#(it gets exchanged once every few years so they can sell it again & my dad gets a new car. like a new new car)

[liebelesbe]

have i said this before? but FUCK touchscreens in cars. why is every new car made with touchscreens. it fucking sucks!! put the buttons back where they belong!!!!

[slavic-roots-western-mind]

Life in China Observations #4

It's been a while since I last did this, so let's go again!

Identity is complicated The question "where are you from" can be just as complicated as it is simple. For many people, their country of birth is where they're from, which is usually the case here. However, if you happen to be born in country A to parents from cultures B and C, immigrated and became a citizen of country D and now attend university in country E and are now on an exchange program in China, the question "where are you from" is not that easily answered. From what some of my friends told me, where you're from is actually the place where your dad was born in even though you may have been born in a different city which is a pretty interesting concept known as the "ancestral home" - 祖籍 (zǔjí) or 籍贯 (jígùan).

You have to make the first step I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but people are constantly doing something and unless you specifically and intentionally reach out and work on your friendship, you may end up drifting apart. Maybe this is a specific thing, but back home I could go a few weeks without really reaching out to my friends and then someone would suggest grabbing lunch together and it would be like no time had passed at all since we last saw each other. Here? Quite different.

Beauty and pop trends There are all sorts of weird and wonderful trends that you can come across in China. From using bread as a study tactic to decorating your workplace with banana plants, I feel like the more I assimilate here, the bigger the reverse culture shock will be when I go back home, and not just for me. dr.candiselin covers some of these trends on Instagram (not a promo post!), and I recommend checking out her content, it's quite brilliant.

Taobao You can buy anything on taobao. Literally. I saw someone selling a house there. I was previously a little shocked to see animals such as cats and bunnies being sold, but after seeing houses and cars being sold I honestly don't know what else is there to surprise me with.

Prepare in advance (foodwise) for the lunar new year During those 8-12ish days during the holdiays a lot of stores were closed. The convenience store outside my campus was open thank God, because otherwise I would have been living on instant porridge and instant soup which was my main food source 2 weeks prior due to being ill and there is only so much instant oatmeal that you can eat before slightly losing it.

Being ill is a nightmare And I mean the mandatory-bed-rest-no-going-out-for-at-least-5-days ill kind. You need to go to the hospital or a clinic to get a note to give to your school otherwise the day's you're absent will be counted, and once they reach a specific percentage you won't be allowed to take the exam (which can seriously mess with your grades, even more if you're there as an exchange student).

The weather can change at the blink of an eye I remember back in December the weather was in the negative digits and then suddenly the next day it was around 20 celcius?? The very next day it went to 3-4, and even now in March it's very all over the place. The weather forecast is not that useful because I'll leave the dorms wearing my coat in the morning only to return carrying my coat, jumper, long-sleeved shirt and wearing only my t-shirt.

More affordable beauty products I saw some products go for around $80 online?? And here on Taobao they cost under $10? I'm assuming it's the shipping costs that drive up the price so drastically, and now I'm pondering whether it would be cheaper to order online or to travel to China every couple of years just to stock up on beauty products.

[phoenixyfriend]

Auntie ‘Soka and Little Leia (and Rex)

The counterpart to Uncle Ben and Little Luke (Original Post, Chrono)

Listen. You all knew this was coming.

This got... very long and detailed and I’m going to have to clean it up and post to AO3. As in, this was supposed to be 2-3k and is literally ten times that long. It crossed 25k. And the initial section actually glosses over a bunch, actual fic-style writing starts at “That, of course, is when things get interesting.”

Warnings: discussion of various canon traumas (most relating to being child soldiers), general PTSD, several scenes featuring dissociation or panic attacks upon being triggered, and canon-typical violence.

Rated T, gen.

I still want there to be de-aging nonsense involved so Ahsoka is physically a late teenager despite having a solid two decades of field experience behind her (we’re pulling her from Malachor).

Leia, much like Luke, is now six. She just came from being a rebellion general. She is not happy about being a child. She was already short, this is just mean.  She’s a human espresso.

UNLIKE BEN, Ahsoka is not happy about this turn of events. Being seventeen-ish is not helpful in the outer rim. She’s a female togruta, young and healthy, and in the Outer Rim, caring for a small human child. Sure, she has her lightsabers and plenty of combat experience, and she can keep them safe, but she’s just one person, and a major target for those looking to make some quick cash. It doesn’t matter how good she is; she needs sleep at some point.

It makes my heart happy to treat Ahsoka and Rex as two halves of the same black ops specialist so you know what, he’s there too! He’s physically like... 10-12 in natborn, maybe. They’re not sure, because clones age weird. He’s moderately more useful than Leia (who is very competent but also physically six, and short for that age), but he’s still... very small.

Reminder that none of them have been born yet.

Ahsoka has a harder time explaining WHY she has children with her, since she's barely more than a kid herself, and clearly unrelated by species. She sometimes just says “Oh, my adoptive brother’s kids” since it’s kind of the truth for Leia and she’s not touching the actual truth about Rex with a ten foot pole.

Ahsoka definitely knows about Leia being a Skywalker, or at least has suspicions that Bail never outright confirmed but was conspicuously quiet about. She does tell Leia about it, but it’s not like that means anything, right? Just, you know, your dad was my teacher! I don’t have to tell you he became Va--oh shit, you already knew that part. Well, fuck. What do you mean he had a son? OH SHIT, PADME HAD TWINS.

Alt take for explaining why she’s got kids: She’s my foundling, I know her name as my child (Leia shut up!!!)

(Ahsoka can fake Mandalore. Sometimes.)

That said, there is... significantly less gambling and significantly more theft to get to Coruscant.

As previously stated, Ahsoka is a black ops kinda gal, and more importantly, she looks like a fairly attractive young woman in the Outer Rim, with two children in good health. She’s a target, and also not the kind of person one generally gambles with. If she does gamble, people get upset when she doesn’t lose, in ways they don’t get upset about Ben doing the same, because she’s, again, a cute teenage girl. It’s exhausting.

As things go, she largely ends up stealing from people who deserve it and/or smuggling herself and her charges into someone else’s ship. They’re small, they can hide. Sometimes she can get them all passage by working as a mechanic, she’s good at that.

Once they’ve got a handle on when they are, they have to decide on Names. None of them have been born yet, so technically they could use their own names without anyone Knowing. Rex and Leia might not even be born, depending on how successful they are at, you know, stopping the war and everything. Ahsoka, though, she’s going be born in two years, and there’s no reason to prevent it, so... she doesn’t want to steal baby-her’s name. That would be mean.

Leia is already calling her “Auntie ‘Soka” when she can for reasons like “selling the bit” and “manipulating adults” and “making us both feel better after we had a mutual breakdown about Anakin being Vader.” Ergo, she decides that whatever new name she picks better include that in some way, and decides on “Sokari” because it sounds pretty.

Overall, they don’t... they don’t actually make it very far before there’s an Incident. Again, teenager with small children. They spend a lot of time hiding out in space ports looking for an opportunity.

That, of course, is when things get interesting.

Specifically, Ahsoka spots a Mandalorian.

She doesn’t recognize the armor. She does recognize the sigil, and thinks ‘well, they’re more likely to help than some,’ because from what she’s heard, the Haat Mando’ade are Decent People Overall. Her view is a little biased, mostly on account of the sheer level of grudge she has against Kyr’tsad. It’s fine! The True Mandalorians have the same grudge, right? And Mandalorians like kids and Ahsoka hasn’t slept in five days and it’s fine. It’s fine! IT’S FINE.

“Oh shit,” Rex whispers, before she can suggest anything. “Oh fuck.”

“Stop cursing,” Leia hisses, elbowing him. “People are going to notice.”

“That’s the Prime,” Rex panics, mostly quiet. Ahsoka’s heart drops, because fuck is right. “That’s Fett.”

Leia isn’t impressed. Ahsoka just angles herself between Fett and Rex and hopes that he doesn’t see them. That’s just asking for trouble.

Unfortunately, Ahsoka is in fact running on none sleep with left trauma, and doesn’t notice Fett walking up and dropping into a seat across from them until he’s actually done so, removing his helmet to glare a little more efficiently.

“Wanna explain why your kid has my face?”

Ahsoka later tells herself that he’s killed Jedi and that’s why he can sneak up on her, and that she can be forgiven some slip-ups with the exhaustion being what it is, and that she’s obviously going to be dealing with some emotional instability in light of the sudden return of teenage hormones and new forms of anxiety that are markedly different from those she was dealing with a few weeks ago.

What Ahsoka wants to say is “that’s kind of a long story,” or “maybe he’s a cousin,” or “kriff off, I don’t know you,” or maybe even “he’s a clone.”

What Ahsoka actually does is burst into tears, which is embarrassing for her, for Fett, for the kids, and for the entire rest of the bar.

It really is the straw that broke the eopie’s back. Even when she was actually this age, she didn’t exactly cry much. Objectively, Fett quasi-aggressively asking a valid question shouldn’t send her into a panic. She’s been through torture and worse. She shouldn’t be crying.

But she is, sobbing her eyes out with no control, and he’s just sitting across from her and looking uncomfortable while Rex wraps his little arms--oh Force he’s so small--around her, and both ‘children’ glare at Fett.

“So, I’m going to take it she didn’t kidnap you from a loving family or do something illicit with a blood sample,” Fett says, after it becomes obvious that Ahsoka’s not going to be ready to talk any time soon.

“She didn’t,” Rex says stiffly, with just the right emphasis for Fett to catch what’s implied. Ahsoka just keeps her head down, eyes pressed against the heels of her palms, trying to get her body to stop rebelling against her.

Fett’s eyes dart to Leia, who folds her arms and draws herself up, every bit the unimpressed princess. “My father claimed her as a sister, so she’s my Auntie ‘Soka.”

The man dithers a bit, the conversation clearly not going where he’d expected. “Right,” he says. “You--you’re all kids. I thought she was a little older, at least, but I didn’t have a good look at her face before.”

She is older, but actually admitting that is only going to make this worse, both for her pride and for her chances of making it out alive.

“Where are you staying?”

“What?” Leia bites out.

“You’re kids, you’re alone, and you’re clearly not okay if you were trying to hide the one with my face as blatantly as you did, and then... whatever this is, when I confronted you,” Fett explains. Ahsoka lifts her head to glare at him, but it’s probably not doing much with the way her eyes are rimmed with red and still wet. “Don’t give me that look, ad’ika, your kids looked as confused and horrified by that as the bartender did. They obviously didn’t think it was normal either.”

Well, kriff you too, Ahsoka thinks.

“And what do you mean by ‘blatantly,’ here?” Leia challenges. It’s adorable, but Ahsoka watched this tiny girl shoot a man last week, and wonders when people are going to start taking that seriously.

“There’s a lot of people in this galaxy, and I don’t exactly have the clearest memory of what I looked like at that age,” Fett says, slow and careful like he thinks they’re dumb. Ahsoka decides to chalk it up as being because Leia’s visibly six. “I would have thought it was just a coincidence if you hadn’t put in effort to hide him.”

Leia huffs, and Rex glares harder. Fett just sighs, like they’re all going to give him grey hairs.

“You can explain whatever the hell’s going on,” Fett says. “I’ll let you stay on my ship, there’s a spare bunk and you’re small.”

“For free?” Rex demands.

“A night on a bunk in exchange for information,” Fett clarifies. “We can negotiate from there.”

Ahsoka takes a few moments, notes that both of the others are waiting on her for the decision, and cringes. She doesn’t feel steady enough to carry that. She has to anyway.

“Rex?” she asks, voice rasping after the breakdown of the past few minutes.

“Yeah?”

“How much?”

He looks up at her, eyes calculating, and grimaces. “We don’t want Order 66. A warning is better, even if we... share information.”

She nods, and turns to Leia. “Any premonitions, princess?”

Leia glowers, cute and furious. “No.”

“No, don’t tell, or no, you aren’t getting any vibes about sharing info one way or the other?”

“The latter,” Leia clarifies, huffy to the last.

“Right,” Ahsoka says, and then just... hesitates. “Fett...”

“You’ve got conditions,” he guesses.

She bares her teeth in what could have, through a squint and perhaps a few drinks, been called an apologetic smile. “Just one, really.”

“Yeah?”

“No hurting, killing, or turning us in for bounties,” she says. “Any of us.”

“You’re children, I wouldn’t.”

She blinks at him, slow and careful. She hesitates. She reaches down, out of sight, sees him stiffen.

She unclips her sabers from her belt and puts them on the table.

His eyes are fixed on the weapons the second they enter his line of sight, and don’t move as he clearly realizes why she made the condition she did.

“I left years ago, because I couldn’t stay without it ruining me,” she says. Still slow. Still careful. She’s so tired. “But if I want to keep Leia safe, I have to get back to Coruscant.”

His eyes finally lift from the sabers, expression blank. “Just her?”

“Rex doesn’t have the same monsters coming after him,” she says. “If it were just me and him, I’d worry less. Leia’s a different kind of target.”

“You’re putting a lot of faith on the table by telling me that,” Fett says, voice flat and toneless. “Considering my occupation.”

“She’s a child,” Ahsoka says, feeling heavy and boneless. “Even with what I was and will be, even with what money you would get from the right buyer, you wouldn’t.”

“There are other risks.”

“There are.”

They stare at each other for too long, probably, and then Fett jerks as Rex kicks him under the table. The boys glare for a moment, and then Rex says, “If she weren’t good, I’d still be a slave to those who grew me.”

Fett blinks, and then nearly growls the word, “What?”

“She freed me,” Rex reiterates. “While I was trying to shoot her.”

Ahsoka lifts a hand and puts it on his far shoulder, pulling him into her side. She doesn’t meet Fett’s eyes again, because part of her is back on Mandalore, dodging her own soldiers and crying out as her family dies across the galaxy.

Fett breathes in. Breathes out. He puts a hand to his head, visibly frustrated. “Fine. A good Jedi kid, and two smaller kids, one of which is apparently in some way mine.”

Rex makes a face, which is fair, but also not helping.

“To the ship,” Ahsoka says, putting her sabers back on her belt and sliding out of the seat. “I’m... I’m Sokari.”

“You already know my name.”

“I do.”

---------------------------

Fett watches her like she’s a predator, which has the benefit of being accurate and slightly flattering. She lets other two take care of most of talking, and then Fett tells her to sleep first, and talk in the morning.

“You’re dead on your feet, jetii,” he snorts. “And that crying jag didn’t do you any favors. Sleep.”

So she does, and Fett doesn’t even wake her. He just lets her sleep. He watches her in the way of a guard. She sees him when she gets up to use the ‘fresher in the middle of the night, but he doesn’t even comment when she collapses right back into the mediocre cot she’s borrowed for the cycle.

Rex and Leia are safe, her hindbrain tells her, even in the depths of sleep. Her mind curls around theirs in the Force, and she trusts that they are here. They are not happy, but they are alive and unharmed, and that has to be enough.

When she stumbles her way to true wakefulness, groggy and loose-limbed, Fett greets her with caf.

“The kids wouldn’t let me near you,” he tells her.

“They’re good,” she says, cupping her hands around the mug. She feels wobbly, in every sense. Her body, her mind, her emotions, her connection to the Force. Nothing is on-kilter right now. “Did they tell you anything?”

“They waited for you,” he says. “But the little miss needed a nap of her own. They’re down in the other bunk.”

“I didn’t notice,” she admits. She should have. She’s Fulcrum. She’s a veteran of the Clone Wars. She’s... she’s supposed to be better than this.

“How long?” he asks, and then when she squints up at him, he clarifies. “How long did you fight?”

“My last fight--”

“No, whatever war you came out of,” he says. Her chest twists cold. “I don’t know if the Jedi sent you into it or if you waded in yourself once you left, but you move like a soldier.”

“I was,” she confirms. “But... but I don’t want to talk about the details. Not until the other two are here.”

He frowns at her. “Is there anything you can talk about?”

She shrugs and looks away, trying to take solace in the warmth of the caff she holds above the table, as if it can hide her, guard her, from the disgraced Mand’alor across the table.

“Jedi?”

“I’m not officially a Jedi,” she says, voice quiet. “Not anymore.”

“Then what do I call you?” he asks. “We’re not exactly close enough for names.”

“Torrent,” she says. “It’s not--I can’t claim my family name anymore. But I can claim Torrent, so I will. And if you want a title, I was a commander.”

“Bit young for that.”

“I got the rank when I was fourteen,” she says, and watches his face do something complicated and unpleasant. “Don’t. I know your own culture puts children on the field that young.”

“Not in command.”

She shrugs. “Yeah, well... the soldiers were technically younger. Adults, but...”

Ahsoka can see the way he casts about to figure out what species grows at that rate. He guesses a few, and she shoots all of it down.

She won’t tell him. Not until Rex is awake.

This part of the story is his.

--------------------------

When Leia tries to sit alone, a foot away on the bench like a proper adult, Ahsoka refuses to let it happen. She pulls the younger girl to her side and quells protests with a glance. It’s a decent skill, but she’s not sure how long it’s going to work on her niece-in-spirit.

“Your body needs the chemical release of skinship,” she says, and Leia glares at her. “I spent way too much time with the boys to not know about this. Deal.”

Rex sits close enough to knock their knees together under the table, and his warmth is the old comfort she needs.

“Do you want the story you’ll believe, or the truth?” Ahsoka asks.

“What’s the difference?”

“One of them involves something so impossible that even most Jedi wouldn’t believe it,” she tells him.

Fett folds his arms and leans forward to rest them on the table, challenging but oddly open. “Try me.”

“Time travel.”

He blinks, just once, fully controlled. “That’s a tough one.”

“There were only three Jedi left alive when I died,” she says. “Or... whatever it is that happened to me. I think I died. All I know is that one moment, I was thirty-two and dying, and the next, I was... seventeen again, and had these two with me. All of us younger than we were. None of us have even been born yet.”

She refuses to look him in the eye. “They both outlived me by... six years, maybe. Got caught up while traveling instead of dying. Leia was twenty-two. Rex was thirty-five. I’m not technically the oldest anymore. I mean, physically I am, but that doesn’t mean anything, and it’s not exactly doing us any good, and--”

Rex bumps his shoulder to her arm. “I dunno, Commander. I’ve spent a long time looking older than I should. Nice to look younger for once.”

She shoots him a small, pained grin. “Could be worse, yeah.”

“Let’s say I believe you.”

Her attention snaps back to Fett, who’s looking damnably blank, and is showing even less in the Force.

He waits a second for her to relax back into her seat.

“Let’s say I believe you,” he repeats. “How’s ‘Rex’ connected to me? What’s so special about Leia there? And what war did you fight in that has you acting like a veteran?”

“Three years in the clone wars,” she whispers, glancing to Rex and forcing herself to not go for her sabers to defend against an attack that her paranoia says is coming and the Force says is not. “Then almost all the Jedi were wiped out at once, and I spent a year... drifting. Then black ops for the next fifteen.”

“Black ops,” he repeats, still damnably flat.

“There was a Sith Empire,” she says, and she can hear her own tone growing somehow emptier. “Glassing planets. Enslaving entire species. Committing genocides all over. Of course, there was a rebellion, and of course I joined it. I was one of the only people left with Jedi training. For all that I’d left the Order, I still had a duty to the universe.”

His eyes flit to Leia, who shrugs and tries to look prim. “I was adopted and raised by one of the founders of the rebellion, a movement built on the desire to instate freedom and democracy in a galaxy that had lost even the pretense.”

“That why you’re special?”

Leia smiles, thin and patronizing. It doesn’t fit on her little face. “I’m special because my biological father was one of the most powerful Force users in history, and his Fall to the dark side and choice to become a Sith is why the Emperor’s rise was nearly uncontested. I do not like power, but it’s in my veins and I can’t change that. Force users are... a lucrative trade, and I’m still the size of a child, so I can’t fight back. I’ll be safer in the Jedi Temple, even if I don’t want to be a Jedi.”

Fett looks to Ahsoka, makes to ask a question, and then shakes his head. Not the time, maybe.

“So, that’s all... very complicated and I don’t know how much of it I believe, but it doesn’t explain...” he trails off, and sighs. “My kid, or whatever you are. I heard you mention clones.”

Rex grins. It is not a kind expression.

“Let me tell you about Kamino.”

---------------------------

Ahsoka has no idea if Fett believes them. Either he thinks they’re telling the truth, or he thinks their delusional kids. Whatever the case, he offers to take them closer to the Core. Ahsoka quietly offers to take a look at his engine in return, and then pretends not to notice when Fett awkwardly drifts to and away from Rex.

“They put chips in our brains to make us kill the Jedi we respected, cared for, even loved. I tried to shoot ‘Soka, Fett. She was seventeen and risked her life to get that chip out of my head while I was trying to kill her. I have never hated myself more than when I woke up and realized what I’d almost done, and I was one of the few that were able to fight it. I heard the stories of dozens of brothers who woke with their chips having degraded and chose to eat their blaster rather than live with the guilt of the orders they’d followed without question because of a thrice-damned Sith slave chip in their head.”

“So no, I won’t call you father or acknowledge you as clan until you do something to prove you’re worth it, shared blood or not.”

What Ahsoka does get out of the arrangement, for all that Fett’s route mostly takes them on a meandering path that isn’t faster than their previous system, is sleep. She gets to rest. She gets to trust that Fett won’t kill Rex, out of guilt for something he hasn’t done, that he won’t kill Leia out of a worry that she’s just a delusional child, a real child, that he won’t kill ‘Sokari’ because it would ruin any chance of gaining Rex’s favor, ever.

She’s not safe, won’t believe she can be until she’s in the Temple and Sidious is dead dead dead, but she’s safer than she’s been in a long time.

Every night, Ahsoka wakes up and stumbles to the little galley, deaths and torture sparkling behind her eyes with the energy of a thousand lost Jedi, ten thousand mourned brothers and sisters.

She is not the only one of their little group to be a survivor of a near-total genocide, but Rex could not feel his brothers die in the Force, even if his nightmares featured what they heard of suicide missions by the emperor’s favored shock troopers, and Leia had... Alderaan had more off-world survivors than there had been Jedi at all.

It’s not worth comparing their pain. It’s stupid to even think it. Part of her can’t help but do it anyway.

“Caf?”

She feels a lek twitch in response to the voice of the only other person on board who can reach the top shelf. “I probably shouldn’t.”

“Whiskey?”

“That’s a definitely shouldn’t.”

“Hoth chocolate?”

“...please.”

She doesn’t lift her head from her arms until the mug clicks down in front of her, ceramic on plastisteel.

“Do I ask what it was this time?”

She shrugs. “It’s hard to explain to non-sensitives.”

“Try me anyway.”

Ahsoka twists the Hoth chocolate in her hands, takes a sip as she thinks. “The Force isn’t just one thing. It’s... energy and philosophy and spirit, a sense of being that ties the entire universe together. Sentient and inanimate and living and dead, empty space and lush forests and stifled cities. For those of us who are sensitive to it, it’s possible to feel the life of everyone around you, theoretically possible to feel entire systems. If you have a Force bond, like a master and padawan, that can stretch across planets, even systems if one or both are particularly powerful.

“So just... just imagine, for a moment, what it’s like to feel the screaming of all those Jedi in the Force as their trusted men shot them down.

“Some of them were close enough that I could feel them die,” she manages. “I... it’s horrible. It’s horrific. It’s not something I can ever forget, and I want to. I want to forget what that moment was like. Not that it happened, but...”

She can feel the tears. Fuck..

“You want to dull the edges.”

“Don’t we all?” she asks, scrubbing the back of her hand across her eyes. “Leia lost her entire planet, billions of people, and she was forced to watch. Rex... Force, I can barely imagine, and I was there for most of it.”

Fett watches her, measuring. “From what he said, they were as much your brothers as his, by the end.”

“No,” she immediately denies. “They could have been, maybe, but the ones I was closest to died earlier, and then I left, and by the time the Empire rose, all but a handful were... no. Rex, I will claim as a brother in all the ways that matter, but I don’t get to do that with the rest. I don’t have the right.”

“You’re hard on yourself.”

“Fate of the galaxy, my good bitch. Guess who’s got it on her shoulders.”

He snorts at her, and nods at the mug. “Drink your Hoth chocolate. We’re landing in eight hours, and you’ve got kids to look out for.”

---------------------------

There’s a twitch in the Force when they land, something pulling at her in a way she barely feels. She’s had her shields up so fully for so long that it’s natural to hide away what she is to the point where she can hardly tell what anyone else is, either. It takes more than a moment to remember how to let herself spread out across the world.

“Auntie ‘Soka? Why’d you stop?”

She doesn’t have an answer to Leia’s prodding question. “I don’t know.”

It’s almost familiar. Old and half-forgotten, not the same as what she remembers, but--

“This way,” she says, and wanders off into the crowd. Leia and Rex follow without question. Fett curses and rushes through the rest of his transaction with the docking attendant. The sound of him jogging after them is almost funny, with the armor, but she can’t focus on that.

Ahsoka slips between people with the ease of a career built on such a habit, children trailing like ducklings. She knows this feeling, she knows this person, what is she missi--

“Oh,” she breathes, going stock still. She knows that face. She knows those braids. She even knows the presence.

Younger than Ahsoka had ever seen her, but unmistakably Master Billaba.

“Torrent, what the hell?” Fett demands, finally catching up. “You can’t just run off like that!”

“It’s Depa,” she says, eyes still fixed on the woman parsing through a datapad with an irritated vendor. She has a padawan braid. It doesn’t feel like Master Windu is on-planet, so this might be a solo mission, a... oh. Senior Padawan, Knight Elect. This is the kind of mission taken to test if she’s ready to be promoted.

Ahsoka feels light-headed.

Fett waits for her to elaborate, but she can’t. This was Kanan’s master. This was a member of the High Council. This was a woman who died and--

“You need to sit down,” Fett says, not a touch gruff. He puts a hand on her shoulder and guides her off the main walkway. “I’m... going to talk to the woman in the Jedi robes. You three just stay there and don’t get kidnapped.”

Ahsoka nods, feeling like she’s not quite inhabiting her own body.

It’s Depa.

Her eyes track Fett without conscious control, and her montrals pick up the sound.

Depa looks up when the armor comes close enough, free hand tensed in a way that says she’s preventing herself from reaching for a saber in reaction to the heavily-armored individual standing several feet away.

“Mando,” the woman says. “May I help you?”

“Are you Depa?”

Depa doesn’t do anything so dramatic as gape or step back, but she does blink rapidly for a moment. She then folds her hands down in front of her, drawing her spine up ramrod straight. “I am Jedi Padawan Depa Billaba, yes. May I ask why it is that you need to know?”

Ahsoka imagines Fett grimacing, or rolling his eyes, or maybe dithering. She can’t tell from this angle, and he has a helmet on besides. It turns his awkward silences into judgmental ones.

“I’ve had some Jedi kids on my ship, hitching a ride,” he says at length. “One of them recognized you and then just... froze.”

“You have our younglings in your care,” Depa says, carefully not accusatory, but close enough to be a warning.

“Not quite,” he says. “The one that actually came from the temple is seventeen. One of ‘em isn’t Force Sensitive, and the last one is but hasn’t been to Coruscant before. They’re trying to get the little one to the Temple for her own safety.”

Depa considers that, and then passes the datapad to the vendor. “Lead on.”

It’s surprisingly simple, really. Fett did all the talking.

And then Depa is standing right in front of her.

“Like I said,” Fett sighs. “She froze up.”

“Hello,” Depa says, hands laced together inside her sleeves. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Ahsoka shakes her head. “I know of you. I’ve seen you spar. You’ve never spoken to me.”

All true. A little misleading, but it’s fine, it’s all fine.

Depa waits a moment, and then says, “You seem to have me at a disadvantage. You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“Sokari T-Torrent,” she manages. The words feel clunky in her mouth, the sound abrasive for all that it’s just her own voice, no different from usual. A little shaky, maybe. She can feel a cool breeze on her upper arms. Shouldn’t she have armor? She should have armor. “It... it’s been a long time since I’ve seen another Jedi. I’m having a hard time believing you’re real.”

“I see,” Depa says. “Perhaps we should take this somewhere more private? You seem a little unsteady.”

Ahsoka lets herself be led back to the ship, in the company of Mand’alor Jango Fett, Jedi Padawan Depa Billaba, Princess-General Leia Organa, and good old Captain Rex.

It’s like the start of a sick joke.

---------------------------

Fett and Depa talk where she can hear, but they rarely address her directly. Both seem to realize that she’s not particularly useful right now. Leia and Rex are pressing up against her at the little table in the galley, and Ahsoka lets them.

This is real. She can feel Depa in the Force, recognizes her energy even if it’s not quite what it will-was-could-have-been. This is happening.

It’s a textbook Traumatic Stress Response case, one of them says.

Fett has his helmet off. Ahsoka’s sure that’s wrong for some reason. She thinks he might already be on wanted lists. Should she worry about Depa trying to arrest him?

Depa asks about Rex at one point. Fett tells her that someone cloned him without his knowing, but the kid is more comfortable with Ahsoka so they’re still working on what that means for him.

It’s more or less true. Rex squeezes her hand the one time someone suggests separating them. She’s not letting that happen unless Rex wants to leave for whatever reason. They’ve worked apart before. They can do it again.

“Auntie Soka? You’re shivering.”

Is she?

Leia cuddles in closer, and Ahsoka runs a hand over her hair. It’s an absentminded motion, and for all that she knows Leia’s hair is fine as silk, it feels like plastic in the moment.

“I don’t think I’m okay,” Ahsoka announces. The words hang in the air like lead balloons, and she can feel Depa staring at her. “I haven’t been for a very long time.”

“Yeah, we noticed,” Fett says. “Do you need to lay down, Torrent?”

Does she?

“No,” she says. “I... I don’t know what I need.”

“The spicy drink,” Rex tells them. “It’s grounding.”

Right. That.

Fett goes to grab it, and Depa continues to watch.

“How long ago did you leave your master?” Depa asks. “Or... did he die?”

Ahsoka closes her eyes and shakes her head. She can feel the shivers now, tremors in her biceps and a shudder she can’t control in the height of her ribcage. Her teeth grind together, jaw like stone.

“You don’t have to answer that,” Depa assures her. “I’m... going to recommend you see a mind healer on Coruscant.”

That was a forgone conclusion.

A cup clinks onto the table. Fett’s back. “Drink.”

She does.

Depa and Fett continue discussing it as “the adults” at the table. She’s older than both of them. Rex is older than all of them. Ahsoka follows about half of what they say. She agrees with most of it. Rex bullies his way into speaking when she doesn’t, without her even asking, because he knows her mind as well as she does. Fett rolls with it. Depa lets him.

She’s going to reach out to the Temple and see about getting them a ride back to Imperial Center Coruscant.

Fett makes Soka go to bed, taking Leia with her.

---------------------------

She feels more like a person come morning.

Depa’s sitting at the table, datapad in her hands and caff on the table in front of her.

“Good morning,” Ahsoka says, rough and croaking, and Depa’s eyes flick up to meet hers. She nods a shallow hello.

“Feeling better?”

“Much,” Ahsoka says, and goes about gathering a breakfast. There’s definitely some dried meat in here. She can get something fresh when they stop by the market later.

“I was hoping to speak with you about your options,” Depa tells her, once she’s sat at the table. “Fett and your friend Rex took care of most of the negotiation, and I feel like I have an idea of what would work best for you.”

Ahsoka nods slowly. “Okay.”

“There is a Master-Padawan pair a few planets away,” Depa says. “The Council informed me when I spoke with them about you and your wards. They’d be headed back to the Temple in a few days anyway, and the Council has agreed to extend an offer to Fett to handle the transportation. The presence of a Jedi Master on board will allow for him to get in and out of the Core unmolested, and we’d like for you and yours to have a Jedi escort, given what happened yesterday afternoon.”

Her complete spiral into nonbeing?

“I understand,” she says instead. “I suppose Fett agreed because he’s still trying to get Rex to like him?”

Depa shrugs. “That part isn’t my business.”

Of course it isn’t.

“Rex can stay with me for a while, right?” Ahsoka finally asks. “I know it’s not exactly protocol, but I’m...”

“In need of a support system until you’ve seen a mind healer, and against all odds, the child is part of it,” Depa summarizes. “Yes, I recognized as much. I think the Council will be able to allow some leeway there. I don’t know if he’ll enjoy it, given that all the others his age are Initiates, but we can adjust as necessary. On that note... Do you know Leia’s midichlorian count?”

“No,” Ahsoka says, and hesitantly adds, “But her biological father was my Jedi Master, and I’m told his count broke records even as a child. Given what Leia’s shown so far... it’s why I’ve been in a hurry to get her to the Temple.”

Depa frowns at her, clearly working through the implications of a Jedi having a daughter and still teaching... and then visibly dismisses the situation, eyes closing to breathe in the steam of her caff.

Biological father certainly implies a child that was raised by her mother or adopted out so the Jedi father could remain in their chosen career without a conflict of interest or duty.

She’ll tell the council the truth, or... at least Master Koon. Master Kenobi is still a padawan, but she can tell Master Koon.

She already told Jango Fett, of all people.

“Padawan Torrent?”

Her head snaps up. She hasn’t been a padawan in over fifteen years. It’s weird to hear. “I’m sorry, what?”

“I asked if you wanted some time to think it over before I presented the offer to Fett,” Depa says.

Ahsoka gets the distinct feeling that Depa is planning a report to the Council that has ‘needs a mind healer’ underlined at least three times.

“No, I’m--I’m fine. That sounds like a good plan.”

“I’ll speak with him, then. Would you like to come with?”

"No, thank you.”

---------------------------

Fett agrees. Ahsoka’s pretty sure it’s all to do with Rex and maybe Leia. It’s probably nothing to do with ‘Sokari.’ She’s a Jedi, an adult in mind and in body, or at least close enough to count. She’s a damn sight more ‘enemy’ to Fett than the other two are. Not as much as Depa, maybe, but Fett’s been playing nice with her for Leia’s sake.

He plays nice with Ahsoka for Rex’s. That’s all.

They’re only a few planets over from the meeting point, and they have a few days to hang around before the escort meets them. Depa hadn’t given them a name--apparently it could have compromised the opsec for the Jedi team--but Ahsoka’s pretty sure she’ll be able to identify almost anyone. She gets the feeling that the Force is going to send her a familiar face, just as it did Master Padawan Billaba.

Ahsoka lets herself feel the world around her. It’s dark and dreary, in the sense that the beaten-down port is full of petty crimes and less petty horrors, but it’s still lighter than most of the Empire had been. She sneaks away from the ship at night, ignoring Fett at her back, and performs a bit of vigilante justice while she can. She’ll be banned from doing so as soon as she’s reinstated as a Jedi, probably, but for now... for now, she can look at the drug cartels and ‘they’re not slaves, really’ workers and do something to help.

She doesn’t use her sabers. She doesn’t need to. It’s been a long time since she has, for small fry like these.

“What are you doing?” Fett asks her, landing heavily behind her back.

“Chip removal,” she says, hand pressed to the slave’s leg. Her eyes are closed, but she can hear him shifting. “Let me concentrate, I don’t have a meddroid for this.”

He’s silent until she finishes, and waits until the people she’s helped are on their way to the planet’s freedom routes. He doesn’t ask what she did with the owners.

“You’ve done this before.”

“Regularly,” she confirms. “You?”

He doesn’t answer that, just ambles over to the the chains and stares down at them.

“Fett?”

“You go through this like it’s as easy as breathing,” he says. “It’s... impressive.”

“I guess?” she hesitates to continue. “I’m... I don’t think of it that way. This is the easy stuff. A time-waster that helps people. If I wanted to help for real, I’d been going after Jabba or Sidious or--”

“How old were you?” he asks, turning on his heel to face her dead-on. The vocoder of his helmet pulls the emotion from his voice. “When did this... these missions, the slavery battles, when did that start for you?”

“Fourteen,” she says. She’s not entirely sure, really, what counted as a mission for ending slavery and what counted as just a part of war, but she can round down. “Maybe fifteen. It’s a bit of a blur.”

“And you just kept doing it.”

“Of course,” she says. “If I have the time and the energy, if I need to do something and there’s nothing official on my hands, why not?”

He doesn’t answer her.

---------------------------

Rex greets them before she does.

Ahsoka, in her defense, is asleep at the time. It’s a restless sleep, but it’s enough that she doesn’t sense the nearing Force signatures until they’re almost at the ship.

She recognizes one of them.

“Auntie ‘Soka?” Leia questions, when she lurches to her feet and starts pulling on her boots with all the energy of a zombie. “Where are you going?”

“Jedi,” Ahsoka grunts. “Here.”

“I see.”

Leia dresses to follow her, in a little coat that’ll withstand the chill of the outside air, and Ahsoka makes it to the cargo hold just in time to hear Rex saying, “I’m not shaking your hand until you put your gloves on, Vos.”

She laughs to herself, breathless with the knowledge of what she’s about to find. She jumps the railing of the upper walkway, drops down just in front of the Master-Padawan team, and keeps her back to Fett and Rex. “Hello, there.”

One human, one Kiffar. She knows the latter.

“Would you be Sokari Torrent?” the Master asks.

“I am,” she says, with a slight bow. She can tell there’s a bit of judgement for how she’s dressed, but they’re covering it well. A Shadow and his trainee know the value of armor better than most Jedi bother with. “I’m afraid Padawan Billaba didn’t inform me of your names before we met.”

“And yet your friend knew my padawan,” the Master says.

“By reputation,” she says, as smoothly as she can. “I’ve encountered Quinlan Vos before, though I doubt he remembers--”

“I’d remember someone like you,” Quinlan interrupts, with a grin she’s sure is meant to be charming and rogueish.

He’s... very young for her, and not her type. Mostly, she wants to pat him on the head, but that probably wouldn’t go over very well. She still looks like she’s younger than him.

“Anyway,” she says, turning back to the master, “I’m afraid I still don’t know who you are, Master.”

“I am Tholme,” he says, with the bow that a Master gives a Padawan. She feels a little slighted, but it’s fine. She looks the right age, it’s fine.

It’s not like they know.

“It’s nice to meet you, Master Tholme,” she says. “My charges are Rex Torrent, the young man behind me, and currently coming down the ladder is Leia Antilles. I’m sure you’re aware of Jango Fett.”

“The Mand’alor,” Quinlan volunteers, and Ahsoka can almost hear Fett’s teeth grinding.

“Don’t call me that,” he says. She’s sure he’s got a hand drifting for his blaster.

“There isn’t a whole lot of room on the ship,” she says before the men can get into whatever weird contest she’s sure someone might start. Her bet’s on Fett. “But Leia and Rex are small enough to share with me, so I’m sure we can make it work.”

“There’s spare rolls for anyone comfortable with sleeping in the hold,” Fett grunts. “Or on the floor in the passenger room.”

“Well, I guess I could ask for a little help fi--”

“Vos,” Ahsoka snaps, letting her voice take on the kind of ‘obey me or get fresher duty’ irritation that she’d perfected back when the rebellion still had her managing people, before they’d realized she was more use in the field. “Do not.”

There’s a moment’s pause, and Tholme looks unimpressed with that raised eyebrow, but the kind of unimpressed that’s split between his own padawan and the stranger before him.

“Um,” Quinlan says. “I just--”

“No,” she cuts him off. “No flirting.”

It’s weird and uncomfortable and she’d have maybe been okay with it if she was actually the seventeen-or-eighteen-ish(?) that she looked, but she’s not. She’s in her thirties and Vos is... what, twenty? Twenty-one? No.

He stares at her, and she wonders momentarily if she’d gone too far in the direction of judging his intentions in the Force and preempted actual flirtations.

“I’m sorry?” He offers, looking confused, but ashamed. “I, uh, I’ll keep that in mind.”

She definitely preempted the actual flirtation.

Fuck.

Ahsoka closes her eyes and breathes in. Breathes out. Opens her eyes. “Right. That was... I’m not sure how much Padawan Billaba told you about me.”

“Enough,” Tholme says. He moves forward and puts a hand on Quinlan’s shoulder. Ahsoka has no idea if it’s to comfort him or hold him back. “I didn’t share most of it with my padawan, but I have a general understanding of what’s going on.”

Quinlan darts a look at his teacher, but Ahsoka doesn’t acknowledge it. It’s fine. Everything is fine.

“Thank you for your understanding,” she says, and bows, and stiffly turns away to walk to the galley.

---------------------------

Leia squirms into the bench seat, shoving her way under Ahsoka’s arm like a particularly wriggly tooka.

“What was that?” Leia demands, the authority of a rebellion general rather useless in the squeaky voice of a child.

“What was what?”

“The whole thing with Padawan Vos,” Leia says. “You blew up at him before he even did anything.”

That’s pretty true.

“I felt the flirtation coming before it happened and reacted inappropriately because I panicked. I’m significantly older than him, but I can’t tell him that, so it’s just awkward and uncomfortable and... I’m not okay, Princess. I haven’t been for a long time.”

“Yeah, we can tell.”

“Leia.”

“What? I need therapy too! Captain Rex needs therapy! I’m pretty sure Fett needs therapy! You, Fulcrum, you really need therapy. None of us are okay.” She huffs, wiggling impossibly closer. “I don’t like it, but it’s true.”

“I know,” Ahsoka groans. “I just... I just need to hold out until the Temple.”

“Will you be able to hold it together if you see someone you actually care about?” Leia demands. “What are you going to do when you see Kenobi?”

“Stop.”

“I’m serious, you--”

“Leia, that’s enough,” she snaps. “I was fighting that war before you were even born, and I’ve dealt with the consequences since. I know the risks and I’ll thank you to remember who taught you to control your own mind.”

Leia stiffens, sucking in a sharp breath. “That was uncalled for.”

“You’re not the child you appear to be,” Ahsoka reminds her, not a little sharply. “You want to dish it out, be ready to take it. What will you do when we see Bail Organa? When we see the toddler that is Anakin Skywalker?”

“I get it.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Ahsoka mutters. She isn’t surprised when Leia ducks out of the embrace and leaves the galley. She lets the girl go, guilt warring with the memory of how Master Kenobi had more than once spoken that way to Anakin at the height of the war. The fact that she’s an adult in the body of a child isn’t an excuse for poking at Ahsoka’s open wounds. It was cruel and unnecessary, and unbecoming of a... not a Jedi. A princess. A politician.

She rests her head on her arms and zones out. She should meditate, but that seems like... too much effort.

She can feel Vos and Tholme setting up in the room they’ve been assigned. Neither seems particularly angry. Most likely, Tholme’s given the absolute shortest explanation of ‘child soldier, dead master, highly traumatized and emotionally unstable’ to Vos to smooth over the incident in the cargo hold. Rex is with Leia; he’s agitated, but less so than Leia herself. Fett’s annoyed, in the cockpit, but he seems annoyed as often as not. There’s a shudder at lift-off, and a few minutes later, they’re in hyperspace, headed for the Core.

Fett finds her, falls into the other bench in full armor, and drops his elbows onto the table. The helmet clunks down a moment later.

She doesn’t lift her head. “What do you want?”

“Do I need to keep Vos away from you?”

“What?”

“Vos. He made you uncomfortable. Was that him being someone that hurt you in the future, or just the interaction being awkward?”

She lifts her head. She stares at him. “What?”

He leans back and crosses his arms. “Do you need me to tell Vos to stay the hell away from you?”

She’s gaping. “You realize I’m thirty-two, right? I can handle my own battles.”

“You’re also traumatized as hell and everyone can see it,” Fett argues back. “If Vos himself is a trigger, I can handle it.”

“He’s not,” she tells him. This is strange. Fett’s being strange. “He was actually a friend of my grandmaster’s. I’m just uncomfortable with the flirting because I’m a lot older than he realizes, and I can’t tell him that.”

He nods sharply, and then looks away. The silence sits.

“Thanks for asking?” Ahsoka says, well aware of how her confusion over the offer turns it into a question. “I mean, thank you for... caring.”

I guess, she finishes in the privacy of her own head. Or at least pretending to.

Fett makes a face, still not facing her. He eyes the galley instead. She can guess where his thoughts are going. The galley is... not very big, especially with six people on board instead of one, but she’s sure they’ve stocked up enough. On the off chance they do go through more than expected, because of how many growing bodies are in residence, they can stop off and buy more. They have those resources now.

Jango never does ask what she did with the slavers.

“Who’s going to cry if I spice things properly?” he asks.

“Probably Leia,” she says immediately. “Vos will try to power through it even though he’s going to be overwhelmed. No idea about Tholme, but I think he’ll keep a straight face whether he likes it or not. Rex and I are fine, ‘hot’ was pretty much the only flavor of seasoning the GAR had.”

“GAR?”

“Grand Army of the Republic.”

He finally looks at her.

“You already knew I was a child soldier, Fett; don’t act surprised.”

“That doesn’t mean I like hearing about it.”

“I was fourteen. That’s old enough by Mando standards, Fett. Just think back, when did you get on the battlefield?”

“I take your point,” he says, lip curling unpleasantly. “It just hits different now that I’m old enough to look back and think of how damned young fourteen really is.”

Ahsoka shrugs. “Yeah, well--”

“You said the clones were ten.”

There’s the rub, isn’t it?

Of course it was about the clones.

“...closer to seven, by the end. Kamino was just making speedies at that point. Triple growth on the average instead of double, but averages in that case meant they’d been growing at double rates for six years and then got forced through four growth cycles in a single year to beef up the army when we kept losing men.” She looks down at the table, picking at a scratch in the plastipaint with her nail. “Rex and the rest of the ones from the beginning were basically twenty in mind and body, even if they’d only been decanted ten years earlier. The speedies... I always wondered. They’d gone from functionally twelve to functionally twenty in a year. That’s not... even in Kamino, that can’t have been normal. They didn’t act like adults, not the way the originals did.”

Fett rubs at his face, groaning. He swears under his breath in three different languages.

She pities him, if only because he hasn’t actually done any of this yet. He’s paying for the crimes of a man he likely won’t ever become.

She kicks him under the table. “Wanna make tiingilar and see how long it takes Vos to start crying while he insists it’s fine?”

---------------------------

Dinner is when the questions start. Some are relatively easy. Others, not so much.

“My Master was Leia’s biological father,” is an easy truth to share. “She inherited his power, so I need to get her to the temple for her own safety, because home no longer is.”

“Yes, her adoptive parents were unfortunately killed rather recently. We’d prefer not to talk about it.”

“Rex is with me. Where he goes, I go, and vice versa.”

