#ONE SINGLE stipulation f

[reflectionsofgalaxies]

.

[theidiotwhowritesthings]

A Fresh Start [17]

Din Djarin x F!Reader

Warnings: losing tempers, arguing, mentions of alcohol and a bit of binge drinking, angst, people getting drunk

Word Count: 15k (i am so so so sorry, i know y'all said you wanted long but this is probably insane. i just needed to end it in that specific place to get the theme i wanted to touch on finished😭 i think you'll like the content if you can bear through it lolol)

Summary: When you made plans for your future they never involved being hired by a Mandalorian to baby-sit his adorable, green gremlin of a child. However, after your life fell apart in the span of one disastrous night,  you found it to be the only feasible option you had left. Nevarro was a  far cry from Coruscant, but the thriving community turned out to be  exactly what you needed. Every day you spend in Nevarro you  fall more  and more in love with your new life, but when your past rears its ugly head you find that perhaps peace wasn’t meant  for everyone.

#17: CLOSE YOUR EYES, NER KAR'TA

"to be in love with you is to know that even on the days you make me so mad i could scream, i still want to kiss the hell out of your face." ⏤Beau Taplin. "it's the way you wrinkle your nose when you're disappointed in me."

a/n: y'all would not believe the trouble tumblr gave me in posting this smh anyways sorry again this is stupid long (i did warn y'all im a mouthy motherfucker) but hopefully it can make up for the absolutely heartbreaking episode we all suffered thru today :)

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“If I asked you to kick Karga’s ass, would you?”

“Without hesitation, ner kar’ta.”

You couldn’t help but snicker under your breath at his quick answer. Din was lying reclined in the cot beside you with Grogu napping on his chest. It was an entertaining contrast. The soft father rubbing his son’s back as the child snored while promising immediate violence at a single word from you. The awkwardness of yesterday morning seemed to have dispersed after your confession to him. Add to that the fact that Nima was sleeping in a medically induced coma on the cot you sat on the edge of, and you were on cloud nine. There was still a ways to go and you hated that your close friend⏤ your family⏤ had been injured in such a traumatizing way, but her arm would be saved.

The bacta tank had healed what it needed to. It fixed bone, muscle, and tissue nearly 80%. You didn’t want to risk letting the tank manage the injury to the full 100%. Repairing hand injuries was a tricky thing simply because the tendons and muscles in the hand were so complicated. You’d rather set her hand the old fashioned way⏤ make sure she didn’t lose any function. Nima would be devastated if her dexterity was compromised. Her job, her passion, relied on her hands.

“Anything else I can add to our to-do list today other than fighting the High Magistrate of Nevarro?” Din asked with a hum.

You grinned at him. “I’ll let you know if I think of anything.”

Din nodded his head once. Your eyes glanced down at the hardware holding Nima’s hand motionless so it could heal properly. You had already adjusted them, applied a healing paste, then wrapped it, but you couldn't help but re-check your work over and over again. Your obsessive behavior came in handy when Karga had stepped in ten minutes or so ago to check in on Nima. Though his ‘checking in’ had turned into offering you a job once more. It seemed like every type of denial you had he had a counterpoint.

Your main one being that legally you weren’t allowed to practice medicine. You still had a license because the trial questioning whether or not you were ethically to blame for Soran’s death had ended in your favor. However, one stipulation⏤ which had come from a psychological evaluation the hospital made you go through after you were attacked⏤ was that until Kurt’s trial was over you shouldn’t be in the position of making medical decisions. It had been something you were more than happy to abide by as you ran from your life.

Karga’s cheeky reply had been that he was the High Magistrate and as such he could allow you to do anything you wanted to do. Especially if that thing you wanted to do was be his city’s physician. 

A thought formed in your mind and you huffed out a sigh. You could see Din tilt his head toward you in question. You faced him, “Would I be crazy for considering taking Karga up on his offer?”

“I wouldn’t say crazy.” Din replied. “But why? I don’t want you to feel obligated because Karga won’t leave you alone.”

“It’s not that.” You said. The thought grew in your mind, a chaotic frenzy that wouldn’t leave you alone. “If I hadn’t been here, Nima would’ve lost her arm. She might have even died. I stopped that.” Din remained silent and let you think aloud. “I can keep making that difference. I have to. If I don’t then… If something terrible happens then isn’t that my fault?”

Din sat up, holding Grogu to his chest so the boy didn’t fall, “No. No, it’s not. Thinking like that, taking on that guilt, isn’t healthy.” He threw his legs over the side of the bed so he was sitting up and facing you. “Don’t make a decision based on guilt, ner kar’ta.”

“I guess you’re right.” You mumbled.

He stayed silent for a beat before reaching a hand out to you. You stood and took the singular step that would get you close enough to settle your hand in his. Din pulled you forward so you stood between his legs. The cot was on a lower setting which left you staring down at Din while he was forced to tilt his head to stare up at you. 

“Take guilt out of it. Pretend like you’re one of many that Karga is trying to hire for this job.” Din said. You lifted the hand Din wasn’t holding so you could scratch Grogu’s head. His mid-afternoon nap would be over soon and he’d be awake and bouncing off the walls with energy. “Would getting this job make you happy?”

You pondered over the question. There was a thrill in medicine. One you quite enjoyed when you weren’t forced to care for the people who meant the most in the world to you. Plus, thinking long term, you couldn’t be Grogu’s nanny forever. It wasn’t feasible. Not that you wanted out of their lives. You were so entangled in the web of their lives that that was hardly an option anymore. But, if you wanted a real relationship with Din one day, you couldn’t be his employee. You’d have to find a different way to make credits and support yourself. 

“I think so.” You nodded.

“As long as you're happy, then I think you should do it.” Din replied, but the sigh he released didn’t match the approval of his words. “I just don’t want you to make yourself sick with stress.”

“Worrywart.” You teased. Din chuckled and the rumbling in his chest must have roused Grogu. The boy began to rub his face against the metal he was lying on sleepily. You ran a finger alongside his ear. “Hi, baby boy. Was buir too loud? Did he wake you up?”

Grogu mumbled, then turned with outstretched arms. Din lifted him as you reached out. When you pulled the small child to your chest he leaned his head against your shoulder but you knew he wasn’t sleep based on the way he let his small fingers rub against your shoulder back and forth⏤ just like you and Din would do to him. Grogu was mumbling soft words you didn’t recognize.

“Mhmm, tell mama all about it.” You hummed.

Din’s hands had rested on your hips when he didn’t have Grogu to hold. His thumbs tracing circles over your shirt right above your belt. He nodded, “Do you want children of your own one day?”

Your eyes widened in surprise at his sudden question. It was the last direction you expected this conversation to go. Your jaw popped open slightly. “Uh, wh⏤what?”

“Just curious.” Din shrugged nonchalantly.

To be honest, you had never given it any thought. That was a future decision for future you to make. While in training, you told yourself it wouldn’t be something you needed to even think about until after training was over. Then when you were working in the hospital, you told yourself you needed to get settled in your job first. Finally, your life spiraled apart and during the last year that was hardly something that was on your mind. It was funny that you went full circle and all of that led you to standing in Nevarro’s clinic thinking about a future with children of your own. 

Taking care of Grogu was an experience that had given you more factors and variables to consider, but still you weren’t sure what to say. You shook your head and spoke the truth. “To be honest, I haven’t thought much about it.”

“You’re so good with Grogu, is all.” Din replied.

“What about you?” You paused. “Er, that’s not what I⏤ Obviously you already have a child. You have Grogu.” Din chuckled at your babbling. “I meant, would you want… more?”

Din tilted his head and a very casual nod. “I think so. I like the idea of a big family.”

“Do you have siblings?” You asked suddenly. “I’m realizing just now that I don’t know a lot about your life before Nevarro⏤ other than Grogu and the bounty hunting.”

“No siblings.” Din shook his head. “Not by blood at least. After I was brought in by the Mandalorians, as a foundling, I grew up with a few other kids I considered to be siblings on Concordia.”

“Wait, you were a foundling? Like Grogu?”

“Yes.” Din nodded. “I was born on Aq Ventina, but when I was young… My town was destroyed in a Separatist attack. Battle droids destroyed everything. They… I lost my parents. I would’ve been killed myself if a Mandalorian hadn’t saved me.”

You stepped around him so you could sit down on the cot beside Din. He followed your movements with his t-shape visor. You lifted the hand not holding Grogu to settle on his knee. “Din, I am so sorry. I had no idea, I⏤ I wouldn’t have asked⏤ I shouldn’t have asked⏤”

“It’s alright, ner kar’ta.” Din chuckled and set his hand on top of yours. “I knew you didn’t know, but I wanted you to know. Besides, I started this line of questioning.” He squeezed his fingers around your own. “I know you said you were from Naboo. Can you tell me more? Do you still have family there?”

You fell into a casual conversation with him telling him about the family you still had there. Sharing a few memories that couldn't help but slip out when they came to mind. You felt bad that you were talking about happy memories when Din had just admitted to a tragedy, but he continued to ask question after question leading you into them. Which led to him sharing a few memories of his own from both worlds that he walked. Din lingered on a story about his parents⏤ a happy one he held close to his heart based on the soft tone he spoke in.

“How much do you remember of them?” You asked.

“Enough to know they were good parents.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t get to spend more time with them.” You replied softly.

In response, Din lifted the hand on top of yours to bury it in the hair at the nape of your neck. He leaned you toward him and set his forehead against yours. The two of you only remained that way for a moment before Grogu sat up and rested one hand on your cheek and the other on his father’s.

“Skraan.” He blurted. Din and you broke apart, laughing, but Grogu was solely serious as he repeated himself. “Skraan, skraan, skraan.”

Din knew what he had to do. The part he was struggling with was the how. Oddly, in his mind, the first step was going to be the hardest bit. Steps two through whatever included taking the N1 out to Mandalore, find the living waters, bathe in said living waters, bring back proof to the Armorer, be redeemed in the eyes of his Covert, return to you as a full fledged Mandalorian rather than Apostate, and request to court you properly. Simple. Easy to remember. Din didn’t even need to write it down. However, step one involved telling you that he was leaving Nevarro and that was going to be tough.

At first he thought he’d just bring you with him, but then you told him you wanted to try being Nevarro’s physician. Din couldn’t pull you away from your home right as you had grown comfortable enough with your past to retry medicine. So, that was out. Then, when he had worked up the courage to say good-bye, Cara quit. That one had caught Din off guard. It happened days after Nima’s accident. Cara claimed she got an offer to be part of special forces with the New Republic⏤ an offer she couldn’t turn down. She even took the time to remind him that this was never a permanent thing anyways. 

However, Cara left in the dead of night without even taking the time to wait until Nima woke up. Din didn’t believe that was a coincidence. He was more than familiar with the concept of running from emotions. When Nima finally did wake up, the look of heartbreak on her features when he had to answer her question of where Cara was had been tough to handle. Din reminded himself that his plan was not the same as Cara’s. He was not leaving you to stay away. Din was not running from you. If anything he was running to you. He just wanted to be the very best version of himself before propositioning you, and Din wanted to do this right.

Before he left, he was going to explain this to you⏤ in great detail. And, if you truly meant what you said about allowing him to uphold his Creed, you’d understand. Din repeated that to himself over and over again like a mantra.

Regardless of how that played out, Din was stuck. It was one thing when he was leaving Nevarro short one marshal temporarily. Now the city would be missing him and Cara, and in good conscious he couldn’t let that be.

Mayfeld, hands laced behind his head as his feet were kicked up on his desk, called out. “Come on, Mando. What? You don’t trust me to hold down the fort while you’re gone?”

“Exactly.”

“Uh, ow.” Mayfeld complained. “You could’ve at least pretended to think about it before answering so fast.”

Din chuckled under his breath. Honestly, his relationship with Mayfeld had come a long way. How he felt now was a stark difference in comparison to how badly Din wanted to shoot him in the face when they first met. After what happened on Morak, after revealing his face in front of Mayfeld, Din truly respected the man⏤ trusted him. The truth is he would never forgive himself to leave Mayfeld here to deal with all the responsibilities alone. That wasn’t fair to his friend. All those facts didn’t deter Din from mocking and mildly bullying the man though. That was much too fun to give up.

“I have a friend flying in today to baby-sit you.”

“Nice. Got me a nanny too?” Mayfeld replied. “Hope she’s as pretty as yours.”

Din knew the man was only trying to rile him up, and he technically had picked the exact topic that could do it. But, Din didn’t take the bait. He shrugged. “He’s not really my type, but I’ll let you make the call on that.”

“Alright. So I’ll be the Marshal, and he’ll be my Deputy?”

“No. He’ll be Marshal, and you’ll still be Deputy.”

Mayfeld dropped his feet off the desk, hands falling to his side, and his jaw popped open in shock. “Hold on! The new guy gets to be Marshal before I do?? You’re just gonna promote him over me? Immediately.”

“Exactly.”

The man scoffed in response and crossed his arms like a petulant child. It reminded Din of the way Grogu would pout when you told him you couldn’t snack on cookies or cakes right before dinner time or when Din would wrestle a full sized critter out of his son’s mouth before Grogu could swallow it whole. Mayfeld shoved up from his seat to cross the room and pour himself a cup of caf. Din stayed where he was⏤ leaning against Cara’s old desk.

“You tell your girl that you’re leaving yet? Or is that still a secret?”

“I’m going to tell her.” Din said firmly.

Mayfeld slurped out of his mug, purposely trying to annoy him, “You said that four days ago, then three days ago, then two⏤”

“Keep talking and I’ll demote you from Deputy.”

“Is there even a level below deputy??”

“I can make one.” Din replied dryly. A wide grin crossed Mayfeld’s face and Din shook his head with a grumble. “Today. I’ll tell her today.” Mayfeld just stared at him from above the rim of his mug. Din pushed off the desk. “I’m going to do it.”

Mayfeld shrugged in response and Din resisted the urge to throw something at the man. He huffed and turned to leave. Mayfeld called out behind him, a teasing comment, and Din threw him a crude hand gesture over his shoulder causing the man to burst out in laughter. 

It barely took him any time to get from the station to the clinic. When he stepped through the front doors he was greeted by Aayla and one other worker he wasn’t familiar with. The Twi’lek waved him in and hit a button on the desk to unlock the backroom doors. It was the sound of your voice that greeted him first.

“⏤and if you pull those staples out, you’ll be dealing with me.” You stood at the end of a bed with your hands on your hips and your face drawn in concentration. Aayla had found and wrestled you into a white coat when you started and Din would be lying if he said he didn’t like the look on you. Din especially liked watching you take control of a room. You could command a scene with voice and stare alone, and Din really, really liked watching you do it.

“Baby girl,” A vaguely familiar voice chimed and Din frowned at the nickname, “Dealing with you would be my absolute pleasure.”

Din stepped further into the room to see that a worker from the hanger, a Trandoshan man he couldn’t recall the name of, was sitting on a cot with a long cut from wrist to elbow. A line of staples was holding it closed. Din crossed his arms and tilted his head. “Yeah? How about dealing with me?”

The Trandoshan looked to him at the same time you did, and he found it comical how different the reactions were. Your face split into a bright, gorgeous smile while the hangar worker stiffened up and averted his eyes.

“Well, hi there, Marshal.” You cooed and stuck your hands into the pockets of your white coat.

“Do we have a problem?” Din asked, trying to keep the amusement out of his voice.

You turned to look at your patient and raised an eyebrow in question. The Trandoshan glanced at him before looking back to you and shaking his head rapidly. You nodded and reached out to set a hand on Din’s forearm. “I think we’re okay here.”

“Can⏤ Can I⏤?” The worker pointed to the door.

“Yupp. Keep it dry. Come back in a week, and I’ll see if you’re healed enough to take the staples out.”

The Trandoshan jumped up but paused when he realized he was going to have to pass Din in order to get out. Even though Din was technically blocking the way, he kept his position so the man was forced to squeeze around him. When the man was finally out, your laugh filled the air and Din sighed in admiration. You shrugged, smile still in place, “That was kind of fun.”

“How’re you doing?” Din asked.

“I’m okay.” You nodded and then scrunched your nose once. “It’s so weird. I’m still not used to this, but at the same time I am?” You motioned around yourself. “It’s familiar, but it’s not. Am I crazy?”

Din shook his head, “Of course not.”

“Hmm,” You took a step closer to him so you had to lift your face to meet his visor, “I think you’re biased.”

He grinned under his helmet then shrugged. “Maybe.”

“So, what can I do for you, Marshal?”

“Have you had lunch yet?” He asked, and you shook your head in response. “Can I walk with you to get some? You aren’t busy are you?”

You shrugged out of your white coat and tossed it onto a cot. “That’s the beauty of working for a man who is super desperate to keep you around. I can do what I want.” Din chuckled and followed you out of the room. As you passed the front desk, you called out, “Aayla, I’m going. Just call me if any real emergencies come in. Okay?”

“You got it, doc!”

As you both stepped out, Din offered you his arm and you slipped yours through it. He nodded back toward the clinic. “Who is the new girl?”

“Miriam.” You answered. “Aayla is training her to work the front desk so I can train Aayla. She’ll be able to help me with little stuff. I think she’s got a lot of potential.” Din nodded toward a stand merchant who greeted him first. “We’ll be able to see more if I have an assistant, but we still can’t do any routine kind of work. Karga still needs to get another physician to work that side of things.”

Din hummed. “I hear he’s working on it, but I’ll… encourage him to work faster.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it.” You shook your head. “I can be plenty annoying on my own. You should’ve seen how much I bothered Admin back in Coruscant when I wanted them to buy the emergency department a whole set of ultrasounds.”

Din could imagine the scene and he wished he could’ve seen it. He’d have to make sure he had a front row seat for when you began to hound Karga for this. Without even discussing it, it seemed you both had the same sandwich place in mind⏤ the one that sold the cookies Grogu liked. Din didn’t bother ordering for himself. He wasn’t overly hungry. He mostly just wanted to spend time with you and make sure you took a break to eat. Din watched as you greeted the owners by name and after ordering your food you ordered a pack of cookies for Grogu as well. He could barely even pay attention to the conversation at hand because he was so busy watching you.

Even when the owners offered you the meal for free as a thank you for taking the job in town, you insisted on paying the full price. As you walked out, you frowned at him. “Are you sure you don’t want something to eat?”

“I’m fine, ner kar’ta.” He replied. Din planned finding a bench where you could sit and eat⏤ you had commented about how much you loved the current weather this morning⏤ but the sound of his communicator made him groan.

“What’s going on?” You asked.

Din lifted his vambrace to see he was being hailed to the hanger. “Oh. I have a, uh, friend visiting today. He’s here early.”

“Really?” Your eyes widened.

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I have to go meet him.”

Din had begun to pull his arm away, but you kept your grip around it and briefly bit down on your lower lip drawing all his attention to the shape of the lips he loved so much⏤ the lips that haunted his every dream. You pleaded, “Can I please come with you?”

“You want to?” Din was surprised.

“Yeah!” You bounced in place. “I’d love to meet your friend. I mean, if that’s okay?”

“Always. You should start eating while we walk.” Din nodded.

You snickered. “Okay. Bossy.”

Din’s eyes snapped to you, and he chuckled. The two of you changed direction toward the hanger. 

It wasn’t like you weren’t going to meet Cobb Vanth eventually.

The week had gone shockingly well. Better than you could’ve hoped, but then again your expectations were incredibly low. Working in the emergency clinic was actually enjoyable. Karga had tried to rope you into doing everything, but you put a hard stop on that for obvious reasons. Nevarro was still relatively small so when it came to emergencies⏤ there really were not many emergencies. Only a patch up job here and there like with the Trandoshan this morning. Again the bar was low considering you started this job with Nima nearly losing her arm.

