#not that im gonna be gone long but also i dont wanna post this at like 7 when i get back

[myriadsystem]

.

[bunnyb34r]

I need to get another crab or two for Gurkle since it doesnt look like Scupa made it through his molt (it's been over a month... im scared to sift through the substrate for his remains/shell) but I dont wanna feed the crab trade and my adhd/depression are like no ❤️ and my anxiety is like GURKLE NEEDS FRIENDS

Even though he never really was a sociable crab like from the start sggdgdgd i mean he broke out of his tank twice the first week I had him and when he was in the tank with Scupa and Speedy he was like AHHHHHHHHHHHH DONT LOOK AT MEE! 😬

So idk man I can't get anyone new til I find scupa('s shell) bc if he is alive/his remains are down there I don't want the new ones eating him... and then I gotta add new substrate and augh it's just so much shit

[no-droids]

Another Rough Day

gif credit @chrishemsworht

Part Twenty of the Rough Day Series

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 13.7K

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

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

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

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

anyways chapter below the cut lets get serious yall

---

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

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

They’re… awful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“P-Please don’t kill me!”

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

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

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

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

You pause, staring down at him in shock.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m n-not—I hate the Empire—”

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

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

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

“W-What?”  He squeaks up at you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You make the decision immediately.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s just… not really your thing.

---

They’re everywhere.

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

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

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

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

Din needs to go.

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

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

Run, sweet girl.  Run.

---

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

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

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

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

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

“Radar?”

“Old.  Only engages above fifty meters.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

There’s too many for Din to handle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He also spoke of a girl.”

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

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

“A girl?”

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

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

Except, then—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

You’re right on time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A star destroyer.

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you hurt?”

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

“No,” you eventually whisper.

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

You feel… nothing.  Absolutely nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You dream of a faceless man ringing bells.

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a Mandalorian.

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

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

After a while, Din quietly breaks it.

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

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

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

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

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

And that covers everything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

@cptnbvcks thank you so much for the incredible art!

[mao22716]

bonus comic ( wooo clap clap clap)

no overlay ver:

can u even see the difference....

commenting on my drawing u can ignore (pls do)

omg all my comments r gone bc i accidentally posted and i deleted it out of panic 😭😭😭😭😭

overall im very happy with this its around 80% of what i originally had in mind

in my imaginagtion i wanted the picture to look more blue bc its morning and its bright but if i put a lot of overlay the colours wont look interesting anymore i am conflicted

so ill post both with some blue overlay and without it

im gonna wait until the day after i make this draft to post so that i can see if theres anything i can improve on it has been a few hrs since i first made the draft and i made some changes to the drawing

i actually changed a few things already like the hair ribbon (it was blue previously) and the umbrella handle (it was a dark brown like the bag)

i also put some pink in the umbrella bc i thought it was too plain i hope it looks good to everyone else who might be seeing it

i want kurikos face to be the focus but i find it hard to do that bc the umbrella is also a light colour so i tried to put more shadow & hopefully theres more contrast

the bag is easier to focus on.... this is sad

the ribbons on the bag r also sad but they look like ribbons so thats good

im not good at perspective so the bottom of the skirt might look out of place but i did my best to fix it by rendering

it looks messy but its supposed to be like that pls believe me

the hair was so fun to paint theres so many colours that go well tgt and looks pleasing

mao cafe hahhha im so funny lolol

i think i could have painted the nose better but idk how to make it look better

aaaa i wanna go back and change it & put bigger dust and sparkles around the character i looked at it too long and its boring

i should redo the mouth too maybe

also i have an idea that saiki was made to wear lolita dress as kuriko bc yumehara and aiura bribed him with expensive coffee jelly

i want to make small comic i dont have confidence but ill do my best

^^^ i did it..... i hope u will like it its very messy but i think it shows what is happening clearly

[jazzyblusnowflake]

OMG hi…I really like your art and was wondering if you wanna be mutuals??????????? Also tell me about your MD ships :3c

honey we are dating- .....okay yknow what- HI PRETTY & TALENTED LADY- yess i will absolutely love toooo 🙈💕💕💕💕💕

also lets see uhhh okay this is an excuse for me to just... expload-

keep in mind not every ship is meant for all of you so dont badger me about stuff that ISNT CANON or YOU DONT SHIP. contrary to whatever you believe, when somone posts about THEIR ships, nobody wants to hear about you NOT shipping it on THAT EXACT post.

hang in there, this gon be a long one >:p

First off we are starting strong with Nuzi- Biscuitbites obviously thats a given- these two just have too much to be said about why and how they make eachother the best version of eachother, whether they ever became canon or not- they fit like puzzle pieces- they lessen eachothers negative traits by being their for eachother.

next is Vuzi- Violentviolet, they are my favorite kind of enemies to lovers 😔 but its also tragic smh. kinda pissed off at how V always does something good in Uzis favor only when she is LITERALLY PASSED OUT- either in the camp ep on the bus or in Alices lab. like damn ofFUCKINGcourse Uzi wouldnt know she cares about her 😭😭😭

envuzi- Violentbitingbiscuits, i love these goobers with all my heart- they deserve the best 😔💕💕💕💕

envy - [does this poor ship just NOT have an exclusive FINDABLE tag name??? im calling them GoldenMemories...], i like to think that if they were in the manor still, and nothing bad had ever happened, these two would be comforting eachother in the healthiest way possible. V needs someone like N and N is just adorable like that uwu

Next we have JxTessa/Jessa- [calling them Fancyblades cuz why not-] J deserves some closure for the shit shes gone through smhhh 😔, its a tragic yuri of J loving and wanting something she probably already accepted she couldnt have, and even then she gotta deal with Ns ass being the favorite one regardless of how hard she tries to be perfect... sighhh i wanna imagine them in a future where Tessa was spared as the only human and J could save her 😭😭😭😭 Tessa might have loved doing mechanical stuff or wore black to hide grease/oil stains on her clothes from her parents and wore gloves to hide her oily stained hands- i want her to have a scene of wiring drones back to life and saving them and saying something like "hey there, you made it! dont worry, ill take care of you, youre my friend now :3" or something //dies//, also before anyone says it- even if Tessa was a teen in the flashbacks- romance is not exclusive to ADULTS, teens can love eachother without having sexual stuff involved. no she was not their MOTHER figure, she was their FRIEND who liked to fix robots for herself to not be alone in a house where her own parents literally chain her up as punishment. i dont even know why im arguing about this, people headcanon or make aus about characters NOT being dead all the time and if Tessa was alive for as long as J thought she was, Tessa would have been a perfectly fine adult either way. so counting this, yes shes canonically considered an adult when Cyn tries to imitate an adult humans body 🙄 makes as much sense as everything else i guess-

next ones i got is NorixYeva/Neva- Solverlilies- i just think theyre neat 😭😭😭 and once again, like everything else in this franchise- they are tragic yuris 😔 damn liam im finding a pattern over here 🤨 anyway, i like to think they either got closer in the lab experimentations or were already close when they were working as WDs in the campsite area for the humans. obviously canonically they were probably straight or just not into eachother romantically- [Nori either u have the worst taste men or Khan just fucking lost it after you died-] but also on the other handddd.... they have 2 hands and they are robots, i want them to kiss like two barbie dolls and im gonna make them do just that-

