#spiritassassin AU

[a-whale-bone]

I've been posting my Rogue One/Hunger Games AU! Jyn & Cassian POVs, with droidcaptain and spiritassassin.

A lot of people were surprised when Jyn Erso emerged as the victor of the Hunger Games.

More fool them.

Chapter One: Survival

Jyn Erso wins the Hunger Games, and begins life as a Victor.

Chapter Two: Alliance

Cassian tries to bring Jyn into the burgeoning rebellion against the Capitol.

Chapter Three: Discovery

Jyn finds something important. Cassian pretends to be fine.

Chapter Four: Snow

Bodhi's Victory Tour rolls into Jyn's district.

[sesamestreep]

Chirrut/Baze, 35

35. It’s brighter now (from this prompt list)

“It needs more lights.”

Baze grunts in both acknowledgement and frustration from his precarious spot at the top of a very tall ladder. “Can you let me get down first before we critique?”

“Sorry, Professor,” Chirrut says, with a smile, clearly unrepentant.

Baze grumbles again, at the glib nickname and at his knees, which are registering their complaint over going up and down a ladder repeatedly. He doesn’t know how he ended up here—well, that’s not entirely true. He knows how he ended up here today in a literal sense. Chirrut had asked him this morning, as they were both getting dressed for work, if he could stop by the community center after he was done with his classes for the day and help him set up the Christmas tree in the lobby. The kids who attend programming at the center will make ornaments and garlands and all that during their art classes and decorate it to their hearts’ content, but someone needed to assemble to enormous fake tree and add the lights. Somehow, this person ended up being Baze.

“What did you used to do about assembling the tree?” Baze had asked earlier, as he moved papers around on his desk looking for his keys. The back half of that question—before you met me—is left unsaid, though Chirrut clearly heard it anyway.

“Grindr,” Chirrut had replied, straight-faced.

Baze had tripped over his own feet and knocked a small hard drive off the desk for good measure. “What?!”

“Idiot,” Chirrut said, lovingly. “Bodhi normally helps me, but it needs to get done this week and he’s busy.”

“Bodhi is busy with something that isn’t catering to your every whim and eccentricity?” he asked. Chirrut’s assistant is, as far as Baze is concerned, an actual saint for the amount of nonsense Chirrut puts him through. He’s convinced Chirrut would forget to eat without Bodhi to remind him. “I can’t believe it.”

“Neither can I,” Chirrut said. “Just between you and me: I think he’s dating someone.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He suddenly has plans outside of work.”

“That’s not that strange.”

“It is for Bodhi,” Chirrut replied. “I’m not complaining. I think it’s good for him.”

“But now you’re realizing how much unpaid overtime you ask of him.”

“I’m a terrible manager,” he said, with a bright grin. “And an even worse boyfriend.”

“I’ll help you with your tree,” Baze had said with a heavy sigh. It’s always pointless to argue with Chirrut. “Just don’t introduce me to people as your boyfriend. It makes us sound like teenagers.”

“We’re not teenagers?” Chirrut had asked, as he slipped his arms around Baze’s waist from behind and kissed him on the shoulder. Against the shell of his ear a moment later, he’d added, “Could have fooled me.”

In the end, they’d both been a little late to work this morning.

Now, safely back on the ground, Baze steps back to survey his work. Chirrut is perched atop the front desk in the lobby, feet swinging like a little kid and gaze fixed on the tree.

“It looks good,” Baze says, but not quite firmly enough. He does think the tree looks good, but the statement still went up at the end like a question. He, stupid man that he is, wants Chirrut’s approval.

“It needs more lights,” Chirrut says, in the exact same tone as before. Pleasant, but brooking no argument.

“You can’t even see it!”

“And still I know it needs more lights.”

“How?”

“I can feel it,” he says. “The tree is too dim.”

“Chirrut…”

“I know, I know. I’m very taxing. But we have more lights. We might as well use them.”

“Fine, but if I fall and die because you insisted on the tree needing more lights on it, when it looked fine already…”

“I’ll feel very silly indeed. They’ll all chuckle at the eulogy I give.”

“I don’t want you anywhere near my eulogy,” Baze grumbles.

“Who else would do it?”

“Leave it to Jyn,” he says, crossing over to the desk, where the extra sets of lights are sitting next to Chirrut. “The service will last five minutes, tops.”

“You would want an expedient funeral.”

“No point in dithering. I’m already dead.”

“Jyn won’t be your graduate student forever, you know…”

“No, but I’ve made the mistake of getting emotionally attached to her, so she’s a permanent fixture, I’m afraid.”

“I like Jyn,” Chirrut says, pleasantly. “Why should you be afraid of admitting that?”

Baze waves a hand, dismissively, even though such a thing is useless around Chirrut. “You know how I am about feelings.”

“You’d just as soon not be burdened by them?”

“Yes,” he replies, pulling out another strand of lights to test at the nearby outlet.

Chirrut snorts. “You know, it’s that kind of attitude that kept you single well into your fifties.”

“‘Well into my fifties!’ I’m fifty-three! And you, if all people, should be happy I stayed single as long as I did.”

“I’m not prone to jealousy,” Chirrut says. “As long as you were single when we met, I would have been happy.”

Baze unplugs the lights rather more savagely than necessary. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

Chirrut’s hand darts out suddenly to grasp him by the wrist. His thumb moves gently over Baze’s pulse point. It’s enough to stall him in his plan to retreat in a huff, and he covers Chirrut’s hand with his own.

“I sometimes feel guilty that I didn’t find you sooner,” Chirrut says, earnestly. “I know that’s foolish, but it is how I feel.”

Baze doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s almost too big of an offering to understand, let alone accept. “You found me,” he says, after a moment. “That’s what matters.”

“Still, we could have had a life together…”

“We have a life together now.”

“You think I’m a silly old man.”

“Yes,” Baze says, squeezing his hand. “And I love you for it.”

“You hear that?” Chirrut asks the empty lobby. “He loves me!”

“A very silly old man,” Baze says, as he feels his own face warm in equally foolish embarrassment.

“More lights!” he chirps, happily, his former earnestness now pleasantly forgotten.

“Is this why you wish we’d met sooner? So tormenting me about the Christmas tree could be a yearly tradition?”

“It still can be! Life is what we make of it!”

Baze groans, but dutifully returns to the tree to add the next strand of lights. He repeats this process until they’ve used every last strand that Chirrut had the staff at the center pull out of storage, and then steps back to admire his handiwork.

“See?” Chirrut asks, even though he himself cannot.

“You were right,” Baze admits, begrudgingly. The tree is bright enough to light the entire lobby now. “It looks better.”

“I’m always right. When will you learn?”

Baze returns to Chirrut’s side. “I’m getting used to the idea.”

“Does this mean I’ll be able to convince you to buy a tree for your place?”

Baze sighs, and turns to face him, letting his head tip forward until their foreheads touch. His hands come to rest on Chirrut’s hips. He doesn’t normally decorate for the holiday, partially because he doesn’t really celebrate Christmas but mostly because he’s just never seen the point. He’d just have to take everything back down in January! That’s far too much effort for his taste. Still, he can already feel himself wavering on that conviction. This compulsive need to make Chirrut happy is really interfering with his reputation as a miserable old bastard.

“I’m fairly certain you could convince me to do almost anything,” he says, and Chirrut’s answering smile is even brighter than the damn tree.

✨

[ji-ang]

DRC Valentine’s Day Fest: A Rebel(CA)p(T)ain Reclist

Part II: Modern/Earthly Settings

Fics set on Earth or something that kind of resembles it.

Return to main post for other cat related rebelcaptain content! (this link is now fixed!)

In the spirit of clicking links, today and every day is a good day to click to freely donate ad revenue from this site to the UNWRA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).

Recs below! 💕

Alphabetical by author! All links are to the ao3 version of the fic because that’s how and where I found them.

I've tried to do my research and identify authors' tumblrs if I'm able to tag them. If I tagged the wrong person or if you're tagged and you don't want to be, just let me know. 💕

Tethered (to The Story We Must Tell) by dancealongthelightofday (@dilf-din)

I only just discovered this one because it got uploaded to ao3 after previously only being on tumblr! Witch!Jyn gives off all sorts of spooky all knowing and cool vibes, as do her identical black cats.

The Hacker and the Veterinarian by jbn42

The title gets to the premise pretty straightforwardly! Siblings Bodhi and Jyn each adopt a cat and deal with their respective traumas (with a bit of high stakes Krennic drama thrown in as a final arc to the story). Jyn and Cassian have no chill and fall in love pretty much right away. Some lovely Dad!SpiritAssassin content.

partners in exasperation by katsumi (@leralynne)

A fun neighbors!au where neither of them are the cat owner, but the cat definitely has a major hand in facilitating their meeting and getting together. Also features a lot of great Bodhi & Jyn sibling energy and banter.

In Defense of Cat People by TinCanTelephone (@cats-and-metersticks)

An incredibly cute sickfic that features a prickly cat!Kay who eventually comes around to the idea that Jyn is tolerable.

F. I. N. E. by TinCanTelephone

Angsty Cassian adopts cat!Kay to try and cope with feeling lonely when he returns from an extended trip to find coworker Jyn is in a relationship. Some great Bodhi & Cassian friendship moments!

let the cat out of the bag by wintersend (@andorerso)

Jyn’s cat Mimi (whose personality is as fiery as Jyn’s) develops a strong relationship with FWB!Cassian, which pokes at Jyn’s commitment issues. Excellent romcom vibes.

