Grogu just tilts his head to the side and smiles gleefully. Nova squints at him, matching his quirked expression, pointing a long brown finger through the air like a threat.

“You are,” she continues, softening as Grogu toddles across the green, mossy earth of Ahch-To towards her, “a little war criminal. I hope you know that. Just because you typically use your powers for good doesn’t mean that I don’t notice that you don’t fight fair.”

Grogu babbles. Nova laughs. When she hoists him off the ground and notches him safely against her hip, she turns again to inspect the fuel gauge underneath Kicker’s patchwork underbelly, she nearly crashes into Luke Skywalker.

“Maker above,” she gasps, hand immediately slapping over her mouth. “You scared me. I’m used to stealthy, but you didn’t even make a sound.”

Luke Skywalker smiles serenely at her, like it’s nothing. “Hello, Nova.”

“Hi,” she echoes, faintly, and Grogu reaches out for Luke. Belatedly, Nova hands her baby over to him, hands shooting to the lightsaber hanging from her belt. “I have your lightsaber,” she adds, rather dazed, handing the thing out to him. He looks down at it, and there’s something complicated that flashes behind his expression.

“Have you used it?” he asks, and Nova slowly shakes her head. Luke starts moving, up the impossibly tall stone steps that look like they’re as ancient as this mountain is, like they were built into the bluffs of the sea. He’s much more agile than she is, and easily more used to this walk, but Nova tries to keep herself in pace without heaving air into her lungs. “I would have thought you might have used it on one of your missions from the Alliance.”

Nova stops for a half-step to catch her breath, and Luke stops without even looking back at her. “Well,” she starts, running her tongue over her teeth, “I haven’t really…had any missions.”

There’s a strange smile on Luke’s face when her gaze finds his eyes again. “Rebel activities and royalty still don’t exactly go hand in hand, I assume.”

She squints, nodding. “I don’t like being a diplomat,” she allows, even though she’s well aware that to Luke Skywalker, she probably sounds like a whiny brat, but he laughs. He opens his mouth and laughs out loud, in this gorgeous sea air, sounding as gleeful as Wedge always talked about him.

“You sound like my sister.”

Nova’s heart does a tiny backflip, and she sits up straighter. “Your sister?”

“General Leia Organa,” Luke grins, before turning back into the steps and moving nimbly up them. “She was a princess, too, for a while. She preferred action to negotiating. Still does. That’s why she’s holding rank up in the Alliance, even now. Well,” Luke stops, moving his sandy hair back and forth like he’s trying to measure something, “she’s taken to calling it the Rebellion.”

Nova smiles, trying her best to keep up with Luke’s pace. “The Rebellion. I like that—”

“Don’t,” Luke says, jabbing a long finger in her face so quickly that Nova nearly misses the next step and takes a tumble all the way back down the mountain. “Don’t let her title win, Wedge and I will never hear the end of it. Besides, I like the sound of ‘The Rebel Alliance’. It makes it feel like we’re all in this together.”

Nova laughs. He does, too. For a second, just a second, they’re giggling like the kids they never really got to be, like the galaxy isn’t facing impending danger, like they aren’t two of the known four surviving members of the Jedi left. It’s cold on Ahch-To, foggy and biting, but the landscape here is so lavish and so green, that she can pretend, just for a moment, that they’re back on Yavin. The Alliance hasn’t gone anywhere, there’s no First Order, and her parents are still alive, just around the corner. “I like being in it together,” she manages, finally, hoping that Luke won’t notice the tears under her voice. His expression is kind, gentle, and when he returns to the winding hike to the top of the hill, Nova follows him. Eventually, the ground levels out a bit more, and she stands on the top of the flattest rock, looking around at the entirety of the island. There’s something magical about this place, something that holds as much holiness as the throne room on Mandalore does.

“What made you come here?” she asks, and her voice is so quiet that the howling wind could have easily whisked it away. Luke seems to genuinely parse over Nova’s question, and he gently hands Grogu back to be swaddled up in her arms. The shawl that she draped over her head for the getaway off Mandalore is barely still knotted around her neck, and Nova wraps it closer to herself, pulling Grogu and his gentle warmth as close to her chest as she can. “Why leave the Outer Rim after the war was won?”

Luke has a strange expression on his face, and Nova’s gaze drops, suddenly worried she’d said something to offend him. “We did win the war,” he answers, finally, his voice far away. “But I also lost my father to it. I lost my old mentor. I lost my aunt and uncle. Leia—and Han, really—were the only family that I had left, but being around them was difficult because they had each other, and soon after, they had Ben. My nephew.”

Nova nods, chewing on her tongue. “It was hard to stay?” she asks, genuinely wondering. She knew that feeling. It’s what left her without the Alliance for the first time after her parents died, moorless and heartbroken.

“Exactly,” Luke offers, beckoning her closer to get out of the whipping wind. They’re half shrouded by the giant outcropping of boulders that rest atop the mountain, and she leans against the support of it for strength, trying to catch her breath. “It was hard to stay. Not because I didn’t love them, not because I didn’t love the Alliance, but because it felt like…everyone found peace except for me. It was a lot of loss, and it was incredibly…complicated. I knew someone who looks a lot like your son,” he continues, the ghost of a sad smile on his lips, “and he was the only other Jedi I ever knew up close. I had Ben—Obi-Wan—but until the last few days of his life, he wasn’t a Jedi. He was just a sad man who lived out in the desert, trying to make life better for me than his ever was.” Luke pauses, staring at the lightsaber in his hands. “I came here, to the Unknown Regions, to Ahch-To, to try to put the history of the Jedi together, and to recruit every new one that I’ve found.”

“That’s a great goal,” Nova answers, stroking her finger against Grogu’s fuzzy green head as he babbles in agreement.

“Would you like to see what I’ve gathered so far?” Luke asks.

Without even a second of hesitation, Nova nods. “Yes,” she echoes, and he points toward the biggest stone at the top of the mountain, where a tall, dark room has been hollowed out.

“Novalise,” Luke says conspiratorially, “welcome to my life’s work. Oh, yeah, and my humble abode.”

It’s not what she’s expecting. Any of it. There’s years’ worth of research here, old texts, folders, things that aren’t in languages she even recognizes. She’s speechless, turning around, eyes jumping, trying to take it all in.

“Wow,” Nova manages, finally, after she’s sure she’s turned all the way around a few times. “This is…”

“I know,” Luke adds, softly, and he looks down at the lightsaber in his hands. “There aren’t many Jedi left, Nova. You should come here and train. Your skills are…of the old world. You’re strong. You have a good heart. I would be honored to teach you.”

Nova looks back at Luke, holding on tighter to Grogu, who looks up at her and smiles. She knows, instantly, what he’s thinking—he wants his mom here, learning how to be Jedi side by side—and she has to keep her own feelings guarded because she doesn’t want to reveal to him how badly she wants the same thing. Again, she chews on her lower lip, thumbnail hovering beneath teeth and tongue. She promised herself she’d stop chewing on her nails what feels like a million miles ago, but right now, all she wants is to stay here, to learn. Din could be happy here, too, she thinks wistfully. He might be bored, but it’s only a small island on this whole planet. She and Grogu could train together, become Jedi together. It was perfect, she muses, blinking back the tears threatening at the corners of her eyes.

Except it wasn’t. Ahch-To is a safe haven, but Nova’s job is to keep it that way. She’s seen how ruthless and intense the First Order are, and there’s not a single doubt in her mind that they would follow her here and desecrate this place, leave such a holy site in ruins. She swallows again, trying to conjure up the strength to say no, but from the look on Luke Skywalker’s face, he already knows.

“I’ll be here,” he offers, quietly, and Grogu touches his tiny palm to the small crescent of Nova’s exposed skin underneath the warmth of her blue shawl. “If you decide the galaxy would be better protected if you had training.”

“I want to,” she interjects, her voice low and pleading, like she’s the one begging for it. “Maker, you have no idea how badly I want to. I could be happy here. I—I want you to teach me how to become a Jedi, but—”

Luke’s gaze shifts to the ring on her left hand. The stone sparkles in the low light, the tiny crystal sunk into the beskar. It’s so tiny, but it’s there, and there’s something both sad and fond behind his smile. “You have bigger things to handle first.”

Nova swallows, nodding gently. “But—if I were to become a Jedi—”

Luke holds out his hands, one gloved, one bare. Grogu hops eagerly into his arms. “Like I said, I’ll be here. Grogu will be safe with me. My nephew will be joining us soon. And my sister,” he adds on, his voice suddenly a bit more electric, “my sister is Force sensitive, too. I have a feeling that you might run into her at some point, considering—”

“The Alliance,” Nova grins, nodding. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell her we aren’t changing the name.”

Luke chuckles. The sound is so jarring, so much closer to the boy Wedge always talks about knowing, and Nova’s heart aches. He’s only a handful of years older than she is, and for a moment, she lets herself imagine what it would have been like growing up alongside Luke and Leia on the base at Yavin. If she’d be in Jedi training. If anything about her life would be there same. “If anyone could,” he agrees. “I have something for you. You can have him back for a second.”

Instead of picking Grogu back up, Nova sinks down onto the cold earth inside Luke’s makeshift home, trying to fold her body tiny enough so that she’s face-to-face with her kid. His eyes are huge, reflected and starry and sad, but she can see the hint of joy of being here, of training alongside someone who cares, someone who will protect him until Grogu is old enough to fully protect himself.

“Hi bug,” she whispers, sticking out her palm for his tiny fist to hold onto. “This isn’t goodbye, you know. I’ll be back for you. Your dad and I will come visit any chance we get. You go and be good for Master Luke, okay? No eating his frogs. No hide and seek. I’ll be checking.”

Grogu babbles, the mischievous light in his eyes sparking up just for a second, and then he moves closer, falling into Nova’s warm hug.

“I love you,” she whispers, and he presses his fuzzy forehead into hers. They stay like that for a second, swaying, an unspoken promise. She can hear his little voice in her head—no words, nothing concrete—but a reminder through the power of the Force that he loves her, too.

