#ANYWAY my eyes burn and I yam sleepy

[crybaby-bkg]

I think Bakugou loves you in such ways, that it seems small to other people. They ask you, how is he romantic? He doesn’t seem like the type—how does he woo you? Love you? And the answer comes so easily to you.

He loves you in ways that are overlooked by a glutton. He runs out into the rain when you come home from a long day, umbrella ready. The only thing you have to do is hold the handle, and he holds you—doesn’t let your feet touch the muddy ground, answers to your giggling inquiry of why you can’t walk with, because you’re too clumsy for your own good. That he can’t afford any more gauze or bandaids because of your slip ups, but he kisses them tender every time, anyway.

He loves you in ways that are simple, but carry more meaning than meets the eye. He buys your favorite food, your comfort snack along with it, stops at the convenience store to pick up those gross flavored drinks you swear by. It’s not even an ask from him, just a natural order of things, to spoil you in ways that come easily, in ways that you can’t help but praise, in ways that he becomes bashful because to him, all he’s doing is the bare minimum.

He loves you in ways that make your chest warm and your eyes sting. He adapts to you and your emotions, learns when holding you is enough and when his brash words of encouragement are needed. He reassures you, kisses kindly behind your ears when you need his voice of reasoning. He listens and he does and he tries and even though he thinks it may never be enough, it’s always the right timing.

Bakugou loves you in everyday small gestures that equal a lifetime of adoration. That shows you he doesn’t just tolerate you with the occasional grand gesture to shut your nagging up. He loves you everyday, chooses to, and the overwhelming feeling of being loved by Bakugou is something you don’t think anyone could truly ever understand.

[theworstjedi]

Parental Issues

3636 BBY

The boy’s eyes were ringed with amber. Friyr Illustratum. A hefty name he had chosen for himself. The old Shadow recognized the solemn conventions of a Darth name too well to mistake it as a mere surname. She had spent too many years hunting after their misused and discarded artifacts. As a young woman, she had never had much consideration for the Sith she encountered. She had certainly never considered that an apprentice could be treated the same as an object. But here he was, Alema’s greatest moral objection and the last attachment binding her to the mortal plane.

“Sit down,” she said.

He did as he was told. His fingers curled around the sand of the garden beneath his knees. He drew in on himself, shivering and defeated.

Friyr had been her sister’s last padawan. She had raised many. Alema had raised none. Friyr was her first Sith but the last before her old age reconsumated her into the Force. He was the last frayed string of her life and Alema the only Jedi with the desire to resolve it.

Alema lowered herself onto the sand slowly before him, like approaching a wounded animal.

Friyr shrank back as though sensing the inate revulsion. His blue-amber eyes cast elsewhere, as though looking at the slanted light on the ground.

3630 BBY

Alema’s finger traced down the grimy plastifilm. Rows of scribbled names next to call buttons passed by until she reached a nondescript X. Far be it from Caretaker Alema’kekori to visit shady apartments on Nar Shaddaa at the smuggler moon’s slinkier hours, but she had a sweet yam casserole to deliver.

She pushed the clean white button, and it depressed without complaint. This came as little surprise. It looked almost polished from all the use it’d seen. She waited. Listening to the quiet hum of speeders over head and relaxing her shoulders into the calmness of a night illuminated by ever burning lights.

Uhhh yah?

A sleepy little blue holo of Friyr Illustratum and his favorite baggy shirt popped to life next to the X. The white coarseweave her padawan wore now billowed down over his thighs. A stray sleeve had drifted partway down one of his broad shoulders. The looseness had a softening effect on his hard physic so that what Alema would normally class as “wiry” became “slim.”

She was glad Friyr was fond of long floaty tops. He had been growing into his thirties when she met him and though what someone approaching forty did with the agency of his body didn’t make her blink, she felt fondly enough of the young Jedi that she preferred a less casual audience with him.

Dunno what this is about, but th’answer’s prahhhably no.

Alema held up the wrapped tray as though Friyr were capable of seeing it. “And if I brought food?”

The holo-Friyr stopped grinding a palm into his eyes and swallowed a yawn. “Master?”

“One of them, yes,” Alema deadpanned.