That one gets her an odd look.

“I thought...” Quinlan trails off, gesturing between Rex and Fett.

Fett keeps his face impassive, but his discomfort and guilt leak into the Force. “I didn’t know Rex existed until I ran into these three in a spaceport cantina a few weeks ago.”

Quinlan blinks at him, looks at Rex again, and then turns back to Fett with a grin that might have been described as ‘saucy’ if he were less smug about it. “Wild oats, huh?”

“Are you shitting me right now,” Leia whispers, and Ahsoka elbows her.

“That was inappropriate, padawan.”

Quinlan’s grin fades as Fett just continues to eye him.

“Um, so--”

“How old is the kid?” Fett interrupts.

Darting eyes answer him, as Quinlan tries to gauge Rex. “Ten? Maybe twelve?”

“And how old am I?”

“...early thirties?”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

Quinlan’s grin fades further as he does the math.

“I’d have been between fifteen and seventeen when he was born,” Fett says, tone flat. “Between fourteen and sixteen at conception. I know damn well I wasn’t doing anything that could have resulted in a kid at that age.”

Quinlan rallies. “So, brothers?”

Tholme sighs loudly, hand over his eyes.

“I’m a clone,” Rex says, and Ahsoka can feel the amusement he gets out of Quinlan’s confused shock. They’d both had plenty of respect for Master Vos, but Padawan Vos was nothing but trouble. “Harvested genetic material, grown in a tube, inconsistent aging meaning I don’t even know how old I am for sure.”

“I broke him out,” Ahsoka adds, which is half true.

“There was a chip in my head,” Rex adds, with a bright smile. Quinlan’s discomfort grows. “She got it out. Also, lots of brothers. None of them are... around anymore. The creators were trying to make an army.”

Vos and Tholme have no response. Fett looks like he’s been carved out of stone. Leia’s just ignoring them and picking at her food.

Ahsoka lifts a hand and, without looking, Rex high-fives her.

---------------------------

“Drop your elbow.”

Ahsoka tries to cover her smile at the dirty look that Leia shoots Fett. Fett remains unimpressed by the glare of royalty, just gestures for the girl to do as he said.

“I know how to fight,” Leia grumbles. “I took lessons. I was good at them.”

“And I’m better,” Fett says, leaving no room for argument. “You want the Torrents to take over?”

The Torrents. Rex and Soka. She likes being referred to that way. Like they’re a team that never got split up.

Force, she wished they’d never gotten split up.

“Again,” Fett orders, and Leia moves through the Mandalorian kata with ill grace in her emotions and all grace in her sweeping limbs.

Well, as much grace as an undersized six-year-old can, at any rate.

“Think he’ll ask me to spar her again?” Rex asks, dropping down into the seat next to Ahsoka and passing her a drink.

“Maybe,” she acknowledges. “I think he’s wondering if it’s worth asking Vos to spar with her, so she gets more experience with size differences.”

“Hm?”

“She flinched at his face again,” she tells him. “The whole... thing with Boba, I guess. She still won’t tell me why Fett triggers her sometimes, but he’s not pressing her to spar with him, and there’s only so much she can get out of fighting me. Asking Tholme would be presumptuous, but Vos is just a padawan. I think it’d work out.”

“And you?”

She looks at him, already feeling a cresting wave of bullshit she doesn’t want to deal with. “What about me?”

“Are you going to spar with the Jedi?”

She should. She hasn’t sparred with a saber since she got tossed back into a body only half-familiar to her. She’s let Leia borrow the shorter one to learn some basic blocking moves, Shii-Cho and then, with hesitance, the first Soresu form. Another time, she loaned it to Rex to practice some attacks; they both know that the next time he picks up her saber in battle, having lost his weapons or she her grip, it will be neither the first or last time he wields a sword of light. None of that, however, is... sparring.

None of that is against someone who knows what they’re doing.

How long has it been since she sparred with anyone other than Kanan and Ezra?

How long has it been since she sparred without the looming specter of Darth Vader in the back of her mind, without fear of the Inquisitors, without the knowledge that any saber held by someone other than her two friends would be red as blood and twice as drenched.

Would she be able to hold back as she fought?

“I should,” she acknowledges, eyes on where Fett is nudging Leia’s feet into position for some kind of leveraging flip. She’s so small. “It would probably be a good idea to spar against a master at some point.”

“Do you think you can?” Rex asks.

“I never knew him,” she says. “And he isn’t Dark. It should be fine.”

Rex nods, taking her word for it. They watch as Leia stumbles on a final move, and Fett gestures for her to sit down and get a drink.

“That man is a terror,” she informs them.

(She’d once described him as a slave-driver. She had not made that mistake twice.)

“Least it’s not Kamino!” Rex tells her cheerfully. When Leia refuses to look impressed, he laughs at her.

Ahsoka has a half-second’s warning before heavy boots thud to the ground next to her. “What’s Kamino?”

“Hello, Vos, it’s nice to see you too,” she drawls. “I’m good, thanks for asking, and yourself?”

The boy-not-quite-man rolls his eyes. “Hi, Torrents; hi, tiny one.”

Leia glares at him next.

“So, Kamino?”

“Planet by Rishi,” Rex says.

“Why were you there?”

“They specialize in cloning.”

Ahsoka covers her mouth as the conversation drops into the same awkward gap that always happens when Quinlan stumbles into a subject he didn’t know to avoid.

“Like... you were made there, or you were researching how it works for your own--”

Ahsoka slaps a hand over his mouth. “Now’s a great time to stop talking.”

He licks her palm.

She bares her teeth and arches her fingers just enough to press nails into his cheek.

He bites at her palm, and she yanks her hand away.

“You’re all children,” Leia accuses, conveniently forgetting that Ahsoka and Rex are both over a decade older than her.

“I can throw you the length of a swimming pool,” Ahsoka tells her. “One of the fancy competition-ready ones that would make a Tatooinian cry. You are absolutely the child here.”

“Using the Force is cheating, sir,” Rex informs her.

“Only if there’s a competition,” Ahsoka shoots back. “And proving that a certain princess is a small child is not a competition. It’s a declarative fact.”

“I’m going to rip open the seams on all your tops except the ugliest one,” Leia decides.

“Try me,” Ahsoka challenges. “Adi’ka.”

A low, rough cough interrupts them. “Are you done?”

Fett has his arms crossed, and an eyebrow raised. He knows they’re all adults here, and is entirely unamused. As the silence drags, the eyebrow climbs a little higher.

“Done with what?” Quinlan finally asks, thereby volunteering himself to spar in hand-to-hand with Jango Fett, as one does.

“Poor, poor Vos,” Rex laughs, watching as Fett barks out orders at Quinlan every five seconds to fix his footwork, to stop dropping his guard, to stop wasting energy on flips instead of just dodging the easy way.

“Throw him!” Ahsoka calls. To her delight, Fett obliges.

The thing is, Quinlan isn’t bad at brawling. He’s got training, endurance, skill. The man knows what he’s doing, objectively. He’s just not a match for Fett, and is used enough to relying on his saber that his hand-to-hand skills are rusty. They are perhaps less rusty than those Jedi who don’t take questionable jobs in the Mid-Outer Rim, and Ahsoka’s got a suspicion that Vos regularly gets into bar fights in his downtime, but none of that is enough for him to actually do more than survive against Fett without his saber.

Even the saber wouldn’t help, if Fett had his armor.

“Whose idea was this?”

Ahsoka cranes her head back and smiles. “Hello, Master Tholme. Vos... volunteered.”

“Did he know he was volunteering?”

“No comment.”

Tholme snorts, crossing his arms and eyeing the spar in front of him. “I thought Fett hated Jedi. Giving us a ride for the sake of you three is one thing, but why is he teaching my padawan?”

Ahsoka shrugs. “Constructive bullying?”

There’s a small twitch of a smile, quickly gone. “He said something wrong, I’m guessing?”

“There was no way he could have known,” she dismisses. “We’re just, like, ninety-percent tragic backstories.”

“You’d think the Force would warn him,” Rex notes.

“That’s not how the Force works,” Leia chides.

“No, no, he’s right,” Ahsoka corrects. “The Force does sometimes step in to stop a person from saying something stupid. However, Padawan Vos is at an age where people think they are very rational while being more irrational than they likely ever will be again.”

“Do I want to ask what you were doing at that age?” Tholme asks.

“Running bla...” she trails off, then whips around to gape at him.

He smiles, bland and unassuming. “Does Fett know?”

“Know... what?” Ahsoka asks.

“That you’re significantly older than you look,” he says, voice just low enough that the sparring duo can’t hear him. “All three of you.”

Ahsoka turns back to the spar, only catching Tholme out of the corner of her eye. “He knows.”

“Mm. Were you planning on telling the Council?”

“Yes.” That part was never in question. “How did you figure it out?”

“I am a good investigator,” he says. “And you rely a little too heavily on your physical forms to obfuscate. Were it just one of you, that wouldn’t be a problem, but the pattern repeated across three is a little easier to discern.”

“I hoped the whole ‘child soldiers’ thing would be a bigger distraction,” Ahsoka mutters. She glances at Leia and Rex. Both of them are used to being in charge to some degree, giving orders and making contingency plans, but in this... in this, Ahsoka is in charge. They’d decided that at the very start. It didn’t matter that Rex had lived longer and had more experience, or that Leia had held the highest Rebellion rank of the three of them. Ahsoka had been agreed as leader, and they were relying on her.

They’re waiting on her orders. Stiff and unhappy, in Leia’s case, but they trust her.

“Will you be telling Vos?” She asks.

“No,” Tholme says. “Your secrets remain your own unless they endanger us, and I’ve a feeling they won’t be.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Rex jokes, smile not reaching his eyes. “I’ve been working with this family for too long to trust that trouble won’t find them around the next corner.”

“This family?” Tholme repeats.

“Sokari was telling the truth about her master being Leia’s biological father,” Rex says. He shrugs. “I worked with him, with his wife, with both of his kids, with his master and his padawan. All of them, to a one, are trouble magnets.”

“Ah, but that’s not the secret that’s putting us in danger,” Tholme points out. “Simply existence as a Jedi.”

Rex shrugs. “Fair enough. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.”

Ahsoka lurches to her feet, turning with a smile and dancing backward into the the stretch of empty cargo hold they used for such things. “A spar, Master Tholme?”

He looks past her, to Quinlan, and raises a brow. “Would you not prefer to spar with someone a little closer to your level first?”

She barks out a laugh. “Master Tholme, I’m afraid I’ve spent more of my life fighting to survive than having normal friendly spars. My style is more lethal than the average, and you’ve already seen what war’s done to my mind. I ask to spar with you because, if I lose control, if I slip in time or react on an instinct that isn’t appropriate, I trust that you’ll be more able to stop me than a senior padawan.”

He smiles. “Yes, I gathered as much. Still, better to ask. Shall we wait for them to finish up?”

Ahsoka shrugs, turns, and yells. “Clear the deck!”

Rex snorts behind her, and lowly mutters, “Sir, yes, sir.”

She smirks at him over her shoulder. “At ease, Captain.”

“That’s ‘Commander’ to you, I got promoted,” he sniffs, chin held high.

Heavy steps herald Fett’s arrival at their little group. “The hells are you doing?”

“I’m going to have a spar with a Jedi Master, and I want you and Vos to not get stabbed.”

“I’m not that easy to injure in an actual fight, let alone by accident,” Fett grouses. He looks up and over at Vos, who is already significantly taller, if a fair shot less built. “This one, on the other hand...”

“Hey!”

Ahsoka laughs and backs into the center of the cargo hold, drawing her sabers. “Don’t worry, Vos, I won’t play dirty. You’ll probably get your master back in one piece.”

He wrinkles his nose at her. “Getting a bit ahead of yourself there, aren’t you? He’s a Jedi Master and former Watchman. You’re... what, eighteen?”

Ahsoka raises a brow and activates her sabers, tapping the blades together and watching as more than one person winces. “Wanna bet on how long I last?”

“No,” he says immediately, stepping back to join Rex on the bench. “You’ve already blindsided me enough. I’m not dumb enough to fall for whatever you’ve got up your sleeve.”

“I don’t have sleeves.”

“Armwarmers-slash-greaves, then.”

“Greaves go on the legs, these are vambraces.”

He throws his hands up in the air. “I’m just going to stop talking now!”

“Good plan,” Leia snarks, and then literally hisses when Rex ruffles her hair.

Tholme lights his saber and sinks into an opening stance.

Ahsoka mirrors him.

---------------------------

She wins, but barely. She's had a few weeks to practice her forms, has sparred hands-only with Rex and Fett, but this is her first real try at using her sabers against a person, instead of a blaster or thin air, since she arrived in the past. She’s only mostly adjusted to her body.

But Tholme is a healer and a watchman, not a duelist. Ahsoka held her own against Ventress, against Grievous, against Maul when she was this age. Still adjusting to her body or not, her lineage is one of battle, and it bled true.

“You’re terrifying,” Quinlan tells her after they’re done, smiling like the sun as he hands her a towel. “Please never turn that on me.”

She laughs at him. “Would you believe that I’m out of practice?”

“Out of practice with what?” he asks, horrified and fascinated. “Fighting Sith Lords?”

“Among other things,” she says, and smirks when he chokes on his drink. “Multiple darkside users who claimed to be Sith, at least. One being a full Lord, one that was disowned by his master, and one that was apprenticed to a Banite apprentice, so she wasn’t technically allowed to be a Darth because of the rule of two.”

Tholme meets her eyes past Quinlan’s shoulder, head tilted and eyes half-shut in consideration. He’s taking her seriously. He knows what she’s not saying.

“How...” Quinlan trails off and shakes his head. “You know what, no. Asking you people questions never ends well.”

“Good plan,” Ahsoka says, clapping a hand down on his shoulder. “Also, you need to spar with Fett more. Your footwork is shit.”

“It is not,” Quinlan gripes. “You’re all just scary good at this stuff.”

“You mean surviving?” Leia pipes up, and smiles innocently when Quinlan turns to pout at her.

“You’re getting bullied by a six-year-old,” Rex informs him.

“Yeah,” Quinlan sighs. “I know.”

Ahsoka laughs, and it’s fine. It’s all fine. For a week, everything is honestly great. She trains, she laughs, she works through the nightmares.

Then fucking Denon happens.

---------------------------

Denon is a city-planet on the intersection of two major hyperlanes. It’s the kind of place where they stop for two things:

Fuel.

Paperwork.

Technically, there’s a whole mess of paperwork they have to fill out to continue along this specific hyperlane, since they aren’t official Republic ships, and don’t have the licenses to just pass along like ships that are pre-registered to the Trade Federation or the like. They could sneak past--literally all of them know smuggler’s routes--but it’s honestly less of a pain to do things legally. They have a Jedi Master. They have cash. Some of that cash wasn’t quite legally acquired, but nobody needs to know that.

It’s supposed to be a pit stop. That’s all.

It’s just a pit stop.

But no, the galaxy isn’t that kind and Ahsoka’s luck is currently being compounded with a Skywalker, two Fetts, and Vos, which means that of course they run into trouble. Of course they do. There was never any other option, was there?

“Motherfucker,” Ahsoka snaps, lifting her head up and slamming her drink on the table.

The glass is empty. That’s good. They’re in a restaurant right now, a little splurging after weeks with only each others’ company, and spilling the sugary child-friendly juice with that move would have drawn way too much attention from the servers.

“Language,” Tholme says, voice idly unconcerned.

“Sir?” Rex asks, kicking Ahsoka under the table. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wr--that jackass,” she hisses, getting to her feet. “Rex, grab a blaster, I’ve got shebs to kick.”

“Okay,” Rex says, grabbing one out of Fett’s holster and scooting out of the booth before anyone can tell him not to. “Whose?”

“I didn’t even know that he was... osik, I don’t have jurisdiction,” she realizes. “I don’t have any record of wrongdoing. I can’t arrest him since we don’t have evidence of criminal wrongdoing...”

“Are you two going to explain what’s going on?” Vos asks. “Or sit down, maybe?”

Ahsoka makes her decision. She eyes the window--the restaurant in question is a little dingy, but it’s also several dozen stories in the air. “Rex, remember the thing we did on Geonosis that you hated?”

He pauses, and then sighs heavily. “Yes, sir. I remember the... yeeting.”

Hah. That slang doesn’t even exist yet.

“Great. With me!”

It’s a good thing the windows are forcefields instead of transparisteel. A bit of a twist to the energy and they’re gone.

She only hears a little screaming before the wind tears all noises away while they plummet.

They land lightly--of course--and Ahsoka wraps them both in a don’t notice me aura. Nobody even notices that they’ve just come from above. It’s great that she can just Do These Things again, and get brushed off as Weird Jedi Shit, instead of worrying about the Empire. She’s missed being able to jump out of windows without fear.

Rex follows her as she starts running through the city. They don’t have comms, and he’s still so small, which means he can’t keep up with her even if she runs at normal speeds without Force enhancement.

“Should you carry me?” he asks, before she can figure out if it’s worth suggesting. She did it a few times before they joined up with Jango.

“It’s not... urgent, I think,” she says. She hesitates to speak, even as she keeps jogging with Rex at her heels. “Honestly, I’m trying to figure out if there’s anything I can ding him for so we can attack him. It’s all well and good that I can beat him right now, but all the crimes I know about haven’t happened yet, so it wouldn’t be legal...”

“Commander?”

“Hm?”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

She scrolls the conversation back mentally, considers, and says, “Oh.”

“Who’s getting steamrolled?”

“Uh, Maul’s here,” Ahsoka admits.

“Ah,” Rex says. He makes a face. “I understand the desire to jump out a window, now. I don’t agree with it, but I understand.”

Ahsoka laughs. “I mean, I just... every time I’ve seen him for almost twenty years, it’s been like... on sight, you know? We’ve never not attacked each other, except when I needed him to cause problems on Mandalore. But I always knew I was in the right, then.”

“So... what do we arrest him for?” Rex prompts.

“Um... carrying a lightsaber without a license?” she hazards. “We’ll need Tholme there. Hopefully I can just shout at him and he’ll attack me, but I think he only went full nutjob after Master Kenobi cut his legs off. He might be too controlled to try to kill me just for yelling at him.”

“...do we have to stalk him?” Rex asks, sounding like he’d most likely sigh if he weren’t mid-run.

She scoops him up and swings him around onto her back before she answers. “I think we have to stalk him, Rex’ika.”

“Don’t call me that.”

---------------------------

Maul is... exceptionally sneaky, actually. Either that, or he hasn’t done anything wrong yet. Ahsoka’s betting on the former, because she’s seen this particular skocha kung take over a planet before anyone realized he was the most dangerous person around.

Or maybe he’s just not committing crimes, and is in fact just here to buy groceries.

He’s examining a papaya.

She fantasizes about jumping across the market and greeting him with a heel to the cheekbone.

“Are you imagining a flying kick, Sir?”

“Yeah...”

“He’s examining a papaya, Sir.”

“I know...”

“Does he know we’re here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? Do you think I should go hit him?”

“No.”

“Should I hit on him?”

“No, Sir. I would not advise that.”

“He’s looking at the neloms.”

“I can see that.”

“Why does he have to be so bo--did he just fucking bite a nelom?”

“It appears so, Sir.”

“Like... like rind and all. Just bit the little fucker.”

“Seems it.”

A scuff of metal. “What the fuck are you two doing?”

Ahsoka tips her head around to peer through the grate. “We’re spying, Fett, what does it look like we’re doing?”

Rex cranes his head. “We’re hanging upside-down from a fire escape to get a look at a suspected Sith Apprentice that is currently shopping for various fruits, Mand’alor.”

Ahsoka waves. “Hi, Master Tholme.”

“Sokari,” the master greets. “This seems a very conspicuous way to spy.”

She shrugs as well as she can from this angle. “Yes, but you see, this way’s more fun.”

“Is it now.”

Rex shifted. “He’s on the move!”

“To kill someone?!”

“No, to the deli meats.”

“Kriff.”

---------------------------

Apparently, Tholme and Fett had told Quinlan to take care of Leia, as Leia had wanted to finish her juice and refused to get involved in the Torrents’ nonsense. According to her, if they couldn’t be bothered to explain the nonsense, they didn’t need her.

This was true and accurate.

Quinlan shows up while they’re still stalking Maul, having moved to a low rooftop for a decent vantage point with less likelihood of being spotted. He’s giving Leia an eopie-back ride, and the pout on her face at needing it is adorable. She pouts harder when she sees them.

“Are you even trying to hide?” Leia scoffs.

“Not really,” Ahsoka admits. She’s got Fett’s binoculars out. “I’m not sure he’s caught wind of the fact that we’re here yet.”

“Or he has and he’s just biding his time to escape while we’re distracted,” Tholme points out.

“Meh,” Ahsoka says, avidly devouring the visual that is a teenage Maul glaring at leafy vegetables. “I just want him to do something so I have an excuse to beat his ass.”

“Do I get to know who?” Quinlan asks, setting Leia down on the roof. “Or are we going to keep being completely unwilling to share information?”

“Baby Sith Lord,” Ahsoka says. “He’s fifteen. A child.”

“A baby,” Rex agrees.

“You’re... that’s... ugh,” Quinlan groans as loudly and as dramatically as he dares, flopping down to the rooftop. “Master Tholme, please tell me this isn’t a real Sith.”

“He’s Dark,” Tholme confirms. “Sith is... up for debate until we have evidence.”

“He’s a bitch is what he is,” Ahsoka mutters. She observes the teenager in question stop to poke at some pink tomatoes. “E chu ta, break the law, already!”

“Does he have a lightsaber?” Quinlan asks. “If he has a lightsaber and no Jedi ID or specialty license, we can probably arrest him.”

“Auntie Soka doesn’t have a license or ID,” Leia points out.

“She’s got a Jedi escort,” Tholme says. “And if our supposed Sith is polite and plays nice, we can probably escort him to the Temple as well.”

Rex snorts derisively.

“Do you know why he’s on Denon?” Fett asks.

“No clue,” Ahsoka admits. “Evil reasons, probably.”

“You’re useless,” Leia tells her.

“Thanks, princess, how’s that attempt to open the jam jar by yourself coming?”

Leia says something very inappropriate for a princess, for a child, and for a lady. It’s fairly appropriate for a soldier, which is admittedly what she’s been for a few years now. Ahsoka sticks her tongue out at the girl like the mature operative she is.

“I wish we could still get him to lose his osik by just showing up and insulting him,” Rex mutters, low enough that Quinlan probably can’t hear.

“I wanna punch him in the face,” Ahsoka confesses. “I want him to try to punch me in the face, and fail.”

“Don’t bully the baby Sith,” Rex admonishes.

“He’s a Sith.”

“He’s fifteen, it’s tacky.”

“But it’s Maul.”

“I know, but you’re tw--significantly older than him.”

“But... but it’s the motherfucker himself.”

“...you can bully him a little, but only because he’s a Sith.”

Fett steals the binoculars. “You can borrow them again when you stop acting like children.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Rex says, dry as Ryloth. “I’m ten.”

“Pretty tall for your age,” Ahsoka mutters, and then giggles.

“Don’t steal my jokes,” Rex says. He elbows her, hard.

“You know,” Quinlan says, slow and tired. “Master Tholme and I are trained investigators.”

Ahsoka and Rex look at each other, and then up at him.

“Okay?”

“...do you want me to find actual evidence of this guy doing something criminal?”

“Oh, yes please.”

---------------------------

Quinlan, as it turns out, is not overselling his skills. He does catch Maul doing something illegal later that day. It’s a little more ‘stealing corporate secrets in the dead of night’ and less ‘torturing people for kicks,’ but it’s still enough to legally arrest him. Quinlan attempts to do so.

Quinlan does not succeed, and is forced to jump out a window to avoid getting cut in half. Maul follows, steals a passing speeder by throwing out the driver, and takes off. Someone--looks like Tholme--drops back to save the driver, but the rest of them give chase. Ahsoka gleefully takes point on that, of course. She’s the best pilot.

(Rex looks bored, but someone is likely to puke by the end of the night. She hopes it’s not Leia, who insisted on coming for some fucking reason.)

“How the kriff is a teenager that good?!” Quinlan yells, clinging to the edge of the speeder to avoid getting tipped out as Ahsoka swerves around a corner with a wild laugh.

“He’s a Sith!” Leia shouts over the wind. “What do you think?”

Quinlan is not impressed by the claim of Sith.

Ahsoka screeches as she drifts across four lanes of traffic and into an alleyway to pursue Maul. He’s pretty good at dodging cross-building walkways, but she’s better. She bares her teeth, hissing, and tries to pick a plan.

“Vos, how’s your aim with Force throws?” She calls to the backseat.

“Uh, decent?”

“Great! Fett’s the projectile!”

Vos takes a second longer to process that than Jango does.

“I’m wh--”

He cuts off, screaming, and is flung forward by Quinlan to crash headfirst into a teenage Sith.

“Take the wheel!” Ahsoka commands, not waiting to see who follows the order, because Fett and Maul are both getting to their feet, the other speeder is about to crash, and she’s not sure who’s going to win that fight.

She jumps from the speeder they’ve been violently dragging around Denon, and lands feet-first on Maul’s... shoulder.

Hm.

That definitely dislocated something.

“You should wear armor!” she chirps at him, drawing both sabers and grinning as he whirls to face her, eyes wide with hate.

He’s utterly silent.

That’s disturbing. Expected, but disturbing.

“Did you just throw me?” Fett demands, higher pitched than she’d normally expect.

“No, Vos threw you.”

“Because you told him to!”

“Yeah, it’s a good strategy!”

“It is not!”

“Why not? Throwing people was standard practice in the GAR.”

She can’t see his face, but she’s pretty sure he’s about ready to strangle her.

Ahsoka cannot, at that point, continue snarking with the father of her best friend, because there’s a red lightsaber coming for her throat, and she should probably worry about that. Maul’s very good at killing people and she’d like to avoid becoming part of that statistic.

As she is quickly reminded, he is... fifteen. And shorter than she’s used to. And already injured.

It’s really, really easy to take him out, actually.

At some point, the other speeder was safely recovered before it caused property damage, and their own is landing a few meters away with Vos and the kids.

“You have Force-negating cuffs, right?” Ahsoka asks.

“No, Master Tholme has them.”

“Oh,” she says, and grimaces. “I guess I’ll just... keep sitting on him then.”

Maul snarls, and she raps him on the skull. “Stop that, it’s uncivilized.”

Rex snorts.

Jango makes a noise that is incredibly frustrated with the lot of them, and turns on Rex. “Was she telling the truth?”

“About?”

“Throwing people being standard practice for the GAR.”

Rex’s face goes pained. “It was in the five-oh-first. And a few others.”

“What’s the GAR?” Quinlan asks.

“None of your damn business,” Fett snaps.

Quinlan throws his hands up in the air again. “Come on! I just proved I know what I’m doing!”

“And their tragic backstory is none of your business, prudii!”

Quinlan blinks at him, and then glances at Ahsoka. “Um.”

“He called you a shadow since your training, um, seems to be pointing in that direction,” she says as carefully as she can. “We were theorizing.”

“Wh... you actually paid attention?” Quinlan asks, looking horribly confused. “I thought I was just annoying you.”

Ahsoka laughs at him. “Oh, Vos... I’ve been running black ops for... much longer than most would guess. Trust me, I know another spy when I see them.”

She smiles as kindly as she can, because she hadn’t actually meant to make him feel left out or unwanted or... well, she’d been pretty patronizing, especially for someone seemingly younger than him. The smile does not work. Quinlan just looks kind of horrified about how young she just implied she started spy work.

Granted, she’d been sixteen for Zygerria...

Deciding to ignore him for a bit, she shifts on Maul’s back and pats him on the cheek. “Don’t worry, Baby Sith. We’re going to get you lots of nice therapy. Mind healers, no Sith tortures, all that fun stuff. Maybe some plushies.”

“You’re also getting therapy, right?” Quinlan asks. “Please say you are. I’m required for the specifics of my training and if anything you’ve said is true, I feel like you really need it and I’m scared of what’ll happen if you don’t.”

Ahsoka laughs, knowing exactly how empty it sounds. “Oh hell, if I didn’t get therapy, I imagine Kix would rise from the grave to force me into it.”

The name means nothing to anyone except Rex, and... ah, yeah, she told Fett about Kix a few weeks ago.

“No more throwing me without warning,” Fett grumbles, dropping to sit on the ground next to her. “Especially not at baby Sith Lords.”

“I am not a child!” Maul spits.

“He speaks!” Ahsoka cheers. “Aw, I knew you could do it.”

“’Soka, I told you not to bully him,” Rex complains. “It’s tacky. You’re being tacky.”

“I’m allowed to be tacky,” Ahsoka declares. “I’ve died twice, that’s, like, permission from the universe.”

“You’ve died twice?” Quinlan asks, back in ‘fascinated horror’ territory. “Wait, no, I shouldn’t ask--”

“Too late! The first time was on a planet that doesn’t exist and my Master lost his mind, killed a god, and used the good favor of another god to have me brought back to life at her expense. Not in that order.”

“I--what? No, that’s--what?”

Ahsoka smiles brightly. “You asked.”

Tholme finally shows up with the cuffs.

---------------------------

“You should eat something.”

He glares at her.

“Baby Sith Lords need to eat.”

He keeps glaring at her.

“Maul, you’ll never get big and strong and ready to kill if you don’t eat your vegetables.”

He bares his teeth.

“No, I don’t eat my veggies, but I’m a Togruta, so if I eat too many vegetables I throw up.”

Rex kicks her thigh, right on the faulds. “What did I say about bullying the Sith Lord?”

“Not to.”

“And what are you doing?”

“Making him eat his vegetables.”

“Soka.”

“Rex’ika.”

He kicks at her again. “Get up, we’re swapping out the watch.”

“But I wanted to hang out with my favorite little criminal mastermind.”

Rex drops to the floor and presses his forehead to her shoulder. “How the hell is being around this guy the first thing to make you cheer up in weeks?”

“I’m allowed to be mean to him.”

“He’s going to bite you.”

“I’ll bite back.”

Rex jabs a finger into her ribs, and she squeaks. “Go get something to eat, Commander.”

“Fine,” she huffs, rolling to her feet and moseying along to the galley. She walks in on Tholme and Fett having an argument about the ways in which Jedi and Mandalorians differ. Quinlan’s on the side, watching with wide eyes, and little Leia’s drinking a juice box at his side, tucked up under his arm and occasionally saying things to fan the flames. Ahsoka assumes she’s enjoying herself.

She opens the cooling unit, looks over the contents, and pulls out a raw leg of eopie mutton. She leans against the counter, bites into the chilled-but-not-frozen meat, and uses the back of one hand to wipe the blood off her chin. The ‘real adults’ don’t notice.

“I’m like ninety percent sure you’re doing this to mess with me but also...” Quinlan trails off, staring at her with horror. “Why?”

“A girl’s gotta eat.”

“Yeah, but all the obligate carnivores I know are like... generally holding to basic rules of courtesy when it comes to not grossing people out,” Quinlan says. “Like, I don’t chew with my mouth open. You don’t... eat in the most intimidating--did you just crack the bone with your teeth?!”

Ahsoka smirks at him, using her free hand to take away the shard of bone so she can suck out the marrow without eating the bones themselves. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this isn’t polite society. We’re in a galley on a bounty hunter’s ship, and I’ve been living on the run or in an army for most of my life. Table manners are optional.”

“No, they’re not,” Leia orders. “Fett, it’s your ship, tell her to--”

“--and another thing!” Fett snaps at Tholme, clearly paying less than no attention to the food argument.

Ahsoka keeps on eating, trying to catch wind of where the discussion’s at. Mostly, it seems to be at ‘talking past each other.’ Neither of them seems to have fully grasped more than the absolute most basic parts of the other culture, and that’s only enough to insult each other, not actually have a constructive conversation. She’d have expected more out of Tholme, at least. He’s not exactly young.

“Hey, quick question,” she says, in a moment where both of them have paused for breath and the opportunity to seethe. “Fett, when’s the last time you worked with a Jedi, or any member of a Force-based religion, before I popped into your life?”

His nose scrunches up as he makes a face.

“And Tholme, when’s the last time you worked with anyone from the Mandalorian system?”

Tholme’s reaction isn’t any more gracious than Fett’s.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” she says. “Vos, were either of them actually interested in that conversation, or just looking for an excuse to yell?”

“Now listen here, jetiika--”

“Fett,” she snaps. “I am not a child.”

“And neither am I,” he growls right back. “This is my ship, and I damn well don’t need you treating me like a misbehaving youngling. You’ve got a problem, you bring it to my face, not get all smug about people’s tempers blowing over.”

Well, then.

She smiles thinly. “Of course.”

He stands with his arms crossed, in full armor save for the helmet. She puts aside the eopie meat and wipes her hands, smiling until she can put her hands on her hips and let it drop to a challenge.

“You know, I’m just--I’m just gonna go,” Quinlan mutters, pulling Leia out with him, the girl hanging from under one of his arms. “This, uh, this looks like a problem for... you folks. Um. Yeah.”

He sidles out.

Tholme doesn’t.

Fett rubs at the bridge of his nose, and then gestures at the table. “Sit.”

“I’d prefer not to.”

He drops his hand and glares at her. “We have another week on this ship together. We are going to have this conversation. Sit.”

She sits, right on the warm spot left behind by Quinlan and Leia. She crosses her arms, lifts a brow, and waits.

Fett takes the seat across from her. Tholme leans against the counter.

“We all know you’re older than you look,” Fett says. “I heard Tholme mention it, I know that much has been shared. You’re acting like an actual teenager, and I’ve... I’ve put up with a lot. I am trying to keep things civil, particularly with you. I’ve tried to be friendly. You’ve been fucked up since we met, fine, everyone’s got trauma. The thing where you’ve started talking shit to our faces for what seems like your own amusement? That has to stop. You’re older than me, Torrent. Fucking act like it.”

She blinks at him, slow and not exactly happy, and turns to Tholme.

The man shrugs. “I was planning to put up with it until we arrived to the temple and handed you over to some mind healers. Fett doesn’t have that kind of time.”

There’s a curdle in her stomach, defensive and angry and guilty.

“You’ve been... a bitch,” Fett finally says. “You know that. I’m not going to mince words. You’ve been holier-than-thou and rude and condescending, and aiming that at Antilles is one thing, when you’ve apparently known her since she was a toddler and taught her things. Aiming at the rest of us isn’t going to fly. We’re all adults trying to share a space. Stop acting like... just like you have been.”

There is no defense to be made that they aren’t both already aware of.

She closes her eyes and tries to strangle the burst of irrational rage.

Their accusations aren’t unfounded.

They deserve an apology.

She is in the wrong.

She’s felt freer than she had in years, and in that freedom allowed herself too much rein, let herself lace her words with barbed wires and poison instead of sparks and spices, comments that were cruel instead of just joking. Too familiar. Too comfortable.

“My behavior’s been inappropriate,” she finally says, the words clumsy and too big in her mouth. “You’re right about that. I’m sorry, and I’ll endeavor to keep a tighter rein on my less pleasant behaviors in the future.”

At least she only lashes out with words. It could be worse.

She opens her eyes, fixes her gaze on the wall behind Fett, wrestles her expression into stiff neutrality. “Am I dismissed?”

“...uh, no, not after that,” Fett says, sounding just a little horrified. “What the hell was that?”

Tholme hisses out a breath. “Let her go.”

“No, this needs to be discussed, that’s not a healthy rea--”

“Fett, let her go,” Tholme insists, low and heavy.

Fett looks between the two for a moment, seems to come to a realization he doesn’t like, and then gestures almost violently towards the door. “Fine. Go.”

She walks out, doesn’t sprint. She’s stiff. She’s controlled. She’s the one that fucked up, so it’s fine if she doesn’t feel great right now. Getting called out on one’s own failings as a person isn’t something to get upset about if the failings are real. The feelings are real and normal, but this was her fault, and so it’s up to her to fix it, and she can’t let them know it hurt her, because this was her mistake.

She goes to the cargo hold.

---------------------------

Ahsoka works out her frustrations on Fett’s punching bag. She does not augment herself with the Force, just uses raw strength and technique, ignoring the tears that press at her eyes.

She’s fine.

It’s not weird. It’s not odd. It’s not strange to not notice she’s been kind of a bitch since her mood came up with the whole Depa thing, and then Maul. She’s been mean, mostly to Vos and Fett, and nobody’s confronted her about it until now. They let her have room for her trauma, and she hadn’t reined it in. She’s just gotten worse.

‘Snippy’ she’d always been, but age apparently hadn’t fucking tempered it.

“Um.”

She catches the punching bag, breathing heavily and covered in sweat. She hasn’t worked out all the twitchy, nervous energy yet.

“Vos,” she greets, once she’s caught herself enough that her voice won’t waver. He’s on the other side of the bag, but she knows his voice. “Do you need something?”

“You’re kind of... projecting,” he tells her, drifting to where she can actually see him. “Not self-loathing, but, um, recrimination? You just don’t feel very good and I was hoping to help”

Why in all the Sith hells does he have to be nice.

“I got called out on my behavior and wasn’t ready to face the fact that I’d kriffed up,” she tells him. “I’ll be fine. And I’m... sorry. I haven’t been fair to you and was using you as an easy target for some of my ruder comments.”

“I mean, I kind of figured,” he admits, coming closer. “I’ve been tutored by Shadows before, and a lot of them act like you. I just assumed it was more of that.”

“I still shouldn’t have let myself run loose like that,” she says. “I’m... it wasn’t appropriate. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

He shrugs, not meeting her eyes. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” she says. “Not with... not with you. Or anyone other than Rex and a mind healer, really. Most of it is...”

She trails off, distantly noticing that her eyes are tearing up enough to blur her vision, and her nails are digging into the bag in a way Fett won’t appreciate.

There’s so much that beat her down, never quite breaking her, that she doesn’t even know what made her act the way she does.

“Want to spar?”

She looks over at him, wonders what he sees that makes him want to fight her when she’s visibly unstable.

He smiles, kind and easy, and it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. It’s genuine in intent, if not in energy. He wants to help. “You all keep saying I could work on my hand-to-hand. Just take off the armor so I don’t break a finger, maybe.”

“You’re serious.”

“No, I’m Quinlan.”

She’s going to wipe the floor with this boy. “You sure you wanna fight me?”

“You won’t be able to meditate until you do,” he says. He’s right, damn him. “The other option is that I go get your... vod, I think? I go get Rex and you two can talk it out since you trust him with more. I don’t want to do that, though, he’s still a kid.”

She eyes him, lips pressed together and mind awhirl with emotions and thoughts she’d tried to beat out of her head and into the bag. “Ever fought someone without the Force?”

“...yes?”

“Was it cuffs?”

“Oh, you meant me not having the Force,” he realizes. “Er, no. Is... is that something you’ve done a lot?”

She smiles at him. “You’re planning on Shadow work. That means getting captured and stripped of everything you are at some point, Force included. Unfortunately, the cuffs are in use on a very annoying Dathomirian right now, so we’ll have to make do with you shielding like your mind’s a Kessel Spice Mine.”

“...do I want to know how often you’ve been captured?”

“No, you don’t.”

When he comes at her, it’s easy to dodge. It’s easy to tap him on target points, little pokes that show she could take him out, but isn’t going to until he’s learned something. He stays grinning throughout, letting her take the lead, and he treats her like... like a knight. Like a teacher. He’s stepped back and gone from trying to impress her as a fellow padawan, to proving himself to a full knight.

She’s not sure when that change happened, or why or how, but it makes things much smoother. She wants to think that it would have even if she hadn’t gotten a wakeup call from Fett.

So she treats him the way she treated Ezra, for the year she’d spent traveling with Kanan. She treats him as a student that’s willing to learn, good but not yet great, competent but not yet ready to survive. She draws him into the kind of chest-heaving exhaustion that tells a fighter just how much energy they waste.

(Ahsoka may have had her own style, but her grandmaster had been the pinnacle of a Soresu user. She’d spent years on the frontlines of a war. She knew the worth of conserving energy, and she’d teach it to any who stepped in to challenge her.)

“Who taught you to fight like this?” He asks, when they’ve taken a handful of moments to circle each other. His steps are heavy, sure, planted. Her own are light and ready.

“Soldiers,” she says. It’s true enough.

“Not your Master?” he asks, just as he tries to kick for her upper arm. It’s a safe question. For anyone else, it would be a safe question.

But for Ahsoka, it’s another chink in the armor, after a maelstrom of emotion, a storm of self-loathing, a dervish of instability.

She doesn’t break right away.

She spirals. She fights Quinlan, but doesn’t quite see him. Her strikes get sloppy, her feet stumble. She can’t make herself meet Quinlan’s eyes, not when the scrape of his heel against the metal sounds like the rasp of a breathing machine. Her shields get fuzzy, she knows, and she leaks what she feels into the air, making it sour and thick. She doesn’t notice, because all she can see, all she can--all she can hear and feel and--

She drops to her knees and grabs at her head, trying to stop it.

“Sokari?”

She breathes. In and out, harsh and jagged but natural in a way that the damned respirator wasn’t.

Her master her teacher her brother the traitor the hound the executioner

Her face is hot. Something prickles. It might be tears.

She tries to say something, tries to say a name or a request, tries to make anything come out of her mouth that isn’t the broken wail of a woman who hasn’t let herself think about how she died.

She feels herself pulled into someone’s arms, and she can’t quite tell who, but they’re bigger than she is, and feel warm and worried. They care. They don’t understand, they’re scared, but they care.

Her hands shake, clutched to her chest and she can’t breathe she can’t make herself take in enough air to do a Force-damned thing the empire is going to feel her her shields are down and broken and her emotions are spilling and the empire is going to find HER ANAKIN IS GOING TO FIND HER AND--

“COMMANDER!”

Rex.

Rex is here.

Her breath is coming so fast that she’s hiccupping more than she’s actually inhaling. She feels small hands in gloves on either side of her face, and then her forehead presses to something warm.

Rex. A Keldabe kiss. Her brother, her partner, her other half. He’s here. He’s calm. If he’s calm, then things are fine.

“What happened?” Light voice, high voice, small and distant. Leia. Little Leia little princess Leia she’s in danger she’s in trouble Anakin will--

“Commander.”

No. Here and now. She needs to focus on here and now. Her throat feels cold. She breathes too fast, still. She can’t stop it.

“I don’t know.” That’s Vos. He was... they were doing something. He was here. Talking to her. “We were sparring, and she just--”

Right, sparring.

“I don’t know if I said something?” He offers, voice pitching up, unsure and worried. Is he the one holding her? He’s the one holding her. That’s embarrassing.

“Commander?” Rex prompts. “Commander, can you open your eyes?”

She tries. She can’t. She shakes her head.

“Soka?” he asks, voice quiet. “Where are you?”

“F-F-Fett,” she manages. It’s enough.

“And where were you?”

His voice is so soft. So worried. She held him the same way after Mandalore, after Order 66, after all his brothers, all her friends...

“Soka.”

Her mind is spinning, and suddenly all she can hear is Anakin Skywalker is dead. I destroyed him.

Her breath hitches, and she wails.

“Commander,” Rex tries again, but her head is a vortex of Then you will die and Perhaps this child and not the Jedi way.

Our long awaited meeting.

I destroyed him.

Then you will die.

She can’t breathe she can’t breathe she can only see that yellow eye that’s too familiar but belongs to a stranger can only hear a voice that shouldn’t exist can only mourn and break and--

“Soka?”

“Malachor,” she manages. “I--h-he--I died.”

“What did you say?” someone asks. A vod. It’s the right voice, almost, rough and business-like, not accusing anyone yet, and... and... no. No. Not one of her boys. It’s Fett.

“Um, right at the end? I asked her who taught her to fight like this,” Quinlan says, nervous. “And she said it was soldiers. And I joked, I asked that it wasn’t her Master, and she didn’t answer that. A couple minutes later, she just started...”

“Oh, Soka,” Rex whispers, pulling her closer. “Commander, just breathe with me.”

“H-h-he, he just--R-Rex, he j-just--and I c-c-couldn’t--”

“I know,” her captain whispers. “I know, just breathe with me.”

“He k-k-k-killed me,” she sobs, falling out of the Keldabe and into too-small arms. “I l-loved--he was my broth-ther and--and he just--he killed me, he didn’t even stop.”

“I know,” Rex whispers. “Soka, I know.”

Of course he does.

---------------------------

“It was just bad timing,” Rex says, once they’re in the room she’s been sharing with her little family, curled up under a blanket and watching the floor like it has all the secrets to how she lost her world three times over.

“Is there anything we need to keep in mind?” Fett asks, gruff and uncomfortable. She wonders if he’s angry that she took his necessary confrontation and turned it into this mess.

“Don’t bring up her Jedi Master,” Rex says, and pulls her in when she shivers. Her eyes squeeze shut before she can stop them, tears beading up again. “Just... don’t. It’s too soon.”

“He’s--”

“He Fell,” Ahsoka interrupts. “I thought he died, but he became a Sith. And fifteen years later, we ran into each other, and I refused to join him in the Dark, so he tried to kill me.”

Fett swears, low and muffled. She thinks he has a hand over his mouth.

Quin and Leia aren’t there. She thinks they’re keeping an eye on their Baby Sith prisoner. That’s good.

“Soka,” Rex whispers, and she buries her face in his shoulder. She’s too old to be this kind of mess. She’s thirty-two. She’s Fulcrum. She’s...

She’s in need of a lot of therapy.

“We can avoid the subject unless you bring it up,” Tholme promises. “Definitely until the Temple. Is there anything else we shouldn’t talk about?”

Ahsoka can practically feel Rex’s deadpan look. “Sir, we’re a trio of child soldiers ripped from everything we know. Every other sentence is a risk. We’re just... working our way through.”

There’s a knock at the door. Oh. Quin and Leia.

“Just figured we’d drop this off before we went down to visit Mr. Grumpy-Face,” Quinlan whispers. He still thinks Leia’s a child. He’s trying to make things less terrible for her. That’s nice. “We decided he’ll be less angry if he tries Hoth chocolate, and made some for everyone.”

They definitely made it for Ahsoka herself, and Maul was an afterthought. Still. It’s sweet.

“Commander?” Rex prompts, jostling her a little to try and get her to sit up.

“Gimme a sec,” she manages. It takes longer than it should to push herself away from him, to accept the mug that Leia gives her, too-serious worry in the furrow of her brow and the twist of her soul.