Luke steps back into the narrow slice of light Novalise and Grogu are standing in, holding something out in his bare hand. “This is for you.”

Nova stands, squinting at the thing Luke’s holding out. It takes a second for her to recognize it in the darkness, but when she does, she inhales a sucking gasp. “I can’t take this,” she protests halfheartedly as he presses it into her open palm. “I’m not a Jedi yet, I—”

“Ben Kenobi gave this to me before I was a Jedi,” Luke interrupts, his voice gentle but urgent. “You will be a powerful Jedi too one day, Novalise Djarin. I know it. He knows it.” Luke’s gaze shifts over to Grogu. “And you know it,” he continues, tapping a long finger against her heart. “Just take care of this, okay?”

“Luke—”

“Take it,” he enunciates. “Go home to your husband and the people that need you. I know Wedge loves having you around.”

Nova tilts her head at him, quietly hooking the gifted lightsaber onto her belt loop. “I know why you’re out here,” she says, carefully, “but there are people who need you, too. And people who love having you around.”

Luke doesn’t say anything, but there’s a ghost of something that looks an awful lot like hope behind his conflicted eyes. “I’ll see you soon.”

With that, Nova presses a quick kiss to the most prominent wrinkle in Grogu’s forehead, pressing her thumb into both her old Rebel necklace and the signet that matches Din’s. She reaches her hand out to shake Luke’s, but he grins at her and pulls her into a quick, strong embrace. He smells like the ocean, and still, somehow, of Tatooine. Luke and Grogu watch as Nova slowly descends the stone steps jutting out of the cliffside, so much easier to get down than heave up. When she’s back at Kicker, she checks the makeshift patch on the underbelly of the ship, which seems to be holding up okay enough to get back to Mandalore relatively unscathed.

“May the Force be with you,” she calls up to Luke and Grogu, waving her hand frantically.

“May the Force be with you,” Luke echoes. For a second, there’s nothing but the sound of the ocean hurling itself onto the gorgeous, green mainland, and as she climbs the gangplank, she hears Luke call out again. “Novalise.”

She sticks her head back out, shawl flapping in the wind. “Yes?”

Even from all the way down here, she can see the smile on Luke’s face. “That’s the Skywalker family lightsaber. Don’t lose it.”

She nods, feeling the weight of it on her hip as Kicker groans to life. She’s crying by the time she lifts off the surface of Ahch-To, her heart both heavy and light, sunken and buoyed. Space is dark, and she hops immediately into warp, heading back to Mandalore, back to the place she’s slowly learning to call home.

Mandalore, as usual, is quiet. It’s dusk, the foggy azure of the sky descending and swallowing up most of the planet, and when she lands in the designated parking bay, she checks the patch holding steadfast on Kicker’s underbelly, knowing that her beloved trash heap of a ship will need to go back into the more capable hands of the local mechanic. When she looks straight up, even through the dark, she can still see the faintest smattering of stars.

“Nova.”

She whirls around, hand on her belt. Din’s standing there, fully armored, just out of reach. “You scared me,” she chastises, closing the distance between the two of them. His beskar is cold, but his hands immediately encircle around her waist. “Has the threat passed?”

Din sighs, long and heavy. Her heart pounds as she listens to the timbre of it through the modulator, remembering all the time that she spent trying to dissect his breathing before he took the helmet for her and let Nova make him moan instead.

“There’s always another one,” he says, darkly, and she nods, tilting her head to the side. “I missed you, cyar’ika. Mandalore is cold and quiet without you.”

She wants to come up with a snappy retort, but the honesty and exhaustion in his voice pulls Nova down to his same level. She steps in closer, just letting Din hold her there, satisfied in the small comfort that she’s still his anchor. “Space is cold and quiet without you,” she offers, cheek pressed up against the beskar.

Din looks up. She can tell it even without looking at him, the way that his muscles shift underneath the beskar she’s still pressed up against. “I’d give anything to be back out there,” he whispers, finally, his voice low and complicated.

Nova’s heart flutters once, twice, and then she has an idea. “Din,”

“No,” he answers, immediate, helmet tipping down again to focus on her face. “We can’t, it’s too dangerous—”

“We can,” she enunciates, squinting her eyes at him, trying to put on the best Sabacc face she has, which isn’t much, because as Din is always reminding her, Nova is a terrible liar. “Twenty minutes. Nothing is happening. The palace is quiet. Boba Fett sent the pirates packing, remember? We won’t even leave Mandalore’s gravitational pull. We’ll only be just outside the atmosphere. We—”

“Stop it,” Din says, but there’s no fire in his voice.

“Come on,” Nova wheedles, well aware that she’s being reckless, a terrible influence. “Come on, come out with me into the stars. I’ll make it worth your while, you know,” she teases, raising one dark eyebrow playfully. When she hears Din sigh again under the mask, she knows she’s convinced him.

“Bo-Katan will not be happy that we left,” Din protests, but now he’s dragging Nova up the gangplank. She hides her smile in the shoulder of her shawl.

“Well,” Nova counters, spinning out and around while still holding Din’s gloved hand, spiraling down into the familiar comfort of the pilot’s seat, “it’s a good thing you’re Mand’alor, not her.”

Getting back into the stars with Din feels completely different than it did when Nova traversed the Outer Rim alone earlier. The silence isn’t crushing. It’s comfortable and easy, and when they’re finally safely out of Mandalore’s atmosphere, Nova pulls Kicker into a slow coast, heart still galloping in her chest. No matter how many times they’ve fucked, the little anticipatory period that comes before anything still feels like the first time. Quietly, Nova spins around in the pilot’s chair, expecting Din to still be seated behind her so she can climb over and straddle his lap.

But he’s not. Somehow, he’s the second person whose stealth has completely surprised her today, and Din’s no longer in the copilot’s chair. He’s standing over her, in full beskar regalis, visor of the helmet tilted downwards. All she can see reflected in the surface is the slow dance of the stars out of Kicker’s front window, and she swallows. Din steps forward, close enough to shift Nova’s legs apart, hands gently reaching forward to grab either side of her face. For a second, he doesn’t move. Nova’s breath hitches in her throat, desire sparking up a low flame in her pelvis. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since Din fucked her on the throne, promising that Mandalore was theirs to desecrate, but it feels like a lifetime ago. Everything in her body is on fire, electric.

“I missed the stars,” Din murmurs, his gloved finger ghosting over her plump bottom lip, lingering enough to reveal her teeth. Nova shivers.

“Me too,” she whispers, not daring to take her eyes off of the helmet. She can see the bulge growing in his pants peripherally, but she’s determined to stay here, frozen in this position, until Din begs for her mouth, her touch, her warmth.

“More than anything,” he continues, voice rumbling low and deep, his hand traveling down the marks he left on her neck—the pulse points, the light imprints of hickeys in between—and Nova swallows, the air going starry and unhabitable, “I missed making you scream my name out here with no one to hear you.”

“Oh,” Nova gasps as Din slowly kneels down, parting her legs like an ocean. Faintly, somewhere in the distance of her logical mind, something is telling her to make sure Din doesn’t tear these trousers off her body, because they’re light and comfortable and didn’t keep the dampness of Ahch-To trapped against her skin, but as he hooks his fingers around the waistband, any protest fly out the window into the starry darkness. “What—fuck, what happened to fucking me in front of an audience?”

“I don’t want that tonight,” Din whispers, immediately. He lifts the helmet just enough to reveal his mouth, and as his hands are pulling Nova’s pants down to her ankles, his tongue writes a symphony on the soft, smooth skin of her inner thighs. “I want to be the only one to worship you.”

Nova gasps again, heart fluttering in her throat, barely even registering that Din’s pulling down her panties until the heat from his hands travels up, notching perfectly between her thighs. She slumps in the chair, everything in her electric and alive. It feels like years since Din’s spent longer than a few seconds down here, the warmth and wetness of his mouth lapping up her every orgasm. She pulls the helmet clean off by accident, but she doesn’t burn in embarrassment when it makes a loud, clattering noise against the metal hull of Kicker’s floor. She just tangles her hands in Din’s hair, knotting her long fingers in his curls, pulling him in closer and closer, teetering on the edge from just his touch.

“Are you going to cum for me, Queen of Mandalore?” Din rumbles against her flesh, tongue immediately sliding back in between her folds after the last word comes out of his mouth.

“No,” Nova manages, yanking gently at Din’s hair. Immediately, his mouth comes off of her, even though she didn’t say a word. She stares into his brown eyes, gorgeous and full of lust and darkness. “I’m not the Queen of Mandalore out here.”

“Then what are you?” Din asks, pressing his wet lips against her inner thigh. He adjusts his grip on her thigh, and she exhales, a staccato beat, complicated with how badly she wants his touch.

“Your wife,” she manages, “so devour me like I belong to you, Din Djarin.”

There’s something deeper in his eyes, a flash of something guttural and animalistic. His mouth is back on her pussy so fast that it knocks the wind straight out of Nova’s mouth, and she gasps, her moans loud and unencumbered. When he adds the pumping of two fingers, entering her like it’s nothing, like he owns every single inch of his body, Nova’s on the edge again. And then, without warning, he’s pushing her over it, again and again and again. Everything in her is both electrified and exhausted. The stars outside the window are spinning, she’s panting like she’s in Tatooine’s heat, and blood is rushing so powerfully in her ears that she can’t hear anything else. Nothing in the galaxy exists except for her and Din.

It takes a moment for her to realize, dazed and satisfied, that Din’s mouth has left her. “Hey,” she manages, her voice sounding disconnected and warbled, nothing like it’s coming out of her whole mouth, “where’d you go, it’s your turn—”

“Nova,” Din interrupts, his hands coming out of nowhere and bracing against both of her cheeks, instantly anchoring her in the moment, “your comm is blinking.”

