#these things are virtually indestructible

[rosetyler42]

Ericka: She's a trained assassin and gymnast who tried to kill count Dracula even if it was in a rather strategic way rather than brute strength. Woman kicked a kraken in the FACE. She kept both herself and a dead weight full grown man from falling into the sea with one hand. She's physically stronger than me.

Lucy: She's half vampire, she's stronger

Simon: He's half vamp AND a huge 6' 3" brick. He's stronger

Alice: She's both taller, a toon, an Angel, and corrupted undead. She's stronger.

Audrey: probably stronger mostly due to she's taller, but she's one of the closer ones.

@lovelylivelyv 's Jack Nephalem: He's the son of TWISTED ALICE and THE INK DEMON. Plus a toon! AND being half angel and half devil. He's stronger.

Bill: Bill rarely does things physically often using his powers. He is a trillion year old dream demon however who has no physical form. His real 3D form is stronger though with how big he is and him being mostly invincible outside the mind scape.

Ford: Stronger than me; dude's been dimension hopping for 30 years.

Fidds: Possibly stronger than me having grown up a farm boy.

Mabel: At least her punches are quite strong. I'm much older than her though. She's only 12-13.

Coraline: I'm probably stronger than her considering she's 11.

Mr. Ring-A-Ding: Interesting question. He's a god who, like Bill, rarely does things physically. He's also a toon and thus virtually indestructible and follows toon logic. HOWEVER, little guy seems to get winded pretty easily by stairs. Unless that was part of his game. In his larger form (pre-perspective and near the end) he'd easily overpower me.

Bloo: Probably. He may be shorter than me, and his strength changes depending on the ep, but little dude could rip doors off their hinges and toss aside friends larger than him when on a mission.

Shego: Oh, no doubt, she could clobber me.

Meteora: Ditto.

Eclipsa: Maybe since she's a bit more athletic than me, but of the group she's probably closest to me with how smol she is and her preferring to handle things in other ways.

Caine: Unknown

Pomni: Mostly her cartoon physics give her an advantage.

Every poll on this blog is about fictional characters only. This request was sent to us and we made a poll in response to it. Send any Blorbo-related question you want to our inbox and we’ll make a poll on which people can vote with their own Blorbos in minds

[lioma-art]

Walked in on a conversation between a coworker and my boss at lunch break, and just heard them talk about stuff that's near indestructable, and I go "You talking about tardigrades?"

And my boss laughed because they were talking about secure long-time archiving methods but tought making the mental leap to tardigrades was just like the nerdiest thing.

We're all nerds at work. It's wonderful.

[homunculus-argument]

If you know anyone who seems really chill to the point of being virtually indestructible, like nothing could ever bother them in any way, could get hit by a train and just shake it off and be totally fine, laughing it off as soon as they've dusted themselves off and stopped bleeding, but who occasionally just randomly falls apart to complete fucking smithereens with seemingly no cause nor warning, only to get back up again a few minutes/hours/days later like "ok yeah I'm fine again that was weird lmao", and you've ever wondered what the fuck is up with that:

They are actually not ok and most likely are not ok at any point. The whole "hardiest person you know who just collapses randomly sometimes" thing isn't a deliberately constructed façade, as a matter of fact it might be something that they actually personally believe themselves to be. But in reality this is somebody who's either unintentionally learned or has been deliberately trained to hide negative emotions and mask symptoms at all costs, as the #1 priority that goes over any other survival needs.

So even though it may look like they go from 1 to 100 completely at random and unpredictably, and then swing right back again to being totally fine, you have no way of knowing how long they've been at 95% before the last line of defense broke down and the system collapsed. And once they flip back up, odds are that they just managed to scrape their shit back together again just enough to get their backup masking systems running. The "check engine" light never turned on because the wire was clipped years ago.

If this is you, this is your callout to seek some sort of help. I'm telling on everyone in this room including myself.

[artbyblastweave]

Surviving members of the Boston City Government announced an ongoing initiative to just cover the whole thing in spikes. "The original plan was much more modest," elaborated city spokesman Blaine Grumbide. "We were just going to do a light spike-dusting on the usual offenders- retaining walls, alleyways, the bases of inset windows, park benches and all the seats on the T. But our subcontractor, well, you could say they got a taste for it, and yesterday they showed up with a 33-billion-dollar action plan to cover every Euclidean plane in Suffolk County with a uniform layer of needle-thin, virtually indestructible yet unnervingly prehensile skewers. Exteriors, interiors, whole shebang. We couldn't say no. I mean we literally couldn't, they were doing something. With their eyes."

Boston City Hall, reportedly the locus for the ongoing initiative, has been described by onlookers as resembling, quote, "a gorestained, brutalist sea urchin." Remaining city officials, who have decamped to the North St. Dunkin' Donuts, project that at current rate of expansion, all Boston neighborhoods will be inhospitable to human life by 2034, with the exception of Seaport, which in 2017 was deemed inhospitable to human life on unrelated grounds.

[trashydez]

like a phoenix. (2.7k words)

what if phoenix- instead of being virtually indestructible, actually wasnt? what if he was actually incredibly prone to death, but he just… never stayed dead?

(trigger warning for a multitude of causes of deaths!! some in detail and some not. other tw’s include implied suicide attempts, implied child neglect, derealisation and thinking one is already dead. be warned! take care of yourself!)

at 9, he wakes in his bed after having a high fever and his mom ships him off to school hours after it began. he finds it odd, because last he’d checked his temperature (that morning, when he told his mom he felt like he was going to die and his mom had left to go run errands, barely sparing him a glance), his temperature had been at 107 degrees farenheit. that was definitely high, but after he slipped into unconsciousness, writhing and restless and in a lot of pain, he woke up to his mother checking his temperature and saying he was fine to head off to school. he didnt feel fine, but his temperature had gone down significantly enough that his mother felt like he had no excuse not to go. hes glad he went to school though, even as he shivered, sneezed and sniffled, because there he found a friend in a boy with a funny bowtie and a heart made of gold.

he crunches and chokes on glass shards and poison but doesnt die. the doctors dont find anything wrong with him, aside from feeling a bit ill, so he goes back into the courtroom and dollie is convicted of murder. hes happy his roommate is away for some theatre troupe thing, because the sickness eventually catches up to him and he throws up shards of glass, acid and blood. it cuts into his throat and burns his eyes and he swears, he swears he dies right then and there, freezing and shaking and everything hurts. but when he wakes up hours later, the sun having set and the only light source in his dingy dormroom the moon outside, hes amazed to not feel sick anymore. but the puddle of sludge is drying beside his face and he considers himself lucky, or maybe unlucky, because unlike dahlia’s other victims, he actually lives to tell the tale.

phoenix arrives early to the office, having been in the public library nearby reading a book on reincarnation. he enters the office and promptly has his skull caved into his brain. he does not see his assailant, but when he wakes, theres an oddly dressed girl crying, crouched over his boss’ cold body. he doesn’t think about the drying blood in the back of his head, or how cold mia’s body is (and why he can even tell, considering the fact he has not touched her corpse) or the chapter in the book he’d been reading that talked about quantum immortality— all he thinks of is proving maya fey’s innocence.

as it turns out, being constantly anxious and terrified of mortal peril actually has its perks. maybe the fact he’s a lawyer whose only ever dealt with homicide cases definitely wasn’t benefiting his mental wellbeing either. in any case, its that fear of literally everything and constant feeling of impending doom that makes his body react before his mind does. taser! danger! maya! so, he gets tasered. and it fucking HURTS, but he feels more relieved than frightened as the searing pain shoots through him, because he’d been able to push maya away before von karma got to them both. wasnt a symptom of death by electrocution an overwhelming feeling of helplessness and imminent death? maybe he was going crazy. when he comes back though, its to his head in the lap of a crying spirit medium, so maybe a psychotic break isnt too bad if it means everyone else gets to escape with no damage to their own psyche.

its only after she stops screaming in terror- oh my god, nicks a zombie!! kyahh!!!- and nearly beating him with her bulky magatama necklace, that she tells him what she saw. (“like, there was a sudden bright light and then i realised it was coming from you! but when i tried to touch your glowing skin,” she says it like its the most absurd thing she’d ever seen, which really said something considering the fact she was from a family of people who could channelthe dead “it was HOT! like, japanifornia summer hot! blazing! i was only able to check your pulse after you cooled down a bit…”). maybe its this that makes him less alarmed by the way his skin glowed in the dark of his trashed bedroom, after drinking himself to death following a certain phone call from a terribly sad, newly bossless detective. he doesnt think he can bear the taste alcohol ever again, after that.

maybe the number of times he’s died of blunt force trauma to the head should be a cause for concern, even more so when he wakes up without any of his memories. he’s terrified, and doesnt even knows who he is, until he does, and is able to prove maggey byrde innocent. fun times! he should probably watch out to make sure his next death wasn’t to the head, lest he be as mentally impaired as a number of people liked to say he was… (and he should probably also be concerned by the fact he was already thinking of the next time he’d die, but ah well, blame it on the concussion).

as it turns out, getting whipped to death was not on his list of ways he thought he’d die next, but life liked to mess with him like that, it seemed. still, dragging his delirious self to the bathroom of his office to try and save the infected wounds from killing him wasn’t all that fun, and he’s immediately reminded of his first death, slow and painful, alone and scared of what came next. he feels bad for feeling relieved when maya shows up and screams upon seeing the state he and the bathroom (that’d he’d accidentally trashed when his legs gave out after he opened the door, a number of bottles fallen to the floor beside him) were in. he stops her from calling the police- there was no point, he didn’t have much time left. but when she asks what she could do, he goes quiet. (…just… stay here? i dont- he coughs up a distinctly red shade of spit. maya makes a noise between a choked cry and a whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck. but phoenix was shivering worse now, and hugs himself tigher. i dont want to die alone.) so she stays with him, on the cold bathroom floor, as his labored breathing eventually slows. when he awakens, he finds maya asleep leaning against him, and promises to get her burgers as a thank you.

who knew death by a monkey throwing a giant bronze bust of max galactica at you could happen? at this point, he’s almost glad he was basically immortal, because there was no way in hell he’d allow his autopsy report to say ‘cause of death: monkey manslaughter’! edgeworth would laugh himself to tears if he saw! not that he could see. or cry, because he was dead. and not coming back. damn.

so edgeworth isnt dead! yippee? he thought it was his thing to get reanimated after death, not edgeworths. when he saw him, standing in the middle of the police department, alive and breathing and very much not dead, he nearly started laughing. he must’ve finally gone insane! curse the amount of times he’d died of brain related injuries, not that he knew how many of them there were at this point. he might actually have laughed a bit, because pearls was looking at him like he was losing it (he was) but he couldnt really bring himself to care as he had more pressing issues at hand, like saving his best friend from a crazy serial killer holding her hostage, and punching his other best friend in the face for faking his own death (because really, dying was his thing! not edgeworths!). and if he pulls edgeworth into a hug immediately after, throwing caution in the wind (you only live once, right?), the warmth- a normal, human temperature, unlike his burning hot when he came back from death- is enough to stabilise his harried mind for just a moment, before he has to return to his guilty client and his hopeless situation.

by some crazy turn of events, he actually doesnt die from having boiling hot coffee thrown at his face. it burns, and maya screams when she sees the boils on his face after that first trial with godot, but after throwing a wet towel over his face and putting him in timeout on the sofa for 12-hours, the burns go away as if they were never there. he fell asleep at some point, and after alot of back and forth debate, they eventually came to the conclusion that 1. his body heat rising to burning levels when he dies must have caused his body has to grow immune to heat and 2. since sleep was like a ‘temporary death’, a ‘temporary wound’ would just heal like it did when he died of normal wounds, right? he didn’t want to dwell on it too much, because maya was looking at him like she wanted to test that theory for real, so he quickly changes topics before things got out of hand.

so their theory on the immunity to heat thing was correct! …almost. larry had tried to stop him, but it was fire and he was basically immune to heat, right? nope! his skin burned and boiled but he didn’t die as he tried to run across the burning bridge. even so, nothing hurt more than falling through one of the burnt planks and slamming onto the surface of the freezing cold rushing stream below. luckily the death was near immediate, but unfortunately he came to while in the water still, so he swallowed a sizeable amount of water before paramedics arrived. he hears the doctors find his survival miraculous, despite the scorching hot fever he was now under. he blacks out again, and comes to in the hospital, feeling absolutely terrible.