DollxLizzy/Dizzy- Bloodypink, wost fucking ship names ever, i cant find shit on them with these tags and it makes me angry >:/ at this point 2/3s of my ships are just tragic yuris smh, Doll did not deserve any of the things handed to her, even if she went about doing some things the wrong way i wish Lizzy didnt just abandon her- but then again, Doll did kinda abuse Lizzys trust and Lizzy got scared of being close to a serial murderer so.... morality calls this a draw? 😭 im crying... i wish someone was there to help Doll... sigh... i like to think Lizzy would have waited for Doll to just come back at some point... oh well, thats why AUs exist :"3 //sobs in the corner//

DollxUzi/Dollzi- Bloodybats, this ship is so underrated to me... they could have been... so much more. but why weren't they? did Yeva abandon ever getting close to Uzi when she was a kid after Nori died? did Uzi and Doll just never play around together as kids when their mothers were so close? were they ever close and something went wrong as they grew older? at worst they could have been like sisters together, and at best maybe more than friends. i just dont know what happened here, like Yeva could have tried to keep an eye on Uzi, maybe Uzi could have found Dolls powers so cool before having them too- i dont know theres literally tons of possibilities- but if Doll deserved to be saved or cared for by anyone, at least one of them should have been Uzi... sigh.

ThadxV- Killingblonde, yall this is... the cutest shit... ever???? like from here on out we kinda go into the more or less crackship territory but these two are adorable- Dumbass yet wholesome jock boy that just wants to keep his queen happy 😔👌👌👌 He and Uzi would have so much to talk about on "crushing on literal murder bots that stabbed and almost ate us" its literally love at first stab smhhh 😫💕

ThadxSam- Smokyjock ???? for some fucking reason??? i dont know what my brain did here man- i just like the trope of someone getting under Thads skin- like pair up the healthy sports loving gym boy with the lazy but wholesome dumbass that does drugs or is always just sleep deprived and Thad is always trying to just... take care of his ass and make him take care of himself but he just WONT SMHHH-

okay some more or less crack ships down here:

ThadxN: it speaks for itself. its too adorable and youll go blind from the light of wholesomeness-

ThadxNxUzi: Uzi will die here from the overwhelming wholesomeness... oh bonus if its just a 4s polycule of ThadxNxUzixV i mean i know im pushing my luck but.... random crackships go brr- V and Uzi will complain but love their dumbass golden puppy partners-

ThadxUzi: i think they could have been close and Thad caring about her as a childhood friend turned crush sounds just too cute for me 😔

LizzyxUzi: another random ass rivals to lovers or some shit idk what this is, Lizzy would pay Uzi to kiss the fuck out of her i dont make the rules-

ThadxLizzy: in some cases where they are NOT headcanoned as siblings or cousins, i think they have a good energy of wholesome jock bf and girly queen cheerleader lol, Thad is just a good bf eitherway-

DollxUzixLizzy: the gals would not leave a single second of silence for the small gremlin i swear to God- [Uzi is gay as FUCK for her gfs, absolute girloser unit with her gorgeous but crazy gfs]

okay for the end i have some characters that arent ships but i wish they could have become closer as friends or work out their issues...

J and N- too much abuse and toxicity here, i wish they could talk together more and see they have a lot of things in common- maybe a full line of dialogue from J without threatning N in every sense of the manner would be nice for a change =_=

Doll and V- again, a bit morally ambiguous to ship a character with the murderer of your family, esp when said murderer hasnt expressed regret lmao, but i wish they could at least be friends... Dolls disdain for the murder drones pushed her to end up the way she did. maybe if she didnt do it alone she would have been alive by now. so i like to think what would have happened if she and V could have made up- not necessarily Doll forgiving her- but at least having the space to grow and understand why they did they things that happened.

Cyn and literally ANYONE- i want the solver to be SEPARATE from Cyn- i wish Cyn would have still existed somewhere down there and was savable- i wish this poor child AI had a happy ending to her by connecting with the others as ACTUAL siblings... goddamnit 😔

aaaand thats it for this fine ass day 🫡 yall are welcome to ask about any of these- boy the tags are gonna be.... a lot.

[yelshin]

CAT? HUMAN? | MLIST

﹙SCARAMOUCHE/WANDERER X FEM READER﹚

An: IM GETTING IMPATIENT TO POST THIS ONE SO ILL POST THIS RQ BEFR I GOT BUSY

Tw: 3.3 SCARAMOUCHE LORE SPOILERS, used pronouns in 3rd POV: they/them/you, cursing , another day another ginger slander/J DONT ATTACK ME PLS一

"ma'am are you sure you want a room this large-" "Did i stutter?" You send a threatening glare to the man while he nervously gulp "I-it cost 5,4000 (i def did not guess frfr) along with the items" You look over ur bank acc; feeling hesitant but still its for you best kitten right?

"fine, I'll take it." Just like that they start working on Kuni's new room which is pretty large for his size.. buy its okay atleast he got WAY TOO MUCH space to explore

"[Name] can you be fr right now?" Yoimiya sweatdrop while you're at the couch being proud parent that Kuni learned how to stand in 3 second "Yes Yoimiya I am being for real" you smiled before showering Kuni with your affection

"A LARGE ROOM JUST FOR A 3 SECOND STAND?? sigh this cat is very special yeah?" She also sat down beside you before noticing the amount of changes in your house

Before your house dont have toys around, a bowl at the floor, a sack of cat foods etc. 'thats a different breed there..'

Yoimiya looks over you who was busy pampering your kitten before asking the same question again "Are you sure you wanna pay that high just for...yk Kuni"

"He deserve everything in the world. If he got hurt i wont hesitate to hunt them^^"

"oh my fucking god."

--

"Kuni! Where are you, its time for bath!" You called out playing as if you dont see him at the very corner of your house; sulking

"there you are!" You pick him up before heading towards the bathroom and give him the most relaxing bath that no kitten could ever have(/j). Making a bubble bath you scoop some before putting it to his forehead as a hat... (ITS CUTE. FIGHT IF DISAGREE 👿)

You giggled before taking a picture of him having a bubble hat and grumpy looks and finish his bath and drying him up.

---

"Can i PLEASE bring him? I'll make sure he won't hurt anyone" You plead at your(girlfriends) friends to let them bring your kitten to your hangout "Cmon [Name]! We only hangout for like 3 times a week and we rarely spend time with each other!" Hu tao frowned but even you guys hangout yesterday it felt like a month to them

You frowned before looking at Kuni who's sleeping peacefully at his cat tree wiping small tears in the corner of your eyes "but look at him! He look so lonely if i left him alone yk.."