“My—comm,” she repeats, head still feeling underwater with the aftershocks of her orgasm, and she blinks the stars out of her eyes long enough to look at the thing on her wrist, her vision slowly returning back into focus. Her eyebrows furrow down the middle, and Din tilts her head, still standing on his knees like she’s about to knight him. She swallows, pressing the button. “Hello?”

“Your shields aren’t up,” an annoyed voice relays through the comm, slightly muffled. “You’re Order bait out there.”

Nova rolls her eyes. “Bo-Katan, we just went for—”

“Alone time,” Bo-Katan interrupts iciliy, but the current in her voice immediately makes Nova realize she’s not annoyed with them for sneaking away, she’s panicked for something else. “We have a problem.”

“You’re repeating yourself, Bo-Katan,” Din interjects, gathering the panties tangled at Nova’s waist and gesturing her to lift her hips up so he can slide them back over her thighs. “What pirates entered Mandalore now?”

“Not pirates,” she snaps. “Not Mandalore, either.”

Nova rolls her eyes at Din, exhausted. As she sits up, pulling her trousers back over her thick thighs, the mountains of her hipbones, she cracks her neck to the left. The wetness of Ahch-To’s atmosphere sunk into her bones, and now that the warmth of Din’s mouth has evaporated, she’s suddenly freezing again. She nimbly picks up her discarded azure shawl, wrapping it around her shoulders, her neck, dipping the pooled fabric up over her head. Her hair is wild, hanging in her face, running out of the shawl like water. “Bo-Katan,” Nova chances, trying her best to not sound sour because of the very unwelcome interruption, “can you please tell us what exactly is wrong?”

“Rebel girl,” a voice filters through, and Nova sits straight up, startled. The shock of Wedge’s voice is one thing, but hearing it through the same frequency—and, most likely, location—as Bo-Katan’s makes her heart start hammering for a very different reason. Din and Nova exchange glances—his skeptical, hers frightened—and Nova waits with bated breath for Wedge to continue speaking. His voice is low, full of foreboding, when it crackles across the comm again. “We have,” Wedge says, sighing heavily, punctuating the silence with his voice, full and intentional, “a problem.”

as always, reply here or send me a message to be added to the taglist!!! (and if you’ve already asked me and you’re not on it, please message me again!!!)

if you would like to be taken off the taglist or put on it, send me a message/ask/comment!! <3

I HOPE YOU LOVED IT!!! we're about to dive headfirst back into where SM left off with the Order, ruling Mandalore, and the Rebels, and biiiiiiiig things are coming ;) hope this one tides you over until next week!

as always, i'll be here, on tumblr (amiedala), and on tiktok (padmeamydala) for even more Dinova/SD content, so come hang out! <3

CHAPTER 3 WILL BE UP SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18TH AT 7:30 PM EST!!!

xoxo, amelie

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robert-de-niro-only-fans · 4 years

Text

Accidents Happen

Rodrigo Mendoza x Nurse!Reader

A little late, but this is a birthday present for Miss @pichyfan ✨ HAPPY BIRTHDAY GIRL I LOVE YOU 💖✨

TW: smut, swords, weapons, talks of battle, injury, mentions of blood, mention of death

Word Count: 2.5k

"AH!" Rodrigo chokes back a yell, quickly walking off the pain of the sword that just met with his hip.

He had been teaching some of the villagers to sword fight and make weapons for the upcoming battle with the people that threatened to take away the community that the Jesuits worked so hard to set up. Despite Rodrigo being a devout student of Christianity and disciplined in the rules of the Jesuits, he found it was more important to revoke his Jesuit vows so that he could teach the village people to fight in battle. They all worked tirelessly in hopes of defending their home.

The sword injury in question came from a young boy Rodrigo was sword fighting so that he could demonstrate some important technique to the group. The boy knew he wasn't supposed to land any hits on his teacher, but he accidentally swung too hard and put a hefty gash in Rodrigo's flesh.

Upon seeing the way the cloth of Rodrigo's pants split and blood started to pool, everyone decided it was a good idea that their best warrior go get checked on by the village nurse. Luckily they had brought gauze and splints and other medical supplies with them for the village to use.

Rodrigo hobbles up to the little medicine shack leaning on one of the teenagers for support and surrounded by a huge group of kids. All the kids just love Rodrigo, so naturally they all flock to him since he's hurt.

One of the kids knocks on the door, and you hear Rodrigo's voice shyly call, "(Y/N)?"

You walk over, swinging the door open, shocked at what you see. Rodrigo has quite a bit of blood flowing down his leg at this point. "RODRIGO! What happened to you?!" You rush down the steps and get under Rodrigo's other arm, helping him up the steps and into your nurse's station.

"I, uh, hurt myself," he chuckles. He could never blame a little kid for this accident, it was already sad enough that he had to teach them to fight.

You help Rodrigo to sit on a cot, and he lounges back on his elbows, not wanting to bend his hip too harshly. As you turn around to find your little stool that you sit on, you see that the room has filled up with little kids wanting to make sure Rodrigo will be okay.

"Alright, alright, I don't need an audience while I do my job," you laugh at the kids, "I need a bucket of water from the river, could one of you run and get that for me?"

A little boy at the back of the room simply runs out the shack, grabbing a bucket on his way to the river. One little girl grabs Rodrigo's hand as you try to shoo them out.

"It'll be okay, my dear. The nurse is gonna fix me up," he kisses her knuckles, and turns to all the kids, "I'll be okay! Miss (Y/N) is very good at what she does. Go ahead, go play! We've got training to do when I get out of here."

And with that, all the kids shuffle out, a few of them trying to linger for as long as possible, especially the little girl who was holding the man's hand.

"I think you've got a little admirer," you point out while you turn your attention to Rodrigo's injury.

"Yeah, she's got a little crush on me, I think," he chuckles again before taking in a sharp breath.

"Does that hurt?" you ask.

"Yeah, it hurts a bit, but I didn't want the kids to see me making any faces," he explains.

"Hmm, well you must trust me then, letting me see you in pain." You just can't seem to get a good look at the cut, so you have to ask, "Rodrigo, can you take your pants off for me? I need to get better access so I can clean and dress this wound."

"I, uh..." Rodrigo suddenly becomes shy, which really isn't like him, "Are you, um, are you sure that would be... appropriate?"

"Rodrigo," you coo, "I've delivered babies before, and I've healed warriors just like you. You aren't the first and you certainly won't be the last patient I've seen undressed."

"Well... Alright," he sighs and slowly stands up.

"What? Is a big strong man like you scared to get naked in front of me?" You joke, turning around on your stool to give him some privacy.

"Only for what I might do to you..." he whispers to himself under his breath.

"What was that?" you pipe up.

"Nothing," his voice chimes in a cheery tone.

After some audible struggling and a bit of hissing when getting the fabric off his wound, Rodrigo settles back onto the cot.

You turn around and have to pause to take in the sight of him. His pants were discarded on the floor, ruined from cuts and blood. He opted to take off his tunic and use it to cover himself. So there he was, completely naked, lounging back on this cot, nothing but a thin piece of fabric laid over his groin. You had no idea he had muscles like he has: big shoulders and swollen biceps, toned chest and abs. It really shouldn't have surprised you; you heard the stories of him hauling a net full of heavy armor up the steep cliff...

You snap out of your thoughts and move back over to Rodrigo, inspecting his hip.

"For a nurse who's seen a lot of people naked, you certainly did hesitate upon seeing me," Rodrigo says, looking down at you with a half-smirk.

"I bet it's been a long time since you've made a cocky comment like that to a woman," you look up at him from where you were gently poking around at his hip. He gives you a confused look. "I heard about how you were before you came here," you return that same half-smirk.

A little knock at the door breaks your eye contact. You walk over and crack the door open, the little boy from earlier lifting a heavy bucket of water to you. You thank him and return to Rodrigo, "Okay, stand up again, please."

"What's that for?"

"Just to get the blood off of you. You act like you've never been hurt before," you say sitting next to him with the bucket and a wash rag.

He stands up, wincing did just a second at the pain, "Well... I haven't."

"You haven't, what? Been hurt before?"

He shakes his head no, as you bring the wet wash cloth up to his side, squeezing it to let water run over the cut. Rodrigo grits his teeth and tightens his grip on the shirt in his hand, because it stings a little, before saying, "A good warrior doesn't get injured."

"You must not be a very good warrior then, getting bested by a child," you look up at him and with a sweet smile.

"I'll ask him for a rematch," he gives you a warm look before hissing again at the sting of the water. After drenching the wound a few more times, he's ready to be all bandaged up.

You go over to a little cabinet to mix up some different herbs and natural ingredients that will help heal his wound. Quietly, you apply the salve, while Rodrigo watches you work intently.

"Okay, Rodrigo, I have to wrap this bandage and you. It has to go around your thigh and your waist so it'll press on your hip."

"Okay," he stiffens up a bit, not moving.

"Okay... So, I'm gonna need you to move your hand," you refer to the hand still clutching the shirt in front of his sex.

He lets out a sigh, looking up at the ceiling for a second before dropping his shirt on the cot but quickly replacing it with his hand, gently cupping his privates and desperately avoiding eye contact with you.

Despite him being difficult, you still try to wrap the fabric around him, starting with his waist. You have to work around his arm, but it's not too big of an issue. He scrunches his nose in pain as the bandage presses down on his split skin. You got around his waist several times, as low as you can go, even brushing through the man's pubic hair a few times.

When you get to his thigh, you have Rodrigo turn his back to you and lift his sex up and out of the way. You work quickly to finish this up, but you can't help but take a moment to admire his muscular back and, frankly, plump behind. You tuck the fabric into itself, tying off the bandage.

For your next move you decide to take a little risk, patting him twice on the ass, telling him, "Finished!"

"Did you just-" he quickly spins around towering over you.

"Just what?" You look up at him innocently. "Could you sit down for me, please?"

"I think I should be going, (Y/N)."

"Without any pants? Yours are practically unusable."

He looks at his pants all tattered on the floor, and back at you, before he resigns to sitting down in the cot and covering his lap with his shirt again. You sit on the stool in front of him, placing your knees between his.