She doesn’t look six. She doesn’t even look twenty-two. This girl was always too old for her skin, forced to grow up in the hostile fear of the Empire.

“Thank you, Princess.”

She sips.

She can barely taste it beyond the ashes she imagines coating her tongue.

I destroyed him, her memory echoes. His slightest hesitation before he made the final move, it haunts her. She almost reached him. If only she’d tried harder, yelled louder, been better...

She shivers.

“Do you need help falling asleep?” Tholme asks. “I’m a regular healer, not a mind healer, but...”

She probably should.

She takes another sip of her drink, willing herself to taste it. It’s good. She likes it. She knows she does.

“Can you make it dreamless?” she whispers.

“It doesn’t always work, but I can try,” he tells her.

She nods. “When I finish the chocolate.”

“Of course.”

---------------------------

Everyone’s careful around her for days. The whole decision to be nicer doesn’t mean anything when she’s walking about in a daze of too few emotions, drained of everything she could feel in favor of a grey cloud of fluff in everything she does.

She does forms. Single saber and Jar’kai. Ataru and Djem so and Soresu. Reverse grip, regular grip, partial reverse on either side.

Again. Again. Again.

She loses herself in the motions, not meditating so much as just empty.

Rex worries. Fett worries. Vos worries.

Leia and Tholme keep their shields locked up tight, and she doesn’t know how they feel. She thinks Leia might be judging her. She think Tholme might be pitying.

Maul simply hates. It’s an old and familiar sensation to walk into, and she takes unthinking comfort in his rage. She’s silent instead of snippy, when she plays the role of guard, and they stare at each other in silence. His eyes burn, and she wonders how much he’s heard of her nightmares.

“You need to talk,” Rex tells her, when he finds her with a cold cup of caff, eyes fixed somewhere beyond it all. She lifts her head. “Soka.”

She just stares at him.

He sighs and pulls her into a hug. “Commander, please.”

She can’t.

Ahsoka stares at the wall behind him, resting her chin on his head. Her neck itches under the lek at the back of her head, a little tingle of a feeling that she can’t bring herself to do anything about. The pale light of the galley is sharp against the chipped paint of the metal that surrounds them. It hurts her eyes to look, but it’s not the deep and dark lit only by red--

Then you will die, her memory growls.

She flinches.

“Breathe,” Rex tells her, too-small hands clinging at her back. “Just breathe, ‘Soka.”

She curls in tighter and tries to just breathe.

---------------------------

“Tell me something good.”

Ahsoka blinks. She looks at Leia. She doesn’t have the energy to parse that.

Leia chances a look at Rex, who isn’t leaving Ahsoka’s side any more than he has to, and Fett on the other side. Tholme’s asleep and Quin’s on Baby Sith duty. It’s just people who know, right now.

The little girl across the table, the child senator, the spy, purses her lips and huffs in irritation. “You knew my biological father before he became one of the worst people in the galaxy. Both of you did. Tell me something good about him.”

Good things.

About Anakin.

“You fought a war as a Jedi,” Leia prompts. “Surely you must have done some good things with him, or at least thought you were.”

Did they?

Every mission ended in tragedy or was just a ploy of Palpatine’s. Every saved life was just...

Wait.

“He built Threepio,” she finally says. “Your father wi--I mean, Bail wiped Threepio’s memory after the Empire rose, for your safety, but Anakin was the one who built him.”

Leia sits up, eyes brighter. “I didn’t know that. I... was Artoo involved? Did he build R2D2, or...”

“No,” Rex says, “But Artoo was his favorite astromech, and they always pushed each other into stupid stunts. We risked a hell of a lot to save that droid, more than once, and I didn’t find out until you started working with the Rebellion full-time, but Artoo and Threepio were the witnesses for your bio-parents’ wedding.”

Leia gapes at him. So does Ahsoka. (Fett doesn’t know enough to care.)

Rex grins, and if it looks a little forced, that’s fine. “He had a holo recording. I was one of the few people left that knew about the marriage that might have wanted to see, so Artoo offered. It was... sweet.”

He waits, probably for Ahsoka to add something herself, but she has nothing.

“I think that’s when they swapped droids, since Threepio was more useful to a politician and Artoo did his best work when we set him loose on the enemy.”

“He never changed,” Leia muses. “Did he always swear that much?”

“Yes,” Ahsoka answers, as Rex laughs. “Always. All the binary I learned started with the best swears.”

She tries to think of another good memory, something else that Leia might appreciate. Her mind ticks back to saving Stinky, which is just a terrible option, because that mission started with Hutts and ended with the Battle of Teth. That massive loss of life, all for the son of the creature that had put Leia in chains.

She wonders if she has anything in her memory that doesn’t end in blood and graves.

“Soka.” Rex.

“Hm?”

“Remember that time Fives and Echo got lost in the undercity their first time on leave, and we had to get the General to help us find them?”

She does.

He’s right, that’s a good story.

“Okay, so what you have to understand,” Ahsoka says, already digging the faint details out and dusting them off, “is that these boys were ARC troopers, top-notch, terrifyingly competent once they got through specialty training, and loyal as hell. Echo had memorized the reg manuals front to back, and Fives was... well, Fives ended up being the only person to figure out the chips before they went into action. Point is, the Domino twins were good... eventually. Just like everyone else, though, they started out shiny.”

---------------------------

“Tholme’s hiding something.”

Ahsoka wonders if Leia will just leave if she ignores her enough. Probably not. This was the girl that got kicked out of boarding school for leading a sit-in at age seven. She’s got patience.

“His job requires him to hide a lot of things,” Ahsoka says instead. “Not as many as Vos will have to, eventually, but a lot.”

“He’s hiding something from us,” Leia insists, visibly frustrated that Ahsoka isn’t as upset about this as she is. “Something important.”

The way she says ‘important’ is clumsy and impacted by the missing baby tooth. She can’t say the r. It comes out as ‘im-poh-ten,’ which is adorable, and if Ahsoka comments on it, she’s probably going to get punched by a six-year-old.

“The Force doesn’t care,” Ahsoka says. “I trust his intentions, if not him as a person.”

“If you don’t trust him, then why trust his intentions?”

“Leia, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I trust one and a half people in the galaxy,” Ahsoka points out. “Me not trusting a person isn’t a sign of anything except my paranoia. The only person I trust fully and without reservation is Rex. Even you, I only mostly trust, because my brain starts screaming if I think too hard. That’s why you’re the half.”

“Okay, whatever, paranoia aside,” Leia barrels on, “He should tell us. Whatever it is that he’s hiding, we deserve to know. We’re not children that he can just hide things from for our own good.”

Ahsoka presses her lips together. “Leia. Princess. I know you’re used to holding all the cards--”

“This isn’t about me being a control freak!”

“It is, though,” Ahsoka soothes, and smiles. “Your mother--the bio one--was the same way. You spent years as one of the leaders of the Rebellion, so obviously you’re used to having all the information, and people reporting to you... but Tholme is a Jedi Master. He reports to the Council and the Republic. Do you know how many people I kept secrets from while I was a padawan? We’re an unknown, Leia. They have no proof that we’re on their side, especially since we’re traveling with Fett.”

Leia crosses her arms and glares as hard as she can.

“I’m not going to bother him,” Ahsoka says. “I’ve already had, like, five unrelated mental breakdowns. I’m putting this on hold until we get to the Temple and I can trust that there’s a healer on hand to sedate me or something.”

“You... want to be sedated?”

“Leia, this... really should be obvious, but a Force-Sensitive losing their osik the way I have been isn’t actually safe. I know I broke a weapons rack last week.” Ahsoka gestures vaguely. “If the Jedi Master isn’t telling me something for reasons that might relate to my clear and obvious mental instability, I’m going to assume he’s got a point.”

“So he should tell me or Rex.”

“We’ll be on Coruscant in four days,” Ahsoka soothes. “Just... let it be. They won’t hurt us.”

“You don’t know that.”

Ahsoka shrugs. “I don’t have to. The Force leads me in all things, including this.”

Leia isn’t impressed by that, but Leia isn’t impressed by much in the first place.

She strides off in a fit that is, perhaps, more influenced by her six-year-old emotional control than she’d like to admit. Ahsoka lets her. It’s not worth the argument.

It’s only a few minutes later that Fett strides in, takes the seat Leia was just in, and asks, “What would it take for you to teach me how to use a jetii’kad?”

She blinks at him. “You want to learn how to use a lightsaber?”

“Yes.”

“...why?”

“Viszla.”

“I see.”

She does.

Ahsoka taps her fingers against the table, eyeing him with the kind of interest she copied from Master Kenobi, years ago. Fett doesn’t fidget, but she thinks he might want to. He just looks back, waiting for her judgement.

“You’ll need to justify it,” she finally says. “It’s a significant difference from what you actually did, so I need to know your reasoning for doing it, and your plans for once it’s done.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s step one,” she corrects. She tilts her head, considering. “My standards for you aren’t built in a vacuum, and you know that. Explain to me what you plan to do and how you plan to do it, and if I approve...”

“You’ll help me achieve it.”

“Maybe,” she allows. “A lot of that depends on Rex.”

“I expected as much,” Fett says. “He is... an admittedly large part of the reason.”

“He would be,” she says. She gives the silence a few more seconds to sit awkwardly between them, and then stands up. “I’d guess you’ve been brainstorming already. Do you have it written down or is it mostly just in your head so far?”

“I’m still... debating options, so to speak.”

She grins, and the shape of the predator’s smile, the baring of teeth... that almost makes him step back. She can see it in the twitch of his muscles. Smart man.

“Follow me,” she says, and doesn’t wait for him to stand. She strides out with tooka-light steps, hears the heavy beskar tread behind her, and goes to the cargo hold. Fett’s confusion grows tangibly behind her, especially when she tosses him a wooden quarterstaff. She picks up the other and spins it in one hand.

“You’re going to fight me,” she tells him, stretching and letting the staff help with the process. “And while we fight, you’re going to tell me what your plans for Mandalore are.”

He mimics her, but there’s a frown on his face. “And why staffs?”

“You and I, we’ve only sparred bare-handed,” she says. “I need a feel for how you fight with a weapon anyway. These are a good start.”

“Not the beskad?”

She grins, and the twitch is back. “No. That can wait. We start with the staffs.”

He takes a stance, and she mirrors him. She lets him strike first with a weapon, but she’s the one that asks all the questions.

(He is the only one on the ship that can fight her one-on-one right now, and he can win. Still, she makes him work for every inch, and what she doesn’t win in bruises, she wins in words.)

(Fett might yet be a proper Mand’alor, but Ahsoka learned war from her brothers, negotiation at the knee of a general and in the shadow of a prince, and government at the side of duchesses and queens.)

(If he wants her help uniting his people, he needs to prove that he can hold them together once she’s gone.)

---------------------------

Ahsoka’s interrogation of Jango’s plans is thorough, and she’s not the only one involved. She brings Leia in, and has her join in on the grilling. She maybe laughs as the twenty-seven-year-old survivor of Galidraan, the Mand’alor, a man who has killed Master Jedi with his bare hands, gets lectured on various government structures by a tiny girl that's missing several teeth and needs to sit on books to see the table properly.

Still, Leia knows this better than any of the rest of them do. The girl might have grown up heir to a monarchy, but she got a classical education and was drilled on democracy and all associated forms of government. Where Ahsoka knows military protocol and law enforcement, intersystem relations and defensive measures, Leia knows agricultural subsidies and welfare programs, infrastructure and education.

Ahsoka may know how to find out if someone’s breaking a zoning law, but Leia knows why it exists in the first place.

“And I grew up in a cult,” Rex says, when an argument on that topic breaks out. Everyone that hasn’t heard the joke-that-isn’t-a-joke stares at him. “The Jedi grew up in a religious meritocracy; Leia grew up in a monarchy; and I grew up in a cult.”

Ahsoka elbows him. He’s not wrong, but still.

Unfortunately, Ahsoka is about forty-seven percent sure that Leia will put her foot in her mouth when it comes to Mandalorian culture, blunt as the girl is. That prefrontal cortex isn’t anywhere near as developed as it should be, either, so impulse control for the princess isn’t great. Ahsoka refuses to let Leia and Fett talk about ways to mend the breaks between tradition and the pacifism of the New Mandalorians without either Rex or Ahsoka herself as a mediating presence. Tholme sits in a few times, but while he knows that Leia isn’t really six--though not about the time-travel, yet--Quinlan doesn’t.

They admittedly end up doing this while he’s on Maul-sitting duty.

“It’s like he doesn’t even care about making nice with the people that, at this point, make up the majority of his people!” Leia grumbles one night, as Ahsoka kicks over a step stool so the girl can brush her teeth. “He may not like the New Mandalorians, but from what I understand, it’s still early enough to prevent the majority of the cultural bleaching you brought up. If he stays this stubborn--”

“Leia,” Ahsoka says, and the girl’s mouth snaps shut. “I’m aware of your reasons for not trusting his intentions. But if I may say? Chill.”

“He’s not even trying!”

“He’s trying a hell of a lot harder than he did in the original timeline,” Ahsoka reminds her. “Brush your teeth.”

“I’m not a--”

“Teeth.”

It’s a little worrying, how the child’s brain affects Leia, but... well. That’ll pass in time, hopefully. Until then, Ahsoka gets to be the aunt she should have been. This includes tucking Leia in, which the girl grumbles about despite the fond waves of comfort that enter the Force around her. Ahsoka doesn’t call her out on it, just brushes back wisps of hair to plant a kiss on Leia’s forehead, and then does the same once Rex stumbles in, grumbling about the limitations of a cadet’s body, but far more ready to follow the protocol that is bedtime.

Rex doesn’t pretend to not like getting tucked in, for all that he’s sharing with a grumbly, already-asleep princess. He smiles up at Ahsoka, lets her hug him, and pretends they can be a normal family for five seconds.

Quinlan’s making a late night snack for himself in the galley. Tholme is guarding the Baby Sith. Fett...

Ahsoka goes to the cockpit, takes the copilot’s seat, and watches hyperspace pass them by.

It takes long minutes before either of them say anything.

“Do Jedi believe in souls?”

His shields are up, locked up tighter than the innermost chambers of the Imperial Palace. She has no idea where he’s taking this question. She has to cast about for an answer.

“That depends on how you define a soul,” she finally says. “Leia told me about Force Ghosts. A Jedi Master who underwent the right meditations and training could pass into the Force upon their death without losing their sense of self. They could remain themselves, to an extent, and interact with force-sensitive individuals. I don’t know if they could last that way indefinitely, but depending on your definition, I could argue those ghosts were evidence of a form of soul.”

“So you believe that the dead pass into the Force, but that what passes could be a soul. Something must exist for a sense of self to disappear at death in a way that impacts the Force as you understand it, and many would use the word ‘soul’ for that something.”

“Mm,” Ahsoka considers it. “I’d say that’s pretty accurate. You’ve put a lot of thought into this.”

“What about those not yet born?”

Her fingers feel cold, and she finds herself no longer able to watch the passage of hyperspace as passively as she had, and her eyes catch on streaks and motes of what is not dust, her vision unable to keep any more still than her heart.

“Oh,” she hears herself say. “The clones.”

It’s a long time before he answers, but the walls come down. He carries a confused sort of grief with him, guilty and a mite resentful. His questions have been building for longer than she’d thought. His voice is rough. “I’ve taken plenty of lives, but I’ve never known the name of someone I erased from existence before they were even born.”

“The stories we told Leia about the brothers.”

There’s a grunt of agreement from Fett, so those dots at least connect.

“I take it my answer wasn’t helpful,” she manages to say.

“Will they still exist?” Fett asks. “Will they be born elsewhere? Or is... is a soul something that only comes into existence after the body does?”

“I have no idea,” Ahsoka admits. “I want... I want to think that I’d be able to find them eventually, to recognize them, if their souls are still born into this world elsewhere.”

“And if your Sith finds someone else to build his army out of?”

Ahsoka looks at him, sharp and pointed. “You wouldn’t.”

“They’ll be doing it anyway, if their plans are as ironclad as you say.”

“You’re already associating with Jedi,” Ahsoka says, fighting the urge to break his nose. “They wouldn’t approach you, not now. They can’t leverage your anger against you. They won’t know everything, but they’ll know that you have friends among the Jedi.”

“You think they can’t come up with better lies?”

He has a point. He has more than one point and she hate hate hates it.

A Jedi does not hate.

I am no Jedi.

“You’re going to have to convince me,” she says. “Especially if you want to somehow balance this with the darksaber thing. I won’t teach you how to fight with it if you’re not planning to retake Mandalore.”

“That’s how they’d sell it,” he says. “Retaking Mandalore. An army ostensibly for the Jedi, and ultimately...”

“You’d build an army of slaves.”

“No, I’d be the inside man for when they build that army anyway.”

She holds his gaze. She looks away first.

“Torrent?”

“I’m thinking.”

He lets her.

“I’ll need to talk to Rex. Probably Leia.”

“Understandable.”

“I don’t like this.”

“I’m only just considering it. It’s an idea, not a plan.”

“That’s the only reason I haven’t ripped your throat out with my teeth.”

“Hyperbole doesn’t suit you.”

She glares at him, and leaves, her mind chopping up and laying out every possible angle on Fett volunteering to do the exact same thing as last time, but somehow worse.

Great. Just what she needed.

---------------------------

Ahsoka isn’t there for the shouting match between Rex and Fett, but she doesn’t have to be. She can hear it form clear across the ship, and Rex comes to her afterwars. He’s been crying, which isn’t as surprising as it could be. These bodies are still prone to such things, and will be for years. She doesn’t comment.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

“We need to take out Sidious before he starts anything on Kamino.”

“Agreed,” she says. “It’ll be hard, though.”

“I don’t care.”

“What did Fett say?”

“That if it wasn’t going to be my brothers, it would be someone else’s. Either we stopped the cloning from happening at all, or we mitigated damage by being there.”

“I don’t think Sidious is going to tap him for it,” Ahsoka admits. “Not unless you’re willing to stage that kind of fight publicly enough for Fett to claim the Jedi poisoned you, family, against him. It could work, but it’s a gamble.”

He knows all of this.

“I miss them,” he says, and she cards her fingers though the curls he’s managed to grow in the past weeks. “I just... even at the end, I had Wolffe. I knew Boba was out there; I wouldn’t be surprised if the beskar let him survive a Sarlacc. I had brothers. Not as many as I used to, but there was always someone. I miss them all, so much it hurts.”

“It wouldn’t be them,” she reminds him. She pulls him closer, puts her cheek to his head. “It would be the same process, the same faces, the same training, even, but the boys themselves...”

He clings to her and shudders.

“Rex?”

“I can’t force them to grow up the way I did. I want them back. Sidious is going to make the army no matter what. Someone’s going to suffer, and I don’t want it to be my brothers, but they won’t exist otherwise, and...”

“And it’s an impossible choice,” she summarizes. “And it sucks.”

“It’s sucks Gungan balls, ‘Soka.”

She laughs, and feels him smile against her shoulder. Good. He needs to smile more.

“He’s still trying to get me to like him,” Rex says. "He’s still making an effort, and he never did that for anyone except Boba, and it’s weird. I don’t know what to do with any of that.”

“Gain a brother,” Ahsoka whispers, and she feels him jerk against her. “If that’s what you want.”

“He’s not vod.”

“Same blood as all the rest, and you’re older than him, so he’s not really in a position to be a parent to you like he was to Boba,” she says carefully. “You don’t have to do anything, if you don’t want to, but... I think he’s trying. I think this means a lot to him, and that he isn’t any more sure of what to do than you are. You don’t have to forgive him for what he did in the future, you don’t have to accept when he reaches out, you don’t have to ever talk to him again after we reach Coruscant if you don’t want, but I think... I think it’s worth at least considering what you have to gain. I think it’s worth looking at what he’s trying to give you.”

Rex huffs. “Why couldn’t he just be the shabuir I knew in training?”

“Something happened between now and then?” she offers. “I don’t know. I never met him in the original timeline. I just know the guy that keeps trying to get on my good side so you’ll like him.”

He outright scoffs. “Soka, that’s not the only reason he’s trying to get on your good side.”

“...I’m a former Jedi who talks trash to his face,” she says slowly. “And I cried on him. There is no reason for him to be nice to me, other than you.”

“He thinks you’re cool and a good person and wants you to be his friend.”

“Bantha poodoo.”

Rex grins in a way that goes straight to smirking. “Soka, I’m not joking. Jango Fett wants you to be his friend.”

“Kriffing why?” she asks, more than a little horrified. “I’m a mess, look like I’m ten years younger than him, have gleefully kicked his ass in front of an audience; I even told Vos to throw him at a baby Sith Lord. Putting up with me is one thing, but I’m... I’m only barely not a Jedi. I’m a historical enemy of Mandalore, and part of the community he hates more than anything, and--”

“And his reaction to you kicking his ass was pure Mando,” Rex says. “In that he now thinks you’re a badass, and thus worth being friends with.”

“I can’t believe that. I physically cannot.”

“Soka, just accept it. The Mand’alor wants to be friends with you.” He scratches at his scalp. “I mean, he met you while you were protecting what appeared to be children, and it’s apparently still early enough for him to care about that.”

She leans back in her seat, eyes on the wall ahead of her and back against the cool metal of the other side. Rex falls back with her. She wonders if Rex changed the subject so they didn’t have to talk about deciding how many of his brothers get to exist, and whether or not he can swallow the bitterness of his history to have a connection with at least one member of his blood. She doesn’t ask. If he wants to change the subject, that’s his right.

“I don’t... no.” She denies it as well as she can, and then the implications dig a little deeper. “Is this me accidentally signing up to be the Jedi Order’s official liaison to the Mand’alor?”

“I mean, this point in time... they’ve got Kenobi for the Duchess, yeah?” Rex shrugs. “Good relations with the system are probably a good thing, and you’ve got a stronger connection than Tholme and Vos.”

“Ugh,” she says. She rubs a hand against her head, and then lurches to her feet. “Fine! Fine. If it’ll get him to retake Mandalore before the Sith decide to bribe him with an army he doesn’t get to keep, I’ll teach him how to fight for the kriffin’ Darksaber.”

“That’s what makes the decision for you?”

“Well something had to!”

They only get one lesson in before Coruscant, but the lesson lasts a full day, and Ahsoka’s got his comm number. Fett’s a quick learner anyway, and Tholme was there to give pointers where Ahsoka couldn’t.

He won’t measure up to a Jedi in saber-to-saber combat, but he doesn’t need to. He just needs to learn enough to turn all those skills with a beskad to something that works with a jetii’kad.

(The balance of a saber is wrong to those used to a physical weapon. The inertia doesn’t work the way anyone expects. There’s no need to worry about damaging the blade.)

(Fett is good. Ahsoka is better. And, bless his heart, he knows it.)

(She will mold him into the shape of someone who not only can, but should rule a system with a history like that, and he damn well knows that too.)

---------------------------

“Dropping out of hyperspace in T-minus twenty seconds.”

The Slave I is not, in fact, a Venator-class starship, or anything else near the size and smoothness of the ships that Ahsoka grew up on. This is a bounty hunter’s vessel, and the drop to real space jolts like nothing else. Ahsoka’s in the copilot seat for the return, but Tholme’s going to swap with her as soon as they’ve got confirmation that there were no problems with exiting hyperspace, and nobody’s shooting at them.

“We’re not going to get shot at,” Tholme had assured her.

“I always get shot at,” she’d told him.

“I have our clearance,” he reminded her, seeming more amused than frustrated. “There’s no need to worry about getting shot at.”

“I also always get shot at,” Jango had thrown in.

“Okay,” Tholme had allowed, after several minutes of his trust in the Temple warring against Ahsoka and Jango’s learned paranoia. The looks Quinlan had darted around the room when Leia and Rex also claimed ‘chronic getting-shot-at disease’ had been a treat. The paranoia of a Watchman and a future Shadow was great, but the paranoia of three revolutionaries and a galaxy-wide criminal was greater. “You can take us in close enough to get in radio contact, but the second we have to ask for clearance and a vector, I’m in the seat.”

She’d agreed, of course. She was paranoid, not inexperienced.

“We’re much less likely to get shot down by ground control if you tell them we’re with you,” she’d said, to his hilariously apparent metaphysical exhaustion. “Obviously.”

“Good enough,” he’d sighed.

What that means is mostly just that Ahsoka gets to watch the distant star at the center of Coruscant’s system grow rapidly brighter. She can pick out the constellations she’d grown up with, the stars the creche had projected on the ceiling every night, the ones that she may not have seen from the surface, but had greeted her and then sent her on her way every time she left on yet another campaign that lost her men their lives for a Sith Lord's wretched plans. These were the shapes and stories she’d never seen again as Fulcrum, a woman so hunted that to come within a dozen subsectors of the planet was to court her death.

For sixteen years, she hadn’t ventured closer than Alderaan, save for a single trip to Chandrila.

And now, maybe twenty minutes away at this speed, was the Temple. It was home.

A home that didn’t know her, that had sentenced her to death, that had hosted the rampage of her former master... but home nonetheless.

“Stable?” Fett grunts.

“Thrusters are good,” she confirms.

“I meant you.”

Ah. “I’m... fine. As good as I could be, anyway.”

She hesitates, but manages to speak before he does. “You?”

“I’m not the one walking into an entire building of triggers.”

“Only because you’re not entering it,” she says. “It’s the home of your ancestral enemies who, bad info or no, killed off a whole lot of your friends.”

“I get to leave,” he says. “You don’t.”

She plans to needle him a bit more, maybe on something a little less based in both their traumas. She needs to talk, if only to fill up the silence and keep herself from reaching out to all the lights in the Force. It’ll be too much, she knows.

Tholme enters the cockpit. “Change of plans.”

“Better be a good reason,” Jango says, voice flat.

“Leia’s crying.”

Ahsoka’s unbuckling herself before she can process the words fully. “What?”

Leia doesn’t cry for no reason. Her emotional control is as difficult as the body makes it, but she doesn’t just cry. There’s always a cause.

“I don’t know. Rex said to get you,” Tholme explains. “She was saying a name. He seemed to recognize it.”

Not good not good not good. If Leia was feeling the Emper--No. She cuts the thought off there. No catastrophizing. Information first.

“What name.”

“Luke. Mean anything to--and she’s gone.”

Ahsoka ignores him, just sprints to where she knows the ‘young ones’ are. They’re all in Maul’s room, because nobody wants to be alone with him now, but it’s the worst time to leave him without supervision. It’s not the worst option; he mostly refuses to talk, still.

This holds true, because he definitely isn’t talking when she bursts in. He’s sitting on the bench, in a corner, hugging his knees and watching Quinlan try to calm Leia down.

“Captain, sitrep.”

“Vos and Tholme attempted to show Leia how to reach out to feel the Temple from a distance. They felt that it would be a good use of the time, and an interesting exercise at this distance. She attempted to do so, struggled for several minutes, and then reacted with shock. She has repeated the name ‘Luke’ several times since then, and we’ve been unable to fully calm her down. I asked Tholme to get you, as you are the only Force-Sensitive on board that understands the situation in full.”

“Understood.” She nods to him, and then goes to nudge at Quinlan. “Vos, move.”

“Torre--”

“You can sit behind her, hold her in your lap like you did when we had lunch the other day, but I need to get in her face.” She waits for him to comply, and then drops to her knees and takes Leia’s hands in her own. She radiates calm and assurance, even though she knows Quinlan’s probably been doing the same since this started. She dips her head enough to get in the girl’s line of sight, waits for her to meet eyes.

“Princess,” she says, and meets Leia’s eyes. “What did you feel?”

“Luke.”

From this distance... they’ve got half the system to go, at least, and Leia’s training shouldn’t reach that far for anything more than the fact that the Temple is there. Ahsoka could feel unshielded individuals from here, if she focused, but she’s also been doing this much, much longer. The twins theory holds more water than ever.

“Can you show me?” Ahsoka asks, instead of asking for more clarification. She squeezes Leia’s hands and smiles. “In the Force?”

Leia nods, and closes her eyes. It’s not the first time they’ve done this, but it’s the first time in a while that Leia’s needed Ahsoka to guide her through.

Luke’s light, for all that it’s unfamiliar to Ahsoka, is brilliant among the rest of the signatures in Coruscant. Like Anakin and Leia, he’s a star in his own right, but he’s brighter. He doesn’t have Anakin’s bitterness or Leia’s righteous anger, just... light. Ahsoka had asked Leia to show her instead of looking for herself because she’d expected to not recognize the boy, but she needn’t have. He’s unmistakable.

He’s so bright that she almost misses the other signature that she does recognize. She shies away, knowing that it would be there, but... but it’s almost twinned with another nearby. Not identical, but different in a way that comes with age, with trauma, with... death.

Leia hadn’t arrived alone, after all.

Why would Luke?

Her eyes snap open, her hand coming up not-quite-fast enough to clap over her mouth as she gasps. She feels a shudder, one that starts in her shoulders and reaches deep into her ribcage, finds a home in her chest and doesn’t stop.

“Oh fuck,” Quinlan whispers. “Torrent? Um, Sokari?”

Rex steps closer. “Commander?”

“That shabuir faked his death again,” she manages. “Three times, Rex!”

He blinks at her. “...I know way too many people who fit that description, Soka.”

“Master Ke--” she cuts herself off. He might have changed his name, just like she had. There’s already an Obi-Wan here. Rex seems to be figuring it out, but she needs to give him another hint.

“He pulled a Hardeen,” she stresses, and Rex’s eyes snap shut with a tired groan.

“Who?” Leia asks, her own tumult of emotion paused in the wake of Ahsoka’s shock. There’s a hope and relief to her, and Ahsoka belatedly realizes that her main worry had been that she’d misidentified what was going on, that she’d given herself a false hope. Ahsoka’s internal reaction, her approval and awe at Luke’s presence, had trickled over enough to give Leia the reassurance she’d needed.

Unintentional as it was, Ahsoka was glad that she’d succeeded in helping her charge.

“Er...” she trails off. “I don’t know what name he’s going by, right now. We’ve spent so long in hiding...”

“The man Luke knew as Crazy Old Ben,” Rex says, and Leia’s eyes light up.

“Oh,” she breathes. “General O--no, names. The High General, then.”

“Yeah,” Ahsoka says, not a little soft. “Yeah, I guess death didn’t stop him any more than it stopped me.”

“I could have told you that,” Leia says, smiling far too widely. She squirms where she still sits on Quinlan’s lap. “He was... he taught you, right?”

“As much my master as the official one,” Ahsoka says. She glances as Quinlan, feels Maul’s gaze on the back of her head. “Your f... my official master was very young when I was assigned to him. He wasn’t ready to teach, wasn’t even ready to be a knight, entirely, so my training was split between him and his master.”

Quinlan pops in at that moment, “Your grandmaster was military, too?”

We all were, she thinks. Even you, in your own way.

“I landed in their care mid-battle,” she says carefully. “It was a complicated situation.”

He nods, and she vaguely notes that he’s got his arms wrapped around Leia, and his chin tucked on top of her head. She isn’t sure if Leia’s noticed, but Quinlan’s picked up ‘baby’-sitting duty so often recently that she’s fairly certain he’s all but declared her ‘little-sister shaped.’ It doesn’t matter that Leia’s older--she’s still taking the juice boxes and gummy snacks that Quinlan shoves at her every single snacktime.

“Do you think...” Rex trails off, something uncomfortable twisting in the Force, even though his face keeps it mostly hidden. “My brothers. If the General survived and... and made it back...”

“I didn’t feel any,” Ahsoka says, because she knows she’d have noticed if it was anyone she’d met, and likely any clone at all. They all felt different in the Force, but they all held a spark that made her know it was one of them. “I’m sorry, Rex’ika.”

“A long shot,” he says, that dash of hope shriveling up. He must see something in her face, because there’s a curl of warmth in him, even if his smile is brittle. “It’s fine, really. I have you, ‘Soka.”

Rex and Ahsoka. Two halves of one whole.

She can’t wait to hear the lectures on attachment, the way people who haven’t seen her wars try to criticize her for clinging to any chance at still having a will to live. She can’t wait to see them justify telling her that it’s selfish to hold her sanity in her hands and refuse to let the grief take it away. She can’t wait to stare someone down for asking her to ‘learn to let go’ after she’s lost her family, her life, her universe three times over.

Most of the Jedi are more sensible than that, are reasonable enough to see those shades of grey and how to approach rules in the spirit they are meant instead of the rigid letter, but there will be some.

There will be more than enough telling her she is wrong to hold her oldest, closest, best friend as dear as she can.

Attachment, they’ll say.

What they’ll mean is ‘codepedence.’

They won’t be entirely wrong.

She reaches out for him, lets him fall into her side and stay there, closes her eyes and reaches out for the man she’d long called father, when they’d still been in each other’s lives.

This time, past the deafening flare of surprise-love-hope of the little star next to him, she can feel him reach back.

---------------------------

The second the ship has landed, even before Tholme and Fett are done with the checks, Ahsoka’s waiting at the exit. She strains her hearing so she’ll know the second the system will let her open the massive door of the cargo hold.

Leia clings to her side, and the boys stand to her back.

Quinlan’s stressed enough that she can feel it like a cloud. She is very much not trying to feel that stress. Quinlan’s stress levels, back where he’s got Maul so he can keep an eye on Ahsoka and the Baby Sith at the same time, are so low on her priorities list that it’s a a little sad.

It doesn’t take long for her to be able to punch the button and open the damn door.

It opens slowly. She bounces on her toes, because there’s a beacon of light and a steady, familiar glow on the other side, and she’s so, so close. She can’t see through the crack yet, because it’s day in this part of Coruscant, and the sunlight is blinding against the dark of the hold. So close. She’s so close.

“The hell’s wrong with you?”

Fett? Fett. He’s already here to get off? This door’s slow.

She doesn’t answer him, because the door is finally open enough to let her out, and she leaps through the gap.

She lands on a pourstone floor, feels pebbles and grit compress under her boots, frantically looks around as her eyes adjust to light and--

The High General, the Negotiator, Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, looking just as he did when she first met him, if a little less armored and a little more fed. The hair, the beard, the crinkle in the corner of his eyes. His spirit is a little older, his smile a little more strained, his posture a little more tired, but it’s him.

He spreads his arms, low enough that she could have dismissed it if she’d cared less for hugs, except she’s almost as small as she was when they met.

And every other hug she’d given back then had been, functionally, her being a living missile aiming her montrals for someone’s organs.

She’s a little more aware of how to avoid stabbing her friends in the intestine now.

“Master!”

She sprints for him, collides and sobs, feels him stumble back and then sink to his knees on the too-hard floor, and can feel the tears pouring out of her already. Her breath hitches, and she wails like a child, and that last part of her that couldn’t even grasp at safety shreds itself. His arms are tight around her, warm and strong and Master Kenobi don’t you dare leave again.

It doesn’t matter that Sidious is out there, that the Republic’s been building towards war for a century, that even now someone’s kicking up the Trade Federation. Her dad is here.

“I’ve missed you too, my dear,” he says, pressing a kiss to the side of her head, the bristles of his beard scratching along the skin of her forehead. Off to the side, the binary suns that are Luke and Leia grow brighter in proximity, so bright she can barely bear it.

(“Fett, why the kriff are you reaching for your blaster?!”)

(“Torrent said her master tried to kill her.”)

(“Different guy, that was a different guy, put the blaster away.”)

(“You could have just warned me.”)

(“I didn’t expect you to go for a shot on sight!”)

(”Calm down, Jetiika, if I was going to shoot on sight, we’d already be in a firefight.”)

She ignores everything.

“If you fake your death one more time, I swear I’m going to kill you myself.”

He tries to pull away to talk to her more directly. She does not let him. He apparently resigns himself to this, because he just adjusts how he’s sitting and pulls her in closer.

“In my defense, I was far from the only one presumed dead that took advantage of that status, by the end,” he says, letting her slump into his lap and cry herself dry. “I’m proud of you. You know that, I hope.”

She nods against his chest, smearing tears and snot across the linen and wool. She doesn’t care that they’ll need a thorough washing. She can have her public breakdown and it’s fine because Master Kenobi is here.

He doesn’t even know what she’s spent the past fifteen years doing. Luke wouldn’t have known. He doesn’t know she’s thirty-two and broken, beyond a shadow and cut down by her own master. There’s so much he doesn’t know but the Force rings with the truth of it: he’s proud of her anyway.

“I’m going by Ben, now,” he mutters against her montral. “There’s already an Obi-Wan here, after all. Still, I remain a Kenobi.”

She can’t make the words come out of her mouth. She’s overwhelmed, so much so that speech is a mite bit beyond her.

Sokari Torrent, she presses along the frayed bond that’s knitting itself back to life with every breath they take. Leia was already calling me Auntie Soka, and Rex and I both took Torrent, for...

“For the men you lost,” he mutters. “Yes, that’s fitting.”

He smells like sapir tea and a spiced beard oil.

There’s a whirl of activity about her, greetings and ‘a Sith apprentice?’ and introductions. She distantly notes when Fett almost shoots Dooku before Rex shuts that down and advises the Master to leave the area before things spiral out of control. She feels Ben stand, and she stands with him, clings to his side like a child and trusts that whatever happens, whatever needs to happen, he’ll take care of it until she can stand on her own two feet without swaying.

Rex grabs her free hand, and she feels herself settle back into her skin, bit by bit.

She’s back at the Temple. The twins are safe. Her grandmaster is here. She has her other half.

They can save the galaxy this time.

She’s alive she’s home she’s okay.

She’s okay.

Everything’s going to be okay.

[renjuseyo]

I guess i will try requesting then~

Chan

No one ever give male reader chocolate before on valentine day so he's surprised when reader find a chocolate with a note on his desk. It turns out to be chan, who is also jihoon younger brother and reader underclassmen. Reader ask for a time because he never date before and don't know how to do about it. So maybe story about their relationship after the confession? I will leave how it's gonna be turn out to you because i think you're better at this ☺️ 💞

sweetest thing ; dino

group: seventeen

pairing: lee chan / reader (male)

synopsis: you’ve never quite stood out at school, being more of a wallflower. so on valentines’s day, you’re a little more than surprised to see a box of chocolates and a note addressed to you.

genre: fluff, crack if you squint

ahhh my first request!! this prompt is very cute, but i’m not sure if i did a good job with it and i kind of wrote the last part in a rush if you couldn’t tell ^^” i hope this satisfies you, and as always, feedback is much appreciated~

- reader is a part of the ‘96 line. order goes as junhui > hoshi > wonwoo > reader > woozi

title inspiration: sweetest thing by seventeen

“...and of course, like the confident leo that i am-”

“-confident? you dropped, ducked and rolled in the convenient store the other day because i mentioned their names. look at me, i’m choi seungcheol who’s head-over-heels in love with yoon jeonghan and joshua hong, but i’m a coward who watches from afar!” wonwoo mocks.

seungcheol sends him his most threatening glare, but wonwoo nonchalantly blinks back. “that’s a thing of the past! i’m a changed man now, wonwoo.”

you walk up the stairs to the third floor laughing. “hyung. i barely know the two of them, but they made more progress establishing a friendship- well, relationship now- than you ever had. you are literally a coward.” seungcheol makes an offended noise as wonwoo cackles behind you, and you spin around to fist bump him. having known the two of them since childhood, you and wonwoo have made it your sole duty to shoot seungcheol down when the opportunity presents itself. the perks of being friends for so long, you suppose.

seungcheol jogs up beside you two, glaring at your smug smirks. “you two are just jealous you’re single! at least i gained the courage to confess to them!” he exclaims, exasperated.

you and wonwoo exchange incredulous looks, and he knows he’s only digging a deeper grave for himself. “firstly, we were the ones that pushed you to even meet up with them,” wonwoo begins.

“and secondly, they were the ones that confessed, because you kept on getting tongue-tied!” you finish. you turn to fist bump each other once again.

the older of you three visibly deflates, throwing his hands up in defeat. “i actually hate you two. can i not have my moment of glory?” he whines.

you roll your eyes as you approach your classroom, sliding the door open. seungcheol’s lingering at the wall, since his class is a few doors down from your’s and wonwoo’s. “you’re getting a little too cocky there, my boy. maybe in five years you can try boasting again.”

“i’m older than you?!”

you stick your tongue out at him, who storms away from you and wonwoo in a huff. your jabs at him have always been made in lighthearted fun, and you know he’d tell you and wonwoo to stop if he truly felt uncomfortable. but making fun of his love life is always amusing, especially since it provides you something new to look forward to amidst the mundane hours of school. it’s not like you and wonwoo have anything going on in your usual life, much less your love life.

but apparently the fates has something in store for you today, because the moment you step into the classroom, you notice two of your classmates lingering by your desk. you recognize them as jeongyeon, your friend and the class president, and soonyoung, a mutual friend of you and wonwoo. “what are you two doing?” you ask, approaching the duo.

“oh, hey (name). we were just passing out papers for ms. park when we noticed this on your desk!” soonyoung explains, pointing towards your desk. your eyes trail towards the small box neatly wrapped with a note tucked in between the ribbon. it’s not surprising to see gifts popping up on people’s desks, especially since today is valentines’ day. but you’re a wallflower, and you’ve never actually received a gift aside from the candy that kids in elementary school passed out to the whole class. if it weren’t for your name written in thick letters, you would’ve mistaken it for someone else’s.

jeongyeon gives you an apologetic look. “sorry (name), i tried dragging soonyoung away, but you know how curious he can be.”

apparently wonwoo knows you’ve never received a gift before either, nudging you with that unmistakable grin on his face. it’s the one he has whenever he makes fun of seungcheol, but this time, it’s directed towards you. “it seems our little (name) here has gotten a valentines’s gift~!” he teases.

you seat yourself at your desk, curiously staring at the present. you have five minutes before class starts, so what harm is there in opening it up? your fingers make quick work of the ribbon, unfurling its shiny restraints off the box. you’re about to unfold the note before you notice three pairs of curious eyes staring at you. “do you mind?” you ask. soonyoung and jeongyeon quickly apologize and straighten up, but wonwoo merely smirks. you make a mental note to apologize to seungcheol for your relentless teasing. reluctantly, you unfold the note and read its contents.

happy valentine’s’ day hyung! i hope this letter reaches you safely :)

~ your secret admirer

ps. i know you don’t like nuts, so i advise you don’t eat the ones on the bottom row! they all have nuts in them. on the other hand, if you don’t like chocolate or are allergic, feel free to give these to someone else! i wouldn’t want to poison you!

you can’t help the chuckle that escapes your lips, because even if you don’t know who said admirer is, you think that he’s incredibly endearing, if his note is anything to go by. you refold the note and place it on top of your desk. when you remove the lid of the box, you’re surprised to see an assortment of chocolates all with different designs.

jeongyeon gasps in awe. “those are the pricey chocolates from carat, that patisserie! they sell pastries, but i hear their chocolates are wicked good.”

like the best friend that he is, wonwoo leans towards you, wiggling his eyebrows. “expensive chocolates, eh? this admirer of yours must mean serious business if they spent money on you~” he teases.

“he,” you correct, plucking a piece out. “he used hyung.”

wonwoo sighs, wiping away a fake tear. “our son is all grown up now. i feel like a proud dad,” he whistles.

you don’t have time to smack him because the bell rings, signalling the beginning of first period.

when wonwoo approaches you during lunch, you know he has something to share, if the mischievous glint in his eyes is anything to go by. “(name), have you eaten your chocolates yet?” he asks.

you’re already wincing, feeling seungcheol’s piercing eyes at your back. “chocolates? what chocolates?”

wonwoo gives you a knowing smirk, the corners of his lips lifting up like the cheshire cat’s. “he didn’t tell you? our dear boy here-” he pauses to smack your back, though it comes out a little too hard than anticipated. he seems to notice this too, hiding behind seungcheol’s back as you send him a withering glare. “-received a box of chocolates and a confession during first period today,” he explains.

seungcheol gasps with wide eyes. “what! and you didn’t think to tell me?”

you shrug, looking away. “i didn’t think it was-”

“-do not tell me it isn’t that important, because it is! now i get to tease you about your love life,” he cuts off, cackling. you lean forward to steal a kimbap from his lunchbox, eliciting a scream from him. nearby students shoot you three weirded out looks, though you could care less, shoving the kimbap into your mouth.

you roll your eyes at seungcheol’s sullen expression. “to answer your question, wonwoo, no, i have not finished the chocolates. soonyoung helped me eat a few though.”

wonwoo gives you an offended look. “why would you give that leech anything? he’ll just come back for more. plus, they’re a gift from someone else! why would you just give them away?” he asks.

you shrug, pulling a piece out from the box. “eating that many chocolates isn’t good for me. and i don’t really like the nutty ones, so i gave them to soonyoung. it’s not like i’m dumping them away altogether.”

wonwoo shakes his head. “you have no soul. it’s no wonder you’ve been single for so long.”

“i’m sorry for not swooning over a confession, mr. i-know-everything-about-romance,” you retort. you pluck out a diamond-shaped chocolate decorated with hazelnuts and pass it to seungcheol, who devours it the moment he sees it. “plus, that’s not the only gift i’ve gotten.” dragging your backpack towards you, you unzip it to find it overflowing with more boxes. “it seems that at the end of every period, a new box just presents itself on my desk. so far, i’ve gotten chocolates, peach-flavored gummies, a can of iced coffee, and a stuffed dinosaur. they all have cute notes attached to them, too.” the duo coo at the gifts, though you can see them specifically eyeing the consumables.

he seats himself beside you, stealing a piece of chocolate from you. “well, you know jihoon, your neighbor? he said he found another box on your desk and wanted me to give it to you.” he rummages through his backpack and slides out another box with a note attached to it. you and seungcheol curiously eye it before you grab it from wonwoo’s backpack.

“open it!” seungcheol whispers, eyes gleaming with curiosity. you roll your eyes; why are your friends more invested than you are? reluctantly you untie the ribbon and remove the note, but this time you open the box first. you’re surprised to see a slice of strawberry cake nestled inside a plastic container. judging from seungcheol’s dramatic gasp, you guess it’s from the same patisserie. you pay no mind to him though, moving onto the note.

i hope this letter reaches you safely! i got you this cake because i know you like strawberries. do you like them because they’re as sweet as you?

~ your secret admirer, lee

“wow, he’s getting bold! putting out a last name now,” wonwoo chortles.

you turn back to the slice of cake. so far, you know that your secret admirer is younger than you with a last name of lee, and he knows you well enough to know you dislike nuts and like strawberries. before you can narrow down potential admirers, you can hear someone yell out. you barely have time to register a basketball slamming down beside you, startling you so much you nearly fall over.