"Why not hire someone to babysit him?" You grinned at Ayaka's idea before contacting someone to take care of your little (demon) angel Kuni while you we're gone

"WHY ME?! OUT OF ALL PEOPLE WHY." Childe sobbed at the fact his life is gonna be in danger for the next 20 hrs of his life "Don't worry this is your chance to befriend with him! Im sure he wouldn't hurt you unlike last time^^" and just like that you left with your girlfriends while Childe look at Kuni who's now awake and preparing his evil plans to make Childe living in hell.

Childe was chilling at the living room watching some movies on the TV until he heard a glass getting shattered on the floor. He look at the counter to see Kuni glaring at him before signaling him to put food at his container. Childe only rolls his eyes as he continues watching..which made your cat wanna scratch him again

"why should i give you food when you scratch me last time 😒"

It didn't take that long for Kuni to jump high and landed on Childe's stomach and Childe felt like his organs are getting destroyed.

"YOU LITTLE一" Kuni showed him his sharp nails meaning if Childe continue his words he wont hesitate to scratch him; damaging his face.

Childe gulp before going to the kitchen and put some cat food at Kuni's container "I wanna go home..." The ginger walked to the door and tried to open it but...

It was locked.

Childe felt the whole world is against him. He wanna get out of the house and leave Kuni alone! "What did i do to deserve this.."

"You not giving me food."

Childe flinch at the voice and look around to see a small person; with indigo hair and eyes. Childe was completely confused.

First Kuni is a little demon cat(for him) AND NOW HE'S HUMAN??

"WHO ARE YOU?!"

"the demon under your bed." Kuni answered grinning at the poor ginger "I KNEW IT! YOU LITTLE DEMON MAKING MY LIFE GO HELL!"

Kuni rolled his eyes and walk to the kitchen grabbing some sweets at the shelf ignoring Childe's presence. Childe grab his phone and instantly contacting you to tell that your kitten is officially now a human!

You felt your phone ring so you picked it up

"hello childe?"

"COMEHOMENOWYOURCATISAFUCKINGHUMAN"

"Can you PLEASE speak slower?"

"YOUR CAT IS A H一"

and after that the call ended, you just shrugged before continuing to eat your food

--

It took 30 mins to Childe to calm down before talking to Kuni who introduced himself as Scaramouche. "So like you can be a cat around [Name]...?" "Dumbhead i can turn into cat whenever i want, but for now ill stay hidden because I don't wanna be ended up on the streets again" Scaramouche frowned while Childe look at him with pure confusion

"You're lucky [Name] loves you so much that they bought you your OWN room" he sigh for the 69th time while Scaramouche sat back "i told you they're secretly Kylie Jenner"

"if your previous owners are kylie jenner then why did you ended up on a box?💀"

"WE DONT TALK ABOUT MY PAST."

An: Y'ALL IM SORRY IF THERES NOT MUCH OF SPOILING KUNI😞😞 IM REALLY RUNNING OUT OF IDEAS(just like ur bank acc)

Taglist: @thetwinkims @sunsethw4 @etherisy @kunikuzushicandegrademefr @Heiijoxz @eliciana @naritecs @kkazuyass @itztaki @makilovescofi

[zuureleena]

i drew the mercs, miss pauling, admin, and my tf2 oc on the plane to uni 😭

i did all of these a week ago and completely forgot to post them HAJAHAH miss p, the admin, and a rlly simplified ver of my tf2 oc miss lynn!! (zoey lynn hehe + js rambles abt her) under the cut

IM ACTUALLY REWORKING HER DESIGN RNNNN bcs i made her on the sims 4 LMAO and realised how much better and concise she looked, but i really wanna try and make her look like someone you'd js see irl? sooOOo tryna make her also recognisable from silhouette alone and blahablahblah tho she isn't the kind of character that would rlly make too much of a difference in the tf2 universe

i js wanted to make a loveable character LMAO who'd have more of an impact on the relationships and kinda the story?

i liked the idea of miss p having an extroverted bestfriend who's also her wingwoman bcs miss pauling is obvs an awkward lesbian mess who needs help in the love department, and vice versa bcs zoey is into scout and miss pauling is js so glad to have him move on n realise that they r better as friends!! and that he needs to be with someone who isn't annoyed by him 24/7 (IM SORRY, LWNAKS MY SELF-INSERTEDNESS GOT IN THE WAY HAHAHAHA I CANT HELP IT) also, i haven't rlly thought of any orientation for zoey... i'm thinking of her js being a het woman or js whatever u wanna interpret her as!! cuz her sexuality isn't a core thing abt her

she's an absolute harbinger of chaos who'd do anyt for money and some company (this girl has been hella lonely n stressed out of her mind and i'll explain why in an oc post🤭🤭) and even tho she never outright admits it, she does enjoy the freedom of violence she gets to have as a mann co assistant 😭 (which will ALSO make sense when i explain her background to u guys later on)

and bcs of her long experience w shady bosses and asshole customers she's had to deal within all the jobs she's had, she catches onto the administrator's whole thing with the australium fairly early into the job, but she's in tooooo deep now and is like "damn. do i get myself out of this fucked up job (that i am fucked up enough to actually enjoy) or do i stay bcs i literally have everything i've ever wanted....shit." like,, she did say she'd do anyt for money but at the cost of what 😭 [also MAN i wish we got that final comic so i can js make zoey's suspicions make sense??!?@ but in a way it js works bcs it's js this massive mystery that we don't even know of ourselves???? so likeee, im js assuming its smth rlly dangerous or smth bcs helen literally goes to the most insane lengths to get australium and finish off her final... thingy.. that uh DEBT is it... i forgot what she called it BUT WHATEVER BUSINESS SHE HAD TO ATTEND TO B4 SHE DIED QOABJASH]

OH AND YEAH, zoey hates how bossy the admin is and is an ass abt it at times, and the admin wants zoey gone so badly bcs shes an annoying little shit (which she is and honestly, her and scout can be annoying shits tgt <3) but miss p always convinces her to keep zoey BAGAHAHA and they do get things done much faster w zoey there sooOoOOo 🌝🤭

i mean she does try to kill both miss p & l anyway but still, she can't deny that they r both good at what they do

BWOSBQJS BYE I DONT THINK ANYONE IS GONNA READ THIS AHAGAH BUT THANK YOU IF U DID 😭 I HAVE SM ABT ZOEY AND I RLLY WANT HER TO BE LOVEABLE AUGHWGS

[kylelover]

headcanons on the joint YouTube channel of the Reader and Eric, Wendy and Kyle? (for each separately please)

Thanks in advance!!<3

hi anon! i love this omfg you guys are gonna make me wanna do that streamer au even faster... heh anyways thanks to u for requesting! I also made it so it was for Kenny and Stan as well, hope you don't mind.