"Can I look at it?" You say, pointing to him.

"Look at what? I think it would be inappropriate for me to expose myself again."

"Your bandage, Rodrigo. I didn't get to see how it looked from your front side," you reach out, moving the fabric off of his hip and taking his upper thigh into your hands, examining it. It looks like the bandage is placed correctly, but he's already got some blood peaking through the cloth in a few spots.

"You'll need a new bandage every day at least. Maybe twice a day until it's healed," you inform the man.

"Mhm," Rodrigo says curtly, looking away from you once again.

"So you'll have to come see me, okay?"

"Yeah," he says, trying to conceal his deepened breathing

"Rodrigo."

"Hm?"

"Look at me."

He turns his head and does as he's told. He has a bit of a desperate look in his eyes.

"Are you alright?" you ask.

Rodrigo simply shifts uncomfortably, and judging by the movements of the pile of fabric on his lap, you can tell what the problem is.

You gently place your hand on his lap, feeling his growing member through the shirt.

"(Y/N)." He grabs your hand roughly, "I can't. My vows."

"You revoked your vows, Rodrigo."

He lets out a breath, feeling your hand squeeze his length. His eyebrows furrow, "I shouldn't. I only revoked my vows to help protect the village."

"And you deserve to be rewarded for all you for our home."

Another squeeze; his hand tightens on yours.

"I would be going back on all the progress I made since I converted..."

"You revoked your vows, Rodrigo. Not just one, all of them. You're allowed to do this."

Another squeeze, and Rodrigo's hips buck into your hand. He's as hard as he can be and starting to soak through his shirt with precum.

"Just because I'm allowed to, doesn't mean I should."

"But you want to, and that's okay. You're a changed man, a better man, but still a man, and men make mistakes, and they sin. You won't go back to the person you used to be just because you allow yourself a bit of pleasure."

With that, Rodrigo's resolve breaks. He firmly grips your hand and ruts up into it, while his head rolls back and lets out a moan.

A moment later, he looks back down at you, and rips the shirt off his lap, then you both find yourselves with a hand pleasing the hard cock in-between you.

Your free hand guides Rodrigo's hand away from his length, intertwining your fingers. You continue to work on him while you look up at him, appreciating the overwhelmed look on his face for just a moment before you kick your stool out from under you, get on your knees, and start placing kisses on his sensitive tip.

"Oh God..." Rodrigo certainly felt like he was in heaven.

Your lips envelop his sex in warm, wet pleasure. The man's fingers lazily caress the back of your head, as he becomes a moaning mess.

You take as much of him as you can, his cock hitting the back of your throat and your hand handling the rest. He helps your head bob up and down for a while; unfortunately though, he can't take very much before he's pulling you off of him--it's been a while for him.

"What?" you giggle, "Not good?"

"No," is all you hear before his lips crash into yours. He pulls you up to him, pushing your pants down in a rush, then getting you in his lap.

Rodrigo is practically growling and digging his nails into you, becoming a bit animalistic as he seats his dick inside you. He'd nearly forgotten how amazing it feels having contact with a woman this way.

You make your own series of noises as well, taking his big length. You want to make him feel good, so you muster all your skill while riding him. Rodrigo stands up, grimacing with pain from his hip, but keeps fucking into you.

"Be careful!! Don't hurt yourself, my love," you please with him.

"I won't. But I am gonna finish this off like a man."

Seconds later, your back is hitting the cot as Rodrigo's hips slam into you agressively. You'd never seen him be so forceful; he'd been nothing but sweet and compassionate in his time in the village. But this is a man desperately in search of achieving the ultimate pleasure, a pleasure that he couldn't have any more.

He rips your tunic open, lips meeting with your breasts. Breasts. Rodrigo missed breasts. He worshipped them, praised them, until his carnal desire is satisfied as he orgasms, spilling his seed in you with a few rough pumps.

After lying his forehead on your chest for a moment, he looks up and meets you with the sweetest kiss you'd ever been given. The way he squeezes you in his arms and softly presses his lips to yours again and again makes you feel, well, loved.

You both lay on the little cot, cuddling and placing kisses all over each other's faces.

"Hey," you whisper.

"Hey," he mimics you.

"You don't... Do you think I'll get pregnant from this? I'm sorry- it's just, I'm a nurse, so I worry about these things," you ramble nervously.

"Well, I don't think it matters. We may not make it through the battle." There's a long, quiet pause between you as you realize you might be facing your mortality soon. "But if we do make it out alive, I'm gonna marry you... since I can take a wife now."

You look up at him, tears threatening to form in your eyes, as he nuzzles his nose against yours.

#robert de niro #robert de niro x reader #robert de niro imagine #fanfic #robert de niro fanfic #rodrigo mendoza #the mission #happy birthday

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a-secondhand-sorrow · 4 years

Text

but lately I've been feeling strange

(read on ao3)

For as long as she could remember, Dina had been able to see the future.

Okay, well, no. Not see the future. Sense the future, if you could even call it that. Or sense like, three seconds ahead. But maybe that gave it more credit than it was worth.

Whenever Dina woke up in a bad mood for no reason, which was pretty rare, bad things happened that would totally justify a bad mood. She’d told her mother this when she was younger, on the day she broke her collarbone. Her mother said that her attitude was the reason the bad things happened; believing it to be true made it true. If you’re happy all the time, her mother said, then happy things will happen to you. And ten-year-old Dina, like a moth to a flame, took to that idea.

Most days, it seemed to work. She wasn’t exactly the cheeriest person around, but no one could deny her happiness. Her father took to calling her a “little ray of sunshine” while her sister took to kicking her out of her room when she got a little too positive. She may not have had pep, but she made up for it with a genuity no one could doubt. And the days where she woke up with that sinking, gnawing feeling that something bad would happen - well, she pretended it didn’t. She had to be happy all the time, or bad things would happen. She wouldn’t bring misfortune upon herself.

Most days, it seemed to work.

One day, when she’d tried to act happy, her (former) best friend told her she was too cheery all the time. She didn’t listen, she said, only thought about herself. She wasn’t real enough. And that best friend became her former best friend.

And one night, she awoke with a jolt like she’d begun falling in her dreams, but her stomach never picked itself up again. She could hear voices in the kitchen, so in an attempt to calm her nerves, she eased out past her bedroom door just in time to hear her father whisper to his mother that he’d lost his job.

And when her mother picked her up from school, she knew a second before her mother told her that that was her last year at the school, that they were moving, and she knew that that’s what the dark feeling in her gut had been trying to tell her since she woke up.

Upon their move to Brownsville, she found she liked sports. Basketball, soccer, tennis, any team that would take her. Her advisor had suggested them as a way to burn off energy, but she wasn’t too bad at them, either. It helped that she knew exactly where every opponent was at every moment and could guess with an eerie accuracy every move they were about to make. She always felt a little...odd when playing. It didn’t feel quite right. It felt like she was doing something wrong, even though all she was doing was sending her environment.

She had a dream before her first day of school in Brownsville that at the lunch for new students, there’d be a girl sitting there with hair cropped into a pixie cut and no one to talk to. They’d be the only sophomores there at the relatively small lunch, and she’d slide across the seat from her and say…something. And sure enough, with a bright, bubbly feeling just behind her eyes, Dina’s eyes locked onto the girl from her dream at the lunch, and her feet carried her there of their own accord.

“What type of sacrifice do you think I’d need to make for a milkshake?” She said, dropping her tray down at the table and allowing her body to follow. The girl furrowed her brow.

“Like, ritual sacrifice?”

“Sure,” Dina replied. “Do you think it’d be a nice, tame, Percy Jackson-esque scraping food into a fire? Or would it require slow-roasting a freshman over a Bunsen burner?”

The girl took a bite of her sandwich - peanut butter, as far as Dina could tell. “Maybe like, that lizard in the advanced bio teacher’s room?”

“I like the way you think,” she replied. She stuck out her hand a moment later. “I’m Dina.”

Her companion took her hand in a surprisingly fine handshake, voice dropping a few notes from where it had been before. “Sydney. Or Syd.”

“Always good to know the names of your accomplices in sacrifice.”

Sydney shook her head. “You really want a milkshake, don’t you?”

“I’d kill a classroom lizard for one.”

“Seems gratuitously violent.”

“I take my milkshakes seriously.”

Syd shook her head again, incredulity taking over her features. Her nose scrunched up just a little, and Dina could suddenly see all of the freckles on her face. She’d noticed them before, but they’d all blurred together. Now, she could see each tiny dot in perfect detail. She wrenched her eyes away as Syd began to say something else. “I mean, my mom works at a diner that sells milkshakes if you want one that badly.” She backtracked, cheeks flushing a little. “But you’d probably have to, like, wait for after school?” She took another bite of the apple.

“God, it sounds perfect.”

And so she and Syd sat at a booth in her mom’s place of work, splitting a milkshake as they’d do so many times in the future. Dina didn’t know how she knew they would - it was just something she could tell. Just like she could tell that a defender was going to cut in front of her a moment before they did, she knew that she and Syd would end up right there time and time again, and just the thought of that made her smile like Syd smiled when she thought Dina wasn’t looking.

Sophomore year passed in a blur of essays and all-nighters and milkshakes, and then she and Syd were free to roam the streets of Brownsville as they pleased. Sometimes Syd’s little brother Liam joined them, and Dina secretly loved those times. She’d always been good with kids, since she seemed to know what they wanted to do or talk about, and Liam was no exception. He was a cute kid, always happy to chatter on about armor on superheroes or the benefits of mac n cheese or any other topic that interested him that day.

“Grown-ups are so boring, you know?” He said to her one day. “They just like the same thing day after day, like they have to pick one thing only. They can like lots of things! And one person, too! I think you and Syd are already getting to be like that. You spend all of your time together, just one person. It’s weird.”

Dina choked out a laugh. She was glad Syd was checking out freeze pops for them while they waited outside; Dina got the feeling she got embarrassed when Liam said stuff like that around her.