the horribleness feels familiar though, and when edgeworth walks in, he realises what it must be, when the man presses the back of his hand to his temple and quickly pulls his hand away as if burned. (oh. he thinks, tearing up despite himself. it must be the fever. i’m going to die like this again.) his internal monologue must’ve been external though, because edgeworth balks (‘again?!’). but phoenix was crying in hiccups and sobs, feeling terrible and like he was nine years old again, wishing his mother were there to nurse him back to health like she’d never done before. he faintly hears edgeworth sitting down on his bed and reaches out, gripping the mans waist like it was a lifeline. in a sense, it was. “don’t go.” he whispers, gripping the man tighter like he’d disappear into thin air (again). “please, please don’t go.” in his delirium, he nearly wails in despair when he feels edgeworth move, but he was only moving to readjust himself so he’s lying next to him, their bodies so close that it must burn, but the only sign edgeworth shows that he’s in pain is a wince and the crease of his brow. he allows himself to be cried on, curling a protective arm over phoenix’s burning body. “i- i dont know what’s going on, wright, but i’m not, i’m not going anywhere, okay?” he seems to be attempting exasperation, but it comes out terrified and concerned, but phoenix is fading quickly, so it might just be his waning mind making up things that don’t exist. “i am terrified. your body is life threateningly hot and— wright? wright!”

he comes to with nurses surrounding him, and a distressed edgeworth swearing on his life that that man was dead, his body was seizing and on fire and- and his heart stopped beating! but phoenix couldn’t dwell on it, because the mention of fire immediately brought him back to why he was in the hospital at all. and plus, it gave him the chance to use his best friends sensitive treatment of him afterwards to convince him to play defense attorney, so that was nice. still, he feels like he dies when he finds out dahlia had actually been iris and that godot was actually his dead mentors apparently not dead boyfriend. oh, and he was also a murderer. he also feels like he dies when dahlia- actual, serial killer and dead by execution dahlia, was exorcised from maya’s body. but that had more to do with his soul leaving his body in terror rather than actually dying, so that was a nice change of pace… probably.

later, he’d had to have a conversation with edgeworth to give him an explanation on just what the hell he’d witnessed in that hospital room. although, apparently his re-aliving symptoms must’ve started becoming more dramatic, because miles describes it as his whole body glowing as bright as the sun, and then his eyes opening for a moment to reveal nothing but white, glowing eyeballs with no irises. phoenix has to convince him to still board his flight the day after, that he was okay… probably. maybe not safe, but definitely okay. (still, edgeworth stays the night at his, and they hold eachother close, basking in the shared warmth of two alive bodies in heat equilibrium, listening to eachothers breathing and rhythmic heartbeats, no signs of impending mortality in sight, save for, what did the french call it? la petite morte? most of all, phoenix basks in the promise miles makes to him. “i’m not going anywhere,” he repeats, over and over like he was trying to convince himself as much as he was phoenix. “i’m not going anywhere, i promise.”)

and when he loses his badge, he thinks he really does die, permanent and definitively. he feels far away from his body when the forger is called to the witness stand. feels like a ghost when the council walks out the room and past him, making no eye contact and answering the unanswered question on the tip of his tongue. feels his life crumble to pieces when a blonde man with a pleasent, almost saintly smile gives him the most maddeningly sympathetic look and tells him he is sorry for his loss, as if there really was someone dead. only, the only one dead must’ve been him, because there was no one else there who had just lost their life. he couldn’t even hear himself as he laughed, which turned into sobs, as he excused himself and fleed to his bicycle. not one pedestrian bats an eye at the state he is in, so he must really be a ghost, cycling past speeding cars and large trucks and buses as if it couldn’t kill him, because he wasn’t there, he was already dead. when he reaches his office, freezing and quiet and dreadfully void of any human life, he passes by the window his boss had died at and sees his reflection, unkempt and red faced and badgeless. he wants to scream, but he couldn’t because no one would hear a ghost scream, so instead he just sits down in the spot his mentor had lost her life in, and mourns.

when two weeks later a warm, incredible alive life falls into his hands in the shape of a little girl with a too big tophat and a joy for being alive that he’d lost years ago, well, maybe he is glad that he couldn’t die for real, if only to be able to wake up to that beaming grin as his little girl tries to pull her daddy out of bed because she’d made breakfast, and it only smells burnt because of the magic something she’d added as a special ingredient. he eats it, char and all, because he can’t taste the burnt-ness of it anyway, but he could taste the love and care put into it, and that was more than enough to take his mind away readying himself for his next death. instead, he thinks of his daughter’s next performance at the wonder bar, and their next trip to kurain, and miles’ next visit. for once, he thinks of living.

[koolades-world]

Hello dear, I really enjoy your work and was curious if you’d write something for some of the demons with an s/o who has issues with anger? Getting angry fast at usually innocuous things, that kind of hot frustration that’s hard to tame at times. I’ve been trying to deal with my own recently and was itching for some catharsis from namely Lucifer, Diavolo, Satan, and Beel if thats not too much. N pressure of course, and thank you greatly for your time <3

hi! again, sorry for the wait! thank you for waiting! I actually love you for only giving four characters and that one is Dia!! I don't get to write him much and I love him sm

I can of course write this! hope you enjoy!!

Mc with anger issues

Lucifer

Back when he was younger, he also had that sort of rage, not unlike Satan's. it was explosive and was very different from the demon you see today

before he met Mc, he didn't even know humans could experience such a problem but is willing to help you out

over all just super understanding

When he notices the anger beginning to bubble, he urges you to take a break and come back once you're ready

if he's not there when you get angry, however, his room is always open for you to hide and destress in, even if he isn't there!

Diavolo

As a prince, he's bene prepared for and dealt with most types of demons, and subsequently, people and angels if needed

he's pretty good at diffusing situations but he wasn't sure how that would translate to his s/o

he's here to offer all the hugs and everything money can buy for you, such as a dummy of someone who may or may not make your particularly angry

he doesn't try to stop you from being angry, since he knows it can't be healthy, so he just lets you get it all out and try again later with what ever made you mad, even if it was a person

you are allowed to take breaks during RAD in his office whenever despite Barbatos' nagging

Satan

ooh boy he's all too familiar with rage that can't be tamed that's literally his whole existence

he understands everyone is different and you will probably have different triggers and destressants, but he shares everything of his with you

he lends you all his virtually indestructible items he uses to calm himself but he also understands if you just want to let it all out

he's also there to just talk and let you vent if that's what you need

he wants to be the person he never had when he learn to deal with his rage and help you through it

Beel

he's another one that's very understanding

while he doesn't have personal experiences with the type of rage you experience often, he's always offering you anything to make you feel better

he's heard exercise might be the outlet for you, so he starts inviting you on all his trips to the gym to show you all the equipment

he also invites you on the more unconventional workouts, such as mountain climbing to show you some of his favorite sights

he learns what makes you tick and uses it to make you more comfortably by removing triggers and introducing things that make you happy to his personal spaces <3

[communistkenobi]

something I’ve been thinking about is like, the internet is this magical system of technologies, never before seen in human history, and one of its capabilities is to answer virtually any question you ask of it. Which is not even remotely a novel observation obviously lol. But I’m thinking about this in the context of a point that Adorno & Horkheimer made (in The Culture Industry I think?) about the radio: that to expedience the radio, to live in a social context where there is this vast incomprehensible system of technological infrastructure that you do not understand or control, and which allows you, a mere peasant, to listen to news broadcasts, music, and advertisements, is effectively like listening to the voice of god. Like the average person’s relationship to modern telecommunications is so mystifying, incomprehensible, and abstract that we experience technologies like the radio as an all-powerful, indestructible authority, and this (obviously) shapes our relationship to the information that is shared through it. People make jokes on here about how transmission towers are angels, but like tbh that is essentially how we experience them - vast, incomprehensible, highly dangerous objects whose impact on our lives are at once all-consuming and unknowable. We do not just turn on the radio and listen to the news, we tune into what the voice of god has to say today - right now he’s selling toilet cleanser!

and all that to say, I always find something a bit incomplete about discussions about wilful ignorance online - that we live in an age of mass information and yet people still seem as ignorant as feudal peasants, or whatever. Nobody googles things, nobody tries to branch out and experience new kinds of art, nobody educates themselves on important topics they don’t understand. and like this frustration is very real and well taken, I feel it frequently, but what I’m grappling with is whether this is the correct framing - that maybe “why don’t people just google things” is the wrong question to ask, because I tend to find the explanations offered unsatisfactory. Like specifically I’m thinking of discussions on here that are about like, “anti-intellectualism”, kids these days are so ignorant even though they grew up with the internet, reading comprehension is piss poor, and so on. Recently I’ve seen a lot of weirdly moral-panicky posts about children not knowing how to type on computers because back in my day we were forced to learn how to touch-type by age 8 even though we couldn’t look up any tutorials on YouTube to help us, etc etc. And like I just do not buy that people are individually choosing to be ignorant, that people are “getting dumber,” and that this state of getting dumber is inversely related to the amount of information we have access to (which makes “getting dumber” even more dumb). An unstated assumption that goes into a lot of these “anti-intellectualism” discussions is that “information” is this universal object that has a standardised enlightening effect on the people who interact with it - that the only reason to have an ignorant, sheltered, or ill-formed opinion on something is because you have individually chosen not to Look At Information that will cure you of your ignorance. And so going back to the god radio thing, having regular access to the google search bar is not just having access to an encyclopaedia or dictionary - it is like having a direct line of communication to god, this authority that can answer any question you ask of it. But it’s not just one answer, it’s many answers, more answers than you could ever possibly read through. Google reports the number of hits it returns for whatever you type in - you will regularly get millions of answers to your question. And these answers are embedded with advertisements, just as radio news broadcasts are. Like if god is selling you toilet cleanser while telling you the number for a suicide hotline or news about what’s happening in the world, how do you psychologically deal with that, how is your relationship to capital-I Information shaped by this relationship?

The corollary to “we live in an age of mass information” is “we live in an age of mass misinformation,” but they both show up as answers on google (again, not a novel observation). but in the face of that how do you not simply stop asking questions? & of course this decision to stop asking questions is given form and substance by social circumstance, it reinforces systemic privileges and violences, and so this decision is not one free from consequence, and in many cases it is not an innocent decision. a white person deciding not to read the news because it’s too hard to figure out what is happening/too frightening/etc has the consequence of reinforcing the white supremacist outlook that is foundational to the social context of white people because they’re not reading anything that challenges that outlook. ignorance has many social contexts and many of them are violent. etc. like the consequence of “why does nobody google anything” is just a continuation of the status quo, just with this supposedly glaring and easy fix to it (simply google it). but that just leads us back to a discourse of individual choice, of people individually choosing not to “google shit.” it is a deeply individual fix to a systematic social problem. and so maybe the question is not, why doesn’t anyone google shit, but rather, why is the primary delivery system of knowledge a god that sells you toilet cleanser 

[theangrycomet-art]

Myrida-11 and the Chronospinner twins

Aka, me thinking the funniest set up for an Omniverse crossover with Transformers: Animated would be for Kevin's car to be sent (probably via magic) to Detroit and turned into a cybertronion.

I was going to/want to do more iconic vehicles from the series (the Rustbucket, Kevin's orignal car, the Prot-Truck, the Tenn-Speed, etc) but drawing the timebikes' legs fried me. totally worth it though they look amzing :)

Some Random Tidbits:

Myrida-11 (pronounced mY-Ride-ah), is virtually indestructible and armed to the teeth due to the immense amount of upgrades installed into her by Kevin and Rook pre-spark. Though laid back, she is always ready for a brawl, no matter the opponent's ties.

The Chronospinners (them/he) are more on the mischievous side and love setting up traps. Like the jet twins, the two can combine, and this is the only way for them to access their spaceship mode as well as time powers. This does not happen often, however, as the two prefer their separate forms. Roto does not use contractions and tends to take things literally where as Omni picks up Earth slang rather quickly.

Their eyes, not shown, are a pale yellow like their headlights.

COMMISSIONS OPEN

[the-scandalorian]

like a moth to the flame, part IV

Pairing: monster!Din Djarin x Female Reader Rating: E, 18+ Word Count: 11.1k Content Warnings: dark!Din, predatory/obsessive/possessive behavior, body horror/painful physical transformations, injury/gore, blood and hunting and monstery shit, oral (m-receiving), p-in-v Note: Endlessly grateful to both @frannyzooey and @ezrasbirdie for lending me their big beautiful brains xx

DIN Din had woken, disoriented and hurting, that morning after he’d found the Armorer on Glavis.