Sharing a YT channel with Team Stan + Wendy

Stan

you and stans youtube channel would be of gameplays that you play together!

its kind of funny because sometimes both of you post videos playing alone, so its just half animal crossing, half cs:go lol

it would definitely have a pfp of a selfie you took together

sometimes stan posts guitar covers of his favourite songs and small clips of his life he finds cool, just like kyle!

somehow the channel got over 200k+ subscribers and you dont even know how

so... yeah.

lorde attacks once again - 80k views.

"3... 2... 1... ok, go."

stan started touching a similar tune on his guitar, as you focused the camera on the instrument.

"how are you so good at this?" you smiled

suddenly you could hear someone walking near the entrance of stans bedroom.

"oh shit, i think its my dad."

you immediately covered the camera with your hand.

blackness could only be seen from the videos perspective.

a door creak could be heard from the distance.

"stan, check this new song im writing!" his voice sounded raspy, he was intoxicated, one bottle on his left hand and a microphone on the other.

randy took a sip of his beer quickly.

"god damn it dad! when are you gonna stop that whole lorde thing!"

you moved your hand from the camera and focused it on randy.

he was wearing a red gala dress and a brown-ish wig.

"makes me feel so good~ i could dance forever! because i am lord-" randy's sentence got cut off by stan grabbing his shoulders and moving him off his room.

"ok dad, stop, youre embarrasing me." could be lowly heard as he shut the door off and the video finished.

Kyle

i always felt like kyle would have a youtube channel where he posts skits and short videos of his life!

which means together you would post vlogs and short clips you guys recorded with your friends.

apart from those, since kyle is very interested on guitar hero i feel like he would also post his best scores on the game and little game plays of his.

mainly the channel is filled with small moments from both of your lifes, since you and kyle only wanted to keep your memories on a small archive channel:)

vid for mom lols - 5 views, private.

as you started recording the screen turned from a black screen to suddenly seeing kyle's own face.

"wait, are you recording?" kyle questioned.

you nodded in agreement.

both of you had gone to a nearby cafe area to have some lunch together to study for some really hard math exams.

"kyle, I'm gonna send this to my mom. act like you weren't smoking a fat joint earlier," you joked as you zoomed the camera closer to his face

kyle's expressions went from an ear to ear smile to a poker face.

"WHAT? I WOULD NEVER DO THAT!" kyle spoke loudly as he put his hand in front of the camera so his face couldn't be seen.

"dont send that to your mom, y/n! I'm gonna have a bad impression on her!"

you turned the camera to focus your face. "don't worry mom, he is a very studious gentleman," you said whilst moving once again the camera and recording kyle's long study-notes.

you laughed softly while turning off the camera. you'll save that video for later...

Cartman

cartman obviously would have a reacting channel.

however since he shares it with you he decided to also make challenge content.

such as the ice bucket challenge, eating the most spicy pepper, etc.

together you would record videos of pranks and some youtube shorts.

cartman would definitely make one of those videos where he eats the most nasty spicy mix ever, cry, and then say "no reaction."

WE DID THE ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE ⛸️🧊 (end is incredibly funny) - 3892 views.

"h-hey guys hows it going, this is cartmanbrah on another challenge!"

you moved the camera to butters standing on the freezing snow as cartman appeared slowly on frame pointing at him.

"today we are doing the ice-bucket challenge! so dont forget to like and su-su-subscribe!"

the camera got closer to cartmans face as he said the last line.

suddenly the video was cut and only butters could be seen.

he was only wearing boxers...

"come on butters just say it!" cartman shouted.

"i'm butters a-and i got dared by scott67 to do the ice bucket challenge" his voice and body shaked, he was clearly cold.

you grabbed the bucket filled with cold water and poured it on him.

the video was slow motion as the water hit butters head slowly.

"WO-AH DUDE! that was awesome!" cartman laughed.

"Ok guys! smash the like button, by-bye!"

Kenny

kenny didnt have a phone so of course he also didn't own a camera.

so when you bought a new camera you had such a great idea.

make a youtube channel with kenny!

your channel mainly consisted on dumb videos of you two.

maybe it was kenny climbing a tree, or crossing the river jumping on rocks.

sometimes it was you guys just running away from 5 mad dogs following you.

random videos in general.

everytime you watched them together you always smiled.

big man ken - 2 views, private.

the camera moved closer to kenny, showing his side profile where only his bright orange parka and dirty blonde hair could be seen.

his face turned to the direction of the camera.

he laughed softly, his crooked smile and small teeth gap could be seen.

"guys check this out, its the immortal snail." kenny grabbed the camera gently and focused it on a random slug.

"thats not even a snail, kenny!" your laugh could be heard off-camera.

"its the same thing."

he changed the camera to selfie mode and made an exagerated shocked face while he looked at the small animal.

"alright kenny, stop acting like a reac-"

suddenly, a tree fell on top of him, killing him instantly.

"WHAT THE FUCK?"

Wendy

wendy and you would have a story-time vlog channel.

you would basically do pijama parties, yoga, etc together and record

it was fun since you added some effects while recording story-times which made them more engaging to the public

sometimes bebe joined and you three made outfit videos!

your channel was pretty popular among south park.

having over 12k subscribers!

pillow fight! - 50 views, private.

"alright guys! heres a tutorial on how to see if your boyfriends cheating on you!" bebes face could be seen on the camera.

"lord, bebe! I thought we would record our hairstyles!" wendy snatched the camera away from her.

"bebe, don't worry I got your back" you whispered to her whilst grabbing a pillow slowly.

BAM.

you had hit wendy on the head with a pillow.

"i can't believe it!"

"pillow fight!" heidi's voice could be heard behind the camera.

the camera was moved by bebe to a corner in the room and you all started hitting each other.

[st2r-b0y]

Hi gang I wanna talk abt the steven universe finale (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

◦◦,°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°,◦◦◦◦,°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°,◦◦◦◦,°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°,◦◦

Okay I'm a HUGE steven universe fan, and I know that the fandom has been dead for a while now but idc I wanna talk abt my issues with the fandom and how ppl just misinterpret the show.

And no I'm not talking abt the lilly orchards and the ppl with the most braindead takes u have ever heard cuz I feel like they've been talked abt enough. No, I wanna talk abt the finale and I wanna talk abt White Diamond cuz imo she causes sm controversy in the fandom.

Lemme just say I LOVE white diamond, she's in my top 10 su characters for sure, and I feel like a lot of ppl dont understand her arc and her character in general.

Like yes she did bad things and yes I wish we got to see more of her overall but the fucking show got cancelled before it was supposed to and imo ppl need to take that into account when talking abt her and the finale. Her character and her arc does make sense in regards to the buildup and the show as a whole. I feel like a lot of ppl just wanted a boos fight which #1 would've completely gone against the point of the show and also she's like 100 ft tall with mind control powers they were not beating WD in a fight idc. Not to mention the fact that we lowk got a boss fight right before that anyway so that would've just been repetitive.