“oh my god, i’m so sorry!” you look up after recovering from your near-death experience to see chan. he lives right across from you, yet you only know he’s your underclassman and is jihoon’s younger brother. he looks awfully concerned, though you suppose that’s natural, considering how he nearly crushed you with a basketball.

you send him a reassuring smile. “it’s okay.” it may just be your imagination, but you swear you see a blush creeping up his cheeks. perhaps it’s just the heat from the sun, you guess. he bends forward to pick up the ball, apologizing once again, but you catch his eyes lingering on the slice of cake on your lap. you don’t have time to question it though, because he’s already jogging towards his other friends.

wait a minute. your secret admirer is someone younger than you, has the last name of lee, and knows you well enough to discern your likes and dislikes...

“i think i know who my admirer is,” you blurt, staring at chan’s retreating silhouette. seungcheol and wonwoo look surprised; you’ve always been quick at solving problems, but having done so before the end of the school day is an impressive feat, even for you.

“well? out with it!” seungcheol exclaims, eyes wide with anticipation.

you don’t have time to tell him or contemplate your next move, because then the bell rings, signalling the end of lunch.

you’ve laid out a solid plan: confront your secret admirer, turn him down because you have no dating experience whatsoever, and continue your last year smoothly. there should be no hitches in your plan, because having no experience and not wanting to hinder them should be excuse enough. plus, you doubt you’re worthy of being someone’s object of affections for a long time.

it seems your secret admirer isn’t done with his gifts, because even after lunch the gifts have been reappearing. they’re all very sweet, though you wonder why he chose you of all people, especially if the feeling may not be reciprocated. however, there aren’t any more hints that could lead you to him other then the cheesy compliments he writes you.

the school day has officially ended, and everyone is bustling around, desperate to leave. you’re sipping on a bottle of strawberry milk your admirer had gotten you while listening to a heated debate between soonyoung and wonwoo about the superiority of mint chocolate chip ice cream. “you actually have no taste buds, wonu,” soonyoung retorts.

“it tastes like toothpaste. of course you would like it,” wonwoo snaps.

“it tastes like toothpaste,” he mocks. “you haters use the same excuse every time. come back to me when you have a valid reason.”

 “it tasting like toothpaste is reason enough!”

you chuckle at wonwoo’s exasperation. personally you’re on soonyoung’s side in this new debate. wonwoo just doesn’t have taste buds. you’re about to support soonyoung’s side when, from the corner of your eyes, you see jihoon lingering by his desk, as if he’s waiting for something. “hey guys, i’ll be right back.” you excuse yourself from their conversation, eyes never leaving jihoon’s frame.

“wait! (name), mint chocolate chip, yay or nay?” soonyoung hollers.

“yay,” you answer. you can hear soonyoung cheering behind you, probably breaking out into his little victory dance. wonwoo’s muttering something about having tasteless friends, but you’re only half paying attention. you push through clusters of students before stopping in front of jihoon’s desk. “hey, can i talk to you for a moment?”

jihoon looks startled to see you, which only furthers your assumptions. “me?” you nod. “...sure.”

the two of you step out of the classroom and into an empty part of the hallway. a trio of girls passes you two, chatting about their plans for valentines’s day. one girl is talking about taking her girlfriend out to hotpot, while another is talking about binge-watching romance dramas with her boyfriend. you wonder how people can just jump into a relationship with no experience whatsoever. there isn’t a manual to it, so how do people know they’re doing it right?

you’re pulled out of your thoughts when jihoon clears his throat. “listen, correct me if i’m wrong, but i have an idea on why you brought me out here. but my answer is no. i’m sorry, i have a boyfriend, but i have a younger brother who-”

you turn to face him with wide eyes. “wait, what? what did you think i came out here for?”

jihoon gives you an incredulous look. “well, it’s valentines’s day, meaning everyone’s confessing to people they’ve liked. is that not what you’re doing? i’m flattered, but-”

“-i thought you were going to confess to me!” you exclaim. he gives you a blank stare, and suddenly you feel like you’ve been transported to some corny romance comedy. this is obviously the big comedy part. sighing, you pull out the most recent note, waving it around. “you’re younger than me by two months, your last name is lee, and we’re neighbors and classmates. you’ve probably heard me express my disdain for nuts and love for strawberries before. plus, you were the one who gave wonwoo the cake! who else could my secret admirer be?”

all of a sudden, a loud laugh rips out from jihoon’s chest, and you feel like you’re missing something very obvious and very crucial right now. “i admit that you’re handsome, but i have a boyfriend, and i’m very loyal to him.” he pauses to give you a mysterious smile. “but i do know who your secret admirer is.”

you widen your eyes in surprise. “really? who is it?”

he approaches you, pulling out a slip of paper out of his pocket. “i have been the one putting gifts on your desk, but only because i was told to do so.” he hands you the note, and you unfold it and read its contents.

the final note of the day! can you guess who i am? if you so desire, meet me at the basketball court beside the cafeteria after school today :)

~ your secret admirer, lee

“he’s waiting for you.” you look up at jihoon, who’s folding his arms. “now if you’ll excuse me, i’m off to get some boba. oh, and can you tell him he owes me twelve-thousand won? and no skimping this time!”

you’re standing by the cafeteria entrance leading to the basketball court, heart beating at a fast pace. you aren’t sure why you feel so nervous, especially with a solid plan in mind. as you lean against the door, trying to calm your heart rate, you catch chan at the court, shooting hoops. with wobbly legs, you start making your way down the stairs. at the sound of a newcomer, chan stops dribbling the basketball and turns to face you. “oh, hi hyung.” he pauses, watching you nervously look around. “are you waiting for someone, perhaps?”

you nod, eyes wandering the horizon. “you could say that, yeah. what about you?”

“yeah, i’ve been waiting for you.”

today has just been filled with surprises, you note, turning to face chan. he’s giving you an innocent smile, ball tucked between his arm. “i beg your pardon?”

he shrugs, shyly fiddling with the hem of his school uniform. “um... surprise?”

seeing how bashful chan is has you piecing the puzzle pieces together. your secret admirer is younger than you... chan’s your underclassman. his last name is lee... chan’s full name is lee chan. he knows you don’t like nuts but like strawberries... your parents are friends, and his mother always brings over fresh strawberries for you to eat. he’s jihoon’s little brother, so it’s no wonder you came so close. now that you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

...but it doesn’t. because aside from the times you drop food over at their place, you never talk to him. how can he like someone he barely knows?

chan inhales, straightening the wrinkles of his shirt. “um... hi hyung. i’m your secret admirer, and i’ve liked you since i was a first year. it would be really cool if you accepted my confession?” he frames it as a question, probably to make you feel less nervous, but it does nothing to ease your nerves. from the way you’re standing before him, frozen in place, his smile falls. “or not...?”

“i’m flattered, chan, i really am...” you glance up at him, and the sad smile he has on his face, the one bracing for rejection, breaks your heart a little. “but... there’s a few things we have to take in account. first of all, i barely know you. i don’t know about you, but i’m not quite ready to jump into a relationship, much less with someone i barely know, even if we’re neighbors. i also don’t have any experience in dating. and there’s also the age difference. i’m graduating this year. chan, you’re a cool guy, but do you really want to date someone who you barely know, who has no experience, and will be away before you know it?” you ask, listing out the different factors.

if seungcheol or wonwoo were here, they would reprimand you for coming up with excuses. but what else can you do? you’re being realistic, even if it may sound harsh. you look up at chan, who’s sad expression is replaced with one of determination. “all of your reasons do make sense. but hyung, i don’t think you should make judgments on who i am. like you said, we barely know each other, but i would love to get to know you more. you’re really nice, and you’re someone i look up to.” he approaches you with such confidence that you feel yours knees getting weak. “i don’t have any experience, either. and about the age difference... i can always wait. because i really like you, hyung. i understand if you can’t accept this confession, but i just wanted to tell you before you graduate. and truthfully, i’d appreciate it more if you just told me you didn’t like me instead of listing excuses.”

well, your whole plan is thrown out the window now. you gulp at the bitterness seeping through his voice. “the thing is, i don’t know you well enough to make any conclusions.” you pause. “this may sound selfish, but... could you give me some time to figure things out? i wouldn’t be opposed to learning more about you, but i don’t want to make it sound like i’m leading you on. that being said, just because i’m figuring things out doesn’t mean i won’t be upset if you decide to move on. you deserve someone who’s made up their mind, anyways.”

there isn’t an immediate response from chan, which makes you feel anxious. but then he approaches you with a wide grin, his whole face alight with hope. “i can give you all of the time in the world!” he chirps. you aren’t quite sure why he’s so happy... does he really like you enough to behave this way? “i promise you won’t regret being friends with me.”

you smile at his giddiness. “thank you for understanding. i’m really sorry about not being conclusive.”

he shakes his head with such fervor you’re reminded of a golden retriever with his blonde hair and all. “it’s okay. i’ve long accepted that not everyone can be a hundred percent sure about everything like i am. that being said...” he pauses to extend a hand towards you. “hi there, my name is lee chan, a second year. what about you?”

you chuckle. might as well start this friendship on a new foot, you suppose. extending your hand to shake his, you smile. “hi, my name is (first name) (last name), a third year. pleased to meet you.”

and that was two years ago, when you and chan were in your late teens, still navigating the hardships of high school and paving a path towards the future. truthfully, you had forgotten how your relationship with chan began in the first place, considering how you two are close-knit best friends now (though not as close as you are with seungcheol and wonwoo. they wouldn’t allow it, anyways). now, you’re a second year in university, still trying to navigate the trying hardships life throws at you. chan attends the same school as you, majoring in dance.

you’re sitting inside a booth in mcdonald’s with seungcheol and wonwoo, along with the new addition of jihoon. ironically enough, you two had gotten close after that event, and he had quickly assimilated himself into your little group. to seungcheol’s dismay, he’s a carbon copy of you and wonwoo, and now his tormentors have increased by one.

“so, valentines’s’ plans anyone?” you ask, taking a sip from your soda.

seungcheol dreamily sighs. “hannie, shua and i are going to a drive-in theater. aren’t they the best?” you exchange looks with wonwoo and jihoon. even now that they’ve graduated, he’s still hopeless as ever.

“yes. very cool,” jihoon deadpans. seungcheol throws a fry at him, but he catches it in his mouth with scary accuracy. “i don’t understand why people glorify valentines’s day when it’s just a corporate holiday.”

wonwoo snorts, taking a bite from his chicken sandwich. “and yet you’re the one with the most extravagant plans. aren’t you the one who’s going to treat jun to a fancy restaurant and then take him shopping?”

jihoon shrugs. “i’d much rather go to a ramen shop or do something low key, but junhui likes to do fancy things for holidays.” he turns to face you. “what about you, lover boy?”

“who are you calling lover boy?” you ask, stealing one of seungcheol’s fries. “and no, i have no plans. yay for single people.” all of a sudden, the booth falls silent. when you look up, you’re startled to see three pairs of eyes intensely staring you down. “what?”

“you have no right to say that. that’s wonwoo’s phrase.”

“hey!” wonwoo splutters, glaring at jihoon.

“don’t listen to them. but dude, you’re still single?” seungcheol asks.

“why wouldn’t i be?” you ask, narrowing your eyes at them. they all look at one another, and you recognize that look. it’s the one you and wonwoo would give each other whenever seungcheol said something embarrassing in front of his crushes. well, boyfriends now.

seungcheol sighs. “it’s been two years already, (name). you’re telling me now that you and chan are just friends?”

before you can protest, wonwoo takes out his spoon out of his mcflurry, waving it in front of you. “and don’t give me the i’m still thinking crap, because i see the way you look at him. that’s the gayest look you could give someone, and i’m surrounded by gay people.”

if you’re being honest, your impression on chan has improved since becoming friends with him, and you’d be lying if you said you only saw him in a platonic light. but chan has been waiting for you for a while now, so even if you were to jump into a relationship, it would probably take forever to make any progress considering how neither of you have experience. chan deserves better than having to wait around. “he doesn’t-”

“-deserve to wait around for me and he deserves better. we get it, dude, we really do,” jihoon interrupts. “but i’m his older brother, so i know him better than he knows himself. and let me tell you that he’ll wait for you like a puppy until you give him a definitive answer.” he stares you down, and suddenly you realize he’s entered protective brother mode. “if you like him, just tell him. so what if he deserves better? if he thinks so, he’ll tell you. worst comes to worst, you have three other guys to comfort you.” he gestures at seungcheol and wonwoo, who nod.

really, you do understand that the worst that could happen is you feel heartbroken. you know chan isn’t the type to throw you away like trash, botched confession or not. and yet a small part of you is afraid of telling him, because then you’d have to tell him about your insecurities, too.

“i’ll think about it, okay?” you tell them. the trio all give each other another knowing look; the last time you told someone you’d think something out, two years had passed.

“just two guys, sitting five feet apart ‘cause they’re not gay~” chan sings from the kitchen.

you roll your eyes, sitting on the couch. “i can’t believe you came here just to raid my fridge.”

he hums, reentering the living room with a bowl of strawberries in hand. he flops down beside you, throwing an arm around your shoulder. you think back to the vine he had been reciting moments ago, because they are definitely not five feet apart, and you’re very much gay. “come on, it’s valentines’s day. you won’t even spare some room for your favorite dongsaeng? what happened to singles for life?” he asks, throwing a strawberry in his mouth.

that’s the problem, you bitterly think to yourself. i kind of don’t want to be single for life. he’s oblivious to your turmoil though, grabbing your phone and scrolling through netflix. you decide to distract yourself by eating your bitterness away, but now your favorite fruit just reminds you of the botched confession from years ago.

you two had decided to binge-watch naruto again, and before you know it, the whole evening has passed by. you’re watching team seven make their way through the forest of death when you feel something on you. chan’s head, you discovered too late, is resting on your shoulder, and now you’re feeling bothered. the problem is, he isn’t even sleeping. “what are you doing?” you ask, nervously laughing.

chan doesn’t say anything, instead moving to lock your hands together. now you’re really bothered. “a little birdie told me that you had something to tell me,” he hums.

you clear your throat. “jihoon wouldn’t appreciate you calling him little,” you laugh. chan giggles at that, but his head or hand never leaves you. he must know about your not-so-platonic feelings now, because before establishing a friendship you two had clearly stated there were to be no hugs or hand holding until you had figured out your feelings. well, here goes nothing, you suppose.

“do-”

“-i think i like you but i’m not experienced and i don’t even know if i want a relationship and you deserve better than waiting around for me,” you blurt. the room suddenly falls silent, the sounds from the television more prominent than ever.

you’re already going through the several stages of regret until chan nuzzles into you, nosing your neck. at this point you might as well die from embarrassment. you’re supposed to be the cool, suave upperclassman chan looks up to, not the flustered puddle he’s reduced you to. his breath is fanning your skin, goosebumps dotting your body. “what did i tell you when i first confessed, hyung? don’t go making assumptions for me.”

you scoot away from him, releasing his hold on your hand. “i don’t even know if you like me still, and even if you did, jumping into a relationship is already going to take time. i’m just wasting your time.”

at this, chan furrows his eyebrows. “you are definitely not wasting my time, hyung. i told you before, didn’t i? i would wait for your answer. and,” he continues, gripping your shoulders. you’re shorter than chan by only a centimeter, yet you feel impossibly small in his hands. “i still like you. the way i feel about you hasn’t wavered once.”

you gulp, face a bright red. “so... what does this mean now? are we boyriends?”

he shrugs. “i’m just as clueless as you, hyung. are labels really a necessity?”

you laugh. “i suppose not, are they?”

“we can figure this out in five more business days,” he jokes, causing you to giggle. he leans forward to wrap his arms around you, resting his head on your shoulder again, surprising you.

you grumble, digging your warm face in his shoulder. “when have you gotten so charismatic, chan?” you ask, voice muffled. “you’ve really grown up now.”

chan hums in satisfaction, tightening his grip on you. “learned from jun-hyung. how else do you think he and hyung started dating?”

[yutahoes]

Sakura

(Part Two)

One - Two

genre : Chaptered, Fluff

pairing : childhood friends: soccer player! Nakamoto Yuta x single mom! Reader (Y/N)

word count : 2.3k words

You’ll always be his Sakura.

taglist :  @ailoveyuta @loona-4-eva @aiforyuu @2-3-t-i @cosmiclatte28 @url-lindo-sexy @nuoyipeach @aaasteroidsky  @readers-posts @delightfultacobread @bby-kji9 @a-bts-world​ @mel-yjh​ @yeolsechanhun​ @yutazen01 ​

It was the summer before his third grade when his dad announced that they will be moving to Seoul because of a business opportunity. The then eight-year-old Yuta hated that he had to leave his friends just because he can't stay in Japan. He hated that he had to transfer schools and learn a new language. Why do they have to move to another country? Why not move to another city instead? 

When the teacher introduced him to the class of third graders, he just glared at his Korean classmates who were looking at him in wonder. He doesn't want to be friends with them. He doesn't want to talk. He doesn't want to learn a new language. He's Japanese, why would he speak Korean? The teacher told him - or at least that was what he understood - to sit on a vacant chair at the back of the class. His classmates were staring at him. He's the new guy, it's normal. But he hated the attention. 

It was lunch when he decided to eat on the school's rooftop. He wasn't surprised that it was locked but a girl was drawing on the door of the rooftop. Isn't she in his class? The girl seated in front of him? A crayon drawing of stick figures made him curious, what is that? 

A certain symbol caught his attention, a straight line with a beak-like image and wings at the end held by a stickman he believed is a girl because of the triangular picture below her body. "Sakura?" He asked and the girl jolted in surprise, quickly hiding what she was doing. "Cardcaptor Sakura?" 

The girl was wide-eyed, looked at her drawing then at him. He noticed how her eyes twinkle at that even if the area isn't well-lit. Or is it because she just cried? "You're that Japanese guy." She said in Korean and he only caught the words 'Japanese' and 'guy' so she's probably referring to him. "Do you know Cardcaptor Sakura?" He only nodded. It is a hit in Japan, everyone knows Sakura. "I like Cardcaptor Sakura!" She exclaimed with a bright smile. 

That was the first time he saw that girl who loves Sakura. The first classmate who talked to him as if they spoke the same language. He remembered handing her a comic of her favorite cartoons the next day and she introduced herself as Y/N, even asking him along the lines of 'Can you teach me Japanese?' and 'Do you want to be friends with me?' 

His initial plan of not knowing Korean or not talking to people backfired. He wanted to have a real conversation with this Sakura girl. His first Korean friend. 

Yuta would remember teaching her hiragana every lunchtime, on their own place by the door of the rooftop and she would teach him hangul in exchange. Before class, she would tell him stories about what happened to Sakura from the episode yesterday as if he didn't watch the same show. After class, they would spend some time in the playground waiting for her mom to pick her up. 

She was also the person who encouraged him to try out for the soccer team. Unlike in Japan, soccer isn't a required PE in Korea so his classmates were amazed that he knew how to play soccer, even defeating some older kids. "Yuta, sugoi!" She exclaimed that made him smile, a real genuine smile he never showed to everyone. "You're handsome when you smile. You should smile more often." It was her who made him smile more. Just because he wanted her to call him handsome once again. 

In fourth grade, the two were so close that she spent time in their home and him on hers. Sometimes she would even sleep at their place when her mom has to stay all night in the hospital. He found out that she doesn't have a dad, he left them when she's just a baby and that she would always cry in her sleep looking for her dad. Kids weren't very welcoming with the idea of a broken family either and he would often see her crying on the stairs to the rooftop. 

And now, she's the one who has children. A mom. He never imagined that he will see her as a mom in the future. He wondered if she still cries for her dad. He wonders if she still knew how to speak or write Japanese. He wonders if she could call him 'handsome' again. 

Yuta promised that he wouldn't stay that long in Korea, he wanted to leave as soon as the wedding was over and he had every reason why. But Mark Lee, his secretary, thinks that he needs to stay for a couple more days and think of it as a vacation before the big soccer leagues happen. 

"Your alma mater is inviting you to teach the soccer club," Mark noted as he stared at the email by the administration of his former elementary school. The place where he honed his soccer playing skills. 

The place where he met her. 

The younger guy was surprised when the soccer player agreed to the said invitation. Even forcing him to do it today before he changes his mind. Luckily, he doesn't have any schedules that day.

The school changed a lot. Well, it's been years since he last visited the place. A lot of buildings surrounded the soccer field and he watched how elementary kids played. They look so small or is it because he's used to watching the adults play? The principal greeted him and introduced him to the soccer coach who looked so cocky. But instead of heading to the soccer field, he asked the principal if he could look upstairs. 

His feet dragged him to the staircase to the rooftop. Their meeting place. The door changed color, erasing her drawing that they maintained for years. From the stick figures to an actual 2D drawing of Sakura and Syaoran. 

He wished he could just erase his memory of her as well. The same way as the drawings are erased. 

It was free period when he went down to the classrooms and saw little kids in the school's hallway. Are they this small? "It's because you don't have a dad." He heard a child say and saw that it's a huge kid, probably a third-grader, in his jersey. "The soccer team doesn't accept kids who don't have dads." Well, elementary didn't change. 

When his gaze caught the smaller boy he's talking to, a sudden feeling of recognition hit him. Jae. Y/N's son. "My dad lives abroad." He nodded, he's correct about that. 

"Dads should watch your soccer games." The older kid claimed, making Yuta shake his head. Are children’s behavior like this? Well, he really should refrain from making one of his own. "Accept it, Jae. You can never be good for the soccer team." 

"Yah!" Someone shouted from the side. "Stop bullying my brother." Yuta smiled as he watched the mini version of the girl occupying his mind shout at the bigger kids who were hurting her brother. She's totally different from her. "Did your dad teach you that?" 

The bigger kid only glared when the soccer coach called for him, and he quickly called him 'daddy'. So that is where his confidence came from. His gaze returned to the siblings, Jae was holding his sister's arm saying sorry that she had to get angry. Yuta smiled, that's their mom's attitude. Always apologetic. How can these two be a spitting image of her? Truly, they're her children. 

"Yuta Nakamoto," Jae called before he could flee the place. He greeted the young boy then smiled at the girl who was looking at him in curiosity. "I told you he's eomma's friend, noona. He knows my name." Yuta chuckled at that. He just met his youngest fanboy. 

The younger girl pulled her brother behind her that surprised Yuta. "Eomma said not to talk to strangers." The older smirked. She's really different from her mom. 

"Should we call your mom? Can you give me her number?" The girl shook her head and Yuta nodded, already texting Taeyong. He responded with her number and Yuta quickly called the said phone number, "Hi Y/N. It's Yuta." Both kids were staring at him, "I'm here in Jae's school. Can I bring them to the mall?" 

"Ahjusshi, can I see if it's my mom?" The girl asked and Yuta handed his phone to her. "Eomma?" The girl stared at him in wonder as she heard her mom's voice. "Then can we go with this ahjusshi?" She glared at him for a moment then nodded as if she’s talking to her mom. “She wants to talk to you.” 

“Yuta, you don’t have to do this if you’re busy.” But he wanted to. He wanted to spend time with them and learn about her as a mom. “Just message me where you are. I’ll pick them up.” He agreed. If only he could spend time with her as well. 

It was Jae who’s most excited when they reached the mall. The older girl stayed a few feet away from the two of them. Maybe she’s not interested. But really, she’s a tough nut to crack. He discovered that Jae wanted to play soccer but his mom doesn’t want him to, saying that he’s too young to play. So Yuta brought him to a shop where they sell sports shoes. “I’ll go talk to your mom. But for now, wear these soccer shoes,” he claimed while tying the younger boy’s shoelaces that made him beam. Jae hugged Yuta, thanking him for the shoes. “You’re welcome, bud.” 

Yuta realized that he didn’t know the older girl’s name. What was it? Did Y/N mention her name? To be safe, he just asked Jae about it. “Cherry,” he called then walked to where she was, staring at the skating shoes. “Do you want one?” She shook her head mumbling that their mom would get mad. “Besides, it’s not snowing.” He nodded. 

“We can go ice skating...” 

“You’re not my dad.” That made Yuta stop. Of course, he’s not. “Stop acting that you care about me or Jae. You’re just like the other guys.” Other guys? “You’ll leave me and Jae. You’ll leave eomma.” She’s a difficult nut to crack. 

Yet she’s so different when she’s next to her brother. The cold eyes were changed into warmness when her brother asked if they could play in the ball pit. She looked like a child, smiling at the younger as they bounced at the trampoline. She looks exactly like her. How can two children, both from the same parents, have so different personalities? 

He was just watching them, texting Y/N where he is, checking from time to time the two kids playing with the others in the ball pit area. "Hey," Y/N called, sitting beside Yuta on the mall bench. She smiled seeing the two playing. "Did they tire you?" 

Yuta laughed. "It's fine. They're cool." There was silence, a comfortable silence. It's awkward to see her now. A lot of things changed. "Jae has the same personality as you, that's cute." She giggled. "Cherry looks like you." 

Y/N nodded. "I'm glad she talks to you." 

"It was hard, honestly." He confessed and again, she giggled. That sound. He missed her laugh. "I think she wants to go figure skating." That surprised Y/N. "And Jae wants to play soccer."

"He's too young. He'll get hurt with the bigger kids." Yuta was about to revolt at that. "I remembered when you played with the bigger kids back in eighth grade." That was one of his worst plays ever. Until now, he can feel how hurt he is. 

She confessed that she doesn't know anything about sports that's why she's a little worried about sending her kids to the sports clinic that made him smile. She's such a mom. "I'll train Jae," Yuta announced that made her look at him. "I have to stay in Spain for two months for the league then I'll come back and teach Jae soccer." He explained. "I'll help Cherry too." 

"Yuta, you don't have to." 

"I want to." He held her hand. "Please." 

"Why are you holding hands?" Cherry asked that made Yuta let go of his hold on her. 

The older just gave her daughter a glare that made Yuta laugh. They look alike, the resemblance is too uncanny if you see them now yet they’re so different. “Eomma!” Jae called, reaching out to hug his mom. “I had fun today.” And she smiled at him. “Yuta samchon is so cool.” 

“He bought you shoes?” She asked, checking the new kicks on her son’s feet. Jae claimed that he also bought Cherry one that made the older girl glare at Yuta. “Did you say thank you?” Both nodded. 

Yuta smiled at them. They do look like a happy family. “I’ll get going. I’ll see you when I get back from Spain.” Y/N nodded. Yuta asked for a hug and Jae was the only one who’s ecstatic to hug him. Cherry rolled her eyes that made the older guy laugh. As expected. “Come on, Y/N, a hug.” He said, hands extended for the older girl. 

The girl giggled before giving him a tight hug. His hand rested on her back then the other on the back of her head, caressing her hair. “You’re doing a great job being a mom, Sakura.” 

She laughed before muttering the words, “I’m proud of you, Syaoran.” 

Watching the three of them head to a different way opposite him, he wished he would have another chance to bond with them. He would love to be with them. Maybe having children isn’t too bad. 

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

Three

[last-necromancer]

((Soon this blog will be switching to my new AU where their stories will change but since there are still many asks about their past I want to put their backstory out. Here is a complete 'speedrun' of their past until the 'present'. Hope this will answer all your questions~ ))

James and Ari backstory:

- Jameson was born on another Hyperion station but his family moved to Helios when J was very young to remember that, Ember was born when J was 4 years old

- J spend 4 years in the special program due to his behavior problems. So he joined the first-grade class 4 years old than others.

- Ari was born on Eden-6, father Sebastian - hunter, mother Maria - cook in their family restaurant. They moved to Helios with their restaurant when they got the chance and few other hunter families working in the restaurant moved with them. Mr. Serino was visiting Eden-6 to hunt regularly selling food to rich and to provide to their restaurant

- Ari had to take care of herself a lot, her parents insisted on her to be strong and independent from a young age. Creating a big feel of loneliness in her from an early age

- Both Ari and J entered the same class, teachers knew about J’s troubles so they sit him with the calmest kid in class. That’s how J ended up sitting next to Ari and how they met

- J annoyed Ari and they fought a lot daily. They eventually bond over the fighting and became best friends. Ari was helping J passing school a lot and often came over to Blacks to help J with homework and learning. Due to their close bond of them, J and Ari form a very sibling-like relationship and started calling each other sis/bro

- When Ember got older she showed huge intelligence and talent for explosives and complex machinery. Unlike J she kept on studying aiming to make weapons for Hyperion

- Ari and J’s high school years were again spent in the same class. J had a crush on one of the most popular girl in school which lead him to his doom. He got invited by her on a sleepover with her friends. The entire thing was staged to get him there and made fun of him. Their fun took a very dark turn. J managed to escape but he never told anyone what happened there that night

- Since the incident, J became very hostile towards women and started seeking attention from males. His behavior was worse than ever and he barely finished high school without getting kicked out. J got in a major fight with his parents to the point they kicked him out. J and Ari moved in together

- Ari worked at game shop building computers and J started selling drugs to provide enough money so they can live on their own. Ari started going on hunts with her father to learn how to hunt and to earn some money on top of her job.

- J started taking the drugs instead of selling them, the dealers told him to pay or they will get the money other ways. Again J told no one about this and didn’t pay since he had no money to do so. The dealers ended up killing his parents and taking all their money. They left J a message that they are even now

- Everyone thought it was a basic robbery, no one knew about the money J owned them and J never told anyone his parents were killed because of him. Poor Ember tried to understand why would anyone pick her parents while J could not look her in the eyes

- Unable to come with the fact his parents died because of him J overdose himself in an attempt to kill himself. In his high state J wandered into Helios labs. The docs there knew he will die so they decided to try their experiment on him to not let this free test subject just go unused. No one survived the experiment, they took him as a joke knowing twig like him will never make it. But the drugs that infected his body over a long time of using them made the acid experiment successful

-  Ari went to find J right after finding he is missing. Asking people if they saw him, they told her the labs took him in. Knowing no one leaves those labs alive Ari went for Ember to form a plan how to get him out fast. Ember went to steal a ship, Ari recorded a message for her parents that they will flee to Eden-6 where they will all met. Ari took her father‘s gun shooting guards and lab workers to get to J fast. Despite J’s horrible state of acid pouring out of him, they managed to get away from the labs

-  They all get into the stolen ship and fly away. None of them knew how to drive it so they crashed on Pandora. They left all their belonging and Echos on Helios so no way to call help. They started wondering on Pandora trying to survive by raiding and stealing from small bandit camps

-  Mr. Serino went to Eden-6 hoping to find them there but they never came. Stayed there since then still waiting and searching for his daughter and her friends. Never losing hope despite his wife not believing Ari is still alive

-  Ari and J blend ‘well‘ and were good at surviving but Ember was too scared and innocent for it. Eventually she tried to help only to step on mine trap and lose both her legs. Hyperion declared all three of them as criminals, if they ever get close to Hyperion again they will be arrested. Seriously wounded Ember and exhausted Ari made J decide they need to join a bigger group. COV was the only one accepting almost anyone as long as you swear to be loyal so they went there

-  J used his showman skills and charisma to get into the liking of many higher COV parts, making his way to Troy. He got Troy’s attention with his skills so Troy take him as his right hand and both girls to live and work for COV. Ember was meant to be working in workshops and Ari at the kitchen.

-  Ember’s health was slowly getting worse every day, J plead Troy to take her to safety, promising his life and infinite loyalty in exchange. Troy sent an echo to Maliwan that an important Hyperion engineer is on Pandora willing to work for them. Maliwan came for Ember and took her with them, offering Ari to come too but she stayed on Pandora with J

-  J did as he promised and did everything to show his loyalty. Troy refused to trust him for so long despite J being so protective and caring for him. Whenever anyone tried to call Troy sick again got it bad from him. J tried to befriend him many times but Troy was so deaf to it. Troy started trusting J after many times J risked his life for him, after J proved to listen to orders no matter what, slowly over time they started becoming friends. Both boys bond over their manipulative and smart tactics slowly becoming even closer

-  Helios crashed and with it Ari’s hopes are gone. Her mother was dead since she never left the station, it was sure she died there. She doesn’t know her dad is still waiting for her so she believes she lost everything. She stopped coming out of the cathedral and never hunt again out of depression whenever she sees the ruins of Helios or remembers that hunting is the trade of her family that she lost.

-  The whole time Ari wasn’t so happy as a cook but she wasn’t one to really complain since working outside of the cathedral was way WAY worse. J pressured Troy to make her an editor since she would fit the position. Troy listened to his advisor and give Ari a place in his editing team. This made her a very high rank in the cult and give her even better living conditions.

-  Very often Ari was coming to work late just to sleep longer and then working to late hours. Troy caught her there once and they finally had their first proper chat. They meet up there sometimes and they always chat a lil bit making Troy feel she can be his friend…

[peaches-writes]

how to appease your asian aunties ch. 1 - christmas

description: in the immortal words of wine aunts and aunts you’re not even related to but forced to call your aunt at gatherings, ‘do you have a boyfriend?’ member: jisung / han genre: fluff, fake dating au, implied rich kids au, eventual childhood / best friends to lovers au, college au, implied fem reader (but i still used they/them pronouns) word count: 7.5k chapter warning: food, drinking, explicit language, one comment about weight note: insp by a twt meme + this is my first attempt at making a story with parents having a bigger role in them omg

ch. 2 // ch. 3 // series masterlist

Though you’re a semester away from graduating college, with your own circles of friends, clubmates, and close classmates, you still can’t understand why your mom and her sorority batchmates feel the need to have reunion parties every single year. Maybe it’s the product of growing connectivity in this modern age or just simply your wide age gap preventing you from having the same nostalgic feelings attending these dinners; nevertheless, ever since your mom started bringing you to these parties to socialize with her friends’ children when you were four, you've always personally found it a bit troublesome. 

They see each other at mall sales, weekend brunches, weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries all the time—a lot of them even work closely with each other. For as long as you can remember, you can’t help but endlessly wonder in this time of year: will they ever get tired of each other?

As you adjust your coat over your semi-formal attire for this year’s dinner party, you sigh in front of the full-length mirror by your house’s front doors and mentally conclude that they probably never will. This is your 19th reunion dinner now and even from meters away in the kitchen, you can hear your mom fuss to your dad and the helpers either worriedly about the desserts that everyone in the house (and your nearest restaurant branch) was forced to bake two nights ago; or excitedly about seeing her college best friend, Mrs. Hwang, even if they literally just dragged their respective families to the monthly brunch last weekend—like she always does minutes before you leave. She always sounds like a crazed woman but you know deep inside that she’s excited to see her friends again and reminisce about the same old college memories you’ve even memorized by heart now.

It’s cute and all, maybe you’ll even end up the same in a decade or so but you swear at present on the dinner menu tonight that the more you spend your first day of Christmas break attending these dinners, the more you’ll slowly lose your mind over this unofficial holiday tradition: from your mom’s dramatic ramblings at the start of the night to the prospect of spending the rest of the evening laughing off your unofficial aunts and godmothers’ unnecessary backhanded comments and trying not to get caught in the trouble the younger children make.

It really just isn’t exactly your type of scene. It’s like family Christmas parties but with more passive-aggressive internalized drama since you’re not related to any of the guests by blood.

“Y/N, dear, come along now, we’re running late!” Your mom scolds you as she approaches your direction to the double doors, carrying cupcake caddies and cake boxes with your dad and your six house helpers. She’s wearing the dress you helped pick out last month, you observe, which is another tradition of hers. Rich people and not wanting to be seen wearing the same clothes twice, you guess. “Oh dear, I need to fix my hair in the car!”

You take one last look at yourself in the mirror before sprinting to the doors and helping your dad open them. You also take a couple of boxes from one of the helpers as you all pile outside, letting everyone pass through before closing the doors behind you. 

The nine of you then head to your dad’s Ford you parked outside the house gates earlier this afternoon, loading the everything in the back of the car without much difficulty before parting ways with the helpers for tonight with the same house instructions from your mom to not wait up for the three of you.

“Bye!” Your mom waves at your helpers through the rolled down windows on the front passenger seat as your dad begins to drive away from the house. 

Once your house begins growing smaller in the distance behind you, only then does your mom attend to her hair while your dad closes all the windows and locks the doors.

You, on the other hand, lean back in your own seat, taking out your phone to pass the ten minutes travel time to one of your godmothers, Mrs. Kim’s house in the adjacent subdivision.

“Y/M/N! Y/F/N! Welcome!” Mrs. Kim greets you at her house gates with her own mini army of house helpers, kindly helping you and your parents unload your party contributions and transfer them inside her recently renovated kitchen. “Oh, Y/N! Look at you, you look so beautiful tonight!”

You smile politely through the wave of compliments and ‘oh you gained a bit of weight’ comments that follow as you try your best to not to trip over the slippery marble steps leading to the house. Contrary to what your mom has been worrying about earlier at home, you eventually discover that you’re fairly early to the party for the 19th year in a row with only half of the families already in attendance to greet you when you entered the house.

“Y/N, all the teenagers are upstairs on the second floor, by the way.” Mrs. Kim informs you once your cupcakes have been neatly organized in the caddies at the very end of the buffet table, making you cringe internally at her preferred term for you and the other older kids in the house. “Dinner is at 7:30.”

“Thank you, auntie.” You smile one last time at her before excusing yourself to go upstairs, sighing internally in relief that her son, Seungmin, has smartly gathered everyone upstairs for the third year in a row to avoid the aunts and uncles for as much as possible.

You’re not completely fond of the parties, sure, but you can’t deny that there are little parts that have unconsciously grown on you—like your unlikely band of childhood friends and your shared hatred for this particular party.

Climbing up the slippery staircase as fast as you can with a death grip on the railings, you reach the second floor in no time to be greeted by six out of the eight people you’ve sort of grown up with in these parties occupying the common area: Felix and Hyunjin having a Wii dance battle in front of the television, Seungmin and Minho having a violent game of UNO on the coffee table, and Ryujin and Yeji scrolling through their phones on the sofa before abandoning them to approach you at noticing your presence by the staircase.

“Y/N!” Ryujin calls you in as she reaches you first for a brief hug and a short exchange of compliments on each other’s outfits, as if you didn’t just meet at one of your shared class’ Christmas parties yesterday. Though all of you attend the same university, you see Ryujin the most since you’re in the same college, just in different departments. “So nice to see you again!”

“Yeah, yeah, hello to you too again.” You chuckle, more genuinely now in the company of party guests you’re actually comfortable with, before waving hello at Yeji who trails behind. 

Yeji then naturally hugs you next, pulling you a few steps away from the staircase so the two of you don’t topple over when she leans her weight on you. “Y/N, took you long enough!” She says next to your ear. “Hyunjin and I were starting to make bets if the aunties suddenly trapped you downstairs like Chan and Miyoung.”

You hug her back with equal force, a little more than you did with Ryujin, pulling away after to playfully slap her arm for the teasing comment. “I’d sell my arm first before I let that happen.” You retort as the two of you laugh. “I just helped set up desserts—mom made us do an extra two boxes of brownies and cookies this year so you better get a lot later!” 

“Of course, but only if you eat a lot of the spaghetti my mom made!” She reminds, kindly fixing your hair for you. “I missed you! You look so pretty tonight!”

Behind the two girls, the boys also greet you in scattered casual ‘hi’s and ‘hello’s before going back to their own activities. You greet them back as they acknowledge you (and even reciprocate Felix’s long-distance high five mid-dance), crossing off everyone’s names in your mental attendance list as your gaze wanders around the room.

Since Chan is busy being a grown-up and showing off his fiance downstairs, you conclude that only one person is missing among your eight friends.

“Ya, Han Jisung!” As if on cue, the missing eighth person in your list emerges from the staircase behind you as Minho calls his name. “Welcome back!” 

Jisung greets everyone back in their second wave of scattered greetings as he walks to Minho and Seungmin’s direction, purposely acknowledging you last by suddenly turning around and walking backwards to send a wave and wink your way. He almost trips over the long ruffles of the big accent carpet as he does this, making you, Yeji, and Ryujin laugh as the only witnesses.

“Oh my God.” You place a hand to your forehead in secondhand embarrassment, stifling your laughs as your best friend regains his balance and looks behind him in case anyone else saw (which, unfortunately for you, they didn’t). You can’t believe that despite missing last year’s party because of his study abroad program’s strict schedule, he still manages to do his ritual clumsy carpet accident somehow. “This dumbass, I swear.”

In front of you, Jisung only laughs it off as well. “You didn’t see that!” He adjusts his coat with one hand and scratches the nape of his neck with the other in between laughs, walking forward to you properly after with his arms extended for a hug. “Stop laughing and come here, ugly. I missed you.” 

You feign a scowl but hug him back anyway, Yeji and Ryujin slyly stepping away with knowing smiles that only you can see with Jisung’s eyes turned away. You stick your tongue out at the two girls as they abandon you and walk back to the sofa before slapping Jisung’s back harshly for the familiar insult. “Speak for yourself, you ugly. I missed you too.” You reply to his latter comment with an amused chuckle of your own. “How are you?”

“Better now that I’m seeing you in person again.” He pulls away after with his signature flirty smirk, visibly eyeing you up and down now while his hands are still on your upper arms. Though he knows such gesture irks you, especially when it comes to the aunts and uncles downstairs, Jisung is the only one among your friends confident enough to tease you this way. Knowing each other a bit longer than everyone else has its perks, he’s come to realize over the years. “Look at you, all dressed up tonight. For me?” 

“Of course I’m all dressed up tonight, it’s Chan’s engagement announcement later.” You retort, swatting his hand away to adjust your now wrinkled clothes. “You’ve known me for twenty years, already; I think it’s time to stop assuming I’ll ever dress up for you now.” 

He only shakes his head, his teasing and lighthearted mood unwavering in front of you. “Nah, I really think you dressed up for me tonight.” He insists jokingly, a hand lingering over the fabric of your coat. “If I get welcome back parties like this from you in the end, should I just do more one-year study abroad programs?” 

“And leave me to fend off the aunties every other year? I don’t think so.” You’re quick to turn down, walking pass him to rejoin your group now. Jisung naturally follows along like a lost puppy, suddenly changing his mind on joining Minho and Seungmin to follow you around now that you’ve started conversation. “You owe me for leaving me to take all the ‘I can set you up on a blind date with my godchild’ and ‘are you dating anyone’ comments last year.”

The two of you sit next to Ryujin and Yeji who, without even looking up from their phones, quickly scoot away to the other end of the big sofa which makes you send pleading looks their way while Jisung laughs and gains enough confidence to sling an arm on the sofa behind your shoulders.

Another annoying thing from this yearly reunion party is how it’s an unspoken rule in your group to leave you and Jisung alone whenever you’re engaging in your usual banter. You and Jisung are the enemies type of best friend, for God’s sake. You don’t understand how everyone (yes, even Seungmin) thinks the two of you are being cute. 

“I keep telling you, you wouldn’t get all those comments if you just tell them you’re dating someone, dummy.” Jisung returns to your conversation once you’re settled, purposely placing a suggestive emphasis on the pet name. “That’s just the most natural thing to do in front of the aunties.” 

“And who would I show them if they ask who?”

“Try me.” Jisung answers smugly, earning him an eye roll from you.

“As if.” You deadpan, leaning to his arm anyway as you take out your phone and connect to the wifi. “Given your new fuckboy look to the aunties, I’m pretty sure they’ll see past that kind of bullshit, especially Yeji and Hyunjin’s mom and Minho’s mom. They’d be more convinced if I tell them I’m dating Seungmin instead and he’s already in a relationship.”

You don’t even have to look to your side to see Jisung pouting as he whines in complaint, his free hand going up to your side to shake your arm. “That hurts.” He dramatically points to his chest when you show the slightest hint of turning his way. “And having Bumble on your phone isn’t being a fuckboy, I don’t even use it to get dates.” 

“That’s not what the aunties think.” You point out, knowing just how much your aunts and uncles easily misunderstand concepts from your generation like social and dating apps. “I’m telling you, I prefer you swaying the conversation for me over you pretending to be my boyfriend.”

Jisung is quiet for a moment and you’re convinced that he’s decided on ending the conversation at this point until he suddenly twists his body towards you and challenges, "Do you wanna bet? Test out that theory?” He smirks again. “It’d really spice up this party, besides Chan’s announcement, of course.”

Only then do you look up at him since you sat down, deadpanning, “No.” 

“Come on, it’d be really interesting!” He taps you on your shoulders with a laugh, a combination of habits he always does whenever he’s trying to involve you in his usual trouble-making antics. “My mom will finally get off my back for always nagging me as a ‘fuckboy’ and our mom’s sorority friends will finally get off yours for not dating.” 

“You’re crazy.” You comment, crossing your arms in front of him. “I think I’ll just re-download Bumble too and bring someone to the party next year.” 

“You’re really taking too much jabs at my heart right now,” He sighs with a contrasting smirk. “and we’re not even past dinner yet.” 

“Because you deserve it,” You chuckle back at him, pretending to punch him on his stomach which he reacts to dramatically. “I’ve always known you’re a dumbass but that’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard from you.” 

Stubborn, he shakes his head in disagreement as you speak. “Nah, nah, we’ll see about that.”

And as if on cue, Mrs. Kim emerges from the staircase and announces that dinner is ready, luring everyone out of the second floor before you can even ask Jisung what he means with his words. 

“Ya, Han Jisung!” You call for him when he sprints to Seungmin’s side when the latter begins leading everyone downstairs. 

You try catching up to him but the staircase becomes too narrow for you to squeeze past everyone, forcing you to walk with Minho and Ryujin at the back of the group. With this, Jisung then takes this as an opportunity to look up at you from the turn on the staircase and send you another wink, a more confident one this time since he doesn’t trip after. 

Your ‘age group,’ as the aunts differentiate you from the younger children, hogs the extensive buffet and steals the best table in the backyard, near the karaoke machine so you can stop the uncles from singing too much of ‘My Way’ once they get drunk later on and as far away from the children’s table as possible so you don’t have to be obligated to take care of them later on. Chan, the eldest among you now, joins your table with his fiance, Miyoung, after they’ve officially declared their engagement before the buffet opened, happily handing out their save the date cards for their May wedding.

“Just remember, Miyoung, that you can literally get all your wedding needs from us, okay?” Yeji comments amidst all the talk about the wedding, gesturing to everyone as you eat and drink champagne. “Like Y/N and Seungmin for catering, Ryujin for the attires, Felix for your honeymoon trip, me and Hyunjin for the flowers and documentation, and Jisung can dress up as a clown for your reception.” 