Nima had been doing very well physically, but, as much as she tried to hide it, emotionally she had taken a toll. You weren’t sure why Cara left so abruptly. Din and you had talked about it in depth one night after dinner and he seemed to think it was because she had cared too much for Nima too fast. The only opinion you had on the matter was that Cara had certainly gotten on your bad side. You were loyal to your oldest friend and it irked you beyond belief that the once deputy of Nevarro had left when Nima needed her most.

“Where’s your friend from?” You asked as Din and you neared the landing pad.

“Tatooine.”

“Ah, my neck of the woods.”

Din chuckled. “Were you even there long enough to call it your neck of the woods?”

“I lived in Mos Espa for at least half a year. In Tatooine years, that feels like a decade.” You replied and the laugh that left him made your cheeks warm. 

He glanced over at you, your arm still looped through his, “What made you choose Tatooine, anyways?”

“It’s kind of a depressing answer. Definitely a mood killer.” You winced. Din’s feet came to an abrupt stop and he turned so he was facing you entirely. You should’ve guessed he’d have that kind of reaction. You shook your head. “I took care of a patient who said Mos Espa was where lowlifes and runaways escaped to when they had no other world to call home. So…” You shrugged. “I went to Mos Espa.”

“Ner kar’ta⏤”

“I don’t feel that way now. A lot has changed, and I’m not the person who initially fled to Tatooine,” You said quickly, “But you asked why I went, so I said.” With your next words, you kept your voice low so only he could hear you. “I promise I’m okay, Din.”

Din gave you a curt nod. With an amused shake of your head, you slipped your arm through his once more and tugged him toward the landing pad. The Mandalorian warrior let you drag him along, and you could’ve swore he was dragging his feet on purpose to make it more difficult for you. The chuckle that left his helmet confirmed this for you. 

“How long is your friend staying for?” You asked, and Din stayed quiet. “And is his visit a social call? I imagine he’s heartbroken being away from the sands of Tatooine.”

Din’s feet came to a stop once more, but this time it came as a surprise. You paused with him and gave him a curious look. He tilted his head. “About that, I wanted to talk to you about⏤”

“Mando!”

You and Din both turned at the voice. Walking in your direction was a very familiar face. Cobb Vanth? The marshal of Mos Pelgo was a far way from home, but he looked no different than the day you last saw him. His signature red scarf around his neck acting as a homing beacon for your eyes. Vanth’s eyes were initially focused on Din, but then they dragged over to you and he shook his head in surprise.

“Little lady!? Is that you??” Vanth grinned. 

Din and you both snapped to look at one another again rather than the new arrival. At the same time, the same words left your lips. “You know Cobb Vanth!?”

Vanth spread his arms out as he continued to approach, a large duffel bag hanging from his back, “Well, ain’t this a surprise!”

The shock wore off and it finally occurred to you that Cobb Vanth was here. Right here, right in front of you. You let out a laugh and rushed to meet him halfway. He greeted you by wrapping his arms around you in a tight grin⏤ a laugh leaving him as well. What felt like another lifetime ago, you had met Cobb Vanth on your arrival to Tatooine. Though your plan had been to settle in Mos Espa you had accidentally ended up in Mos Eisley. In an attempt to get from one place to the other you got lost in the desert briefly after the land speeder you rented ran out of fuel halfway. It had been your fault for trusting the man you got the speeder from. Rather than dying you were saved by the man you were now hugging. Vanth had even been kind enough to get you to Mos Espa eventually.

You pulled away from Vanth. “It’s so good to see you! You look great.”

“Oh, I know, darling.” Vanth winked. “But still not holding a flame to you.” You chuckled and a hand settled on your shoulder. Din had walked over and you took a step back so you stood right beside him. Vanth motioned to the Mandalorian. “You never told me you knew Mando.”

“I didn’t back when I was with you, Vanth.” You glanced between the two men. “How do you guys know each other?”

Vanth readjusted the bag around his shoulders. “Now that, little lady, is quite the story.” He continued on talking about how Din came looking for a Mandalorian and found Vanth decked out in Mandalorian armor. He followed it by describing how Din ended up flying into a krayt dragon to kill it from inside out. A detail you did not love to hear. “We’ve been best buddies since. Right, pal?”

Din didn’t respond. You were still in awe at the coincidence of it all. You missed your Mandalorian by literal months. Din had swung through Mos Pelgo right before you had. What would’ve happened if you met him then rather than now? 

“Mando?” Vanth questioned. Waving his hand once in front of the helmet. “You alright?”

“I’m fine.” Din replied and you wondered where the tension in his voice had come from. You slipped your arm around his once more and he seemed to relax marginally. He cleared his throat before nodding. “How was your trip, Vanth?”

Vanth’s lips stretched back out into a charming grin. “Hey, I can’t complain. Gotta say Nevarro looks better than I thought it would. I’m excited to explore it.” He chuckled. “The weather ain’t too bad either. I was worried I’d miss that desert air.”

“Don’t worry. These lava plains are plenty hot enough.” You replied. “How long are you here for?”

“Suppose 'til Mando here gets back.”

It took a second for the words to register in your mind, but Din picked it up much faster based on the way his entire body tensed once more. Until he gets back. Gets back? You slowly pulled your arm away from so you could turn and look at him. Before your hand could fall away entirely, Din caught it with his own⏤ holding it against his arm. 

“Wait⏤”

“You’re going somewhere?” You furrowed your brow in confusion. He hadn’t mentioned anything about a trip. Din paused and somehow his hesitance irritated you. “Where?”

Din sighed. “Mandalore.”

Your eyes widened, “Manda⏤ The Mandalore that may or may not be poisoned still?”

“Um. Yes.”

“Okay.” You replied. “Alright.” You pulled your hand out from under Din’s hand and shot Vanth a quick, firm smile. “It was really good to see you, Vanth. Welcome to Nevarro! I guess I’ll be seeing you around.” Din took a step toward you, his nickname for you leaving his lips, but you took a step back. “I need to get back to work, but I’ll see you at home?”

You didn’t give him the chance to answer and turned to leave. If Din called out after you, you didn’t hear him. Your footsteps were rushed as you tried to wrap your head around the information you had just learned. Were you angry? Maybe. It wasn’t a clear cut anger though⏤ it was muddled. There were too many other emotions swirling in your head, but the main one that started to push to the front was disappointment. Every time you thought you understood where you stood with Din it seemed like something happened that made you question it all. Had he just planned on leaving the planet without telling you? Or maybe he wanted to wait until the last second and just wave to you as he took off, or hang a note on the fridge for you to find the morning of. Even if you weren’t in this weird back and forth romantic thing with him, as someone who literally lived in his home and helped care for his child you were incredibly involved in his life. If you were a team, then you needed to know the plan.

More irritation boiled up in your blood, and you found yourself changing direction from the clinic to a familiar house. Your fist was banging on Nima’s door before you fully even registered what it was you wanted to say. Nima opened the door, in her pajamas, and your eyes glanced at the metal brace surrounding her right arm out of habit. 

Nima deflated and whined, “Please, please, please, please tell me you’re here to clear me for work.”

“No. Two more weeks. I’m not changing my mind on that.” You replied and she groaned. “I’m here because apparently Marshal Mando is leaving the planet and hired a replacement marshal but didn’t think to tell me any of this.”

“Come on in. I have alcohol.”

“I told you! I told you⏤ didn’t I tell you??” Mayfeld cried then spun to look at Vanth who was leaning against the wall. “I kriffing told him. Days ago.”

“Please stop talking.” Din groaned as he hung his head back while slouching in the seat. Din thought that the worst part of learning you and Vanth already knew one another would be the tight hug you literally ran to give him. Vanth had pulled you up off your toes in the hug, and the primal side of him yearned for a fight. His hand literally twitched toward his blaster⏤ his kriffing blaster. As if he was going to shoot down his good friend Cobb Vanth who left his town to do him a favor. 

Din had a problem. He was a problem. Growing up the way he had, with the losses he faced, he tended to be possessive of what he considered his own. Din liked to think over the years he had gotten good at reigning that behavior in. He didn’t shoot Vanth, after all. Still, that side of him didn’t hesitate in rearing it’s ugly head in moments like when he watched Cobb Vanth hold you for what he considered to be a second too long. It wasn’t until your arm slipped through his, a soft smile on your face, that he felt the logical side of him slip back into control.

Then, of course, it all went downhill when Vanth accidentally admitted the thing he had yet to tell you. Watching that smile fall off your features, feeling you try to slowly pull away, felt like he had taken blunt force trauma to the chest. It physically hurt and left a raw, aching wound and it only got worse as he watched you walk away. Din put the pain pretty high on the list of ones he experienced, and this was coming from someone who had a job that led him to be stabbed repeatedly. 

“I am sorry about that, Mando.” Vanth spoke up.

“It’s not your fault.” Din straightened his posture and shook his head. “I should’ve told her ages ago. That’s on me.” Vanth had apologized to him multiple times during the walk from the tarmac to the station. He’d do so between asking questions about the town that Din was supposed to be giving him a better tour on. Din rested his elbows on knees. It dawned on him that there was a question he hadn’t asked in his distress. “How do you know her?”

Vanth crossed his arms. “It was a couple months after you left, actually. She got lost between Mos Eisley and Mos Espa.” Din’s eyes widened at the thought of you getting lost in that Maker forsaken desert. Vanth chuckled. “Her land speeder ran out of fuel. It was by pure chance I ran into her. She stayed in Mos Pelgo for a few days then I took her the rest of the way to Mos Espa. We stayed in touch though⏤ here and there.”

Briefly, Din wondered what his life would’ve looked like if the two of you had been in Mos Pelgo at the same time. It was a curious thought but he knew both of you had been different people at that time. Even if it, in the great scheme of things, wasn’t that long ago. Less than a year. Then again, as quickly as you had wormed your way in his heart he couldn’t imagine meeting you months ago would’ve been that different. Din sighed and stood, he grabbed a holopad off the desk remembering that despite his dilemma in breaking your heart today he still had work to do. 

“Yeah.” Vanth hummed. “Little lady and I didn’t see each other often, but she’d visit me or I’d visit her for the occasional hook up.”

Din’s head snapped to glare at Vanth and, in an attempt to ensure his hands were free, he slammed the holopad back down onto the desk⏤ ignoring the tell tale sound of cracking glass. Vanth’s lips curled up into a mischievous grin and Din was half tempted to drag him back to the tarmac and ship his ass to Tatooine. Mayfeld burst into laughter and Din just shook his head.

“Sorry, brother.” Vanth chuckled. “I saw how up in arms you got out on the tarmac. Couldn’t help myself.”

“Hilarious.” Din replied. 

Eventually, Mayfeld and Vanth wandered out so the newest temporary marshal could get acquainted with the town and meet Karga. It gave Din a couple of hours to work though he spent most of it internally spiraling over the moment your entire face fell. He hated that he had been the cause of that⏤ just because he had been too scared to fess up. His communicator began to go off and Din answered it.

“Hi, Marshal?” A woman’s voice said. Din confirmed who it was. “This is Ms. Wynn, I’m in charge of Grogu’s class. Everything's still fine, but class ended about twenty minutes ago and I haven’t seen you or Soran. Is everything alright?”

Din shoved up from his desk’s chair. “I’ll be right there.”

On his way out the door, he called Aayla at the clinic to see if you had just gotten caught up with a patient, but the woman claimed she hadn’t seen you since he took you out for lunch. The clinic had been quiet otherwise. Din’s stomach churned uncomfortably as he hurried to pick up his son. Were you alright? Or were you so upset that you refused to even care for Grogu? Din knew the moment that thought crossed his mind that he was wrong. Regardless of how upset you were with him, you’d never take it out on the little boy. Din just hoped you were okay.

You narrowed your eyes at Nima as she downed the last of her beer, “Is this all you’ve been doing all day? Drinking?”

“Well, I can’t work, so…” Nima shrugged. When she offered you a drink you had turned it down, technically still on shift as the physician, but she hadn’t stopped from drinking herself. You had come here to rant about Din, but as it turned out you both had plenty to complain about. For hours, you and her had sat on the back porch of her house . The last thirty minutes or so you were trying to pry information out of Nima about how she felt about the Cara situation, but the mechanic would simply shrug it away. You knew she was hurting more than she claimed though. “Do the skies look gross to you?”

“What?” You blurted and slumped down in your seat.

“The sky. It looks…icky.”

You peered up best you could, and in her defense icky was probably the best word. The day had started clear, but the sky now had a greenish tinge to it. It reminded you of the beginnings of a storm, but you couldn’t see any clouds. You leaned out further to look and by doing so it gave you a clear view of Nima’s kitchen through a side window where you saw a clock resting against her wall. 3:37. Dank farrik. You jumped up.

“Karking⏤ Grogu!” You panicked. Shit, shit, shit. “Stop drinking, Nima.”

She mumbled a confirmation that you didn’t firmly believe then started sprinting back to the center of town. You had never, ever been late to pick up Grogu before. Guilt gnawed at you imagining Grogu looking for you in a crowd of parents and not being able to find you. Maker, how could you lose track of time like that? You got to the school in record time to find that all the kids were gone. Ms. Wynn was cleaning up around a room and she said Din had come and picked him up about ten minutes ago. 

As much as you wanted to avoid Din for a little while longer, you needed to see Grogu so you could apologize to him. On your way in you passed Mayfeld and Vanth who were standing in the lobby. They both raised their hands to greet you and you blew past them without preamble. You were a woman on a mission. 

“Grogu?” You called out, searching the room. Faintly, you could hear Grogu calling back to you and he waddled into the room a second later. You breathed a sigh of relief and knelt down to scoop him up into a hug. “I’m so sorry, baby. I am so, so sorry.”

“No sorry.” Grogu hummed giving your cheek a small pat making you chuckle.

The sound of a throat clearing had you glancing up to see Din leaning against the doorway that would lead back to his office. You were in an odd position because you were still upset at him from leaving you in the dark, but you were also ashamed and embarrassed at missing Grogu’s pick up time.

“Hi.” You mumbled awkwardly.

“I’m sorry.” Din blurted. Your eyes narrowed. Was he not going to address the ‘you abandoned Grogu’ thing first? “I should’ve told you sooner that Grogu and I are going to Mandalore.”

You slowly stood up with the cooing child in your arms. “You and… You’re taking Grogu?? To Mandalore??” If he heard the rising anger in your voice, he didn’t show it. “The planet that, again, we don’t know is even habitable?”

“Of course. Where I go, he goes.” Din shrugged nonchalantly. You blinked once, and Din finally seemed to catch onto at least one of the thoughts you had. “I want you to go, but I can’t pull you away from Nevarro. Not when you just started working in the clinic, and if I did choose to leave Grogu here that would just be added stress for you.”

Right. Because worrying about Din and Grogu on some wasteland of a planet wasn’t a stress factor. You locked your jaw and let out a slow breath through your nose. The boy in your arms seemed to latch onto the tension faster than his father did based on the worried looks he was bouncing between the two of you. Finally, you found your voice, “I forgot Grogu at school. I lost track of time. I⏤”

“It was an accident, I know. I’m not mad.” Din said calmly. 

He wasn’t mad. Din wasn’t mad, and somehow that made you even angrier. A part of you wondered if he was purposely not showing any anger in an attempt to keep you from being angry. One mistake for another mistake. Tit for tat. Maybe he was trying to make up for the fact that he knew he upset you, but you hated the calm demeanor he still seemed to carry. It occurred to you then, that you wanted him to be angry. You wanted to argue. The Mandalorian in front of you was the picture perfect example of composure and it pissed you off.

“You’re not angry.” You enunciated each word.

“Of course not, ner kar’ta.” Din shook his head. He drifted closer. “We should talk more about this trip⏤”

“Why?” You shrugged and pasted a large smile on your face. If he wanted to be composed then you’d be composed too. “I should check on the clinic one last time before heading home. I’ll take Grogu with me. Get as much time with him as I can before you boys go on your little adventure.”

Din shifted his weight from one foot to the other, a nervous tic you usually only saw at home, “Yeah. I might be late getting back. It looks like there might be a volcanic ash storm rolling in soon. Nevarro hasn’t seen one since before the guild left here.”

“No problem.” You said. “I’ll see you at home.”

Din began to take a step toward you, but you turned on your heel to leave with Grogu. You knew you were being petty, but right now you didn’t really care. If the two of you were playing mistake for mistake then this seemed fair too. You were petty to him and he didn’t tell you that he planned to leave you alone on this planet without him or Grogu. Tit for tat.

Din watched you leave with the sinking feeling that the interaction between the two of you had not gone well. Mayfeld stepped in with an incredulous look while Din continued to just stand with his arms crossed over his chest.

Mayfeld scoffed and motioned behind him, “How in the hell did you make it worse?”

Din mumbled a string of curses in every language he was familiar with and pushed past Mayfeld to leave. The man fell into step beside him. As much as he wanted to chase after you, he needed to help get the city prepped for the oncoming storm. Mayfeld, never able to take a hint, shook his head, “I mean, geez Mando. How is it you can string up a quarry in seconds, but can’t figure out how to apologize to a woman?”

“Where is Vanth?” Din asked, ignoring Mayfeld’s own line of questioning.

“Walking your girl to the clinic then home.”

Din locked his jaw. That was good to hear. He wanted to be the one to walk you and his son back to the safety of your shared home, but considering the circumstance he was just glad you weren’t alone. Din ordered Mayfeld to take the eastern side of the city and warn all citizens to bring in or tie down their outdoor belongings while he took the west. 

He didn’t get it. Had you wanted him to be angry at you? Din was a little peeved, it’d be a lie to say that he wasn’t. He had to leave work to pick up Grogu despite you taking on that responsibility this morning. Since starting at the clinic, you and him had taken turns, but Din liked to know beforehand so he wasn’t just up and leaving the station. If an emergency happened, where you were needed with a patient, that was more than understandable, but that hadn’t been the case. You had just lost track of time. A very human mistake to make, and honestly it was your first when it came to Grogu. So, yes, Din was a little peeved, but he wasn’t angry.

Din pushed it out of mind. You knew the truth, and he could better explain himself tonight when he got home. Right now, he needed to focus on the task at hand. 

According to Karga, the volcanic ash storms were quick but deadly. The closest volcano would spew out a hot and devastating breath of ash. It’d roll over the city, blanketing everything in darkness, but it usually was blown away and gone in a matter of hours. Din had heard plenty about them, but they had never occurred while he was planet side. As long as there was proper prep to begin with then it should be a smooth transition. Karga, ever the planner, had built the city buildings with proper metal shields to roll down over windows and doors in the case of a storm. Everybody would stay indoors for a half a day, and then they’d spend the rest cleaning up.

Din wondered if his helmet was equipped to withstand the ash. It should be. The beskar and his flight suit would keep the hot ash from burning his skin, and if his helmet worked correctly then the filter should keep out most of the dangerous ash. He only wondered in case he needed to venture out to save a citizen or two. They were making the rounds to tell everyone that staying indoors was an order, but Din knew with his luck one or two people would ignore the warning.

It took hours to ensure the entire city was ready to be locked down and make sure that Vanth found his place and that it worked for the man. Din had simply housed him in Cara’s old place. It was still furnished and it wasn’t like Vanth needed anything permanent. The storm was still being estimated at being 24 or 36 hours out. It would give Din, Mayfeld, and Vanth time in the morning and afternoon to run through the city once more for final checks.

“Hey,” Din called out as he stepped into the house with a sigh. When he rounded the corner he noted that you were in the kitchen alone and cleaning up. He glanced around, “Grogu?”

“Bathed and in bed.” You replied without missing a beat. “It’s late.”

“Yeah, sorry, getting the city prepped took longer than I thought it would.” Din groaned. “How was⏤”

“I have leftover dinner for you.” You interrupted him and motioned to the stove. “But I figure you’ll want to clean up first.”