And just thinking abt her character, she represents everything and nothing at the same time. She's every color of the light, but she's also empty without the reflection of the other colors. She perceives that emptiness as perfection cuz that's the easiest thing to believe. She's probably older than time itself and has never rlly been proven wrong in any circumstance so when she finds out that pink is gone and steven is steven obviously she's gonna have a fucking identity crisis.

Steven didn't "defeat" her, he just changed her mind, (idk maybe like that's a core theme of the show or smthn) and changed her perspective. He showed her that things can change and that things aren't set in stone. (wow what another core theme thats crazy)

Also another thing she didn't want to murder Steven and I fucking hate it when ppl say that. I don't think she's ever seen a human before and in her mind steven is just pink in a different form so pulling out his gem wouldn't kill him. In reality yeah it probably would, I'm just saying that wasn't her intention.

Anyway this post was way too long and probably doesn't make any sense. I don't expect many ppl to see this either especially cuz I'm barely active on here unless Im looking at fanart but if ur reading this hopefully u got smthn out of it. (°◡°♡)

◦◦,°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°,◦◦◦◦,°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°,◦◦◦◦,°.✽✦✽.◦.✽✦✽.°,◦◦

[s0lar-ch3ri]

theory time!

so reasoning as to why i cant reblog the other one is just cause it doesnt allow videos when i reblog now which sucks but whatever so yeah! its a jrwi theory again, and whatever future info i have was 99% gathered from the wiki (the remaining one percent might not even show up in this theory so ye), and of course theres spoilers for the black rose one shot AND riptide pirates (dont have any exsct eps, all i can say is im at ep 101 now so anything before that is kinda fair game)

for the original theory post

k so we gonna put that one clip (scroll message, about a minute long) and talk about it, def mention all the connections gill would have with the black sea, shit like that

apologies for the buggy clip, just needed to add this and when i recorded i was in school aka just recorded like this for less risk, lets talk about the message though.

"a map that is a guide and a key passed around the hands of destiny, it leads to chaos infinity beneath the seas, the garden giant, the nameless prince, the unborn kings, all await to be inevitably free"

i think in my og theory post i talked on how gill was very connected to the black sea imo so how does all this tie in? lets do some quick lil notes first

ok so the scroll of legend lore has been held onto by gillion, the one closest to destiny's ties, and has not been used until now

chaos infinity while refering to the black sea could also be an undersea thing, what with the leviathins (nobody else remember how the pearl shard gillion has came from one? and how the pearl was never supposed to even see the light of day probs let alone be in some cat mans evil base? just me?)

while i wanna say aster mythborne aeiliana shes not real here so she cant be garden giant

BUT we do have a known leviathin(? could just be a dragon turtle) named duke who has plant shit and is controlled by a gollieth

nameless prince is everso chip coded but we looking all across our board here so yeah

it could apply that the "nameless prince" could refer to someone "unnamed" who holds power like that prince from edison kingdom or smth

it could also reference marshal jon, who's canon first name has been forgotten and canon last name is jon

unborn kings? honestly while i dont think chip's bit of mpreg is apart of this i think the lady inspiring it (aka aslana's mom) has some relations to this whole thing

we all read "kings" btw so theres probs multiple yall

would goobleck count? he is goobleck he must apply someway

non-literal one again? maybe their monsters or smth

wait to be free. huh. gee, i wonder, will the door nightmare with arlin come into play here. thatd be so fun. yeah. ahahaha im losing myself

okay okay maybe its not all clear and i honestly have had this as a draft for too long (as shown below)

BUT ill reblog this later cause ill really just be using text and images and shit

whats the basic idea? this is def where the oath from the sword comes into play (murdering destiny), with the whole "the black sea twists you" thing we may get hints of killion or even dark gillion again, the thign about it being a "key" might imply like a 'this means that' type deal rather then being actually a key, the chaos isnt really referring to the black sea but the state of the undersea in general (lost champion becomign criminal, ally shit gone, oversea war, etc), unnamed prince is either someone we havent met yet or someone who we dont expect to have a return (ie: were deemed before as not really lore relevant), and the unborn kings are monsters, oh and the garden giant isnt arlin but something related to the duke! THIS HAS TO CONNECT TO THE LEVIATHINS FR

some details/info about gill/things related to gill so i write this better:

"You promise to slay all evil before thee, crack corruption that takes hold of this world, strike swiftly enough to split the seas, and even if the thread of fate poses an obstacle against us, we shall sever it"

A hero born of moonlight, storm and sea. / They shall rise or fall to bring unity. / They will be tested or bested by evil’s hand. / By their choice one will remain: sea or land.

[yuukei-yikes]

can we get uhhhhhh some hibiya thoughts

yes. yes. yes. i fucking love hibiya. he's LITERALLY A LITTLE GUY when i got into kagepro he was one of my faves actually cuz he was the closest to my age at the time. i was 13… im 22 now! lol thats not weird at all *eye twitch* sry ive been weird abt the passage of time lately. erm wait this isnt my therapy session <- doesnt go to therapy

HIBIYA. LITTLE GUY. my thoughts on him………honestly, i recently reread all the novels and god his intro chapters were HARD to read. all the creepy stuff abt hiyori yknow. i was cringing so hard. i kinda wanna ignore it bc i'd rather do that with the weird bits kagepro has to offer, but not to get rid of it completely. like id take away hibiyas whole thing abt a collection of hiyori pics but still keep the aspect of him that worships her. and how that dynamic would COMPLETELY go away post str.

post str hibiya is VERY different from how he started out. i mean. 10 year old timeloop…. he hasn't grown at all mentally like he has to process all this with his 12 year old brain, but going through all he did he just kinda looks at things rly differently now. not obsessed with hiyori, for one…. and she's also different to him. their relationship changes drastically bc now they both respect each other LOL listen i know im annoying with my codependent relationship headcanons but… eyes hibiya and hiyori

these bitches are 12. spent 10 years watching each other die over and over and literally die for each other. AND THEN THEY GET EACH OTHER BACK? ERM. yeah theyre NOT letting go of each other. its not so much codependency as much as it is awful awful awful separation anxiety. god are there any fics of hibiya and hiyori going back home and having a breakdown at having to separate and go to their own houses (bc in the city they were living together so it doesnt hit that they need to separate until they go home)???