He came-to curled in the fetal position on the hard metal floor of his tiny compartment on the humming public transport. Before he’d even opened his eyes, he knew his body felt wrong. Uncomfortable and unwieldy, heavy and strange.

When he did open his eyes to the harsh, artificial light, the first thing he noticed was the sharp clarity of his vision. He wasn’t wearing his helmet, but it felt like he was looking through one of the strongest filters of his visor. He blinked hard. No change.

He unfolded his arms and studied his hands, splaying too-long fingers, and his thoughts tangled and snagged as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. 

The glint of cruel silver claws. 

In his periphery, he caught the movement of a dark shape over his shoulder.

He tried to scramble away from it. It followed, a shadow.

Wings.

The word felt absurd. But it was…right. Silver that matched the half-moons of those claws, a structure of bone sprouted from both of his shoulder blades, a hooked joint forming the apex of each inky black, bat-like wing. Colossal and dark.

Piece by piece, in a haze of disbelief, he discovered new parts of himself.

The sheer size of this body, the power coiled in his changed muscles. 

He ran a finger along the edge of his teeth, catching the pad on an elongated canine. Blood welled.

The wound on his thigh, where he'd burned himself with the saber the night before, was largely healed. There was only a trace of it, a fading pink scar.

Din stopped there. He couldn’t bring himself to look in a mirror, to see himself like this. He wasn’t ready for it to be real, to know if his face was still his own.

Instead, he picked up his chest plate to start collecting his armor, and his claws bit gently into the perfectly smooth surface. He was stunned.

What scratches beskar?

Beskar.

Of course.

The silver of his claws, of his wing joints was beskar. Virtually indestructible.

Din sank back to the floor and closed his eyes. He sat against the cold metal wall with his clenched fists pressed against his eyelids, the tips of those talons cutting into his palms. He wanted to escape the prison of this body, of this new reality; to wake from this nightmare; to blink himself out of existence altogether. 

He forced himself to slow his breathing, holding it at the top of each inhale, until some of the tension in his chest eased. He let his thoughts go, focused on the cadence of his breath. Preparing himself as he did before a fight.

A slow, creeping sense of relief spread through him gradually, growing so palpable it turned physical. Like a cool wash of water over his aching muscles, a full-body shiver racked him. The tremble and quake of his broad frame was fleeting but intense. A release. His bones shifted in a pinch of discomfort. His mind drifted.

And then, stillness.

He’d opened his eyes minutes later, and his vision was blessedly, beautifully blurred—just barely. As it always was. As it was supposed to be.

Sitting there, staring at his hands and his blunt, human nails, Din might have been able to convince himself he’d imagined all of it. A fever dream. A delusion. An exhaustion-fueled moment of insanity, his mind addled by the fight and the pain and the life-altering dismissal from his covert. 

Except, etched into his chest plate…those damning marks.

A mechanical voice announced the imminent arrival of the transport, interrupting his moment of existential crisis. Tatooine. The local time and weather blared through the speaker.

Tatooine. He couldn’t go back there. Not like this.

He made a choice. He dressed and readied himself, deboarded and found his way to the baggage claim. A droid unlocked his case, and Din methodically reattached each of his weapons. He reached for the dark saber last. The metal hilt felt hot, even through the thick leather of his glove. Nothing else had—not his blaster or his charges. Just the saber, warm under his touch. Warm like something alive. Like something warm-blooded, something with a thrumming pulse. Like something pleased to be back in his grip.

Like it knew.

He clipped it to his belt and let it drop, relieved to not have it in his hand.

Din turned, looking for the closest screen of departures, and scanned the list for the least populated destination.

*** Now, months later, he wakes to a fantasy.

He hadn’t meant to sleep. He didn’t want to risk it, even in the armor—not after he felt his body start to shift under his beskar last night. He didn’t think that was possible. Then he’d sucked your taste off his fingers, and his head had snapped to the side, his spine straightening. He’d felt the pop of vertebra and the sudden tightness of the skin across his back, the warm tension in his muscles straining for the change, but he’d managed to stave it off. 

Just barely.

No, he hadn’t meant to sleep last night, but he had. And he wakes now, well rested, to the feeling of your warm body curled into his side, your head nuzzled into his neck, your breathing slow and deep. Watery morning light, as light as this dark forest ever gets, is visible through the trees outside the window.

He’d tried to move away from you during the night, to give you space, sure that you’d be more comfortable without the hard edges of beskar digging into your soft body, but every time he’d started to extract himself gently, you’d grumbled and tightened your fingers wherever they happened to be—caught in the folds of his duraweave, gripped around armor, tangled with his own. The leg you had hooked over his thigh had tensed too, your foot tucking itself under his other knee. You twined yourself around him, like a tenacious little climbing vine, and refused to let go.  

He likes it. You’re possessive too.

The realization hurts a soft spot under his ribs—you want what he wants. To belong to someone. To claim and be claimed. To know that closeness. Skin-to-skin, joined and sweaty, without all these fucking layers between you. That hopeless, dangerous thing he can never give you.

That thought is unbearable when you’re asleep on his chest, your hand still curled over the top of his chest plate, fingers clinging to the sharp cut of metal. When he can smell the faint tang of your blood as it pumps idly through your veins, detectable even under the layer of your delicate floral scent, even from beneath his helmet.

His mouth waters.

It’s the catalyst that finally gets him moving. He carefully but forcefully unfastens your hand, inches your leg off his, and slips out of bed. You readjust but don’t wake.

As soon as he’s standing, looking down at you, he regrets it. The space between your bodies is intolerable, and he has nothing to do but wait for you to wake. So he waits. He waits, and he seethes.

He thinks about the mistakes he’s made.

*** He’d spent yesterday angry at himself, fuming at his own idiocy. He’d ruminated on how to proceed, how to scare you off again after he’d all but courted you the previous night when he’d given you a com link. Had invited you to use it. Fucking encouraged it. He’d been drunk on you—on your presence, on your forgiveness, on your smile. On the headiness of your scent as you’d stood so close to him outside your house. And it had messed with his fucking head, made him do stupid things. Dangerous things.

He’d worked through the steps of his drills while he thought, slashing the saber through the air as he’d tried to decide what to do. How to retract his offer of the com. He didn’t think he could bring himself to be cruel to you, to reject you outright. He’d imagined your face, imagined the hurt there, and he’d just…known he couldn’t do it. He’d have to leave. He wouldn’t let himself see you again. He'd jam the frequency of the com link. A clean break.

It was the only option.

He’d decided he’d let himself change early then, before the sun had dipped below the green horizon. One last hunt before he found a way off this planet. 

He’d been minutes away from letting himself shift, minutes away from heading out completely uninhibited, when he’d caught your scent. You were close. The timing of it had made him want to break something. That was exactly the problem with all of this: one misstep, one instance of bad timing…and you could end up dead.

Why hadn’t he thought about you finding the bodies? How had that not occurred to him? 

He’d left a perfect trail from your house to his. His animal brain had thought protect and nothing else. He’d gotten sloppy, comfortable. Maybe some part of him had wanted you to find it, to follow.

This was how it would end, then, he’d thought as he waited for you. Not in the easy way he’d planned, not a quiet exit—a coward’s exit. He’d have to face you, to turn you away and tell you he was leaving. 

Then you were in front of him, and all of that was gone—the struggle and the resolve, the determination and decency. He’d fought to get it back for a few minutes, scrabbled against his own desire. Had tried to deny himself—to deny you. It was futile.

You’d asked him if he thought you were weak, if all of this was somehow your fault. And that was it.

He’d refused to punish you for his sins. 

*** And now you’re in his bed. Warm and soft under his comforter, your head pressed into his pillow. A dream. Something he could wake up to tomorrow and the next day, if he wanted. A string of perfect, untouchable days stretching before him like a beckoning temptress.

He can’t let himself think like that.

Your life, he reminds himself. Your life is what matters most. Keeping you here wouldn’t just be selfish, wouldn’t just be a temporary balm, it would be a gamble. Your life pitted against his own self-restraint. Your life pitted against the self-restraint of a monster he doesn’t trust.

If he can just get you out—out of his bed, out of his house, out of his head—he’ll be able to think straight, and then he can go.

He watches you stir, aware suddenly that a fully armored Mandalorian looming over you might not be the most comforting sight for you to wake to. But you crack open sleepy eyes before he can move, and a lazy smile spreads across your face. His heartbeat stumbles.

“Morning,” you yawn, stretching your arms over your head.

“Morning,” he replies, clipped as he tries to expedite this process.

“It’s early,” you muse, your gaze trailing to the window. “I think you should come back to bed.”

Din’s thoughts stall immediately. You look so cozy, so comfortable snuggled in his bed. In his bed.

“Please?”

Din’s helmet follows the path of your hand as it begins to wander: as it slides languidly down the column of your neck, molds over the swell of your breast, lingers along your waist. You know you’ve snared him right away. You always know.

He just stands there, silent and yielding, as you kick the blankets away and shimmy out of your clothes. He wants to tell you to stop, but his mouth isn’t responding to his brain, his jaw dropped open slightly behind the helmet as he surveys the bare lines of your body. He didn’t get to enjoy this yesterday, didn’t get to luxuriate in the view, to drink in every detail. To commit it to memory.

His visor catches where your fingers stroke the curve of your hip.

“I can’t—” he starts.

You slip your hand between your legs, run your fingers through the soft hair there.

He was going to get you out. To regroup. That was his intention.

One of your fingers slips lower, dips into the seam of your sex. His cock responds.

He barely knows his own name, let alone any sense of reason when you’re looking at him like that—touching yourself like that. Begging him to touch you. His nervous system jolts from freeze directly into overdrive, and immediately he can feel himself brushing up against some physical limit, teetering on the edge of his control.

He watches you drop your knees open, and a low, pained sound passes through the modulator when you use two fingers to part yourself, putting yourself on display for him. You roll the pad of one finger over your clit, and your head drops back onto the pillow, your eyes closing in pleasure. Need claws at the inside of him. 

“Stop,” he commands, but there’s no bite in it, his mouth watering at the sight of your stroking fingers.

You smile and widen the spread of your thighs, moving your hand lower.

He tries to sound firm, but his words come out like a plea: “Don’t—”

“I wouldn’t have to touch myself if you’d do it for me.”

You keep your eyes on his visor as you press two fingers inside yourself, frictionless as they sink inside the warm clutch of your body. He’s fixated on the flex of your wrist as you fuck yourself gently—his rapt attention suddenly a shivering, living thing throbbing under his skin. When you ease them out, he can see the shine of your arousal coating your skin up to the knuckle, a clear thread strung between your fingers for a brief moment when you slowly separate them.

“Your fingers feel so much better,” you breathe.

His blood pulses loudly in his ears, a too-slow beat. He knows what you feel like, clenched around his thick fingers—how slick, how hot. He knows what you taste like, licked off his own skin. Din would like to say that some greater primal force takes over, hijacks his body, that the monster in him doesn’t give him a choice, but that would be a lie.

He decides to let go.

Without changing forms, Din silences the part of his mind that’s protesting. He lets the animal of his hindbrain take control, a predator submitting to the call of its prey drive. It feels good to give in—a rush of blissful quiet overtakes him. He looks at you, and it’s simple. He wants you.

Time slows, but his hands move quickly—going to his belt buckle. The weapon-heavy leather thuds when it hits the ground at his feet.

You watch him disarm himself, poised like a willing sacrifice on his bed with your hand caught between your open legs, a naked eagerness on your face that pleases the possessive, hungry thing in his chest. His vision is tinged red, the severed thread of his control a distant memory as he thinks of all the things he wants to do with you.

To you.

He condemned himself to this the moment he let himself touch you. There’s no going back. He’s going to taste your nectar from the source. He’s going to fuck you with his tongue and gently suckle your clit between his lips until you sob. He’s going to eat you out until you come on his face, your hands tangled in his hair.

And then he’s going to do it again.

He tries not to think about how much easier that would be with his other tongue, his tongue when he’s transformed—long and dextrous as it is. He could get so deep inside you like that. Taste you from the inside out.

Later. He appeases himself with the promise of later. The promise of tomorrow and more more more.

His gaze settles on your mouth. There’s something else he wants now.

He approaches the bed and stands at its side, waiting patiently. That desperate sense of urgency drops away, and his shoulders relax. He can decide to have all the time in the world with you if he only lets himself. 