There's also a tumblr tag that the author has with related content!

Back to main post (this link is now fixed!)

[b-else-writes]

the tiger shark and the sun

New chapter posted for my Star Wars/Avatar the Last Airbender-RebelCaptain fusion AU! It’s the last chapter folks! the grand finale ahhhhhhh

Read on AO3 | Read from start

Pairings: Jyn/Cassian, minor Han/Leia and Baze/Chirrut, random minor background pairings

Rating: T

Summary: Star Wars/Avatar the Last Airbender fusion AU. The Fire Nation, under  Fire Lord Palpatine and Lord Vader, has been at War with the world for  the last twenty years. When Jyn Erso lands on his doorstep the day  Cassian, last southern waterbender, is assigned to protect the Avatar,  she seems just another obstacle in ending the War. An obstacle he would  willingly remove. For exiled firebender Jyn, the Avatar is her last way  home - and to her hostaged father, never mind her own conscience. But as  their paths keep crossing, and the Avatar needs all help in saving the  world, Jyn and Cassian find they are more alike than they ever thought  possible.

No snippet because it’s so long. There’s so much. These kids have been through a war. Get a cup of something warm and read it comfortably in bed.

[shenanigans-and-imagines]

Rogue One Coffee Shop/College AU Rambles

A/N: This is an AU that’s been living in my mind rent free for a while now. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get around to writing it, but I thought you guys might find it fun.  This also includes my OC Sera Darros, so be warned.

If you like this, talk to me about it! I’d love to have someone else to ramble with!

Character Breakdowns

Jyn Erso: College drop out whose father teaches engineering at the local university. She now works in a coffee shop owned by Chirrut and Baze.  She never picked a major before she dropped out and is looking for what she wants to do.

Cassian Andor: Grad student working on his masters in Political Science.  He organizes most of the school protest and is usually the one to start throwing rocks at the cops.  His veins are filled with more coffee than blood now and consistently needs to refill his supply.  

Bodhi Rook: Just transferred as a junior and working towards his piloting license.  He takes Galen Erso’s class and actually does really well.  He does tend to panic when it comes to test and psyches himself out even though he’s never gotten anything lower than a B-. He works in the coffee shop to pay for books.

Sera Darros: Cassian’s step-sister, she’s a freshman in the university following in her brother’s footsteps as a political science major, although she’s considering journalism.  She works in the coffee shop and gives Cassian discounts on coffee.  She also attends most of the rallies.

Kay: Cassian’s best friend.  He’s a computer science major and is one of the assholes who never has to study for anything, but still gets straight As in all his classes.  He helps Cassian with the protest when he can and is often with him in the coffee shop even though he’s not studying.

Chirrut: Baze’s husband he’s more the face of the business.  He makes sure everyone is comfortable and organizes open mic nights.  He also pays very close attention everyone’s relationship status and is always ready to shove someone in the broom closet for them to confess their feelings.

Baze: He runs the business side of things to make sure the shop stays afloat.  He also does the experimenting with the pastries and asks for second opinions from costumers.

Galen Erso: College’s engineering professor. He’s a good man who is disappointed his daughter dropped out, but is still trying to be supportive.  He, however, does not support her dating the angry, grumpy poli-sci major who got arrested last week.

Krennic: One of the political science professors who Cassian hates to the point where he might fail the class.

Saw: Another political science professor who is bat shit crazy with conspiracies, but has tenor so no one can fire him.

Tarkin: Runs the school board

A Plethora Of Scenarios

Sera, Bodhi, and Jyn all make a pact to slip Cassian decaf into his coffee when he’s gone more than 24hrs without sleep.

Everyone discovers Bodhi does illegal street racing to make extra money for tuition and they are confused.

Han, Leia, and Luke also go to the same college.  Han is the only one with a car and regularly arrives late to class with Luke in tow sipping on a Carmel Frappachino®.  Despite this, Han is somehow still passing with a B average and it is slowly driving Cassian insane. 

Leia and Sera are roommates.  Nothing more to add, I just think it’s nice.

Sera and Bodhi regularly hold hands at rallies...for safety.

Bodhi is regularly found sleeping on the coffee shop couches in the early morning hours.  If he’s the one to close up, rather than walk back to his dorm, he stays and studies and 9/10 ends up passing out.

Galen catches wind that Jyn is dating the guy that threw a brick at a cop last week and is...distressed.

When Bodhi and Sera start working together, Bodhi can't put two sentences together and spends most of his time clean up or doing dishes in the back.  Sera is, of course, still friendly and just figures he's not a big talker. It stays like that for about a month. Then, one day Sera is up front working, Jyn is not there for some reason and she messes a guy's order up.  So the guy starts yelling at her, Sera is trying to apologize and that's the moment Bodhi steps in and tells the guy off.  Sera just stares at him for a solid minute because that's the most she's heard him talk like ever.  The guy leaves and Bodhi immediately goes back to his slightly nervous self.  Sera is then hit with the "oh shit, he's cute, I must protect him" stick and immediately makes him her best friend.

Cassian gets arrested on an almost bi-monthly basis.  Most of the money Sera is making at the shop goes to bailing him out.

Chirrut regularly host karaoke nights, you cannot change my mind.

Bodhi regularly beats Han and Lando on poker nights.

Saw regularly calls for the literal execution of some of the school board members, but they can’t get rid of him.

[anagrammaddict]

The Greatest Show

Wow, I am really running behind on the prompts lol. Wrote this one ine a hurry, so it’s a bit abrupt.

For SpiritAssassin Week 2017 by @fyeahspiritassassin. Day 2. Prompt is: AU

The visitors to the Circus Kyberus arrive long before the show starts. Their ships rumble into the  Circus’s vast docking port, attendants waving fluorescent batons at the guests and directing them along the prismatic passageways, to the central auditorium at the heart of the massive starship.

Come and catch the Greatest Show in Space: that’s what they call the Circus Kyberus, the best galactic entertainment there is -  witness daredevil acts and simply stellar performances, excuse the pun (poor advertising from Ringmaster Chirrut Imwe).

But the lights and the glam and the death-defying acts have all but lost their novelty for the star of the show: the High Voltage Acrobat, Baze ‘Blaze’ Malbus.

He’s been here fifteen years; he’s seen the lot; he knows the tricks even though the other circus folk guard their secrets jealously. But after awhile, one trick is the same as the next, anyway. He’s seen the supersonic chariots, the strong man(droid) performances, the laser pyrotechnics, the electrothaumaturges, the rocket booster trapeze, the trained troupes of giant sklatha salamanders, extinct everywhere else in all the charted systems of the universe, except here in this galactic freakshow.

God, if there’s such a being at all, knows why he even stays. Actually, God just might be the biggest, most grandiose circus act of all.

“And now!” a voice booms from the arena. It’s Ringmaster, in his usual brilliant scarlet overcoat with a trailing bridal train and an equally scarlet top hat. He cracks his whip and sparks fly, rising in a hissing cloud to temporarily engulf him, and the audience cheers. “The star of our show, the one and only High Voltage Acrobat in the entirety of the universe, ‘Blaze’ Malbus!”

The crowd howls and stamps.

The cube-shaped electrical grid that had been assembled quietly during intermission now lights up. Brilliant blinding blue. The crystal shaped spotlights swerve around to direct the full intensity of their beams upon the vast and non-symmetrical lattice, which crackles with electricity. Techno music pounds from hidden speakers, bass rhythms amplified by the arena’s subwoofer network, so it feels like the whole starship is pulsing, a gigantic metallic heart in the vacuum of space.

Baze mounts the platform at the top. Notes the positions of the insulated handholds, the mid-air micro-coordinates where he’ll have to twist his body and avoid the wavy parallel rails. Sets a rhythm deep within his body.

But even this is dull for him. Fifteen years of this crap. He’s old. He ought to retire. Maybe go to this faraway idyll called Earth, the native world of coffee and adorable alien feline creatures known as cats.

He glances down, way down past the bottom transmission bars to where Ringmaster is standing, fire-whip still cracking up a frenzy. If he’s not careful, he’s going to set himself on fire again. And then Baze will have to stop his act and douse him with a canister of coolant. Not for the first time either.

As if sensing Baze looking down at him, Ringmaster turns his face upwards. White-blue unseeing eyes, their colour and their blindness magnified by optic irradiator implants, catch his stare. Ringmaster smiles a lazy toothed smile at him. Baze can see the indents of his dimples from high up here.

For a moment, he pauses, disoriented by the recent memory of Ringmaster in his arms, of that smug smile wiped off his face, replaced by the openness of his mouth, slack, moaning, spit curling out of the corner of his lips as Baze fucked him against the walls of his own quarters.

No, he has to concentrate. Or he’ll fry himself pretty in this grid.

He closes his eyes, tries to find that point of calm deep within.

Then he leaps off the platform, calculating all the way, every nano-second of his freefall. Fizzing strings of electricity leap off the bars and try to attach themselves to his skintight conductive suit, try to connect into the circuit of his own flesh and blood, and the electrical impulses of his own heart. Lightning pursues his trajectory through the grid. The crystal-spotlights start strobing in technicolour. It makes for a spectacular display and the crowd grows more feral with the applause and cheering.

Personally, Baze thinks that some of them would just  love  to see him slip, see what happens, never seen a man fry on electricity before.

He makes a grab for the handhold and his aim is true. Then he undoes the hasp of the swing, calculates, concentrates - and swings across the grid, spinning, eeling, until he gets to the next handhold.