hiyori would still be kinda bitchy and bossy but definitely not horrible to hibiya. and also her attitude hits different when she's also always holding his hand and refusing to go anywhere without him and throwing tantrums when any of the dan members even imply any activity that would require to separate them. and she wouldnt rly be embarrassed abt it i think hiyori would be super open and vocal abt HIBIYA HAS TO BE WITH ME ALL THE TIME !!!!!! and hibiya isnt even flustered hes just like *NODDING NODDING NODDING* bc he's the same with her. girl… SEPARATION ANXIETY HIBIHIYO<3 mekadan so sick in the head <3 they have 78 undiagnosed mental illnesses <3

not to make it abt my future headcanons of psych major hibiya but. new generations man. hibiya is 10000% the one in the dan going like GUYS WHAT HAPPENED TO US WAS SOOOO MESSED UP and everyone's like lol yeah !!!! and he's like DONT LOL ABOUT THIS IM FUCKING SERIOUS??? especially since he's such a fucking outsider to everything like everyone else's been experiencing all these tragedies since they were born and he just kinda. had a normal life before? and like i said NEW GENERATIONS MAN THEYRE PSYCHOANALYSING THEMSELVES AND EVERYONE AROUND THEM…. the dan is so used to this shit that they kinda lmao rock and roll thru it and hibiyas like NO. NO. NO. EVERYONE. THERAPY. NOW!!!!!! it becomes his special interest he starts getting all into psychology and when he comes back to the city for his visits suddenly he's diagnosing everyone with stuff and the dans like *shaking* MAKE THE KID SHUT UP also realises he has separation anxiety with hiyori and works on it. hiyori is surprisingly the one most terrified of letting go. and like i said…. 10 year long time loop being processed in a 12/13 year old brain.. hibiya is SUPER self aware. he makes sure of it

ok and. heh. haruka. THE WHOLE HIBIYA HIYORI AND HARUKA THING COULD BE ITS OWN POST… SO… IM LEAVING IT HERE CUZ THIS IS ALREADY SUPER LONG but im just gonna say. hibiya's IN DENIAL of konoha being gone. he keeps expecting haruka to go away. hibiya THINKS he's super mature, and he is for his age bc of all this shit and his willingness to understand his problems and everyone else's. and everyone else also think he is mature, but this is just something he can't stop being a 12 year old about. his friend is gone! WHY does it have to be gone!?!? especially in an ending where hiyori is back. if she wasnt, then he'd be more accepting of the losses bc there were 2 both konoha and hiyori and like it becomes another whole thing abt letting go and mourning but if she is back…everything is supposed to be perfect!! everyone made it back!! why couldn't konoha? why does it have to be gone? its not fair! he doesnt care this haruka was the body's true owner!! konoha was his friend! it also deserved to live as much as this haruka guy!!! why is HE more important!!!?!?!?!? and he just. he's just insanely immature abt it. and he knows he is but truth is he's just really fucking sad and regretful about konoha being gone. i could also talk about hiyori and harukas feelings abt it but heheh yeah this is super long. erm. hibiyita el chiquito <3 hibiya throwing a tantrum in front of the whole dan abt how it isnt fair and how he wishes haruka would just die. LMAO. he is 12. if anyone has fic commissions open Eye eye

also erm wholesome one before i end it. he makes little miniature dolls of the whole dan<3 he's BAD at typing on his new smartphone but since he lives away hes always texting in the gc<3 he gets super into mobile games<3 amongus fan hibiya asking all his grownup friends with jobs and no time for amongus if anyone can play with him<3 they do bc theyre busy but there will always be time to amongus with friends<3

[a-court-of-moonlight-and-ire]

auggggggh ive been wanting to make this post for an eternity but i havent been able to because I keep trying to explain myself WELL guess what. Im giving up, heres the song Wenn ich tanzen will from Elisabeth: das Musical with english translations, does it not make you think of what if Feysand was interesting

If you dont wanna watch the whole thing for some reason, I'd like to highlight this part

Fly!

I'll fly alone!

I alone want to accompany you through night and storm

I don't want to be accompanied anymore

Not even by you — I won't let myself be led

You're free only through me

Only through me

Only for me

For me!

For you shall make the way for me

I'm going my own way now

I've seperated myself from you — Leave me alone!

You've fallen in love with me

Because there's no freedom without me

And no one can understand you except for me!

Oh and also this part (theyre kinda singing over each other at this point)

I'm strong enough on my own!

You were only strong as long as you still thought that you were weak

I'm not calling for you!

You will call for me!

I'm not seeking you out!

You will seek me out!

I'm beginning to love my life!

Soon you will hate it!

Okay, I actually lied at the start of this post, I am gonna try to explain myself. My ideal not-boring version of Feysand that I think of when I listen to this song is like. Okay so, the structure of the story is fundamentally the same (except it takes place over a wayyyy longer timespan) with Feyre initially just kinda going about her new life as a traumatized fae and Rhysand coming to pick her up once a month, which ends up helping her because the SC manorhouse is kind of just covered in a bunch of depressing ooze rn (figuratively) and she cant really leave and Rhysand is basically giving her an excuse to hang out in a place without ooze, so its easier for her to have a good time. Rhysand is kinda awkward around her initially because hes basically like "ohhhhhh shit oh fuck, the woman that I tortured UTM as a fucked up way of coping with what Amarantha was doing to is my soulmate!!" because i really hate the fact that Rhysand apparently already knew about her and dreamt about her before she was even fae, it shouldve snapped in place for both of them during that little scene at the end of ACOTAR but Feyre has no concept of how a mating bond is supposed to feel like so shes just kinda like "huh, that felt kinda weird. anyway"

(this inexplicably got very long. like, 6 more paragraphs long. so much for me not explaining myself)

So yeah, Rhysand is hardcore struggling trying to figure out how to win her over despite all of the torture, but fortunately for him all she wants is to be left alone, so he does that, no putting her in unecessary danger and no asking insane favors of her even though theyve only been hanging out for like two weeks. Idrk how, but at some point they would start to get closer, this all happens very slowly, its a true slow-burn. And then one day Tamlin is like "I cant stand it, I need to find a way to break this bargain" so he collects a bunch of guys and he tells Feyre that theyre gonna go out and travel through all of Prythian and maybe even beyond in order to find a way to do it and itll probably take them atleast a few months. And then when Feyre says she wants to come along because this is about her after all, hes like "no, its dangerous and also, if Im gone then the Spring Court is gonna needs its Lady" and then he puts the shield around the manor because yeah, Im keeping Tamlin shitty in this one, sorry. This is about me trying to make Feysand good but trying to figure that out with Tamlin being in-character is too complicated for me rn so Im just gonna stick to the character assassination (thats something SJM probably also said while writing ACOMAF)

So yeah, like in canon, Mor gets her outta there and then Feyre starts permanently staying the night court except shes not going out on political errands because of the war with Hybern because honestly, this whole war plot is so stupid and it feels so unecessary like cmon Sarah girlie, I can tell youre not actually interested in writing politics, just stick to the romance and the healing journey. Anyway, during her stay she inadvertantly starts spending more time with Rhysand and realizing that he suffered too and that hes only human or fae or something like that, which helps her deal with her UTM trauma because she kinda thought of him as the embodiment of all her new trauma, so seeing that hes really not that and that hes just a person that she can make peace with helps her