Din nodded in relief, “Thank you.” You gave him a tight nod, a smile that didn’t reach your eyes painted your lips, and he paused before heading back to the shower. “Hey, you’re not going to bed are you? I wanted to talk.”

“I’m not going to bed.” You shook your head.

“Good.” Din turned and hurried off. From the moment Vanth let slip that he was leaving, Din had been craving to sit down next to you and explain everything. He wanted to take your hand in his and reassure you that everything was going to be okay, they wouldn't be gone long, and it killed him to leave you behind. Din wanted to explain that he was leaving to find redemption and revenge. Though, he wasn’t quite sure how you’d handle that information.

As Din washed the day off of him, he wondered how you’d feel about that? If he told you the absolute truth that he planned to find redemption in part so he could court you. If he told you that he planned on tracking down Daelar to rip the man’s throat out. He wasn’t positive how you’d handle either fact, but he was positive that he needed to tell you. Din was human, he made mistakes, but he made it a mission in life to not make the same mistake twice.

After getting dressed, Din carried all his armor, sans his helmet, into the room to set aside. He paused long enough to check in on Grogu and tuck the blanket thrown haphazardly around the hammock around the boy’s small body. “Nuhoy morut'yc, adi’ka.” Din readjusted the stuffed frog in Grogu’s hammock with a smile and left the room as quietly as possible. A nervous energy settled along his skin and he rolled his shoulders once, “Ner kar’ta?”

The kitchen was empty and Din titled his head in confusion at the finding. His eyes landed on a plate of food waiting for him on the island counter and drifted closer. Sitting beside the plate was a small note with the most passive aggressive of all smiley faces he had seen drawn.

‘Went out with Nima. Don’t wait up’.

Din aggressively tore his helmet off and the only thing that kept him from slamming it onto the counter was the knowledge that the sound would wake up Grogu. His nervous energy melted into irritation. Sure, he hadn’t clarified that he wanted to talk when he asked if you were going to bed, but Din knew his intentions had been clear. That’s why you had deliberately answered his question in such a specific manner. His hands clenched and unclenched as he took a slow and steadying breath. 

He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t. Din repeated this under his breath in an attempt to convince himself of it.

It was funny. The last time you sat in this cantina with Nima, in these exact chairs, the two of you had also been talking about Din. The subject last time was how awkward it was to tiptoe around him in his own home. Mashal Daddy, is what Nima had called him last time.

“Marshal Dickhead.” Nima scoffed before taking the shot in front of her. She pushed your shot glass closer to you and you tossed it back as well. The liquid burned the entire way down and you grimaced. It had been ages since you drank to this degree⏤ you were a light weight now. “That’s what he is.”

You shook your head. “No, he isn’t.”

“Okay, I need you to work on your shit talk.” Nima pointed at you. “Defending the person you’re complaining about is kind of redundant.”

You tapped your glass and the bartender wandered back over to pour the both of you another shot which you took without hesitation. Nima tried to get them to pour another, but you shook your head and ordered two mixed drinks instead. At least those had something other than straight liquor in it. 

“I’m pissed at him, but I don’t wanna shit talk him.” You replied.

“Then what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” You sighed. “I want to fight.” Nima gave you a questionable look and you shook your head. “Not physically. Maker, I don’t have a death wish.” Picking to tussle with a Mandalorian could possibly be the stupidest choice in the galaxy. “But I want to argue with him.”

Nima narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“Because I⏤ I⏤” Your words got caught in your throat and you tried to wash it down with a large swig of your drink, to no avail. It was dumb to want to argue, wasn’t it? Couples tried to avoid that. Not that the two of you were an official couple. You groaned and buried your face into your hands⏤ already feeling dizzy from the drinks. You wanted him to be upset with you, to feel comfortable enough around you to show that he was upset. Up until now, the two of you hadn’t had any real arguments. Sure, there were little tiffs here and there about nothing important, and it typically always ended with Din conceding the point with a shrug. Despite what most people seemed to think, you knew that towering wall of beskar had emotions. He had a lot of kriffing emotions, and you wanted to see all of them. Even the negative ones. 

“I think I get it. The ‘wanting to argue’ thing.” Nima said softly. You lifted your head to look at her and she gave you a small smile. The Twi’lek reached out to set her hand on your shoulder with a comforting squeeze. “You want to have hot, angry make-up sex.”

Despite the sullen thoughts weighing you down, her words made a loud laugh slip from your lips. Nima look affronted that you were laughing at her theory, but you just shook your head and let the laughter die down to chuckles.

“I was serious.”

“I know you were. That’s why it’s funny.” You replied and took another sip of your drink. “But, I think I want to have not angry sex with him before I go for the other stuff.”

Nima’s eyes widened, “Wait, you guys haven’t⏤” You shook your head. “What the kriff are you waiting for!?”

“I don’t know.” You admitted. It was a fair question. “I think we’re going slow.”

“But, why?” Nima replied. “It’s obvious the two of you wanna jump each other’s bones. Half the city thinks you’re already married to him.”

You furrowed your brow, “Yeah, why is that? I get that the evidence stacked against us is damning, but to just assume we’re married?”

“Oh, I’ve been telling everyone the two of you are married.” Nima replied.

“What? Why??”

“I don’t know.” Nima shrugged. “Seemed fun. Figure it’ll be true one day.”

You scoffed, “Well, it won’t be if he disappears on the cursed world of Mandalore.” 

The words fell out of your lips with more pain than you meant to convey. Nima’s face fell and you lifted your drink to knock back the rest of it. That was a possibility, wasn’t it? Din and Grogu leave you to never return. Then what? You live in the house you shared with them alone? Listening to the ghostly echoes of where they used to be?

“Shots.” Nima called out to the bartender. “We need more shots.”

The two of you were four more shots in when a familiar face wandered toward you. Vanth leaned against the bar on your other side with a smile that you could tell was concerned. “Hey there, ladies.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy!” Nima drunkenly lifted herself from her seat, nearly toppling over, and pointed at Vanth. “We aren’t interested. She’s married,” Nima pointed to you then pointed back to herself, “And I like pussy.”

Vanth’s eyes widened and you dragged her back down into her seat. “First, stop telling people I’m married. Second, stop announcing to the bar that you like pussy. And, third,” You motioned for Vanth to take a seat beside you which he did, “This is Cobb Vanth. He’s a friend from Tatooine and the replacement Marshal while Di⏤ Mando is gone.”

In your own tipsy stupor, you had nearly said Din’s name aloud. Luckily, Nima was too gone to notice and Vanth didn’t seem to care. He leaned over to over his hand in greeting. “It’s nice to meet you…?”

“Nima.” She replied curtly and held her hand out like a queen offering it to a peasant. You rolled your eyes, but Vanth just changed the position of his own hand to take hers with a small shake.

“Nima.” Vanth said. “Can I buy you two drinks?”

“I insist you do.” Nima nodded and pulled her hand away.

You chuckled with a shake of your head and tossed back the rest of the one in front of you so Vanth could get you a fresh one. Nima was babbling about something mechanical that you couldn’t follow along with and directing her words to anyone who glanced her way. 

“I’ve already apologized to Mando, but I feel like I owe you an apology too.” Vanth said. “I’m sorry about what happened on the tarmac.”

You snorted. “It wasn’t your fault for assuming Mando wasn’t keeping secrets.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it a secret.” Vanth shrugged, catching the bartender’s eye and holding up three fingers. He turned back to you. “I think the poor guy was just scared.”

“Mandalorians don’t feel fear.” Nima blurted out from behind you, apparently a part of the conversation now.

You shook your head. “I don’t care if he was scared as long as he tells me that he is.”

“Fair request.” Vanth shrugged. The drinks were brought over and you took a small sip of yours. The tipsy buzz floating in your skull was slowly shifting to just plain drunk, and a sadness crept in alongside it. You suddenly wished you were at home curled in bed⏤ curled in his bed. Listening to the soft snores of both him and Grogu. “So,” Vanth’s voice snapped you out of Din’s dark and safe room and back into the noisy cantina, “Where does that leave the two of you?”

“She’s dropping his ass.” Nima barked.

“Nima⏤” You whirled on her.

“You don’t need him! He’s abandoning you!” Nima cried and you took in the way her lower lip quivered for just a moment. “We don’t need either of them! They can⏤ They can go explore the kriffing galaxy or join the New Republic’s special forces team or whatever it is they want to do! We don’t care. We’re better than that. We don’t need them.” She turned and shook her head before taking a large sip of her drink. “I’m better off without her.”

You reached out, wordlessly, and pulled her hand away from the glass so you could hold it. Nima tangled her fingers with yours and squeezed once⏤ hers eyes glistening with unshed tears. You knew she had taken Cara’s departure worse than she wanted to admit. Nima was right. She didn’t need Cara. Nima was strong and beautiful and smart and incredible. Cara had been a friend but she had also been a bump in the road. She left selfishly when Nima needed her most, but Nima was going to rise above it. However, she had been wrong about you.

You did need Din. That’s why the thought of him leaving Nevarro was so jarring and painful. Coming here had been a way to escape your past and hide out, but you had never expected to find someone who would grow to be so important. Honestly, it was a bit scary if you thought about it for too long, but the truth was that you needed Din in your life. Him and Grogu. Without them, you’d have a gaping hole in your heart and you weren’t sure there was anything else in the universe that could fill that. Din hadn’t fully explained his reasoning, you hadn’t given him the chance, but you knew he wasn’t leaving you. Nima had been blindsided by Cara and left with nothing. Maybe it would’ve taken him forever, but Din wouldn’t leave without saying good-bye and you knew⏤ deep, deep down⏤ that he’d fight tooth and nail to return to you. 

“I’m sorry to ruin your night, Vanth.” You said, “But I think we’re gonna call it quits.”

“Don’t be silly.” Vanth shook his head. He tossed back his drink before rising himself. “I’ll walk you ladies home.”

You gave him a thankful smile knowing you were in no state to navigate to Nima’s house in the dark, put her to rest, then find your way back home yourself. Vanth chose to help Nima walk considering you had at least a little better control over your legs. The three of you stumbled out of the cantina into the warm night air⏤ it was time to go home.

Din didn’t have the time to put all his armor on, it was nearing one in the morning when his communicator went off, so he had simply thrown on the upper half of his flight suit, gloves, and boots. It left him in one of the more ridiculous outfits he wore considering his sweatpants did not match any item he adorned, but he just needed to get the door.

When he swung it open, Vanth stood on his porch with you in his arms sleeping soundly. He nodded toward your figure, “She was wide awake when we dropped off her friend, and was doing decent on the way here, but by time I reached the end of you street she was dozing off on her feet.”

“Thank you.” Din mumbled. He was quick to step forward and take you into his arms⏤ not enjoying the way you were snuggled into Vanth. Though he did appreciate the man bringing you home. “I really do appreciate this.” You shifted so you could bury your head into the crook of his neck and Din sighed. “Was she… How was she when you found her at the cantina?”

Vanth didn’t answer at first. He stared at Din for what felt like a long moment before looking at you then back to him again. Vanth chuckled, “I know I’m new to town, brother, so take this with a grain of salt.” He shook his head. “But it’s obvious she cares about you as much as you care about her. A fight now and then is normal, but don’t let it go on for too long. You don’t get time wasted back.”

“Thanks for the tip.” Din mumbled. 

Vanth gave him a quick nod before turning on his heel and leaving. Din shut the front door with his foot and carried you through the quiet house until he reached your room. The thought that you spent the night drinking until you were too inebriated to get home yourself bothered him more than he wanted to admit. You were a grown woman who could do what you wanted, but you had gone to specifically avoid talking to him. He found that incredibly annoying. 

It was like you were purposefully trying to rile him into lashing out, and that’s the last thing Din wanted to do. Din had a temper, but back during his bounty hunting years that was easily handled. He’d get angry, he’d go hunt a quarry and burn that emotion right out of himself. Now, he was in a setting where he didn’t have an outlet and he worked hard to keep that temper under wraps. Din had lashed out at Karga a time or two since his arrival, but that was expected and Karga was no stranger to his anger. 

Din settled you on your bed and began to carefully take off your boots followed by your socks and pants. He kept his gaze off your lower half as his only goal was to make you more comfortable. He stood and pulled your covers up to tuck you in. Din paused for a moment before pulling his helmet off and tucking it under one arm. He ran a hand through his messy hair and sighed. Maker, you were driving him up the wall. You had no idea the kind of fire you were playing with. It’s not like you were in danger, Din would tear his own heart out before hurting you, but he didn’t want to yell at you. 

“Ni aalar sha yaim ti gar.” Din sighed aloud. A reminder. He leaned forward to press his lips against your temple. Din would not lose his temper with you because he could not afford to lose you. He turned off your automatic alarm sitting on the night stand by the bed and wished you the same farewell he had to Grogu earlier in the night. “Nuhoy morut’yc, ner kar’ta.”

The headache you woke up with was nasty, and you swore in that moment to never drink again. Probably a fruitless promise to yourself, and not the first time you had claimed it, but right now you were miserable. You groaned and rubbed your face in your pillow before sitting up with a grunt. There was a weird amount of sunlight in your room and not just in ‘my poor hungover eyes are overly sensitive’ kind of way. You rubbed your face, glancing around, and it was then you realized the alarm sitting by your bed was off.

“Shit.” You breathed and jumped out of bed. The sheets tangled around your lower leg and you hit the floor with a curse. First you forgot to pick Grogu up from school and now you’d be late to taking him to school. Maker, you were so stupid. As reliving as it had been to drink and talk to Nima last night, it hadn’t been worth it for this. The speed in which you got dressed was startling and you burst into Din’s room to find it empty.

Your hungover brain realized much too late that this could’ve been bad if Din were in here with his helmet off. “Grogu??” You hurried out of the room and into the hall. When you stepped into the kitchen you were met with the smell of food and the sound of babbling. Grogu sat in his high chair eating with his father right beside him dressed and ready for work. “Grogu.”

“Ma!” Grogu greeted briefly before diving back into his food.

Din turned to stare at you and you rubbed your face in embarrassment, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why my alarm wasn’t on.”

“I turned it off.” Din shrugged. “Vanth brought you home late. Figured you needed to sleep in.” Din rose from his seat and began to try and clean Grogu up from the mess he had made of breakfast. “You’re fine. I can take Grogu to school this morning.”

“What?” You gaped in disbelief. 

“What?” Din echoed. 

“You hired me to take care of Grogu while you worked and I am failing at that right now.” You spat.

Din scoffed. “Failing is a bit dramatic. You made a mistake. It happens.”

“I show up passed out from drinking on a work night, and your response was to tuck me in and turn off my alarm??” You said as your voice began to raise. “Seriously??”

“Wasn’t a work night.” Din replied calmly. “I wasn’t on schedule.”

You groaned in frustration, “That’s not the damn point, Din!”

“Then what is the point?”

“The point is you’re supposed to be upset! You’re supposed to be angry!” You snapped. Grogu cooed nervously from his seat and you bit back as much of your anger as you could. “It’s a normal human response. Why can’t you just admit that you’re angry at me!?”

Din set his hands on his hips and shook his head. “Why do you want me to be angry at you so badly?”

“Because I want you to be human around me!” You snapped.

Din stiffened, and as much as you hated the way you worded that, you thought maybe it would be the line that pushed him over the edge. Instead, he just gave you a tight shrug. “Sorry. I didn’t realize I wasn’t being human around you.”

“Really?” You laughed in broken disbelief. “You’re not even going to react to that shitty thing I just said?” Din remained silent. “Whatever. I’m taking Grogu to school.”

“You don’t have to do that⏤”

“Actually, I do.” You replied sharply and scooped the boy up from the chair. Grogu reached up to set a hand on your face and you sighed⏤ momentarily finding peace. When your gaze lifted up to spot Din once more the peace fell away. “It’s my job. Remember? Might as well do what I was hired to do while Grogu is still in Nevarro.”

Din didn’t respond. He stood stock still. Enough so that a stranger could walk in and confuse him for a droid. On your way out, you scooped up Grogu’s bag by the door and hurried out. There was a sharp, acidic tang in the air that greeted you and you flinched at the smell. The sky was uglier than it had been yesterday, but you were already late so you pressed on. 

The entire rushed walk to school, you spent it apologizing to Grogu for yelling at his father in front of him. You shouldn’t have lost your temper in front of the child. As if he understood the situation entirely, Grogu babbled along with you and continued to give your face small pats of reassurance. Right outside of the school, Ms. Wynn stuck her head out to greet you.

“Hey, Wynn. I am so sorry about yesterday and for being late this⏤”

“Hurry, get in.” She grasped you by the wrist and tugged you inside. She shut the door tightly behind you and you glanced around the room to see all the children being kept busy by the other school workers. You gave Ms. Wynn a confused look and she sighed. “The storm is coming sooner than everyone thought. The watch people are estimating it to hit city center in the next twenty minutes or so. You can’t be outside.”

You shrugged, “I can get to clinic in fifteen.”

Grogu wiggled and whined in your arms so you set him down so he could run off to play with his friends. Ms. Wynn shook her head. “No. It’s not worth the risk. Volcanic ash storms are incredibly dangerous. The entire city is locking up right now.” You still thought you’d be able to make it, but before you could argue further your communicator began to beep. “I’ll let you take that. I need to start class.”

You nodded and watched her walk off before activating your communicator. “Hello⏤”

“Ner kar’ta?” Din’s voice crackled to life⏤ panic evident. “Where are you and Grogu??”

“At school. Wynn just locked us in for the storm.”

“Good.” You heard Din breathe out a breath of relief. “Just stay there until the storm passes. It should be over by this evening.” There was an awkward pause of silence before he cleared his throat. “If you need anything, call me. Please.”

“I will.” You replied. Then added, “You’ll be safe at home, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” You hummed. “I’ll, uh, talk to you later.”

The call ended miserably and you wandered to the side of the room where you could drop into a chair. The good news was you wouldn’t have to worry about Grogu like some parents probably worried about their kids. Minutes later, the sound of strong wind and debris rattled the metal sheet covering the window you sat by. It made you jump in alarm and you silently thanked Wynn for stopping you.

That had come much sooner than twenty minutes.

You had to applaud Ms. Wynn and the other workers for their tenacity. The storm outside sounded miserable and terrifying, but the kids seemed nonplussed by it with the way the teachers distracted them. Around the end of the first hour, Aayla contacted you to ask about a few people who had wandered out into the storm and then stumbled into the clinic. Most of the injuries had been superficial⏤ the exposure short term as they came from nearby buildings. You walked her through how to mix some paste for burns.

It was during the second hour that the patients got too complicated for Aayla.

“I don’t know what to do, Doc.” Aayla’s voice shook. “I keep having him use his inhaler, but after a few minutes he ends up needing it again.”

“I’m worried he’s scorched his lungs. His asthma making it that much worse.”

“Do I mix a paste? Or⏤ Or make a solution?”

You sank in your seat. It was a solution that needed to be made, which you trusted Aayla to do, but that fluid then needed to be aerosolized. That way the patient could breathe it right into his lungs. Working with the machine that did so was tricky and even you weren’t the best at it. You hated the idea of getting Aayla to attempt it only to make a mistake and take on that guilt herself. She was still new to medicine. That kind of guilt shouldn’t be weighed on her conscience considering she hadn’t been trained for this.

“What’s his oxygen status right now?” You asked.

“It’s in the mid-80s and that’s with an oxygen mask on.”

Dank farrik. He might not make it to the end of this storm. The patient could crash much sooner than that. You gave Aayla a few orders to keep the man stable then pushed to stand. You caught Wynn’s attention and the woman drifted closer after helping a child with a small task. She gave you a warm smile, and you returned a skeptical one.

“Hi. So, I need a jacket, scarf, and some sunglasses.”