Then he finishes his whole circuit, spends all his moves. It’s banal like that.

He starts to descend, when a tremendous crack comes from below.

Ringmaster has held up his hand for silence from the crowd. Baze stops and stares. Now what?

“You have all seen the magnificent Blaze! Now for the next part of his act…”

The  what  part of  what  act? No, no, fuck this shit, his act is over. What is Chirrut up to?

“..I, your humble Ringmaster and host for tonight, will now ascend to the platform and enter the grid…”

“You will not!” Baze thunders from where he’s standing. But nobody hears him.

“...and I will leap off, without a safety harness or a protective suit…”

“And fall to your death! And then I’ll have to extract your sizzling, charred meat off the rails.”

“..and our one and only High Voltage Acrobat, Blaze Malbus, will catch me…”

“What if I don’t?” Baze shouts, only to be ignored.

“...or maybe he won’t…”

The crowd howls louder than ever. It sounds like they’re baying for blood. Wishing the excitement of mishap upon the performers.

“...and if he doesn’t catch me, then well, let me thank you all for being here with us. You’ve been an exceptional crowd and I am truly honoured to have been your host for tonight.”

With that, Ringmaster sheds off that six-foot bridal train of his robes, and his scarlet overcoat and top hat, wearing only a shirt and red harem pants. He scales the ladder easily to the platform opposite Baze, on the other side of the grid.

He smiles at Baze. “I’m ready when you are.”

“Chirrut, this isn’t in the script.”

“Well, this is an unscripted performance.”

“I’m not doing it.”

“We are already in the middle of the performance, whether you like it or not. Besides, what have you got to fear? You’re going to catch me, aren’t you?”

“You,” growls Baze, “have far too much faith in me.”

Chirrut spreads his arms, tilts his blind gaze to the ceiling. “And  you need to have some faith in me. You need to have some faith in the fact that I have faith in the fact that you are going to catch me, no matter what.”

“I think if your brains get fried on the grid, it’s not going to affect your twisted sense of logic.”

Chirrut laughs. Then he straightens all the mirth out of his face and looks directly at Baze. When he speaks, there is iron in his syllables. “Catch. Me.”

Ringmaster steps off the platform. He hurtles downward, straight as a calm arrow, electricity fizzing in his wake, but never seeming to touch him.

Baze forgets to calculate. He leaps off without thinking, seizes the swing and arcs downward, a hand outstretched, sweeping through the charged air, to lock around Chirrut’s elbow. He hears Chirrut gasp as Baze nearly wrenches his arm loose of his socket, and then twists them safely around to a lower platform.

The audience nearly erupts.

Later, once the show is over, and Baze goes to Chirrut’s quarters.

“Right,” says Baze. “I quit. I’m leaving.”

“Think before you do anything,” Chirrut cautions.

“Says the Ringmaster who jumped off the platform straight into waiting death.  Why would you do something so stupid as that? Don’t you know the risks?”

Chirrut is carefully storing away his ringmaster jewelry and overcoat. “Don’t you feel different?”

“Feel what?” Baze growls.

“All this time. All these years you’ve been working here. You’ve been here far longer than I have. I know your discontent. Boredom. You’re bored with the whole act. Everything is just one shiny routine to you. So why not change things up a little? Spontaneity is the salt of life, they say.”

Baze takes a deep breath. “Just because I’m bored or discontented doesn’t mean I want you to risk  any  part of yourself for me. I can’t - I don’t know what I’d do if - if -”

He trails off.

Chirrut doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “I’m sorry.”

Baze is incredulous. “Did you just - say you’re sorry? That’s a first.”

“I’m sorry to have caused you much distress.” Chirrut looks thoughtful. “Though all that distress is unnecessary, if only you’d believed in the both of us a bit more.”

“I knew that apology wasn’t going to last long.”

Chirrut puts his arms around him from behind, kneads the muscles of his shoulder. “Please don’t go, Baze Malbus.”

“Say that again,” says Baze roughly.

“Please.” Chirrut unbuttons Baze’s shirt.

“Again.”

“Please. Stay.” Chirrut’s mouth presses kisses on the nape of his neck, stutters a line along his bare shoulders. "With me."

“I’ll think about it,” says Baze. Then he turns to face Chirrut and kisses him, a deep bruise of a kiss.

***

Later, Baze sits up in Chirrut’s bed. Chirrut is asleep, his body flushed and bare, his sleep unbroken and rhythmic.

Baze thinks of another show he’ll have to do the next night. And the night after that. And after.

He thinks of anchoring himself to some planet, preferably one with an ocean (that Earth place sounds so good in all the ads), where he can learn how to surf. How to fish. How to look at the stars and all the universe from a fixed point, instead of constantly swinging through space in some big flamboyant circus starship.

But then again, he’s already got his fixed point, his anchor.

He gets up from bed and gets himself a glass of water. But he stays.

[rustandruin]

Chirrut x Baze has strong Toph x Sokka energy.

[anathtsurugi]

A Rose Upon a Thorn (Chapter 3 Teaser)

"Why do you wear a blindfold?"

Chirrut chuckled quietly at the child's question. Despite everything the little one had been through, despite being kidnapped and tortured, he was still just a boy, and little boys tended to be curious about such things.

"Ezra!" the older child scolded him. "You can't just ask people things like that!"

"But how else am I gonna find out if I don't ask? I wanna know!" he insisted petulantly.

"The child is right, you know," Chirrut told Ezra's self-appointed guardian, Sabine. "Knowledge must be sought."

"But...it's rude, isn't it?" Sabine asked, her voice uncertain. "You'll have to excuse him. He's only six."

"No need for excuses, young ones. The answer is simple enough. I wear a blindfold because I have no eyes. The sight of such a blank face tends to unnerve most people."

The blind warrior smiled knowingly into the ensuing silence, waiting for the moment when Ezra finally broke it with a quickly muttered, "Can I see?"

"Ezra!"

Chirrut just laughed in response, offering no admonishment as he untied the blindfold, allowing the strip of cloth to fall into his lap. He was no more surprised when he felt small fingers reach out to press against the bare stretch of skin where eyes would be in a human. It was one of his stranger Fey characteristics, not having eyes. The one that tended to raise more questions than he typically cared to answer. So he didn't. But he didn't mind answering them for the little boy. His questions were asked out of curiosity, a true desire to know; not out of fear or ignorance.

"But...how do you see? How do you look to walk around?" Ezra asked him, sounding almost worried.

"I cannot see. I have no eyes, after all. I never have. This is the way I was born. But there are senses other than sight, Ezra," he said, reaching out to lay a hand on the boy's shoulder. "After all, how did I 'see' to know where your shoulder was?"

"How?"

Laying his staff to the side on his cot, he tapped at his ear, then at Ezra's. "I can hear you. That tells me more than you might think. Perhaps you ought to give it a try."

"How?" the boy asked again.

Picking up his blindfold and tying it carefully around Ezra's own eyes, he slowly spun the boy about. "All right, Ezra, I want you to listen carefully, then walk toward the first sound you hear."

"O- okay."

Ezra stood still for several moments, the infirmary almost eerily silent, neither of its other two occupants making any noise. Hera had set Bodhi the task of minding the two children while she found food for all of them, and he was taking to the task with gusto. But for now, it seemed that both he and Sabine wanted to see what Ezra might do.

The sound in question wound up being Hera as she entered the room, the sound of a basket bumping against her leg indicating to Chirrut that she'd been successful in her quest, and the sound of Chopper’s caw at her shoulder telling that the bird had already taken his dues.

"Breakfast!" she called out. Ezra immediately started moving toward her. "Oh? What's this?" she asked with a light laugh as the little boy fumbled his way over to her.

"Bit of an impromptu lesson," Chirrut answered with a chuckle of his own. He heard Ezra half crash into the woman, arms quickly wrapping around her legs to keep himself from falling. Hera laughed as she removed the blindfold.

"And was the lesson a success?" she asked.

"I found you!" Ezra declared, pleased with himself.

"Rousing success, I would say."

"Think you could do me a favor and take Chirrut his breakfast?" Hera asked the little boy, who agreed enthusiastically. In another few moments, Chirrut found his blindfold being laid back in his lap, along with the scent of fresh bread and a hint of apple filling his nose. This was followed by the feel of a warm loaf being pressed into his hands and an apple being laid beside the blindfold.

"Do you understand, little one?"

"Ah fink so," the six-year-old answered through a mouthful of apple. "You can see stuff wiff fings 'sides yo' eyes."

"Something like that, yes," the blind warrior said before biting into the fresh-baked loaf of bread. In truth, his own senses were a bit more complex than that, but it was a good starting point to learn from. And he could tell that the boy had a long ways yet to go.

"Well, that's Chirrut all over. A lesson before breakfast, lunch, and dinner," Hera said as she carried the basket over to Sabine and Bodhi.

"Miss Hera?" the girl started to ask. "Is there anything I can help with?"

"You don't need to help at all, Sabine. You'll be here until your wounds heal a little better. I just want you to focus on healing right now."

"But I- I should be earning our keep...shouldn't I?"

"I promise you, dear heart, you don't need to worry about a thing. If you end up staying with us, things like that can come later. But for now, you and Ezra are our guests. We'll take care of you until you're feeling better."

"Oh. I...okay."

"But if you'd like something to keep yourself occupied in the meantime, I can give you that."