When he hunts, when Din really truly hunts these days, he finds that he likes to draw out the indulgence of it. The tease and the chase. The kick of adrenaline before the slaughter. He understands why a predator plays with its prey before it makes the kill. 

Because it can.

Because it feels good.

You’re expecting him to join you on the bed. He can see it in your expectant gaze.

“You want it so bad?” he asks, dipping his helmet down. “Come here.”

A wicked look flashes across your face at the change in his voice, at the invitation. There’s a beat of anticipation as you decide to play along, and then you crawl to the edge of the bed on your hands and knees. He watches, an imperious tilt to his helmet.

You perch on the edge, looking up. Waiting.

“Go ahead,” he nods. “Take it out.”

Your hands move to the button on his pants, but you don’t pop it open right away. You let your hand mold to the hard bulge there, feeling the heft of him.

He tilts his helmet the other direction, impatient, and you go for the zipper. 

Before you’ve even pulled his cock out, before you’ve even touched him, Din thinks the sensation of your hot breath on the expanse of skin exposed by his open fly might be the most erotic thing he’s ever experienced. 

He rips his gloves off and locks a hand around the nape of your neck. 

He thinks for a fleeting moment how obvious it must be—his obsession with your mouth. The edge of mania he’s shoved toward when you let your tongue drag up his hip bone. That he’d slit his wrists at the altar of your perfect lips if you asked.

Your eyes drag upward slowly as you lick across his skin, gaze catching on the armored lines of his body before it meets his visor. You peer up at him as you inch the fabric of his pants down just far enough. And then your eyes flick down to watch a pearly bead of precum slip down the length of his shaft at your closeness.

“You want it?” he rasps. “Open your mouth.”

He grunts in satisfaction when your lips part immediately. Again when your hand curls around the base of him and your tongue darts out to circle his head, a touch so infuriatingly delicate that it makes him want to hold you down and fuck your throat raw.

He doesn’t, of course. He lets you set the pace even though your teasing lick across the underside of his cock and another over his slit feel as much like torture as they do like pleasure. 

Finally, finally, you take him fully into the heat of your mouth. You start up a steady rhythm, and he’s more than satisfied to let you take the reins. 

You’re less satisfied with that though—you settle a hand over his on your neck and press down, your eyes skirting upward as you nod subtly, your other hand urging his hips forward, urging him to fuck your mouth. 

Use me. 

He wishes you could see his face in this moment, what you do to him. Din’s eyelashes flutter shut at the perfection of your request. But immediately, he snaps them open again, needing to see.

He thrusts forward, and you whine in approval, your fingers tightening on his hip—taking him deep again and again, until he watches a line of saliva slide down your chin. Until your lashes grow wet, eyes watering at the effort of taking him over and over. 

It’s too much. It’s too good. 

The tight, hot constriction of your throat as you swallow around the head of him, the hard suck of your cheeks hollowing out around his shaft. His helmet rocks back, and a growl reverberates through his chest. But he’s not about to let himself come without knowing what it feels like to fuck you.

His hand drops away from the back of your neck; he forces his hips to still. “Enough,” he grits.

When you surge forward again, taking him deep, he closes a hand gently around your throat and eases you backward, off him.

“I said stop.” He thinks the words would be menacing if the fractured restraint in his voice weren’t so apparent. If you couldn’t see the steady leak of precum from his cock, the drizzle of opaque liquid on his dark pants. He’s teetering right on the painful edge of orgasm, and you know it. 

“Need to fuck you,” he says, his hand still settled over your throat.

“Then fuck me,” you reply, your voice hoarse as you shift backward on the bed. 

“You want my fingers first?” he asks, his hand drifting down the inside of your thigh. “You want to cum on my hand again?”

“No,” you say, catching his wrist and pulling him onto the bed, over you. 

“No?” he says. “You want it to hurt?”

“Yes.”

His fingers tighten on your thigh. Too hard. “Turn around.”

You flip over and settle on your knees in front of him, and Din can see how much you enjoyed sucking his cock in the glossy spread of your cunt. 

He catches a drop of your arousal with two caressing fingers. “You want to be fucked hard? Is that what you want, you greedy little thing?”

You press your hips back, rubbing yourself into the cup of his hand. And for a moment, his mind buzzes with blankness—with the thought that he could be tasting you instead of just touching you. He satisfies himself for now by lining up his cock with the soft heat of your pussy, by pressing his sensitive head against your arousal-slick flesh. 

But when you whine and start to shift backward into him, he waits. Savors. “You need my cock that bad, huh?”

“Please, I need it. I want it—”

It’s that thing he fantasizes about—the daydream he strokes himself to in the shower after he hunts, when he’s sticky with blood and the leash on his desire has long been snapped. Your whined plea for him, your need so stark and bright that he couldn’t ever possibly deny you. Your need for him so heightened it threatens to match his for you.

“Take it then,” he pants. “Take what you asked for.”

He sinks his cock into the welcoming heat of your body, pressing slowly against the tight resistance of little preparation—hears the soft, drawn-out oh of your pleasure—and he knows there’s no coming back from this.

*** So he doesn’t fight it. He keeps you.

Days turn into a week. Into two. You bring life and sound to this desolate place—the creak of your steps on the hardwood floor, the sound of your humming, the quiet clanks of your movements around the kitchen in the early morning light. The quiet, steady tick of your heartbeat. All those pretty little noises you make when he has you in his bed—the moans and the whimpers and the pleas. His pillow smells like mellow spring flowers, and there are rose colored skirts and silky blue pajamas in his dresser.

He likes it.

He likes the noise and the tightness of the space and the company.

When he heads outside to chop wood for the fireplace, you follow to watch him roll up the duraweave sleeves of his flight suit and swing the ax—again and again until a thick log splits down the middle with a crack—and the attention pleases him. 

The weeks stack up, and there is a bar of soap speckled with lavender flowers in his shower. There are sweet strawberry preserves lined up in his cupboard, a colorful wool throw blanket tossed over the back of the couch that you insist is a necessity. For sitting in front of the fire, of course. You poke fun at his ascetic choices, at the lack of coziness in his house, but you don’t seem mad at all to be the one to provide it. 

He thinks you know instinctively that home isn’t a place or a concept he’s familiar with. He thinks you love being the one to show him what it could mean. 

He can tell you don’t mind that you have to face opposite directions when you eat. He thinks you like the sound of his voice even more when it’s not passed through the modulator. You draw out every meal with questions. He draws them out with his answers.

He tells you about the little green bounty that changed his life, the soup his mother made for him when he was sick, being adopted by the Mandalorians, the fact that he used to love swimming as a child. That sometimes he thinks about how good it would feel to strip off his armor and swim now. You tell him about your dreams, your childhood, your plans, everything.

When he slips his helmet on again and you turn to face him, he can see that the gulf between what he does tell you and the whole truth is obvious, though.

There is a question—are many questions—swimming in your eyes. The intention to get answers too. He’s not sure which exactly questions they are: Why the armor? The helmet? The Creed? Why this place? Where is he going next? When? What happened to him? What is he? Why the isolation and the fear and the hesitation and mile-high walls and why why why?

What the fuck happened to the wall of the shower?

Valid questions, every one. Many are things he asks himself regularly. All are questions he doesn’t know how to answer without shattering this perfect moment, without ruining the lovely domesticity you’re cultivating together. So when he sees that look and your lips part, Din speaks before you can. He’s not ready, yet, to go there. He reaches for your hand or strokes a gloved finger over your cheek and deflects. 

Just a little longer, he thinks, please. And you’re not fooled—he knows that. You understand the request and allow it for now, and he’ll take what he can.

“You want to learn how to shoot?” he asks instead. 

Your eyes light up.

He helps you pick a blaster from his collection—“How many blasters does one man need, Mando?”—that’s well suited to you, that fits your grip. He sets up targets outside, scattered on trees at varying distances, and stands close behind you, a solid wall against your back. He adjusts your stance and the placement of your hands, letting his touch linger on your waist in a way that makes your heart rate readout on his helmet spike. 

“Are you going to let me focus or not?” you quip, peering at him over your shoulder. “I thought you were trying to teach me something here.”

He raises innocent hands and steps back. “I didn’t realize I was distracting you.”

You smile slyly at him. “Sure.”

He lets himself enjoy it, the ease between you, the way you can read him even through the armor. Standing a short distance behind you, he talks you through the process: how to aim and shoot, how to breathe.

Hand-to-hand, next, he thinks to himself as he watches you practice. Then blades. Tracking.

He’ll teach you anything and everything that will protect you.

For when he’s no longer here to do it for you, he doesn’t let himself think. 

He watches you practice each day, watches you focus on the target, your lip caught between your teeth in concentration, until you nail the bullseye. You run to the tree where the target is hanging—a hole singed through the middle—letting out a triumphant cry, and he follows.

“Look,” you grin, so proud it makes his heart trip. You point at the perfectly placed burn mark. 

“Good,” he praises. “Do it again.” 

You roll your eyes, but you do. You return dutifully to the line he’d drawn in the pine needle strewn ground and shoot until you get the hang of it, until a miss is rare. And then he fucks you up against that tree, your dress bunched up around your hips, the blaster abandoned somewhere by your feet. 

You leave for a day, maybe two, here and there to check on things at home, that little fawn you love. As soon as you’re gone, he spends a couple hours getting as far in the opposite direction as he can, changing, hunting whatever he can find in the shortest time, and then after he’s washed every trace of blood away and donned his armor, he waits for you to come back. He tells himself it’s a perfectly workable arrangement.

It’s fine. It’s safe. Safe enough.

With his attention elsewhere, it takes him a few weeks to notice that those prints, the ones he’d been tracking so obsessively, have started to show up closer to his house, to yours. They mark a quiet, slow encroachment into his territory—inching just barely past that boundary he’d been so careful to hold until recently. Their bravery is returning, their local numbers rebounding, because he hasn’t been pushing them back by culling their pack with regularity.

He makes a mental note to keep a closer eye on things, reassured by the fact that there are miles of buffer between their progress and you. And, more importantly, that more often than not, he’s by your side these days—like the times you ask him to come with you when you leave. He’s not going to say no to you.

Every night, he gets to undress you and pull you into his bed. To touch you and fuck you and make you come. He gets to learn what makes you cry, what makes you scream, what makes you beg.

All in the armor, still. In the beskar prison that keeps you safe from him. That line he manages, somehow, to maintain. The monster in him hasn’t wrested it from him yet, and he clings to that last safety net, that final border between risky and reckless. 

He wonders every day when you’ll hit your threshold. When it’ll all become too much—the secrets and the questions and the armor. Every day you don’t ask or push or leave, he breathes a sigh of relief, knowing full well it just means the next day is more likely. That worry is so dwarfed by the pleasure of having you that he barely notices it, though.

It helps, too, that he’s well rested for the first time in a long time.

Din doesn’t dream when you’re in his bed, isn’t haunted by the nightmares. He slips into sleep, and it doesn’t fight him like it usually does. He sleeps soundly with your warm, soft form tucked against his side, your face pressed into his cowl. Your presence, your touch, your scent—they soothe him.

He’s always known—even before he admitted it to himself—that there would be no halfway with this. No measured approach to having you. And he was right, of course. Here you are, living with him… and happy, he thinks. He doesn’t like to think about what would happen if that changed, if you left. What he'd do. What he'd have to stop himself from doing.

Din loves hard, with teeth, and all of his are sunk deep in you. If he really thinks about it, though, the opposite is true. Yours, sunk deep in him. You have a bone-deep hold on him, a fatal bite that severed something vital upon first contact. If you decided to let go, he’d bleed out.

And he feels lighter than he has in months. Maybe years.

It scares him so much he doesn’t want to think about it.

So he doesn’t.

YOU

It’s not intentional. You don’t sit down together and make a decision, but you don’t want to leave and he doesn’t want you to go. So you just…don’t.

Slowly, with time, your most essential things migrate from your place to his. You bring a bag of clothes here and your favorite blanket another time. Your shampoo comes along with other bathroom essentials, and some kitchen supplies find their way into his drawers and cabinets.

Within a few weeks, you all but live with him.

You know instinctively that the opposite arrangement—staying together at your house—isn’t possible. Whether or not it’s actually necessary, Mando takes his self-imposed exile seriously. It’s another of the many things you don’t push him on.

Yet.

You visit home on a regular basis, of course, to keep an eye on things. Town, too, for supplies. You make the long walk alone—or sometimes together when you can convince him to put off whatever mysterious, imperative thing he has to do when you’re gone, and it feels shorter then. He’s not so hard to persuade.