“Maybe you’re right, Liam,” she said, dropping her hand to his head. His curls always felt smooth and soft under her palm, making her weirdly nostalgic for when she used to do her hair with her mom all the time. “But wouldn’t you like to be stuck with your sister if you had to be stuck with anyone?”

“Definitely,” he said, and Dina felt her heart warm a little at his honest admission. Syd appeared a moment later and he was quickly distracted by the blue freeze pop in his hand.

She’d be lying if she said that Syd’s reaction to having Liam around, her tone of voice as she said “Goob” and her gentle hand on Liam’s back and the smile she smiled while looking down at him, didn’t have something to do with her enjoyment of their time with him.

Their time together sans Liam, though, was more than nice, too. They’d truly just started hanging out because they were the new kids, but Dina had a feeling that they would have been friends anyway. They were too close to not have some kind of innate connection.

Junior year was a harsher year in general. Even Dina’s normal happiness was tested day after day, just from the course load and social stratosphere.

Of course, there was a day when she woke up with a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach, but she tried to mask it. Syd could tell something was wrong. After school, they walked in the direction of the supermarket, but Dina had a sudden tingle of pain run up her spine. She grabbed Syd’s arm and dragged her towards the closest bench, the heavy feeling in her stomach growing so that she wondered if she’d throw up for a moment. She could feel her arm vibrate slightly like it might when her phone was underneath it, but her phone was in her backpack. Syd followed her and sat when Dina tugged her down.

“Are you okay?” she said.

“Yeah,” Dina said. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just kind of...lightheaded...”

She trailed off as Syd’s phone began to ring. She got a sudden, unbidden mental image of a dark basement, but it was gone and forgotten as soon as she’d seen it. Sydney looked away from Dina, still frowning slightly, and swiped the call open.

“Hello?” Syd said, and suddenly Dina knew what the person on the other end would say before they said it. Her hand found Syd’s arm, trying to instill her with some kind of strength, as though she could protect her from the contents of the call.

And as Syd learned that her father had hung himself in her basement, Dina took her hand and watched as her expression shifted from neutral to panicked to shocked. Dina would learn, later, that there was no note when Mrs. Novak found him, that her best friend would have no closure whatsoever. She didn’t know how she knew Mr. Novak had even died before the caller had said it; she just knew that she had to keep her touch on Syd, to make sure she was still alive and physically okay. And when Syd hung up on the call finally and her expression shifted, Dina felt the despair reflected on her face. When Syd turned her rapidly tear-filling eyes to Dina, her own eyes become teary. She didn’t pull her in for a hug since she didn’t know if that would be the right thing. She just tried to be there and hold her hand and she cried a little bit herself. She didn’t want Syd to feel alone like Dina knew her friend felt at so many times; she wanted her to know that she was feeling similar things and that she was allowed to show her sadness. She didn’t think Syd always knew that.

That overshadowed most of everything in Junior year, but eventually, summer came and went again. It felt weird without Mr. Novak there to push puzzles on them and tell wandering jokes with no punchline, but she knew it wasn’t as weird for her as it was for Syd. Her best friend became even more withdrawn around everyone, but she took comfort in the fact that she knew when to pull her out of her shell and when to leave her in. She got Syd to dance with her on the empty streets one day as school started again, putting one foot after another and another laugh after another, and that felt pretty nice. More than nice, even. A feeling she didn’t have a word for.

She’d never had a boy be interested in her, is all. And Brad Lewis...he was interested in her and her sudden lack of braces and growing of boobs.

She’d recount it all to Syd later. In the diner, over a milkshake, of course. “And he’s all like,” in a bad imitation of a male voice, “‘who’s the new girl in town?’ And I was like, ‘shut up. It’s me, Dina.’”

“Right, this is Brad...Lewis?”

Dina shouldn’t have been surprised that Syd was skeptical. She was skeptical of most people. And she didn’t need to have her improved hearing to hear the skepticism in Syd’s tone. “Yeah,” she breathed, thinking of the night before. “He’s sort of sweet, you know?” She continued, ignoring Syd’s quirked eyebrow.

Bradley - Brad - well, he really was very sweet. Not nice, exactly, but sweet all the same. An absolute knock-out, too. She almost considered calling Syd to moon over him, but Syd had never once shown an interest in talking about boys and she doubted she’d start then.

One of her friends from her old school told her on Instagram that football boys liked it when you came to their practices. She did, one day. It wasn’t really her cup of tea - she’d given up on playing sports after sophomore year. They took too much time and the intuition was beginning to scare her a little bit - but she definitely enjoyed watching Brad run around in tight pants. He caught her eye a few times and smiled at her laughter.

She met him at his car after practice, greeting him with a kiss.

“Come to homecoming with me?” He breathed before she could even say anything about the practice.

“What?” She laughed, letting her hands rest on his chest. “That was a non sequitur.”

“I know, I know,” he mimicked her laugh. “It’s just, well, this may sound kind of dumb.”

“I’m sure it won’t.”

“I’ve been wanting to ask you. And seeing you there today - well, I’ve never had someone come to my practices. And I wanted to ask you before I lost the high of seeing you there.”

Her smile grew. “Well, I’ve never been asked to homecoming before.”

“I guess it’s a night of firsts.”

“Yeah,” she said, moving to hold his head more firmly between her hands. “It is.”

She opened the backseat of his car door and fell back into it, dragging him with her. Some small voice at the back of her head, that feeling she sometimes got, said night of firsts again. She kissed him, only pulling back to whisper “of course I’ll go with you.” She could feel the curve of his smile against her mouth, and she felt it there for quite a while after Brad shut the door to his car, locking them into their own little world.

It was almost surreal to think of it the next day, sitting across from Syd at her mom’s diner, sharing a milkshake as they always did.

“And then…he asked me to homecoming,” Dina said.

She opened her mouth as though to say something, but nothing came out. She found her voice half a second later. “Wait… and you accepted?”

“No, I told him to take his washboard abs and chiseled jawline and get out of my face.” For someone who was sarcastic almost every time something came out of her mouth, it seemed to take Syd a second to process the fact that Dina meant the opposite of what she’d just said. Dina laughed, trying to force her way through the feeling that Syd’s disappointed face gave her. ”Yeah. Of course, I said yes.”

She could feel, literally feel, Syd’s eyes on her face as she looked back down. She realized why Syd was studying her so intently a moment later. “Oh my God. You had sex with him, didn’t you?”

Dina just smiled in response, another laugh building. She couldn’t seem to get the words past her lips, but Syd didn’t have the same problem.

“Holy shit. Holy shit, you gave Bradley Lewis your v-card??” Syd practically spluttered in an undertone. Which, admittedly, was exactly what she’d done, but hearing it laid so plainly out like that was a bit unsettling. She...wanted it, though, didn’t she? She liked Brad, and she liked what he did to her. But she could still feel Syd’s eyes on her face. Damn Syd for always being able to read her like an open book. She kept laughing through Syd’s questions, but eventually, something in her eyes made Dina crack.

“I really like him, okay?” She finally said. She wanted Syd to believe her. She wanted herself to believe it.

“No, yeah, sure. I get it.”

“Just give him a chance! Now, c’mon. There’s gotta be someone you sorta like. Just a little.”

She felt a response on the tip of Syd’s tongue, as though she were bursting with the fact, as though she almost planned on saying it. She could feel it, but it rolled away. Syd’s eyes, widened like a deer in the headlights, might have betrayed the answer, but Dina was distracted by the “I dunno. I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Well, think about it,” she said firmly. “And maybe we can all go to Homecoming. Like a double date.”

When Brad slid into their booth, bringing with him an air of superiority and several kisses, she knew that Syd wasn’t happy. It didn’t take a superhero to sense it. And with whatever transpired between Syd and Bradley while Dina got ketchup, the air at the table was so stiff and dry that she couldn’t be surprised when Brad’s nose started bleeding. That was just what they needed; an injury.

Of course, she and Syd would sit at the table again. Between shallow breaths, Syd would breathe “I sort of...hadsexwithStanleyBarber?” and God, didn't that hurt. She wondered if that’s how Syd had felt, and then she realized she should have been happy for her best friend, but what she felt was mostly shock. She told herself it was because she’d fucked Stanley Barber of all people, rather than any feelings she might’ve had herself.

When the topic of Stan’s sexual prowess (or lack thereof - Syd was never a great liar) exhausted itself, Dina frowned down at her phone.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s just - it’s just Brad. We were going to go to the party tonight, but he’s not sure if he’s feeling up to it. With his ankle and all.”

“Oh, well, we, um, we could go? Together?” Dina looked up for her phone, locking eyes with Syd. “If you still wanted to go, you know. I know you were...looking forward to it.”

Dina finally shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. Why not?”

Syd finally allowed herself to smile. “Great. Cool.”

It seemed like the next thing she knew, she and Syd were at the party. Brad had been in a terrible mood, bitching about every little thing all day. She told herself he was worth it, a bad mood and all, but it was honestly nice to be at a party with Syd. Just to have some...friend time. Gals being pals. They hadn’t hung out just the two of them in too long, even if Syd had brushed it off earlier in the day.

And, when doing her makeup, she knew she didn’t imagine the hitch in Syd’s breath as she applied the cherry chapstick to her lips.

Weirdness with Stan aside, she was having a fantastic time. Syd seemed to actually be happy, which was a feat those days, and the drink in her hand was starting to numb her mind and make her fingertips tingly in a pleasant way. Their chat on the couch with drinks in hand was awkward enough that Syd didn’t seem to mind when Dina pulled her away to the dance floor.

“This is my favorite,” she’d said by way of an explanation and apology for Stan. Although discomfort practically radiated off of Syd when Dina stopped them in the middle of the crowd, she didn’t object.

“C’mon,” she said, basically shouting over the noise. Syd laughed, and Dina would’ve been surprised that she could hear her laughter over the music, but she’d realized before that she could always hear what Syd did, so she didn’t waste too much time dwelling on it. Syd just shook her head and laughed. Dina could feel Syd’s pulse in her fingertips as she grabbed lightly at her wrists.