"Yeah?" Sabine asked, immediately perking up.

"I'm sure Bodhi's worn out from this latest round of healing. He can only do so much at once, after all. We have an audience with Prince Orrelios later today and I'm sure he'd like to freshen up a bit. You can help him rebraid his hair if you'd like."

Chirrut felt excitement radiating off of the girl like rays of sunshine. Turning to Bodhi for permission, she asked him, "C- can I?"

"Of course, little one," the young man agreed with a warm laugh of his own. It wasn't long before Chirrut heard the sound of a brush being run through Bodhi's long hair.

"So how are you holding up, old owl?" Hera asked as she came to sit beside him on his cot, beginning to munch on an apple herself.

"Just fine, really. I know the healers wanted to keep me here another day to be certain, but I truly don't think it will be necessary. The wound seems to have mostly healed."

"And that of itself is something worth noting. You- really ought to be dead now," she said, voice heavy with both exhaustion and relief.

"That is what people keep telling me, and yet they always seem to be wrong."

"And you've honestly never been hit with cold iron before?"

"Never," he said, voice dropping lower to avoid rousing the interest of the other three, hoping to leave them to their own devices. A sense of peace pervaded the three that he knew couldn't last forever and he wanted them to have as much time as they could. "But I've no more answer to offer than anyone else. I have experienced my fair share of oddities in my time, but this is something entirely new to me."

It didn't bode well, he knew. Not that he wasn't pleased to still be drawing breath or anything of that nature. It was just- a power like this...he had never known its like before. The fact that he had been killed, but still lived...it spoke to something off in the very dimensions of reality itself. It was a danger, both to himself and to everyone he cared for, but as of this moment, he had no help for it. He would just have to wait.

"In the meantime, though," he continued, a different sort of warning sparking at the edges of his awareness, "I believe someone who is actually in need of a healer's aid is on the approach."

"Hmm?" Hera started, shifting to look toward the entrance to the infirmary. Almost immediately, Zeb's heavy footfalls entered the space, along with the whisper of booted feet being dragged over stone. Hera was quickly back on her feet. "My Gods, what happened?"

"Nothing," Kanan's weakened voice answered. "I just- couldn't quite make it all the way back on my own. Zeb helped me out."

Hera groaned in frustration. "You know, I told you not to go down there for a reason. I hope what you learned was worth risking your health over."

"That remains to be seen," Baze's voice joined in, and while Zeb helped Kanan over to a cot, Chirrut's husband came to sit beside him on his.

"What did you learn, then?" Chirrut asked him, breaking off a hunk of his loaf and passing it to the larger man.

"Lady Orrelios knows the man. He's under some kind of geas of the Fey king's, so we won't get anything from him. She's going to try and work through it, but it will take time. Also seems that Zeb's young man is among the faeries."

"Ah. The Alexsandr we've heard so much about."

"The same. The story just keeps getting more and more complicated."

"And will continue to do so, I have little doubt. You can tell me all about it later. For now, I would like to enjoy my breakfast in relative peace."

"You are all right?" his husband asked in his typical gruff voice, but the tone was undercut by the gentle hand he rested on his knee.

"Perfectly fine. I simply feel that...we are very near an edge. I couldn't say what, but...it seems to me we ought to take moments like this where we may," he said, smiling faintly as he listened to Hera fuss over Kanan and Zeb, listened to Ezra begin to ask the green knight about his trick with the trees, and listened to Sabine and Bodhi laugh together as she braided his hair, talking about finding feathers and beads to add in.

It was a tender moment. Close as they all were, it was the sort of thing that happened rarely in their lives, so the blind warrior sat basking in it, with the taste of warm food in his mouth and laughter in the air and his love by his side.

They would all need this later.

The ongoing story’s available right here.

This is just a preview of the third chapter, which will be out next week, but is available right now on my Patreon, if you’d like to check that out.

[rinskiroo]

My Favorite Color is You

People keep telling him the best is yet to come, but Poe's not sure that's true. Thing's are different now--he's different. These days, his life is full of academic deadlines, cram sessions, and long, long train rides to and from university. Sometimes, the train feels like the bane of his existence, but it has its bright spots, like the woman who owns the hat he accidentally stole, and her cactus.

[a-whale-bone]

To The Victor chapter 7: Beginnings

Cassian in the Capitol. Jyn tries to make friends.

---

The first thing Cassian did on arrival in the Capitol was visit a salon. He wasn't exactly scruffy, but the level of grooming required for these meetings was far beyond what he could achieve by himself. He called for a car at the train station, but in the two minutes that he had to wait he was spotted by a few excited Hunger Games fans.

"You're my favourite victor!" one delighted teenage girl exclaimed, thrusting an empty page of her schoolbook towards him for an autograph. "I've rewatched your Games four times."

"I always support District Eight," her friend agreed. He had pulled his vibrant orange hair back into a ponytail, though it wasn't quite long enough; Cassian suspected that lots of boys and young men had tried to grow their hair to emulate Bodhi. "I'm gonna try and sponsor you guys this year."

"That would be great," said Cassian, putting his Capitol smile in place and signing whatever they thrust under his nose. He partly meant it – any sponsorship could make a difference to tributes in the Arena.

[adigeon]

ok but thanks to blade 2, lets pls consider vampire!chirrut/vampire-hunter!baze

ooh, yes indeed

i’m thinking still religious!chirrut confounding baze at every turn? vamp chirrut who gets blood donations from his neighbors, who watches over them without being asked to – he tells fortunes on the street sometimes, he wards off other, less moral vampires, killing the ones who notice he’s blind and try to take over his territoryand baze, who shows up with a crossbow that fires silver-capped bolts, who can *tell* there’s a vampire in this area, why are the locals so reticent to disuss its location? who meets chirrut and at first wants to kill him but quickly realizes chirrut is something else entirely than what he expected – and someone he’s reluctant to leave 

[egregiousderp]

When you see this post an excerpt from a WIP!

Fuck. Okay. I saw this through @unicornsandbutane . Uh. So. Remember that Spiritassassin past life dreaming AU I was talking about? It. Uh. Goes something like this.

(Sorry this is huge. This was going to be a chapter. They didn’t say how long the excerpt had to be and I don’t know when I’ll next get to this because I’m…well…me.)

Context: force sensitive people in one life dream about their past lives. Baze and Chirrut dream about one another. Baze denies this. Heavily. That some new age shit.

He meets Chirrut for the first time after dreaming about him dying in his arms.

Chirrut has retinitis pigmentosa. He can still see but is in the process of becoming fully blind. Baze doesn’t know.

Okay. I- Uhm…

/VAGUE PRESENTING GESTURES ——– ——–

The client can smile as much as he wants as long as he pays is a personal rule.

Baze is starting to question that rule.

He is hours in and halfway through being swallowed by the innards of a sink that probably hasn’t been replaced or altered in more than fifty years, and still can’t make head or tail out of what the client actually wants him to do.

“If,” the man says, still smiling like the sun, “if I wanted to make the house safe for a blind person, how would it be modified?”

Baze grunts something about the stairs and keeping a clear floor. None of which particularly requires an interior contractor. He sees no reason to lie about the difficulty of his work when the man is probably just looking to sell a house.

“If I wished to install disabled ramping what would I do?“

Baze grunts again.

Not enough space for ramping. Install a chair lift like everyone else.

“If I-”

“Pipes and wiring,” Baze interrupts, his patience narrowing.

“Come again?”

The tilt of the other man’s head is birdlike, cheerful. The nightmare from the night before has unsettled Baze too much to be easily shaken. He rubs his forehead to clear it, feeling the start of a headache.

“Old house, old wiring,” Baze grunts.

“And…what does that mean?”

Baze sighs through his nose, and pulls his glasses back on. He dislikes doing so. Dislikes the looks of amusement he gets while holding documents at arms-length and studying layouts even more.

He hates old manses. The owners are either stingy or gullible, and rarely know what needs to be done.

If this guy wants a pretty interior job he should have called Jyn first, gutted all the beautiful wood paneling, the antique tiling of the floors and remade with a modern interior, calling him up when they were done. Baze chews on the end of his pen in distaste.

“Means the house came first. Electricity came later.” He thinks of the trio of children he saw giggling together on the trolley, barely six years old, watching a video on their parent’s phone. “And usage has gone up. You want that done first."

The owner just gazes at him, eyebrows lifted.

He has no idea what he is talking about, obviously.

Baze taps the sink in the kitchen on the print.

“Is this an original?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” the other man laughs.

He comes uncomfortably close to see the print, then turns his head to look at Baze. He is grinning at the beaded chain for his glasses. Librarian comments incoming, no doubt.

Baze’s mother would have knocked his knees out from under him with a volume of the Britannica, and she was barely five feet tall, with a limited grasp of English–-a textbook example on why quiet wasn’t the same as peaceful and neither were librarians.

Baze foregoes the commentary by folding the print back under his arm.

Might as well take a look.

Judging by the sink fixtures, the kitchen had a rehaul during the sixties. He wrinkles his nose as he opens the cabinet, pulling out bottles.

He half-expects to find a bag of weed somewhere under the sink. Keeps his nose out for the stink of it.

The client’s perpetual smile makes him seem the type.

He half-expects protests, the defensiveness of a dealer.

The stillness and the slight creeping sensation down his spine makes him crane his head back to find said client instead matter-of-fairly checking out his ass.

Baze snorts.

Well. That’s this city for you.