Wynn warned you against your idea, but you were dead set. You had no choice. So, ignoring her advice, you pressed on. You soaked the scarf in cold water then wrapped it a few times around your mouth and nose to use as a makeshift filter. The glasses would hopefully at least protect your eyes a little, and the jacket was to cover up the remainder of your skin. You were thankful you hadn’t worn shorts today. 

You had traveled to the back door to leave that way none of the ash would slip into the same room as the kids. It would take you 15 minutes to get to the clinic. It was now or never, you supposed.

Din was furious. His temper running hotter than the volcanic ash whipping around him. As it turned out, his helmet would keep out the dangerous conditions surrounding him. Grogu’s teacher had reached out to him to let him know that you had traveled out into the storm to reach a patient. She had done so to ensure that someone else was aware of the situation. Din had thanked her before rushing out himself. 

He asked one thing of you today. One. 

He just wanted you to stay inside the kriffing school with Grogu. It wasn’t asking a lot considering the literal fire and ash raining outside. It was common sense for someone to stay inside. Din was literally just asking you to follow common human survival instincts, yet you still left. You left, not protected in beskar as he was, but rather dressed in a wet scarf and jacket. As if that was going to help a karking thing.

Din tried to hail you over the communicator but it never got through. He told himself it was because of the storm. If even a little ash got into the communicator it’d glitch. That had to be it. Din refused to believe anything could have happened to you. Still, fear mingled with his rage, but he chose to ignore that for the time being.

Black and gray wind swirled around him, whipping his cloak in every direction, as flickers of burning ash drifted in the air. It was so thick that he could barely see a few feet in front of him. If he wasn’t careful, he could step right over you on accident and not even know it. The thick ash was beginning to settle on the ground in thick piles like the snow of Hoth. When he reached the clinic doors, he saw the metal shutters were down. Din didn’t hesitate to slam his hand against the metal as hard as he could.

If nobody opened the door soon he’d break through the shutters. Sure, ash would collect in the clinic lobby, but he’d deal with that problem later. Luckily for everyone, the shudders cracked open and Din quickly slipped through. Miriam, the new girl, had opened the door for him. Din didn’t mean to blow her off, but he sped past her. She was clever enough to open the second set of doors without him having to have asked. 

Inside the room, were a few people sitting on the cots or against the wall with a pink paste rubbed into splotches on their skin. Aayla stood in front of an older man who was struggling to breathe. A nebulizer, the same kind of machine that blasted a mist of medicine for Grogu, was being held up in front of his mouth.

“Where the kriff is she?” Din snapped.

Aayla nervously stiffened in place. She pointed out of the room, “There’s a small break room down the hall. She’s⏤She’s in there.” Din spun to leave, but Aalya called out to him. He nearly ignored her until she spoke again. “I think she’s more injured than she lets on. There’s some leftover pink paste from the last batch for her skin burns. Right now, she’s using the other nebulizer.”

Din huffed out a small thanks before snatching the jar off a side table and following her instructions out of the room. He wasn’t familiar with the back halls of the clinic, but he didn’t need any more clues to find you. Halfway down the hall he could hear a barking cough. Din picked up his pace then threw the break room door open hard enough that it slammed into the wall.

You startled where you were sitting at a table with a nebulizer mask held in front of your face. Your eyes widened in surprise and you opened your mouth to begin to say his name only for you to begin coughing violently. Just for a moment, his anger subsided. Din hurried over and set a hand on your shoulder to evaluate your injuries.

“Injuries. What’s wrong?”

“Just⏤ Just some burns.” Your voice was hoarse. “Worst of it⏤,” You began to cough again, “Lungs. In my lungs. Medicine will help.”

You took a few more deep breaths of the nebulizer and Din let his eyes trace your exposed skin. There were patches of mildly burned skin on your hands and on your forehead and upper cheeks. The pattern made it clear to see the shape of the sunglasses you had worn. Din tore off his glove and threw it aside rougher than he intended. Your eyes widened but you didn’t say anything. Din dug his fingers into the paste and began to rub it over every single burn he could see on you⏤ no matter how small. 

When he was appeased that he got every single injury, Din shoved the jar aside angrily and huffed, “Are you out of your damn mind?”

“No.” You replied. Your voice already sounding better. “It’s not like I had a choice.”

“Excuse me?” Din narrowed his eyes at you.

“I had a patient who needed me.” You shrugged. Then, you had the audacity to roll your eyes and mutter under your breath, “Just relax, Din.”

Din pushed to stand so fast that the chair he sat in went sprawling back and you jumped at the sound. He set his hands on the table and leaned toward you. “Relax? Did you just tell me to kriffing relax??” You stared at him silently, and Din took a step back with a shake of his head. He scoffed. “Relax.” Din felt his blood boiling under his skin. “Bic ni skana'din.”

“Din⏤”

“No.” Din snapped. “You’re going to sit there, and you’re going to listen to me.” He leaned in once more. “You wanted me angry? Well, now I’m angry! Dank farrik! What the kriff were you thinking!? I told you to stay in the school. I made myself very clear.” He slammed a hand down onto the table in frustration. “Do you realize how badly that could’ve ended?!”

You set down the nebulizer mask, “Din, I had to⏤”

He reached out to snatch the mask from the table where you set it and forced it back into your hand. Din shoved your hand up so it was holding the mask by your mouth once more. “No, you didn’t. Those patients look fine in there.”

“The old man wasn’t.” You snapped back with a glare of your own. “He might not have made it till the end of the storm.”

“Was there a chance he could’ve?”

“I mean, I guess, but there was just as equal of a chance that he wouldn’t. I⏤”

“Then that’s the risk that gets made.” Din yelled. “You don’t risk your life like that ever again. Do you hear me!?”

“I’m a physician!” You cried. “What would you have me do, Din? Risk him dying⏤”

“Yes.” Din reached out and wrapped his hand gently on the side of your face. Din was breathing hard, his rage making him shake, but he kept his touch soft as he forced you to face him. “That’s exactly what I would have you do. I don’t give two shits about him, but you I can’t live without, ner kar’ta. Is that not clear to you!?” 

You shook your head. “You don’t mean that. You wouldn’t risk him dying.”

“Wouldn’t I?” Din let out a harsh laugh. He wouldn’t risk one of the citizens of his city dying. In your shoes, he probably would’ve done the same thing⏤ but that wasn’t the point. Din sucked in a sharp breath trying to get back to the point he was making. “If I tell you to stay put, in order to keep you safe, you will listen to me. Do you understand?” Your eyebrows furrowed deeper and Din understood the immediate distaste for his words, but he didn’t care. “I said, do you kriffing understand?”

The nebulizer stopped on it’s own and you tossed aside the mask before standing up with a scoff, “I understand, but I’m not promising you I won’t do the exact same thing again.” You tried to walk around the table, out of his reach, but Din mirrored your movements and met you on the other side to block you in. You shook your head. “This is my job. Helping people is what I do. I’m not going to put people at risk just because you don’t trust me to be competent enough to succeed.”

Maker, you were the most frustrating woman⏤ Din’s hands found his hips as he leaned into your space. “You think it’s a trust thing?” He barked out an angry laugh. “All it takes is one mistake, one miscalculated step, and that’s it. It’s not about competence or about trust. It’s about gambling, and I’m not going to let you gamble your life away for a stranger.”

“As if you’ve never gambled your life for a stranger before?? I highly doubt that.” You spat. “Din, you’re a good man and if you think⏤”

“No.”

You narrowed your eyes. “What?”

“I said, no. I’m not.” Din said through clenched teeth. You were going to be the death of him. He was vibrating with frustration. Fear grabbed control of him at the realization that this was who you were. You were good, to your core, and this was going to keep happening. It was clear on your face that you didn’t believe his words. You weren’t getting this, and Din wasn’t good enough with words to get you to. Resolution settled in his mind, determination, and his next words came out in a low growl. “Close your eyes.”

You blinked almost owlishly. “Huh?”

“Close your eyes, ner kar’ta.” Din demanded, his hands traveling to his helmet without pause. Your eyes widened in alarm before shutting tight. It scrunched your features up. Din tore his helmet off and slammed it onto the table before closing the space between the two of you.

Din had never kissed someone before, which seemed ridiculous considering the other acts he had performed, but the idea of it seemed easy enough. His hands found your jaw and he tilted your head up enough that he could press his lips firmly against yours. Din held them there until he felt your entire body slowly relax. He pulled back just a bit and opened his eyes to see your features had softened though your eyes remained closed. Din’s nose brushed against yours, unable to bring himself to pull away from you any further. He mumbled the next words out, exhausted, but tightened his grip around your face in hopes to get his message across loud and clear, “I am not a good man. I’m a selfish man, and there is nothing I wouldn’t do⏤ no line I wouldn’t cross⏤ to keep you and Grogu safe.” Din leaned his forehead against yours and sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I kissed you without asking permission. I just… Ner kar’ta, I cannot lose you and I didn’t know how to…”

“It’s okay.” You mumbled. “I‘ll forgive you on one condition.”

“And that is?”

“Kiss me again.” You breathed. You wrapped your arms around his neck, pulling yourself up to your toes, and Din didn’t hesitate to meet you halfway. His lips pressed against yours once more, but this time it wasn't so simple. It was messy, for lack of a better word. Your lips moved against his, furiously, and Din mimicked every action. It was as if the anger of your argument had shifted and transformed into this moment right here. Teeth clashing against teeth, tongue pressing against tongue. The kiss was desperate and felt like a battle. You versus him in a competition to devour the other, and Din was never one to back away from a challenge. 

He hooked his arms under your legs, lifting and turning, so he could set you on the table. Din’s hands shoved aside the nebulizer machine that sat in the way and he heard the device clatter against the tile floor. He’d buy the clinic a new one. Din pressed into you forcing you to either catch yourself by reaching back or continue clinging to him. You chose to keep your arms around his neck, wrapping around even tighter, and Din had to readjust and wrap his arms around your waist to keep you both from collapsing onto the table.

Din took a chance by nipping on your lower lip and the moan that left you was the perfect reward. He licked into your open mouth, a similar action you had done to him, and it deepened the kiss once more. Finally, breathlessly, Din was forced to pull back just enough to get air. You were panting as well⏤ the only sound in the room being the heavy breaths you shared between one another and the howling storm outside.

“I’m sorry I forgot to pick up Grogu.” You said and the disappointment in your whispered words made his chest ache. “I’m sorry I left last night instead of staying to talk. I’m sorry for yelling at you this morning.”

“No, I’m sorry.” Din replied. “All of this could’ve been avoided if I had just told you about Mandalore. I also promise to get more angry at you if you promise it’ll always end like this.” The soft, breathy laugh that left your lips was like a reassuring melody. You were safe. You were in his arms. You were okay. Din let out a breath of relief. “Ner kar’ta…”

You tilted your mouth against his to let a soft kiss linger against his. The exact opposite of the kind of kiss the two of you had shared. You sighed, “Why did it have to come to this? Why wouldn't you just admit you were upset with me?”

“I… I was worried about scaring you away if I lost my temper.” He admitted. “Things felt so good between us, so perfect, I didn’t want to ruin it.”

“Telling me how you really feel is never going to ruin anything, Din. I want that. I want to know what you’re thinking.” You replied. “Fighting isn’t always a bad thing.”

Din pressed his lips softly against yours once⏤ twice⏤ three times. “I can see that.” Maker, maybe taking his helmet off was a bad idea. After getting to feel your lips against his it was going to be twice as difficult to maintain his control. “I need to put my helmet back on, ner kar’ta.”

You chuckled and set a soft kiss against his cheek before releasing him. Din took one more second to stare at you, unhindered by his visor, and he loved the way your lips were swollen from his. He grabbed his helmet and tugged it back on. When it was back in place he let you know. It was cute the way you peeked out of only one eye, just in case, before letting both open. 

“I think I’m ready to talk about Mandalore now.” You shrugged. “Unless, you have something better to talk about?”

Din chuckled and gave you a small shrug. “We can talk about how you were my first kiss, if you’d like.”

“I am?” Your eyes widened. “Seriously?” He nervously gave you a small nod⏤ face burning under his helmet. “Oh man, I am so sorry. If I had know I would’ve⏤ would’ve⏤ I don’t know. Been gentler?” Din laughed at the concern drawn all over your face. Your lips twitched up but you gave him a small shove. “I’m serious! Maker, I was basically going for your tonsils…”

Din lifted a hand to hold your chin. “I’m not complaining.” He leaned his cold forehead against yours. “And by the way, I am proud of you. I’m so proud of everything you do. I… Can you promise to at least call me before you do something risky?”

“Yeah.” You nodded. “I can promise that.”

Din would take the victory where he could.

mando'a translations:

Nuhoy morut'yc, adi’ka

Sleep safe, little one.

Ni aalar sha yaim ti gar

I feel at home with you.  

Nuhoy morut’yc, ner kar’ta.

Sleep safe, my heart.

Bic ni skana'din.

Expression of being angry or repelled, i.e. ‘that really ticks me off’

@aheadfullofsteverogers @yyiikes @kneelforloki @c-ms1ut @sgt-morgan @luthienaliceisilra @fawn-kitten @missbabyjay @coldlamaspersonspy @dilfsaremyfavourite @jamesbuckybarnes @yorkeylover @teawrites01 @emily-roberts @djarinxore @impala1967666 @shelbyteller @faithrenner @dindjarindude @dankfarrick29 @rh1nestonecowg1rl @garbo-lesbo @anythingforattention @tearfulsolace @onceinamando @catharinaroxastovaova @uwu-i-purple-youu @modiddys-blog @harriedandharassedd @stagerightlauren @mini-bees @xxinvisblexx @adoringanakin @sagegreensensei @spidey-3 @sydney-1209 @thepascalofus @hrtsforpascal

[mylifeisactuallyamess]

The Keldabe Kiss

A/N: It’s no secret I actually despise February 14th (whether I’m single or not!) and so I fall back on my boys to help me through. Don’t ask, I’m complicated. This year the lucky guy is Tech 🥹 honestly my clone fixation has blown up recently and I’m not even sorry. (I use that tag a lot.) I wrote something simple for him.

Summary: Festival of Love has come to Ord Mantel (yes I fucked with the timeline.)

Warnings: none except this is based on a little universe I have going on in my head where the Bad Batch rescued a medic and nicknamed her Stitch. F!Reader (I can’t remember if I stipulated that in the fic so just covering my ass. If could be GN I honestly can’t remember.) Mention of children (Omega.) It’s kinda fluffy.

Word Count: 3.5k+

You stood outside Cid’s parlour, watching some people put up flickering lights ready for tomorrow's Festival. You’d been so set on going, never having the opportunity to experience something like this before as you’d always been on the run or ‘avoiding the locals', your father had called it. These things were never fun alone though.

The wistful sigh couldn’t be contained but your sinking mood was lifted by the group coming toward you. Their armour was distinctive, marked with orange and grey, carrying their helmets as they eyed everyone with a healthy dose of suspicion. You knew where they were heading and you waited to side until they reached you.

“Ah, Stitch!” Wrecker grinned joyfully at you and barged past his brothers to grab you in a bear hug, lifting you clean off the ground.

“Wrecker!” You giggled, momentarily losing your balance after being swept off your feet. Hunter automatically reached out to steady you with a firm hand to your shoulder followed by the softening of his gaze. “Good mission?”

“Depends on what you’d define as good.” Hunter muttered and moved past you revealing Tech who made eye contact for a brief second.

“That bad?” You asked and fell into step beside the younger looking clone.

“Well no one was injured, so I think you’d class that as a successful mission. Cid, not so much.”

“Ah,” you understood perfectly. They left you at the bar with Omega and you glanced at her fallen face, wondering how you could cheer her up. “There is a festival tomorrow,” you told her.

“What sort of festival?”

“It’s a celebration of the best things in life. There’s going to be stalls selling special items, different food, they are putting decorations up and I heard, there might even be fireworks.”

“Fireworks??” Her brown eyes shone with wonder.

“Want to come with me?”

“Oh yes! Hunter, can I go with Stitch?” Omega swivelled on her stool and you looked up at the tired group as they all grabbed a drink.

“Go where?” He asked, his tone laced with doubt and you wondered if you should have offered at all.

“Oh it’s nothing…” you tried to gloss over it but once Omega got her teeth into something she didn’t let it drop.

“It’s not nothing! It sounds really cool! There might even be fireworks,” she parroted. “I want to go.”

“You’re talking about the festival, tomorrow?” Echo huffed as he slumped on the other side of you.

“The Festival of Love originated from Endor and has since been recognised in places like Naboo, Coruscant, Ord Mantell and other places. The Festival is to honour kinship and love. Traditions include exchanging gifts, eating meals and…dancing.” Tech lowered his datapad and glanced at the expressions on his brother’s faces.

Echo sighed and turned to look around the bar like he wasn’t even part of this conversation, Wrecker grumbled something about wanting to play dejarik and sidled off. Hunter’s shoulders slouched like he couldn’t think of anything more tedious while Tech had his nose in his datapad, probably scrolling through more facts.

“I don’t mind taking her,” you mumbled.

“You can’t take Omega on your own,” Hunter instantly said, causing Omega to cross her arms and sulk. “Plus we have another mission for Cid tomorrow.” He leaned closer to the little girl and you could see the regret etched on his tattooed face. “I’m sorry, Omega.”

“I never get to see anything fun!” She pushed away from the bar and stormed off to find Wrecker.

“Handled that well,” Echo muttered.

“You could have stepped in,” Hunter shot back hotly.

“May I suggest an alternative?” Tech appeared at your shoulder, taking Omega’s vacant seat.

“You’re going to anyway,” Echo snarked under his breath and you raised an eyebrow but Tech didn’t even notice the other clones' sour tone.

“If it’s Omega running off you’re worried about, I can watch her. I’ll make her wear a tracker.”

“Tech! You can’t put a tracker on a kid!” Hunter nearly spat out his drink in shock and stared incredulously at his brother.

“I can. I have before and she didn’t seem to mind.”

“Did she know?” You asked Tech gently, making him look up from his datapad as he thought about your question.

“Actually, no.”

“I don’t think she should go and it puts us at a disadvantage if Tech stays behind.”

“Not so,” Tech cut across Echo. “You don’t need my particular skill set for this mission.”

“He’s right,” Hunter agreed and Echo just rolled his eyes in response. A strained quiet settled over the group only broken by the sounds of the parlour and Tech’s tapping on his datapad. You clutched your drink, feeling bad that you’d not spoken to Hunter first, of course it was his decision if you took Omega or not. “All right, fine!” Hunter grumbled and then downed his drink. “Plant a tracker on her and do not let her take it off. Plant one on Stitch while you’re at it, we can’t afford to lose her either.”

“Gladly,” Tech blinked owlishly at his own response and his fingers stilled on the screen.

“Well! Now that’s settled I’m going to head back. I’ve had a long day.” You emptied your own cup and slipped off the stool, hoping no one would notice the silly smile you couldn’t suppress at the idea of Tech putting a tracker on you.

“Tech…” Hunter jerked his head in your direction and then went off to find Omega and no doubt tell her the good news about tomorrow.

“Of course.” To your surprise the datapad was put away and he stood, looking at you with an air of expectancy. “You were leaving?” He reminded you, a hint of uncertainty in his voice like he worried he’d missed something.

“You’re coming with me?” Tech swallowed and adjusted his specs as his honeyed brown eyes met yours for just a second.

“Hunter is worried about you walking back at this time. Crime activity has increased by 28 percent in this section and I believe it’s why he wants you and Omega to have an escort tomorrow.”

“Oh.” You stood there stupidly for a second, trying to gather your skittish thoughts. “It’s not necessary,” you eventually managed to say.