“Ya!” Jisung protests to your left, cheeks full of steak and spaghetti that makes the whole table erupt in laughter. “Chan’s and Minho’s studios can arrange the music and the decor; my mom will probably argue with Miyoung’s mom for the locations and hotels.” 

“I can just tell my dad to hire you as a clown, though.” Minho shrugs nonchalantly, further fueling your laughter. To your right, you can even see Miyoung giggling through her glass of champagne, having given up on stifling her laughs. “It’d make good entertainment.” 

Jisung then leans over to you to turn to Miyoung on your other side with a pout and a pleading look to her and Chan. “You two are just letting them drag me like this?” He whines dramatically before turning to you. “Y/N, back me up here.”

“No!” You press a finger up to his forehead and playfully push him back on his seat. “It’s a great idea, what are you talking about?” You tease as you do so, much to more whines from him. “There’s like five months before the wedding, think about it.”

Next to you, Miyoung forces herself to stop laughing, teasingly asking Chan, “Babe, what do you think? Should we just demote Jisung from groomsman to clown?” 

“I’d very much prefer being a groomsman, please.” Jisung asks over Chan, leaning over the table. “I can’t compete with Changbin for best man but as long as I’m not dressing up as a clown I’m good!” 

“Hey, how come Jisung’s a groomsman?” Seungmin complains from across you, frowning cutely at the couple. “Miyoung, I’m your cousin! I introduced you and Chan in university!” 

“You’re a groomsman too, Minnie, don’t worry.” Miyoung reassures with a warm smile before elbowing her fiance. “As long as you can get your parents to cater with Y/N’s family.” 

The offer makes Seungmin’s ear perk up in interest. “Okay, call!” 

“Can we all be in the wedding party at this point? I’m seriously pushing it now, I want to dress up really cute!” Yeji, who sits on Chan’s other side, pleads. 

“Me too! I second that!” Felix backs her up immediately, the two now leaning over the table expectantly in Chan’s direction. “Though I’m not so keen on designing things.”

“Ah, but we have to make more room for actual relatives.” The groom-to-be in question laughs sheepishly. “Though, knowing our parents, I’ll try to squeeze everyone in somewhere in the program. Just let us iron out everyone’s contributions first.” 

“Yeji, I’ll take note of your suggestion, though.” Miyoung points at the younger girl with an appreciative grin. “I’ll message the groupchat once Chan and I meet up again with the planner.” 

Meanwhile, Chan’s last comment gives you and Minho an idea and the two of you suggest in chorus, “Get Seungmin to sing!” 

“Jinx!” You and Minho exchange winks and long distance-high fives from Jisung’s two sides after while Chan and Miyoung ask Seungmin about said idea, making Jisung pout at you. 

The general table conversation then naturally flows to other matters, mostly about the famous names you might be expecting at the wedding, but Jisung doesn’t participate much anymore, turning to you instead and asking, “Ya, are you cheating on me with Minho now? You sacrifice me as entertainment then back Minho up but not me!” He rambles in between mouthfuls of food, making you and even Minho chuckle in amusement despite the latter being in another conversation with Ryujin and Seungmin. “I just left for one year and you’re already doing this to me!” 

“What are you on about again, dumbass?” You roll your eyes with a scoff, stealing a piece of steak from his plate for the third time this dinner. “Finish your food, everyone’s done and you’re so slow!” 

Jisung then belatedly swats your chopsticks away, “I’m almost done, dumbass, stop mooching off my plate!” 

"Then hurry up, you still have to accompany me to the dessert table.” You point out, referring to your least favorite part of this reunion parties: getting attacked by invasive questions on your return trip to the buffet table. “Remember, you owe me. I’m not going in there alone again.” 

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He replies on his last two bites of food, eating one then handing the other one to you. “Have the other one, then.” 

He pokes your lips with the last piece of steak and you instinctively lean your head away, catching the food with your own chopsticks instead. “Thanks.” You bring the food to your mouth before carefully patting the oil he ended up smearing on your lips with your table napkin. 

Across the table and out of your earshot, Yeji elbows Hyunjin and points to the two of you. “They’re at it again.” 

Without you or Jisung looking, Hyunjin looks at the two of you in feign disgust. “I know, every damn year.” 

On Hyunjin’s other side, Seungmin nods frustratingly in agreement which makes Yeji laugh. “We shouldn’t have taken last year for granted, 'no?” He sighs. “Last year was so peaceful without them together.”

“Agreed.” The Hwang cousins agree in chorus before listening to the table’s general conversation again.

Meanwhile, Jisung finally finishes his food and excuses the two of you from the table to get dessert. Miyoung waves at you politely and Felix playfully orders that you two get him cupcakes but the rest only acknowledge you with simple nods as they’re completely engrossed in betting on whose dad will be singing My Way on the karaoke machine first (everyone’s in the middle of betting on Mr. Bang). With that, you and your best friend then take your leave, going back inside the house and making a beeline to the kitchen.

Unfortunately for you, you catch your mom, Mrs. Han, and Mrs. Hwang gossiping by the punch bowls once you reach the kitchen’s open doorway—literally the worst combination of sorority aunts to be bombarded with invasive questions.

“Shit.” You mutter under your breath loud enough for only Jisung to hear, the two of you still out of the three women’s sights. Looking up at Jisung with pleading eyes, you ask, “Should we just go back later?” 

Quickly seeing this as an opportunity to get back at you, Jisung only smiles evilly and links his hands with yours, dragging a hesitant you inside the kitchen and towards the direction of the dessert table. “No, let’s get dessert now, baby.” He dismisses your silent pleas teasingly, making sure his voice is loud enough to get your worst nightmare of trio’s attentions. “Felix also asked us to get cupcakes too, remember?”

And like vultures, the three women immediately turn to you and Jisung as you head in their line of vision, three different shades of questioning looks on their faces. You especially catch your mom’s face, a mixture of surprise, amusement, and genuine curiosity for some reason, which sets all the gears in your head into panic mode while Jisung only gains more confidence from this. 

You swear at that moment on Jisung’s sort of untied shoelaces that you just want Mrs. Kim’s new kitchen floor tiles to swallow you up right there and then.

“Hey, mom!” Jisung greets his own mom with a wave, coming off as sweet to her but mocking to you. He then bows politely to your mom and Mrs. Hwang and you’re forced to follow along for the sake of courtesy. “Mrs. Y/L/N, Mrs. Hwang.” 

The three women look at each other curiously, as if in a silent debate on what they’ve just heard, while Jisung pretends to be unfazed, passing you a dessert plate and examining tonight’s dessert options. 

“Jisung, I swear to God,” You hiss at him as you take a slice of chocolate cake for him. “I’m going to kill you after this party.” 

He leans close to your ear while gathering cupcakes on a separate dessert plate, whispering, “I think it’s too late for that, though.” before your mom, Mrs. Han, and Mrs. Hwang suddenly appear in front of the two of you on the other side of the buffet table with sickeningly sweet smiles, and a million questions. 

You especially fear Jisung’s mom. Mrs. Han and your mom often go to the mall together, especially when there’s an ongoing sale, and you’ve been forced to carry all their shopping bags over the years because Jisung and his older brother usually bail on you. Though she’s very sweet, you’ve always known her to be very picky on some things and it just makes you think that she’s picky on who Jisung dates too. 

“Mom,” You call for your mom with wide eyes. “Do you need anything?” 

But she waves her hand dismissively with a reassuring smile at your question. “Oh, nothing, Y/N dear,” She answers, eyes darting almost threateningly between you and Jisung. It makes your hand shaky as you now complete your tower of dessert plates. “your aunties and I were just talking and we didn’t mean to but we saw you and Jisung so we just got curious and thought we’d ask how the two of you are.” 

“Oh, just ask them already!” Mrs. Hwang exclaims excitedly, slapping your mom’s arm like a school girl. “If you won’t, I will.”

But Mrs. Han is already leaning over the table with a knowing smile, straightforwardly asking, “Are you two kids dating?” which immediately makes your mom and Mrs. Hwang erupt into fits of giggles. “Come on, the aunties want to know!” 

“Oh, um—” You stammer out before Jisung beats you to it. 

For the second time tonight, you feel Jisung’s arm on your shoulder as he speaks over you confidently, “Y-Yeah, we’ve been for a while now!” He then places his dessert plate back on the table and boyishly rubs the nape of his neck which only elicits swooning reactions from the three women, a complete contrast from your expectations a while back. “Just some time before my program ended so it’s been a bit long-distance for the most part.” 

“Oh? But how?” Mrs. Hwang asks curiously. “I didn’t hear of you going to Malaysia this year, Y/N, and Jisung, your mom told me you didn’t have time to go home!”

“You could’ve just told me, Sungie! Then, I would’ve had you sent home earlier if you wanted to see Y/N!” Mrs. Han adds as well, clasping her hands in satisfaction. “I knew this was coming! You two have always been so cute together!” 

Your mom agrees, “Luckily, I refused Mrs. Park’s offer to set Y/N up with another one of her nephews a while back. Had I known you two were dating, I wouldn’t have talked to her tonight at all!”

You open your mouth to try and speak but Jisung beats you to it again. “We’ve been in touch: message, calls, and video calls, you know.” He half-shrugs casually, as if he’s been rehearsing the line for a while now. “It’s our first time meeting since we started seeing each other so telling you guys just kind of flew past us.” 

You groan internally but you also can’t help but sigh in relief at the prospect that you avoided getting set up by Mrs. Park again because of Jisung. Though this doesn’t completely erase your annoyance over him for putting you in this situation, you still owe him a ‘thank you’ after somehow.

So, you conclude that you should just follow along. It’s fake dating your best friend over another pointless blind date at this point now, after all. “You’re okay with this, right?” You decide to ask in a follow-up, pretending to not know that they’ll agree anyway. Next to you, Jisung’s eyes visibly widen and, seeing it from the corner of your eyes, you quickly elbow him in response before giving your most innocent look to your mom. “I mean, Jisung won’t be studying abroad now and we’re graduating, anyway, so it’s cool, right?”

Judging by their softened reactions, you feel like you could challenge Hyunjin to acting now. 

“Of course we’re okay with it!” Your mom answers first, Mrs. Han nodding along happily. “I’m glad that it’s someone I know at least and I’m sure your dad wouldn’t mind.” 

You hear Jisung gulp nervously at the last comment. If you’re afraid of his mom, he’s afraid of your dad because of the one time he helped you practice for your driver’s license and the two of you almost ended up crashing the Ford on your subdivision’s club house. You allow yourself to relax and laugh at this, making him tighten his grip on your shoulder. 

“Me too, sis.” Mrs. Han agrees, gesturing over to her son. “My Jisung here’s been going on dates with strangers online before this so I’m glad he’s finally stopped and settled for your kid! Modern love, huh?” 

“Oh my God, mom!” Jisung whines, his free hand coming up to his face in embarrassment. “I’ve told you before, I use them to meet friends! Not in front of Mrs. Y/L/N and Y/N please!” 

“Ay, it’s the same thing!” His mom insists to him before turning to Mrs. Hwang and your mom. “Social apps, dating apps, they’re all the same. Why do you even use them if you’re just going to fall in love with the person right in front of you? I taught you better than that, Sungie.” 

“Mom!” Jisung hisses, cheeks tinted pink. “This is so embarrassing!” 

You snicker next to him, catching his attention. “Your mom’s right, you know. Tsk, dating people from miles away and you just end up confessing to me on FaceTime.” 

He scowls at you in a way that scolds you for suddenly turning this situation in your favor. You only smile triumphantly at him which the three aunties take as a really sweet moment. 

“Aw, look at them! So cute!” Mrs. Hwang gushes before turning to her two best friends. “Should we just leave them alone now? We’re intruding!” 

“Right! It’s especially embarrassing since we’re both here, Mrs. Han.” Your mom agrees, leading the three out now. She then turns to you and Jisung, “I guess we’ll be off now, then? Don’t want to intrude to you two lovebirds anymore!” 

You smile up to your mom, making sure Jisung does too. “It’s fine, mom, we’re going back to our table now too, anyway.”

But Mrs. Han waves her hand dismissively at you. “No, no, we’ll run along now first! See you later, okay?” 

You and Jisung bid your moms and Mrs. Hwang goodbye, overhearing your mom bragging that she’ll share this new information to Mrs. Park while Mrs. Han and Mrs. Hwang agree before the three completely exited the kitchen. 

Once they’re out of earshot, you sigh in relief and elbow Jisung harshly who responds by dramatically taking a step back and massaging his side. “Ow!” He winces, careful not to hit the dessert table. “What was that for?” 

“I told you to drop the fake dating thing a while back.” You protest, threatening to hit him with your plate of chocolate slices. “Now I have to have you at home more often. I’ve already had enough of you at campus, here, and when your mom visits at home.”

“Ya, but you played along!” 

“That’s because I was put on the spot! And they did mention another blind date from Mrs. Park’s army of nephews.” You explain. “It was between you and another blind date.”

“At least I got you out of another potential blind date, right?” He points out defensively, proceeding to put your hand with the chocolate slices down on the table with caution. “And more effectively now than before, too! So why’d you hit me?”

“Yeah, I know but still, that doesn’t cancel out how you got me out of that.” You frown in disappointment, taking both of your dessert plates now. When he holds his hand up defensively, as if expecting you to throw them to his face, you only roll your eyes and walk past him to the direction of the second kitchen exit. “Now, I have to fake date you for real either until Mrs. Park lays off the blind dates or until I actually date someone.” 

Jisung immediately follows you suit, genuinely rubbing the nape of his neck in a bashful way now. “We don’t have to, maybe they’ll forget about it.” But when you give him a pointed look, as if suggesting that what he just said seems unlikely, he ends up suggesting, “Okay, fine, should we break up after Chan’s wedding, then?”

He then glances over at you to see you contemplating and calming yourself down so he instinctively insists on carrying the dessert plates for you, walking a little bit ahead as well and opening the screen door leading back to the backyard. 

When you’ve made yourself calm down and think more rationally, you firstly point out, “That’s too far away and wouldn’t that be too scandalous? It’s a big event so it could become gossip.” 

Passing the entire length of the backyard now, you receive a few congratulations and questions confirming your relationship from some of your mom’s sorority friends and their husbands, forcing Jisung to hold his thought until you’re not being swarmed again. 

“But if we do it before, it’d be too suspicious since we’d only be dating for less than 6 months.” He counters once the adults have left you alone, glancing ahead and seeing your entire table looking at you with quirked up eyebrows and comically intimidating looks. “Remember when my older brother did that as a joke to the aunties and got caught because they only did it for 3 weeks? They smell fear and deceit, Y/N.”

You sigh in defeat, “Let’s just figure it out later.” With that, you reach your table, setting your plates down and asking, “What did we miss?”

Judging by the way they eye you, your mom has probably told Mrs. Kim who’s gone table to table. 

“It’s fake, isn’t it?” Ryujin speaks up once you’ve settled back in your seat, making the table break character and laugh. “It can’t be a coincidence since you two were just talking about that a while ago inside!” 

“Please be fake.” Seungmin adds, gesturing to you and Jisung. “It’d be more annoying for all of us next year if it’s true.” 

You and Jisung, having the same thought and trust for your friends, nod simultaneously at Ryujin’s question, eventually joining in on the laughter. 

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you’d actually try that!” Ryujin cackles, a clear giveaway that she and Yeji were eavesdropping on you and Jisung a while back to a degree.

“To be clear, though, it’s his fault!” You add in between laughs for clarification, pointing to Jisung with your dessert spoon. “He started it!” 

“And they were about to get set up on a blind date by Mrs. Park again.” Jisung gestures to you back, completing the thought. “I was being a good Samaritan.”

“Ooh, and what did they say?” Felix asks curiously, one elbow propped up on the table as he listens intently. 

Jisung groans in exasperation as he eats his chocolate cake. “We bumped into my mom, Y/N’s mom, and Mrs. Hwang so you can imagine how they reacted.” 

“I can imagine, especially our mom.” Hyunjin sighs with his hands carding through his hair in secondhand embarrassment. 

“At least now we know where you inherited certain qualities from.” Chan teases, making the younger boy exclaim ‘ya!’ at him. 

“This is good, though isn’t it?” Yeji asks curiously over her iced tea. “I mean, Mrs. Park’s wouldn’t set you up on blind dates now.”

“Yeah, but that leaves me as Ms. Park’s only target!” Ryujin moans in frustration. “You know Mrs. Park doesn’t get convinced with dating people online!” 

You shake your head at Ryujin’s complaint. “Yeji can fake date you, though.” You point out, much to the girl’s annoyance. “Or ask out that girl from our lab.”

“So, does this mean we’re getting a dramatic break-up at Chan and Miyoung’s wedding?” Hyunjin interjects, having moved from playing with his now long hair to his glass of champagne. “Because if so, then you better tell us now so we won’t get too drunk at the reception until it happens!”

“I honestly want to see that happen too.” Seungmin agrees, the two high-fiving at the thought.

“That’d be interesting, breaking up at weddings.” Minho chuckles along now too. “People usually propose or hook-up so this is new.” 

“Hey, no stealing my spotlight on my wedding!” Miyoung complains playfully to you and Jisung this time. “We’re all supposed to have a good time there!”

Chan nods in agreement. “If you break up at our wedding, you’re getting kicked out.” 

So you shake your head reassuringly in between eating cupcakes. “We aren’t planning to.” 

“You’re going to date for real?” Felix asks teasingly, earning him a glare form you.

“Gross, no.” You and Jisung turn down the thought in chorus.

“Jinx.” Jisung adds, stealing a spoonful of cake from your plate.

“So when are you breaking up?” Chan asks, leading the whole round table to look back to you. 

“Whenever, I guess.” You shrug casually, belatedly swatting Jisung’s hand from your plate this time. “Until Mrs. Park gets off my back and Jisung actually stops fucking around on Bumble.” 

“I don’t fuck around on Bumble!” Jisung complains over a mouthful of chocolate cake.

“Well, that’s going to take a long time.” Chan dismisses. “At least let us all know so we can schedule faking a whole drama in this group.” 

“Anyway, it’ll die down soon, surely.” Jisung assures with a half-shrug. “Also, our parents only meet up constantly during this reunion party. If anything, we just have to fake date in front of our moms since they meet up more often.” 

“And Mrs. Hwang.” You point to Hyunjin and Yeji. “Since we all go to brunch once a month.” 

At the mention of the monthly brunch, Yeji’s eyes widen. “Does that mean Jisung has to be at our monthly brunch?!” 

“Oh, ew!” Hyunjin adds in disgust. “I’ve had enough seeing you at campus already!” 

“Why does everyone keep saying that?!” Jisung exclaims back in complain. “I doubt I’d get invited to that, we’re supposed to be dating not getting married!” 

Jisung turns to you expectantly, sighing in relief when you say, “That seems unlikely, it’s my mom and Mrs. Hwang’s thing, anyway. It’s not the Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner brunch.” 

“It better be!” Hyunjin says with crossed arms. “Hopefully our moms don’t get that kind of idea.”

You quietly agree. Having Jisung on your monthly brunch with the Hwangs would just cause so much trouble and cement him in your mom’s good graces—but as your boyfriend, this time.

That’s probably not good. 

The party officially ends some time around 3 AM, when most of the parents with elementary school children have gone home hours earlier and, besides the Kims, it’s just your family, the Hwangs, the Hans, Chan, and Miyoung left at the front gates, bidding each other goodnight.  

“Thank you for having us again, Mrs. Kim.” You bid Seungmin’s family last since they’re the hosts, bowing politely to Seungmin’s parents before giving Seungmin a high-five. 

“See you after break.” Seungmin greets you after your high-five. “Have fun in Japan.” 

“And you enjoy your trip to New York.” You reply with an enthusiastic smile. “I do hope your mom reconsiders staying longer so you can spend the New Year there.” 

He nods with a sigh, “Yeah, I know. Still, I’ll try my best to convince her.” 

Your mom then approaches the two of you, bidding Seungmin and his parents goodnight before taking you away by the arm then turning you towards the direction of Jisung and his family. “Goodnight, Seungmin, Mr. and Mrs. Kim!” She smiles warmly to them before turning to you. “Y/N, aren’t you going to say goodnight to Jisung?” 

“I already did.” 

“Ah, but go to him anyway! Your dad still has to start the car.” 

You groan internally. After a whole night of drinking, singing, and gossiping with her friends, you’d think that she would’ve forgotten about earlier. 

Yet you oblige anyway, excusing yourself from your parents and approaching Jisung whose parents are busy having last-minute small talk with Chan and Miyoung, probably endorsing their chain of hotels as early as now for the wedding. 

“Hey, ugly.” You greet him casually as you approach, both your parents out of earshot so the old nickname naturally comes out. At this, Jisung immediately turns from scrolling through his phone to looking up at you with wide eyes. “My mom didn’t see us say goodnight a while ago so I’m here.” 

“Oh,” He muses, eyes flitting to your mom behind you once. When he sees her glancing expectantly, he turns to you and suggests, “Should we hug?” 

“Yeah, I guess.” You sigh, going straight into his extended arms. “‘Night.” 

“’Night, baby.” Jisung hums gently, too sleepy now to throw more witty comebacks besides the cheesy pet name that originally got you in trouble tonight. “See you after the break.” 

“No, see you on our moms’ next shopping spree.” You correct firmly, pulling away from his warmth before you could accidentally fall asleep on him. “Since we’re ‘dating’ now, you’re morally obligated to attend shopping bag duty now, too.” 

This makes Jisung sigh in defeat, “Fine, fair enough. See you on our moms’ next shopping spree, then.” He pauses for a moment then asks, “The day after New Year, right?”  

“Yeah.” You confirm with a nod when you catch him pouting, “You started this so don’t pout now.” 

“I know, I’m regretting it now.” He rolls his eyes with a scoff, only making you chuckle. “I suppose it’s different when we hang out as friends and when our moms think we’re dating.”

You continue laughing anyway until a thought crosses your mind and softens your gaze up at Jisung. “Anyway, thanks for saving me from another date—I almost forgot. The means is still annoying but I have to appreciate it somehow, right?” 

This time, it’s him chuckling, “Now you appreciate my efforts. See, I told you, something good comes up with this.” 

“Whatever.” You dismiss before you hear your mom calling for you as your dad pulls up in front of the Kim’s gates. “Okay, that’s me. Bye, ugly!” 

“Hm, bye!” With a final wave, Jisung then sees you off before joining his parents who he didn’t even realize have already gone to their car. 

Seating himself at the backseat of his mom’s car a moment later, Jisung accidentally glances over to his mom from the rear view mirror only to see her wiggling her eyebrows at him. 

“So,” Mrs. Han says. “you and Y/N.”

“Yeah?” Jisung response with a questioning tone. “Me and Y/N, what about it?” 

Mrs. Han only shrugs from the driver’s seat as she now drives away from the Kim’s house. “Nothing, you’re just both really cute.” She comments casually with a proud smile. “I like it. Though it is too bad we can’t invite them to dinner since they’re going to Japan for Christmas this year.” 

“How about next year?” Jisung’s dad suggests. “We can go on one of our hotels abroad.” 

“Ah, but—” Jisung stammers, only to be interrupted by his dad again.     

“Or, honey, when you and Mrs. Y/L/N go to the mall again.” Mr. Han quickly quips in to Mrs. Han before turning to their son in the back seat. “I expect you’d stop bailing on your mom when she goes to the mall now since Y/N’s always at these shopping trips.” 

At this, Jisung shakes his head, “I won’t. I’m ‘morally obligated’ now, apparently.”

“That’s good.” Mr. Han says, turning back to the road ahead and relaxing into the front passenger seat. “You better.”

Jisung sleepily props his elbow up by the window and sighs, letting his parents enjoy this new prospect of him seriously dating someone now. “Yup.” He ends the conversation, closing his eyes and getting a few minutes of sleep before arriving back home. 

Suddenly, this is probably not a good idea—lying to his already hyped parents. 

ch. 2 // ch. 3 // series masterlist

tag: @t-toodumbtocare​ @sandaigdigan-reads​ @pwarkhans​ @ruellelix @malai-barfi @mahalau​ @milkywayfelix @qweens-stuff​

[lindsayrises]

Hey!

So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything.

I feel like summer is basically over (it’s not, but it feels that way).  I worked in my classroom Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday the 15/16/17/18.  All day plan/work/team meeting on Monday the 19th.  Professional development in the morning and work in my classroom in the afternoon on Tuesday the 20th.  JumpStart (for incoming first graders) Wednesday and Thursday mornings, the 21st and 22nd.  Plan/work/team meetings the afternoons of Wed/Thurs the 21/22.

Two days ago (Monday) I had a day-long professional development session.  Yesterday (Tuesday) I had professional development in the morning.  Tomorrow I have professional development in the afternoon.

Next week is my last week of summer.  Where the fuck did summer go?

I had to move classrooms over the summer.  I have gotten rid of so.much.stuff.  It feels good, and I am feeling better about this new classroom (that feels smaller and definitely has less storage).

I had planned on going through everything in my basement again this summer (last time was 2018).  I have stuff down here I don’t even know that I have.  I don’t even want to deal with selling stuff.  I just want it gone.  I definitely prefer to do projects in big chunks of time, but I might have to try to switch that mentality and work in small sections in the evenings once school starts.

I decluttered and deep cleaned every room upstairs (main level).  I have so many boxes of things to donate.  Again, it feels so good!

I finally got around to doing genetic testing to see if I have an increased cancer risk.  I tested negative!  Yay!  Such a huge relief.  My mom died of ovarian cancer.  My dad had cancer.  I found out in the past 6 months or so that when my mom did genetic testing (a few months before she died) she tested positive.  I had to wait a few weeks for the results.  I was obviously hoping it would be negative, but I was also preparing myself for the news that it might be positive.  

I still spend too much money.

I still drink too much Dr. Pepper.

I still eat too much fast food and other crappy food.

I still don’t exercise as much.

For several weeks this summer I went to therapy twice a week.  Sometimes I feel like I must not want to change my lifestyle and things in my life badly enough, or I would have by now.

I recently watched the original Full House all the way through.  Now I’m watching Fuller House.  It makes me laugh and reminds me of much much much simpler times when I was a kid.

Ramsey is doing well!  I took him to the vet today for a check up and the vets LOVED him!  He did so good!  I bought him some new toys after his appointment.

It’s hot here.  I do not enjoy the heat.

I need to stop prioritizing EVERYTHING/ANYTHING else above my health.  It’s bullshit.  I feel like I hyperfocus on one thing and don’t think about anything else.

I’ve had some eye-opening text exchanges with one of my best friends who is currently living in Italy....focusing on self-care, self-love, taking better care of my health.

I feel incredibly lucky to have so many good friends and family in my life.  That includes Tumblrs!  I have had to lean on so many people this summer for different things.  I will be forever grateful for those who are there for me.

I had a two hour phone conversation with a good friend today.  It was needed.

I’ve been using TV/Hulu/Netflix to numb out way too much lately.  I can be really hard on myself, but sometimes I think I’m too easy on myself.  Like, if I don’t want to do something, I just won’t do it (or if I do want something, I’ll get it/do it)...and then I think it’s taking care of myself.  Um, no, Lindsay.  That’s not how it works.  Getting Dairy Queen because you’re sad IS NOT SELF-CARE!  Skipping Orange Theory because you’re tired IS NOT SELF-CARE!

I have no concept of delayed gratification.  I basically make decisions like a child.

I want what I don’t have.  I don’t jog or walk because it’s boring, so then I start back at Orange Theory. That lasts a few weeks and then I wish I were jogging/walking and not doing Orange Theory.  

Hmmm....I thought I had more to write.

Basically, same shit, different day/week/month/year.

[angelfishofthelord]

sea of blue or aztec gold

(a fic for 12x16 where Claire got bitten by a werewolf except for Cas is there)

+

The three of them stand in the left corner of the motel room like some kind of conclave of the grown-ups. Claire picks at the chipped gray polish on her fingernails and stares at them between the sweaty strands of hair falling into her eyes. The British guy--was his name Miles or something--keeps twisting his feet around like he wants to leave. Sam and Dean’s voices rise and fall and she strains an ear to hear a few snatches.  

“--maybe Cas--heal her--” comes from Sam and Claire shakes her head. No one sees it, of course, because nobody's even asking her. At twenty years old she’s seen more dead bodies than the average middle-aged adult but sometimes--like right now--she still feels like a kid. Like some wayward youngster who ruined the cake at a party and now everyone is trying to figure out how to fix it without causing a scene.

“--in the area--looking for Kelly--call him--” Dean rejoins.

She bites back a sigh. It looks like a decision has been made already, without the options ever reaching her. Closing her eyes she leans her head down into the crook of her arm and tries not to think about that blessed half second before the werewolf’s fangs sank into her skin. The split moment before her life disappeared and was replaced by the kind of nightmare she’s killed without a second thought

“Hey.” Sam puts his hand on her shoulder and she forces herself to look up. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she shrugs. “You didn’t call Jody yet,” she adds, more as a hope than a question.

“Not yet. Cas is gonna come by and see if he can heal you. He should be here in under an hour.”

Her nose wrinkles and she hikes up the blanket around her shoulders, sliding deeper into the armchair. Castiel isn’t her parent, but he’s going to fuss over her and make that same face where the brow gets all twisted up in concern. Except for he has an additional look of a million or so years of sadness in his eyes, and she doesn’t really have the energy to pretend not to care about him right now.  

“Let him know I said hi,” she murmurs, shutting her eyes again. Pretending to fall asleep is still the surest way to get grown-ups to back off.

She knows when Castiel arrives even before he speaks. His heavy, deliberate footsteps come echoing from across the room. They pause a few paces away and Castiel exchanges hushed words with Sam and Dean before moving closer and putting a hand on the armrest of the chair.

“Claire,” he says and for half a second she swears he sounds just like her dad. Not that she really remembers what her dad sounds like anymore; those memories have been too saturated with blood and confusion, too deeply buried to ever retain the clarity they once had. But there's so much gentle worry coiled around the sound of her name that she almost wants to launch herself into his arms and have him tell her a story that’ll make the bad dream disappear.

Instead she opens one eye and grunts wordlessly at him.

“May I?” he asks and waits until she nods before pressing two fingers to her forehead.

The buzz of grace streaking through her feels like downing a shot of migraine. When she flinches away he immediately pulls back. “I’m sorry,” he says, first to her and then to Sam and Dean who are standing next to him expectantly. “I can’t…the cells are already mutating. It’s beyond my power to-”

“Okay,” Dean cuts him off, tersely. Terrified. “So what now?”

What happens next is a Russian roulette of options. Dean tries to sell her on his plan of being a vegetarian werewolf who eats rabbit heart salads on the daily. Sam explains the details of a risky cure where the sole test subject died. The British guy sputters objections for both ideas, all the while looking more and more unnerved by the whole situation.

Castiel is the only one who says nothing. He sits there on the edge of the bed across from her, hands on his knees as he listens to everything being discussed. “It’s up to Claire,” he says tepidly when Dean presses him for an opinion. She wonders if he’s afraid to interfere in her life again. He still doesn’t say anything when she finally chooses to try the cure. The look on his face, on the other hand, is absolutely rife with sorrow.

In fact all four of them are staring at her with such piteous expressions that it makes her feel nauseous.

She blocks them out by pulling the blanket up and over her head as they discuss who’s going to go get blood from the werewolf who attacked her and who’s going to stay with her. Dean suggests him and Castiel for the hunting team, but Castiel disagrees.

“She could already be changing, we have no idea how fast this will happen. If something…” his voice drops, making the words even sharper to her ears, “…I should be here. I can heal.”

Claire decides that this is the point where she needs to muster up enough strength to protest. But the second she tries to stand up fireworks of pain go off through her body. She clamps down on her tongue to keep from crying out and works slowly, putting one foot down on the linoleum floor and then the other. The blanket drags behind her as she finally staggers to her full height, only to see there’s no one left in the room except for the British guy--Mick-- and Castiel. They’re standing an awkward distance apart, staring each other down with equal parts suspicion and contempt.

“Well,” Mick begins tentatively. “Someone should make sure the rooms beside us stay vacant so we are undisturbed during the…process. Perhaps we should also have some words with the manager, to keep her from being alarmed by anything she might hear.”

“Yes,” Castiel answers and then moves to position himself in front of Claire. The message is clear: he doesn’t trust Mick to be left alone in the room with her.

“I’ll do it,” Mick says hurriedly before turning and leaving the room.

Claire pokes Castiel in the shoulder after the door closes. “Scary,” she teases him.

Castiel turns around, the coldness in his eyes instantly replaced by soft strokes of concern. He reaches out to give her a hand as she sways in place. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah.” She latches onto his arm because her joints are on fire right now and it’s less humiliating to need support than collapsing and him having to carry her. “Just peachy.” The bed suddenly seems very far away. She concentrates on the ugly checkered bed sheet ahead of her like it’s the only thing in existence and pushes her body forward one half step at a time.

Finally her fingertips brush against fabric and she heaves her body over the bed with a groan. Every pore of her skin feels like a miniature furnace. She doesn’t have the strength to scream. She wishes she could, wishes she had a set of lungs that could strip the glass from the windows with a long, curling howl.

Cool petals of water brush against her forehead and she realizes that Castiel has put a wet towel on her forehead. It doesn’t do much to actually dim the fire raging through her veins, but the familiarity of the action is comforting.

“I’m sorry,” he says. The mattress creaks from the corner where he’s taken a seat. “I know how hard this is. You are an incredibly brave young woman.”

“Doubt that angel can get turned into werewolves,” she mutters.

“No, but--” he stops, prompting her to peer up at him from the corner of the towel.

“What?”

He’s sitting there with his hands in his lap again. “Well, I have been poisoned or infected by...things before. It may not be the same but... I know how hard it is to stay in control of both body and mind. What you’re doing, even now, is a testament to your great strength of will.”

“Wait.” Claire tries to push herself up on one elbow but only manages to lift her head a few inches. “When were you infected with what?”

“You should get some rest,” is his response as he leans over and fits a pillow under her head, then moves around to tuck the blanket around her chin. His fingers graze the side of her cheek; they feel like a bouquet of icicles. She leans into the touch desperately and his eyes cloud with sympathy.  

“Your cells are in chaos right now. Your body, your immune system is trying to fight off the mutation,” he explains. “Is there anything else I can do for you? Do you want to call--”

“No,” she says, loudly and quickly. If she allows herself to think about calling Jody--and hearing her voice--she’s going to dissolve on the spot. “Just--talk to me. Tell me about what happened when you were infected. What, was it like an angelic version of the zombie virus?”

Castiel sits down on the bed, still half on the edge like he’s unsure of how much space he’s been invited to take up. “No, there were several different--the first time was years ago.” He stalls, eyes growing distance even as they fixate on the floor below him. “I was full of souls from Purgatory. I…needed them to defeat Raphael. But then the power of those souls changed me. I thought I was God,” he finishes in an embarrassed mumble.

There's a lot to absorb from those few lines but above all the idea of this mild, awkward angel pretending to be the Almighty is what stands out to her. “You?” she laughs faintly. “What did Sam and Dean think of that?”

continue reading on ao3

[itisannak]

CEO!Michael x President’s Daughter!Y/N (Michael Clifford Smut Fic)

Summary: (Y/N) is the daughter of the company's president Michael holds the CEO position. They dated a few years back until they broke up due to the long distance. Now, (Y/N) is back, and her father has plans for her. Plans that Michael is absolutely opposed to. (Smut / Unprotected Sex / Oral; Female Receiving) The fic contains 2 scenes where marital rape is mentioned. The mentions are not graphic and there is no description of the incident. I have put the scenes in Italics and they are marked with asterisks (****) at the beginning and end of the paragraph. I actually saw this story in my dream once and I simply had to write it. I hope you like it, I put a lot of work into it.   (Words: 15.9k)

"Good morning, Ms. (Y/L/N). Welcome back." My father's secretary greets me as soon as I step out of the elevator. I take off my sunglasses, looking at her with an ironic smile; such a kiss-ass. "Good morning, Mrs. Venable. My father is waiting for me in the board room. You must be aware of that..." I reply and she nods. "Of course. That's why I am here. I have specific instructions for guiding you there. You see, we had a little bit of a floor remodeling while you were away." She states, gesturing for me to follow her. "It was about time we had one." I mumble, following suit behind her. My high heels click against the marble floor, covering whatever chatter talk the secretary has been mumbling as we walk. "Your father made sure no one is going to bother you during the meeting." She comments, opening the door for me. I nod my head before walking in, being greeted by my father who opens his arms for me.

"(Y/N), sweetheart. Thank you for being here on time." He comments as I hug him. "Was I ever late when we had a meeting? Let me pour myself some coffee and then we can talk about the important matter that is so important that we couldn't talk about it at home." I sass, reaching for the pot in the center of the table. "Cutting straight to the matter, I see." He states with a chuckle, making me smirk. "Learned from the absolute best. Now, let's talk about business. Is this meeting about me being hired on the legal team of the company? Because you really didn't need to make that announcement all fancy like that." I brag just a little, bringing the mug to my lips. "It is not about that, darling. It is far more important than that." He assures me, making me look at him with furrowed eyebrows. "Then what is it, dad?" I ask, causing him to clear his throat. "Remember the Jophersons?" He asks me and I hum. "How couldn't I forget? What about them?" I ask, sitting up straight. "We have been bargaining a partnership. Their company and ours becoming one. It would be huge, we would take over the world market." He explains, far too passionate about it. "This is exciting, daddy. Do you need my approval as a shareholder? Because you know I would agree with that, even if you didn't ask." I smile at him, patting his hand. "Well, not nearly. The thing is... Jophersons' youngest son, Edward... You remember him, right? Well, he set a condition or else they pull the offer." He states, making me even more confused. "Ugh, of course, he would, that sleazy bastard... What did he ask for?" I ask, cringing at the memory of him. "You know that boy always had a crush on you... He asked... He set a clause that he would allow the partnership under the condition you would agree to marry him." He explains, making my stomach spasm. "No, not him. No. He has been trying to get me for years. It is a vanity project for him. I am nothing more than a trophy. Daddy, there has to be another way. Not Edward. Not Sleazy Eddy. Please, dad." I panic, feeling the temperature rise. "(Y/N), listen to me... It is the only way. Please, take a deep breath." He says, standing up and patting my shoulder. I tear up at the thought; he is the typical rich white guy, the type you see on the Bachelor show. He thinks that looks and money make the world revolve around him. He has been 'flirting' with me at every party, always trying to push on the boundaries, always being way too suggestive. It makes me sick, he makes me sick. My father can't really ask me to marry someone I don't like, can he? "Dad, no... This is inappropriate. This is unacceptable. We don't live in 1950. I am not some kind of exchangeable goods that he can demand on a contract." I hyperventilate, standing up from the chair I was sitting. "Sit down and lower your damn voice. All this year I have provided you with everything. It is time you finally paid back to the family. You know how important this is for me." He says, way sterner than before. "You can't be asking me to make that sacrifice. I don't love him, I don't even like him as a human. Please, dad. Anything but that. I will die if I marry him." I plead, feeling my throat convulse. I can barely breathe. "You are being dramatic. You will marry him and that's the end of it." He sounds way too determined as if he called me here to announce it rather than ask my input. "You are going to sacrifice my happiness on the money altar?" I ask him, making him scoff. "You make it sound like an Ancient Greek tragedy. You are not Iphigenia, sacrificing yourself for winds in your father's favor. You are marrying a rich guy, making your family richer and more powerful. You and your children, your children's children, and many generations after yours, are never going to worry about money. Stop pretending you are the victim here." He spits out, looking at me pitifully. "Not all that matters is money, dad." I state and he scoffs. "Please... It is easy for you to say that. You think money is not important because you never had to go a day without it. If you think money is not important, you are free to reject the offer and try to live without it." He announces, pointing at the door. I stare at him in shock, gulping down, and tensing my jaw. I nod my head, biting my lip. "Well, it seems like the decision has been finalized way before I was asked." I feel tears brimming in my eyes, sniffling as I try to stop myself from crying. "Get yourself together and go get ready. We have a meeting at 4, and your engagement will be announced along with the partnership. Make sure you are not late, make sure you look happy." He orders, making me chuckle. "Of course. We would hate for people to find out I'd rather kill myself before laying in bed with the devil." I state before storming out of the room.

I walk into the bathroom, trying to calm myself before I have a panic attack. My clothes feel awfully tight, constraining my breathing. I feel awful, disgusted by myself, by my family. My father is willing to practically sell me to someone to gain more power. I thought that this is something only happening to girls in 3rd world countries. I feel powerless; my family can't disown me, I have practically nothing, plus their connections would turn their backs on me. And I really can't marry Edward. I can't, I won't. The thought of him disgusts me, to the point of actually feeling like throwing up all over his face. I certainly cannot hope for a white wedding; his intentions for me wouldn't let him.

I press my back against the cold tile wall, sliding down on it. I want to crawl out of my skin, I want to scratch my flesh off my body. I can't be marrying him, but I also cannot reject it. The decision has been taken, my agreement was just fine letters for them. I think I chose to stay in the bathroom because I felt powerless to move anywhere else. I take a look at myself in the mirror; it is like I am having an out-of-body experience. I don't recognize the woman in the mirror, she doesn't nearly look familiar. I close my eyes, taking a deep breath before opening my purse and reaching for my little makeup bag. Just a bit of powder to make my eyes look like I haven't been crying my soul out and a little bit of lipstick to add some color to my washed-out complexion. I look better than my father and future husband deserve; had I have the guts, I would show up dressed in rugs.

"You don't look like you went home to change." My father comments as I take a seat by him on the big table in the board room. "It might be because I didn't. I didn't want to be late for the glorious announcement." I state sarcastically, taking my phone out of my purse. In walk the Jophersons, the father followed by the eldest and youngest son. Oh, my future husband... He has the stupidest smirk, the victorious kind he always sports. God, I will have to spend my life with this moron, whose only achievement is being born in a family of old money. He takes a seat across from me, giving me a side smirk as he settles. My stomach stings, every bite of my breakfast crawling up and threatening to fly out of my mouth. And then he walks in, looking like a million bucks. I haven't thought about the possibility of running into him here, like my brain refused to run down the scenario. Michael is still the CEO, he still runs the company. My father holds the founder position and the chairman of the board, but Michael is still the CEO here. My mind goes fuzzy around the edges, only focusing on him as his eyes lock with mine. Now my stomach fills with butterflies, my heart skipping a bit. I haven't seen him for 3 years now, ever since the breakup, but I would be damned if I said I haven't thought of him every day ever since. "Everyone's here?" My father asks, standing up from his chair. I press my hand against my temples, bracing myself for the impact. "Shall we begin?" He asks again, fixing the button of his blazer. "Before we talk about the business part of the meeting, I have an important announcement to make. My beautiful daughter, the most precious part of my heart, and Edward Jopherson are getting married. Everyone present is invited and welcome to the engagement party on Saturday." He announces, making the board clap and cheer, as Ed smirks smugly. I dart my eyes away, finding Michael looking at me in a state of shock.

I scrubbed and washed my skin away, trying to get rid of the dirty feeling that has seeped in under my skin. I want to lock myself away from the world outside, wishing to build a haven for me where I will be safe and all of this is just a bad dream. My hair has moistened the fabric of my romp, and my face is as blank as it has never been before. The only lights that I let in are coming from the big window that overlooks the city and the TV that has been playing for hours now, providing some noise that distracts me from going insane. I sniffle as I wipe my tears away, deciding that a good ol' sob-out is what I need. This is how my life is going to be from now on, I just know it. I don't want the only happiness in my life coming from materialistic stuff, but I know that marrying Edward is only going to give me this kind of happiness. I don't let myself get delusional, thinking that somehow Edward is going to turn out to be some decent guy, a guy that will love and respect me, because I know him for the douche he is. I am going to be a trophy wife for him. A sad, lonely trophy wife.

My doorbell rings, making me jump up from the couch. I walk to the door, fixing my romp and wiping my eyes before I peep through the peephole, finding Michael standing outside my door. "Who let you in?" I ask him as I open the door. "Yous still have the same pin. You still have my birthday as your entrance pin." He points out, making me huff. "Shit... I forgot to change it after coming back. What do you want? You shouldn't be here." I state, gulping the lump in my throat. "Can I come in?" He asks; it is more of a demand than a request, his tensed jaw moving from side to side. "You really shouldn't be here." I repeat and he hums. "Well, I am here." He states, cocking his eyebrow at me. I move from the door, letting him inside my penthouse before closing the door. "What do you want, Michael?" I ask, crossing my arms in front of my chest. "Why are you marrying him?" He asks me, making me roll my eyes. "Why do you care? We are not together anymore. We haven't been for years." I protest and he groans. "I still fucking care and you know it. You were the one who called the end." He snaps, making me chuckle sarcastically. "I called it quits because we were apart. I was away for my master's and you were here running the company. I was the one traveling to see you. Do you know how many essays I wrote on planes traveling back and forth? You were never visiting, I was tired of you finding excuses. It's been years since, Michael. Stop pretending you care." I shake as I let it out, making him groan at me from deep in his chest. "I still fucking care about you and you can't change it. Why are you marrying Sleazy Ed? Your stomach turned at the sight of him and now all of a sudden you want to spend your life with the douchebag?" He asks me, raising his voice. "Stop yelling at me. You know damn well why I am marrying him." I reply, prompting him to look at me a little disgusting. "You are marrying him for money? Doesn't your family have enough?" He asks. "I am marrying him to give my father his precious partnership. I am marrying him because there is no other way." I snap at him, making him drop his face and walk closer to me. "What? What are you talking about?" He asks, voice going soft. "Ed, set as a clause that I will have to marry him for him to agree on the partnership. You didn't know?" I ask and he shakes his head no. "He can't do that." He protests and I shrug. "Apparently he can and he already did. I was exchanged for more power, I was part of the deal. So please, spare me the dramatics right now. I have already maxed out on my tragedy for the day." I say, feeling hollow. "You can't marry him." He stutters, making me chuckle. "The other option was destroying the deal, and my parents disowning me and me being left with no one and nothing." I reply, throwing my hands in the air in frustration. "No, no... You can't marry him... I can't let you marry him." He exasperates, running his hand down his face. "Michael... It is too late. You were there when the contracts were signed. The partnership is about to start and I am about to go wedding dress shopping for my wedding with Sleazy Ed. It is over for me, Michael. It has been over for us for years, and now it is over for me as well, I will be sad and lonely for the rest of my life." I shrug my shoulders, feeling all my emotions choking me. "It's not over. It's was never over for us, (Y/N). I haven't stopped loving you and I know you haven't stopped loving me either. I know you haven't, I knew since the moment I saw you in the conference room. This can't be our end." He says, looking at me with the softest look. I can't really breathe; the only thought in my mind right now is somewhat ending up with Michael. "Don't say things you know that can't be true." I sniffle, causing him to walk towards me, grab my face in his hands, and pull me in for a kiss.