Nobody has much to look at in steel-toed work boots and tan coveralls. And Baze has even less to look at these days. He’d once been a trim man. Now he’s just a sad forty-year-old nearsighted divorcee checking the nuts of an S-pipe as a favor to a brilliant young architect who’d found him at random by looking up welders in the phone book.

Jyn Erso is twenty-two, driven, and all business. Something more than a client. A grudging friend. He’d done all-night work with her in near-silence together for her grad display. You don’t pull rush jobs like that for just anyone.

They meet once a week for drinks. They aren’t what he’d think of as particularly close friends because Jyn has a guardedness to her that tells you it isn’t a date, and if you try anything she’d crack your nose and leave you in the hospital. Not that Baze would try anything. But there is something particularly depressing about meeting up with an attractive and intelligent young woman who talks shop, having a nice evening, and then going home alone to your own unfinished house.

When Jyn had said her best friend needed to have his house looked at for renovations, Baze had had the sinking feeling that that was it, that he was being couched into approving of some future boyfriend, herded headlong into some sort of fatherly role.

He did not expect Chirrut Îmwe, answering the door before he could knock.

“You’re the inside man?“

Baze had blinked.

“Something like that.”

“Chirrut. Chirrut Îmwe.”

His handshake had been firm, vigorous, his hands as calloused as Baze’s.

“You’re…Blaze Malbus?”

“Baze,” Baze corrected with the long patience of a lifetime with an unusual name.

He’d kept clean-shaven and his hair close-cropped for years to try to cut down on the drug dealer jokes. He’d been a child during the Haight-Ashbury days, and still had never taken a hit. Straight A student. Good future.

Then his father had died when he was seventeen, and someone needed to bring in money for the house.

He knows all about how being good at something doesn’t cancel out bad luck, how the unexpected normally goes hand-in-hand with ‘unpleasant’.

In fact, Chirrut is unexpected in a lot of ways.

Trim black turtleneck. Woven bag. Loose pants and sandals. A red wrap around his waist that’s got an interesting and subtle woven texture to it. Clean-shaven. Close-haired. Chinese, like him, which had been another surprise. And definitely older than fresh-faced Jyn, though he has the peculiar agelessness to him that comes with a heavy fitness lifestyle. Probably another fucking righteous vegan, Baze thinks.

He thinks again of his dream, the details all blurred together, just a lingering sense of unease, of loss. Something that makes him want to wipe his fingernails on his coverall and expect to be talked down to by another idiot who doesn’t know which way a screw turns but makes more money than him and believes that’s because he’s lazy. Unintelligent.

The bad dream seems to be leaking into his sense of the man. He’s seen plenty of people like Chirrut. Has been checked out by far more intimidating-looking ones.

Baze wonders with a snort if he’s being set up, if Jyn has made some assumptions. Unlikely. Jyn usually keeps her head down when it comes to the affairs of others.

“I’m not that kind of plumber,” Baze says, too tired to keep any real heat in his voice.

Chirrut gives a bark of laughter that’s completely unselfconscious, a smile that’s much too even not to have been set that way as a child, with plenty of complicated orthodonture. Money, Baze thinks a little bitterly. Something he doesn’t have much of even before the ex-wife remarried, stopped demanding alimony in advance, and filed a totally unnecessary restraining order.

“Aah, well, you never know,” Chirrut breezes.

He is so blithe even Baze has to snort.

“Try turning the water on,” Baze mutters.

Chirrut steps over to the sink and Baze listens to the pipes, squints with his little penlight tucked behind his ear, the red beads of the chain clinking on pipe.

“Pour a glass for me. I want to check the clarity. Something transparent.”

Chirrut shuffles slightly above him.

“Don’t worry. There’s beer in the refrigerator if you get thirsty.”

“Beer,” Baze repeats.

Chirrut gives a noncommittal noise.

The only thing that’s thirsty here is you, Baze thinks a little uncharitably, making his way gingerly out from under the sink and unbending slowly, and with a wince.

“You don’t seem the type.”

Chirrut’s face shifts into comic dismay.

“My feelings are grievously injured and I rescind the offer of my specialty homebrew. You can drink out of the sink.”

Baze laughs, despite himself.

“That your business?”

“A hobby.”

Something odd has passed into the man’s face, the smile sagging at the corners.

Baze doesn’t ask.

Somehow it doesn’t surprise him that Jyn befriended a microbrewer.

“It was once women’s work, you know, the making of beer,” Chirrut calls.

His voice is a little too loud and bright in the low space.

Baze considers this tidbit, and how he’s probably supposed to react to it. What might be hinted and what might not be.

“Don’t tell that to Jyn,” he decides on.

Chirrut rips out another laugh, this one with a wicked edge.

He has a great laugh, Baze thinks absently. He must have caused plenty of trouble in his time. This too doesn’t surprise him in terms of Jyn’s choice of friends.

Against his better instincts he finds himself oddly okay with being watched by this hovering fellow. Always asking questions about what he’s doing, why he’s doing it. It should be annoying. Somehow it isn’t, comforting to talk about tangible things with that lingering dream hanging over top of him. The sense of incoming, inevitable failure and loss.

Baze often dreams of failure.

“How did you meet?“ Chirrut asks out of the blue, after hip-checking a table by accident.

Clumsy, Baze notes. Like anything that isn’t directly in front of him isn’t there.

"Hm?”

“You and Jyn.”

Baze is surprised at the heavy, intent look on the other man’s face. Blinks as he realizes.

Oh.

“Phone book.” Baze grunts, “Under ‘Welders’.”

Nothing weird, he wants to add. Doesn’t, since he’s sure somehow that would make it worse.

…Is he actually going to be given the shovel talk by a Five-foot-Eight beatnik?

Baze doesn’t know whether to be flattered or concerned. Jyn is a very pretty girl, with a good head on her shoulders. Nice tits, too, if he’s completely honest. She could do a lot better than him for sure. He hopes, in a blaze of worry, that she knows it. Good God does he hope it.

He blinks.

The rising, tight tilt of the other man’s chin is very much like Jyn’s.

“You?” Baze asks, trying to keep the uneasy frown off his face.

“Destiny,” the other says.

Baze laughs before considering whether he’s supposed to. A dry noise.

“Really.”

The corners of Chirrut’s mouth go mercifully up. He leans back against the counter.

“I wandered into the grad installations by accident and she almost murdered me with a power sander.”

He makes it sound like the most casual and reasonable thing in the world. Baze swallows down another laugh.

“Get out.”

“That’s what she said,” Chirrut deadpans back, dislodging Baze’s laugh from his throat despite himself. Despite how utterly cheesy it is. Chirrut, he notices, turns his whole face like a cat when he peers at him. A flicker of surprise.

“…Have we met before?” Chirrut asks faintly, something uncertain in his features.

Baze snorts, shaking his head.

“Definitely not.“

Chirrut frowns but goes on with a shrug.

"Anyway, my Tai Chi was completely ruined, I offered her free self-defense lessons to compensate her for the fright, and we’ve gotten along famously ever since.”

Baze makes a listening noise.

The thought of anyone weaponizing Jyn Erso’s anger is completely terrifying. He’s half-convinced Jyn’s lambent rage is its own renewable energy source.

“You give her your beers?”

Chirrut gives him a look of practiced disdain his mother would have been impressed by.

“Forget I asked.” Baze mutters, shrugging.

“Have you met Galen Erso?”

Chirrut’s dark eyes are narrow, intent. Without the easy smile his whole face is narrow and long, proud-looking somehow. Something in the combination of lips and chin and brow.

Baze searches his memory for the name. Finds nothing with a slow shake of his head.

“Who?”

“The father,” Chirrut’s chin tilts up again, a slow fury in his dark eyes.

Baze frowns, guessing.

“…Alcoholic?”

“Mm,” Chirrut agrees, his chin set and stubborn like a little fist, “The quiet kind.”

Baze considers this more carefully, a slow frown settling. Next Thursday he’ll relocate them to a cafe, he thinks. Cut down on the girl’s intake. Someone has to take care of her.

“You try talking to her?”

Chirrut gives a sharp laugh again.

“Have you tried stopping Jyn from doing something before?”

Baze thinks. Chirrut’s already grinning, shaking his head, utterly fond.

“When Jyn Erso rebels, the whole world follows,” the man says.

Baze frowns. He’s starting to realize why a thirty-something-looking bohemian fitness freak of a man in a Bill Gates turtleneck is Jyn’s best friend.

“I have Thursdays,” Baze says stubbornly.

“Are you serious?” Chirrut laughs.

“Your day must be either Tuesday or Wednesday–”

“It’s Friday, actually,” Chirrut cuts him off, the laughter still in his eyes. He looks utterly unintimidated. Amused, even, arms folded across his stomach.

“Then if she matters to you–”

“Good God, you’re like an old woman,” Chirrut interrupts, laughing.

Baze’s fingers tighten. He’s a big man, and he knows it.

Chirrut is not, and still meets his look without an ounce of fear, a blasé arrogance. Baze notes suddenly the outline of his shoulders. The trimness of his waist, remembers he’d said self defense classes.

“Jyn’s an adult. She does her work and does it well. Life doesn’t end because of a bit of Black Porter on a Friday Night,” Chirrut says, shaking his head slightly.

Baze’s disapproval sits heavy in his belly, welling up in frustration. A great weight of words he can’t say to a stranger, a friend of a friend.

“I can see why you and Jyn are friends,” he settles for, leadening it with the full force of his disapproval.