Rhys is falling head over heels for Feyre because she just reminds him SO much of Cassian while Feyre is kinda conflicted but starting to develop some affection for him, and again, this happens over the course of many many months instead of just two. And after all that time, Feyre is starting feel pretty good and she doesnt really wanna go back to the spring court if shes totally honest with herself and then oops, Tamlin's back! He finds her and hes super worried like "oh my cauldron, feyre, my servants told me he just kidnapped you and they couldnt find a way to free you!! but Im here now and Im taking you back home dont worry" and Feyre feels guilty and shes basically like "yeahhhhh this was totally necessary, I definitely wanna go back... home, its just that he exploited this loophole in the bargain so had to stay here. Totally against my will, oh no it was so bad" and Tamlin tells her not to worry, theyve found a way to break they just need to get back to the spring court so they do that

At the Spring Court, Feyre gets to thinking. She thinks shes basically completely defeated her trauma by hanging out with Rhysand and shes like "well, my trauma was pretty much the main thing that made mine and Tamlins relationship not work, so now that my trauma is gone its gonna be all smooth sailing from here" and she just willfully ignores the fact that his way of coping with his UTM trauma was suffocating her and making it impossible to deal with her own issues and when she pointed it out to him he had a panic attack about it. Also, at this point it kinda hits her that shes been spending all this time with Tamlins enemy and feeling this affection for him that she hasnt really felt for Tamlin ever since theyve been back from UTM and their relationship started getting really bad, so now she feels very guilty and wants to rush into a marriage with him after all. Also, maybe by this point shes revovered enough to take a step back and start focusing on her surroundings again instead of just herself, and she realises that the people of the Spring Court would really need this kind of big celebration after this long time of turmoil and suffering, so maybe that plays into her decision to marry Tamlin as well idk

Meanwhile, Rhysand is back at the night court absolutely CONVINCED that Feyre is gonna come back to him even without the bargain or atleast send him a message or something, because of the mating bond and because by this point he thinks that Feyre loves him back, she just hasnt said it because Tamlin interrupted them or whatever. Yknow, because Feyre stopped throwing shoes at him and started to tolerate his presence somewhat, which are obviously the surefire signs that someone is in love with you. But anyway, Feyre never does get back to him because shes busy with her wedding and also trying very hard not think about either Rhysand or Tamlin too much so she doesnt simply run out into the forest to avoid dealing with all this bullshit

So yeah, Rhysand finds out about Feyre marrying Tamlin and he gets very upset and so he winnows to the Spring Court on the day of the wedding. Feyre has just been dressed up in this gorgeous pastel pink and green pantssuit (thats very important for the story) and now Ianthe is leaving her alone for a bit before the grand wedding ceremony. At this point Rhysand comes in and they have a confrontation thats basically just the song except in dialogue-form, remember when this post was about a song I really like, yeah me neither. During this confrontation I really want Rhysand to bring up the mating bond and kinda throw it in her face and I want Feyre to basically respond "oh, so now the guy who always preached about giving me choices and not letting others decide for me is gonna get on my case for not doing what some god wants from me, gtfo" and thats basically how it ends. Then the next book is the book where Feyre hay to make the choice between Tamlin and Rhysand because its a romance series at the end of the day, so even though I would like the last book to just be Feyre ending up single and going on her own adventures, I recognize that thats not a great ending for a romance series so

I wanna end this off by saying that I was trying to only focus on the romance for this because its easier, if I were to write my ideal acotar sequel it would look different than this even if I used the original acomaf as a base. So yeah, thats it hope you enjoyed my 7am ramblings, I have been awake for three hours already writing this

[wonunuu]

Uh hi? I honestly don’t know how to start?? But I’ll just start anyway

First of all, i am so sorry for disappearing so suddenly 😭 I’m not gonna go into detail why but I got suuuuuuper busy with school and life in general that i didn’t have time to write/post for the jeonghan au (trying to remember the title rn but i literally can’t because it’s been that long😭). I was also not motivated to write last year because tbh i wasn’t really liking the plot that i had (that i now forgot)??? Combined with the amount of attention it was getting, i was worried it wouldn’t meet people’s expectations haha so i guess i was just overwhelmed and poorly decided to hide from everything. But yes… that and busy life 😕 so i am terribly sorry for being gone for like a year without saying anything.

Secondly, even though i was gone i kept getting love from u guys so 🥺🥺 THANK YOUU LOTS!! I’m actually so ashamed rn i feel like i don’t deserve this given my disappearance ahhhhhhh anywayyyy thank you thank you !!! even though some of you might hate me rn and wanna put my ass on blast, still I’m thankful 🫶🏼🫶🏼

And so regarding that jeonghan au (YALL I ACTUALLY FORGOT THE TITLE THIS IS SO BAD) i know i kept saying i’ll finish it… but I’m going to discontinue. As i said i didn’t rly like the plot that i had (i liked it when i made it but over time i was like uhhhh no 😭) so yeah.. thank you to those who continued to read and show support! I also apologize because as much as i want to i cant continue to write if i really don’t like it pls understand 😭 however i might post lil somethings here and there if i ever get inspired. Since im on uni break, i do have a bit more time (for a lil before i start my summer job ahh) uh so yea i MIGHT if i get inspired but don’t hold me up on that 😔

I think that’s all. I dont have anything else in my mind rn but if i rmbr something i’ll just come back and say it. Also sorry for the messiness of this. Im just typing what comes to my mind 😅

Edit: oh my gosh the title is still loving you

[getitoffyourchestofficial]

hi this is a lot im sorry. i love to say words and dump shit that upsets me with no real correlation. my bad /gen (genuine) (idk if you know tone indicators im sorry ough)

you dont really Have to cook up a proper response to this i just need to put it somewhere where i wont immediately get piles of advice that i cant use. i know its well-meaning but ultimately the whole situation is ou of anyones control

(also putting this 🎪 here so i can try to find it later)

im stuck in a sisyphean nightmare of a weekly cycle: i have a good day -> my mood skyrockets -> i have a bad day -> my mood plummets -> rinse and repeat. at this point i think it might be a mental condition bc something doesnt even really have to Ruin My Day, i just have to face a minor inconvenience and then suddenly im all doom-and-gloom depression for 3-5 business days before springing back up as if nothing ever happened to do it all again. my mom says i might have bpd or bipolar disorder (i always get the two confused) because she has it and we just havent seen anyone about it, mostly because we dont have the money to see any doctors most of the time. i also kinda dont wanna have either of them? not in like an asshole way but in a these-people-face-stigma-that-i-dont-know-if-i-can-emotionally-handle way. in a im already queer and fat and poor and disabled in multipled ways and overall unsavory to neurotypicals/cishets/Default Settings way. yknow