You check on Luna, who is happy and well fed in the warmth of the barn, kept company by the chickens and the handful of braying goats. 

You find that she’s terrified of other people—or at least of Mando. You’ve never brought anyone else around so it’s hard to know if it’s something about him specifically. Maybe it’s the armor or his size. The first time she sees him, she goes rigid, the picture of freeze, and it takes twenty minutes to calm her down after you nudge Mando back out of the barn and close the door behind him. Even after several visits, she remains wary of him, barely willing to tolerate his presence.

A detail, like so many others, you file away for later.

It's one of many that you don't mention—anything that might prompt impossible conversations. Instead of souring the moment, instead of asking the hundreds of questions that are piling up in your head, you tacitly agree to avoid those things, skirting around any topics that elicit unanswerable questions or suggest an expiration date. Again and again. For weeks.

Then months.

It’s easy enough to rationalize. Might as well make the short time you have together pain free. Only good.

And, fuck, is it good.

You wake in his bed each morning and fall back into it each night. You wait for your lust for him to abate, for the initial need to be sated. Two months in, though, it hasn’t so much as begun to subside. If anything, it’s grown. It’s fed, you think, by the fact that you still don’t get all of him—what you do get just makes you want more. 

You get his hands, his cock, the expanse of his lower abdomen and upper thighs when he unbuckles his belt and fucks you. The sound of his unfiltered voice when you eat together. The sight of his thick, veined forearms when he chops wood. Snatches of golden skin dusted in dark hair.

Never his mouth, his eyes, his chest, the rest of him—his face. His face, that you think you might already love without having ever seen.

The why of it all—of the pace, of his nature—doesn’t feel so urgent any more, now that you’ve had the opportunity to soak him in, in more than just brief interactions. You can sense the why on him when you start to appreciate the weight of his past and his creed. There’s a layer of pain and loss calcified under his armor: you can all but feel it when your fingers work past an edge of beskar. He starts to tell you about it, too; he starts to untangle the complicated knot that is Mando. It’s usually during a meal when you’re faced away from each other and you get to hear his real voice that he starts to open up. You untease his past question by question, answer by answer.

When you do almost slip, almost ask a question that is too present, he helps you put it back. Offers a distraction that you gladly accept. An unspoken agreement of not yet.

He just needs time. You just need more time together.

You try not to think about the fact that you might not have time. No, you package that thought up with that list of forbidden questions, the ones that would threaten to crack the ice you’re standing on together, and tuck them all away. 

You take the things that he does offer, accept his baffling limits. You satisfy yourself with the reminder of progress. If you think back to a few months ago and draw a line from those cordial interactions at the Saturday market to the current reality of living with him—to watching him welcome all the ways you insinuate yourself into his space, to witnessing the way he seems to soften for you—you can’t help but feel hopeful about what the next few months will hold.

*** Winter comes early this year, sneaking in on quiet feet. It descends around you slowly—in brisk mornings and frozen dew drops strung along twigs like pearls—and then it comes all at once in a sudden blanket of white. You wake up to a thick layer of snow on the ground, the tree limbs and roof frosted and glittering.

He teaches you how to protect yourself—how to shoot and fight and track. You think there’s a part of him that’s certain if he only teaches you enough, you’ll always be safe. You can feel it in his palpable sense of relief when you master a new skill. As if he has a mental list of things to impart on you before he runs out of time.

When you’re consistently nailing the center of his targets again and again, Mando outfits you with a blaster of your own, tells you to keep it on you at all times—that it’s yours. That day, he drops to one knee in front of you. 

“Lean,” he says, patting his pauldron.

You listen without really thinking about it, bracing a hand on his shoulder.

“Up,” he says, gesturing to your foot and offering his armored thigh.

You comply, and he slips two loops of leather up your leg, the fabric of your skirt catching on his forearm as he inches them up, until the tips of his fingers brush your inner thigh. A holster. A holster he made for you.

He tightens the straps and then slips the small silver blaster into the leather sheath. 

You graduate to hand-to-hand combat next—well, not so much graduate as add it to the schedule. He’s visibly pleased when he discovers that you already have some skills with a knife, when you know how to disarm him of his vibroblade in certain holds, how to make an attacker bleed freely with one well-placed slash. How to sever a tendon or an artery. But he finds plenty of ways to stump you, ways to overpower you, and you practice those until you know how to get out of them too. 

A few weeks in, you’re more than satisfied with your skill level, ready to move on. Mando, on the other hand, is ever insistent on more. He holds you with your back against his chest, caught and pinned, a purring vibroblade at your throat. 

You’re exhausted, sweaty and sore from breaking out of his grasp again and again. You’re supposed to be doing it once more right now. But you’re limp in his hold.

“Go on,” he grunts.

“I’m actually fine with this,” you decide, letting your weight go even more leaden in his arms.

He scoffs low in his throat. “Is that right.”

“That’s right. I surrender. Do with me what you will.” You drop your head back, looking up at his impassive visor.

He considers. “Anything?”

The word slithers up your spine. “Anything,” you repeat, letting your eyes go heavy-lidded.

He closes the blade and tosses it away, releasing his hold on you. When you lurch forward at the unexpected freedom, your knees buckling slightly, he catches your waist to steady you. 

You spin to face him, pointing a finger at the diamond-like center of his chestplate, staying far enough away that he can’t encircle you in his arms again. “Technically that counts as me getting out of that hold.”

He plants a hand on his hip. “Disagree.”

“Emotional manipulation is a weapon. You’re just mad I’m better at it than you are. Maybe I should give you lessons. You know what, yeah, I think it’s only fair that we also start practicing scenarios where I’m the one in control.”

He cocks his head suggestively. “Are we still talking about training?” 

“Yes.”

He stares at you silently, adjusting his weight from one foot to the other. It speaks volumes.

You scoff. “Are you implying that I could never have the upper hand in a fight? That there’s no chance in the galaxy of that ever happening?”

A damning beat of silence and then: “No.”

“You are!”

He gestures at his chest, shrugs. “Beskar.”

You roll your eyes. “I’d just need to catch you at the right moment—sleeping or showering—and take you by surprise. Or have the right weapon. Like poison. I know plenty of plants that would kill you—plenty of plants I could find out here or maybe…yeah…those.” 

You gesture at the row of detonators lined up on the side of his belt as he reattaches it around his middle. He always takes it off before you practice hand-to-hand, along with the vambrace that apparently emits flame.

“Yeah, they’d be effective,” he admits, clipping the buckle together. “The problem is you don’t have any.”

“You don’t like me enough to share your detonators with me?”

“To kill me? No.”

“How about this one?” you ask, reaching toward the mysterious hilt that’s always clipped next to them.

He steps out of reach before you can touch it.

“What is it? Can I see it?”

“I don’t use it,” he says. You know him well enough now to read the lie in his level voice.

“Then why do you always carry it?”

“It’s…a long story.”

“I’ve got time,” you press, curious.

He looks away. “I can’t.”

And you realize it isn’t just stubbornness or stoicism. It’s pain. A bruise he isn’t ready to address, and you’re prodding it.

You wonder how many secrets can simmer between you before they boil over.

“Alright, come on,” you say, grabbing his hand and turning for the house. “I’m starving.”

*** It’s deep winter when Mando starts to take you into the woods, away from his house, to teach you the basics of tracking. Each time, when the forest lightens around you and you can hear the titter of birds overhead, he tells you to pick the tracks of a deer or a fox to follow. It’s easier now that the snow is thick on the ground, a continuous blanket of white.

He instructs you, as he always does, to disregard the larger prints—the clawed ones—that you come upon occasionally. Too often for comfort.

“I’ll take care of those,” he says, unconcerned. 

Each time, you think back to that bloody trail and know he’s more than capable. And then you wonder when he’s away from you long enough to actually do that. 

Never, it turns out.

You’re on the tail of a stag when he holds out an arm unexpectedly, stopping you in your tracks.

“What is it?”

He turns his head slowly, scanning the quiet forest. Listening, waiting. You can’t hear a thing—not a rustle of leaves or whisper of wind. The stag isn’t close.

“They’re coming.”

“The sta—?”

Mando drops his arm and grabs your hand, hauling you back in the direction of home. You follow on instinct when he breaks into a jog with you in tow, heavy boots crunching through the snow. He twitches as he moves; he groans and presses his shoulders back, rolling his neck, his hand too tight around yours.

He’s in pain.

“Mando—” you say, trying to slow him down, to understand.

“Run,” he interrupts, pushing you ahead of him, urging you toward the house. “I can’t stop it."

You halt in front of him, a hand raised to his chest plate. “I can’t— I won’t—”

He growls when you hesitate, the sound not entirely human. His hands are shaking.

“I can help—” you start, not even entirely sure what you’re offering.

“I won’t risk you.”

“But—”

A gloved hand settles over your mouth, the other gripped tightly around your bicep. “We don’t have time for this. I won’t let you—I can’t—just go home and lock the door. And promise me you’ll stay there until I come back.”

He drops his hand and starts stripping off his gloves and vambraces. “What are you—?” The pieces click together belatedly in your head. Those colossal prints, the clawed ones.

They’re coming.

“Promise me,” he says, forcing them into your hands. “Take this too.”

He reaches for his helmet and rips it off his head, pushing it into your arms. Your jaw drops open in surprise. You don’t even have time—or the free hands—to cover your eyes or the sense to shut them tight.

“It’s okay,” he says, responding to the fear in your eyes. “I wanted to—been wanting to.”

You only have a moment to take him in. He’s just as handsome as you imagined—maybe, impossibly, more. His dark hair is wavy and tousled, falling across his forehead. His eyes are brown and wild with fear, his sharp jaw peppered with gray-flecked stubble. His perfect lips are set in a half-smile. He looks a little bashful for a moment, a little boyish as you study him.

He holds your face between his warm hands. “Promise you won’t leave the house until I come back.”

You nod.

“Say it,” he prompts, his dark eyes serious. He knows you didn’t really mean it the first time.

“I won’t leave the house until you come back,” you repeat, a little dazed.

You’re looking into his eyes. Your brain is struggling to process it.

There's fear there that doesn't just belong to the threat to your safety. It's more: the fear of being seen. Wholly.

You’re waiting for more words to come to you—something that will express the feeling that’s blooming in your chest without relying on words it’s too early to say.

“Be careful.” It’s the best you can manage.

He presses his lips to yours in a quick kiss. It’s too fast, not enough. If your arms weren’t full of beskar, you’d grab him to keep him close, to kiss him deeper. Instead, he’s pulling back and turning you on the spot with an iron grip.

“Go.”

He urges you forward with a gentle push, and you break into a jog, glancing over your shoulder as often as possible without running face-first into a tree or slipping in the powdery snow underfoot. He’s stripping off his chest plate, his pauldrons, his thigh guards. Leaving them haphazardly on the forest floor.

The last time you look back, his back is to you, and several pairs of yellow eyes are emerging in the dark spaces between the trees.

One, two, four—too many to count.

You’re tempted to stop. To turn back. To bring him the rest of his beskar. It feels so wrong to leave him out here, alone and unarmored. He’s stripping down from metal to man, and it feels unbearably vulnerable. Maybe you could help—

But just as you’re thinking that, Mando turns his head and bellows, “Go!”

You’re far from him—too far to truly make out the details—but you swear, even across the vast distance, that the whites of his eyes look black.

*** You drop the pile of beskar onto the kitchen table, unholster your blaster, and drag a chair to the window. You study the intricate line work of ice on the frosted pane, tracing cold veins with the pad of your finger. You fidget and shift, but you don’t dare leave your spot.

You stare at the place between the trees where you emerged, straining to hear any sound, knuckles white where they’re wrapped around the edge of your seat.

It’s silent.

Minutes pass like molasses—they stretch and sprawl, leisurely and unhurried, while you wait.

You steal glances at the clock on the wall. You swear it’s been hours since you slid the dead bolt shut behind you, but the clock tells you you’ve been sitting here for eight minutes.

Ten.

Twelve.

Seventeen.

He’s out there, outnumbered and alone.

Fuck it.

You get to your feet.

You wrench open the front door, but before you can break into a run, you catch a subtle movement between the trees. The blaster slips out of your hand. He’s staggering back to you—stripped and injured. His flight suit is unzipped to his waist, the sleeves tied around his hips. One hand is gripping his ribs, the other trapping pieces of his armor against his side. He’s barefoot and limping through the snow.

You run to him.