Chirrut shrugs, a manic glitter in his eye.

“I like a straightman with me when I cause my trouble,” he pauses, inclines his head with a smile, “Or woman.”

Baze lets out a breath in disgust.

He bets it’s the same bar on Friday. He has half a mind to make the time to fish them both out. A growing protectiveness.

“Don’t drag Jyn down with you in whatever trouble you get into.”

Chirrut makes a rude noise, his dark brows knitting irritably, ”Yes, mother hen. Will that be all?”

It comes so sharply, so abruptly Baze just stands there for a moment, realizing how far he’s overstepped.

He almost wants to apologize. Feels the sting instead of the comparison. Dismissal.

Baze bits down his words.

“…I’ll send you an estimate.”

“Well, good. You stay right there and estimate,” Chirrut drawls, bumping the same table, catching the same vase, “while I get you a crate.”

Baze blinks.

“A…what?”

“You need a drink!” Chirrut hollers down the hall, “You need about five drinks!”

“I don’t need anything!” Baze yells back.

He winces at the sound of his own voice.

Chirrut Îmwe has apparently gone selectively deaf.

“I don’t accept drinks from strange men,” Baze mutters, a little hot around the ears when he realizes the other man is indeed bringing up a loose crate filled with dark bottles.

“Then it’s a good thing I’m a painfully ordinary man cursed with spectacular beauty,” Chirrut replies back, making a face, “and not at all strange.”

Baze doesn’t laugh. Can’t. Caught by a strange sense of panic.

Chirrut taps a finger against the little barrel, something challenging in his dark eyes.

“Stardust Ale. Last year’s vintage. It’ll give you something to talk about with my friend.”

“I…can’t accept this,” Baze says quietly.

Chirrut is waving him off with a noise of irritation, shoving the thing into his hands.

“Go on. Get lost. Make your estimates. Come back when this,” he taps the crate, “is gone. Get drunk with some friends. This is my number,” he’s scrawling something large and loose on the side of the wood.

Baze gives him one last, exasperated look as he does so, as he’s manhandled to the door by prodding and pushing hands.

“And wear something different next time,” Chirrut adds, calling after him down the steps to the tilted street, “You look like a Ghostbuster!“

[kylo-ren-has-an-8pack]

SpiritAsassin (Baze/Chirrut) Aesthetic- Rogue One - requested by anon

[b-else-writes]

the tiger shark and the sun

New chapter posted for my Star Wars/Avatar the Last Airbender  RebelCaptain fusion AU! Preemptively asking for forgiveness for what goes down in this chapter

Read on AO3 | Read from start

Pairings: Jyn/Cassian, minor Han/Leia and Baze/Chirrut, random minor background pairings

Rating: T

Summary: Star Wars/Avatar the Last Airbender fusion AU. When exiled firebender  Jyn Erso lands on his doorstep the day Cassian, last southern  waterbender, meets the Avatar, she seems just another obstacle in ending  the War against the Fire Nation. An obstacle he would willingly remove.  But as their paths keep crossing, and the twins discover that destiny  and balance are more than they expect, Jyn and Cassian find that they are more alike than they ever thought possible.

No snippet this time, it’s all too spoilery! Check out the chapter on AO3!

[melyzard]

Rogue One/Sense8

Chirrut notices first, of course, but it’s Baze who puts it all together. When he explains it to Chirrut, his sharik taps his staff thoughtfully against the hard-packed Jedhan dirt for a long moment, and then nods. It makes perfect sense that sharikesh would be joined through the Force in more ways than one, and though neither of them know anything of such bonds extending out through time and space to unknown strangers, well, if the Force wills it, then it must be so. Baze rolls his eyes at that last comment, but does not argue. It does make sense, in some ways. Chirrut has always heard more than others. Or at least, he has always heard more than anyone ever gave him credit. Poor blind boy, stumbling his way through the wide galaxy, nothing but a humble stick in hand to navigate the pitfalls.

“No,” Baze grunts irritably, unwilling to let Chirrut get away with that much. He smacks away the end of that ‘humble stick’ from his ribs, “You don’t hear more, you just listen better.”

“I see no difference.” Chirrut smiles brightly, “For example, I can hear you groaning at that joke, even though you have made no sound.”

“You do not have magical hearing,” Baze is firm on this point. He pauses, glowers at an acolyte who has been staring at Chirrut’s walking staff for several seconds, and as she blushes and turns back to her duties in the garden, Baze adds reluctantly. “I grant the second thing, though.”

Chirrut prods him in the ribs again, gently, and the humor in his tone takes on a faint note of what Baze might call uncertainty if he didn’t know better. “That I walk alone, guided and defended only by my humble stick?”

“No,” Baze grunts again, and catches the staff in one rough hand. “The thing about people underestimating you.”

Chirrut laughs, holds up his free hand in a gesture of peace, and when Baze releases the staff, he cleverly flips it around his wrist in a complicated gesture and settles it more comfortably in his hand. The staring acolyte’s eyes widen. Chirrut flips the staff again, this time a move so complex it seems as if his deft brown hands pass straight through the polished reinforced wood. The acolyte gasps softly. Chirrut’s smile widens.

“Is that what you do?” Baze demands. “When you go to one of them? Show them twirling tricks?”

Chirrut taps his staff gently against the dirt of the courtyard. “Once, I suppose I did,” he concedes at last. “She hardly needed the help, though. She already understood the basic precepts of staff combat. I only gave her a few of my personal favorite moves. Of course, at the time I simply thought it was a dream and she knew dantougu style because I did.”

Baze sighs. “The boy,” he says, “the quiet one with the - ” he makes a sharp gesture with his hand, leveling his palm up high over his head and growling a bit.

“The tall, cranky droid?”

“Mm. Him. Last time I…met him,” Baze pauses and shakes his head, but he really cannot think of a better term to describe something he’s never heard of before. “He was in a shoot out. Low ammo, not yet pinned down but getting backed into a corner. Dust storm gunked his targeting scope and visibility.”

“And you popped in and saved the day, of course.”

Baze gives the acolyte a significant glare, and she stops edging closer and stays respectfully out of hearing range. If she comes over here and asks ‘Master Chirrut’ to teach her the secrets of the Force, Chirrut will be unbearably cheerful about it for days. “I just taught him how to angle off the building’s glare,” he says at last. “Don’t know what his teachers are doing, letting a boy like that run into firefights without knowing how to use his environment.”

“What are his teachers doing, letting a boy that young run into firefights?” Chirrut murmurs, but Baze does not respond. They both already know the answer to that. The Empire is far away, and has no use for a little planet in the Outer Rim that still keeps to old traditions. But there are those who struggle under it’s heavy heel every day, and Baze admires how some of them refuse to bow their heads. He only wishes they would leave the very young out of it. The chattering boy seems well out of it, but both the quiet boy and the girl seem to constantly be diving for trenches or staunching blood with their small hands. The girl, he thinks, is not even yet considered an adult in Core worlds, and neither of them are full grown by Jedhan standards. They should have parents to love and protect them, elders to shepherd them to safer places, teachers to guide them through the pitfalls of anger and bitterness and loss until they learn to control those darker impulses.

“What they need,” Chirrut says into the gentle peace of the courtyard of the great Temple of Kyber, and Baze knows what’s coming by the sly stretch of Chirrut’s smile, “are guardians.”

“Lazy joke,” Baze tells him pointedly.

Another thoughtful tap of the staff end against the dirt, and then Chirrut spins it again around his wrist, so pleased with himself already that he does not even hear the acolyte quietly applaud. “But a true one.”

Baze shakes his head and grabs the staff, his fingers conveniently wrapping around Chirrut’s hand as he does. “You figured out how to meet them on purpose yet?”

Chirrut’s smile wanes but his confidence does not. “Soon,” he promises. “We shall.” 

---

Jyn doesn’t have time for hallucinations. She’s been on her own for a year now, and it’s only this last month that she’s finally gone more than ten standard days without feeling the vicious pinch of hunger in her belly and the headache of dehydration and nausea that always accompany the early stages of starvation. She’s made it almost two weeks now without panic rising like bile in her throat as she realizes that she has nothing to eat and no options to get food that don’t involve the risk of capture or death. But though this job promises to put enough credits in her pocket to make it through at least two or three months, it’s not easy work. 

So she bites down on the inside of her cheek and narrows her eyes until all she can see is the code of the forged scandoc in front of her. She’s almost got this one done, and about five more to go before the crime boss on this planet will pay her the rest of her fee. She does not have time for the guy standing in the corner, watching her hands with interest. He’s not really there anyway. Just like the shaggy guy with the gun or the sleek guy with the staff or the polite guy with the red sash are never really there. (She has no idea why her brain only seems to manifest her problems as Human males, although on her more bitter days she pretends to know.)

“Takodana doesn’t use that registry anymore,” the guy breaks the silence suddenly, his voice low and accented by some unfamiliar planet. Jyn bites down on her cheek until she tastes blood and doesn’t look up, doesn’t acknowledge the person who can’t possibly be there. She’s alone in the little room she’s paying an outrageous amount for above the old droid shop. He’s not really here, because if some strange guy popped out of nowhere in the shadows and started critiquing her work, she’d put a blaster bolt through his head. But last time she tried that, all she got for her trouble was a smoking blaster hole in the bulkhead and a lot of angry grav-bus passengers. Jyn’s logic is thus: she’s a good shot, but she can’t shoot him, so he isn’t really there. Every time she’s seen him, she’s just been….dreaming of someone who doesn’t attack her on sight. Hallucinating the faint smile he gives her when she cracks an irate joke, imagining the soft music of his voice. Going crazy, that’s what it is, her mind fracturing under the crushing weight of survival. Jyn is alone in the room, that’s all there is to it.