“I believe it is.” You couldn’t argue against that so you didn’t protest anymore and he followed you out. The street was almost empty, just a few people with their heads down as they went home. Tech kept a watchful eye, his hand never straying far from his DC-17s. He stayed about half a step behind you almost bumping into you when you stopped at your door.

“Well, we made it.”

“So it would seem. I have yet to check your residence.” You sputtered out a laugh but he only continued to stare at you as he waited for you to admit him.

“You’re serious. Ok, sorry about the mess.” The door opened and the lights came on automatically. You went to go in but he put out an arm to stop you, dropping the visor down over his specs and stalking into your apartment that also doubled as your treatment room.

Your droid woke up at the movement beeping out a greeting, coming forward a few steps before the power seemed to disappear completely from it and you huffed as it slouched lifelessly. Opening the front panel you stared completely clueless at the wires wishing you could afford to get the damn thing fixed.

“The charging ports might need replacing,” Tech announced his arrival from scouting out your place. “I could run a diagnostic if you like?”

“It’s late, you’ve barely been home.”

“Home is a state of mind.”

“Yeah…” he was right. You’d never had a place you could really call home. So home being a feeling rather than a place was the most accurate thing you’d heard in a long time.

“Another time then,” Tech said. “Your place is clear. I shall be back tomorrow with Omega.” He walked towards the door and you followed, desperately wanting to say something else but not sure what.

“Tech…” he turned at the sound of his name and you really tried hard not to gaze directly into his eyes, knowing that made him uncomfortable. “Be careful. On the way back.”

“Always,” he saluted you with two fingers before disappearing round the corner. You closed and locked your door letting out a frustrated sigh. Of all the clones to harbour secret feelings for…

Your droid looked like a patient, laid out on the table with its wires hanging out as you tried to repair it, not wanting to put Tech out. He had better things to do than maintain your equipment. The door alarm sounded and you quickly smoothed down the material of your outfit, your heart fluttering a little at the idea of spending the whole day with Tech. And Omega.

The latter wrapped herself around you as soon as your door opened, her mouth instantly going as she spilled her excitement. You grinned at Tech and his tense expression, beckoning them inside. Omega went straight to your table, standing on a supply crate to have a proper look inside the droid.

“Did she sleep much?” You asked him noticing the way he clutched his datapad and glanced over at the mess your droid was in.

“She slept less than the normal amount,” he informed you matter of factly. “Echo was not amused.”

“Not a lot amuses him at the moment,” you replied dryly.

“Echo believes we should be doing more against the Empire rather than just hiding. He cannot help it.” You hated to admit Tech was right. He seemed completely unruffled by the conversation and you admired his utter acceptance of his brothers.

“Are you ready?”

“Yes!” Omega leapt down and hurried to the door. “Come on! We don’t want to miss anything!” She shouted and you smiled at Tech as he refrained from rolling his eyes.

“I’m not actually sure we can miss an all day event,” Tech called after her. “You forgot this.” You locked your door and turned to find him holding out a tracker on the palm of his hand, the light blinking innocently.

“I don’t think Hunter was serious about one for me,” you half laughed but Tech stayed standing in your way with his hand held out.

“He was. And so am I.” You took the tracker and slipped it into your pocket, Tech lifted his datapad and pressed a few buttons. “Perfect signal.” For some reason that made you so happy that you’d pleased him over something so simple.

“Are you guys coming?” Omega appeared around the corner eyeing you both just standing in your doorway. Tech brought up the rear as you reached for Omega and she clasped your hand eagerly.

The festival wasn’t what you expected at all, it was so much better. The streets were lined with pink and red coloured streamers, all fluttering in the breeze. Bunting stretched from one side of the street to the other and the lights were flickering. You couldn’t wait to get the full effect of it when it was dark.

Omega danced from stall to stall, her excitement contagious and you found yourself caught up in her joy and zest for life. Tech trailed after you both, suffering the chatter, loud noises and heavy crowds. Keeping himself occupied by noting down new facts or recording anything he found remotely interesting.

You happened upon a stall run by a twi’lek, your stomach rumbling at the fresh meilooruns. You approached the stall noticing the usually orange fruit had a purple tinge to the rind. You’d never had this variant before but before you could ask for one Omega was tugging on your hand and dragging you to look at something else.

Soon even Omega was flagging, but her eyes were still wide from all the sights she’d experienced. Her bag was full of trinkets and she’d bought something for each of her brothers. You felt honoured that she had asked for your opinion, enjoying the feeling she instilled inside you. She really was something special.

As darkness fell you suggested getting a good view for the fireworks and began to head in the direction of the seating area when Tech stopped you.

“I have a better place where we can watch the fireworks, away from the crowds.”

“Is it far?” Omega asked, chasing it up with a yawn.

“It’s approximately 0.5 klicks from our current location,” Tech rattled off as he adjusted his specs, the light of the datapad reflected in them.

“I can make it,” she said cheerily but you heard the fatigue in her voice, especially if she had been up early hassling her older brothers.

Now Tech took point, leading you away from the streets where the festival was still in full swing. You wanted to question him but instead you decided to trust him. Tech had never let you down yet. Your interest peaked when he told you to climb an outside staircase. Omega went first with no hesitation, climbing to the top of the seemingly abandoned building and gasping loudly.

“Oh…wow.” You looked up at the sky, mesmerised by the amount of stars that dotted the black sky above you. Tech had led you to a place on the edge of town that wasn’t affected by the lights of the festival, giving you an incredible view of the stars and no doubt the fireworks when they started.

“I calculated the amount of noise and light pollution from the festival. From that I was able to survey an appropriate place where it was quiet and had uninterrupted views.”

“Tech…this is amazing!” You gushed.

“He checked it out last night,” Omega said slyly and Tech looked at her in shock. “What? I was awake when you snuck out. Now I know what you were doing.”

“Clearly I wasn’t as subtle as I thought,” he muttered, reaching to adjust his specs again.

“Oh look! Seats!” Omega dropped her bag and fell into one, turning to wave you over.

“Were these you as well?” You asked Tech quietly.

“The fireworks are supposed to last approximately 15 minutes. I had assumed that by being on your feet all day and chasing Omega, you’d want to rest.”

“You assumed correctly.” Omega had taken the middle seat, cuddling up into you when you settled beside her. Tech sat on the other end, his trusty datapad in his hand as he counted down to the fireworks; and they started exactly when he said they would.

The fireworks were the best moment of the day, filling the sky with glittery flashes that lit up the world all around you. Omega laid her head in your lap and you rested a hand on her side watching the display together. You revelled in the deep bangs that seemed to explode in your chest and the fizzling crackles that popped in your ears. You’d never seen something so eye-catching and you were sorely disappointed when they finished; just a plume of white smoke the only evidence that they had happened at all.

“She’s asleep.” You glanced down at Omega and sure enough her eyes were closed, even breaths passing through her slightly open lips as she lay completely relaxed in your lap. “You’re good with her.”

“You think so?” Biting your lower lip you glanced over at Tech to find him looking at you both with a strange expression on his face that he tried to hide.

“I know so. Due to her nature she is exceptionally accepting but she does seem to favour you.” Gently you swiped some blonde strands out of her peaceful face, regretful that you were going to have to wake her soon.

“I think she’s great and after everything she’s seen and been through…she still has this innocence about her. She’s a credit to you all.”

“I don’t see us having much influence over her,” Tech said and you scoffed at his words.

“She idolises every single one of you.”

“That’s nice to hear,” you turned to find Hunter, Echo and Wrecker coming from behind. Tech stood up and greeted his brothers. Wrecker reached down and plucked the sleeping child from your lap, cradling her in his massive arms.

“Look at her,” he whispered in his gravelly voice. “This is the quietest she’s been for days!”

“Don���t wake her then, Wrecker!” Echo hissed as they made their way carefully down the stairs.

“Was it worth it?” Hunter asked you and the smile that spread over your face told him everything he needed to know.

“Thanks for lending us Tech. He did actually put a tracker on me,” you told Hunter who let out a soft chuckle.

“Good. I’d be having words with him if he didn’t.”

“You know, I’m scrappy. I can look after myself.” Hunter fixed you with a knowing glare and it reminded you so much of Tech for a moment.

“It’s what we do. Anyway we need you, Stitch. More than we like to admit.”

“Medics are everywhere,” you told Hunter with a quick roll of your eyes.

“Not ones, as good as you.” The pair of you stopped and looked back at Tech who came to an abrupt halt. “Well,” he adjusted his specs and lifted his datapad. “Stitch has performed 107 successful repairs on all of us together, the most drastic being my broken femur from the failed mission on Serenno. Not to mention the blaster shot to your chest and Wrecker’s shoulder. Also her continual observation of Echo…” Hunter gave his brother a lopsided smile and clapped him firmly on the shoulder.

“Now you’ve listed her best accomplishments, you can walk her home.” He melted into the shadows suddenly leaving you and Tech alone in the dark.

“Do you know the best route? I’m still not familiar with this part of town,” you admitted shyly.

“It won’t take us long,” he reassured you. The walk was quiet, you weren’t sure what to say to him and your feet were beginning to ache something drastic. You followed Tech onto a street you were familiar with and fished around in your pockets for the tracker.

“I should give this back.”

“Keep it. I have plenty.” Tech said quickly. He glanced at you and then continued. “It’s a modified one, with a panic option that goes straight to my datapad. Should you ever need it.” Your fingers closed round the tracker, suddenly finding it the most precious thing you had.

All too soon your door loomed and the pair of you stood under the small light that flowed on the outside.

“Tech…?”

“Yes?”

“I got you, something.” He watched curiously as you opened your bag and pulled out a small box, taking it gently when you offered it to him. “I hope it’s useful.” He opened the lid and revealed a brand new All-kit tool. The handle had a rubber grip, the alloy shiny from having never been used. At first Tech didn’t say anything, just reaching for the tool and you panicked, thinking you’d got something he really didn’t need. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know if you had one, I’ve never noticed you with one.”

“I don’t,” he interrupted. “I didn’t have one, until now.” He looked up to see the relieved smile cross your face and a small frown appeared on his own. “You shouldn’t be so worried, I am always in need of tools and this…” he pulled it from the box and with a flick began to cycle through the different heads. “It’s immediately my favourite,” he reassured you. “Which reminds me…” he put the box in his bag and extracted something that had you gasping a little. “I saw you looking at these but not actually buy one.” You took the purple fruit from his hand, trying not to over think the fact you both gave a gift during the Festival of Love. He probably didn’t realise the depth of the tradition and you were fine with that. Although out of the whole squad, he’d be the only one to know.

“Tech, thank you so much.” Emotion coloured your tone and you stepped closer to him. Gently resting a hand on his shoulder you made your intentions clear expecting him to pull away. When he didn’t you went ahead and planted a soft kiss on his cheek, breathing him in as you did. He lifted a hand to rest against your elbow, as though he was steadying you both. Your eyes were still closed as you pulled your lips into your mouth, reluctant to move away just yet. Tech’s quick breath fanned over your face as he pressed his forehead against yours. His fingers tightened on your arm and you both stood like that for a moment, just drinking in each other's closeness.

“Tech?” His com lit up with Hunter’s voice and you separated. Clearing your throat you backed up and allowed him to answer, telling Hunter he was all right and was just making his way back.

“Thanks, Tech.” You swallowed down the huskiness in your voice. “For today, for all of it. Get back safely, please.”

“Always,” he said, touching two fingers to his forehead and giving you the casual salute. “I’ll be back tomorrow to fix your droid.” He told you, walking backwards down the street, his gaze still fixed on you.

“I’ll be here,” you answered, leaning on your doorframe and watching him leave.

“I know.”

[alwayslurkinginthebackground]

Meant to Happen - A "Kissing You" Drabble

Pairing: Frankie Morales x f!reader Warnings: Mostly just fluff, brief mention of drug use, Santiago is kind of an asshole (sorry, Santi, I love you), mentions of mental illness, nothing too crazy on this one friends Word Count: 2k Prompt #68: A tender kiss on your lover's chest a/n: My schedule has been nothing short of pure insanity, and my brain is doing that thing tonight where I’m convinced I’m not good for anything, so here’s a Drabble I’ve had in edits for ages about Frankie feeling kind of the same way. Mostly it’s just exposition with a tiny bit of fluff but sometimes the brain writes what it wants to write.

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It was never really meant to happen. 

Frankie had been Santi’s best friend since their days in special ops, but you’d been friends with him even longer. As kids, you and Santi had raced around the block on your bikes, and as teenagers he’d taken you to every dance with the very clear stipulation that you were not dating. Not that you thought you were; things had never been like that with him, and up until several months ago, they hadn’t been that way with Frankie either. 

When Santiago returned from service, a whole handful of new friends came along with him, and you fit into their little group with ease. You knew they’d seen some shit, every one of them, but it was Santiago’s behavior upon their return that was the hardest to ignore. It was clear that where Benny found his focus in the ring and Frankie found his in little white lines on the kitchen table, Santiago liked to drown out his demons by focusing all his energy on one particular task. 

Finding you a date. 

It was all in good fun, although you’d punched him more than a few times after he’d texted you about meeting up only to never show, leaving you alone with some sleazeball he’d met at the gym. He’d introduce you to every eligible single at parties like you were on an episode of the Bachelorette, and he’d purposefully make sure that there weren’t enough seats in the living room at game night whenever he brought someone new for you to meet. You always sat in Benny’s lap instead, just to spite him. 

He had your best interests at heart, you knew that, so it didn’t bother you too much when it became an ongoing joke, one that was only encouraged by Will and Benny, who were quick to point out that they were single too. Tom usually took your side, coming to your defense when you reminded them that you weren’t really looking for anything. And Frankie…well, Frankie was usually quiet. He’d watch from the sidelines as Santi went on about how you’d never want to date the likes of them anyway. 

But then they left. All five of them, heading to South America for a mission that they didn’t want to talk about. You knew Santi was behind it, and that the others weren’t keen on going, but it was apparent that everything changed while they were gone. 

You only knew what happened in general terms - hard not to when Tom didn’t come home - but no one would tell you the full story. Santiago ignored your texts, and then he left for months without telling you where he was headed. Will and Benny came around to check on you, kept up with weekly get-togethers, but deflected whenever you asked how they were doing. 

Frankie was the only one to confide in you. You weren’t quite sure how the conversation started, but you do remember the way he let you pull him into your arms and the way he cried against your chest. His nose had been tucked into your neck, tears wetting the collar of the old t-shirt you wore that night as he finally purged the emotion pent up inside him. 

Later, when you settled him in your bed, you held him as he slept the whole night through, for what you suspected was the first time in months. It was like a switch flipped, and while you’d spent years telling yourself that Santiago was right, that Frankie wasn’t your type, you had to admit that it was much harder to deny your feelings once he was laying in your arms. 

What followed was a hurricane of secrets and stolen moments. You suspected that Benny figured it out after a couple of weeks, when you’d chosen Frankie’s lap over his at game night. Santiago hadn’t been there, still off in God knows where, and you’d naturally gravitated toward the man you tiptoed on calling your boyfriend. But if he did notice, Benny said nothing. Neither did Will. 

Frankie had practically moved in within the span of a few weeks, and you relished in the little life you were building together. Mornings filled with blueberry pancakes and quick kisses on the way out the door. Afternoon rendezvous in the cab of his truck that left you both on the brink of quitting your jobs, just so you could stay a bit longer. Evenings spent together, lounging on the couch as you introduce each other to your favorite shows and movies. All leading to late nights that felt too easy, even amongst the horrors you both struggled to cope with.

His struck often, and you had your own too, things from your past that you shared with him in the comfortable darkness of night, blankets wrapped tightly around you both. And as one night turned into another, and then into weeks, followed by months, you wound yourself tighter around each other until you were nearly inseparable. 

And then Santiago returned. 

For all the guilt and shame that weighed on the shoulders of Will, Benny, and Frankie, you were certain that Santiago felt it all and then some, but he acted as though the past eight months hadn’t happened. But you knew him, and you knew that the dark circles under his eyes, overgrown hair, and half-hazardly trimmed beard were all signs that he was still struggling to deal with the loss of one of his best friends. The rest of your boys had each other, had you, but he’d been dealing with it all on his own.

And you just had to go and make everything that much harder.

It took Santi all of five minutes to figure out what was going on. You thought you’d been subtle with your stolen glances, waiting for the right time to tell him, but he’d picked up on the way you easily maneuvered around one another in the kitchen, as though you’d done it hundreds of times. And he’d been right - you had. 

You’d discussed on occasion how you thought Santiago would react, and while Frankie had been hesitant, you’d been steadfast in your opinion that your friend would be happy for you both. Happy that Frankie was showing you exactly what it means to be loved, and happy for him that you were quieting his nightmares - the ones that came in the dead of night and the ones that haunted his waking hours too.

But as it turns out, Frankie was right to be skeptical.

Whatever insecurities Santiago was facing, they came out disguised as warnings about Frankie. Mostly things you knew already, about his drug use and the loss of his pilot’s license, failed relationships and Frankie’s lack of a secure financial situation. For every rebuttal, he had another argument lined up, and at some point, you’d stepped in between him and Frankie, certain that even if he lashed out at his friend, he’d never take a swing at you. 

But that didn’t stop your knuckle from making film contact with his jaw the second he told you that Frankie would never amount to anything. Frankie was pulling you back immediately, arms secure around your waist as Will pulled Santiago outside and forced him into his truck to drive him home. Benny quietly made his way to the kitchen to clean up so you wouldn’t have to, and Frankie followed him after encouraging you to retreat to your bedroom.

You’re wearing a hole in the floor when Frankie joins you a few minutes later. Your hand hurts, but anger is still coursing through your veins, so you barely feel it. In fact, you’re barely paying attention as your boyfriend slips through the door, slowly closing it behind him.

“I can’t believe him,” you shout as you pace away from Frankie, your feet carrying you toward the bed and then back toward the door. “Some best friend he is if he can’t even be happy for us.” You continue your routine. “He’s one to talk, after all, disappearing from the face of the Earth, leaving us all here without a clue as to where he is, or if he’s even alive, only to come back and pretend that he knows what’s best for us.” 

When you turn back toward Frankie again, you realize that he’s still standing at the door, his forehead resting against the wood, and your anger is quickly replaced with concern. 

“Hey, you okay?” you ask, the gentle whisper of your voice a stark contrast to just moments before. He flinches lightly when your hand runs up his back, and you instinctively pull away. “Frankie?” 

When he turns, you know he’s the furthest thing from okay. His eyes, which you now know to be so full of life and love, look cold and distant. He’s frowning, the creases in his skin more apparent than usual, and you itch to smooth them with your fingers. He reaches for you this time, and suddenly you’re in his arms, his body melting into your embrace. 

“I’m worried about him.” 

His voice seems small when he speaks, but you know that the depth of his emotion is anything but. Your brow furrows and you sigh, running a hand down his arm to tangle your fingers with his, pulling him toward the bed. Frankie follows without protest, allowing you to settle him between your legs so his body rests on top of yours, head tucked into your neck the same way it had been that first night. 

“He’s going to be okay,” you reassure him, although there’s a significant part of you that doubts your own words. He doesn’t respond, and you press kiss after kiss to his skin, whatever you can reach. When his tears start to dampen your shirt, his quiet sobs shaking his body, you only thank whatever gods might be out there that he trusts you enough to be this open. 

Time ticks by, the evidence of such reading on the clock next to the bed, but you pay it no mind. Your fingers have been locked in his hair for ages now, tangling in his curls and tugging in what you hope is a comforting motion. And it must be, because neither of you move until his breathing has evened out, the only remnants of his tears the occasional sniffle. 

“What if he’s right?” 

You barely hear his whisper, but anger flares in your chest nonetheless. You hate that Santiago did this. “He’s wrong,” you state firmly, hoping that he’ll believe you, even though you know he won’t. Not at first, at least. 