His hair is sticking to his sweaty forehead, and there’s blood on his face—so much blood—coating his lips, smeared across one flushed cheek. Lines running down his neck. It covers his hands, forearms. It’s splattered across his muscled chest. When his lips part in a pained grimace, you can see the inside of his mouth is bloody too, red lining his white teeth. 

You don’t have time to process it, to think about what it means because he’s hurt.

He must see the terror on your face when you register the state of him because he shakes his head and says, “Not mine. Just this,” jerking his chin down to gesture at his side. 

A row of deep lacerations is seeping blood down his ribs, over his tense fingers and down his stomach, where it’s soaking into the dark fabric bunched at his hips. You shudder at the sight of it—even through his spread fingers, you can see that his flesh is torn open in a way that makes your stomach pitch.

Behind him, there’s a sporadic trail between the trees, red dripped on virgin snow.

You want to hold him, to pull him into your arms, and, most of all, to fix him and put him back together. You start by taking the pile of armor from him and slipping under the arm of his uninjured side, pulling it over your shoulders to support his weight. He accepts the help wordlessly, leaning on you as you stumble forward together.

“They’re gone,” he pants. “Dead. Are you alright?”

“I’m fine,” you scoff. “Are you?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”

He grunts.

You limp the rest of the distance to the house together and pull open the front door, kicking it shut behind you as you help him inside. He reaches behind you to lock it, his shoulders dropping in relief when it clicks.

You drop his beskar on the floor as gently as you can while you’re half holding him up. It clatters.

“We need to get these closed up,” you say, gesturing toward a kitchen chair. “You need bacta. Sit down.”

When he doesn’t move to sit, you look up at his face, and he’s staring at you with an intensity—a soft, quiet intensity of creased brows and bright brown eyes—that takes your breath away. 

“I’m fine,” he protests, gently gripping your shoulders and pushing you back in the direction of the bed instead. He fumbles with the hem of your shirt, trembling fingers slipping under the fabric to caress your skin. “I’ll heal. Just let me touch you.”

His hands are hot on your waist.

"You’re not okay,” you protest, trying and failing to redirect him. “You won’t heal if you bleed out.”

“I just need to hold you.” His words are starting to slur, running together. The blood loss is tipping him into delirium.

“After—just let me—”

He ignores you and curls himself around you, crushing you against his body, a heavy hand holding your head to his chest, the other arm locking yours to your sides.

“Mando, please—I really need to stop the bleeding—”

“Din,” he says, nestling his face against your neck sweetly. His forehead is sweaty and feverish. He brushes gentle lips over your fluttering pulse. “My name is Din.”

You’re speechless.

“I want you to call me that,” he says. “Please.” There’s a heartbreaking vulnerability behind his words, like he’s worried you won’t accept the offering of something so precious.

“Of course. Of course, I will.” His grip slackens, and you wrap your arms around his middle reflexively. The heat of his throbbing wound and the hot slip of blood against your forearm make you recoil.

“Shit—sorry—”

But Din doesn’t react to the pain.

“Din—hey—”

You try to pull back, to extricate yourself from his hold and get a better look at him, but the arms draped over your shoulders go leaden, and he sways on his feet, forcing you backward a couple faltering steps. The backs of your calves hit the bed.

“Din—” You try to steady him, but he’s getting heavier by the second, his weight shifting unexpectedly as he tries to keep his balance, half-conscious and fading.

Your knees threaten to buckle when he grunts and goes completely boneless, slumping against you.

“Fuck—”

You’re just barely able to angle your body so that you can gently—and awkwardly—use his momentum to guide him face-first onto the bed. It’s a miracle you both don’t end up in a crumpled pile on the floor. You hoist his legs up too. It takes all your strength to haul his dead weight over to flip him onto his back so you can access the slashes across his ribs.

Your heart jumps into your throat when you see how rapidly a crimson stain is spreading on the comforter underneath him. You run for the med kit, dumping it on the bed beside his prone form and digging out all the necessities.

He doesn’t flinch when you clean, close, and dress the wounds. Not even when you prick him with a bacta shot. You work as quickly and carefully as you can, keeping tabs on his breathing all the while. Any time you have a free hand, you rest it on his chest, soothed by the shallow but steady rise and fall. 

The whole time, you think about all those questions, those details, those secrets. You turn them over again and again in your head in a feverish loop—all those things you’ve been stacking on top of one another all this time, a teetering pile of essential pieces of him, ready to topple with a gentle nudge. Kept at bay by distractions and diversions and half-truths. All the ways you’ve both been keeping your relationship in stasis to postpone…what? Loss? Something that’s inevitable, something no one can ever truly prevent. It feels undeniable when your hands are covered in his blood. When you almost lost him anyway.

It seems obvious now. Obvious that in the end, it will be more painful to have only stayed in this place with him than to have at least tried to give yourself wholly to whatever this is.

Before you secure the final bandage over the wounds, you check your work once, twice—terrified the simple expansion of his ribcage as he breathes will force them open again. You press edges of the bandage down and watch closely, dreading the red seep of blood on clean white. It doesn’t come. You breathe a sigh of relief.

You clean him up with a moist towel, wiping the blood from his skin, his face, his rumpled hair. 

If he hadn’t chosen to take his helmet off before any of this, you’d feel like you were invading his privacy by being able to see so much of him. It still feels that way, just a little, as you admire the taut lines of his biceps, the broad spread of his shoulders, and thick muscles of his pectorals. As you gently swipe over the soft expanse of his middle, feel the hard abdominals underneath. As you study the slope of his nose and the grays threaded through his stubble, his long eyelashes fanned over his cheeks. The soft pink of his lips. 

You rinse that stained-red towel until the water runs clear, until there’s no trace of blood left on him. 

The bloodied sheets and blanket and pillow underneath him will have to wait; it doesn’t even occur to you to be bothered by them when you climb in next to him, when you sweep his damp hair back off his forehead and press your lips to his warm skin and settle against his non-injured side.

You fall asleep like that, your head on his sternum, the subtle rise and fall sweeter than a lullaby.

*** He’s healed by the morning.

He’s healed.

When you wake after a fitful sleep, you scramble out of bed to pull back his bandages and find that the wounds slashed across his ribs look like they’ve had several weeks to mend, the skin knitted back together seamlessly. You run your fingers gingerly over the tender flesh in wonder, in relief.

Another one of his secrets. Something else to ask.

He rouses at your touch, starting as he blinks open bleary eyes. He must be immediately aware of the absence of his helmet because his whole body tenses as he recoils, his eyes panicked as he tries to decide to attack or to flee, jerking away from your hand on his arm. 

“It’s okay,” you say, holding up your hands in placation. “It’s me, Din. It’s just me. You’re safe—you’re home.”

He calms somewhat as he meets your gaze, as he registers your face and his surroundings, settling his head back against the pillow. The tension in his body remains.

“How are you feeling?” you ask, resisting the urge to reach up and brush his tousled hair off his forehead. Touch, you think, is his to initiate in this moment.

“Fine,” he croaks. He’s visibly uncomfortable like this, still not used to being so unguarded around someone else. Holding eye contact for longer than a moment seems almost unbearable for him, his eyes shifting around the room so they don’t have to stay settled on yours. 

You hand him a glass of water, and he sits up against the headboard to drink it. He winces a little as he maneuvers, his jaw ticking. He’s sore.

“You’re the worst patient, you know,” you gripe, trying to lighten the mood, to give him something to focus on. 

He scoffs, lifting an eyebrow over the rim of the glass.

You give him an unimpressed glare. “I couldn’t take care of you until you fainted from blood loss.”

He has the audacity to shrug a little.

You blow out an exasperated breath, distracted, maybe, by the movement of his throat as he swallows. By every detail of his face that you can’t seem to memorize quickly enough—a privilege you’re more than willing to relinquish if it means easing the tension in his shoulders, the wrinkle of concern etched between his brows.

When he sets the glass down on the bedside table, you retrieve his helmet and offer it to him wordlessly, a show of nonjudgmental understanding, a willingness to back-pedal if that’s what he needs right now. His eyes soften when he takes it.

The urge to say something before he disappears behind beskar jumps up your throat.

“I was scared, so scared,” you admit quietly. “Din, I thought—I thought you…”

He sets his helmet beside him on the bed and jerks his chin. “Come here.”

You make to settle next to him, but he pulls you onto his lap instead, guiding you until you’re straddling his thighs. 

You try to wriggle away. “I’m going to hurt you like this—just let me—”

“Shhh,” he breathes, hands locking down on your hips. “I’m fine, okay? I’m not going anywhere.” He hesitates for the briefest moment before he leans forward and presses his mouth to yours.

His lips are soft, tentative. His first, you realize. Of course.

Your mind snags on the way he tends to be in bed—directive, commanding, sure—and holds the two up side by side. This hesitation, the halting press of his lips, has something in your chest going soft. Between your legs going molten.

You cup his jaw and lick into his mouth when his lips part—an it’s okay, I want you to take—and his breath goes ragged against yours. He leans into you, an arm slung low around your back to keep you close as he starts to tip you backward.

“Don’t move,” you say, attempting to ease him back gently.

He ignores the command, responding to your open mouth with the slip of his tongue.

“Or I’ll stop,” you threaten.

He sits back, chastened, a subtle pout to his lower lip. It disappears when you lean back in. 

He makes a low noise of protest when you don’t meet his lips, but it turns into something pleased when you move your attention to his neck. You lick over his thrumming pulse, across the faint saltiness of his flushed skin. Your hands roam the planes of his chest, over his pounding heart, and down the swells of his muscled arms—greedy for so much warm skin, for so much of him you’ve never seen or touched or tasted.

Even with the helmet set beside you, the fear that you’ll have to go back—to concede gained ground—that he’ll revert back to full armor again, rankles at the back of your mind. You dig your nails lightly into his shoulders, and he growls.

You can tell it’s taking all his restraint not to move, to keep totally still aside from his wandering hands. You know he’s hard underneath you, that he’s aching to wrest control from your hands, to put you on your back and fuck you like this, with no layers between you. And he knows you won’t let him when he’s still healing.

You try not to let it escalate, to keep things from getting out of hand. But then his mouth is on yours again, your lip caught gently between his teeth, his hand locked possessively around the nape of your neck, and you can’t help the quiet moan or the subtle grind of your hips in his lap.

Din jerks back, hands braced on your shoulders to keep distance between your bodies, his head tipped back against the headboard and eyes closed as his panted breath gradually slows.

And you know it’s not just the injury. He isn’t humoring you or in too much pain. He’s fighting it—the transformation, the change that keeps him in his beskar. What he wouldn't let you see in the forest.

“It doesn’t bother me,” you say—quiet, serious. 

He pauses, understanding despite the sharp turn. The energy in the room shifts as he waits for you to continue.

“Your…you—?” you stumble over the words, struggling to find the right ones. It comes out badly. “What you…are.”

His eyes are downcast, fixed on the silver shine of his helmet.

He doesn’t ask how. Of course you know—it’s an open secret between you, has been for months.

“I want to see,” you press. An honest plea. “To know. Just let it happen.”

A tight, subtle shake of his head. No.

“Please, Din,” you say, laying a hand on his chest. “Show me.”

He looks away, his eyes full of some unnameable emotion, something soft and fragile, a sharp edge that might be anger. He slips away so easily, even without the helmet.

“Please,” you beg, framing his face with your hands to guide his gaze gently back to yours.

He still won’t meet your eyes.

Suddenly, you know this was a mistake. That this is the thing that’s going to break what’s between you. He’s given you his face, his name—they should be enough. Yet, here you are, pushing him for more. There’s no coming back from it, no swallowing the words, though. You find you don’t want to anymore, even when you can feel him slipping out of your hands.

“It’s not safe,” he says.

“How? It’s you.”

“No,” he says, “it’s not.”

“I don’t understand, Din,” you say, a hint of desperation laced between your words. “And I need to. I need to understand. We can’t avoid it any more—look at what happened. I just—I can’t do this when I know I don’t have all of you. I can’t do this anymore. All these walls, all these secrets between us.”

His head snaps to you, a flicker of panic kindling in his eyes. But he doesn’t deny it, the skirting and avoidance, the game you’ve both been so willing to play. His eyes settle on your joined hands. 

“I want all of you. I need all of you. Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” he says, his voice low, and the panic in his eyes is swallowed by a deep, hollow want—a yawning blackness that expands and disappears so quickly you think you must have imagined it. “I do understand that.”

“Then let me see you.”

His brown eyes flick upward to meet yours, and he nods.