She couldn’t seem to stop laughing, and the funny faces Dina was making as she got into the music certainly didn’t help. But eventually, persuaded by the music and her best friend, Syd acquiesced and shuffled a bit, which Dina figured was probably the most she’d get.

She didn’t know if it was the alcohol muddling her brain, but as Sydney started to move more, she found her eyes tracing her every move. They both moved close together, ignoring the ways that one was supposed to dance at a party. With a jolt, Dina realized they were much closer than everyone else. If she’d tried, she could easily pull Syd flush against her body. But of course, she didn’t. Syd’s breath blew across her chin in short, warm puffs. Dina could see the peaks of goosebumps on Syd’s arms even though the room was sweltering.

The music stopped, but they stood together for a moment, breathing in the same breath.

And then, of fucking course, Brad arrived. Of course he was the source of the music discontinuing. She was torn between annoyance and fondness at the sight of him; one part of her wanted to go back to the moment before, but the other was desperately glad he was there.

(She might’ve been afraid to go back to that feeling of dancing with Sydney rather than actually being glad to go back to Brad, but she pushed the thought away.)

He was angry. Unbelievably angry, and for what she didn’t know. He dragged her away - well, he didn’t exactly drag her away. He sunk his claws into the air around her and tugged, bringing any of the high of before and the flush of alcohol away from her. So she followed as though she were a puppy on a leash, leaving Syd behind with a heavy heart.

He was so goddamn angry she was half surprised he didn’t hit her. He only hit the wall, but that seemed to hurt, and he was “already injured enough.” Brad, his voice low and steady like it had been when he’d breathed out an invitation to homecoming, asked for his jacket back. Dina’s eyes found the moose on the ceiling just as he asked, but her eyes snapped back on him.

His voice had been just as low, but it held none of the affection, none of the gentle tone.

“Fine,” she said, managing to keep her voice cool even as her eyes welled with tears. The jacket slipped off her shoulders easily, and he snatched it from her hands as though disgusted by the thought of touching her. Only when he was gone, the door slammed behind him, did she allow herself fall back onto the bed and let the tears fall past her eyelashes.

She could tell it was Sydney as soon as the door peeked open. Her breaths were shallower than anyone else she’d met, but surprisingly steady considering the circumstances. One quick glance to her right, even with tear-filled eyes, confirmed that it was Syd. She had a gentle way of moving that made quiet little sounds across the carpet. Every nerve in her body seemed to recognize the moment that Syd’s body came in contact with the mattress. Heat radiated from her thighs and shoulder, comforting and unprecedented. She must have put her sweatshirt back on.

“Hey,” Syd whispered, her voice catching on nothing in particular.

Dina didn’t remove her eyes from the ceiling. She sniffed.

“You’re crying because...there’s a dead animal hanging over your head?”

She’d honestly begun to tune out the taxidermy moose, but she wasn’t quite ready for one of Syd’s jokes.

“Hey, talk to me,” she whispered. Dina felt the barest shift of Syd’s forearm closer to hers. “What happened?”

Music pounded from the main party, echoing in Dina’s head like a dull headache. She sniffed, lifting her shoulders in a half shrug. She hated how her voice still wobbled. “It’s just Brad,” she finally said, not moving her eyes from their point on the ceiling. “We got in this - this huge fight, I honestly don’t even know what it was about.”

Syd’s face was tilted on its side, angled closer to hers. When she spoke, Dina could feel her breath against her tearstained cheek. “That happens with me and my mom a lot.”

She sounded almost - almost eager. Like she was excited that she could finally try and help Dina rather than the other way around. Like she was glad that she could relate to whatever Dina was feeling. The thought made something bloom in her stomach. She swallowed harshly against the feeling. She could tell that Syd’s eyes were at the corner of her jawline and the bob of her throat before they turned back to the ceiling.

“And then he-” her voice broke. “He asked me for his jacket back.” She angled her head towards Syd, the movement making the pillow crinkle under her. Syd did the same and met her eye barely a second later.

Dina turned onto her side, far past the point of caring about her hair or makeup, and cradled the pillow between her head and arm without breaking that eye contact. Syd mirrored her, lowering herself so that they were face-to-face, barely any space between them. Warm breath blew onto her own lips. “Well, look on the bright side. At least you won’t have to wear that hideous jacket ever again.”

The corners of her lips quirked up a bit at Syd’s joke, some kind of squeaky laugh escaping her throat, and Syd’s followed suit.

“Guess you’re stuck with me.”

She felt very lips curl into a smile. “I wanna be stuck with you,” Dina admitted, her voice low and catching on the unshed tears making a home in her throat. Syd’s mouth mirrored her own.

Dina knew it was coming a moment before it did. She didn’t know how she knew, just like she didn’t know how she knew anything else. But she didn’t pull away or sit up. She was content to wait for it to happen, to monitor the shift in Syd’s expression and to get distracted by the warm chestnut color of her eyes. She’d never noticed that color before. She had thought they were brown like her own, but they were warmer, a little more golden. Her smile deepened, muscles in her face pulling tight.

Syd’s breath hitched a bit, but she was still smiling, even as her head jerked up almost involuntarily as though she’d moved innately. Then Syd leaned over with the support of one arm braced across the bed and pressed her lips to Dina’s. The sudden, warm pressure of them set a contrast in Dina’s brain, like a flint against a stone. The sudden fire in her brain almost got her to reciprocate. She had not sensed before that she would have wanted to reciprocate. Some new, sudden part of her wanted to do more than smile against Syd’s lips; it wanted her to move, to part her lips and keep kissing her, kiss her back, to press Syd against the cushions like Brad had done to her not so long ago. But that sudden part of her brain scared her. She pulled back, instead, and sat up. Her drinks had muddled her head; she knew she was still dating Brad, even though they’d fought. It was...wrong, wasn’t it? To want to kiss her best friend? Especially when dating golden boy Bradley Lewis.

“Syd, we’re just drunk,” she said, her voice too loud for the eerie silence of the room. Syd sat up as well. Even with the drinks and the low light, Dina could see every freckle on Syd’s cheeks.

“Oh, yeah,” Syd said, her cheeks rapidly flushing. Her voice had pitched upwards, an expression Dina couldn’t decipher on her face. “Sure, I didn’t mean, um.”

Panic flaring in her gut, Dina attempted to keep it out of her voice “Um, it’s just not-”

Syd sat for another moment before she was all motion. Dina could swear she felt the ground vibrate for a moment as Syd stood.”Yeah, no, totally, it’s fine! It’s fine, really, I’m just, I’m, uh,” it was almost painful watching Syd try to come up with an excuse. She gestured vaguely outdoors. “I’m just, uh, getting a ride home with Stan, so, um.”

“Okay?” Dina said, trying to clear her own head with a shake, but Syd was out the door with a shaky smile. It began to close behind her. “Wait, Syd-” but she was already gone, and the unsteady ground went with her.

When she walked out of Chem class on Monday, tracing the same unsteady ground as before that it seemed like only she could feel, she felt the heavy weight of Brad’s jacket once again around her shoulders. She’d almost forgotten about it all morning, even though a few of her sort-of friends had commented on it by her locker in the morning. The only thought she was really capable of thinking was of how the floor had seemed unsteady as Syd rushed out. She’d felt it; she was sure of it. As sure of it as she was sure that Syd was carefully pulling her glances away from Dina. She traced the feeling of the unsteadiness, like the world’s worst earthquake, into the girl’s bathroom.

Knocking on the only occupied stall door, Dina prayed that it really was Syd and not some random freshman. That would be awkward.

“Syd? Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied. Her voice was pulled tight.

“Well, look, I wanted to. Um, to talk to you?”

“...Okay?”

“Uh. Brad and I talked. He gave me his jacket back.”

“That’s...nice.”

It was clearly sarcastic, but Dina didn’t really care. She had something else on her mind.

“Look, about the party…”

“Dina, it’s fine,” Syd replied. Dina could see her feet angled awkwardly under the stall door. She frowned.

“So...we’re cool?”

“Yeah. We’re good.”

“Okay,” she said. She almost turned to go, but at the last moment she reached into her pocket and pulled out a tampon. She slid it under the stall door, bright against the plain and gross tile of the bathroom. “Feel better.”

She could’ve sworn she heard Syd laugh, a slight exhalation of nervous energy she’d held inside of her up until she finally let it out. Dina smiled a little as she left.

In detention, when Stan and Syd approached her - or pulled her away from Brad, quite rudely, too - she knew they weren’t telling the truth. They were each forcing the words about their “sexcapade” out of their lips like it was something foul to think about (which it, admittedly, was).

In fact, as she’d been pushed against the wall by Brad, she could’ve sworn she felt something low in her gut just before they came to get her. Something like the bottoming out of your stomach when you drop a glass of water and know it’s going to collide with a harsh tile floor, but distant and larger. That lingering feeling was part of why she pulled away at all; nothing would’ve been able pull her away if she’d really been into it.

Stan’s plan was, admittedly, ridiculous. But so was the whole, faux-honest situation. She was preparing to have to pull some sort of save, and as her ears picked up a faraway clacking of dress shoes on tile, she poised herself to sneak down the hallway. Summoning several years of former ballet classes that she’d quit when the hobby had become too time-intensive, she tiptoed down the hallway, praying to every deity she could for the principal to not hear her. It came in handy; she made a crashing noise just before he could reach the door.

It was odd to feel victorious when the deed was done. But she did. She felt...victorious. Like she’d done something, stupid as it was. And so she said “oh, fine,” to Stan and Syd’s offer of a joint. With smoke curling around her fingers like a fond snake, she found it difficult to worry about much of anything. She was high on victory and about one-twelfth of a joint, and she was happy with that.

When Syd and Stan had dispersed, for the bathroom and fuck knows where, respectively, Dina rested her head back against the lockers and took a deep breath. She could hear, distantly, low voices. Panicked, really. But resigned. Syd’s voice mingled with Jenny’s and Brad’s. She grimaced, resigning herself to retrieval duty.