“Maz Kanata dropped her tavern out of that registry,” the guy says again, a little more urgently, and steps closer.

Or rather, he doesn’t, because he’s not there. Jyn is alone, she’s just got a really, really obnoxious imagination.

“And since her tavern makes up most of the planet’s revenue, it wasn’t worth it for the Takodana government to pay the fees to stay in, either,” the guy does not tell her, his voice still quiet but now turning just a little bit exasperated. As if he has any right to judge her for not listening, when he doesn’t even exist.

“If you use that scandoc,” Not Really There But Definitely Really Annoying continues, stepping yet closer, “you’re going to get caught.”

“I’m not going to use it myself,” Jyn snaps, sitting up and glaring at him (glaring at the spot where he would be, if he were real and present, which he isn’t), “I’m going to sell it, and then get the hells out of here with my creds before Huan Miu nags me for more work than he’s willing to pay for.”

“Huan Miu?” The guy blinks at her, a frown creasing his face. “The crime boss from Ryloth? He’s going to Takodana? Why?”

Jyn’s stomach does a strange flip. Why doesn’t he know that? He’s her, albeit some weird, distorted version of her own mind. Really weird. She’s never even seen anyone who looks like him; if he’s some manifestation of her past trauma or a ghost of someone she’s killed in the war, why doesn’t he look familiar? “Next time,” she tells him flatly, “You should grow your hair out and put it in a tail.”

The Guy Who Isn’t raises a dark eyebrow, the concerned frown vanishing into a younger, more uncertain kind of confusion. He reaches up to run a hand through his short dark hair, and for the first time, Jyn thinks he might actually be somewhere near her own age. Only just barely an adult, still young enough to be awkward when thrown off his game. “What?”

“That, or shave your head completely,” she shrugs at him. She’s heard through…sources that Saw is letting his hair grow again, but she only ever knew him to be hairless (heartless) and –

(no, that’s not right, if he’d been heartless all along then her heart wouldn’t hurt so much but, shit, Jyn, just forget about it)

“I can’t shave my head,” the guy says. “It wouldn’t fit Sward.” Jyn opens her mouth to demand who the hells is Sward? – but he cuts her off. “Don’t put that registry on the scandocs. Huan Miu will hunt you down if your product causes him any trouble. He’s been getting into slave running lately, and he’ll put a buzzcollar on your neck and sell you to the highest bidder.”

“Huan Miu runs arms to wealthy arseholes in the Mid Rim,” Jyn snorts. “Even if he did get into slaves, those are the kind of rich pervs who want pretty young things to hang on their elbow. No one wants a scarred up gutter rat like me.”

He looks at her for a long moment, and Jyn stares back because she doesn’t know how else to handle the sensation of being…looked at like that. Well, she does know, but again, shooting at him won’t do anything helpful. He’s not really there, after all. Jyn’s alone in this cold, dusty, cramped little room that smells like old oil and rusting metal.

“Don’t use that registry,” he says slowly. “And don’t deliver the product to Huan Miu in person. Please.”

Jyn’s heart clenches, and it’s only distantly that she notes the panic bubbling up in her chest is nothing like the usual terror that surges in her throat. The last time someone said please to the nobody that was born Jyn Erso, the last time someone asked her to do something that was meant to keep her safe, she found herself alone and starving in a hole. Again.

Jyn throws her vibroblade at him. It embeds itself in the wall, quivering only slightly less than her cold hands. The guy is gone, because of course he is. He was never really there anyway, in this empty room where she huddles over her work. Jyn tucks her icy fingers under her armpits and closes her eyes, and tells herself she’s glad for it. She’s glad she’s not hallucinating anymore. She doesn’t need to pretend that someone in the galaxy cares about her. She knows better. Jyn’s alone, and she prefers it that way.

She leaves the registry off the scandocs, sends her finished work to Huan Miu with a short-lock virus embedded in the documents that warns him he has two hours to pay her, or the virus will eat all his files and then set his console on fire. The money comes through in thirty minutes, and Jyn gets the hell off that planet an hour later. A few days after she hops the system, she finds a cancelled bill of sale in Huan Miu’s ‘catalogue,’ with a grainy image of Jyn’s face stolen from some security camera or other. The buyer had been compensated for the failure to deliver.

Jyn transfers all the credits from that job through five shell accounts before she feels safe enough to use any of it, and sleeps with her vibroblade in her hand for the next week. If she let herself think about it, she might be a little bit grateful. Her mind might be warped beyond repair, but at least her hallucinations aren’t totally useless.

Still, better to keep him out of her head. Better to be alone.

---

Bodhi doesn’t really like his run between Naboo and Jedha, despite the good pay. Naboo is a really pretty planet, and he imagines it’s nice enough for those born to it. But the air is full of strange smells that make his nose itch and taste a bit rotten on his tongue. Naboo, he learns, has almost fifty thousand species of flowers in the capital city alone, lots of festivals that involve cutting and arranging bouquets, and a tendency to just throw the dying flowers into massive compost piles in the countryside when they are done with them. So technically, something is always rotting in the air around the famous planet’s most beloved city. He learns not to voice that thought out loud on his first trip there.

The dock workers are friendly enough as they unload his shuttle, and when there’s some sort of administrative hold up and all cargo ships are put on a freeze while the office workers chatter and scold and run around with datapads on the catwalks above them, the pilots and the dockworkers hunker down on the dock floors and indulge in some sociable sabaac. Bodhi sees a few disgruntled faces when he scoops up a big pile of winnings, but mostly the grumbles are good natured. “Our Ensign Rook,” Yancy crows, another pilot assigned the Jedha-Naboo run around the same time as Bodhi. He laughs like a dying bird and smells like Jedhan spice. “He’s a skinny grek, but he knows how to call the cards! Show ‘em how a Jedhan gets it done, brother!”

Bodhi grins and lays down a complete Royal Hutt. The rest of the table groans. Yancy squawks his scratchy laugh as Bodhi cleans up the betting pile again.

The bad shit doesn’t happen until almost three hours after the whole dock shuts down for paperwork problems, and Bodhi’s feeling pretty good about the stack of credits and ident cards and cheap but useful nicknacks he’s acquiring by his elbow. There’s no booze, and Bodhi wouldn’t indulge if there were (Mum may be far away, but no amount of fermented plant juice will ever be worth her disappointment). He’s still feeling a bit flushed anyway, and maybe a little cocky with his success. He has a job now, a steady one, and the grey jumpsuit he wears is clean and not really even that scratchy. He’s got enough in his winnings pile to maybe pick up something nice for Mum from the Naboo shops, and since Temple offerings are now forbidden, he could use the leftover bit to maybe buy some new flight goggles. Maybe even a good pair of flight gloves!

So his head is full of rosy pictures of goggles and gloves and the chance his Mum will finally smile again (it’s been almost two years since the Imperials invaded Jedha, he’s starting to worry), and he’s not thinking at all when he opens his mouth and comments on the rot in the air all around the city.

Their corner of the docks goes silent immediately, and Bodhi blinks at the sudden change. Several seconds too late, he realizes that every face around him, save Yancy, looks much more Core-world-esque than his own. Every face save Yancy’s is turned toward him, the friendly smiles and good natured scowls gone.

“You think you’re any better, Jedha?” One of the dock workers snarls. The worker jabs a grease-covered finger at Bodhi’s left shoulder, at the still pristine white crest stamped into the cheap grey cloth. “Think you’re better than us when you wear that on your sleeve?”

“Apologies,” Bodhi says quickly, putting his hands up, “I didn’t mean the planet was rotten, I just meant - ” His words stutter slightly, he finds himself speaking faster as the dock workers rise to their feet around him. Funny, he hadn’t noticed before just how burly they all are. The Imperial docks seem to prefer larger sentients for their workers around here. “It’s just the flowers,” he starts again, pushing up from his chair and shuffling backwards, suppressing a little twinge of jittery unease as the workers move closer, glaring. “They make the air taste rotten.”

It’s the wrong thing to say, and he knows it before the words are even completely out of his mouth. The unease starts to shiver into real fear at the anger all around him, and part of Bodhi is baffled. Naboo has been Imperial since the beginning, everyone knows that. Even if he was making some kind of dig at how easily they capitulated to the command of the Emperor, why would they even be upset about it? It’s all old news, right? The Empire isn’t even that bad, as long as people get on with their lives and don’t break the laws.

“You think we’re like that, Jedha?” Another worker asks in a dark voice. “You think we roll in rot because he’s from here?”

Bodhi holds up his hands. “I think something’s getting lost in translation here,” he says a little helplessly, glancing up at the catwalks above and wondering why none of the security folks up there are reacting to the obvious brewing fight. To his left, Yancy is still sitting quietly, staring at his feet. Bodhi wonders briefly whatever happened to brother, but then the dock worker nearest him lunges forward and wraps a muscled arm around Bodhi’s neck.

“Think we like it, Imperial, having to bow to your kind?” The man’s voice is harsh in Bodhi’s ear, his breath heavy with an unfamiliar sweet smell, but Bodhi only has a moment to register either before the worker clamps down and Bodhi chokes as his air cuts off. He flails against the arm, feels his elbow make glancing contact with something fleshy, but the iron band around his throat doesn’t ease and dimly he becomes aware that someone else is moving toward him, fist angling for his face and all he can do is scrabble weakly at the arm and stare in horror -

“Hey,” a female voice says from somewhere to his left. “Fuck you.”