Frankie, predictably, shifts away, rolling off of you and to your side as he runs a hand over his face. “Everything Pope said is true, though.” 

Your body follows his, seeking out his warmth as you ease a leg over his thigh to tangle your limbs back together. 

“Like what? Tell me exactly what he said that’s true, because I don’t believe a word of it.” You accentuate your words by kissing away the remains of his fallen tears. 

It takes a bit for him to respond, but his thoughts are so loud you can nearly hear them. Still, you wait, and when he speaks his voice is quiet. “He said that this was never supposed to happen.” 

You know he’s referring to you, to whatever this between you might already be and what it might still become, and you make a mental note to kill Santiago later for putting doubt into Frankie’s mind. Doubt about himself, mostly, but also about you. 

You reassure him that you love him, because you do, and you’re pretty sure you always have. For every date that Santiago set you up on, for every new suitor he brought home, your happy ending had been there all long. And as you press a soft kiss to your lover’s chest, right above his heart, to prove to him that you’re here, you remind him of the one thing you’re more certain of than anything else. 

“That’s where he’s wrong. I think this was always supposed to happen.”

Masterlist | Previous Drabble | Next Drabble

[am--f]

Hollis Frampton, "A Stipulation of Terms From Maternal Hopi" (1973/75)

1. [] = The radiance.

2. ]D[]Y[ = Containers to be opened in total darkness.

3. ]PS[]L[ = A drug used by women to dilate the iris of the eye.

4. ]H[]H[]L[ = Epithet of the star ]S[]S[]N[*, used while succulents are in bloom. 

5. ]PT[]Y] = Last light seen by one dying in the fifth duodecad of life.

6. ]XN[ = Heliotrope.

7. ]TL[]D[ = Rotating phosphenes of 6 or 8 arms.

8. ]BN[]T[ = Shadow cast by light of lesser density upon light of greater.

9. ]V[]TR[ = The pineal body; time.

10. ]XR[ = The sensation of sadness at having slept through a shower of meteors.

11. ]MR[][ = The luster of resin from the shrub ]R[]R[, which fascinates male babies.

12. ]NX[]KT[ = The light that congeals about vaguely imagined objects.

13. ]DR[]KL[ = Phosphorescence of one's father, exposed after death.

14. ]SM[]N[ = Fireworks in celebration of afirstborn daughter.

15. ]GN[]T[]N[ = Translucence of human flesh. 

16. ]TM[]X[]T[ = Delight at sensing that one is about to awaken.

17. ]TS[]H[ = Shadow cast by the comet ]XT[ uponthe surface of the sun.

18. ]R[]D[ = An afterimage. **

19. ]D[]DR[ = A white supernova reported by alien traveller.

20. ]K[]SK[ = A cloud; mons Veneris.

21. ][]Z[]S[= Ceremonial lenses, made ofice brought down from the high mountains.

22. ]KD[]X[ = Winter moonlight, refracted by a glass vessel filled with the beverage ]NK[]T[.

23. ]P[]M[]R[ = Changes in daylight initiated by the arrival of a beloved person unrelated to one.

24. ]G[]S[ = Gridded lightning seen by those born blind.

25. ]W[]N[]T[ = An otherwise unexplained fire in a dwelling inhabited only by women.

26. ]G[]GN[ = The sensation of desiring to see the color of one's own urine.

27. ]M[]K[ = Snowblindness.

28. ]H[]R[ = Unexpected delight atseeing something formerly displeasing.

29. ]H[]ST[ = The arc of a rainbow defective in a single hue.

30. ]L[]L[]X[=The fovea of the retina; amnesia.

31. ][]R[ = The sensation of satisfaction at having outstared a baby.

32. ]ST[ = Improvised couplets honoring St. Elmo's Fire.

33. ]V[]D[ = The sensation of indifference to transparency.

34. ]Z[]TS[ = Either ofthe colors brought to mind by the fragrance of plucked ]TR[ ferns.

35. ]X[]H[ = Royal expedition in search of a display of Aurora Borealis.

36. ]T[]K[]N[=Changes in day light that frighten dogs.

37. ]Y[]X[ = The optic chiasmus (Colloq.); abysmal; testicles.

38. ]N[][]T[ = The twenty-four heartbeats before the firstheartbeat ofsunrise.

39. ]F[]X[= A memory of the color violet, reported by those blinded in early infancy.

40. ]T[]Y[]Y[ = The sensation of being scrutinized by a reptile.

41. ]B[]NM[ = Mute.***

42. ]N[]T[]N[ =The sound of air in a cave; areverie lasting less than a lunar month; long dark hair.

43. ]S[]TY[ = The light that moves against the wind.

44. ]B[][ = Changes in one's shadow, after one's lover has departed in anger.

45. ]N[]GR[ = The fish Anableps, that sees in two worlds.

46. ]RZ[]R[ = The sensation of longing for an eclipse of the Moon.

47. ]H[]F[ = Stropharia cubensis.

48. ]S[]LR[ = Familiar objects within the vitreous humor.

49. ]W[]X[][ = A copper mirror that reflects only one's own face.

50. ]MN[]X[ = Temporary visions consequent upon trephining.

51. ]G[][]KR[ = Cataract.

52. ]RNpW[ = Hypnagogues incorporating unfamiliar birds.

53. ]M[]D[ = A dream of seeing through one eye only.

*Probably Fomalhaut (alpha Piscis Australis). **Also used as a classifier of seeds. ***Standing epithet of ancestral deities.

PDF

[catdemontraphouse]

Note: referenced a post by @thedarkestcrow several times which I think is a really interesting one. Can’t seem to paste in the link🤨🙄 it was an ask answer about Sebastian’s contract

Hey also if anyone can tell me how to do “read more”on mobile… please tell me 😂🤦‍♀️

Just some character uh, idk analysis/hypothesis??

The more I think about it, the more I reckon Sebastian’s problem is that he has an unfortunate mother hen syndrome which he either isn’t fully aware of OR, more likely, is aware of but actively tries to deny. This is of course going off the assumption there is no governing body for demons like there is for reapers since we’ve never seen anything like that? And that Sebastian’s contract is something he made up for himself with no actual consequences outside his own judgement.

Sebastian goes above and beyond to critique and perfect the conduct of other people who are under his authority. His contract (which I won’t even get into atm lol) only states the following stipulations as far as I recall:

Yet he goes out of his way to not just keep OCiel alive but to rear him as he sees fit. He tries to feed him balanced meals and regulate his sugar intake, he demands the child brush his teeth well, instructs him diligently in various academic subjects etc.

Some of this you could argue is for the sake of the mission, i.e. making OCiel as versatile and cultured as possible in order to maintain social connections necessary for revenge. But I kind of have to wonder, is it even necessary? Like is that degree of adhering to societal expectations really required to reach the end goal? I mean maybe I’m wrong here but I feel like there’s other cheaper, quicker ways they could investigate who’s behind the cult than making alliances with other nobility and whatnot. 🤷‍♀️ Sebastian seems to spend more time teaching OCiel dancing or Latin than bloodily interrogating suspicious people who might be connected to the cult.

Same could be said for how Sebastian treats the servants. He praises them when they manage to or at least make good efforts at upholding high standards of etiquette and efficiency in their roles as housekeepers, even though he knows that isn’t really what they’re useful for. They were hired to be bodyguards in essence. I get that they want housekeepers around to make it look “normal” so people won’t question the Phantomhive household but I just find Sebastian’s dedication to molding them into proper servants a little more intense than is probably necessary? Could be he is just tired of doing everything alone but also this guy built a wholeass mansion in a night alone with magic. He could magically clean the whole house alone if he really wanted to, probably? Or maybe he’s running low on MP from not eating lol. Idk I’m just saying he seems to almost enjoy being a teacher even if his students piss him off.

He tells Will he’s “tired of messily sampling every dish available to him” and how that’s his reason for basically starving himself. I guess it would be like… idk a farmer raising a single giant pumpkin and waiting to eat that instead of growing lots of crops and eating regularly? An obsession with cultivation at the expense of well-being.

At one point the reaper says this about Sebastian compared to other demons:

This suggest you don’t *need* to make a contract to eat a soul, which would mean Sebastian’s suffering is self-inflicted. Because he’s obsessed with rearing and tending to things.

He says he enjoys “playing butler” and what that behavior translates to in Sebastian’s day-to-day life is essentially being a care giver. He enjoys raising and caring for things weaker than himself.

We see a similar behavior when it comes to cats. The main difference here I think is that cats dont seem to be considered demon food as far as we can tell. He doesn’t ever try to write off or hide his love of cats. Keep that in mind for later.

He also mentions that there are pets in his world but he basically indicates that he finds them ugly and unappealing. So having affection for other beings doesn’t seem to be an unusual thing for his species per say? It’s just what they find cute is very different from Sebastian.

There is no discussion of the demonic world other than this, Sebastian never returns there or mentions having friends or something akin to family there etc. He never spends time with other demons in the manga canon even though this panel kind of implies they have some sort of world or society? He seems oddly divorced from his own kind, doesn’t he? Or is that just me that thinks so idk

I think ultimately Sebastian finds what is, for his own kind, considered probably ugly and stupid livestock somehow endearing and cannot really cope with that. He is probably considered weird or creepy by members of his own species, and while he’s aptly aware of that he can’t help but be amused by humans and want to impress them. He doesn’t just fulfill the contract he goes out of his way to do it in a fashion that makes humans go “oh wow.” It’s not for the sake of impressing other demons!! They’re not watching. He doesn’t associate with other demons, ever. Only reapers, who I might add were once human dunno if that matters tho. He wants humans to *like him* he goes out of his way to charm humans that will do nothing for him except satiate his own ego and attention span.

But he eats them to survive. And also as a demon, he isn’t supposed to grow attached to humans. So he’s battling with this cognitive dissonance constantly, I theorize. Like he kills and eats people but at the same time, he likes raising them like pets? He loves teaching them things and is proud when he cultivates a human that really stands out among other humans. I have reason to believe he is an outcast in his own society and part of him is pained by that? Idk it’s all speculation but I’m fuckin autistic and stuff so I have to write essays about it.

I can’t find the damn video but there was this one VA live reading of a hypothetical scene where OCiel is dead after Sebastian ate him and he’s still going thru the motions of celebrating the kids birthday like… WTF? This man ate his pet and realized it was a mistake major wtf moment

Sebastian is like one of those Karens that breeds exotic cats and gets competitive at CFA shows…my human is a prime specimen give me an award

[valentinstjohn]

appearing to be 38, this 541 year old true vampire is a well educated alchemist and scholar. he is the founder and head of a private invitation only club of vampires called the caliburn club, whose mission statement is for the betterment of vampires. he strives to create a viable substitute for blood so that vampires are no longer restricted in their diet and can walk through daylight unharmed.

​🇵​​🇪​​🇳​​🇳​​🇪​​🇩​ ​🇧​​🇾​ ​🇰​​🇮​​🇲​ . . ​🇵​​🇸​​🇹​ . .

       𝓫 𝓲 𝓸 … 

TW: War, Non-Sexual Non-Consent, Fire, Body Mutilation.

The life he had as a human is but a distant memory for Valentin, whose only claim to it remains in the form the name he was given at his birth, Fionnan Malone, which he has long since stopped using. His becoming a vampire was a result of the 40 Seasons War that raged between the different kingdoms and while he does not recall most of his life as a human, the way in which he became a vampire is a memory he can’t forget, nor the way he had been unable to stave off the ravenous hunger for blood. It made him flee his once human life, too afraid to inadvertently kill any he had once cared for. 

He didn’t know his sire well, mostly knowing them as a voice in his head issuing demands and various tasks that he couldn’t deny. For years he’d been ravaging towns, preying on innocents, a shadow in the dark that stole lives and was hunted for it simply because he needed to feed in order to survive and for years he’d let himself believe that it needed to remain as such, but no more. 

Valentin turned to science, to educating himself on the anatomy of his fellow vampires, learning everything that he could about their species and their unique abilities and conducting experiments. He discovered his own innate powers, if well fed he could control and manipulate his own blood, change its properties, alter its cell structure to make it dense and hard like crystal or steel or turn it to vapor. The vampire who had turned him now made her grand reappearance into his life, perhaps she believed she could use his abilities to her advantage. She turned him into a true vampire with the belief his powers might grow and once he was freed of her influence, he never again followed a single one of her commands. Upset with the loss of a potentially great ally, she left, spiteful. With his age, he was no longer burdened by his thirst for blood and could manage his abilities and emotions masterfully as an artist and precise as a surgeon. 

After the end of the war, he spent the better part of the next two centuries conducting various experiments and formulating a club of other elite vampires with  shared interests as his own. His research and acclaim brought him to the various kingdoms and courts across the continent where he was ever in search for more scientific and alchemical advancements. Test subjects were easy enough to come by, often they would seek him out once his reputation reached their ears, for the promise of further enhanced abilities drew out the power hungry, and existing vampires seeking respite from the daylight or their bloodlust brought the desperate to his doors. Most were unremarkable and then one day, an aasimar approached him with an offer and she was remarkable. Something about the components of her blood and the way in which he had turned her had worked. She was the first vampire he’d spawned through his experiments who didn’t face insatiable bloodlust in her new life. This was a breakthrough, however, the promise of turning her had come with a stipulation, to find a way to restore the once aasimar now turned vampire with her wings which had been tainted. 

This was a scientific mystery to the vampire and he spent countless days locked in his lab running test after test, trying to find a way to restore the wings to their once radiant celestial glory and more importantly, allow the woman to not be poisoned or killed by the transplant. She was his first major success and his first major defeat at once and she found a way into his heart in a way he could not have anticipated. Out of everything he had created or done, she would always and forever be, his masterpiece. Even when she, in her emotional despair at seeing him experimenting on her wings – something which he had tried to prevent her from witnessing for he had seen the desperation in her eyes when she spoke of the restoration of her wings and knew without a shadow of a doubt she could not tolerate the sight of them being experimented on – destroyed his work and his lab and his estate, he did not fault her for it, nor did he hold any resentment. 

The fire she had started nearly destroyed everything but he had managed to save a few key notebooks that held some of his more important calculations and also her wings. He did not, however, come out unscathed. Despite his regenerative powers, a mixture of various chemicals and elements exploded in his face during the fire and he forever lost his left eye. The scientist in him only upset that he did not know the exact mixture of this solution that had rendered his regenerative powers unable to restore his lost eye, but this also only incited his interest to recreate it and noted this down as a future experiment to perform on another. A replacement of his eye came from a fae and provided him with a new form of sight, now able to see through fae glamour and other secrets. 

The loss of his estate not great for he had many residences across the continent and he needed only remove himself to the next one but the loss of his more recent work set him back a few decades and he needed to regain what he had lost. He attempted to seek her out but found that something magical was blocking him, this however did not prevent him from continuing to try and restore her wings, nor did he stop seeking her out. 

       𝓼 𝓽 𝓪 𝓽 𝓼 …

NAME: valentin st john AGE: 541 GENDER: male PRONOUNS: he/him SPECIES: true vampire FACE CLAIM: cillian murphy

HEIGHT: 5'10" HAIR COLOR: brown EYE COLOR: blue (right), black (left) WEAKNESSES: direct sunlight, blood lust, needs to be invited into private and holy residences, pure silver, his grave dirt STRENGTHS: immortality, regeneration, enhanced senses, can control and manipulate his own blood, can see through fae glamour or secrets with his left eye PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: he has fangs which he can retract and descend at will, otherwise he has a generally average looking build and features save for his left eye which the iris is black in color as opposed to his natural blue. it is the eye of a faerie which he plucked out and made his own. ADDITIONAL INFO: his ability to see through fae glamour is linked exclusively to his left eye, if removed this is no longer an ability he has. he smokes a tobacco blend of his own making that is infused with crushed fae bones which allows him to glamour his left eye so that it can appear to match his natural color. he gets many of his volunteers for his experiments through making a deal, fulfilling their desires in exchange for their becoming a test subject for his latest alchemical or scientific interest.

[aplacetosharemyfics]

Mary Poppins: The Opportunity

Grace stood in the street watching the scene she’d missed the day before. The children’s mischievous antics brought a chuckle to her lips. She wanted to go and examine the shopkeepers’ wares, and listen to the stories they spun about their products.

“Miss!”

Running towards her, waving her hand, was the woman who’d given her bread the day before. Looking closely, Grace recognised the unofficial uniform of a seamstress: dress heavily patched with many assorted colours and types of fabric, pins tucked into the seam or cuff for easy access. “I was hoping to catch you.”

As the woman paused to catch her breath, she snuck a glance up at Grace. Gone was the pitiful girl who looked like she had nothing more to lose in the world. She straightened up in relief.

“Are you still looking for a job?”

Grace nodded. A blossom of hope was forming. What this the opportunity Mary Poppins was talking about?

“If you can sew, we’ve got an empty position at our shop.”

A saviour, Grace thought, clasping the woman’s hands and thanking her. Not only had she shown her kindness in her darkest hour, when even her friends had turned her away, she had given her a chance.

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

Finally, late that evening, just before the post office shut, Grace slipped through the door. The bell jangled above her head. From behind the counter, the postmaster glared over his spectacles, making sure to pointedly check his pocket watch before placing it prominently on the counter. Thankfully, the young woman only wanted to check her postbox, and it was low enough that he didn’t need to risk climbing the rickety ladder. Inside was a single letter. She thanked him kindly and left, the bell jingling its merry tune along with Big Ben in the distance.

When she’d moved to London, her mother had insisted on setting up a postbox so that, no matter where she ended up, their letters would reach each other. Her mother had passed peacefully a few years ago, but Grace still routinely checked the box. Just in case. The letter clutched in her hand now would be the first letter she had received since.

The streets were quiet and, as Grace walked, she examined the letter. The paper it was written on was expensive, the same quality her boyfriend would receive business communications on, and she felt a sense of guilt as she noticed how her fingers had already dirtied the clean whiteness. Stopping under a streetlight, she squinted at the scrawled text. She blinked. She read the letter again. She chuckled nervously.

The contents of the letter explained that, when her mother had passed, she had left behind a will with the law firm Simms & Co. It was one of their senior lawyers that was contacting her, a Mr. Alburn. The will stipulated that most of her mother’s belongings be donated to charity, excluding a house in London which was to be left to her only daughter. However, the poor man, when he went to contact the daughter, couldn’t find her. It was only luck which helped him to chance upon a postbox key amongst her mother’s possessions which led to him finding her address along with the many letters she had written to her mother that had never been collected. If she would kindly meet him at his office, he would hand over the letters and the key to the house.

A bubble of excitement sat in her chest. Surely, there was no harm in meeting him, or at least checking the address. After all, it wasn’t as if she had any money for him to steal.

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

The office was impressively large and ornate. It took a few minutes for Grace to psych herself up enough to enter, standing out amongst the crisp business suits. A disgusted expression crossed the clerk’s face as she approached. But even though she could see him motioning for the guards to be on standby, he didn’t throw her out. Not yet.

“I was told to come here.”

She pulled the letter from her pocket, pushing it across the counter. The clerk, whose seat was placed high up so he could look down on visitors, leant forwards. Wrinkling his nose, he picked the paper up by the very corner and peered at the contents. His eyebrow twitched. His lips pursed. With a hard-done-by sigh, he dropped the letter on the counter and slipped off his chair.

“Follow me.”

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

The house was nestled in the middle of a quiet street, two-storied with an unusually large quantity of bedrooms and a massive front room overlooking the street. Just inside the front door was a large wooden staircase leading to the second floor. Upstairs was mostly bedrooms, though various rooms had been repurposed into studies, playrooms, or simply storage. A large bathroom sported a clawfoot bath with bronze fittings, and a spare water closet could be found on the other end of the corridor. Downstairs, and past the stairs, a passage led back further into the house, doors leading off into the kitchen, a scullery, more bedrooms, and another bathroom. The kitchen was wonderfully spacious with a long countertop running around most of the room. The large living room was near the front door, carefully positioned so those seated in the living room would not be visible from the person standing at the door. However, this feature was slightly foiled by the bay window through which the living room was visible.