[indieyuugure]

You know, I just thought: would turtles be uncomfortable with a weak human body?  After all, they lived their whole lives as superhumanly strong mutants with strong skin, regeneration, and armor in the form of a shell.  And now their bellies and backs are not protected at all.  Will there be their first reaction in the comic to being punched in the stomach and falling on their back?  One of those falls that knocks all the air out of your lungs and you can't breathe for a few seconds and you think you're going to die without oxygen.

Lol, they absolutely hate it! Raph hates how fragile he feels, he so used to being virtually indestructible, he doesn’t even know how to fight with such high stakes, and same with all the brothers!

I thought the exact same thing when writing this and that’s what I keep alluding to when I mention The Shredder. You guys seemed to be wondering why in that picture of them frantically concocting the Anti-X for Donnie, that Leo looked like he was about to pass out, well, this is why:

Mikey gets knocked out for a bit with a punch to the gut, Raph gets thrown into the concrete floor, braking a couple ribs and completely knocking the wind out of him, and Leo ends up taking a Shredder slice to the back trying to protect Raph while he’s down.

Splinter of course gives them a stern lecture on the importance of adapting to their knew, more fragile bodies. That is as soon as he makes sure they’re not currently dying.

[idiot-mushroom]

Raph’s Mystic Power: Turning Big + Virtually Indestructible

(leo is there for size comparison)

more info below 👇

ok so basically he can just turn into his version of the hulk! She just grows in size + more animalistic features, and this amplifies his strength and overall ability. In this form she is almost indestructible, the only things being able to hurt him is explosions or really loud noises.

Another thing to add is that when she goes into this form, he becomes way more emotionally available, which is both a bad thing and good thing. See her mind kinda just melts into emotions and basic awareness (a lot like a small child) so they will often spark into an angry fury as they are less likely to hold herself back.

but yeah it’s most literally a lot like the incredible hulk in a way 👍

[iocity]

One of the things I love about One Piece is their depiction of pain. Even for Luffy. There are time when he is hit and he writhes and screams. There are times when he doesn’t, and he is stoic. It’s a really valuable lesson that feeling pain deeply is, at times, just as noble as concealing it. No matter how strong a character is, sometimes they writhe and scream and cry. Sometimes they fail miserably and feel as if their world is out of their control. It shows that even the strongest characters experience pain in the most excruciating of ways. I always was really affected by that, because despite how much pain a a straw hat is in, they get back up. When things look the worst, they come back stronger than ever to conquer it. It makes them so much more human to me.

I also like the concept that Luffy isn’t as used to pain as the others and has a lower tolerance. He has been a rubber man since he was a child, so he doesn’t really get cuts and scratches or broken bones. He never got to build up that tolerance. It makes the scene where he takes a beating for Ace and Sabo even more significant and emotional because this kid who sees pain as a concept that is somewhat foreign is willing to take amounts of pain that even regular adults couldn’t bear. I’m sure his tolerance has been building since the start of the show, but I genuinely think it’s something to consider. This kid who is virtually indestructible, who is relatively hard to hurt, and who is relatively unconditioned to being uncomfortable in his body (like being sore or pulling a muscle) and hurting, is constantly taking a crazy ass beating for those he loves, but also those he barely even knows. Pain is significant to him, yes, but he is willing to put all of his suffering aside for the sake of people who have done right by him. Whether it be saving his life in Alabasta, or buying him a few lunches with their last few cents in Dressrosa; he will always suffer greatly in order to do right by the people he values.

[wanderingnork]

Githyanki Deep Dive: What's So Wrong With Dragonlance?

An Introduction To Crystal Spheres

So the greater cosmology of D&D is...interesting. Not only are there the various planes (arranged in a tree, a wheel, a weird stack, whatever), there are also...planets. If you visit the Forgotten Realms setting, you don't just have to visit the planet of Toril: you can also visit its moon, its asteroid cloud, or one of the other seven planets in that star system. And if you just keep flying, out away from the planet into the Sea of Night, you'll eventually hit...a wall. An endless curving wall of impenetrable, indestructible dark ceramic, like a shell.

That's when you'll realize that those beautiful stars you can see from the surface of Toril are actually innumerable portals to the Plane of Radiance or the Plane of Fire. If you can find a portal that doesn't go to one of those planes, or if you've got the right teleportation magic, you can cross beyond the sphere, out of Wildspace and into the universe beyond. Which is...an infinite rainbow ocean of "phlogiston" through which spelljamming ships can sail between the crystal spheres.

Because there are a LOT of crystal spheres. Essentially, in meta terms, any unique D&D campaign setting (with the direct exception of the Eberron campaign setting) has a crystal sphere of its own, containing JUST its own sun and local planet group. The crystal sphere containing the Dark Sun campaign setting, Athas, is completely inaccessible. Even Earth, in this cosmology, has its crystal sphere!

Please just hit pause right here and go read the "Earth" page on the Forgotten Realms wiki.

ANYWAY.

The "big three" of the crystal spheres are Realmspace, Greyspace, and Krynnspace. Realmspace is familiar to us all as the default setting of much of 5th Edition D&D and Baldur's Gate 3. Greyspace is the home of the Greyhawk campaign setting, one of the earliest settings and the default campaign setting to edition 3.5 D&D. Krynnspace is home to the Dragonlance campaign setting...and it's something of an oddball here.

You see, although each crystal sphere runs by its own rules, they usually share some commonalities. Spacefaring species can generally be found in any crystal sphere, as long as the particular sphere will sustain them. You might have a run-in with neogi ships, trade with the Arcane, or seek passage with a ship of adventurers in any crystal sphere at all. And since the githyanki have full access to spelljamming ships, you will certainly encounter them at some point or another. Unless you go to Krynnspace.

There, you won't find any githyanki at all.

What's So Special About Krynnspace?

Before I get going, please know that just about everything I'm going to discuss here comes from SJR-7, "Krynnspace," which is the AD&D 2nd Edition Spelljammer supplement on the subject. It's the most complete single reference on the subject (the Krynnspace article on the Spelljammer Wiki cites it more than any other single source).

For one thing, although virtually all crystal spheres are spheres, Krynnspace is like...flat. Pancake, albeit a giant pancake. So that's weird right out of the gate. Krynnspace is also colder than any other sphere, with its wildspace full of clouds of freezing vapor that can kill an unprotected traveler in an instant and can't be scried through, even by deities. Terrifying.

Unlike Realmspace, Greyspace, and other major crystal spheres, Krynnspace is relatively empty of wildspace societies. The sun has efreets and "helians." The burning planet Sirion has efreets and azers. The barren planet Reorx is mined and explored by dwarves, gnomes (from Krynn and beyond), and mind flayers (who we'll come back to in a hot minute). Chislev, a planetwide rainforest, is home to a limited amount of mortal races and whole lot of dragons. Zivilyn is even more scarcely populated, and only by shipwrecked travelers and marooned pirate victims. A cluster of asteroids hosts giff, space giants, gnomes, and others. Krynn, the largest, most hospitable, and most populated world, absolutely thrives with all sorts of life, including some mortal species completely unique to the cosmos...though it has only two ports of call for spelljamming travelers.

A tiny company of knights patrols Krynnspace, a few merchant vessels hop from planet to planet, and scattered pirate ships prowl the system. But that's it. Only a tiny fraction of Krynn natives are even aware of life on other planets and travel throughout the system is virtually nonexistent. Stories of Krynn and its heroes have gotten out to other spheres, but stories from other spheres have not generally gotten into this one.

In meta terms, this is easy to explain: the creators of Dragonlance were not interested in allowing spelljamming into their world. It just doesn't fit with the stories Dragonlance is meant to tell or the feeling of the world of Krynn. Dragonlance is a setting of knightly orders and great chivalric quests, not space pirates and journeys of millions of miles between planets. Minimizing those elements preserves the setting as its creators intended.

But...within the setting, what gives? Why the hell wouldn't Krynn, a world rich in resources and art and people, full of knights who want nothing more than to quest and would jump at the chance to go to the stars, be linked into the rest of the spelljamming world? Even if the other planets in the system are inhospitable, why aren't spelljammers regularly reaching out into the rest of the cosmos?

I can't answer those questions in this post. But I can answer this one: why exactly don't the githyanki try to take advantage of Krynn the way they do every other planet they can get their hands on?

Mind Games

Well...there's more meta reason for this, actually. In the 3rd Edition "Bestiary of Krynn, Revised," there's a whole table of iconic D&D monsters who are explicitly stated not to exist in the Dragonlance setting. Krynn doesn't play host to orcs, halflings, werewolves, drow, or even the great tarrasque. The table informs us that these creatures simply don't fit into the setting as written, and they're completely correct in that.

Halflings are replaced with the relatively similar kender. Adding drow (and Lolth) to the world of Krynn would destabilize the existing complex elven politics--and besides, there's no Underdark in Krynn unless a DM adds one! The githyanki and githzerai, with their distinctly extraplanar flavor and violent tendencies, would just not fit into the knights-and-dragons style of the setting.

One notable strange point on the table is mind flayers. Despite 2nd Edition Spelljammer allowing mind flayers to colonize the planet Reorx, this newer source states very plainly that mind flayers do not exist in the setting as written. Allowance is made for the Yaggol (p. 116-117), a group of squid-headed humanoids who came "from Beyond" but lost their innate mystic powers and civilization long ago. They're now just another monstrous threat in the wilderness, albeit a powerful one with a penchant for eating brains with their tentacles.

So there are just some creatures that don't fit the setting, end of story. And...we could just leave it at that. But that's not interesting, especially when there are two very powerful in-game reasons why the githyanki would want to stay far the fuck away from Krynnspace.

First, and most frightening on a personal level to a githyanki, is the fact that the planet of Krynn is actively hostile to psionics.

From the 2nd Edition "Unsung Heroes" Dragonlance supplement comes a single explanatory paragraph on page 1. The planet of Krynn does not produce any native psionicists. Visitors from other places never stay long because "if they stay on Krynn more than one month per level, their psionic abilities disappear permanently." Emphasis mine.

Doing the math, no githyanki ever gets far beyond 11th or 12th level before Vlaakith calls them home to consume their soul. Your average githyanki warrior would have less than a year on Krynn before their innate psionic ability vanished for good.

Sure, the githyanki could visit Krynnspace. But there's only really one planet worth their time--Krynn. Due to living primarily on the Astral Plane, the githyanki aren't looking for resources in terms of food or other perishables, so it doesn't matter how fertile the world of Krynn may be. There's no way for them to establish any meaningful permanent base there. They'd have to cycle people in and out of a stronghold constantly. No creche could be established. The babies would hatch without psionics!

For the icing on the cake, they have a living example of just what happens to a powerful psionic species that stays too long on Krynn. All they have to do is look at the Yaggol, the remnants of their most ancient enemies, to know the consequences of trying to stick around on Krynn.

Tiamat and Takhisis

The second reason to stay out of Krynnspace is of more concern to the society as a whole. The githyanki have several major weapons in to bring to bear when they go out into the cosmos. Their silver swords, their psionics, and their pact with Tiamat and the red dragons. Silver swords would function just fine on Krynn regardless of the issue of psionics, and let's assume that some very clever githyanki mages worked out how to protect their psionics when planetside. Great! Now they can come and go as they please!

Except that they still wouldn't, because the second a githyanki crosses into Krynnspace, the pact with Tiamat stops working.

And here we circle back to the cosmology of the wider D&D universe and the way the crystal spheres function. See, each crystal sphere is a universe unto itself. Not only does it have its own basic rules, it also plays host to its own pantheon of deities. The gods of Greyspace, Realmspace, and Krynnspace hold dominion only over what is within their very literal sphere.

Deities, while they can access other spheres, have their power limited to their own specific spheres. They can't harm deities from another crystal sphere or their worshipers. No matter how much Erythnul, god of slaughter in Greyhawk, might wish to wreak carnage on Faerûn, he's bound by an ancient compact to stay in his own sphere. And no matter how much Torm, god of justice in Faerûn, might like to see Erythnul brought down, he has to leave that fight to the gods of good in Greyhawk.

Most importantly to this discussion, different aspects of the same deity, who might be worshiped in different spheres, are limited in the same way. Tiamat is not a deity in Krynn. Takhisis, a similar five-headed evil dragon goddess, is one of the major divine players in the setting. According to the most recent source, they are aspects of the same being (Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, 43). But that doesn't change the fact that Tiamat's power stops at the edge of Krynnspace.