Syd was really much more loyal than anyone gave her credit for. She barely hesitated before telling Dina everything about Brad’s betrayal. She’d expected fury to overtake her, or overwhelming sorrow, or something. And she surely felt angry, and maybe a little sad. But mostly she felt like her relationship with Brad was fated to end with him not caring about her and doing something insensitive.

Somehow, seeing the library in ruins made her even angrier than Brad cheating on her had. Even though she’d known something bad had happened completely unrelated to Stanley Barber ever 69ing, the extent of the damage made something harsh and angry rise in her throat so that she thought she might choke. It might’ve been the sudden knowledge that she and Syd weren’t really best friends anymore win the way that they should be, just like her former best friend had once told her. She’d been too self-involved, or maybe Syd had been too self-involved. It just hurt to know that Syd couldn’t bother to tell her the truth. Went out of her way to tell lies with the help of Stanley Barber.

“What happened, Syd?” she demanded the next day, pulling to a stop in front of the bench where Syd sat. She’d been scribbling away in something but looked up as soon as Dina started to speak.

“What?”

“I saw the library. I’m not stupid. What really happened?”

It almost seemed to pain Syd - she choked for a moment. “I can’t tell you?”

Dina just looked at her for a long moment. “You asked me to help you steal something and you can’t even tell me?”

“...Yes.”

She knew Syd could read her like an open book, so she didn’t try to explain her feelings. She just turned and walked away. But before she fully could, she turned on her heel again.

“We’re best friends, Syd. Or at least, we’re supposed to be. Best friends talk. They’re supposed to tell each other everything. But we don’t! We haven’t spoken about anything. We don’t tell each other anything. I just - you should be able to tell me.”

Syd swallowed hard. She looked down at the book in her lap. “I know. I’m sorry. I just - I can’t. I can’t tell you.”

Dina’s eyes roved over Sydney’s face. She nodded after a moment, a small, exasperated sigh leaving her. “Right.” And she finally turned on her heel in favor of heading to class.

Syd shouted after her, but she pretended she hadn’t heard.

She never could keep a grudge against Syd, though. And Syd knew it.

So she shouldn’t have been surprised when she turned up outside of Syd’s house in time for homecoming, as planned. She was weak for Syd. But she did have to blink in surprise as Liam opened the door.

“Ah, Dina,” he said. “Come in, come in. Syd is still getting ready. Girls, you know?”

“I...do know, yes,” Dina said, fighting back a smile. The kid had always been able to make her smile, she’d give him that.

He was in rare form, talking on and on. He’d gotten into a fight, apparently, which made Dina’s lips tug downwards, but he wasted no time in assuring her that he was happy with the outcome as his (very tall) crush was now interested in him. She just nodded through his commentary, sending half-hearted glances up the stairs. When she finally saw Syd coming down, she thought her heart might stop for a moment.

She wasn’t sure if it was the dress or the necklace or the sudden flare of confidence that filled her like a balloon, but Syd looked beautiful. Dina had always known that her best friend was pretty, and what was more, she knew that she was pretty inside. Which sounded a little creepy and either serial-killer-esque or like a Hallmark card. But whatever it was, she was painfully reminded of that feeling that twirled inside of her stomach and refused to stop, that warmth growing in her chest, and her darkening cheeks.

She smiled at Syd, and Syd smiled back.

And later, when she and Syd swayed together on the dance floor, she could’ve sworn that another kiss was coming. She wanted another one. Dina desperately wanted another kiss, which was a little terrifying and a little thrilling at the same time.

“You know, that kiss at the party…”

Syd’s brow furrowed preemptively, as though she anticipated something bad.

“I didn’t...dislike it.”

And slowly, ever so slowly, Syd appeared to let herself hope. That same confidence she had standing on her stairs came back, filling her up. “Yeah?” She said, words slipping out between a rapidly growing grin.

Dina smiled back. “Yeah.”

She thought there was another kiss coming, but before there could be she heard (felt?) distant footsteps. They had the same pattern she’d heard stomp away at the party - Brad’s gait had become somewhat unique with his injury. Turning to watch homecoming king and queen be announced, she could only swallow the sudden crop of anxiousness that exploded in her stomach. He couldn’t do anything then, right? Right.

Oh, how wrong she was.

And just a moment before it happened, she felt a pressure bomb tick. It was that horrible moment before glass makes contact with a tile floor when you know that a crash is going to happen but can do nothing to stop it. Like that feeling at the diner, when Brad’s nose started bleeding, but five times closer and a thousand times more powerful. She saw the moment in painful detail. Brad’s hand coming too close to his body, his eyes a little more bloodshot than a moment before, his lips parting where the microphone began to hide them. A curve of glass the second it reached the floor, destruction when it was nothing but beauty, eerily reminiscent of Stanley Barber’s body hitting the polished gym floor. Thunder before lighting.

Still, in her ears, she could hear the vitriol he’d spat. Kissing my girlfriend. As though he knew anything about Syd, about her, about them. As though he deserved a tenth of what Dina ever gave him. She could hear Syd’s tiny, soft sniffle. Dina’s own thousand thoughts praying for some teacher to intervene. Syd’s confidence leaching out of her, sucked away in a second, no smile in sight. She could almost hear her embarrassment, her anger, her sadness. Her hatred of Brad for taking over everything else at that moment, and Dina had to admit that she felt the same way.

She sensed it, just as she had been able to for years.

She heard, right in front of her, Brad’s head explode just before it really did.

(A minute later, her only thought would be of Syd. Where did she go? Was she okay? What did she think happened? Maybe she and Stan would try to find out together. She had a feeling that they would.)

But right then, all she could do was press her hand to her mouth and try to ignore the warm feeling of blood on her skin. She didn’t believe what she saw; she thought her brain had made it up.

A minute passed, and Brad still had no head, and blood was seeping her dress and pooling on the polished floor, a liquified version of broken glass reflecting the fluorescent lights of the gym.

For the first time, Dina really fucking wished she could see the future. Sense it. Sense even a few seconds forward, past the overwhelming overload of activity in the gym - feet against floors, screaming, all kinds of emotions hanging in the air but mostly terror and horror.

She lifted her head, just slightly, and locked eyes with Stanley Barber. He cocked his head to the side, and she stared back.

They had something to do, right?

#i am not okay with this #ianowt #dina/syd #dina #sydney novak #bradley lewis #stanley barber #syd/dina

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seenashwrite · 6 years

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Dearest Nash, I've touched on this before in (I believe) in a discussion re: why some mainstream fics get oodles of notes while more original ones do not, *but* I wanted to get a bit more specific here. There are certain writers here whose writing has a definite vibe to it (if you will) that separates their work from others, and your name is one of the first that comes to mind. Bear with me, because trying to detail what makes your writing stand out is difficult while trying to articulate a Q

^ this is a gif with parts 2 - 4, just FYI

Hmmm… this is a bit of a brain buster. But I can answer it, and I think succinctly, maybe with a touch of that Spidey sense you mention:

Thank you for your inquiry, hope that helps!

I kid. But this is a brain-turner. And a characteristic which, like you say, ain’t limited to me. I’d honestly throw comedians under this umbrella, too, not because I’m necessarily gunning for a laugh every time, but because it’s pretty much their job to take a “basic” (a tenet or fact of life or present reality or whatever) and present the observation with a twist. I think of storyteller comedians specifically, your Patton Oswalt-s, Maria Bamford-s, Kathy Griffin-s, and John Mulaney-s.

So if I can sum up, assuming I’m tracking with you, what you’re more or less driving at with the “how” is this –> Is there anything beyond simply personality, or an auto-pilot thought cascade (for lack of better terminology) that contributes? Are there things someone could do/be proactive about, to perhaps cause this same sort of reaction to happen in their brain?

I think there just might be.

Folks reading this, let me ask you a question, and you cannot look it up:

What was the name of the Sherpa guide who led Sir Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest?

His name was Tenzing Norgay.

Nash, what in the name of the frozen corpse of George Mallory does this have to do with Lion’s question?

I shall tell you.

My father told me that fact when I was quite young, so young I legit couldn’t even ballpark my age for you. The context was that having little facts tucked away in your brain may come in handy. Not in a Jeopardy kind of way, more in a conversational way. I’ve no idea why the man thought the Sherpa guide who led Hillary up Mt. Everest would ever come up during a conversation with enough regularity to justify my knowing that fact (aside from him randomly quizzing me throughout my life) but hey, I guess it just did.

But speaking of Lil’ Nash, the situation for her was that she was the eldest of all the Nash litter by miles… like seven or eight years, I’m not bothering to check. So I had a lot of alone time, and my grandmother was my chief babysitter, so prior to kindergarten and then til I was in about second grade (so: all day long during the week, then every weekday after she picked me up from school), I was pretty much always at her house. Yeah, there were toys, but not a lot to do. And I’d read. I’d been reading on my own for a decent while, not because I was some prodigy but because my dad read to me *constantly* when Lil’ Nash was Itty-Bitty Nash, and it “took”. My mom also, every time she went to the grocery store always - and I mean always - brought back a book for me. It might’ve been an Archie comic—-

Mandatory #fuck the CW’s Riverdale tag

—-or a Babysitter’s Club, or Sweet Valley High, Judy Blume, Madeleine L’Engle, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, you get my point. Some small paperback. It would piss Dad off because he’s a cheap bastard and two buck books once or twice a month were really gonna cut into the savings [eyeroll] but also, in a way, because I’d kill it in a half day/a day. Wouldn’t put it down. After awhile, I started writing my own silly little kid stories, then - and this is where the creative writing love came about - I started writing soap operas for my Barbies. (When I was older - like, 5th grade? 6th grade, maybe? - none of my peers were still playing with Barbies, and I got made fun of when, at a sleepover, they saw my stash. And I was like - No, no, no. Those aren’t for playing. That’s my cast.)