I respond to him, kissing him back as if I depend on it. I remember how much I liked kissing him, I remember every movement of his lips against mine, how warm they felt. I walk backward until my back meets the wall, and Michael's body presses against mine. I sigh in the kiss, just seconds before his teeth pull on my bottom lip. My hands move to unbutton his shirt, a little eager to feel him whole against my body. "You can't be marrying him to please your father when you know what I can do with my tongue." He mumbles, lowering his body and wrapping my legs around his waist. "Are you going to make me feel good?" I ask and he hums, bringing his face to my chest. "As always, princess." He mumbles, setting me on my bed. He kneels, undoing the belt that holds my romp together. I am left in the matching, silky negligee, which Michael just lifts its hem to my stomach. He pulls my panties to the side, bringing his mouth to my sex. "Oh, Michael..." I sigh, closing my eyes and throwing my head back. I always loved his lips there, he always knew how to make me cum. His tongue swirls against my clit, before flicking on it fast. My hand lowers to his hair, twisting and gripping on his locks. "Oh fuck..." I cry, pressing my core more on his face.

He sucks on my bundle of nerves vigorously, bringing his fingers to my entrance. His ring and middle finger circle around my entrance. I turn my head to the side, my eyes falling on the window running along my bedroom. The city looks better than ever right now, the lights reflecting on the glass of my window blurring in and causing lines of highlights to blend in the scenery. He hooks his fingers up against my spot, making my legs shake and my whole body writhe from pleasure. "Michael, please... Please, I need more of you, I need all of you." I cry out, making him smile against my core. "Want me, baby?" He asks, taking his mouth off my cunt, taking a breath as he plants kisses on the inside of my thigh. "Today... more than ever." I utter, stroking his hair. "Me too, baby." He smiles, crawling up my body and leaving a trail of kisses from my thighs, to my hipbones, and then all the way up to my neck. He reaches down to unzip his pants, lowering them until he frees his cock. He pulls me closer by my thighs, wrapping my legs around his hips and stroking his cock against my sex. "You still like it raw, baby?" He asks, nibbling on my ear lobe. "Only from you." I whimper and he chuckles. My hands go to his biceps as he tries to slip inside me.

When he does, he moves slowly, giving me time to adjust to him after all this time. His hand goes to the side of my face, stroking his fingers over it as I whimper softly and try to accommodate to him. "Please, make love to me... This might be my last time experiencing that." I plead, making him shake his head. "It won't be, princess. I won't allow it." He assures me, pressing his lips against mine. I part my lips, letting him slide his tongue in my mouth and deepen the kiss, just as he starts thrusting faster. I feel him stretch my walls as he moves, which makes me moan and moves against him. His thumb grazes over my cheek, soothing me while he pounds in me harder, angling up to hit my spot just right. I moan against his lips, throwing my head a little back and causing his lips to move on my chin. "Princess..." He mumbles softly, his voice huskier than before. "Don't stop." I beg, moving my hips against his. "I won't... I won't stop, baby. I missed you, I missed us." He breathes out, his breath fanning against my skin. "Oh, Michael... You know my body too well. I am so close." I whine, touching his face with my fingertips. I bring his face to mine, connecting our lips as he thrusts in and out of me, making my eyes flicker at how good he feels inside me. The knot in my stomach snaps, making me groan as I orgasm around him, twitching underneath him. "Fuck, I had forgotten how good you feel cumming around me." He hisses, tilting my head to the side, and latching his lips on my neck.

"There must be a way you can avoid marrying that douchebag and not breaking the deal." Michael comments as I walk back to my bed after cleaning up. "No, there isn't. And I don't want to talk about it right now." I reply, sighing as I sit on the bed. "This was a mistake..." I mumble, feeling tears forming in my eyes. "You regret it?" He asks me worried. "Not a second of it. I just... I will never be as happy as I was on this bed with you. And tonight only makes living with Ed seem harder. So, tonight shouldn't happen again. Because if it happens again, it will only highlight how sad my life with him is going to be." I sob, making him kneel in front of me. "Let me stay tonight. Let me hold you in my arms, let me take you in, one last time. If this is goodbye, we deserve a proper one, we deserve a soft one." He says, making me nod as my lips pout and twitch and my eyes fill with tears. "Hey, hey... Don't cry. Tonight we pretend all of this is not happening and that we will be alright." He says softly, peppering my face with kisses. "I always thought I would be marrying you. I always saw myself having children with you, living in a beautiful house by the sea, with a huge garden, kinda like a field." I state as Michael pulls me to lay on the bed, pressing my back against his chest. "The house sounds dreamy. How many children?" He asks me, strumming his thumb over my hip. "3. Two boys and a girl." "Two Michaels and one (Y/N), huh? Well, I want 4. And a bunch of dogs." He replies and I giggle. "This is just a dream." I say under my breath. "I know. But dreams do come true, you know..." He plants a kiss on my shoulder. "Rarely." I add and he chuckles. "I promise to make this one come true. Even if it means moving heaven and earth to make it." He tries to assure me, making me smile at how naive this is.

The house is full of people; people I don't know, people I don't care to meet. All I care about is the fact that Edward has been walking around, with his hand on my lower back and a smile on his face, introducing future Mrs. Jopherson to the invitees. I have been drinking the whole night, trying to numb myself, disassociating from all of this. I hate his touch, I hate the feeling of him close to me, I hate the sound of his voice. I hate everything, and this is supposed to be only the beginning of it. "I have to go freshen up... Excuse me for a sec." I remove myself politely from the company, walking away as fast as I can. I can't wait for the event to be over and I get to go home, lock myself in my apartment, away from everyone, away from my parents, away from my fiance.

I let myself into the upstairs guest bathroom, locking the door behind me before I sit on the lid of the toilet. I fidget with my fingers, trying to breathe normally; I didn't think of what I would do once I was away from the people in the party, only focusing on a way to just go away. The knock of the door startles me, making me jolt in my seat and gasp. "Occupied." I call, hoping whoever it is will fuck off elsewhere and leave me alone. "Michael." He responds, almost whispering. I stand up, walking to the door, and unlocking it to let him in. "What are you doing here?" I ask, closing the door. "I wanted to check on you." He says, shrugging his shoulders. "I mean at the engagement party. Why are you here?" I ask and he sighs. "It is painful. But it is way more painful for you. And I didn't want to leave you here alone. I know you are alone in this house tonight, and I wanted you to have someone here for you tonight. Plus, your father invited everyone and I think people would notice if I wasn't here." He replies, making me gulp the knot in my throat and nod my head. "I hate it here..." I sniffle and he cups my face in his hands. "Hey, hey... No crying. He doesn't get to make you cry. You are going to make it through this, I am going to help you any way I can." He mumbles, making me look at him. "You have to go. We agreed we wouldn't..." "I am not here to take advantage of you. I am here because I could tell from across the room you were about to meltdown... And I didn't want you to make anything stupid." He replies, making me chuckle. "I wouldn't. The deal would be off." I joke, laughing and making Michael join me in. "You are the love of my life. I love you, more than anything in the world." He says, looking at me in the eye. "It is time to stop. It is time you find someone else to love... It is ok, you can't wait for me forever." I assure him but he shakes his head. "You can't tell who to love or for how long. I gave you my heart way back, and it is yours to keep. I will be waiting for you because you are getting out of it." He states, pressing his lips on my forehead. "I'll go downstairs now. Try not to take too long." He mumbles, stroking my cheek before he turns away.

Sooner than I anticipated, the night before my wedding arrived. My parents and future in-laws through a big rehearsal dinner, where my future husband decided that PDA was essential. I nearly vomited 3 times during the hour-long dinner, really putting my acting skills to full capacity to avoid showing off how much I wanted to die. I could only feel gratitude the moment I walked into my apartment. My parents wanted me to stay at the family house my last night as Ms. (Y/L/N), my mother for sentimental purposes, so she could be there for her little girl on the final night she would sleep alone, and my father just to make sure I wouldn't run away. But he settled on me going to the family house bright and early, accompanied of course by a bunch of his guards. I pour myself a glass of whiskey, petrified by daylight coming in soon. I thought about escaping, I am not going to lie, but I have nowhere and no one to go to. At my father's command, everyone will cut me off if I disobey him. I thought about running to Michael; I know he will be there waiting with open arms. But he is going to lose his job and have a similar fate to mine, being turned down by everyone he asks for a job from. I know how hard he has worked to get where he is, and I would never, ever do that to him. He was at the rehearsal, looking at me silently from his spot, enduring the torture of seeing me with another man.

My doorbell rings and I rush to it, my heart skipping happily; I knew he would come. I open the door and find Michael behind it, just as I expected. I fall in his arms, making him wrap them around me tightly. "I knew you would come..." I mumble, refusing to let him go. He still holds onto me as we walk in, closing the door behind him. "I can't stay away from you." He replies, pushing my chin up so he can kiss me. "You are the only person I wanted to see tonight. No one else." I state in between kisses, making him hum. "I know. I could feel it." He mumbles, cupping my face in his hands. "Are you going to stay with me?" I ask, looking at him pleadingly. "I can't leave you... I can't..." He breathes out, picking me up to carry me to my bed.

His hands work fast to bare me of my clothes, while his lips trail my skin. His hands touch me everywhere, making me chill at the sensation. "I love you... I love you so much..." He mumbles, looking up at me. "I love you too... More than anything in the world." I reply, making him smile at me softly. His lips move to my neck while he thrusts inside me, taking my hands in his. I gasp, closing my eyes to focus only on how good he feels inside me. He kisses my jawline, breathing against my skin as he moves inside me. "I love you..." He repeats, bringing his lips on mine. He kisses me deeply, squeezing harder on my hands as he bucks his hips against mine, angling up to hit my spot. I kiss him back just as deeply, bringing my hand to twist in the hair on the end of his head. My thigh is pressed against his side, trying to hold my body closer to his as he thrusts harder, making me pulse around his length. "You feel so good." I breathe out, throwing my head back. One of his hands leaves mine, traveling down to my hip and tracing soft patterns on it as he holds onto me. "I will never get enough of you... All of you and all of me belong together." He utters, wrapping his fingers around my wrist. I moan in pleasure, eyebrows furrowing together as I bite my bottom lip. I feel warm and loved underneath him, something that my body has been aching to experience again. I buck my hips up against his, riding on him to meet his thrusts. "Fuck, do that again." He whines, face morphing into his familiar pleasure expression. "What? Move my hips like that?" I ask, rolling them against him. "Fuck... Fuck... I wanna cum..." He hisses, pounding on top of me. "Not yet... Not yet, please... I wanna cum with you. And I just need a little more to get myself there. Please..." I whimper, gasping as I feel his tip press against my cervix. His veins are pulsing against my walls, his thrusts are becoming sloppier and sloppier each passing second, showing me he is achingly close to his high. But he keeps himself from coming, biting his lip and digging his nails into my skin. I want him to leave a mark, I want him to mark me as his own so that I will have to walk down the aisle wearing his touch under my designer wedding dress. "You are pulsing around me... You are milking my cock, princess." He slurs, panting as he fucks me deeper with every move of his hips. "Michael..." I cry out, arching my back off the mattress. He scoops his arm under my waist, holding me close to him as he gives me a couple of final thrusts before I shriek and cum around him, screaming his name as I clutch onto him as if he is the most precious part of my soul; which he certainly has been, currently is, and always will be.

With the final thrust, he glues on me, holding me down and resting his head in the curve of my neck while he cums inside me, making me feel warm, full, and safe. "Go pack a bag." He orders as he calms down from his orgasm, flopping with his back against the bed. "What?" I ask, resting my head against his chest and taking his hand in mine. "Go pack a bag, just a few clothes, and necessities. Let's leave. Now. Please, let's leave together." He begs, making me hum bittersweet. "And where do you think we should go?" I ask, knowing better than him that there isn't a plan for this escape. "I don't know. We will get in a car together, drive to a different state, and take a plane elsewhere. I have qualifications, experience, I will find another job. And we will get a house by the sea, with a big garden, just as you pictured it. Please, go pack a bag." He looks at me like a puppy, his eyes sparkling. "My father is going to fight you, no one will hire you. He has power, money, influence. He knows politicians, he is going to make sure you and I suffer if we oppose and cancel the deal. No one is going to hire you, nor me." "I don't care, I will work at McDonald's, I will flip burgers... I just want to be with you. Run away with me." He presses on me, running his thumb over the back of my hand. "You are going to hate me for the rest of your life. You worked too hard to get where you are right now. If you throw it all away for me, you are going to hate me. Maybe not the first months, or the first couple of years, but 3 or 4 years in, when we will be staying in a tiny apartment and we won't be able to afford to have a baby, and the bills are going to be piling up, you are going to despise me, you are going to curse the moment you suggested we run away and I said yes. So, since I want you to remember me with love and not hatred, I have to say no." I explain and he sighs. "(Y/N), please." He begs, voice cracking. "Mikey, baby... I love you. And turning this down is even harder than getting married to Sleazy Ed tomorrow evening, so, please don't ask me again." I reply, leaving a peck on his chest. I am oddly calm while I let the words out, my soul feeling at peace as I realize I am doing what's best for everyone. "I could never hate you. Never. Even if we lived in a cardboard, underneath a bridge. And sacrificing what I have right now, it will be a lot easier than watching you become his wife." He replies, hugging me to his body. "Don't come to the wedding tomorrow. Putting on the whole show is going to be a lot harder if you are there. I don't want you going through that." I almost beg him. "I think everyone will notice I am missing. We did so well hiding our relationship while we were together, let's not give them suspicions. Plus, I can't leave you there alone." He says soothingly, rubbing down my arm. ****"I... Tomorrow night, he is going to..." I begin but he shushes me. "If he touches you, if he lays his hands on you, in any way, I will kill him myself. I swear to God and anything sacred." He looks at me in the eye, hissing a threat I know he can't bring to life. "We know the only reason he put that clause in the contract is just to get in my pants. He couldn't ask for a night with me, that would show his true colors to my father, to his father, to everyone on both boards. He has been trying to fuck me for years, I have been turning him down every time and that pissed him off. If I don't give him what he wants, he will only become more obsessed. So, tomorrow night, when he thrusts in me for less than 3 minutes, I am going to close my eyes and think of you, and all of the times you made me feel ethereal, like a goddess on Earth." I reply, smiling at him softly. "He is going to..." He begins but I press my finger on his lips. "He doesn't have power over me. I'll give him what he wants and he will be disinterested, move back to fucking everyone with a pussy between their legs." I reply and he groans; I feel his anger, his frustration, his helplessness, and I have been there when I first realized what would happen after the wedding. You see, putting on a dress and saying "I do" is going to be just the beginning. And the beginning is the easiest in this scenario. "You are the bravest person I know. You have bigger balls than any motherfucker I know." He states and I sigh. "Yeah, I know." I reply, raxing my back and yawning. ****

"A week from tomorrow, at 9 pm, you come to find me at the hotel we used to go when we were hiding from everyone. I will text you the room number at 8:30. Come find me." He instructs and I huff. "Are we running away from there?" I ask him, causing him to shake his head. "No. Not yet, at least. It will be just you and me for a couple of hours, a bit of sensitization for both of us, because I know we will both be out of our bodies until then. I will be your haven, your safe space for a few hours, and you will be my happiness, the only thing that will keep me from losing it." He explains, making me tear up a little. "We will meet weekly." I suggest and he hums. "More frequently if we need it. You will just text me, or I will just text you and we will meet at the hotel whenever we need it." He kisses the top of my head, breathing steadily. "I love you." I utter, lacing my fingers with his. "I love you too, pretty girl." He whispers, making warmth spread on my body.

"You look so pretty, (Y/N)... You are the most beautiful bride I have seen." My father smiles as he walks into the bridal suite. He is supposed to walk me down the aisle, deliver me to the douchebag I am supposed to marry in just a few minutes. "Stop, stop with this bullshit, we both know I look nothing like myself. Not even close. We both know that this facade is not pretty..." I rumble, feeling like giving myself one last chance to walk out of this free. "(Y/N), you are being dramatic. I swear to God, if you pull that crap in front of everyone, I will make you regret it." He threatens. My chest tightens and I decide that attack is not the best strategy. "Dad... Daddy... That man... You know that man is going to torture me. I don't love him, dad. He is going to make me unhappy. Please don't throw my life away. Please, dad... You are the only one with the power to stop it. Please, dad..." I beg, looking at him for a reaction. "Everyone is waiting for us, Mrs. Jopherson." He replies, linking my arm with his. I nod my head and wipe away my eyes, taking a deep breath to calm myself down. "Yes, sir. Let's go offer everyone a show." I say coldly, putting on my brave face.

I counted the seconds until the day I would see Michael arrived. I lied to the house personnel that I would be heading to the gym in case Edward asks my whereabouts and drove to the hotel as fast as I could, feeling jittery about seeing him again. There were mere seconds between me knocking on the door and him opening it, smiling at me. I fall in his arms, breathing in his scent to ground myself to reality. He is here, and I am here, and this is real, more real than what happened in the past week. He pulls me inside and I push the door closed with my foot. "I missed your pretty face... I missed you so much." He whispers, peppering my face with kisses. "Not more than I did." I assure him, cradling his face in my hands and kissing him deeply. ****"Did he touch you? Are you ok?" He asks after we pull away, holding me by my shoulders. "He was too drunk to do anything on the first night. We stayed in a hotel suite and the moment he was off, I went and booked myself a room. I stayed there all night and only saw him in the morning. We went for lunch with my parents and his, spent most of the day there. We got home at night and he... It lasted 3 minutes and 37 seconds... I know, I counted them. He rolled to the side, mumbled something to himself. And then he fell asleep. I slept in a guest room, woke up super early just to go back to his bed. After that, he didn't bother with me. He got what he wanted. I am sleeping in a different room than him now. He doesn't seem to mind." I state, making him close his eyes and draw a breath, trying to contain himself. ****

"Hey, hey... I am alright. Can we please, stop talking about it now? This whole safe haven thing is not going to work if we are constantly talking about him." I ask, stroking his cheek, as he nods his head at me. "I picked up some Asian food from the place near my house. I got you extra dumplings because I know you like them." He says, pointing to the bag that is resting on the table nearby. "You know, my excuse for tonight was that I was going to the gym. I can't go back home blotted from dumplings." I joke and he hums. "Well, if you'd like... I can help with burning the extra calories..." He smirks, making me roll my eyes at him. "I was really hoping you would... I have been thinking of you touching me nearly every day since the last time." I place my hands on the sides of his neck.

"I was thinking... Maybe... I don't know, the weekend after this one, maybe we could go on a little trip. On a little cabin in the woods, away from everyone... If you want to of course." He suggests, stroking my hair and twisting a lock of it between his fingers. My head is on his chest, his skin still a little damp with sweat from having sex a few minutes before. "I will have to find an excuse and we should definitely not meet during the next week, just for precaution, but it sounds magnificent." I state, supporting my body on my elbows to be able to look at him a little better. "We will leave on Friday afternoon. I'll pick you up from your old apartment. And we will drive there. Hopefully, we will make it there before night falls and we will have dinner under the stars. Just you and me, miles away." He states, running his knuckles down my back. "Why are we meeting here?" I ask and he looks at me with confusion. "What do you mean?" He asks me back. "I still have my old apartment. We can meet there, it will feel more... homey, I guess." I suggest and he chuckles. "Aren't you afraid of getting caught?" He asks me and I shake my head at him. "Ed doesn't know about the house, and my parents don't have keys. I have no neighbors, I live in the penthouse... Getting caught is no valid worry." I respond and he hums. "Ok then... Next meeting will be at your house." He replies, pressing his lips on my forehead.

The housekeeper leaves the plate before me, making me smile at her politely. Edward has been scrolling on his phone, which is a huge relief for me. He barely ever talks to me while he is at home, which is torturing. He married me to prove he could, and he plans on spending our married life just keeping me incarcerate in a life of nothing. "My best friend from college is coming from Spain next weekend. We are thinking of going to Miami for the weekend to catch up. Girls weekend out and stuff." I state, picking up my glass of wine. "And you are telling me this because...?" He asks, not raising his gaze from his phone. "Just to let you know I will be gone next weekend. Friday to Monday morning." I reply, shrugging my shoulders. "Yeah, have fun. Try not to make a big fool out of yourself." He replies, making me press my tongue against my cheek and swallow my anger. "Thanks. Try not to catch too many STDs while I am gone." I roll my eyes, sipping on my wine.

Friday came and I couldn't wait to get out of the house. If sneaking around with Michael in hotel rooms makes me feel free, that feeling of freedom becomes a thousand times intenser now that we are going away from all that. Michael pulls into the parking under my old apartment, making me jump in excitement. I skip to the car, throwing my duffel bag in the backseat before slipping in the front. "Hi, baby." He greets, smiling at me. I lean closer to him, pressing my lips against his for a quick peck, which he turns into a deeper, proper kiss by gripping onto the back of my head and prying my lips apart with his tongue. "Ready for our trip?" He asks as we part, making me squeal excitedly. "I have never been more ready about anything in my life" I reply, relaxing back into my seat. "The little cabin is absolutely beautiful. It has a fireplace and a cozy bedroom. And a little hot tub on the balcony, which has a breath-taking view. You are going to love it." He says, driving out of the parking. "Pity I didn't pack a swimsuit..." I pout, picking up the coffee cup from the cup holder. "You can go naked. I don't mind... Nothing I haven't seen before, nor I don't want to see... I mean. Babe, you have a body to kill for." He replies, cocking an eyebrow at me. "I packed a suit, unfortunately for you. Just in case... Plus, my whole excuse was that I will be going to Miami. I had to pack some bikinis for cover-up." I bring my hand to stroke his hair, making him groan in disappointment. "What do I have to do to convince you to go in naked?" He asks, making me lick my lips. "Well, did you pack wine with you?" I ask back, cocking an eyebrow at him. "Rosé and Red. I know my girlfriend..." He replies, bringing my hand to his lips. "Shall we put on some music? Let freedom begin?" I ask, bringing my phone out of my pocket. "Let the freedom begin, princess." He smiles at me, almost as excited as I am.

We reach the little cabin just before sunset, the whole scenery looking idealistic with the light surrounding it. "Let's leave the luggage in the car and go to the reception for the key." He suggests, parking the car as I stretch my body. "Didn't you make a reservation?" I ask and he nods. "I did. But we need to pick up the keys and leave some identification." He explains, opening his door and getting out. I follow his lead, walking by his side and locking arms with him. He leans in, pecking my temple softly. I smile and lean my head against his arm, feeling calm for the first time in a while.

We walk into the little reception, small enough to fit only the desk and the back room. "Hi. We have a reservation. Under the name Clifford." Michael says to the woman behind the desk. She smiles at us while he takes out his ID. "Mr. and Mrs. Michael Clifford, you reserved the house up the hill." She replies, checking Michael's ID. "That's us. Did the payment go through?" He asks and the lady nods. "Of course. Give me a second to make a copy and hand you the keys." She says, moving to the back room. "Mr. and Mrs. Michael Clifford?" I ask, making him shrug. "I like the sound of it. Don't you?" He asks me and I hum. "I love it. This weekend I am Mrs. Clifford." I state, my heart fluttering at the sound of it. I lean up, pressing a kiss on his lips while the smile still spreads on my face. "Well, Mrs. Clifford... What do you want to do once we are in our cabin?" He asks me, pushing a lock of hair behind my ear. "I wanna have some wine with my husband, in front of the fireplace. Little to no clothing." I reply and he moans. "It sounds like a plan..." He replies, kissing the tip of my nose. "A good plan, I hope." I place my hand on top of his chest. "The best plan I've heard in years."He assures me, taking my hand in his.

After picking up the keys, Michael and I got into the car and drove up the hill where our cabin is. It looks like a typical cabin in the wood, with log walls and a front porch with comfortable seats. I carry my bag inside after Michael unlocks the door, and I walk in the coziest little living room, with a big sofa and a perfect fireplace. It is perfect, the total opposite of where we usually go. I walk up the staircase, leading to an open-plan bedroom. It is rustic, to say the least, but totally warm and homey. I leave my bag in the little armchair across the bed, smiling to myself as I imagine my weekend here with the love of my life. I was right; this is absolute freedom and I can picture myself living here forever with Michael, even if it isn't the dream house by the ocean I always pictured ourselves in. "Are you ok, love?" Michael asks, standing behind me and wrapping his arms around me. "I have never been better. This is oneiric, my love. I feel free." I take a deep breath, feeling my body relaxing finally. "I'll go start the fire. Wanna take a shower and freshen up?" He asks, kissing down the curve of my neck. "I'll be right downstairs. Crackers and cheese with the wine... My stomach is grumbling..." I pout as I turn around, making him hum. "You are hungry, bub?" He asks, raising my hoodie before kneeling down to kiss my stomach. "Very... But also I feel filthy after all those hours in the car. So, I need to go clean up." I stroke his hair, smiling down at him. "Filthy girl..." He mumbles, standing up and pressing his lips against mine. "Go. I will need warmth after the shower. Go start the fire, pour the wine, plate the cheese and crackers. Maybe have a shower too after the fire and before doing the rest. The car ride made you greasy..." I press my thumb on his bottom lip, pulling it down a bit, enough to reveal his bottom teeth before I press a peck on it. "And what are you going to do if I do everything?" He asks, cocking an eyebrow at me. "Look pretty, smell great, be soft... So soft... Silky soft..." I say between kissing his neck in between kisses. "Fine... Go shower." He moans, throwing his head back.

Michael enters the bathroom right the moment I am wrapping my towel around my body. "Fuck, I missed all the fun." He sighs, making me chuckle. "We have a whole weekend to shower together." I remind him and he hums. "The fire is ready. I'll do the rest after the shower, just as the princess requested." He mumbles, stripping off his clothes. "You such a good boy for me... I will have to reward you for that..." I state, licking my lips as I watch his naked body. "What do you have in mind?" He asks, turning to look at me. "You know I am very good with my mouth... And not just for talking in court." I give him a wink, before walking out of the bathroom and letting him slip in the shower.

He was quick in his shower, soon moving downstairs to set up our little date and giving me time to dress up for him. Usually, when we meet in the hotel room, I am dressed in sports clothes, to cover my gym alibi. So now it is the perfect time for me to dress up for him, finally. So, I slip in my little babydoll, with the nice panties and garter belt underneath, tying it all together with my silky romp with lace details. I walk downstairs, finding Michael sitting by the fireplace already, 2 glasses of wine before him. "Well, that's quite the setup..." I comment, waiting for him to bring his focus on me. He averts his gaze to me, his face lighting up as he scans me. He stands up, walking his way towards me. He stares at me for a while, before his hands move to the belt of my romp. He tugs at it, looking at me for permission, which I grant by just nodding. He undoes it, letting the cover-up fall from my body. He looks at me in my babydoll, blinking a couple of times before running his hands down my sides. "Don't you look like a doll..." He comments, picking up my romp from the stairsteps. "You like it?" I ask, making him hum. "You look like a painting, my love." He replies, helping me walk down the remaining stairs. We walk to the fireplace, where he hands me a glass of wine. "If you get cold, you can always dress up. It is enough for me knowing what's under the romp."

He states, clinging his glass with mine while still staring at me. "It is actually very warm in here. Plus the wine is going to heat me a lot. So, I might strip down eventually." I reply, taking a sip from my wine. He breathes heavily, his chest moving visibly with every breath he draws in, while he gulps thickly. "Shit... I don't deserve you..." He shakes his head, running his hand down his face. "You deserve all of me." I assure him, moving closer to him, cupping his jaw in my hand before I kiss his lips. He tastes like his last gulp of wine, which makes me hazy, craving him more as I swipe my tongue between his teeth. He snakes his arm around my waist, pulling me closer to his body until I straddle him. "Wanna christen the cabin, princess?" He asks me, moving his lips from my lips to my chin and then down my neck. "What do you think, daddy?" I ask, breathing hard already. "You make me feel more intoxicated than all the wine in the world, my love." His breath fans against my skin, making me feel goosebumps spread on my body. "Michael..." I moan, feeling his hands stroking over my thighs slowly. "I know, baby. I need you too. Just as badly, if not more..." He whispers, kissing my neck hungrily. "Let me strip for you. I haven't done it in a while..." I ask, gasping under his touch. "Go ahead, baby. Do it slowly, let me take it in." He requests, leaning back as I stand before him. I watch the flames in the fireplace dance around, taking the tempo from them while I sway for him and touch my body, keeping eye contact as he drinks his wine and watches me as I toy with the straps of my babydoll.

I lower the left one, letting the garment drop a little from my chest. I watch him sit up a little, licking his lips as his face becomes a little redder. I drop the other one now, letting it fall completely. I am now standing bare-chested before him, left only in my garter and my panties, contrasting against my skin. "Let those on. I like them..." He says, moving near me. He brings me to lay with my back against the fuzzy carpet, hovering above me before he brings his lips to my chest. He kisses my body softly, every now and then bringing the tip of his tongue to lick the imprint his lips left as he trails them down towards my navel. He leaves a couple of hickeys, softly sucking on my skin to mark it in the prettiest colors. "Lower... Lower... Please..." I moan, feeling a tingling sensation between my thighs. "Lower? Here?" He asks, kissing an inch above the hem of my panties. "Lower..." I plead, tangling my fingers in the fuzz of the carpet. "Here?" He asks, lowering my panties and kissing my pussy, inches above my clit. "A little lower. Please, don't tease me like that..." I beg, becoming frustrated over the whole thing. "There... Fuck... There." I cry out, right as his lips wrap around my clit. He hums, pleased by my reaction to him, while he circles his tongue around the tip of it. "Oh Michael..." I moan, as his fingers trace down my outer lips. He parts them, slipping 2 of his fingers inside me and hooking them up against my post. He pumps them against it, making me tremor in surprise. "You taste so good, princess." He whispers, leaning his head against my thigh and flicking his tongue against my clit repeatedly and slowly, sending a wave of electricity down my spine. "You are so freaking good at this." I exclaim, arching my back as he goes back to sucking on my clit. He rolls it between his teeth softly, causing a little pain to mix with the pleasure. "Please, please, give me your cock. Fuck me, please." I plead, causing him to chuckle against me, sending vibrations all over my body. "Mikey, I am begging you. Enough foreplay. I need you." I stutter, trembling as he continues his sweet, sweet torture.

He swirls his tongue between my folds, moving his tongue slowly. I hate him for what he is doing oh so well. "Please, daddy. I'll do whatever you want. Please." I beg one last time, throwing out my final hope. His shoulders move in satisfaction before he kisses his way away from my core. He still pumps his fingers inside me, while his other hand works on freeing his cock from his clothes. He doesn't stop brushing my spot with his fingertips until they get replaced by his throbbing length. He thrusts deep inside me, holding onto my legs and pushing them closer to my chest to gain deeper access to my sex. My stomach rises and falls as I take him, whining at how good he feels inside me. "What, princess? I thought you wanted my cock? Now you are whining?" He asks cockily. My gaze falls on the way his cock thrusts in and out of me, which makes me mesmerized, totally indulged in the sight. "No, no... It feels good. It feels too good." I reply, bringing my hand to my face and biting onto it. He pulls it away from my face, pinning it by the side of my face. "You can scream all you want, baby. No one is going to complain." He smirks, bringing my other hand over my head and pinning it there along with the other. "The whole weekend with you, fucking me, sleeping next to me, spending all the time with me. I can just cum by the thought alone." I whimper, bucking my hips on his. "I know, baby. It makes me lose it too. Just thinking about sleeping in the same bed with you for 3 nights in a row... Fuck." He hisses, pounding in me harder. I shriek, pulsing around him, the need to grip onto him becoming bigger with each thrust. "It feels right. All of this feels right. I love you. Fuck, I love you so much... Oh, do that again." I rumble, toes curling and body arching completely off the carpet. "I love you too, dove. But I need you to stop moving your body so I can fuck you properly." He orders, putting his weight on me to stop me from moving. He still fucks me hard, fast, restlessly. He puts his all in every thrust, gasping as he moves against me. My hands twitch, trying to grip onto anything, really, but without any success. "Mikey, I might... Fuck, I wanna cum." I press my lips together, face tensing as I get closer and closer to my high. "Yeah, I can feel you, princess. Go ahead, cum for me (Y/N)... Cum around me, pretty girl." He encourages me, letting go of my hands. I instantly reach for his biceps, raking my nails down his skin, leaving red stripes on his arms. "Fuck." He hisses, giving me the strongest pound yet. My eyes roll back and I become undone, screaming in pleasure at the top of my lungs. It is like pure ecstasy running inside my veins, making my whole body alert, sensitive to his touch. "Baby... You are milking me dry..." He hisses, grasping my face and making me look at him. "Are you going to cum inside me, daddy? Are you going to fill me up?" I ask, gasping for air. My orgasm is only becoming intenser as he thrusts inside me in pursue of his own high. "If you call me daddy again, I might." He says through gritted teeth, making me smirk at him. "Daddy..." I moan, causing him to growl before cumming inside me after 2 short thrusts.

He is a sweaty, gasping mess as he collapses by my side. I look at the flames in the fireplace as I lay my head on his chest, feeling my body totally relaxed. "Well, Mrs. Clifford... What is in that pretty mind of yours?" Michael asks me as he kisses the top of my head. "Nothing. For the first time in a while, I have nothing to think of. Everything just... flows." I reply, tracing my fingers down his chest. "Well, to be honest, I am thinking of what to have for breakfast." He states and I chuckle, pressing a kiss on his collarbone. "Now I am thinking about that too... Definitely something loaded with cheese. Preferably Parmesan cheese." I suggest and he hums. "We will ask at the reception what's the perfect breakfast place in the area." He says, stroking my back. "Maybe we can go hiking after breakfast. And find a little store to buy stuff for dinner. I wanna cook for you..." I offer and he smiles. "We should do that." He murmurs. I cup his jaw, bringing my lips to his before sitting up and slipping my babydoll on. I pick up our glasses, leaving his on the floor by him as he pulls his sweats on. "I am famished. I need those crackers and cheese asap." I smile, taking a sip from my wine. "Did I wear you down, princess?" He asks, with a cocky smirk on his lips. "I could do this all night, pretty boy. I just need to fill up." I shrug and he hums.

Morning comes and I wake up in Michael's hug, which seems to be my happy place since I just woke up with the biggest smile on my face. He is still asleep, his lips parted as he snores softly. The sun hits the bed from the little circular window above it, making the bed a lot warmer now. I like to pretend that this is my everyday life, that every morning I get to wake up next to him, that we live in this cabin, and we make love by the fireplace, and no one else but us exists. But I know Monday will come and I will return home, to a man I don't love and doesn't love me, to a life I despise, to a life which sole happiness is my weekly meetings with the only man who loves me more than I love him.

It is no time to be sad, however. I have the whole weekend to take advantage of the fact I am Mrs. Clifford, live in my little fantasy. "Mr. Clifford..." I sing, trying to wake Michael up. "Mr. Clifford. Wake up..." I nudge him softly, straddling his waist as he stirs a little, groaning in his sleep. "Mr. Clifford, your wife is hungry, she needs you awake." I say softly, making him smile as he opens one eye. "My wife..." He says groggily, smiling at me. "Your wife. Me... I am registered as Mrs. Clifford for the weekend." I explain and he hums. "I would pay all my fortune for this to be real." He says, still between sleep and awareness. "It is real, and your very real wife is really, really hungry. So, up and let's get going." I suggest and he hums. "Can we stay in bed a little longer?" He asks, taking my hand in his. "No, I am hungry, Mikey. I've been up for half an hour now. And I need to fill my stomach. Please..." I pout, earning a groan from him. "Ok, go get ready. We will go get some breakfast, then hiking, as my lady requested last night, and then shopping for dinner. Dress warmly. Can't say no to my wife, can I?" He asks, sighing in defeat. "I don't think you can." I lean down, planting a kiss on his lips before getting up from the bed.

"Ah, Mr. And Mrs. Clifford... Up so early?" The lady from the front desk greets us as we enter the reception. "Oh, the wife is starving. We were wondering where in the area we could go for breakfast." Michael replies, running his thumb over my hip softly. "And any places we could go for a hike after breakfast? This scenery is worth exploring..." I comment and she hums softly. "I will give you a map of the area. There is a diner near a hiking trail, you will need to take your car and leave it there, but the hiking trail starts right after the diner. Here." She replies, marking the map for us before handing it to me. "Thank you." We say in unison, taking a look at the map.

I cradle the mug of hot chocolate in my hands while curling up on the little couch of our booth. "Why do you have to look so precious?" Michael asks me, leaning his face on his hands. "Someone has to..." I shrug, smirking at him. "Why do I sense that something changed?" He asks me, making me look at him with furrowed eyebrows. "What do you mean?" I ask him back, tilting my head at him. "Since we arrived... Something is different on you." He points out. "I don't know, Mikey. It might be... I was thinking last night, while you were sleeping. I will send the contracts to a friend of mine, ask him to weight in on the clause. There must be something. I don't want to live like that anymore, Michael. I will try to fix this, anyway I can." I state, making him smile at me. "Let's drink to that." He brings his cup to cling against mine.

The food is slowly cooking in the kitchen; I have at least 30 minutes until I will have to check if it is ready, so I grabbed my book and a glass of wine and head to the little balcony of the cabin. I am wrapped in a linen scarf, trying to protect myself from the chill that has covered the area since the sunset. "You are having second thoughts..." Michael comments, walking out in the balcony with me. "What? About what?" I ask as he takes a seat on the chair by my side. "About the house by the sea, with the big garden. You are thinking about a mountain house now, a little bit like this cabin." He states and I hum. "Well, it would be nice to have a little cabin. But just for me and you to escape in. The children will have to stay back to the house by the sea, with your parents to take care of them for the weekend. The cabin will be for me and you, a hidden little secret." I reply, reaching to take his hand in mine. "I love it." He mumbles, leaning in to press his forehead against mine. "I know you do." I breathe out, closing my eyes as I stay there, motionless, my forehead pressed against his as my hand leaves my book to travel to his cheek.

"Will I be seeing you this weekend?" Michael asks as I fix the buttons of my blouse. He is still naked, lying in bed with only the bedsheet covering just a bit of his body. "I wish. Saturday Edward is taking me to some investors' dinner. And Sunday, we are going to have lunch with the parents." I sigh, leaning down to kiss his lips. "I'll see you at dinner. I am going to be there..." He smirks, wrapping his fingers around my wrist. "Oooh... I am going to wear something nice then... Just for you." I reply, seconds before he pulls me in for a kiss again. "Can't wait to see you..." He mumbles against my lips, making me smile. "Will you lock the door after leaving?" I ask him, pulling away from him to continue getting dressed. "I always do, don't I?" He sighs, still staring at me. "Mikey... Don't be sad, please... You'll see me at dinner. And then next week, Friday as usual." I coo at him, earning a chuckle from him. "I miss our little cabin in the woods. I wish we could go back..." He pouts, making me sigh happily. "We will." I assure him, throwing him a smile. "Call me when you make it home, ok darling?" He asks me and I nod. "Of course, baby. I always do." I reply, leaning down for one last kiss.

The investors' dinner turned out to be way more interesting than lunch with the parents. Both families gathered in my parents' house, so the place is filled with obnoxious laughs and non-sense chatter. I hate it here, to the point it makes me sick to my stomach. The sight of the food on the table makes my stomach turn, a horrible taste crawling up my throat. "(Y/N), sweetheart... Are you alright? You look a little pale." My mother-in-law comments, making me whimper under my breath. "Too much champagne at the dinner last night... Why don't you go get some air, sweetheart?" Edward snarks, patting my thigh. I wince at his touch but cover it with a smile. "Maybe I should... Excuse me for a second..." I excuse myself, actually thankful for Edward's suggestion for once. I stand up from my chair and take a couple of steps before the room starts spinning and I collapse on the floor.

The smell of alcohol brings me back to my senses and I open my eyes to find everyone over my head. I am confused and disoriented, and I taste this metallic taste in my mouth. "Good... Let's get her to the car." My dad instructs and I am picked up, carried towards the front door. No one is talking, not while I am taken in the car nor during the drive to the hospital. And I decided that staying silent is the best thing I can do, at least until I exclude the possibility that the thought I have in my head since I was taken in the car.

I am seated on the Emergency pit, in one of the beds while some doctors take my vitals. "I will need you to give a urine sample." The doctor says, handing me a little cup. "We will take you to the OBGYN department. They will handle your case from now on." The doctor helps me off the bed, and I bite the inside of my cheek. "Please don't inform my family yet." I plead and the woman smiles at me. "I don't have anything to inform them on just yet." She replies, guiding me towards the OBGYN exam room.

I hand the nurse the urine sample, bouncing on my feet as she dips a strip inside the cup. We only wait for a couple of minutes for the test to show my results, but it is the longest I had to wait for anything in my life. "Doctor, we will need an ultrasound." The nurse announces, making a shiver run down my spine. I feel heat crawl up my face, my throat going dry as she doctor gestures toward the exam table. She gives me a paper gown to change into for my ultrasound, which I stare at for more than it is normal. "Sweetie, I need you to change." The doctor says softly. I nod my head and move behind the divider, changing into the gown.

Once I am on the bed, the doctor preps me for the ultrasound. "I will have to go transvaginally." She gives me a heads up to which I nod. "I know. Go ahead." I reply, fixing my gaze on the screen. It makes me feel some discomfort, only for a little, like every other time I have had an examination. The doctor twists the prob a little, fixing her eyes on the screen. "I would say you are six weeks far. Does that sound right based on your last period?" She asks me, while I look at the little bubble on the screen. "Yes... It does." I reply, smiling softly at the picture. Six weeks ago, I was in that little cabin with Michael, away from everyone, in our own little safe world. It sounds right that I got pregnant that weekend. "I suggest going to your regular doctor for a thorough check, but for now I can tell you that everything seems alright." She replies, taking the bubble's measurements. "Do I need to look at for anything right now?" I ask her as she turns off the machine. "Your doctor will tell you more. But I suggest you stay calm and watch what you are eating. If you are a smoker, consider cutting it, same goes with alcohol." She suggests and I hum. "Thank you. I will go get dressed." I smile at her, moving behind the divider.

"Love... Oh, you made me so happy today..." My dad is the first to hug me, making me panic at the realization they were told about my results. "They told you already?" I mumble. "They told me, my love. And I was so excited not to share the news with them... You are going to make me a father." Ed says cockily, giving me a look I can only translate as threatening. "Of course he told us. I can't wait to tell the whole company I am going to be a grandfather..." My dad cheers. "Maybe we shouldn't announce it yet. I mean, I am pretty early into the pregnancy, I don't want to jinx it." I rush to let out, causing everyone to gasp approvingly. "Of course, darling." Edward's father agrees, making Edward hum. "Of course. We wouldn't want anything to go wrong with our precious little baby." He smirks at me, making chills run down my spine. "We should all go celebrate." My dad is looking at me excitedly. "Father, if you allow it, I would like to take my wife back home. She needs rest and I want to spend some time with her." Edward steps in, wrapping his arms around my waist. I nearly puke, disgusted by his touch but also scared of the moment I will be alone with him. "The parents-to-be need some time together. Go. We will see you next weekend, for lunch. I am not taking no for an answer." My dad insists, making Ed chuckle.

The ride back to the house was silent, with Ed speeding up at times to scare me. I know that the silence won't last long, and I dread that moment. I am not only scared for myself, but the baby inside me as well. We walk into the house and he pulls me straight to the bedroom, dragging me by my arm. "6 weeks ago you told me you were with that classmate of yours... You were with him, weren't you?" He growls at me, forcing me to sit on the ottoman at the end of his bed. "I don't know what you are talking about..." I mumble and he chuckles. He looks like a mad person, making my heart skip a beat. "I am not an idiot, (Y/N). I've only fucked you once and it has been months since, nearly half a year. It's that Clifford dude, isn't it? You've been fucking around with him, and you were both stupid enough to get knocked up." He screams at my face. "Why do you care? You got what you wanted from me." I stand up, trying to walk out of the room. He grabs me by my arm, jerking me back to him. "You are hurting me." I protest and he chuckles. "I've let you do whatever you wanted until now. Now, listen to me. That bastard inside you is the best gift you could give me. Your father will be wrapped around my finger for giving him a grandchild. So, you break up with your little boy toy, he never finds out the mutt is his, or else I will destroy his life. I will make him so miserable, I will make him curse the day he met you." He says through gritted teeth, letting go of my arm violently. "You have a week to break up with him. Or else..." He threatens, tapping the underside of my chin. "Go... You need to rest." He orders, practically shoving me out of the door. I gasp as lock myself in my room, finally letting myself break down. I don't know what to think, or how to feel, or how to react to all of this. My mind is blank, totally empty at the moment. All I know is that I will protect this baby until my last breath. And that I will not let Edward hurt the only person I ever loved.

Friday came and I made it to the apartment way before Michael, in a way trying to practice what I want to tell him.