Grace paused in the living room. She’d explored most of the house, familiarising herself with what was now her house. But now she stood in front of the fireplace staring up at the large family portrait that hung above. On one side, a tall imposing gentleman stood with his black hair slicked back and a bowler hat held preciously at his hip. On the other was a fair lady who leaned in over the child, a hand resting protectively on their shoulder. And, finally, in the middle sat a young girl. Grace knew that girl. She’d seen her before. It was her mother.

Prev - Chapter List - Next

[acquis12345]

Recommended Changes to 12 Key Exemptions of Annex III of RoHS

Specific technical exemptions are subject to ongoing evaluations in accordance with Article 5 of the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive. The consultants' report, also known as Pack 23, covered their recommendations for 12 exemptions to Annex III of the directive and was released in December 2022.

Because they apply to substances and materials that could be included in your products, understanding these exemptions is essential to maintaining your access to the EU market. Although these are merely recommendations to the European Commission regarding whether to extend or revoke an exemption, the commission typically follows the consultants' recommendations; consequently, it is essential for manufacturers to be familiar with recommendations pertaining to substances in their supply chains.

What an Exemption Is and Isn't An exemption lets a restricted substance be used in some situations for a short time. Pack 23 focuses on Annex III, one of the RoHS Directive's two lists of exemptions.

The equipment categories 1–7 and 10 exemptions covered by this report were set to end on July 21, 2021; July 21, 2023, for categories 8 and 9 of equipment; also, July 21, 2024, for class 9 hardware (modern observing and control) and class 11 gear. The exemptions remain in effect until the European Commission decides on the renewal application, as stipulated in Article 5(5) of the RoHS Directive.

Technical Exemptions Examined in Pack 23 of the Report These technical exemptions were examined to determine whether or not they are still necessary and relevant.

4(f): Mercury in other discharge lamps used for special purposes that aren't mentioned in this Annex 8(b): Electrical contacts containing cadmium and its compounds, 8(b)-I: Electrical contacts in circuit breakers, thermal sensing controls, thermal motor protectors (other than hermetic thermal motor protectors), AC switches, and DC switches contain cadmium and its compounds. 9: In absorption refrigerators, hexavalent chromium can be used as an anti-corrosion agent for the carbon steel cooling system up to 0,75 percent by weight in the cooling solution 9(a)-II: Up to 0.75% hexavalent chromium by weight, utilized as an anticorrosion specialist in the cooling arrangement of carbon steel cooling frameworks of retention fridges, intended to work completely or part of the way with electrical radiator, having a typical used power input ≥75 W at consistent running circumstances or intended to work with non-electrical radiator completely 13(a): Lead used in optical applications in white glasses 13(b): Cadmium and lead in channel endlessly glasses utilized for reflectance principles 13(b)- I: Ion-colored optical filter glass types 13(b)-II containing lead: dazzling types of optical filter glass made of cadmium; applications not covered by points 39 and 13(b)-III of Annex III: Lead and cadmium in glazes that are used in reflectance standards 15: Lead in solders to complete a functional electrical connection between the carrier and semiconductor die in integrated circuit flip chip packages 15(a): In integrated circuit flip chip packages where at least one of the following criteria applies, lead in solders is used to complete a viable electrical connection between the semiconductor die and carrier: a semiconductor technology node that is at least 90 nm in size; a single die in any semiconductor technology node that is at least 300 mm2 in size; stacking die packages with silicon interposers or die that are 300 mm2 or larger. The findings of the consultants for each exemption are listed below.

Extensions Using the Current Wording Exemption 9(a)-II Consultants suggested that Exemption 9(a)-II be extended until December 31, 2025, but only for equipment of Category 1 (i.e., large household appliances). Since the applicant only requested that the renewal be extended for equipment in category 1, it is suggested that the exemption be revoked for all other categories (2–7 and 10).

Equipment Categories 1–7 and 10 are currently covered by the exemptions 13(b)-I and 13(b)-II. It is suggested that:

The exemption be extended to categories 8, 9, and 11 beginning one year and one day after the delegated directive's publication. For medical devices in category 8 and monitoring and control instruments in category 9, a maximum validity period of seven years is recommended. For categories 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, and 11, the exemption is extended for five years; however, it is only extended for four years for categories 1 (large household appliances) and 4 (consumer equipment). Extensions with New Wording Exemption 8(b)-I It is recommended that for exemption 8(b)-I:

The exemption is only extended for the following applications: “Equipment categories 1–7, 10, and 11 be extended for 2.5 years until December 31, 2023. Cadmium and its compounds in electrical contacts in circuit breakers, thermal sensing controls, and thermal motor protectors (excluding hermetic thermal motor protectors)” be phased out over a 12-month period for "Cadmium and its compounds in electrical contacts in AC and DC switches," which is currently covered by the exemption for equipment categories 1–7 and 10. This indicates that exemption 8(b)-I ought to be partially revoked. Other AC and DC switches in categories 1–7, 10, and 11 will receive a new exemption, 8(b)-III, that will be in effect until December 31, 2025. Note: Cadmium and its compounds in electrical contacts of AC switches rated at less than 10 A/250 V AC and less than 12 A/125 V AC, as well as cadmium and its compounds in electrical contacts of DC switches rated at less than 25 A/18 V DC, as well as cadmium and its compounds in electrical contacts of switches intended for use at a voltage supply frequency of at least 200 Hz, will no longer be eligible for a valid exemption due to the fact that the electrical rating is not the same The applicant stated that the previous exemption is no longer necessary.

Note: "Lead in white glasses used for optical applications excluding applications falling under points 13(b), 13(b)(I), 13(b)(II), 13(b)(III), and 13(b)(IV) of this Annex" should be changed to "Lead in glasses used for optical applications." Additionally, a four-year extension is recommended for equipment categories 1, 2, 5, and 10; an extension of five years for categories 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 11 of the equipment; in vitro diagnostic medical devices and nine industrial monitoring and control instruments, and a maximum extension of seven years. Extensions with a Restricted Scope 8(b) 8(b), which applies to equipment in categories 8, 9, and 11, has been extended as new exemption 8(b)-II, but it has a much narrower scope and different expiration dates for the various applications.

It is recommended that circuit breakers in computer tomography rotating parts (category 8 equipment excluding in vitro diagnostic medical devices) expire on December 31, 2023.

It is recommended that portable emergency defibrillators (category 8 equipment excluding in vitro diagnostic medical devices) with a Declaration of Conformity (DOC) issued for the first time prior to January 1, 2015, expire on December 31, 2025.

The recommended expiration date for all other applications for equipment in categories 8, 9, and 11 is also December 31, 2025.

It is suggested that the original exemption 8(b) be removed with a phase-out period of 18 months.

13(b) 13(b), which is legitimate for classes 8, 9, and 11 hardware, is prescribed to be restored as two new exceptions with a much smaller extension. It is suggested that the original 13(b) be revoked with a 12-month phase-out period.

The recommendation is to split the technical exemption, with the cadmium exemption only applicable to reflectance standard glazes and the lead exemption only applicable to filter glasses, despite the fact that both application types currently benefit from an exemption for both substances (cadmium and lead).

Note that 13(b)-V "Lead compound coatings in infrared interference filters used in infrared gas analysis and mid-far-infrared spectroscopy" only applies to category 9 industrial monitoring and control instruments and has a maximum recommended validity period of seven years. 13(b)-IV "Cadmium in glazes used for reflectance standards" applies to equipment categories 8 and 9 only. 13(b)-III, "Cadmium and lead in glazes used for reflectance standards," which applies to equipment in categories 1–7 and 10, is recommended to be revoked with a 12-month phase-out period, and 13(b)-IV, a new exemption that is recommended to be implemented, is recommended to be implemented, but it has a limited scope and is only applicable to equipment in categories 8 and 9. New Exemptions Recommend to Be Created From Existing Exemptions 8(b)-II The new exemption 8(b)-II, which is recommended to be created from exemption 8(b), is recommended to apply to category 8, 9, and 11 equipment 12 months and one day from the date of publication of the delegated directive:

"Cadmium and its compounds in electrical contacts of circuit breakers, thermal sensing controls, thermal motor protectors (with the exception of hermetic thermal motor protectors), AC switches, and DC switches" The new exemption has been recommended to have a validity date of December 31, 2023, or December 31, 2025, depending on the various applications that have been discussed previously.

8(c) The new exemption 8(c), derived from 8(b), "Cadmium and its compounds in electrical contacts that are not covered by exemption 8(b)(II)," is recommended to be in effect for categories 8 and 9 equipment 18 months and one day after the publication of the delegated directive by the European Commission. It has been suggested for a legitimacy time of four years until July 12, 2025.

8(b)-III The new exemption 8(b)-III, which was created from 8(b)-I and refers to "Cadmium and its compounds in electrical contacts of," consists of two distinct sections:

Breakers with ratings of:

Thermal sensing controls rated at: 10 A or more at 250 V AC or higher, or 15 A or more at 125 V AC or higher

10 A or more at 250 V AC or higher, or 15 A or more at 125 V AC or higher. AC switches and thermal motor protectors, excluding hermetic thermal motor protectors:

DC switches rated at 10 A or more at 250 V AC or higher, or 15 A or more at 125 V AC or higher:

25 An and more at 18 V DC and the sky is the limit from there. The new recommended exemption 8(b)-III would apply to equipment in categories 1–7, 10, and 11 12 months and one day after the publication of the delegated directive by the European Commission.

The initial segment of the exception has a suggested legitimacy period until December 31, 2023, and the subsequent part has a suggested legitimacy period until December 31, 2025.

9(a)-III It is recommended that a new exemption 9(a)-III be derived from exemption 9, with the wording varying from that of the original exemption. The maximum concentration of hexavalent chromium that can be used is reduced from 0.75 percent weight to 0.7 percent. This exemption would only apply to category 1 gas absorption heat pumps that heat water and space, not to all absorption refrigerators.

Additionally, the consultants suggest that the European Commission grant this exemption only if the adverse effects of substituting hexavalent chromium in these applications are likely to outweigh the benefits. It is recommended that exemption 9(a)-III expire on December 31, 2026. Surprisingly, the European Commission followed the consultants' recommendations and published the draft delegated directive for this exemption already. The delegated directive is anticipated to be published in the first quarter of 2023 in the Official Journal of the EU.

For category 8 in vitro diagnostic medical devices and category 9 industrial monitoring and control instruments and category 11 equipment, exemption 9 would no longer be renewable and would end on July 21, 2023.

13(b)-IV and 13(b)-V Created from 13(b), the new exemption 13(b)-IV, which states that "Cadmium in glazes used for reflectance standards" applies to equipment categories 8 and 9 with a maximum recommended validity period of seven years, and 13(b)-V, which states that "Lead compound coatings in infrared interference filters used in infrared gas analysis and mid-far-infrared spectroscopy" only applies It is suggested that both exemptions take effect one year and one day after the delegated directive is published in the Official Journal of the EU.

Exemptions Recommend to Be Rejected With a Phase-Out Period of 18 Months, exemption 8(b), which applies to equipment in categories 8, 9, and 11, is recommended to be revoked. It is suggested that 8(b)-I, which applies to equipment categories 1–7 and 10, be partially revoked with a phase-out period of 12 months. 13(b), which applies to equipment in categories 8, 9, and 11, should be phased out over a 12-month period. 13(b)-III, which applies to equipment categories 1–7 and 10, should be phased out over a 12-month period. Applications With Inadequate Proof Gave The experts couldn't suggest an expansion for exceptions 15 and 15(a) "Lead in flip chip bundles" due to a "absence of validated proof" as expected by Article 5(1)(a) of the RoHS Mandate. “it could not be clarified whether and to what extent substitution or elimination of lead are still scientifically and technically impracticable,” the report stated.

Applications That Were Withdrawn The applicant withdrew their request for a renewal for 4(f) because the exemption renewal was granted by the European Commission and published in the Official Journal of the EU in February 2022 on the basis of an earlier renewal request.

Stay Compliant With RoHS as It Changes If there’s one thing manufacturers can count on, it’s regulations shifting and evolving from year to year. That’s why you need tools that keep you up to date on the latest changes to RoHS and other EU regulations that imperil your market access. Plus, our regulatory experts provide you with the context and knowledge needed to break down this complex information and avoid costly non-compliance penalties like fines.

To learn more about how Acquis can help you keep track of RoHS restrictions and exemptions, please reach out to us at info@acquiscompliance.com.

[garudabluffs]

Americans are increasingly talking about civil war.

Most of us don't know it, but we are living in the world's greatest era of civil wars. While violence has declined worldwide, civil wars have increased. This is a new phenomenon. With the exception of a handful of cases - the American and English civil wars, the French Revolution - historically it has been rare for people to organise and fight their governments. This has changed. Since 1946, over 250 armed conflicts have broken out around the world, a number that continues to rise. Major civil wars are now being fought in countries including Iraq, Syria and Libya. Smaller civil wars are being fought in Ukraine, India, and Malaysia. Even countries we thought could never experience another civil war - such as the USA, Sweden and Ireland - are showing signs of unrest. In How Civil Wars Start, acclaimed expert Barbara F. Walter, who has advised on political violence everywhere from the CIA to the U.S. Senate to the United Nations, explains the rise of civil war and the conditions that create it. As democracies across the world backslide and citizens become more polarised, civil wars will become even more widespread and last longer than they have in the past. This urgent and important book shows us a path back toward peace.

‘These are conditions ripe for political violence’: how close is the US to civil war?                                                       6 Nov 2022

Nearly half of Americans fear their country will erupt within the next decade. Ahead of the midterm elections this week, three experts analyse the depth of the crisis

“...anocracy. This is when a government is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic; it’s something in between. Civil wars almost never happen in full, healthy, strong democracies. They also seldom happen in full autocracies. Violence almost always breaks out in countries in the middle – those with weak and unstable pseudo-democracies. Anocracy plus factionalism is a dangerous mix.”

“America’s democracy declined rapidly between 2016 and 2020. Since 6 January 2021, the US has failed to strengthen its democracy in any way, leaving it vulnerable to continued backsliding into the middle zone. In fact, the Republican party has accelerated its plan to weaken our democracy further.”

“What can we do about this? The obvious answers are for our political leaders to invest heavily in strengthening our democracies and to have their political parties reach across racial, religious and ethnic lines. But here in America, the Democratic party does not have the votes to institute much-needed reforms of our political system, and the Republicans have no interest; they are moving in the opposite direction.But there is a potentially easy fix. Regulate social media, and in particular the algorithms that disproportionately push the more incendiary, extreme, threatening and fear-inducing information into people’s feeds. Take away the social media bullhorn and you turn down the volume on bullies, conspiracy theorists, bots, trolls, disinformation machines, hate-mongers and enemies of democracy. The result would be a drop in everyone’s collective anger, distrust and feelings of threat, giving us all time to rebuild.“

The American electoral system is already hugely localised, outdated and held together by good faith. Any failure to recognise electoral outcomes, even in a few states, could result in a contested election in which nobody reaches the threshold of 270 electoral college votes. In that case, the constitution stipulates a “contingent election” – acclimatise yourself to this phrase now – in which each state gets a single vote. That’s right: if no candidate in an American presidential election reaches the threshold of 270 electoral college votes, the state legislatures, overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans, pick the president, with each state having one vote.”

“The confusion of legal status of a separate group of persons is a classic prelude to civil war. + The supreme court feels illegitimate because it is illegitimate. The Dobbs decision does not reflect the will of the American people because the supreme court does not reflect the will of the American people.”

“What, you may ask, do white people and the Republican party have in common? Well, 80% of Republican voters are white.”

“The civil war, as it happens, was set in motion by the refusal of the Democrats to accept Abraham Lincoln as the legitimate winner of the 1860 contest given his views on slavery: he thought it morally wrong.”

READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/nov/06/how-close-is-the-us-to-civil-war-barbara-f-walter-stephen-march-christopher-parker

bar none : making america great again!

[quillquiver]

On SPN, Burying Your Gays, and Being Heard

I am shaking, I feel sick, I feel like I’m insane. And did I run a little wild with the theories? You bet. But you know what didn’t help? The botched clusterfuck that was this entire goddamn finale debacle. How was I supposed to believe anything they said in panels when M&G dialogue would leak saying the exact opposite? How was I supposed to grieve and move on when there was nothing from the cast and crew? Nobody said anything! And any info leaked just destabilized what we already knew or directly contradicted what we’d been told. In light of that, how was I supposed to trust anything anyone said? One rogue translator reciprocated the love confession and I was practically sold, because there were so many questions surrounding the English text that this was something good, something that logically fit, and something I wanted to hold onto. 

Because they hurt me. This is about so much more than one episode or a ship; for years queer fans have seen ourselves in these characters and been told that we were crazy. That we were reading too much into it. I’m not sure how people get upset and offended when a storyline that doesn’t exist... doesn’t exist! said Guy Bee (2013). And then, after all of that, they turned around and said magnanimously, you have your version, I have mine... and that’s okay. But it’s not okay. It’s not okay, because that doesn’t erase what came before - that doesn’t erase the baiting and the gaslighting, and that invalidates everything we felt in the time leading up to that episode. It gave them an open window for all the subtext that came after. It allowed them to brush us off.

And then we got Cas’s love confession. I watched that scene about 500 times. Added to the rest of the season - to the fandom avatar being presented as successful and intelligent, to arc being the death of the author - I felt seen. Really seen, by a show that made it its mission to erase me. I had been okay with Cas dying at first because I had been sure the romance arc would carry through. I had been convinced that after everything, there was no way they would give that to us and then take it away.

But they did, because this is Supernatural. To anyone saying this is not bury your gays, I implore you to read up on the Hays Code. This link is to an amazing queer history podcast and the episode that covers it. In short, the Hays Code was a legal document that came about in 20th Century Hollywood during the puritanical war on the American entertainment industry,  and it stipulated what was not allowed on screen. Not all of it was queer - there’s a whole section about kissing - but what the Code is most remembered for is that queerness was not allowed on screen. But queer people are resilient, and so they started testing the waters... and it turned out that you could in fact code queerness into a narrative, as long as it was subtextual, or as long as the queer character died/was punished, or both. The point is that the character is not allowed to live their truth openly. They are buried, either in the ground or punished in the narrative. The former is normally what we refer to these days, because the latter just doesn’t really happen anymore.

Until Supernatural. 

Castiel is immediately punished for speaking his truth - and please don’t tell me he leveraged that punishment and so he had agency. Literally the only thing that could make him happy was confessing his feelings, and so the Empty deal was directly related to this idea of queerness-as-punishment. That being said, Bobo wrote a beautiful scene. Cas’s confession was a love letter to queerness and coming out... but everything that came after buried him. Castiel may have ended the series alive but he was effectively written out of the last two episodes, and that means that he actually never really got to live his truth. He was silenced by the narrative - that is punishment. 

Dean is a whole other can of worms. Does one rogue translator confirm canon bi!Dean? Or do we have to read our own version of the text? The fact that we even have to ask these questions firmly places us in the realm of queerbaiting. Were the writers trying to get bi!Dean approved but were unable to? I have no idea, but queerbaiting requires proof that the writers encouraged a reading they had no intent of following through on, and we certainly don’t lack in evidence of that. Not from this writers room, but from those of previous eras. Did these writers try? They might have, but the funny thing about queerbaiting discourse is that there has never been a show to bait this long, and I’m making the call that even if you tried at the end, you baited me with half the ship and all the years that came before. 