“I’ll put on pants,” Friyr said quickly, then winked out as the apartment door buzzed her up.

Alema adjusted her plain plait of lekku with a smug line to her lips and let herself in.

___

Friyr had found more than a pair of pants when she came up, she observed. A pair of iconic Corellian green jedi robes hung over the plain shirt. It looked like they’d been cut for a woman from the way they tapered at the waist. Alema didn’t ask many questions about this; she was sure she’d seen it on him some long time ago.

He fidgeted with its fit over his shoulders in the doorway. “How’d you find this place?”

“Shoney said Boris had placed you in one of his resort homes,” the older woman said mildly.

She brushed past Friyr - who grumbled but flattened himself to the wall to accommodate the gargantuan twi’lek. A sense of curoisty compelled her in. This was an emotion to conquer, perhaps, but she didn’t find the mere pursuit of knowledge out of bounds. It upheld the second line of the Code, afterall.

The apartment was open floorplan to accommodate for a Hutt’s girth. And it was splendid. Somewhere between a spa and a living quarter, Friyr had high ceilings and cavernous walls. Even for a full bodied slug, the space was roomy and bronzed. The decorations were pleasant, in style, and large.

Though the attention laid in the details. It looked like Friyr had quarreled with the light fixtures and left traces of a Jedi sized panic attack here or there. Uncleaned food cartons and wires made little paths that followed his relentless pacing between the couch and a mess of screens and keyboards. Their plugs half in and out of sockets. He had never coped too well with empty metal spaces.

In her adventures, Alema stepped on something soft. She started backward, only to find a puddle of blankets and pillows on the floor near the door. It looked luxurious, but it was an odd mess to find anywhere outside of an unmade mattress.

“Bed’s too high,” Friyr explained at Alema’s pause. A hand on the small of her back urged her forward. She pranced over Friyr’s little bed to a red overstuffed couch. She straightened her shoulders, then turned to face her bemused padawan.

“I take it you’re well.”  Alema seated herself straightbacked on the couch behind her and sunk into its fluffy maw. Underterred by this indignity, she set the small tray in the center of her lap. It was still warm in her hands, which was relieving. Nar Shaddaa was a big city to traverse from sector to sector, and she wasn’t sure she was keen to find the state of Friyr’s microwave.

“‘M ohhhkay.” Friyr shuffled to the coffee table by memory and seated himself opposite Alema. A few empty microwave meals were pushed back as he claimed the space upon which they sat. “You uh-- What’re you doin’ off Eedit?”

“The Hexagon Square Feast was today.”

Friyr snapped his fingers and pointed at the couch cushion next to Alema. “Riiiiiiiight. Right. How was that?”

“Taste for yourself.” Alema unfolded the geometry of her foil packaging. “It has marshmallows and sweet yams; I know you enjoy your sugar.”

Friyr’s lips twitched into a smile. “I dooo~” he purred.

Once the smell of carmelization spiced the air, his stomach betrayed subtlety with a wanting sound. Her padawan had a deceiving streak of flirtatiousness, but Alema knew confection and fruit purees were Friyr’s biggest vices.

Alema didn’t smile, but she did quicken her unwrapping, so she could trade the gooey homemade meal to Friyr for a sense of peace that sat around her shoulders. She had known that Friyr’s path of pursuing the war effort would bring lean times to an already lean man, but Jedi made no money. Perhaps credits here and there or a meal or two in return, but their life was spare. The Republic’s reliance on them as miricle workers, ground what Jedi were left on the front lines to their bones. Alema had come to know this as a Shadow, and so she understood the language Friyr’s simple display of hunger was speaking in a home that wasn’t exactly his own.

She watched him gnaw a fluffy clump of marshmallow off of his thumb with claspd hands. “I wanted to talk to you about-- Boris.”

Friyr sighed into his food. A wilt followed the line of his shoulders. “Talk then,” he murmured politely around his mouthful of yam.

Alema’s calloused thumbs traced the length of each other in turns as she delayed a second longer. “Couldn’t you ask the SIS for accommodation?”

Friyr’s defeated shoulders tensed. “Alema,” he said. His voice was rigid with a talk they’d gone over before. “You know s’not that simple. I gotta make some of my own way out here. It traces too easy if they give me everythin’. Boris is my alibi.”