todays inciting incident was a shitty shitty halloween carnival that didnt even have the thing i was excited for, didnt have any food, had lines that were miles long (hyperbole), was too hot, and i only got 8 shitty halloween things from -- half of which were lollipops, with half of those just being the same 2 flavors but Again. we stayed for 2 hours before my mom decided she didnt wanna be out of the house anymore as usual. i cant be too mad at her because shes mentally ill in the direction of "i dont want to go anywhere because my anxiety will spike" but unfortunately im mentally ill in the direction of "if i cannot leave the house to Do Things at my own pace at least once a week i will fall into a deep depression" so we clash pretty bad most of the time. this was also following multiple minor inconveniences mind you. and was also trailed by multiple minor inconveniences. it just has not gone well. this halloween is just shaping up to suck bc i was supposed to have a whole party but we had money issues so it had to be cut down to just 2 people for a sleepover, then one of them went out to see his grandma in another state and the other is apparently in the fucking hospital right now??? at least according to his posts. and i cant blame them for these either! schedules conflict and sometimes you go to the Fuckig Hosital. its out of anyones control but it still feels like shit. so its looking like my only shot at having any fun this halloween is the trunk-or-treat at my school and idk if im even allowed to go bc i had to drop out for mental health reasons and they told me i wasnt allowed on school grounds anymore. idk if that applies here. which btw. way to make a depressed kid feel worse. you can NEVER come to this high school again or we'll ARREST YOU. fuckin bullshit. BUT thats off topic the synopsis is that this halloween sucks so far and i dont really expect it to get better which extra sucks bc im turning 18 next year and i dont wanna let this be the last hurrah for my number one favorite holiday. i cant host fucking parties for my friends after then. im gonna be busy trying to fuck off to the other end of the country. i wont have TIME for it. idk. it sucks. this sucks. fuck art and fuck you /ref (reference) /nbh (nobody here)

Ik you don't want advice for this so I'll just put it on the blog.

And idk if you want it but here's a tea

☕

[forsakenmissives]

I know nothing about football but I'd still like to hear about the au :3

see bc i complain and then i don't even know where to start LOL

ok so ig i'll start with the title From the Sidelines and a little description i have, to pique interest heh

Arthur is Camelot FC's star striker and captain. Merlin is the kitman. Life is hardly ever fair.

anyway . i suppose that's. a little misleading. that being said i think this grew into something waaaaay larger than i originally planned @.@ like it was supposed to be a fun little addition to the surprisingly small amt of footballer arthur fics we have but now this fic has double daddy issues (balinor my beloved...), coming out, sports injuries, shitty coaches (aredick die by my sword) and never making the national team. HUH??? i just wanted merthur to fuck on the pitch... (joke) (just in time for fuck him on the field friday)

also there's side stories. like one is when the players get handcuffed tgt for 24hrs but they've got an uneven amt for it and merlin gets roped in

and then there's the valentine's day arwen special that i somehow accidentally made into a statement about arthur's attitude toward his sexuality?? and feelings for merlin??? through his anxiety about his date with gwen????

“All good?” Merlin asks. “Never better,” Arthur replies, then pivots and walks directly into his closet. He stares at his barren shoe rack before he feels hands on his shoulders, and Merlin is turning him around and guiding him back out. “Wrong way,” he hears him say. “Right.” This time, Arthur marches out his room then down the hall to the front door. “I’ll be back.”

i'm allowed to give this info bc i don't know if i'll ever actually post the extras. i dont' even know when i'm gonna finish the main story sjkdfhgjkf

oh yeah another side story takes place in 2007 (that might be the title for it idk) and it's about uther buying camelot fc for arthur's tenth birthday LOL dont question the legaltiy of arthur playing for his father's club. i dont know and i dont care. this is fiction SIMILARLY dont say shit abt arthur being a striker and captain. it's happened before. it's literally fine. dont even worry about it

there's like. ik i rly only talked about the side stories but u have to realize just how much has already gone into this fic and i wouldn't even say i'm halfway done. i don't think i've written out a single match which is also funny bc i've been keeping up with the prem and actually think i can do it now. i just keep dragging my feet abt it lol

i think the hardest part for me is when im gonna have to seriously injure arthur. i didnt want to but i think it's an important way for his and merlin's relationship to progress and also would explain merlin's attitude toward him in january. its less abt injuring him and more abt him having to sit out of games not for like. lineup stats/compatibility reasons

oh my god typing this all out made me realize we haven't met like. half of the guys on the team yet. i was sitting here like "i need to rewatch eps with all the knights bc i dont trust myself to write percy and elyan accurately" but now i just realized i dont even know if mordred is on the like. squad yet or if he's still with the u18s (after a brief check with my info page he is. i'm gonna be sick)

like i said there is a LOT of info on this . sorry this was so long i just needed to ramble a bit and it also made me realize some info i still need to include so yayyy :3 thank you nonny if u have anything u wanna know in specific like fr anything PLEASE ask. i'd love it so much if u asked. u saved my life <3

[crucifiedfaerie]

HOWDY!!!!!🤠

I hope you are having the most amazing day/night (it’s 12:30am right now for me, whoopsies)

I saw your post about stan accounts who follow you and I’m gonna be totally honest, totally might be me (I’m a new follower because I have re-entered my Adam Driver is a refrigerator I would like to climb and open)! But I will say, I try to stay away from the actual celeb(s) and their die hard stans because they are, put lightly, CRAY CRAY!!!! Like a literal war zone sometimes. I admire their hot-ness and their fictional characters’ bangability from a distance of the celeb/rpf!

Anywho, I have only been following for a little, but I want you to know that I LOVE YOUR BEN SOLO WRITING!!! Especially nicotine stains, I love me a modern au and yours is simply delicious!!!

Like so good I might shit myself from excitement when pt 2 comes out!!!!!!!! And I mean that in a good way!!!!

Any way, this has gone on way too long. Have a great day!!! I hope it is as amazing as you are!!!!

🫀🫀🙇‍♀️

omg its all good! i was half joking anyways i really dont care who or what ppl enjoy, im just personally not a [redacted] supporter ! at the end of the day we're all just freaks on the internet trying to have fun.

i totally agree w you though there's certain fanbases who take shit way too far... some more than others but i feel like it can be found in every fandom to a certain degree. there are even icky adam fans out there that i try to steer clear of. like ppl who slander his wife, that shit is so not cool. i love him and thirst after him as much as the next fan but like man :( hes a human being and shes a human being and they love each other and have kids... theres a certain line that should not be crossed. ppl tend to forget that celebrities are real people with feelings.

and aaaaa omg thank you!! it makes me so happy to hear that ppl genuinely enjoy my silly little stories about my emo little guy <3 nicotine stains has got to be my fav so far as well, its literally so fun to write and delinquent!kylo just fills my heart with so much joy. its also nice to not write something so heavy and dark every now and then for a change. kylo ren fanfiction in general tends to always be super sad and sometimes i just wanna see my emo space bf be happy for once lmao.

and girl- me too honestly. im currently writing pt 2 and im making even myself giggle and kick my feet so im super excited to finally put it out... its very overdue bc ive been distracted by a bunch of stuff. (the bunch of stuff in question being a 59 chapter ao3 fic lmao) but if youd like to be added to the taglist so you can be notified when its out, you can always pm me !!!

i hope you have a lovely night/morning as well (its 1am for me lol) and thank you sm again for your kind words on my work, it truly means the most 🫶🏻