In my head, it makes no sense. But Edward always gets what he wants, so he will keep his word and destroy Michael if I don't comply with him. Punctual to the appointment, Michael unlocked the door at 7:30. He has the biggest smile on his face the moment he sees me lounging on the couch. "Baby, you are here already." He cheers, walking towards me. "I brought dumplings from your favorite place. Wanna start eating?" He asks me, lifting the bag to show me the food. "Michael, we need to talk." I pat the empty spot on the couch for him. He becomes more serious, leaving the bag on the coffee table. "What is it, love? Is everything ok?" He asks me, placing his hand on my thigh. "I've never loved anyone or anything more than I love you." I take his hand in mine, making him smile at me. "I know that, love. And I do too. I would do anything for you." He replies. "That's why we need to break up. I am trapped, but you don't have to be. I want you to move on with your life, find someone who is going to give you everything I can't." I state, making him sigh. "We have been through the same discussion before. I don't want anyone but you." He assures me but I shake my head. "Michael, this time I am serious. I want you to move on. I want you to go ahead and have a family, I want you to find a love that's going to make your dreams come true. I want you to build the house by the sea with the big garden for your wife and children, and the cabin in the woods for a little retreat. I want you to have 4 children and a bunch of dogs. I want you to grow old with someone you love and loves you back. I can't give you that. I am sorry." I tear up as I bring the words out of my mouth. Michael sniffles, shaking his head. "No. I don't care about all that. I want to be with you, this is enough for me." He insists, making my stomach hurt. "I thought you would take advice from a friend on the contract... I thought you wanted to fix this." He mumbles and I close my eyes, taking deep breaths. "I can't, Michael. I can't change things. Please, don't make this harder than it is. We can't get out of this. Well, I can't. But you still can. You can get out, you can build a life. Please. It's over for us." I sob, making him breathe out disappointed. "I'll leave. Since that's what you want. But I love you. And I will continue loving you. No matter what, forever." He murmurs as he tries not to break down crying before my eyes. He leans down to peck on my forehead, making my bottom lip quiver. I want to cry, beg him not to go. But I know that if I do, Edward is going to ruin his life. I watch him leave the key to my apartment on the table before he turns to walk out the door. I feel horrible, the worst I have ever felt in my life for breaking his heart and letting him down, but it is for the best. "Your father is a wonderful man. And he would love you so much if he knew you exist." I breathe out, placing my hand on my stomach. I grit my teeth and close my eyes, trying to calm myself down; stress is one of the forbidden things while I carry little peanut inside me. I reach for the bag on the table, picking the paper box out and opening it to dig in the dumplings. At least I get to eat my feelings away before returning home.

Edward is sitting on the couch, waiting for me to walk in. He has the sliest smile on his face, which gives me a headache already. "Your sweetheart just quit. Through email... Very unprofessional if you ask me. We are having a meeting Monday morning to appoint a new CEO... Guess who's the strongest candidate... The only candidate, actually. I love that bastard already." He cheers as I walk in, making my face scrunch up as I feel vomit crawling up my throat.

I have never felt as alone as I felt on the day I gave birth to my son. My parents and Edward's parents were there, along with Edward of course, who played the happy father and the loving husband, but the only person I longed for was absent, still in ignorance of our son's existence. I really dreamt of Michael just barging in the delivery room and holding my hand, even though I knew he wouldn't since he knew nothing. Since the day he quit from the company, he nearly vanished from the face of Earth, no one really knows where he left for. We named the baby Philip; at least Ed let me pick up the name. Philip sounds royal, fitting the little guy who as he grows he looks more and more like his father. Philip was and still is the only reason I am holding on. Edward stopped caring the moment he got the position he craved, only putting on the facade of the warm family guy whenever any of our parents were present, or someone he needed to impress. And Philip seems to not get along with anyone but me, always clinging to me. And to be honest, I am not letting him go, holding onto him all day long. I don't trust Ed; he seems disinterested, and at least for now he is not mistreating us, but I just can't trust that he will always be like that.

The two-year-old is fast asleep in my hug when my phone rings. I hope and pray he won't wake up as I reach for the coffee table to pick up my phone. I don't recognize the number, which makes me furrow; I don't get calls from people anymore, so this seems strange. "Hello?" I ask as I press the accept button. "It's me." I could recognize that voice amid a thousand others. I bite my bottom lip, leaving Philip carefully on the couch so he can continue sleeping while I talk. "I am in town for a few days. I really want to see you." Michael says after a moment of silence. "Michael..." I protest, seriously putting on an effort to turn him down once more. "Please. Just for an hour." He begs. I want to see him, for 3 years now since he's left, I have been dying to know how he is. "Where?" I ask him, giving in to my desire. "The penthouse. Tonight, at 8." He instructs. How does he know that I still have that house? "Just for an hour." I mumble, making him hum. "See you tonight." He replies before hanging up.

I can't stop myself from shaking in jitters, my body filling with anxiety. I haven't heard from him for 3 years, 3years that he could have followed my advice, gotten married, had children, bought my dream house for someone else. I am scared; I am scared that I will see him and he will tell me about his new family, or that I will admit we had a child. And that secret being revealed might cost him everything.

At 9, I unlock the door to my old penthouse. I haven't been here in years, but I paid for it getting cleaned twice a month, so it looks decent enough for two old lovers to meet. I know that the moment I see him, I will die inside, my stomach will fill with butterflies, and I will crave to be touched by him. And the knowledge I can't have him pains me, makes my head hurt. The ring of my doorbell makes me more anxious than before. He is here, behind this door. The love of my life is just milliseconds away from me. I open the door, revealing Michael who smiles at me. He looks better than ever, grown, more mature. And I feel my heart beating fast, my palms sweating. "I didn't think you would actually be here." He comments, walking further inside the house. "I said I would." I mumble. "You look great, my love." He comments, scanning me down. "You look... Well, I can't put it in words. But time treated you right." I smile, taking a deep breath. "Come sit. I won't bite, I promise. Well, only if you ask me to..." He says cockily.

I take a seat on the couch, keeping two cushions empty between us; I know it will be futile if I succumb, but for now, this limits me. "So, where were you all these years?" I ask, running my hands down my thighs to straighten my dress. "I left the night we broke up. Of course, you knew that. I had many job offers but I was staying here for you. So, when I lost you, I had nothing keeping me here. With the money I had in my account and the money I made from my job, I bought shares in the start-up company I was working on. Now I am the CEO and a shareholder. Pretty solid position if you ask me. The first few months after I left were difficult, I am not going to lie, but I managed to get through. I bought a house, overlooking the sea, with the biggest garden I could find. And I bought a cabin in the woods, made it just like the one we stayed at during that trip. I bought them in my name. But they will be titled as yours after you divorce Edward. Unless you prefer me passing them to Philip, our son." He says, pushing an envelope towards me. I gasp and look at him in shock, making him reach to take my hand in his. "You know?" I ask him and he nods. "I still have friends in the company. They told me your father threw this big party to announce it. I did the math... You got pregnant in the cabin, didn't you?" He asks me and I nod. "I couldn't tell you. He threatened me, he told me he would ruin your life." I begin explaining but he hushes me. "I know. Well, I suspected it. I battled with myself not to come and get you the moment I found out. But I knew I had to build a life for us, put us in a position where no one would be able to hurt us. So I did, and I hated every moment I wasn't with you and our baby. I hated every moment I imagined Edward holding our son." He groans, and I chuckle, wiping away my tears. "He didn't. He didn't care about us after he took your place. And Philip pretty much hates him, he cries hysterically every time Edward picks him up. And he only does when he needs to sell the image of the loving father and devoted husband." I reply and he chuckles. "I took the contract to a lawyer. She said that since you followed all the clauses, you can get a divorce from him without affecting the deal. The merge holds and you are free." Michael explains. "He will give us hell. And take us to the court about Philip." I point out. "Baby, you are a lawyer. Think about it. We will have a DNA test, prove Philip is mine. And he won't do shit. He knows that a court battle will harm him. He forced you to marry him, he abused you. He knows it won't look good on him. Nothing and no one is going to hurt us, baby. Not anymore, I won't allow it. Run away with me. Get our baby and run away with me." He says, moving closer to me to cup my face. "I was so scared that you would have gotten married, moved on as I suggested. So, so scared..." I mumble, feeling my cheeks become wet with tears. He presses his forehead against mine, stroking my cheeks and wiping away the tears. "Not yet, baby. You have to get divorced for me to get married. I had children, though. One, to be exact. Philip, who I can't wait to meet and hold in my arms." He whispers, making me chuckle softly.

Michael was right; Edward didn't say a word when I took Philip and packed my things. I filled for the divorce and Michael started the process to recognize our baby as his, the exact same day. Edward pretended to be deceived and heartbroken, to get everyone's good grace, but he didn't fight for custody. Everything was solved before Philip even turned 3. My parents practically disowned me after everything, which I didn't care much about. I didn't want a claim in a fortune that was built and grown on my unhappiness. Plus, (Y/N) Clifford sounds dreamy. The house by the beach surpassed all expectations. It has this vintage vibe that I love, with the prettiest garden ever, in which Philip and Michael run around all day on the weekends. I am pretty sure Philip doesn't understand much, so I will have to explain more when he grows up, but he adores Michael and calls him daddy, which makes Michael melt in a puddle.

I work with Michael now, in the legal department of the company, which is something that I couldn't do before since Edward wanted me to be a trophy wife. I have a pretty office with a view, friendly colleagues. But honestly, the best thing is working with Michael, getting to spend more time with him every day. We even got married, in a small vineyard, with a few people present, mostly his family and a couple of coworkers. It was magical, the best day of my life, truly. It's just me and him that matters. Philip also, of course. But everyone from my past seems to be muted, almost deleted.

And now I am sitting on the warm grass, with the sun hitting on my face and our dog laying on my lap, while Michael and Philip are dressed as superheroes, playing around, with Michael lifting Philip in the air to fly. He is an amazing dad already, and I can't wait to see him grow more into this role. "Hey, superheroes... Snack time. And you both need sunscreen." I shout at them, making Michael giggle. "Let's fly to mama... Come on." Michael cheers, running to me with Philip in his arms. He lets Philip on the blanket, making the toddler giggle. I hand him his cheese sandwich, planting a kiss on his forehead before standing up. "Hi, mama," Micheal mumbles as he helps me up. "Hi, daddy." I reply, cupping his jaw in my hands. "I am trying to make him tired and get him to bed early tonight..." He wiggles his eyebrows at me, making me chuckle at him. "I have my money on Philip spending you down before you do." I reply, tracing the hem of his cape. "We need to give him a sibling... Maybe a little sister." He mumbles, lifting my chin. "Yeah, that doesn't sound that bad, to be honest." I sigh, smirking at him. "Maybe we should go to our little cabin this weekend... Mommy and daddy retreat." He suggests, earning a hum from me. "It's been a while since the last visit." I cock an eyebrow at him. "Sounds to me like it is time for another trip there, Ms. Clifford." He licks his lips, leaning closer to kiss me.

My Masterlist

[fallen-gravity]

Forever Together

Five years ago, he’d received a “not now”, and for days after the self-hating part of his brain had interpreted it as “no, never”.

It was a few weeks after his “corruption fiasco”, as he referred to it, that he shot up in bed in the middle of the night, finally processing the weight behind Connie's choice of phrasing. At the time of the proposal he’d been heartbroken, but that night his heart was beating so heavily in his chest that it made his ears ring. Not now wasn’t even necessarily a no. He knew, logically, that it didn’t make them engaged, but the realization that woke him up was that not now meant that if he asked again in the future then her answer could very likely be yes.

Five years after Steven Universe left Beach City, he comes to the peak of his journey of self-discovery when he realizes his life just wouldn't be the same without Connie in it.

AO3

Or under the cut: 

Steven Universe is 22 years old. 

Ever since he left Beach City at sixteen and a half, he’s felt peace he never knew was possible. It’s not like he hated living there, or that he never wanted to see anyone who still lived there ever again, oh no. It’s just that when he finally had time to really process what his dad had been trying to tell him, along with a few more listen-throughs of his dad’s Kerry Moonbeam CD, he came to the realization that yeah, maybe a change of scenery really would do him some wonders. It wasn’t running away from all his problems, like he’d originally thought when he was too angry to process what Greg had been trying to tell him, it was a journey of self-discovery. 

And when he finally chalked it up to tell Greg he wanted to move on, he had been expecting shock, or wave upon wave of waterworks. And, okay, maybe there had been waterworks, and maybe most of it had been on his own side, but to his surprise, Greg was super supportive of his decisions and told him he was ready to help him start packing as soon as he was ready. It’s not that he wanted Steven to leave, or anything, he just wanted to be as supportive of his endeavors as possible, something he never received from his own parents.

“I had to crawl out my bedroom window, even with two suitcases that probably weighed about 25 pounds each!” he’d exclaimed, and even to this day Steven can’t tell if he had been joking or if he had been dead serious about it. 

Either way, Steven was grateful. Grateful for the support not only from Greg, but from the Gems and all of the townsfolk of Beach City as well. If he hadn’t gotten their immense support, he’s not sure if he’d even gone through with it, and he never would’ve had the opportunity to discover so much about himself and the world around him. While he made ground-breaking progress discovering himself and his mental health through therapy and time alone with his friends and family, the time he had all to himself now that he was on the road finally gave him time to discover even the littlest of things about him, the things that made him human.

Like how he’d discovered, upon stumbling across a music store, that for someone who could masterfully play the ukulele and the piano when he was six, that he sucked at playing wind instruments. 

Or that it isn’t just hometown bias, and Fish Stew Pizza really is the best in the state.

Or that he really, really missed eating fried eggs, and that one month where he’d only drank protein shakes for breakfast was the biggest mistake of his life.

Or even the fact that not only were some of the surrounding states still selling Cookie Cats, but some places were even selling flavors other than the classic vanilla-strawberry.

All these little things that really made him realize that maybe his dad had been speaking metaphorically when he’d mused about his first time trying a taco.

But despite all of these discoveries, and changes, and new experiences, there was always one consistency he could always count on when he was on the road. One consistency that made everything just that much more magical than any mission he’d ever been on with the gems. One consistency that reminded him that wherever he went in the world, wherever he’d end up, he’d always have-

Suddenly, his phone starts ringing. It’s just one five little note ringtone, but it’s enough for Steven to start grinning from ear to ear. He doesn’t even need to take his eyes off the road for half a second to check the caller ID to know who it is. He adjusts his phone’s place on the car clip Pearl had gifted him on his birthday a few years prior, and slides the screen to the right to answer the call. 

“Connie!” he grins again, despite the fact he knows that she can’t see him. “Just on time, I just pulled into town. You done with classes?”

“Just finished about twenty minutes ago,” she replies, and even without being able to see her he can tell she’s grinning too. “I wanted to get a head start at packing so you wouldn’t try to carry all of my stuff out in one go to try and impress me”

Steven blushes. “That was one time!”

She giggles. “That was winter break, Steven. It wasn’t that long ago. Plus, I only have half the stuff to take home with me, since spring break only lasts the week”.

“Awww, only a week?” he replies in mock-disappointment, a stand-in for his lack of ability to pout at her right now.

She snorts. “I’ll be home for the summer a month from now, Steven”

“I know”, he replies, pulling into a parking lot across from her on-campus apartment. “I just can’t stand to be apart from you” he whines exasperatedly, to which Connie replies with hysterical laughter. It makes his heart skip in his chest.

Connie.

Connie Maheswaran, the love of his life, has been without exaggeration, the best piece of consistency in his life he could ask for. Every time she wants to visit her parents at home in Beach City, or every time she wants to go on a short weekend trip of her own, or even just when she wants to grab breakfast somewhere other than her campus dining halls, she calls him and he picks her up without a question about it. Truth be told, she got her license about six months after he got his, but even five years into their relationship she’s told him that she loves any excuse she can to be around him. And he’d be lying to everyone in the galaxy if he tried denying for even a second that he felt the same way about her.

Five years ago, he had asked Ruby and Sapphire for relationship advice. Five years ago, they had both eagerly suggested proposing marriage, and five years ago he went through with it out of desperation for any sense of consistency and assurance he’d have at least one person in his life that wouldn’t leave him behind.

Five years ago, he’d received a “not now”, and for days after the self-hating part of his brain had interpreted it as “no, never”.

It was a few weeks after his “corruption fiasco”, as he referred to it, that he shot up in bed in the middle of the night, finally processing the weight behind her choice of phrasing. At the time of the proposal he’d been heartbroken, but that night his heart was beating so heavily in his chest that it made his ears ring. Not now wasn’t even necessarily a no. He knew, logically, that it didn’t make them engaged, but the realization that woke him up was that not now meant that if he asked again in the future then her answer could very likely be yes. Had it not been 2:45 in the morning when the thought came to him, he would’ve called her right then and there to talk about it.

There’s a sudden light knock on his car window, startling him out of his thoughts so suddenly that he yelps. He turns to see who it could be, and he’s met with Connie’s grinning face as she silently waves hello to him.

“Connie!” he grins, and scrambles to unclick his seatbelt as he opens his car door to greet her. They exchange a tight, squeezing hug, followed by a soft, sweet kiss.

“What kept you?” she asks, once they pull away from the kiss. “I thought you said you wanted to help me pack, but you never came upstairs after we hung up”

“Huh?” Steven blinks, but a quick glance behind her and he notices that she already has both of her bags with her. He blushes, rubbing at the back of his head. “Oh, sorry, I, uh…” he coughs awkwardly, the blush on his cheeks only worsening. “I was just...thinking”.

She gives him a soft smile, but doesn’t question further. She drags her bags to Steven’s Dondai, opens the back door, and tosses her bags inside before closing the door again. On her way over to the passenger’s side door, she stops, places a gentle hand on Steven’s chest, and kisses him on the cheek. “Full of mystery as always,” she teases, gently patting his chest where her hand lay. His blush worsens even more, and it must practically be written all over his face at this point, because Connie snickers again. “You haven’t changed a bit”.

“Heh, well, you know me, Steven Universe” Steven’s voice cracks as he goes to open Connie’s door for her, and she giggles once more before he finally settles into his own seat on the driver’s side. Once they’re both strapped in, and finally sure that yes, they’re done kissing, they swear, Steven settles his back against his seat and sighs comfortably.

He taps rhythmically against the steering wheel. “So…” he says, turning his gaze towards Connie once again. “What are you thinking? Diner first, or are you itching to get home?”

“Pshh, like you even have to ask”, she smirks. 

The first time that Steven had driven up to visit Connie on her campus, they had accidentally stumbled across a little diner called Rosa’s when they’d been looking for somewhere to eat. They’d shared awkward giggles over the pink roses scattered all over the sign advertising the place, and decided to check the place out “just for the joke”, but were soon to discover that Rosa’s sold the best pie slices either of them had ever had, and took it upon themselves to try a different slice of pie every time they went there. He’s yet to find one better than their cherry pie slices, but Connie always teases him with the increasingly likely fact that it’s just because it’s the first flavor he ever tried.

This is the kind of consistency Steven is talking about. He can visit the gems any time, he talks to his dad on the phone on an almost nightly basis, and his weekly escapades with Lars are still going strong. But nothing makes him feel more consistent, more human, than when he’s with Connie. Looking forward to things as mundane as pie slices, or silent car rides, or very not-so-silent car rides, or  cloud gazing, or stargazing, or anything he gets to experience with her makes everything in his life feel that much more cheerful and exciting. 

The morning after he woke up in the middle of the night with the words not now repeating over and over in his head, he called her as soon as he woke up and told her he wanted to talk about what happened after he returned home from the hospital. Good news this time, I promise, he had told her, and minutes later they were right back where they had been, walking hand and hand down the shoreline. They talked all morning about their relationship, and the future near and far, and after dozens of rejected apologies on the grounds that Connie insisted he didn’t need to make them, they shared their first real kiss. 

And Steven had felt like he was on cloud nine. 

And for every kiss after, every phone call, every date, that feeling of cloud nine never really went away. It felt unreal, being with Connie.  

Five years ago, if he’d been asked, he would’ve said he couldn’t live without Connie. He’d say he needed her, like his life depended on it, like he wouldn’t have a future without her. If someone asked him now, he’d say sure, he could live without Connie, but he can’t possibly imagine why he would ever want to. 

Not now.

That had been when Connie was a sophomore in high school. They were sixteen. She hadn’t even taken the SATs yet (whatever those were), let alone gotten accepted into any of her colleges of choice. They were still kids, stuck in their pining phases, too scared to make the first move, let alone call the other their partner to their face.

Connie’s a senior in college now. She’ll be graduating in a month and a half.  She’s been working on job applications since the end of her junior year. Her birthday is coming up in a few weeks. Where they once giggled at the idea of holding hands, it’s now harder to catch them with their hands apart. They’re inseparable when they’re together. Ruby and Sapphire have Garnet. Steven and Connie have Stevonnie, but he realizes now he doesn’t need Stevonnie, just as Ruby and Sapphire don’t necessarily need Garnet.

He doesn’t need to be with Connie forever to be happy; he wants to be with Connie forever because she makes him so happy.

If he weren’t so focused on driving a car right now, the thought would’ve slammed into him a lot harder than it did. As a matter of fact, he’s almost surprised he didn’t accidentally slam the breaks of the car on, the way those thoughts seemed to crash into him. He takes a quick moment to glance over at her in the seat beside him, and she’s staring dreamily out the window, looking just as lost in thought as he just felt. 

The idea crosses his mind that she could be thinking about the same things as him, and it brings a pink blush to his cheeks once again. He quickly turns his attention back to the road, and practically sighs in relief when he sees that they’re pulling up to the diner. Once parked, he takes a deep breath as quietly as he can manage, and turns to Connie.

“Hey,” he smiles in an attempt to assure her that there’s nothing wrong. “You think you can go in and get our table? I’m gonna give the gems a call and let them know we’re on our way”. He hates lying to her, but it’s the closest he can come to the truth without blatantly telling her he’s thinking of proposing again, so he brushes it off as “not counting as lying”. 

As if she’s trying to read his thoughts, Connie glances at him for a few moments, before she leans over to kiss him on the cheek. “Sure,” she says, and unclips her seatbelt and steps out of the car. She leans on her door for a moment, smirking. “Don’t take too long,” she teases, and it’s with a grin and a silent wave from Steven that she closes the door and heads into the diner. 

As soon as he’s sure she’s gone, he scrambles for his phone in his pocket, and shakily scrolls through his list of contacts until he reaches G. He takes a deep breath, to center himself, and hits call. 

“Hello, Steven” Garnet answers after only two rings. “It’s so good to hear from you. I assume you and Connie are on your way home?”

“Yep!” Steven replies cheerily, but rubs awkwardly at the back of his head. “But, uh, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about”.

“Oh?”

He closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. Here goes nothing. 

“I’ve been thinking about proposing to Connie. For real this time”.

There’s a painfully long silence. Steven’s almost worried he accidentally hung up, or that there’s terrible service, until suddenly there’s the sound of  “STEVEN!!! STEVEN STEVEN STEVEN!!!!” from Ruby’s voice screaming into the other end of the ear piece. “I KNOW I’M HORRIBLE AT ADVICE BUT DO IT!! DO IT! YOU TWO ARE SO CUTE TOGETHER!! DO IT DO IT DO IT!!!!” she squeals, and Steven laughs, albeit a bit uncomfortably. 

“Oh, hey Ruby…” he says. “It’s great to talk to you, but I was really hoping I could talk to-” he starts, but there’s the sound of the phone dropping to the floor on the other end followed by another short pause.

“Me,” Garnet finishes his sentence for him. “Sorry, those two just can’t contain themselves when they hear any talk of weddings. You were a terrible influence on them”, she teases, and Steven blushes again.

“I know….” he replies, but then he shakes his head to reorganize his thoughts. “Wait, no, I don’t have a lot of time, Connie’s waiting for me in the diner”.

On the other end, Garnet chuckles. “Wow, you’re really serious about this”.

“I wasn’t going to do it right now!” Steven squeaks, face burning hotter than it’s ever felt in his entire life. “I don’t even have a ring yet,” he mumbles, nervously playing with his hair. “I called you because I wanted to ask if you thought I should go through with it”.

“Hmmm….” Garnet hums, like she’s actually running the numbers in her head. “Well,” she finally says after a painfully long pause of what couldn’t have been longer than three seconds. “Do you love Connie?”

Garnet’s going to kill him, he swears. He’s going to melt into a puddle right here on the seat of his car.

“Yes, I love Connie more than anything else in the world!”

“Do you think she loves you?”

“I…” Steven freezes. “I’m pretty sure, I can’t exactly speak for-”

“Do you want to take care of her?” Garnet cuts him off.

The question suddenly makes him tear up. He wipes at his eyes. “I-I mean, she can take care of herself, but if she’d let me-” 

“Then I think you should.” Garnet replies surprisingly nonchalantly. “Steven, I want you to listen to me very carefully. The reason your proposal didn’t work out the first time was because you and Connie were very young. You know that. The probability of Connie saying yes or no doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that you would be asking her the second time. Your proposal to her this time wouldn’t be any less valid because you thought you had wanted the same thing when you were sixteen. Connie’s answer can’t be swayed by me looking into your future. I can look all you want into hundreds and thousands of different futures, and it still won’t matter. If you want to propose to Connie, all you have to be sure of is whether or not it’s what you truly want. You have to be absolutely certain that you love her to the moon and back and you need to have the self-confidence to tell yourself that she loves you just the same. You need to want to take care of her just as much as she’s going to take care of you. You have to understand that Connie is your equal, not what makes you whole. You have to look inside yourself and ask if you believe your love for Connie is strong enough to withstand anything.  You can ask me to look into whatever future you want, but the person you should really be asking these questions is yourself. So tell me, Steven Universe, do you believe it’s the right thing to do?”

His vision is blurry with tears again. “I do.”  He wipes his tears with his wrist. “Thanks, Garnet”.

“Don’t thank me, thank yourself” she says, and then, after a short pause, “I love you, Steven”.

He giggles. “I love you too”.

Clicking his phone off and placing it back into his pocket, he exits the car to join Connie in the diner. And if he thought he felt euphoric the first time he came to this conclusion, when he was skipping around Beach City gathering flowers and a suit and his own wedding cake, that’s nothing compared to how he feels now, when he’s not even planning to propose until he can stop by the jewelry store just outside of Beach City, and he can’t even do that with Connie in the passenger seat of his car.

He stops at the door of the diner, fixes his hair in his barely-visible reflection in the window, and steps inside.

“Steven, over here!” Connie waves at him from a table towards the back, and his heart starts beating so hard in his chest he wouldn’t be surprised if she could hear it. “Everything okay back home?”

He grins. “Well, Garnet fell apart on me,” he shrugs, intentionally pausing long enough to raise concern, “but that’s just because Ruby really wanted to talk to me”. 

She snickers. “Well, after all that proposal business, I’m not surprised”.

The color fades from Steven’s face. There’s no way she could’ve overheard his phone conversation from in here, could she? He wasn’t projecting his thoughts to her phone again, was he?

“What?” 

She reaches across the table and takes his hands in his own, smiling softly. “Steven, I’m kidding. I just meant that I’m not surprised she falls apart so easily”.

“Oh, “Steven practically sighs in relief. “Well, you know them, falling apart to win a baseball game against Homeworld”. He says, trying desperately to cover up the slamming of his heart.

She laughs again, retrieving one of her hands back from him to cover her mouth, a habit she never quite broke from when they first started dating, and it’s this little meaningless gesture that Steven finds himself falling even more in love with Connie. He starts giggling too, and he’s not quite sure if it’s because of his own set of thoughts, or if it’s because Connie’s laughter is just that adorably contagious, or maybe it’s some kind of beautiful mixture of both.

Either way, he can barely finish his slice of pie when it comes to the table. 

“I guess I’m just...really excited to get back home again”, he explains when she asks about it once they’re back in the car, which technically isn’t a lie either. 

“Mmm, me too” she agrees sleepily, curling up against her seat in the car. “Kinda makes me wish I ate less so I’d be awake when we got there”. 

He chuckles, sparing a glance over to her. Her hair is already falling over her face, and her cheek is squished up against the seat. God, he loves her so, so much. “Yeah, well, if you’re still asleep when we get to your parents’ house, I’ll carry you to your room myself”.

“Mmm,” she murmurs, like she wasn’t fully paying attention to what he actually said. “That sounds nice”.

He laughs again, quieter this time, and takes the rest of the car ride to let himself stew in his thoughts. There’s nothing he wants more, he realizes, then to be able to do this every day with her. Not just casual dates to local diners for dinner and slices of pie, but for moments like this, falling  asleep in the car on the way home, trusting the other enough to safely guide them home.

She’s still asleep when they pull up to her parents’ house, and, a man of his word, Steven carries her all the way to her room (with assurance to her parents that she’s fine, she’s just tired from the ride, she’s okay with being carried). 

Dr. and Mr. Maheswaran, who love their daughter more than anything, who’ve known Steven for less than a decade, simply nod their heads and let him handle everything.

That’s a silent blessing if he’s ever heard one.

On his way out the door, he wishes them a good night, and once in his car, makes a beeline for the jewelry store. He makes it to the store just before closing, and takes it as good a sign as any that it’s now or never.

And the moment he parks his car on the beach in front of the temple, Garnet’s there, and as soon as Steven steps out of the car and into her embrace, he’s laughing, and he’s crying, and it’s the hardest he’s cried in five years, and the best he’s felt in even longer.

-

Despite everything, despite the driving and the diner and all the catching up he’d been doing with the gems and his dad last night, Steven is running on the least amount of sleep he’s ever gotten in his life. 

It’s not that he spent the whole night worrying that she’s going to say no, it’s that he’s not sure he’s ever been more excited in his entire life. Call him cheesy, call him cliché, but he’s been planning his own wedding for as long as he can remember, but now that it might happen in the near future? With Connie? 

He’s not sure how he’s going to handle popping the question, let alone how Connie’s going to react to it.

His phone tells him it’s 8:30am, but he’s already been awake for so long that it feels much later than that. He’s lucky that Connie never broke her early bird habits in college, because if she had made him wait even another hour he’s sure that he would’ve exploded from anticipation. He’s standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, trying to fix up his hair to look nice, but not so nice that it’s obvious something’s up, and once he’s satisfied with how it looks he takes one more look at himself in the mirror.

“Take a good long look,” he says to his reflection, “because the next time you see me you may be looking at Steven Universe-Maheswaran”.  Just hypothetically attaching her last name to his own makes him grin, so he repeats the name under his breath again, and again, like he’s six years old again telling himself in the mirror that he’s a Crystal Gem too. 

His phone buzzes in his pocket, and there’s only two words on his phone screen, but right now they feel like the most important words in the world.

“I’m here.” Sent by Connie at 8:39am

He takes one more deep breath, exits the bathroom, and grabs the ring box from the kitchen counter before he steps outside.

“So...what’s so important that you just had to tell me so early in the morning?” Connie asks as they walk down the steps of his house.  He tries to shrug and act as nonchalant as he can, but fails miserably. He takes her hand in his own, and squeezes it gently.

“Take a walk with me”.

“Oh,” Connie blinks, like it wasn’t what she was expecting him to say at all. “Okay,”

As they’re walking away from the house, down the beach and out of the view of the temple and even further out of view of the rest of Beach City, Steven looks around and thinks back, back to the hundreds of times they’d walked this very beach together, as innocent friends, as comrades in battle, as boyfriend and girlfriend, and now, if things go right….

He stops in his tracks, gently. “Connie?” 

“Yes?” 

He places his hand on top of hers, gazing into her beautiful, soft brown eyes. Keep it together, he tells himself, his breath already getting shaky. Slowly, to steady his balance and his rapidly pounding, he sinks to one knee, and Connie, quick as ever, takes a step backwards.

“S-Steven?”

“Connie….” He pulls his ring box out of his pocket and pops it open to reveal a beautiful, sparkling engagement ring. “Will you marry me?” He asks, his eyes sparkling brighter than they’ve ever sparkled. Before she can open her mouth to say anything, he places the ring box on the sand and takes Connie’s hand in his own again.  “Connie, I love you so much. I love you more than every planet in the galaxy, more than every single gem on Homeworld combined. I want to be with you for the rest of my life because I can’t imagine life without you in it.” he shakes his head.

“I know I said the same thing when we were sixteen. But I don’t mean it the same way now that I did then. You’re strong, and you’re beautiful, and you’re smart, and it’s like Garnet once told me, your soulmate is your compliment, not your missing piece. I want to be your compliment, Connie. I want to be your cheerleader. I don’t care if I’m thousands of lightyears away on some escapade with Lars, or you’re working towards getting your PhD, I want to be there for you. I want to experience everything with you, the same way we used to when we were kids.” He picks his ring box back up. “I want to marry you, Connie” he grins, finally caving in on the tears rolling down his cheeks. “No Stevonnie required”.

There’s a pause, and for a moment, Steven can’t see anything through his own tears. He blinks to clear his vision, and she’s staring at him with her hands covering over her mouth, failing miserably not to cry herself. Her gaze keeps glancing from the ring box to Steven and back again.

They make direct eye contact for the briefest of moments, and she practically dives on him. “Yes, yes yes!” she sobs. “Yes, of course I’ll marry you!” She beams, and out of heat of the moment euphoria, Steven picks Connie up in his arms and starts spinning her around and around until there’s a bright flash of light surrounding them and, ironically, Stevonnie is standing alone on the beach with their arms wrapped around themself. 

Upon realizing what’s happened, Stevonnie start laughing, and laughing, and they drop to the sand on their knees, and they don’t stop laughing until the force and sheer joy of it splits them apart into Steven and Connie, sprawled over on top of each other on the sand.

Connie rolls over from where she’d landed on top of Steven, but turns to face him so she can pepper his face with kisses. “Of course I want to marry you, Steven”, she reiterates, grinning from ear to ear. She takes his face in her hands like she’d done dozen of times before. “I love you so much. You didn’t need to prepare some big speech for me, Steven. It’s like I’ve always said”, she stands, and offers her hand out to Steven to help him stand to his feet.

“I want to be a part of your universe”.

[minimitchell]

benmitchellweek day 5 - “is that supposed to be a challenge?”  (ao3 link)

.

Ben doesn’t actually need to do any washing at the laundromat. They have a perfectly good washing machine at the house. It’s just that the one time Karen asked him to drop by the laundrette because she had something for Lexi, there was this guy sitting in one of the chairs by the machines, completely engrossed in a book.

And because Ben is a complete idiot, he purposefully went by the laundrette as often as he could to find out if that guy using it was a one off or if he goes there regularly, because there’s no way in hell he’s going to ask Karen about him.

He feels a bit like some creepy stalker but it only takes him a couple of weeks to figure out that the guy does his washing there every two weeks on a Friday afternoon, always round about the same time. 

He doesn’t know what it is about the guy, they haven’t even spoken or anything, but there is just something to him that captures Ben's attention in a way no one has done for a very long time. He thinks it’s maybe the nicely-kept stubble that decorates his cheeks or the soft looking brown hair. Or maybe it’s the absolutely captivating blue of his eyes that he got to see when their eyes met that one time he was passing by.

Whatever it is, it’s enough to make Ben regress into a teenager with a crush again, trying to get the cute guy to notice him. He must be new around here, since Albert Square is a place where everyone knows everyone and he definitely doesn’t know who this guy is. He’d like to, but he doesn’t. He hasn’t seen him around the market, or in the chippy, or even in the Vic and it only adds to this weird fascination Ben has developed.

A fascination he’s tried hard to keep hidden, especially from the mother of his child, but apparently he hasn’t been as successful as he thought he’d been.

“Ben, you can’t go there every week until he notices you. It’s dead creepy.”

“Is that supposed to be a challenge?”

Lola’s rolling her eyes at him over her cup of coffee, checking to see if their daughter is still playing idly on the swings. They’ve used the rare occurrence where they both have the afternoon off to take her to the park and it made Ben realize that he has missed spending time with both of them like this. Yeah, they live together but they rarely spend time together as just the three of them. Normally, they’re always doing something with his mum, or his dad, or Jay. And while he loves the rest of his family, it’s still nice to spend time with his mate and their daughter.

Even if all she does is tease him about his crush on laundromat guy.

“So ask him out next time.”

Ben shakes his head while taking a sip from his own coffee, giving his daughter a cheer when she screams over at them to look how high she’s getting.

“I can’t. I’ve never said a word to him before.”

“So you just sit in the same room as him and stare at him until your washing is done? That’s somehow even worse, Ben. Besides, that fact has never stopped you before, has it?”

This is different though. He doesn’t want to pick the guy up and take him home with him. He wants to get to know him, maybe go to dinner with him and listen to him talk about the book he’s currently reading. It’s a new thing for him; to be so invested in someone he doesn’t know that the physical aspect of it all doesn’t even come into play until later. It’s unnerving to say the least, because it means that he’s completely out of his element with this.

Not that he’s going to give any of that information to Lola right now. She’ll only tease him more, call him ‘in love’ probably.

He’s about to give a retort when he catches a glimpse of tall brown hair and that lean body across the square. The guy’s stepping out of his brother’s old restaurant they’ve been trying to sell for a while now, some papers in one hand while shaking his mum’s with the other.

“Shit, Lo, that’s him.”

Lola follows his gaze to laundromat guy and they’re both watching him say goodbye to Ben’s mother with a bright smile on his face, before he disappears down the street.

“Oh, he’s fit. If he ain’t gay send him my way, please.”

“For your fiancé and my brothers sake, I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

They exchange a small laugh with each other, knowing it’s all in jest.

“You should ask your mom what they were doing though. Saves you from stalking that poor bloke any longer.”

-----

Turns out, laundromat guy’s name is Callum and he’s the one who bought his brother’s old space. Apparently, he’s new here and plans to open his own restaurant. He’s only a few years older than Ben and is a very nice, young man - according to his mother anyway. She also informs him that she’s invited Callum to this week’s Friday dinner. A fact, that Ben only freaks out about a little. Honestly.

The day the dinner finally rolls around he’s more than a little nervous. No one but Lola knows about his little infatuation with Callum and he desperately hopes that no one will embarrass him tonight. If everything goes well, he’s going to ask Callum out on a date later and hopefully, they’ll end up dating and Callum can cook delicious food for him for the rest of their lives. At least, that’s what Ben envisions.

Him and Lola are already settled around the laid table, while Lexi is still upstairs washing her hands and his mom is putting the finishing touches on their dinner, when the doorbell rings.

“Oh, I’ll get it. That must be Callum.”

His mom is practically running from the kitchen at the sound, almost looking like she’s the one hoping to score a date with Callum. Ben looks over at the doorway when the sound of two voices mingling gets louder, trying to ignore Lola’s teasing smile next to him, failing to not get lost in the smooth tones of Callum’s voice.

Ben feels his mouth go a little dry when they finally step into the living room, because Callum looks gorgeous. He’s wearing a crisp, white dress shirt and tight, black jeans and his hair is as nicely gelled as it normally is when they’re seeing each other at the laundrette. He’s still holding a bottle of wine in his hands and Ben is overcome with the urge to feel one of his large hands in his.

His eyes shine with recognition when he meets Ben’s gaze and he sends him a small smile; one, Ben can’t help but return.

“Callum, this is Ben and Lola. Lola’s fiancé Jay is joining us later, he’s still at work.”

“And our daughter Lexi is still upstairs but she’s going to, no doubt, bombard you with questions about your restaurant soon.”

Callum lets out a small laugh at that, although he momentarily had a weird look on his face when Ben mentioned their daughter. He really hopes that it isn’t down to Callum not liking kids; it’d definitely be a dealbreaker for Ben.

The dinner goes extremely well, despite the awkwardness from earlier. Callum is great with Lexi; answering every single one of her questions with ease and patience and Lola had to nudge him quite a bit to not overdo the heart eyes when looking at Callum interacting with his daughter. He’s charming and funny and honestly has a great vision for his future restaurant.

Ben is nothing short of enamored with him.

Somehow, they find themselves in the kitchen together. Ben did some washing up so that his mum could sit back and relax a little and Callum joined him when he came in to get another beer. It’s almost sickenly domestic and once they were done with it, they stayed in here to continue chatting in peace, away from the loud chatter that’s filling up the living room, especially with Jay having joined them now.

It’s nice; they’ve figured out that they have quite a lot in common and Ben is almost certain that Callum is flirting with him from time to time. One thing in particular they’ve learned is that they’re both gay.

“Oh, I assumed because of Lexi that you’re straight. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s a long story, but I’m definitely into guys.”

“Good to know.”

They���re just swaying back and forth in his kitchen, matching dopey smiles on their faces, and Ben is pretty sure that Callum’s going to say yes to that date after all. It makes him giddy with excitement; warmth and hope blooming in his chest at the prospect of it. He’s about to ask Callum, when the door opens and Jay walks in, straight to the fridge and completely unaware of the obvious, romantic tension filling the kitchen. Callum doesn’t seem that bothered though, not really paying Jay any more attention right now.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to come say hi when I saw you at the laundrette. I don’t know why I didn’t, but maybe next time we could go grab a coffee while we’re waiting?”

Ben is ready to say yes to Callum’s suggestion when Jay turns around and gives them a confused look, interrupting their moment.

“What are you going to the laundrette for? You have a perfectly fine washing machine right here.”

Jay doesn’t stick around for the fallout; only shaking his head and exiting the kitchen again, leaving Ben behind to drown in embarrassment. When he opens his eyes again - and when had he closed them anyway - Callum is looking at him with barely concealed amusement and Ben would really like the ground to swallow him up right now, please and thank you.

“Okay so I might’ve gone there a few times just to see you. I’d love to go for that coffee though, if you still want to.”

When Callum steps forward into his space, he settles both of his hands on Ben’s neck, using them to pull him the rest of the way into his own body. Ben thinks it’s heavenly how great they fit together until Callum seals their lips together in a soft kiss and then he knows what’s really heaven - the feeling of Callum’s lips on his own and his skin under Ben’s fingertips. 

It’s only a short kiss but it leaves Ben with an explosion of butterflies in his stomach, spreading all the way throughout his body.

“I still want to.”

Ben can’t wait for it. He’ll ask about Callum cooking him dinner later.

[flipomatic]

Nostalgia

Summary:  Here they were again, Marceline on stage and Bubblegum in the crowd. As they had been before they even properly met, all those hundreds of years ago.

Author Note: This is part 4 of the AB (After Breakup) series. I hope you’ve enjoyed the earlier parts! They are linked here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

______________________________________________________

503 AB

For a while now, things had been changing with Marceline. Well, it was less that they were changing and more that they were returning to how things had been. After 350 years of no contact, it felt like everything was moving quickly.

Recently, Marceline had asked for Bubblegum’s phone number so they could keep in touch. The first time her phone buzzed with Marceline’s name appearing as the contact, a wave of conflicted emotions rushed through her. When Bubblegum switched phones after breaking up, she deleted Marceline’s contact so that she couldn’t look back.

They hadn’t texted like this in 500 years.

On top of that, Bubblegum hadn’t heard Marceline sing in almost as long. The last time she could recall was the impromptu concerts in the wee hours of the morning, that she had arrested Marceline for having. Bubblegum hadn’t heard her perform since; she missed it.

She had always loved Marceline’s songs, no matter how angsty they were. When Marceline was singing, she was at her most honest, her most raw, and her most sincere. That was what made the way they broke up hurt so badly.

It also led to them not speaking for over 300 years. That was Bubblegum’s fault; she’d driven Marceline away and into the arms of another. She still hadn’t fully reconciled with that mistake.

But they were getting closer again, talking without constant spite, so perhaps Marceline would let her listen once more.

So when Marceline came to the castle, picking dirt out of her nails and floating after Finn and Jake, Bubblegum made sure to talk with her. She had to wait until Finn and Jake left, of course. There was no reason to involve them in her and Marceline’s hopefully repairing relationship.

When the two boys finished reporting on their most recent escapade, which had involved trying to dig an underground tunnel, they said they were going to get some rest. Marceline had planned to go with them, probably to prank them in their sleep knowing her, but Bubblegum still wanted to talk with her.

“Marceline.” It still felt strange, saying her name. The name that had once been so familiar felt awkward on her lips. “Can you stay for a few minutes?”

Marceline exchanged a look with the boys, and then shrugged. “Yeah sure, I’ll catch up with you guys later.” She waved goodbye to Finn and Jake, who left the room. Jake looked back conspicuously before turning the corner, his eyebrows raised.

“What’s up Peebs?” Marceline asked once they were gone. She was still hovering above the ground, which meant Bubblegum had to tilt her head up to make eye contact. Unusually, Marceline didn’t have her axe bass with her. Perhaps because of the digging, it would be bad if it got covered in dirt.

“Just wanted to talk a bit.” Bubblegum tried not to be awkward, and failed. She held her hands together in front of her body, trying to resist wringing them together. “Do you have any concerts coming up?” That was not casual at all, she scolded herself.

A small smile graced Marceline’s face as she talked about it. “I’ve lined up a show next week, there’s gonna be a huge crowd!” She drifted up slightly as she spoke, which Bubblegum remembered to be an effect of excitement.

What Bubblegum said next could change that mood. “I might come watch, if that’s okay with you.” She spoke quietly, hesitance showing despite her efforts to remain calm.

Above her, Marceline’s expression flashed quickly through a few emotions; surprise, sadness, and then firm anger. “I thought you didn’t like my music.” She floated down slowly, her feet landing softly on the ground. Her voice was low and hard, cutting right to Bubblegum’s candy heart. She remembered saying those words, lying in order to hurt.

“I…” Bubblegum searched for the words to respond, tearing her eyes down to the floor. The silence hung between them, damning her for her past words and inability to summon the right ones now. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Then what did you mean?” The question was pointed and stabbing. Marceline was close, far too close now, hovering just in front of Bubblegum’s face.

Bubblegum inhaled slowly, shakily. “I was angry, and I lied.” She couldn’t bring herself to look up, to see the hurt and anger in Marceline’s eyes. “I never should’ve said it, I’m sorry.” She fought a tear that so desperately wanted to escape.

Marceline’s shadow pulled back slowly, and Bubblegum managed to look up at her. She was staring into the distance, mouth in a straight line and expression unreadable. Then she blinked and seemed to come to a decision.

“I don’t care, you can come if you really want to.” Marceline’s tone was still low, but had lost the anger. She started to float away after finishing those words, not even commenting on the apology.

“Wait, Marce-“ Bubblegum called after her, but was interrupted.

“I have to meet up with Finn and Jake, see ya.” Marceline vanished out the window a moment later, barely finishing the sentence before she was gone.

Bubblegum knew she was rushing to escape this awful conversation she’d trapped her in. She felt like such a dunce, of course mentioning music would bring back memories of their fight.

Still though, Marceline said she could go to the concert.

Bubblegum planned to.

_______________________________________________________

In order to get the exact date and location of the concert, Bubblegum had to text Marceline and ask for it. She got a very short response back with the information. Still, a short reply was better than none.

Bubblegum made sure to arrive early for the concert. It was being held at the stage near the Candy Kingdom, where local musicians often performed. It had been a very long time since Bubblegum attended a concert there. She avoided Marceline for so long, this place was one of the top areas to avoid.

Only a few fans had beaten her to the venue, so she was able to get a great seat in the front row. As Bubblegum sat down and looked up at the drawn curtain on stage, a wave of nostalgia rushed over her. She used to do this all the time, to watch Marceline perform.