“Boris is a Hutt,” she said patiently, but her voice had a tension to it too.

“I-- yah? Would it be better if he was Black Sun? Exchange? Any other of th’swoop gangs or pirates out here?” Friyr made a sweeping gesture with his fork in the mushy ‘tato.

Alema followed the motion. “I can’t judge the merit of an alternative keeper, Padawan. But I’ve seen girls in your situation. Effeminate boys too. The life they’re granted by their benefactors is only good on whim. As long as their benefactors are attached to them.”

She watched his lips purse.

“You are a convincing desperate damsel, but you play your role too well. We all did when we served the Republic.” Alema’s voice hitched. “I played a Shadow too well.” She had never sugar-babied for a Hutt, but the role had consumed her body, mind, and soul.

Friyr let out a clensing breath. His eyes closed. “I ‘preciate that. I really do. But no offense t’you, Master, ‘m dif’rent.”

“You aren’t. You let a gangster attach himself to you.” Alema’s voice hardened, and Friyr looked away expressionlessly. The half-eaten tray sat limply in his lap.

The passing traffic hummed between them. Headlights slatted growing columns on the floor. Alema could hear the faint sounds of a resonant argument from two aprtments down without trying. The silence was loud.

“Look,” Friyr finally said. “You knighted me. You knew I was always gonna try fer--” Friyr waved his arms to encompass the magnificently hollow room. “this.” The young knight exhaled deeply. “Boris-- is pretty terrible.” Friyr laughed uneasily. “But he’s got no ability to hurt me. Not in anyway that matters.”

Friyr held his hands out, and Alema took them if only because making him search for hers would take longer. He rubbed his thumb over the backs of his old Master’s knuckles, both pairs of palms flat from years of lightsaber work.

“It’s hard, I won’ lie.” Friyr’s voice broke as he hesitated between speaking and staying silent for a moment. “I see a lot of stuff I used to be on the other side of. Stuff I couldn’ make a dif’rence in. Keepin’ people in the gutter so a few Hutts can feed ‘em a meal at the end of the day? Like whatever, you got good at their game and then flipped it on ‘em. But ‘m a Jedi now. Shouldn’ I be doing somethin’ more than playing the game. Shouldn’t I stop this?”

“Those aren’t easy questions, but your only dedication as a Jedi is to the Force if you wish it to be,” Alema said evenly. “On the other hand, the Force is an extension of everyone. Your job could be to stop it, if they ask for your help.”

Alema brushed a pale shock of hair out of the human’s face and studied his broken alien features. He teased a smile.

A relief lived inside her ribcage. A worry that Boris was her padawan’s primary concern had spent too much time in the halls of her mind. That he had more quandry with his title, was-- relieving.

“That’s th’biggest way t’not answer a question ever.”

“The practice of being a Jedi, I find, is searching for answers yourself,” she cheeked. 

Her eyes fell to the plate of root and melted sugar. “Is that good?” a note of curosity entered her voice.

Friyr’s gaze dropped down too. “Yah, I mean. I’m preddy into it.” Friyr’s pale blue eyes flickered between his old master and the lukewarm tray. “You uh--” He held it forward with a sheepish smile.

Alema stared. A steady of mild diet vegetable and starches had made garden salad the limit of her decadence. The casserole was positively unapaltable. “Well. Hm.” She tapped Friyr’s fork ridden fingers with a nearly grave hesitance. He folded the utensil into her fingers with a single motion, but it took far longer for Alema to select the most palatable part of the remianing plate. It was a difficult decision with Friyr’s predeliction for shoveling, but she found a reletively unharmed corner. Breaking the crust, the fork scooped up a small portion.

Friyr snickered. “Don’ need good eyes t’know yer a wuss.”

“Hush,” Alema snipped marmishly before sticking the fork in her mouth. Haste would make the experience easier. Sugar exploded like little stars across her palate. It settled like a coat on her tongue. “Oh Force.” She gagged, but forced a swallow.

“That’s what the dark side tastes like~” Friyr sniggered.

Alema rapped his knee with her palm.