Time went on, and when I was bored at post-church lunch/dinners, I would also read the old encyclopedias at my grandmother’s, the ones from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s that she had for my mom and my aunt. As I got even older and became fascinated with rooting through the boxes in gran’s basement, looking at all the cool old clothes, I stumbled upon my aunt’s collection of Whoa-Hooooo Shit There’s No Way My Grandparents Knew You Read These books. Those kinda Harlequin-esque ones, except my aunt’s tastes run close to mine, none were the same shtick with different covers, shmultzy-sappy romance, there was always some sort of intrigue along with the sexy times, and she also had, like, every legit V. C. Andrews (meaning: not the ones from the ghostwriter, this was way before her death) book.

What is my point? I read a LOT. Now-a-days, other than fanfic (which… straight up: I don’t read a lot of that, either. I peace out on probs 80% of it before the third-to-fifth paragraph. It’s gotta sell me fast, yo) I haven’t read fiction in probably, oh…. 12 years? I think the last ones were the first couple Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Wait, no! I lie! I read the 50 Shades books when I was traveling 2x/wk for a job about 4 years ago, and I needed the laughs. It worked. Oh my days, that woman can’t write. The screenplay might’ve been worse, it goes her, then Buckleming, then everyone else. It’s bad. In any event, past decade or so, it’s more historical stuff and true crime and science stuff and all that old fart jazz.

Okay, so that’s #1: Read. And not just anything, be well-read, and that doesn’t mean developing some level of expertise, by “well” I’m saying to cover the spread. You’re building your tool kit, is all. You won’t use most of it, but it’s nice to have options. You also don’t always have to get this stuff from reading now-a-days, because podcasts. Cover the spread there, too. Lemme look at my bookmarks….

[Spongebob narrator voice: A few moments later]

I’m back. Science - Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe; General current stuff without being news - CGP Grey’s Hello Internet; current events with shittons of pop culture, past and present - Greg Proops’ Smartest Man in the World; fun history stuff - The Dollop; entertainment stuff - How Did This Get Made.

#2: Keep a notebook with you and jot down turns-of-phrase that spark something in your brain - things you read on websites, on twitter, in articles, things you hear people say (real life, TV, movies, podcasts), and write it. Don’t snap a pic with your phone or make a note in your phone. There are studies behind this, I’m not hunting them down, you’ll just have to trust me, but there are, and it goes to being reflexive, a brain “muscle memory” thing, if you will. You’re not doing it to plagiarize, you’re doing it to dissect it, kind’ve like you did with the example you gave on me —> went from punch action to punch spiked with booze to a punch with a spiked gauntlet.

Which leads to #3: Mental dictionary. I have a large vocab repository, and it stems from the tons of reading - I stop and look up stuff if I either don’t know it, or it’s used in such a way that I think they’ve got it wrong and want to double-check that maybe there’s another usage I don’t know - and also stems from a drive to combat the (still fairly thick) deep South drawl I can’t kick, and not for lack of trying. But see, I couldn’t have whipped out that progression if I weren’t aware that one definition of “spike” is “to add alcohol to”, or of the common shtick in stories of spiked punch like at high school proms typically, or knew about the existence of spiked gauntlets / old school armor.

And I guarantee you that a good chunk of people didn’t really “get it”, and just thought “Nash Be Nashin’, that nutty gal”. So they “get it” on that level, but don’t Get. It., if you see what I’m saying. And that’s fine. Maybe it got something cranking in the back of their mind and it’ll hit ‘em in the middle of the night, or they’ll be watching Game of Thrones or something, see a gauntlet and be like “Oh goddamnit, I just got a throw-a-way one-liner from three years ago” and have a chuckle.

Related, re: looking stuff up and things that people “get”? I didn’t know fuck-all about Twilight, but it seemed of import to the folks around 5 years younger than me, the Nashlings wouldn’t shut up about it, so I got a good working knowledge of it. Same with Harry Potter, and through it I got to “know” J.K. Rowling, who I find to be an exceptional writer, so that was great, and I’ve watched the movies for the most part over the years at Christmastime, and I don’t give the first shit about what “house” I’m in, nor do I care about what Patronus I’d fart, but I have a working knowledge of what those are, and horcruxes and who Snape and Voldie are, you get my point. I can keep up. But to do it, I had to take the time to look it up. One thing I would not trade for gold is Michael Sheen chewing the goddamn scenery in that battle segment from the last Twilight movie. Have I watched the movie? No. But that scene is the shit. And that baby CGI is horrific on several subtle levels. And not-so-subtle. I’ve digressed.

Back to those notes: So if you’ve got these notes jotted, you might see something else and think “I feel like that could’ve been snappier…. why do I think that….” And you’ve got a resource at your disposal, that little notebook. Hell, jot that thing down - things you think could be done better. I have in many documents a highlight around chunks of scenes for my big dog story where it says in bold above or below “DO BETTER”. Meaning: there’s a better way to get from A to B, but I’m just not quite there yet. I’m pretty quick on the uptake and can crank out something snappy on the fly (like say, in CASPN chat or when banging out a short reply or thank you note) but there’s definitely times I gotta slap a DO BETTER on it and walk away til that snappy something-or-other light bulb goes off.

Here’s a recent one where I backtracked, matter of fact - that noir spoof thing I wrote? Along with my co-writer, Moscato? There was a line that I couldn’t hit with a good zinger, so I just said moments were going by like a fat hamster on a wheel, which is cute, but not really grooving with the setting/the vibe. Less tipsy, when I was correcting some inelegant formatting and a misspelling [sigh], I went ��Oh! Why didn’t this occur to me last night? Right. Wine.” So the line is now about moments dragging like a rolling donut with a copper on its tail. Get it? The cop’s a fat ass. The donut-cop stereotype.

…….Fine, it ain’t my best, but it fits better. Moving on.

And this leads nicely into #4, and a specific tip I can impart - assuming you’ve got a passable-to-high level of vocabulary in your tool belt, practice messing around with making nouns into verbs, and twisting random stuff into descriptors and using bizarre words/things in metaphors/analogies. Like, I say “adulting” quite a bit. Ali - @littlegreenplasticsoldier - I thiiiink was writing recently about Sam being drunk, and he’s a tall wobbly Jenga tower on his last Jenga. Going back to the noir, pulpy detective style, try messing with the whole “S/he was like a ___ that ____”. Add on to stuff that’s well known - He was like a dog with a bone, if the bone was a ____ and he was a ____ and we were in a ____. (I have *nothing* in mind to fill those blanks, by the way, feel free to twist it into sumpin’)

What else…. okay, here’s a #5: In drafts, let yourself wander, and see what kicks out. It can be fueled by silliness or anger, but I don’t reckon you’re gonna get the “snappy” you’re aiming for if you’re down in the dumps and going full-court-press angst. The best stuff, IMO, comes from the space in between goofy and pissed, and that is The Land Of Snark. You can always re-style it to bend more dry or wistful should you need to, certainly, depending on the situation.

Have a sample of a primo Nash Digression that was fueled by ire in a recap from Season 12 (episode 19). I had said - RE: the random inclusion of the character Joshua, which still pisses me off because they burned a character that held massive potential for future stuff as he’d been shown to be the only angel with direct access to Chuck, so, y’know, that could never come in handy, like ever again in the series, right? - the following.

Mandatory pre-emptive #fuck Dabb

[Spongebob narrator voice] A few moments later —>

On god, I have no idea where that came from, and here’s where we go back to ol’ Spidey up there, because end of the day?

All that other stuff’s the foundation, sure, but there’s always gonna be the weird iggy, the thing that can’t be learned or taught, whatever the quirky synapse is that fires off in my/our brains. In my experience, it’s an ADD-ish sort of jam mixed with the Nostradamus effect. Meaning, (A) we’re at Level 10, rapid fire thought processing >50% of the time, and (B) throw out enough stuff for long enough, some of it’s going to stick. And I whiff it plenty. Multiple times in CASPN chat I’ve been like “Whoo, tough room” when something falls flat.

A specific example: @mrswhozeewhatsis - and I think you saw this, but anyone else seeing this may not have - gave probably the most fantastic analogy I’ve seen regarding the whole “getting it” thing, and while it was on the topic of meaty plots that get too far into the weeds (my specialty) and how it can lessen appeal to a broader audience, it still applies here.

She said “Sometimes, when I’m reading something of yours, I feel like there’s a joke I’m missing. It’s like watching Spaceballs without having seen Star Wars.” I say that to say - nobody’s gonna land references that cover the spread 100% of the time. And, y’know, fine. I figure maybe it’ll prompt someone to do a quick google for - well, let’s use Spaceballs. Most folks will no doubt get the Star Wars part, but maybe not Spaceballs. Maybe they’ll check it out, find something they enjoy. Or learn a new word. Or get a brainstorm for a story. Who knows?

Last tip: Don’t actively mimic anyone’s style. Much fail. And I don’t only mean because if they’re on a social Venn diagram with you, would likely recognize themselves in your stuff——

Takes a moment to wave to the peeps still trying with me! #bless your hearts

—–but because it’s fucking hard. I did it broadly on the noir thing, that’s not a hard thing, to homage generalities, but the way I’m messing with doing this on that silly Princess Bride series? Purposefully styling it like Goldman? It’s good challenging and all, and it is making it feel more in the groove with the book/movie, but I have to be in the right frame of mind or it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard, and when I have pushed it, then gone back, it’s sloggy, soggy garbage.

I say all that to say: it’s an amalgam of brain-wiring/personality, and world/life perspective(s), and knowledge acquired over time. The first just is; the second will evolve in myriad ways, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse; the last is the one where you/we have control, we can fill bucket after bucket of information, and the well won’t ever run dry.

Sorry this took so long. I kept adding and subtracting. This is the edited version, if you can believe it. Welcome to Nash Brain. 😉

#Dear Nash #becominglionhearted #Writing Advice #and / or #Writing Stuff #maybe #Writing Tips #unsure #we'll go with all of it #ah I know #Writing Style #that's the ticket #Queueby Dooby Doo #Dad's on a blog post and #he hasn't been queued in a few days

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