Bubblegum tried to push those feelings away as the crowd filled up, all there to see Marceline. Some had t-shirts and fans with her face on them, which they waved to show their devotion. It was interesting to see Marceline selling merch with her image on it; Bubblegum couldn’t remember her doing that before.

Soon every seat was full, and it was time to start.

The curtain was pulled back as the familiar figure of Marceline the Vampire Queen emerged onstage. She flew up to a mic stand at the front of the stage as the crowd cheered. She wore a rock outfit Bubblegum hadn’t seen before, that went well with the style of her axe bass.

Once the shouting died down, Marceline introduced herself to the crowd. She looked around as she did, and when her eyes met Bubblegum’s it felt like the whole world had suddenly frozen.

Here they were again, Marceline on stage and Bubblegum in the crowd. As they had been before they even properly met, all those hundreds of years ago. The way they’d been when Marceline gave young Bonnibel her rock shirt.

Ever the professional, Marceline didn’t hesitate in her welcome speech and she quickly looked up at the rest of the crowd.

Time resumed, but Bubblegum couldn’t tear her eyes off her. She no longer had that rock shirt, but the feelings it gave her remained. She wondered if it still carried power even though she hadn’t had it in months. That didn’t really matter right now, Bubblegum scolded herself. Now was the time to watch her ex perform.

Marceline’s form was striking, under the lights and with her bass. She had always taken Bubblegum’s breath away, and now was no different.

Then she started to sing.

The opening song was about how her dad ate her fries. It was one Bubblegum had heard before and enjoyed.

Marceline worked the crowd as she sang, which was one of her strongest assets. Her voice, strong and smooth as silk, was another. How had Bubblegum gone so long without hearing her sing; she felt like she could never do that again.

Bubblegum cheered loudly with the crowd when the song ended, clapping profusely for Marceline. On stage, Marceline quickly moved to her next song. This was one Bubblegum hadn’t heard before.

Slow dance with you

I just wanna slow dance with you

The song was slow, much slower than the last one. If Bubblegum thought Marceline’s voice was smooth before, that was nothing compared to this. Each word was emphasized, full of emotion.

I know all the other boys are tough

And smooth, and I got the blues

The longing in this song, Bubblegum could feel it. She wondered who it was about. Right before the next line, Marceline’s eyes snapped directly to her, stripping that question from Bubblegum’s mind.

I wanna slow dance with you

A chill ran down Bubblegum’s candy spine; she could hardly breath. Her eyes were wide, unblinking as Marceline continued to play and sing with dark eyes locked on her.

I wanna slow dance with you

I just wanna slow dance with you

Why don't you take the chance?

Bubblegum was sure there were other sounds and people around her, but she couldn’t hear them. Only the pluck of the bass and Marceline’s voice were coming through.

I've got the moves I'd like to prove

I wanna slow dance with you

With that last line the song ended, and Marceline looked away with flushed cheeks. Bubblegum felt like she could finally breath again. She was almost shaking as the crowd roared around her. She gathered her composure by the time the next song started, but she couldn’t forget the look in Marceline’s eyes during that song.

The rest of the concert passed in a blur. With every song Bubblegum was reminded how much she loved Marceline’s music, how much she missed seeing her perform and listening to her songs. When the show ended she cheered louder than everyone around her, clapping her hands as loudly as she could to make up for not having a fan with Marceline’s face on it.

And then, far too soon in Bubblegum’s opinion, it was over. Marceline waved goodbye and the curtain was drawn. Around Bubblegum, the audience started to leave. They filed out, all talking about how great the concert had been.

Bubblegum went the opposite direction. She wasn’t sure if she would be welcome backstage, but she had to try. Her emotions were swirling, unable to be contained.

When Bubblegum reached backstage, she was relieved to see that Marceline was still there. She was perched about five feet off the ground, polishing her axe bass until it gleamed. Her hand stopped mid motion when she saw Bubblegum.

For a minute, they just looked at each other. Emotions were running through Bubblegum’s mind, mixed with the endorphins from the show. There was so much she wanted to say, so many things she’d been holding back since they broke up.

“You were great out there.” Was what she settled on, the easier option, the most important thing to say. “I love the new songs.”

A slow smile spread on Marceline’s face, the very sight of it bringing warmth. “Oh yeah?” She floated down to eye level, stowing the rag that she had been polishing the bass with. “Which one was your favorite?” The question had the tone of a challenge.

Though Bubblegum wasn’t sure what the name of the song actually was, it was an easy question to answer. “Slow dance with you.”

“I like that one too.” Marceline plucked a few notes on the bass, the main bass line from the song.

Bubblegum didn’t say that the song reminded her of old times, reminded her of when they used to embrace and dance like nothing bad could ever happen to them. She didn’t comment on how Marceline had looked while she performed it, with her eyes locked on Bubblegum.

“Thanks for letting me come.” Bubblegum tried not to let her mind get stuck in those emotions.

Marceline played a couple more notes, this time in a pattern unfamiliar to Bubblegum. “I’m glad you did.” She finally said, dropping fully to the ground. “I have another show in a couple weeks, if you’re interested.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” Bubblegum smiled at the invitation, at the thought of getting to see Marceline perform again. At the idea that Marceline wanted her to be there.

“I’ll text you the deets.” Marceline strung her bass over her back.

The conversation quickly dwindled to a close, and Bubblegum was soon on her way back to the Candy Kingdom.

For the first time in what had literally been hundreds of years, she had a great time watching Marceline perform. Bubblegum was finally optimistic for what could come next.

[captcas]

Screwed (A Destiel AU)

Screwed by capthamm (Part 1 of 2)

Dean inherits the old family inn and has to move home to fix it up for selling. When the work proves to be too much, he enlists in the town's only contractor's help– his neighbor, Castiel. Dean is short on time, stuck in a hometown riddled with old flames, and falling for the man who lives next door. He's screwed.

notes: I'm halfway through season 7 and missing Mr. Castiel on my screen so this poured out. I'm almost finished but here is part one. My first ever attempt in the Supernatural fan fiction world... please be kind. Thank to my lovely beta, Luke <3 (@bawley_bug) read on ao3

At this point, Dean’s left thumb had been hit by the hammer more than any of the nails and he was regretting every single choice he ever made that led him to this exact moment.

Why the fuck did he think he was cut out for restoring an inn? Not just any inn– the inn. The one John ran before he got too old and retired, eventually– well let’s just say Dean isn’t here out of any sort of living guilt.

Dean’s not sure why he’s here.

If he breaks it down, it’s because he received a letter in the mail exactly two months after the passing of his father detailing how Lawrence would have no choice but to tear down the old inn unless someone from his family claimed it.

Sam’s not going to leave his law practice and the life he built for Jess and the twins, out in California.

Dean’s the only one left.

So, taking things extremely literally, he’s here because a bunch of lawyers told him he needed to be.

Another slam into his thumb jolts his train of thought off its tracks and convinces him to pack it up for the night. He snaps the tools back into his massive toolkit and stands back to look at the old built-in shelves he decided would probably be the easiest to tackle on his own. Nodding at the good-enough outcome, he turns to scan the rest of the main floor.

Maybe the built-ins are the only thing he’s going to be able to do alone.

Dean doesn’t like the thought of teamwork– especially not with the grumpy prick who lives next door. His neighbor stopped by the day Dean arrived because apparently it was John’s dying wish that their neighbor offer his services when his estranged son eventually showed up to fix the inn. (Leave it to his father to leave Dean feeling inadequate from the great beyond.)

“No, thank you.” “Excuse me?” “You offered, I’m declining. Debt, paid.”   "As you wish, Winchester.”   Even wrapped in the neighbor’s deep lumbering voice, Dean winces at his last name– it feels just as constricting as it did when he thought he’d be stuck in this town forever, “Dean.” “Whatever.”

Dean thought that’d be the last he’d see of the guy until he marched away and slammed the door just across the small garden. That house used to be for whatever innkeeper his parents had hired, but when the inn closed they rented it out to whichever soul felt like a one bedroom one bathroom home was enough to live in.

Apparently that was this asshole.

They’ve seen each other three more times since then, but never long enough to even exchange names. Dean isn’t sure why he’s keeping track– each time just as unpleasant as the first. Sure, Dean could’ve been friendlier, but warning bells rattled through him every time the neighbor’s stormy eyes met his. Dean may have sworn off unnecessary human interaction for the foreseeable future, but he’s not blind and his neighbor isn’t hard to look at.

But his life has no room for attractive neighbors with an attitude problem.

Convincing himself there must be someone else in this town who knows their way around a fixer upper, Dean heads to the Roadhouse for dinner and hopefully the name of someone else to help him get the inn fixed up enough to sell.

Walking through the front door of the restaurant-meets-dive-bar, the familiar smell hits him like a breath of fresh air. He can’t believe he held out for almost a week before eating here. The Roadhouse is one of the few places left in the town left untouched by rotten memories and painful nostalgia. Nothing but good ever happens once he crosses this threshold and it’s that fact that allows him to relax for the first time since moving back to Lawrence.

He starts to order his usual and Jo winks signaling she remembers even after all these years– Dean can’t believe she runs this on her own now. Jo always swore she’d get out of this town, break the chains of her mother’s legacy, but nevertheless here she is– here they both are.

Jo looks happy, maybe even at home– Dean? Not so much.

The plate drops in front of him and Dean catches his old friend lingering a bit. He looks up and says thank you and that was all it took to spark some small town gossip from Jo. While he didn’t come back to rekindle any old relationships– friendly or otherwise– Dean doesn’t mind her company and before he knows it he’s laughing and taking his last bite of burger. The conversation starts to die and Dean remembers why he came to town in the first place, “Oh! Jo, I meant to ask. I’m fixing up the old inn and I need help. Do you have the number of someone who–”

“Of course, Dean! Chuck retired, but Castiel took over, after Gabriel ran off to Thailand.” Dean raises his eyebrow and Jo laughs, “ That’s a story for another meal. Here,” she hands over a napkin with a number scrawled across it, “Castiel is the best in town and will fix up that inn in no time.”

Castiel.  

Dean racks his brain for any recollection of someone named Castiel from their childhood but the name doesn’t ring a bell— and a name like that definitely would ring a bell. He supposes people must move to Lawrence, just like any town, and resigns it to someone new since he left.

He can’t expect everything to stay the same while he spent the last 15 years trying to change in every way imaginable.

Thanking his friend for the help, Dean pays and heads home for the night. Finally having the name of someone to help has lifted a huge weight off his chest. He sighs as he crawls onto the old mattress in the first floor suite, thankful it’s dark enough that he can’t nitpick all that needs to be done. The sooner he can get the inn fixed up, the sooner he can sell it and go back to Sioux Falls and the life he chose rather than the one his parents forced on him.

Maybe it was the comfort of the Roadhouse or the knowledge that this process will move twice as fast with a little help, but Dean sleeps better that night than he has in years. When he wakes with the sun, he feels energized and ready to continue his work on his family’s property.

He decides to start with disassembling the kitchen cabinets and it doesn’t take long for him to find a rhythm in his work— four screws and a trip to the pile, four screws, trip to the pile. Lost in the easy monotony, Dean forgets his decision to call for help until late into the morning. Hoping to catch the contractor before lunch, he brushes the dust from his hands and digs in his pocket for the napkin Jo had written on last night.

He’s not sure why he feels so anxious as he waits for the man on the other end of the line to pick up, but he supposes it rests on the fact that this man only knows Dean by the reputation he left town with— John’s other son.

Sam was always the golden child— pretty blonde cheerleaders and a full-ride to Stanford are not even an exaggeration when it comes to his younger brother.

Dean, on the other hand, was always rough around the edges, emotional, and different — let’s just say he’d go for the cheerleader or the quarterback.

As soon as Dean was shoved out of the closet— his dad walking in on him and Benny not leaving very much up for debate— John shut him out completely. Dean brushed it off as his dad’s way of fighting every piece of homophobia he was raised with, but the fact is: it was more likely he was disgusted by his own son.

But that was ages ago and, from what Sam’s told him, John died swearing his love for both his boys.

Not that Sam would tell Dean otherwise.

“Hello?” A gruff voice breaks him out of his daze and he’s startled back to the present day.

“Uh, hi. Yeah, uh, is this Castiel?” It’s the first time Dean’s said the name aloud and he can’t help but notice how easily it rolls off his tongue.  

“This is. How can I help you?” The man is all business, clearly not as affected by Dean’s use of his name as Dean was.

“Oh yeah, uh, I got your name from Jo at the Roadhouse? My name is Dean Winchester and I’m fixing up the old Winchester Inn and I’m realizing the job may be too massive to handle on my own.” Dean winces at his blatant request for help, never one to ask outright for assistance, but as he looks at the pile of kitchen cabinets which need to be sanded, painted, and rehung, he knows he can’t do this alone. He realizes the man on the other end of the line hasn’t said anything when he continues, “Uh, that is if you have the bandwidth for that…”

Another pause before the man, Castiel, speaks again, “I can be right over.”

Dean didn’t really know how to respond, he was expecting to bargain for payment or at least for a delay in starting the project. He’s not used to this immediate willingness to help a complete stranger. He’s about to stumble through a response when he realizes Castiel is no longer on the other end of the phone. He shrugs, and sets it on the counter as there’s a knock on the door.

Shit. The only way Castiel could’ve gotten here that fast is if he’s...  

Dean opens the door to the man he’s now seen a mere four times despite his permanent residence on Dean’s property. His neighbor— Castiel— looks different today. The usual softness that accompanies the man overtaken by strong arms, an AC/DC t-shirt, and a tool belt placed perfectly on his hips.

Whoa, Dean.  

“Uh, hi?” Dean isn’t sure how one goes about re-introducing themselves to apparently the only help in town after being an ass before. But he’s here and Dean introduced himself on the phone and he still came.

“Hello.” The man– Castiel– greets Dean so matter of factly as he glances around Dean quizzically, presumably taking in the whole of the inn. Dean is a little taken aback by this whole interaction and the way it’s entirely different than any they’ve shared previously. Castiel’s eyes meet Dean’s and Dean can’t help but notice a hint of playfulness before Castiel speaks again, “So you do need help?”

Dean rolls his eyes and Castiel laughs sending a shockwave through Dean he hasn’t felt in ages. He promptly ignores it before motioning towards the foyer and inviting his new contractor inside. They don’t exchange any pleasantries, but rather head right to work. Castiel asks questions about everything from the crown molding and stair railing to Dean’s plan for the half shattered French doors.

The man is thorough and he knows his stuff.

Maybe teamwork with him won’t be so bad.

They finish their walk through and Dean is relieved to hear that Castiel agrees the upstairs mostly needs some fresh paint. John left some money to fix up the inn, but not enough for a total overhaul. After working through the budget, they decide it’ll be more cost effective if it retains its original charm.

“Well, Dean, I like what we’ve got here and I think we can make something out of this.” Castiel slouches into one of the bar stools near the kitchen island as he surveys the room one more time. Dean does his best not to notice the sweat slowly making its way down Castiel’s collar bone and beneath the collar of his t-shirt, and the way he says Dean, and his implication that this is theirs . Dean hasn’t shared anything for most of his adult life– mostly because he hasn’t had anyone worth sharing something with.

But this inn feels like it’s meant to be shared, and Dean can’t seem to find any reason not to do so with Castiel.

“I’m glad you think so. I suppose we should discuss payment…” Dean trails off as Castiel’s gaze becomes confused.

“I don’t intend on charging you a dime, Dean.” Castiel’s matter of fact smile returns and Dean can’t ignore the way his gut flutters.

He’s not a nun, Dean’s been attracted to people for as long as he can remember being alive. From Lucy Jones in kindergarten to a myriad of characters in his adult life, he’s always been a people person loaded with an innate attraction for the kind of itches you scratch and forget ever existed.

Castiel is beginning to feel like an itch he’d like to scratch.

But that’d ruin everything, especially Dean’s plan to sell the inn for as much as humanly possible and then get the hell outta dodge.

“I appreciate that, but I have to give you something…” Castiel waves Dean off and he realizes arguing would be useless. “Thanks.”

Castiel nods before taking time to study Dean until it almost feels awkward. Dean is typically the one doing the studying, and he feels naked under this man’s gaze. They remain in a silence delicately balanced between comfortable and awkward until Castiel speaks again, “Well, best I get back to my place. I will see you tomorrow morning, Dean.”

As Castiel stands, he adjusts the toolbelt around his waist and Dean forces himself to look away, not willing to tempt himself with the flash of skin exposed during the adjustment. The contractor must notice because he smirks slightly before nodding his head in goodbye. If he didn’t know better, Dean would swear Castiel walks a bit closer to him than is necessary. He shakes it off before heading to the bathroom to shower off the grime of the day before checking in with Sam, Jess, and the kids.

. . .

They work surprisingly well together.

His new partner is a quiet but sturdy presence throughout the day– rarely chatting about more than the weather or whatever task needs to be done– but on occasion Dean will learn a bit more about him. He’s started to compile a list of Cas’s likes and dislikes– for example, Cas likes that Dean gave him a nickname.

“Hey, Cas, can you hand me the socket wrench?”   "Cas?” “Uh, yeah, short for Castiel. You got too many syllables, man.”

Cas nodded and moved on with the task, but Dean can’t help but notice the small smirk everytime he has to call Cas by name. Cas also smiles whenever a screw goes in without a fight and when the first raindrop of an impending storm hits his forehead.

Dean likes it when Cas smiles. (Apparently Dean’s compiled a list for that, too.)

He’s tried to largely ignore the growing attraction for the man he’s working with for more than eight hours a day, but it gets more difficult with each glance to make sure the other is still in one piece and every accidental touch of hands when they pass off a tool.

At least Dean tells himself it’s accidental.

He hadn’t gotten enough out of Cas to even know if he “plays for that team,” as Sam likes to say. Dean is almost positive John wouldn’t have encouraged the two work together if Cas is gay, but there are moments that give him more hope that he deserves.

“Dean!” Cas’s steady voice startles him from the monotony of painting kitchen cabinets and his overflowing thoughts.

He puts down the paintbrush and walks over to the fireplace where Cas is supposed to be sanding down the mantle, “Yeah, Cas, what is it?” There’s that smile– sometimes Dean wonders if he uses his nickname for Cas just to get a glimpse of it.

“I’m hungry and I’m out of sand paper.” Cas looks up from the stool he’s been sitting on for hours with a hint of puppy dog eyes. Dean isn’t exactly paying Cas so he could definitely come and go as he pleases, but they tend to stick to a similar schedule everyday. Checking his watch, Dean sees it is lunchtime and agrees to head into town for a sandwich.

“I should probably get cleaned up a bit…” Cas trails off as he surveys his dusty jeans and sweat drenched t-shirt. Without trying to, Dean gets lost in the unfairly attractive mess of it all for a moment too long. He looks up to speak again and Cas is smirking almost knowingly.

Shit.

“Yeah, sure. You can use the shower here if you want but no promise there’s any hot water.” Dean scratches behind his ear nervously. This wasn’t any sort of purposeful invitation, but he can’t help but feel a wad of want fall into his stomach. Cas simply nods his thanks before heading into the main floor bathroom with a change of clothes he brought “just in case”. Dean laughed when Cas told him that he’s always that prepared and cited the fact that Cas only lives thirty steps away from the inn. He simply shrugged and said “You never know” and that was the end of that. Dean supposes Cas was right and the change of clothes had come in handy.

Though, not exactly how Dean thought they would.

As he hears the shower turn on, Dean goes back to painting kitchen cabinets in hopes of distracting himself from the very attractive, very naked man that is showering in the next room. It works for a while but eventually the knowledge feels stifling and Dean decides to clean up quickly and wait for Cas on the porch.

“What’re you waiting out here for?” Cas walks outside, resting his arm on the doorframe to only accentuate his bicep muscles. Dean knows if he looks at what is probably disheveled and wet hair from the shower it’ll take every piece of willpower he has not to jump the guy right then and there.

“Let’s go.” He leads Cas to his car without looking in his direction or answering his question. As Dean walks around the back of the impala he sees Cas smirk again.

Bastard.

They take the short drive into town before stopping at the hardware store. Dean needs to pick up some new screws so he can finish the cabinets and Cas needs some more sand paper so they decide to split up and grab what they need. Cas cuts right, beelining for the aisle like he lives here– now that Dean thinks about it, Cas probably does come here a lot– and Dean wanders to the left looking for the screw aisle.

He ends up finding them along with a confused pre-teen boy comparing screw sizes to an outlet cover. Dean laughs to himself before offering his help, “Anything I can help with?”

The boy turns to Dean, startled at first, but then relaxing when he doesn’t sense any immediate threat, “Yeah, that’d be great. My mom sent me in here twenty minutes ago, but I don’t know anything about this stuff.”

Dean laughs, “Well, your Dad should’ve taught you screw shopping at the very least.”

“How could he do that when he doesn’t know I exist?” The kid says it so matter of factly, Dean isn’t even sure he heard him correctly. He scans him for signs of distress, but whatever therapy he’s getting must’ve worked because the kid goes back to comparing screws without missing a beat.

“Fair enough. Here, you’ll want these ones,” Dean grabs a four pack of the screws the kid is looking for and hands it to him. “Then you’ll have extras in case you need to replace another one.”  

“Awesome, thanks! My names–”

“Ben? What’s taking you–” Dean winces, he’d know that voice anywhere and the fact she paused means… “Dean?! What are you doing talking to… what’s going on here?”

“Mom!”

“Lisa…”

Ben (apparently) and Dean speak at the same time, both turning towards the woman Dean hasn’t thought about in years. They were something– more than something– for about a year, but John’s pressure pushed Dean out of town and Lisa refused to leave Lawrence... so now they're here, awkwardly looking at each other in a hardware store.

“Lisa, look, I can explain–”

“Dean, I found the sandpaper and I also grabbed some extra paint for that wall in the living–” Dean’s cut off as Cas rounds the corner looking down at the sandpaper packaging and clearly missing all the fun in aisle nine, “Oh. Hi!”

Then Cas waves , an adorable wave that if Dean wasn’t so goddamn turned around probably would’ve sent him spiraling. Dean facepalms to hide his smile and proceeds to rub his calloused hands through his hair trying to decide what to say next. But Ben must be oblivious to the absolute shit storm happening a foot above his current height because he chooses this moment to chime in, “I was confused about which screws to get and Dean offered to help, Mom. That’s all. And look,” Ben holds up the package Dean handed him what feels like an eternity ago, “Got ‘em!”

That kid just saved Dean’s ass.

Lisa still looks a little stunned to see Dean– his return had seemingly not reached the far ends of the town gossip chain quite yet– but then she glances back towards Cas… and then back to Dean.

He’s about to correct her when she surprises him with a hug.

They didn’t exactly end on bad terms, but he probably could’ve been nicer when he told her he was leaving.

Hence why the hug catches him off guard, as does what she quietly whispers in his ear, “I’m glad you found someone that makes you smile like that again.”

Dean can't even formulate a correction before Lisa’s telling Ben to thank Dean for his help and the pair is heading down the other end of the aisle. He turns towards Cas who is staring intensely at a speck on the floor by his feet, but seems to be smiling all the same.

Maybe Dean isn’t wrong about him.

They check out and head back to the Impala in silence. It isn’t until they get home after swinging through the drive thru that Dean even realizes he forgot to grab the screws.

[anestheticrage]

Be me: Japanese honor student🎓, 15, with half a brain and even less of a plan. Hunting bitches by day and witches by night. Livin that dank only child✌️ life while mom n dad yeet all over the globe, leavin me plenty of time to forget not to make 2 lunches for myself #quirky 😜

no time for socialization or basic electronics skills ???📱??? when your best friends are an alien demon rabbit🐰👽 and the inexplicable Hole ™ in your brain. lmao, btw did i mention im ✨M✨A✨G✨I✨C✨A✨L✨

dreamin bout my 2D waifus again when familiar pink haired cancer patient dances through my brain passin out fliers: Kamihama Meguca Dating Service: Sponsored by Cult of the Magius. 250 stones per session 🤔

seems legit, Mr. Moneybags. wasn't spending my unwieldy sack of gemstones on anything else anyway. lets pull 💎💎💎

first up we have Redhead Radagast and her plethora of plants. 🌿☺️🦎

anndd, nearly dies immediately. 

well not off to a great start but i guess shes pretty cute at lea- oh FUCK its her girlfriend, Tsundere Poseidon😒🔱💦, and their exasperated, straight and single Sword Mom 😔🗡️🔥. fml gonna have to save up for the next pull. might as well play a few rounds with what i got tho. 

get in some good girl talk about things like school, color coded hair styles, body count, permanent soul damage, and our personal demon pacts. ya know, the usual 😚 . realize my dark backstory seems to be missing, so the girls take me to Ketchup Queen Sappho 🍅🥧 (wtf?) to molest my glowy egg stone. whatevs, more action than ive had since Kuroe 🖤 got added to the story anyway

the gang agrees it's time to hunt down the cutest rabbit pimp 🕶️🐇💵 in the city. >> say 🎵mukyuuu🎵 one more time and ill hug you so hard my backstory will pop right out, you adorable fluffy bastard. plz be my new best friend 💕

Form brand new friendship pact with Kyubae, and remember that my lil Sis 🐥 was always the best wingman for pickin up magic chicks, and kept her side of the room so spotless i forgot she existed. whoops 乁༼☯‿☯✿༽ㄏ Maybe if I find her i can stop paying these exorbitant pull fees.📵💎

speaking of which: hot damn this week's featured bachelorette is a 19 year old model and magical detective🔎 with massive levels of PTSD and self loathing 🥵💙💦 more likely to stab you or dramatically jump off a rooftoop than utter a single positive comment. wow, maybe i really COULD find true love…

... if i had MORE THAN A 1% FUCKING DRAW CHANCE. 😡 smh

hard to make much progress finding sis or winning the broken heart of a hard boiled detective amidst the never ending lover's quarrel of the Trident Vine Lesbians. 💔 Sword Mom tells them if they don't behave a monster will take them away. LOL classic mom 🤣

>>>HOLY FUCK IT DID

declare all-out war on urban legends, starting with staircases ⚔️ to reunite the dysfunctional trio, and hope that I net a way better lineup with the next 10x pull. at least sad sleuth lady came to help out. they say combat is the best way to bond wi-   and there she goes off the rooftop again 🙄 fml

alright that got way off track, we need a fresh start, away from all the loli drama. how bout a little B&E🔓🔨🤷🏻‍♀️ at the local house of worship to clear my head. ahh nothing like the unanswered prayers of the masses to get you in the mood for another wasted pull, and the 🔥 MIGHTIEST 🔥 headache you could ask for with a side of Double Cooked Pork 🐖🍜 (meh 5/10🧾)

venture forth into the spiritual unknown with your new human flamethrower🔥🌻🧡 and ask your favorite private eye to please, for the love of Eve, trade Meguca accounts with me~~~ Head through the eastern spirit portal to meet up with hologram propaganda sis and detective crush's evil ex, who joined a dating-app cult (#fuck) and also turned into the moon?🌕?(that's rough buddy)

get ambushed by Acid Horse on Wheels 🌈🐴 and vomit up my soul so hard that its time for a crossover episode. T U R F F F   W A R R R *que operatic harmonies* 💛 Blondie with the hair drills and enough attitude and guns to fill up a noble phantasm tries to ban my account permanently, but PI heartthrob denies her admin privileges. aww babe i didn't know you cared. 😭♥️

get kidnapped by my new true love and go back to her place 😏  defs enough empty rooms to house five emotionally traumatized girls and at least two ghosts hehehe👻 XD 💚🃏💜🎸 decide to form the anti-gossip brigade and recruit my blazing sunflower after getting ambushed by the witch living in my fruit loops🥣

❌outvoted 2:1 that cults are bad. mf. fiinneee one last pull to round out the team and then I'll delete the app. cmonnn Karin 🎃~

OH HELL YEAH TWO FOR ONE.

Always wanted a daughter 💜🔨🐄 with a penchant for pissing off the local Martial Arts & Books Club and drinking suspicious liquids offered by total strangers. Well if it's good enough for her AND the sexy mayadere with enough game to seduce a mermaid, might as well get in on that myself. 

#curseddrank 🤢 0/24 would not recommend to a friend, 'cept maybe Ria

win alot of cash 🤑, blow up a fountain, meet the pied piper²🎶🖕, moon cult, monochrome feathers, something about liberation✊🏻; adopt temper tantrum cow girl. aces 💜🥩

Next up!!! skydiving with DJ Hammer! Jump to apparently-not-certain death after suicidal A.I. 💚💾🗼 tells you to rescue her hostage before they run out of Radiohead albums and have to move on to Thom Yorke's solo discography. save the invisible shield kitten 💚👑😿 from happiness and get chased through the internet by the sexiest homicidal Paint Pallette 💚🎨😈 since Caravaggio. (apparently green is the color of the digital apocalypse. i’m deleting Kako from my friend's list)

that’s it, fuck this app. 250 stones 💎 per-life-threatening-experience is more than i’m willing to deal with 😓 don’t wanna mess with the perfect nuclear family anyway. we've already got: 

✔️the two emotionally traumatized moms with memory and commitment issues

✔️the adhd daughter with anger management problems and a giant hammer

✔️the psychologically abused scizophrenic cat

✔️and the eccentric aunt with crippling anxiety

#squadgoals

now that were done hoarding bitches, its time to hunt the witches. and the bitches makin the witches. btw did i mention the witches ARE the bitches! AND WERE ALL GOING TO DIE!? 📽️⁉️💀 wait fuck lets back up a second

This is Nemo📕 and Token🧪 and they have all the answers but prefer if you only ask vague questions in exchange for vague responses so they can fill in the rest by discussing their superior intellect 🧠 at length. not to mention they built that dating app, so of course everyone in my harem decides to be a FUCKING. TRAITOR.🤬

cept waifu prime ofc 🥰💙. [PTSD > brainwashing] 'yOu CaN bE tHe LeAdEr NoW'. i have been from the very beginning you traumatized Hinedere nightmare. maybe if you weren't so caught up collecting surrogate daughters you would've noticed IM👏THE👏ONLY👏 ONE👏PROGRESSING👏THE FUCKING👏PLOT✨

rescue the rest of dysfunctional found-family™ from selves before my adorable firebender burns down Disnihama🎡🔥😱 during her weekly anxiety attack. (love the makeover T B H) 

CHAPTER 8: Magical Girl Massacre🩸🗡️

   - everyone has like, the shittiest day ever

   - the new Pope really needs to be extradited from the church

   - make friends with a really pretty tree 🌺🌲✨

i swear, if i don't finish this god damn story in time to get that free pull im gonna beat the shit out of every mirror i find in that giant mansion that i haven't even had any time to even mention yet. 🖕🏚️ let alone EVERYTHING happening with the prequel [fuck you, I'm the star] girls 💗💜💙💛❤️️ and their multidimensional melodrama. We don't need that many repetitive af episodes to emphasize that Homo-ra is a shitty person. we've all seen Rebellion. 🙄

NO, I DONT CARE IF YOU WANT SAPPHO'S BACKSTORY, I ONLY HAVE 79 STONES LEFT AND IF YACHAN FINDS OUT I HAVEN'T DELETED THE APP YET IM GONNA HAVE TO GO SLEEP IN WITH SANA 😭💎💸😠

uhhhggggg where were we… Topple a cult and burn down Hotel Denoument only to realize that Sis was fused with the dating app servers this entire madokafuckin time (told ya she was the best wingman 😊). 

Dilemma: Sis =🥚, Triumvirate of Trouble want 🐣. What do? vote now:

Help Hatch - IIIIIII

Not Do That - IIIII

What The Actual Fuck Is Going On - IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Lets just fight everyone until something good happens.

🔥🔫🔥🗡️🔥😱🔥🌆🔥😱🔥🛡️🔥💣🔥

Kill (???) the artist-in-chief of the italian reindeer murder police after teaching her the true meaning of Christmas 🎄 hatch 🐣lil Sis and realize she WAS your wingman all along🐰 MUKYUUUU! we're just gonna ignore how much trouble it would have saved if you'd just mentioned that. "yOu DiDnT aSk..." 

FUCK YOU SPACE BITCH. ONCE AN INCUBATOR ALWAYS AN INCUBATOR 🖕🐇🔪

anywho, somewhere along the lines we of course summoned the Antichrist ⚙️ because why not raise the stakes to max and still not kill off a single character. Madofuckinkami, can we PLEASE wrap this up. 😩💤

feathers (not the culty kind, tfm) rain from the sky, and the power of friendship and not having the Urobutcher 🔪🩸as a lead writer saves our peacefully sectioned off alternate reality 😇

TL:DR fuck cults, real life waifus DO exist, don't sell your soul to space rabbits, or your stones to megacorporations. Enjoy arc 2 on the JP server with your shitty translation patch you filthy fuckin weebs 

Yours Truly, 

- Thirsty Weeb Eroha 💗💎😘 

[skippysartq]

Yokai - Ushiten Fic part 1

"It has been rumoured many generations that a very special Yokai live here in this part of the shrine. His name is Tendou Satori the fire beast Yokai.

He was known as strange person that lived just outside of the village all by himself at 16 as his family had left one day, leaving him behind with any word.

It is told that he defended the village, with his fantastic Sword skills, from a beast that went rampaging and exploded with the beast in a blaze.

Some have claimed to have seen him in the dead of night only one night every 3 years, roaming around looking for something but no one ever know what.

So that's why we have this festival on that very day every 3 years to honour his sacrifice and bravery to protect the village."

A multitude of small hands clapping together, everyone's eyes wide in awe at the story behind the Fire beast Yokai festival "That can't be true." the child sitting next to me says leaning back on his hands. I turn to look at him, scruffy Grey with black tipped hair and brown eyes stares back. "You don't believe it do you.. Uh?" he points to me, before I speak quietly.

"Ushijima Wakatoshi." I answered his unspoken question. "And I don't particularly believe it unless I was to see him, but it is a nice story regardless." I finished my reply to him as his face lit up. "Alright everyone you can go to lunch now." the kindergarten teacher called to the class of children riled up from such a exciting story, most of them would probably try to go find the Yokai on the day of the festival tomorrow.

"Oh, My name is Semi Eita. Nice to me you Ushijima." we stand up to follow everyone outside, we shake hands. My face remains the same as it always is. Semi's head tilts to the side giving me a confused look. "You don't smile much do you Ushijima?" he asked as we made our ways to the playground near by the shrine as they were on a school trip to learn about the special day. "Is that a problem?" I asked he only smiles more as we walk around just talking. "Nah it's okay, you don't have to smile for someone to tell weather you are having fun." he started again. "Sometimes all you have to do is just look in their eyes and you can just tell what they are feeling." I nod as a response, still walking not knowing where we are going.

I thought for a moment. 'Maybe Semi will be my friend.' and I got the courage to ask. "Would you like to come play Volleyball with me Semi?" I asked hopefully, looking at him still beside me. His eyes widen from what could only be excitement and shock. "You play Volleyball too." he said yes he was shocked. I nodded again. "Then yeah let's go Ushijima!" he says taking my hand and running over to the slab of concrete near the shrine. Ushijima a pulls out a Volleyball from his bag and throws it over to Semi.

The two of them had as much fun playing with a volleyball as they could with only two people. Soon it was time for them to leave. "It's time to go home. Hey Ushijima do you want to hang out at the Festival tomorrow? We can meet at the Shrine." Semi says walking with me ask we both began walking home.

"Are you curious about The fire beast Yokai?" I asked turn to him hold keeping a hole of my backpack. He slightly nods. "Actually yeah, I just want to prove whether he is real or not." Semi says at matter of factly. "Okay Semi, I'll see you there then." Semi smiled back at Me and pointed out. "Wow you can smile Ushi!" Semi grins more.

*The next day*

"Come on Wakatoshi! We are leaving now!" The voice of my farther called from the door were him, and my mother and grandmother stood waiting for me to put my shoes on. I follow them holding grandma's hand to the shrine where the festival is being held. It was all so pretty, the design of the decorations that were flames and pretty red flowers made it feel so warm, lights strung up alone all the food stalls and games glowing a orange and yellows.

The street that always seemed to empty, was now so lively, there were people everywhere. "Wow isn't this lovely?" Grandma looked down at me in her pretty pink flower pattern kimono, with matching Flower pin in her grey hair. "Yes it is." I responded simply to her as we all kept walking avoiding the others around us some other children running around laughing together. Soon my mother chimed in, "Why don't we get something to eat, Wakatoshi what do you want?" she asked, it was always easy to answer, because I always chose my favourite food. "Hayashi Rice." I say with out hesitation. "Oh but you all ways have that, what about something different for once dear." Grandma stopped in front of me. "But I like it!" I tell her, she only sighs chuckling. "You will get sick of it one day if that's all you eat Wakatoshi-chan." she warned, I stare at her mentally telling her I wasn't going to change my mind. "How about this. We will try find a stall that sells it, while you go play some games with you dad. Okay and if we can't find it, we'll get you some tokoyaki balls instead, okay." my mother says again. I gave up nodding to her and dad takes my hand from Grandma and we walk away to some stalls there are all kinds of games to play. Ring toss, water balloon filling and dart games too, all with toys and plushies most of which were themed around the festivals purpose. Some were Pokémon and all kinds of Anime characters, and some were sports mascot including the Mascot for volleyball, I have lots of those at home. But there were also The beast from the story and a plush toy that looked like the hero with his sword. "Ushijima!" I heard a voice behind us, my dad and I both look over our shoulder to see, Semi running through the crowd with a lady beside him. I wave to him and the eventually join us. "Hello, Semi!"

"Oh is this a friend of yours Wakatoshi?" my dad looks to Semi. "Yes we meet at the shrine yesterday." I tell him simply. "This is the friend you wanted to meet Eita, do you want to go play some games with him, if that's alright with his dad?" a tall lady with grey hair similar to Semi's says directed at my dad, who smiled telling it was fine. She walks off after telling him where to meet after they were done. Waving goodbye.

Soon we walked around together. Dad pointed out to a few games and we played them, and well all I can say was that either of us ever won at any of them, but it didn't upset me at all. But Semi lost his temper at some before we moved on to the next. "One more game before we will go find you mother and grandma okay?" he says to me, I smile up at my dad, nodding.

We got to the last one we wanted to try and we won, I got a bag tag of the volleyball mascot. Because you can never have to much of a one thing. And Semi got a plushie of the fire beast. Soon we met back up with Mine and Semi's mum, they got to met and exchanged contacts. Grandma took my hand walking away from my mum and dad as I heard them raise their voices at each other.

"Oh, can we go to the shrine now to, see if he will show up!" Semi says to his mother excitedly. She chuckles telling him he can and he takes my hand saying we would be back soon. We made our way over to the shrine where we were the previous day. "Here we are." he says, it's a lot quieter here then down the stairs to where the festival ground is. "It is quite pretty from up here." I speak my mind he nods smiling happily. We sat at the top step looking down. We sat in silence for a few minutes before he spoke again. *Third pov*

"Do you think the Yokai will actually show up?" Semi asked before Ushijima could answer a rustling from a nearby bush made Semi go quiet again. They both turn to the sound when a small figure stepped out of the bushes that surround the kids. They suddenly stand in that they might have to run. blinking for a moment, and standing there was another boy in front of them. The boy in question, had short straight red hair, large dark eyes. He was skinny and fair skinned, that looked almost white in a dark purple kimono. He stood back in shocked to see the other boys and Semi getting scared hid behind Ushijima.

"H-hello, Who are you?" the small voice of the strange looking boy sounded. He looked scared as well.

The olive haired boy decided to step towards the red head and Semi only Gasped letting go of him. "Hello, I'm Ushijima Wakatoshi." he says and held out his hands to the other. He looked at him Ushijima's hand and then back at his face before reaching out his hand out too. Ushijima flinch a bit at his touch, "Your hands are so cold." Ushijima says holding the skeptic boys hand in his own gentle hand, shaking. The unnamed boy went to pull it away again, but he Ushijima holds it tight. "It's okay I don't mind." he seemed to have relaxed after those words were spoke and he smiled a bit too, "Okay, Wakatoshi-kun." the boy spoke, which Ushijima returned a gentle grin. 'His voice his kind of pretty.' Ushijima though to himself.

They shake hands and let go, when he noticed Semi lingering behind the taller boy. Staring curious and cautiously at Semi with his Cherry eyes he looks back to Ushijima with out a word, both his hands held to his chest defensively looking nervous. "That's my friend." he say to the skinny boy, and going over to Semi grabbing his hand and leading them to each other. "Uh, hi I'm Semi Eita." he holds a shake hand out to the redhead, seeming unsure of him. The boy breaths in glancing up at Ushijima. "Semi Semi!" He smiled to tell him it was okay, and his eyes widen more then they did naturally. "What's your name?" Semi asked the boy shaking hands with each other. He looked like he didn't want to answer, but breaths in deeply muster the courage to. "M-my name is Tendou Satori." his voice quiet but we had both heard him clearly.

"L-like the Fire beast Yokai?" Semi exclaimed, holding out the prize he won from earlier. The boy claiming to be Tendou, eyes widen again but seemed to understand still. "Uh, yes. Well I'm not at the age I was when I got that name." Tendou explains, opening up a little bit to the other children. Tendou stuck his hand out to the plushie and pat its head like a cat. "Wait if your really him, why do you look like a child? Weren't you 19 when you defeated the Beast?" Semi shuffled to sit closer to the other. "Uh, I don't know what happened? This is the first time this happened to me." "Yeah and you look nothing like what people say you looked." Semi says starting to get excited to talk to Tendou. Ushijima smiled to himself as they sat together he opened his mouth to say something about that too but Semi kept talking so he didn't talk. The two talking about all kinds of things under the light of the moon.

Ushijima sat listening to the two talk and pulled out his games prize looking at it and pulled out a pen from his pocket to write his name on the bag tag smiling to himself when done. Talkative Tendou looked to Ushijima as the conversation between him and Semi died down. "Hey Wakatoshi-kun, what's that you have?" Tendou asks pointing to the tag. "Oh, this is a Bag tag of the Volleyball mascot." he answered handing the tag over to the other so while could look at it better. "Oh, this looks cool. But."

"What's Volleyball?" he asked again. "It's a cool sport we're you can't hold or carry the ball and you hit over the net devising the two teams of 6 playing. And the team on the other side of the net tries to stop the ball from hitting the ground otherwise you team gets the point." Semi explains for Ushijima, who only nodded in agreement. Tendou hands the bag tag back to Ushijima, and he places it next to him on the ground instead of back into his pocket.

Soon though a voice from the bottom of the stairs called, startling us all and Tendou hid away, as the lady from before was walking up. "Eita, it's time to leave now." Semi's mum as she came into view. "Do I have to?" Semi wines to his mum, but she only laughs and tells him to say goodbye. He waved as he was dragged down from the shrine. "See you at school Ushijima!" I stayed quiet waving back until he was gone out of site. Ushijima blinks, glancing around back to where Tendou hid, poking his head from the pillar. "Who was that?" Tendou asked slowly making his way back to him. "That was Semi's mum, he had to go home now." Ushijima told him blankly.

"Why did Semi Semi have to leave?" Tendou's head tilt to the side. His red hair falls with his head movements, he continued toward Ushijima standing in the light of the moon, together. "Because we have school tomorrow." Ushijima says bluntly to the red head. Tendou's eyes looked up to Ushijima, before frowning looking away fiddling with his fingers.

"But I don't want to leave." Ushijima stares at his feet. "Why is that Wakatoshi-kun?" Tendou cox his head to the side with one brow raised. "My mother and farther are always fighting about something, sometimes it's over silly things like purposefully not going to look for a Hayashi Rice stand for me." He exhaled the started again.

"Hayashi Rice is my favourite dish, I ask for it every time." he sighed lifting his head again to Tendou, still playing with his fingers.

"Oh. I'm sorry that happened Wakatoshi-kun." Tendou gave him a sadden expression stepping closer. "What about you Tendou. What's your favourite food?" Ushijima asked simply. Tendou gladly answers. "Chocolate, I think it's called. I had gotten offerings of all kinds but I liked the chocolates the best." He smiled at Ushijima, who took a mental note to get Tendou some chocolate on his future visits to the shrine. It was silent for a few seconds before Tendou spoke up again. "Wakatoshi-kun, do you think you could come back tomorrow, to see me again?" the skinny, shorter boy questions fumbling with the waist tie from his Kimono, facing away shyly. Ushijima was taken back a bit. No one, but Semi, had asked to see him again. He didn't have many friends so it was a nice feeling, to hear Tendou say. "I will try my best to Tendou!" Ushijima took a step towards the other, reaching and taking a hold of both his hands, and the sudden action shocked the timid boy. His head whipped back to Ushijima who only smiled lightly back.

Both of them standing in the moon rays, and shining down on them. Tendou's eyes lighting up at the site of the other in front of him, staring in awe as the moon highlighted the olive hair and brown eyes of... His friend? Something of which Tendou never had in his previous life.

"Pretty" they both whispered together, enchanted by the sites of each other.

Ushijima could feel a heat raise to his checks when he noticed he was staring into the sweet, cherry coloured eyes of the little Yokai boy, for longer then was normal.

It's only raised further to his ears when he felt their hands squeeze together as their fingers had intertwined. Tendou's gaze followed the others eyes down to their small hands and a flash of pinky red rest on his face. Ushijima's eyes glancing up at Tendou, his eyes stuck in a trance with glittering red staring back. Mouths agape at the sites of each.

Tendou's lips curled upwards giving the biggest smile Ushijima has seen from him that night. "You promise to come see me again!" was the last thing he heard from the swaying red hair, cherry eyes and fair skinned Yokai boy, "Yes." as the next thing he heard was the voice of his parents yelling from the start of the stairs.

He looked down to them, just like always. He sighs, turning to look back at Tendou. But to his surprise Tendou was gone from sight. The hands he was hold close to him disappeared from his grips. Letting a gasp out of shock.

"Tendou?" he frowns, searching around, a little tight feeling in his chest with a loss of breath. "Wakatoshi it's time to leave!" his mother called. 'But I don't want to leave.' he though looking to his parents waiting on him for moments, staring back and forth over his shoulder waiting to see if he was really gone. But there was no sign of the dazzling face he stared into moments ago. With a quiet exhaled he forces himself to trudged down the stairs letting his grandma take his hand as they left the Shrine.

Staring back sadly to atop of the stairs. That was the last time he saw the other boy.