And then Bodhi shifts his weight. Or rather, his body decides to shift his weight, because all the stars as his witness, he doesn’t do a damn thing. His feet simply move underneath him, his weight rebalances, his knees bend slightly, and his elbow goes flying back and slightly up, connecting solidly with something hard. A rush of overly-sweet breath as the man holding him in a headlock gasps and loosens his grip. Bodhi’s body shifts backward, throwing all his weight against the staggered dock worker, and his legs lash out as he balances on the throttler, his heels thudding into the oncoming attacker’s gut. The move shoves the throttler back even further, and Bodhi’s shoulders twist, wrenching him free from the chokehold. His feet keep moving, dancing closer to the circle of dock workers who are now looking much less aggressive as Bodhi grabs the man who meant to punch him and slams his knee up into the other’s face. Another attacker runs up behind Bodhi (how does he know that? He shouldn’t know that!), so he spins, his fist flying, and the blow sends the new attacker flat on his back with thick blood spurting from his obviously broken nose.

Another attacker on the right, and Bodhi’s arms move faster than he can even comprehend, catching the man’s wrist and slamming up against his joints. A loud cracking noise and a scream from the worker, and Bodhi’s hands grip the man’s worn shirt and fling him brutally away. Someone shouts behind him, and Bodhi drops, his leg sweeps out in a move he knows from action holos but he’s never actually seen done in reality. He feels his shin connect, twice, and two more hulking dock workers crash to the floor in a pile of limbs and curses. Bodhi finds himself on his feet again, standing in a ring of half a dozen bleeding, wheezing, groaning people, with a split knuckle and a pounding heart.

Across from him, Yancy sits frozen in his chair, staring.

“Hutt fuckers,” the woman says from Bodhi’s side, and if it were possible for Bodhi to be anymore shocked than he already is, he might have yelped. She eyes the downed dock workers for a second, and then turns to face him, a few strands of dark hair fluttering down into her green eyes. She gives Bodhi a long look, her chin tilted up and her eyes assessing. “You ditched the red sash,” she says, pointing to his waist.

“Not allowed on Jedha anymore,” he replies automatically, and then blinks. Wait. How does she know he used to wear the acolyte’s sash? She definitely isn’t Jedhan, she can’t know…no, wait, yes, he does recognize her. He’s…seen her, right? In the crowds at Jedha Port? Or...somewhere like that. What’s she doing on Naboo? What’s she doing here? “You… you had a braid. Didn’t you?”

Her face turns from wary to grim, and Bodhi instantly regrets the question. He doesn’t know why it hurt her, doesn’t know why he even asked. It hardly matters. He’s got so many other problems right now. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“Rook?” Yancy asks in a quavering voice. “Are you, uh, in there?”

The oddness of the question, and the careful way Yancy asks it, makes Bodhi’s head snap up. “Yeah?” He clears his throat, looks down at the workers on the floor. “I…I think so?”

“I like the goggles,” the woman says.  Bodhi turns to look back at her.

She’s gone.

He spins in a circle, because he’s out in more or less the middle of the docks where he can see all around himself for several meters in every direction until a ship blocks his line of sight, but she’s gone.

“Rook?” Yancy shuffles back. He seems about to say something more, but then he glances down at the workers and an odd, pinched look crosses his face.

The woman is gone, vanished into the aether, and Bodhi’s knuckles are bloody from a fight he swears he didn’t, well, actually fight.

“What,” Bodhi asks aloud, his voice hoarse and his neck sore from the throttler’s hold, “the Force just happened?”

“Ensign Rook,” a sharp, heavily accented voice answers. The sharp consonants and edged vowels make Bodhi’s stomach flip over, and he whirls around.

“Ensign Rook,” the Chief of Security says again, ignoring the dock workers scrambling off the floor and slinking away into the rest of the now-silent facility. “Regulations forbid the use of inappropriate language in a professional setting. “You will receive twenty demerits and a permanent mark on your record.” The Chief of Security raises a datapad and makes a sharp note on his screen. “As such, you will be docked a day’s pay per demerit.” Behind him, two Stormtroopers watch Bodhi with cocked rifles and empty black stares.

“I – “ Bodhi starts to protest, but a hand on his shoulder stops him.

“Don’t,” the tall man says, his warm, rounded accent a stark contrast to the Security Chief’s cold edge. “He watched you fighting the others. He called the Stormtroopers over before he came down.” The stranger looks at the Security Chief with the sort of disdain Bodhi usually reserves for slimy mold on his food or badly programmed hyperspace trajectories. “He wants you to argue so he can tell the ‘troopers to shoot and later claim you were exhibiting aggressive behavior.”

Bodhi clamps his mouth shut.

The Security Chief doesn’t look up from his datapad for a long moment, and the rot that Bodhi tasted on the air before suddenly seems to condense around his head, smothering him.

With a snap, the Security Chief closes his datapad and clips it to his belt. “You will also be reassigned,” he says flatly. “You are clearly unsuited to Core world runs. Your new route will be adjusted accordingly.”

Bodhi’s stomach drops; the Naboo run wasn’t ever going to make him wealthy, but it was one of the best paying routes, and the only one available to someone with his flight scores that had a chance of paying off Mum’s medical debt.

“See his jaw?” the stranger with his hand on Bodhi’s shoulder says calmly. “He’s disappointed. He’s a bully,” the man adds in a harsh, unpleasant voice. Bodhi gasps, glancing from the stranger’s narrowed eyes to the Security Chief’s back, but the Imperial doesn’t turn around, doesn’t seem to hear the stranger’s provocative comments. “He can’t knock the workers around here too much because they will complain to their Senator,” the stranger continues as the Stormtroopers wheel around smartly and march after their superior. “But you are from an unrepresented planet, and you fought off a bunch of bigger, stronger people. He’s looking for a chance to crush you, so he can sound like a hero later. Just let him go.”

Bodhi stands, frozen, until the Security Chief and the ‘troopers disappear up the catwalks and into the offices again. The dock where his cargo ship sits seems to have cleared completely, even Yancy vanishing into the shadows of Naboo’s evening. Bodhi swallows and clenches his bleeding hand tightly. “I didn’t fight them,” he tells the stranger. “I don’t fight people. It’s not – My mum taught me it was – I don’t know what - ” He falls silent, his usual ability to talk himself out of trouble utterly deserting him. He opens and closes his fist a few more times, appreciating that at least everything seems to be under his control again. For now.

On his shoulder, the stranger’s hand tightens, a comforting gesture. Bodhi doesn’t look back at him again, though. Maybe it’s better not to look. Who knows what he will see?

“It was the woman, I think,” he says abruptly. “The fight. It was her.”

“The woman,” the stranger repeats, and then, “short, dark hair, fierce eyes?”

“Uh,” Bodhi almost turns around then, but stops himself. “Green eyes,” he corrects carefully. “You know her?”

“We’ve met,” the stranger says absently. “Did it feel like you were no longer wholly alone within yourself, following another’s lead within your own skin?”

“Not…quite?” Bodhi reaches up his bloody hand and rubs his throat gingerly. “More like someone else was, um, moving me. Like a puppet in a street show. Wait – did she grab your body, too?”

A pause, a small sound like a man clearing his throat. “No,” The stranger’s hand drops from his shoulder. “One of the older men did. But it felt more like guidance than control. Perhaps the woman hasn’t learned that kind of finesse yet.” The last sentence comes out thoughtful, more like the stranger is speaking to himself than to Bodhi.

Bodhi feels a little flare of hope. Surely an apparition would not speak to himself? That was the kind of thing a real person did, not an old-world demon from a Temple Tale or a figure from a fever-dream. The stranger must be real, and the Security Chief was just ignoring him for some reason. And if the stranger is real, then the woman was probably real too. He’s not hearing voices or anything.

Bodhi braces himself, and turns around.

He is standing alone in the dock by his cargo ship. The closest sentients to him are several meters away by the next ship, and not one of them makes eye contact with him at all. He doesn’t know if they avoid him because the Security Chief put an obvious target on his back, or because he just flattened six big men with his bare hands, or because he’s standing in the middle of the dock talking to himself like a mad man.

Bodhi shoves his hands in his pockets, curls his fingers tight around the trickle of blood between them, and walks back to his ship.

It doesn’t occur to him until several hours and two hyperspace jumps later that he left his winnings behind.

---

**NOTES

Sharik = a made up word (based on the Arabic word for “life partner”) that doesn’t quite translate but means, more or less, “person with whom I walk the paths of life, bound in spirit through the energy of the Force and blessed by the universe.” Sharikesh = the plural, used to refer to all members of such a bond.

Dantougu = a word I made up by sliming the Chinese words “dan tou gun” (“single end staff”) all together

[standstillgo]

Work kicked my ass but I finally got my first ask done! @shiparmada asked for:

You said the magic words and summoned me. I don't mind either digital or traditional, but what I am requesting is Baze and Chirrut in suits. If Chirrut is somehow sabotaging Baze that would be all the better. I hope your 6 day work week goes well! As well as a 6 day work week can.

This ask went way differently than I thought it would. Baze blearily got dressed that morning and totally didn’t notice the sock switch! lol I don’t know how plausible it is but it was the only sabotage I could think of XD;;;