Takhisis may be an aspect of Tiamat, but the deal Tiamat made with the githyanki has no binding power over Takhisis. Nor does it have any power over the red dragons of Krynn. If a githyanki war party crossed into Krynnspace, they would have no backup from their red dragon allies. Speculatively, they might even face hostility from native red dragons, who would be unlikely to appreciate such familiar behavior.

Would Takhisis accept a similar pact if the githyanki tried to make it? Maybe. It could be advantageous to her. But the pact with Tiamat was made by selling the soul of Gith herself and every githyanki ruler who came after. What do the githyanki have to offer of that magnitude now? And what would be the purpose of taking such a risk for just one planet in one crystal sphere when there are so many other worlds they could visit?

[ljh-writing-blog]

Batmom #3

Gotham city is a horrible place, teeming with death and corruption to create a melting pot of horrors her citizens could not avoid. It was here, in this cesspool of dread that your life took a turn for the worst.

A city that had taken everything from her and offered nothing in return. A futile city council let her life fall in the hands of the streets, reducing her to a mere rat in an alleyway scavenging for a meal and warmth. Her fellow citizens ignored her pleas for food, a job, or anyway to clean herself up to be hired for one. A corrupt police department let her disappear, just another missing person’s poster to add to the stack that grew day by day. Gotham took everything from her, how could she ever attempt to love and protect a city that had thrown her down the gutter with no regard as to where she washed up?

Y/N owed her newfound health and sanity to the Justice League but she did not believe she was suitable for offering her help in protecting Earth, let alone Gotham. She had done too much harm, turned into one of the monsters she once feared and terrorized the city herself. How could anyone trust her with human life again, knowing she had been responsible for tormenting such a beautiful thing?

After the night Batman took her into custody her health took a turn for the worst, without the drugs Crane was pumping into her to keep her complacent she soon began to go through withdrawals. Her inability to trust anyone made treatment difficult and she eventually had to be sedated for her body to start healing. While the physical wounds were healing Black Canary feared for her mental state more than anything. They knew Jonathan Crane’s “studies”, Dinah preferred the term torture, focused primarily on fear and obviously something had worked. Just how much damage had been done for your meta-gene to activate?

Diana Prince’s face was the first you saw after waking from months of being in a medically induced coma. The League thought maybe seeing a woman first would induce less stress, it was a plus Diana was virtually indestructible. Diana hadn't bothered with the name Wonder Woman when introducing herself. She knew the woman before her already knew who that, the heroine, was. But she deserved trust in order to give it and her identity was a step. They already knew who the young woman was, it wasn't fair for her to be shrouded by more mysteries and half truths.

-----Past-----

A door opening brought Y/N's attention off the scuff on the wall she had been staring at since she woke. She made no movements and appeared serene as the noise registered in her ears. One could almost believe she was a normal person recovering from an injury, until you noticed the inhibitor collar ornamenting her neck like a choker she would've once thought fashionable when she had possession of her own mind. Her eyes would tell you anything you needed to know about her true state, the saying they were like windows to the soul rang true. Trapped inside the padded cell that was her consciousness she screamed and ran into the walls, searching for any way out of the prison she had been trapped in for months. While her body slumbered and healed peacefully her mind was a living nightmare she had been trapped in for months or maybe even years. She had no clue how long she had been held captive by her own self, her very own thoughts and past actions binding her. It was like a darker, more sinister version of herself lived within her. And with only herself to turn to she appeared, the bete noire, you knew she was Crane's creation. This couldn't have always been you, this thing that weaponized fear like it had been melded into a weapon of her own design. She used your fears against you, when you once thought you were invincible your very own mind was turning you into the same victims your hands had marred. The woman's strong voice brought you out of your torment.

"I know you must be confused, this is most likely the first time you've been completely lucid in years. My colleagues and I want to assist you, we know you've been given abilities you're unable to control. We can help you. I can help you, I want to help you. I know you know who Wonder Woman is but that isn't me, not really. My name is Princess Diana of Themyscira, but here I call myself Diana Prince." She sat next to your bed, unsure if she should touch you but decided with the collar there wasn't much you could do to hurt her. Grabbing your hand that remained strapped down by your side she spoke once more. "I can't promise you that you won't have to atone for your wrongs but I can promise that you and I will work together to right them. We will take back what is yours, and if you decide along the way to fight for more than yourself I will be here to guide you through that as well." A woman who hid behind nothing and no one who helped any thing and everyone, in the few words she had spoken to Y/N she had turned the tides in her mind even if it was only a little. Slowly you spoke, your words gravelly and harsh as the vibration of your vocal cords caused your throat discomfort. "I don't think anyone could ever look at me as a hero, not after what we - I - have done." Diana squeezed your hand as she replied, "We can’t help the way we’re born. We can’t help what we are, only what life we choose to make for ourselves." You could only manage a nod, still too exhausted to try and make sense of your situation. You knew you weren't with Crane and his goons anymore. This was a leg up from any situation you had been in before, with that you allowed yourself to sleep.

-----End Flashback-----

Diana is your best friend, she will always be your friend. The League had given you a home when you hadn't had one in years. They gave you safety and protection. The least you could do was offer it to the world in return. After a year of recovery you would be taking another step in the right direction. At least you hoped it was the right direction for you, it was the only way you could even begin to make up for the damage you had caused. Today would be your first mission as a hero, today your story wasn't being rewritten but given a sequel. You only hoped you could be a hero the League was proud of.

AN: Absolutely shit, i know. i be trying tho.

[therealvinelle]

I think the vampires in Twilight are boring, largely because they are so perfect. They're beautiful, super strong, super fast, fabulously wealthy, they have superpowers, and all without any of the interesting drawbacks from popular vampire lore apart from the bloodlust (which is mostly utilized in the narrative for romance angst) or mental stagnation (which is weaksauce). I'm not even gonna talk about the sparkling

I think there's room for different interpretations of myths and archetypes but I feel like this one just sanded off all of the all interesting bits instead of actually reinterpreting them

What's the point of vampire romance if they're barely vampires?

What's your take as someone who is knowledgeable about this topic?

You know, rather than defend Twilight, I'm going to make the same argument about Good Omens, Alien, the Wizard of Earthsea, and Harry Potter. I'm also going to be incredibly mean to you, I'm sorry, I know your question is asked in good faith but deep in my heart is a snarky monster yearning to break free. It has been unleashed, because you see, I strongly disagree with the "the vampires in Twilight aren't actually vampires!" criticism.

The angels and demons in Good Omens are nothing like Biblical angels and demons and the authors just made stuff up they liked. I'm not sure what the point of that story was.

The alien in Alien bleeds acid, it's virtually indestructible and Ellen has to eject it into space to kill it. What a terrible villain design.

The Wizard of Earthsea and Harry Potter feature very different wizards which makes me wonder- why couldn't either Ursula Le Guin or J. K. Rowling back off? Find some other word, because these fictional creatures can't be both what they are in the Wizard of Earthsea and in Harry Potter. Don't even factor in Lord of the Rings or the Dresden Files - these authors are all over the place, it's like they can't pin down what a wizard even is.

Vampires, being creatures that I take very seriously and want to see accurately depicted in my YA literature, damnit, are grievously disrespected in Twilight where that Stephenie Meyer woman used her imagination and did her own thing. The sheer disrespect, smh.

[viviennevermillion]

Welcome to my newest AU: Lost but everyone who ever stepped foot on the island has some type of usable magic power from that moment on. Rules for this is every power has a drawback and it only activates at a critical moment to their character arc. Here's what powers I assigned them:

Jack Shephard: Can heal people using his own life force. He can only give up to 50% of his own life force to do this, if the injury can't be healed by that, he can't save a person. Jack's power doesn't activate until way into Season 6 because he didn't have faith in the island.

Kate Austen: Has the same power as Blake Belladonna in RWBY. Both are characters who are established as people on the run because of their past. Their powers reflect that. Whenever Kate is attacked, if she reacts fast enough, she can leave behind a shadow of herself to take the hit for her.

James "Sawyer" Ford: The angrier he gets, the more damage his punches do. On the other hand, if he gets genuinely sad and devastated, his physical abilities are significantly stunted and damage is almost non-existent.

Charlie Pace: Can focus on a person and play or sing a song that reflects their true nature. This can be used to gather information about them. He can only do this once per person.

Claire Littleton: She can sense danger, even when there otherwise isn't any indication of it.

Hugo "Hurley" Reyes: Can speak to the dead. Activates off-island.

Sun-Hwa Kwon: Can accelerate the growth of plants and the natural healing process of animals and people. She has to know and understand the species to do this.

Jin-Soo Kwon: Can communicate with the ocean to go with the "son of a fisherman" theme. If his head is underwater the ocean tries to kill him tho.

John Locke: Is the only one who doesn't have a power. He's like Mirabel Madrigal. He's deeply important to the story but he has 0 magic. He himself and other characters throughout the story think that he does during varying points of time but it's always the MiB messing with him. He realizes this at the end. Can you tell I like angst yet?

Michael Dawson: Can create a magic shield using his own stamina. Shield disappears when his stamina runs out.

Walter "Walt" Lloyd: Astral Projection. Self-explanatory.

Vincent: Ages normally and can die of old age but is otherwise virtually indestructible. Usually animals don't get any powers but Vincent's was given to him by Jacob directly to assist the survivors.

Sayid Jarrah: Can burn a person with his touch when he wants to. Doing this inflicts an equal amount of emotional pain to him as the physical pain he causes. I like angst.

Shannon Rutherford: Can master any skill within 30 minutes if she puts her mind to it. Never figures this out because she has been told that she's useless all her life and believes it. Only uses this once when she translates French but thinks those are lucky guesses.

Boone Carlyle: Blood-bending. Mostly gave this to him because everytime he angrily stares at someone you can tell that his blood is boiling. Never uses this once during his lifetime though.

Rose Henderson Nadler & Bernard Nadler: Have a soul link with one another. They can always tell how the other is feeling and neither of them can die while the other still lives as long as they're on good terms. Virtually indestructible unless you kill them at the exact same time but why the fuck would you.

Ana Lucia Cortez: Pyromancy. Fits her vibe. Also bound to stamina.

Elizabeth "Libby" Smith: Can read people's emotions.

Mr. Eko: Precognition. Can tell what he needs to do when and can anticipate things a couple seconds before they happen.

Benjamin Linus: Everytime he lies (to convince someone of his lie, sarcasm not included), it slightly alters reality in an unexpected way to make his lie appear like the truth. This is how Anthony Cooper gets to the island after Ben tells John about the magic box. The result of his lies is always unexpected and can backfire. He can't make something specific happen intentionally. His power activated during the purge.

Juliet Burke: Ice-bending. This has nothing to do with her character but I've previously seen Elizabeth Mitchell in Once Upon A Time and The Santa Clause and both times she plays a character that has something to do with winter. Also bound to stamina.

Ethan Rom: Superhuman strength. Self-explanatory. It actually takes multiple shots from 6 guns to take him down in this AU.

Harper Stanhope: Can see people's time of death over their head. Was very confused that Juliet's said 1977 and Ben's was way past his normal life expectancy.

Goodwin Stanhope: Idk what his power is but it's certainly not danger sense. 💀

Roger Linus: Can sense fear. Terrible power for a terrible man. I love Ben, I promise. I also love angst tho. The moment Ben killed him was the only time he didn't sense any fear from him, which scared the shit out of him.

Desmond David Hume: Activates his power after the events of "The Constant". Can see glimpses of people's past and future upon touching them. Can only do this once per person.

Frank Lapidus: Always lands safe. Literally always lands on his feet like a cat. Also applies to planes / helicopters he flies.

Charlotte Staples Lewis: Can speak any language after hearing it spoken once. Growing up with this was very confusing off-island.

Miles Straume: Reading the final thoughts of the dead. Self-explanatory.

Daniel Faraday: Stopping time for up to an hour. After using this power, he can't use it for 24 times the amount of time he stopped time for. Only can use it in present time.

Illana Verdansky: Able to tell when people lie.

Danielle Rousseau: Her bullet or arrow always hits the target unless the target specifically blocks it.

Alexandra Rousseau: Can make herself invisible. Used for stealth.

Karl Martin: Can accelerate his speed. Bound to stamina.

Mikhail Bakunin: Telepathy.

Eloise Hawking: Chain Reaction. Once a day for 5 minutes she can see the effects of every action of hers she thinks about.

Charles Widmore: Can take a glimpse at people's destiny. Only can do this once per person.

Richard Alpert: Can't be killed by anything ever. Can't even die of natural causes. Can't die.