Of course, the narrative leaves open the possibility of bi!Dean so if you do read the show that way, that means Dean also falls into the bury your gays category; if you read the show this way - which many of us do - the mere suggestion that Dean Winchester was bisexual was enough to punish him. And he was punished. We’ve all written extensively on this, but he was given a random death, on a case his father never finished. All that growth, all that time spent having him accept himself, love himself, that was all taken away. He died the way he always thought he would: as a tool, in service of his father, protecting his brother. He had always believed he’d been a body to throw on the sword and in the end that’s all he was. And when he gets to Heaven? He’s also silenced. He barely speaks in the episode except to monologue during his death, and that is 100% Sam-centric. He is scared. 

It was horrific to watch. I sobbed so hard my roommate was seriously concerned. 

I had been fully prepared for Supernatural to end disappointingly. I had figured everything would end with a huge heaven reunion because white, straight, cis-male S&F writers love the idea of death as a reward, but instead of being disappointed I felt like I had witnessed a slaughter. Every single one of the queer themes intrinsic to the show: found family, resilience, speaking your truth... were gone. And I know we’ve talked about this too, but it bears repeating, because in doing this, in writing the queerness out of its narrative, Supernatural effectively looked every one of us queer folx in the eye and said: you are not important. You don’t matter. All of that stuff that came before is all good and well, but what really matters at the end of all things is blood family. It’s two brothers in a car. Life sucks but at least we get to die and go to paradise - real paradise, that your angel buddy died for and then made for you and who we never hear from again.

I felt insane. I felt cheated. I felt humiliated. I felt devastated. I still feel all those things, but listen to me. You have been heard. Not by Misha Collins, who is a great guy, but doesn’t get it. Not by Jensen Ackles, who is a similarly great guy, but also just doesn’t understand. And not by anyone else who worked on this show. 

You know who heard you? Me. The people who follow me. The people who follow you. We saw each other, and heard each other, and we gave each other a leg up. We made memes. We wrote fic. We drew fanart. We made gifs. All for ourselves and all for each other. We broke Tumblr multiple times. We donated over $60,000 USD to multiple different causes. We got multiple hashtags trending at multiple different points, and today kept it up because we demanded answers and then we got them. There were at least 5 articles written about the show today. We made that happen. We made people listen. 

Supernatural didn’t deserve me, and it didn’t deserve you. It didn’t deserve Dean. It didn’t deserve Cas. It didn’t deserve Misha and Jensen. But this show ended with a bleak, awful message and we turned around and showed them that love is loud. So what about all of this is real?

We are.

[airplanned]

Spirits of Calamities Part 13

Let’s check in on what Purah and Robbie are doing.

Master list...Part 12

***

The Sheikah had dinner at their work bench, bowls of noodles set atop scattered papers.  Robbie had the good manners to sit in a chair, but shoveled curtains of noodles into his mouth.  Purah sat cross-legged on the table top, hunching over her bowl.

"What if we forbid her from coming to the excavation site," Purah suggested.  "We could ban her from the plateau all together."

Robbie chewed for a long moment, then swallowed thickly and said, "If there was an emergency, and I needed to get the princess to the Great Plateau as quickly as possible, I wouldn't grab her and throw her over my shoulder and run.  You know what I'd do?  I'd tell her she was forbidden from traveling the the Great Plateau.  She would be there within the hour."

Purah sighed.  "We could keep it a secret from her."

"Can you?"

Indignantly, she said, "I could try!"

"If we just left and took a team to the plateau and didn't answer any of her letters, she'd never know where we were."

"She'd wonder why we were away from the lab."

"We could...lie to her?  Tell her we're in Hebra?"  Purah cringed.

"You would feel guilty the whole time.  And when she finds out--which she most definitely would--she'd never trust us again."

Purah poked at her noodles.

Robbie said, "The real problem is that we would need her on the project.  She's the best at organizing a team.  And she knows as much about Sheikah technology as you or me.  We'd move much slower without her."

"And if we exclude her, it'll put a rift between her and the Sheikah.  We can't have that going into the battle against the Calamity."

Then they both poked at their noodles.

"We need to know what those towers do.  They do something.  And f our whole plan of attack is to repeat what our ancestors did, then we need to do that.  Not do it half way.  They used the towers.  We need to use the towers.  We need to know what's in that shrine higher on the plateau.  We need to understand the guardians better."

"Maybe if we..."  And then he didn't say anything more.  "Hmm."

"If we what."

He rocked his head back and forth, unsure if he should say his idea out loud.  "Maybe we're going about this all wrong.  We can't keep it a secret from the princess, because she's too curious.  But we could keep it a secret from someone...completely uninterested."

Purah stared at him, hardly daring to breathe.  Her head slowly tilted as she put more thought into his suggestion than holding herself straight.

Rhoam's face grew warm.  Then hot.  Then he spun on the Spirit.

"They are planning to go behind my back."

"If you keep not wanting to be involved, people are going to stop inviting you."

"They're going to lie to my face that they'll keep it a secret from Zelda, ask me for funds, and then keep it a secret that she's involved, meaning Zelda will lie to my face as well.  I am their king!  I gave them one single stipulation!  The Sheikah are supposed to be loyal to the royal family!"

"They're loyal to part of it."

"Well, I know their plan now.  They're not going to get away with it.  I'll have them thrown out of the castle."

"You know of this plan.  You won't know of the next one.  Next time, you won't have supernatural help to spy on people."

He glared at her.

"And you're going to throw out the scientists preparing your defenses against the Calamity?  That's smart."

"I didn't ask you."

"Your decisions are so bad that even the Sheikah are finding ways to work around you.  You're cutting off your nose to spite your face.  You're denying Hyrule strategic advantages because you want to make your daughter miserable."

"I don't want to make my daughter miserable!"

The Spirit lifted an eyebrow.  And then the scene changed around them.

***

Chapter 14

[oumakokichi]

What are the differences between the original and localization?

Hmm, that’s a very simple question with a pretty lengthy answer! I did answer some similar questions in the past, but that was a long time ago, much closer to when the localization was first released. There are probably a lot of people whose main experience with the game has only been with the localization, and who don’t really know or remember those differences anymore.

For that reason, I’m going to go into kind of a “masterlist” of things that were changed in the localization in this post. This will be very long, but I really want to explain the whole story behind the localization and its differences from the original to people who might only be hearing about this for the first time. I’m going to cover full spoilers for the game obviously, so be careful when reading!

Also, please feel free to share this post around, as I think it contains a lot of information that might be interesting to people who’ve only experienced the localization!

Before I really get into it though, I want to stipulate that the differences I’m covering in this post are mostly going to be things that I believe could’ve been handled or translated better, not every single line that was changed verbatim in the game. This is because a localization’s purpose is incredibly different from a literal translation.

Where a literal translation seeks to keep as much of the original authorial intent as possible and has the leeway to explain various Japanese terms and cultural specifics to the readers in footnotes or a glossary, a localization is usually much more targeted towards a specific target audience, usually one more unfamiliar with Japanese culture or terminology. As a result, some things in a localization are occasionally changed to make them more understandable to a western audience.

So, for example, I’m not going to fault the localization for changing Monosuke’s extremely heavy Kansai accent in Japanese to a New York accent in the English dub. It’s much easier for western players to immediately grasp that, “hey, this guy has a very specific regional accent that the other characters don’t,” and it works really well as a rough equivalent. Similarly, localization changes like changing a line here or there about the sport of sumo to be about the Jets and the Patriots also helps get the point across to players quickly and easily without having to explain an unfamiliar sport to western players in-depth before they can get the joke.

That being said… there were some liberties taken with ndrv3’s translation which I don’t believe fulfill the point of a localization, and which changed certain deliveries or even perceptions about the characters in a way that I just don’t agree with.

Let me explain first how the localization team actually worked, to people who might be unfamiliar with the process. Ndrv3 had four separate translators working on the localization. When NISA first announced that the game was being localized, these four translators introduced themselves on reddit in an AMA, where they also mentioned that they were by and large dividing up the 16 main characters between themselves, with each translator specifically assigned to four characters.

Having more translators working on a game might sound like a good idea in theory, but it’s often not. The more translators assigned to a game, the harder it is to provide a consistent translation. Translation is messy work: often there are multiple ways to translate the same sentence, or even the same word between two different languages. If a translation has multiple translators, that means they need to be communicating constantly with one another and referencing each other’s work all the time in order to avoid mistranslations: it’s difficult work, but not impossible.

However… this didn’t happen with ndrv3’s translation team. It’s pretty clear they did not reference each other’s work or communicate very well, and the translation suffers for it. I’m not just guessing here, either; it’s a fact that various parts of the game have lines completely ruined by not looking at the context, or words translated two different ways almost back-to-back. I’ll provide specific examples of this later.

Many of the translators also picked which characters they wanted to translate on the basis of which were their favorites—which, again, isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but which does raise the risk of letting character bias influence your work. No work is inherently without bias; all translators have to look at their own biases and still attempt to translate fairly regardless. But because translators were assigned four characters each, this meant that while they might be really enthusiastic about translating for one character in particular, they were less enthusiastic for others. These biases do reflect in the work, and I will provide further examples as I make my list.

This system of delegation also leaves more questions than it answers. It becomes impossible to tell who translated certain parts of the game, particularly in areas where the narrator is unclear. For example, did Saihara’s translator translate Ouma’s motive video, as Saihara is the one watching it in chapter 6? Or did Ouma’s translator do it, since it’s his motive video? Who translated the parts we see at the beginning of certain chapters, where characters from the outside world make occasional comments? It’s really unclear, and I’m not even sure if the translators divvied up these parts amongst themselves or if only one person was supposed to handle them.

To put it simply, there were quite a lot of complications and worrying factors about the way the translation was divided by the team, and the communication (or lack thereof) between said translators. It’s impossible to really discuss the main problems that ndrv3’s localization has without making it clear why those problems happened, and I hope I’ve explained it well here.

With that out of the way, I’m finally going to cover the biggest differences between the original game and the localization, and why many of these changes were such a problem.

1.)    Gonta’s Entire Character

To this day, I still feel like this is probably the most egregious change of the entire localization. Gonta does not talk like a caveman in Japanese. He does not even have a particularly limited vocabularly. He talks like a fairly normal, very polite high school boy, and the only stipulation is that he’s not very familiar with electronics or technology due to his backstory of “growing up in the woods away from humans.”

Gonta does refer to himself in the third-person in Japanese, but I need to stress this: this is a perfectly normal thing to do in Japanese. Many people do it all the time, and it has no bearing on a person’s intelligence or ability to speak. In fact, both Tenko and Angie also refer to themselves in the third-person in the Japanese version of the game, yet mysteriously use first-person pronouns in the localization.

I wouldn’t be so opposed to this change if it weren’t for the fact that Gonta’s entire character arc revolves around being so much smarter than people (even himself!) give him credit for. He constantly downplays his own abilities and contributions to the group despite being fairly knowledgeable, not only about entomology but also about nature and astronomy. He has a fairly good understanding of spatial reasoning and is one of the first people to guess how Toujou’s trick with the rope and tire worked in chapter 2.

Chapter 4 of ndrv3 is so incredibly painful because it makes it clear that while Gonta was, absolutely, manipulated by Ouma into picking up the flashback light, he nonetheless made the decision to kill Miu of his own accord. He was even willing to try and kill everyone else by misleading them in the trial, because he thought it was more merciful than letting them see the outside world for themselves. These were choices that he made, confirmed when we see Gonta’s AI at the end of the trial speak for himself and acknowledge that yes, he really did think the outside world was worth killing people over.

Gonta is supposed to be somewhat naïve and trusting, not stupid. He believes himself to be an idiot, and other characters often talk down to him or don’t take him seriously, but at the end of the day he’s a human being just like the rest of them, and far, far smarter and more capable of making his own decisions than anyone thought him capable of.

Translating all of his speech to “caveman” or “Tarzan speech” really downplays his ability to make decisions for himself, and I think it’s a big part of why I’ve seen considerably more western fans insist that he didn’t know what he was doing than Japanese fans. I love Gonta quite a lot, but I can’t get over the localization essentially changing his character to make him seem more stupid, instead of translating what was actually there in order to more accurately reflect his character.

2.)    Added Some Slurs, Removed Others

It’s time to address the elephant in the room for people who don’t know: Momota is considerably homophobic and transphobic in the original Japanese version of the game. In chapter 2, he uses the word “okama” to refer to Korekiyo in an extremely derogatory fashion. This word has a history of both homophobic and transphobic sentiment in Japan, as it’s often used against flamboyant gay men and trans women, who are sadly and unfortunately conflated as being “the same thing” most of the time. To put it simply, the word has the equivalent of the weight of the t-slur and the f-slur in English rolled into one.

This isn’t the only instance of Momota being homophobic, sadly. In the salmon mode version of the game, should you choose the “let’s undress” option in the gym while with Momota, he has yet another line where he says, “You don’t swing that way, do you!?” to Saihara, using his most terrified and disgusted-looking sprite. This suggests to me that, yes, the homophobia was a deliberate choice in the Japanese version of the game, as Momota consistently reacts this way to even the idea of another guy showing romantic interest in him.

The English version more or less kept the salmon mode comment, but removed the use of the slur in chapter 2 entirely. Which I have… mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I am an LGBT person myself. I don’t want to read slurs if I can help it. On the other hand, I really don’t think the slur was removed out of consideration to the LGBT community so much as Momota’s translator really wanted to downplay any lines that could make his character come across in a more negative light.

This is backed up by the fact that both Miu and Ouma’s translators added slurs to the game that weren’t present in the original Japanese. Where Miu only ever refers to Gonta as “baka” (idiot) or occasionally, “ahou” (a slightly ruder word that still more or less equates to “moron”), her translator decided to add multiple instances of her using the r-slur to refer to Gonta specifically, and on one occasion, even the word “Mongoloid,” a deeply offensive and outdated term. Ouma’s translator similarly took lines where he was already speaking harshly of Miu and added multiple instances of words like “bitch” or “whore.”

To me, this suggests that the translators were completely free to choose how harsh or how likable they wanted their characters to come across. Momota’s translator omitting just the slur could maybe pass for a nice gesture, so people don’t have to read it and be uncomfortable—except, that’s not the only thing that was omitted. Instances of Momota being blatantly misogynistic or rude were also toned down to the point of covering up most of his flaws entirely. His use of “memeshii” against Hoshi (a word which means “cowardly” in Japanese with specifically feminine connotations, like the word “sissy” in English) is simply changed to “weak,” and when he calls Saihara’s trauma “kudaranai” (literally “worthless” or “bullshit”), this is changed to “trivial” in the localization.

Momota’s translator even went so far as to omit a line entirely from the chapter 2 trial, which I touched on in an earlier post. In the original version of the game, Ouma asks Momota dumbfounded if he’s really stupid enough to trust Maki without any proof and if he plans on risking everyone else’s lives in the trial if he turns out to be wrong. And Momota replies saying yes, absolutely, he’s totally willing to bet everyone’s lives on nothing more than a hunch because he thinks he’s going to be right no matter what.

This is a character flaw. It’s a huge, running theme with Momota’s character, and it’s brought up again in chapter 4 deliberately when Momota really does almost kill everyone in the trial because he refuses to believe that Ouma isn’t the culprit. But the localization simply omits it, leaving Momota to seem considerably less hard-headed and reckless in the English version of the game. If anyone wants proof that this line exists, it is still very much there in the Japanese dialogue, but it has no translation whatsoever. This goes beyond “translation decisions I don’t agree with”; omitting an entire line for a character simply because you want other people to like them more is just bad translation, period.

3.)    Angie’s Religion

In the original Japanese version of the game, neither Angie’s god nor her religion have any specific names. She refers to her god simply as “god” in the general sense, and clearly changes aspects of their persona and appearance based on who she’s trying to convince to join her cult. Everything about her is pretty clearly fictionalized, from her island to the religious practices her cult does.

Kodaka’s writing with regard to Angie is already a huge mess. It feeds into a lot of harmful stereotypes about “crazy, exotic brown women” and “bloodthirsty savages,” but at the very least it never correlated with a specific religion or location in the original version of the game.

This all changed when Angie’s translator, for whatever reason, decided to make Angie be Polynesian specifically and appropriate from the real religion of real indigenous peoples native to Polynesia. That’s right: Atua is a real god that has very real significance to tons of indigenous peoples.

In my opinion, this decision was incredibly disrespectful. It spreads incredible misinformation about a god that is still very much a part of tons of real-life people’s religion, and associates it with cults? Blood rituals? Human sacrifices? It’s a terrible localization decision that wasn’t necessary whatsoever and to be quite frank, it’s racist and insensitive.

As I said, the original game never exactly had the peak of “good writing decisions” when it came to Angie; there are still harmful stereotypes with her character, and she deserved to be written so much better. But associating her with a real group of indigenous people and equating a real god to some fictional deity that’s mostly treated as either a scary cult-ish boogeyman or the punchline to a joke is just… bad.

4.)    Ouma’s Motive Video

Some of the decisions taken with Ouma’s translation are… interesting, to say the least. In many ways, he feels like a completely different character between the two versions of the game. This is due not only to the translation, but also the voice direction and casting.

A lot of his lines are tweaked or changed entirely to make his character seem much louder, less serious, and less sincere than the original version of the game. Obviously, Ouma lies, a lot. That’s sort of the whole point of is character. But what I mean is that even lines in the original version of the game, where it was clear he was being truthful via softer delivery, trailing off the end of his sentences, and seeming overall hesitant about whether to divulge certain information or not are literally changed in the localization to him pretty much yelling at the top of his lungs, complete with tons of exclamation points on lines that originally ended with a question mark or ellipses.

Tonally, he just feels very different as a character. The “sowwy” speak, lines like “oopsie poopsie, I’m such a ditz!”—all of these things are taken to such ridiculous extremes that it feels a little hard to take him seriously. Even in the post-trial for chapter 4 when Ouma starts playing the villain after Gonta’s death, a moment which should have been completely serious and intense, the mood is kind of completely killed when the line is changed from him calling everyone a bunch of idiots to him calling everyone…. “stupidheads.” These changes don’t really seem thematically appropriate to me, but overall, they’re not damning.

What is damning, however, is the fact that Ouma’s motive video is completely mistranslated and provides a very poor picture of what his motivations and ideals were like. I still remember being shocked when I played the localization for the first time and discovered that they completely omitted a line stating that Ouma and DICE have a very specific taboo against murder.

Literally, this is one of the very first lines in the entire video. The Japanese version of the game makes it explicitly clear that DICE were forbidden to kill people, and that abiding by this rule was extremely important to them. By contrast, the localization simply makes a nod about him doing “petty nonviolent crimes and pranks,” without ever once mentioning anything at all about rules or taboos.

This feels especially egregious in the localization considering Saihara later uses Ouma’s motive video as evidence in the chapter 6 trial and states there that Ouma and DICE “had a rule against killing people,” despite the game… never actually telling you that. It not only skews the perception of Ouma’s character at a crucial moment, it also just straight-up lies to localization players and expects them to make leaps in logic without actually providing the facts. So it winds up sort of feeling like Saihara is just pulling these assumptions out of his ass more than anything else.

I actually still have my original translation of Ouma’s motive video here, if anyone would like to compare. Again, translation is a tricky line of work, and obviously not all translators are going to agree with one another. But I consider omitting lines entirely to be one of the worst things you can do in a translation, particularly in a mystery game where people are expected to solve said mysteries based on the information and facts provided to them.

5.)    Inconsistencies and Lack of Context

As I mentioned earlier, there are many instances of lines being completely mistranslated, or translated two different ways by multiple translators, or addressed to the wrong character. This is, as I stated, due to the way the translation work was divided by four separate people who appear to have not communicated with each other or cross-referenced each other’s work.

One of the clearest examples of this that I can think of off the top of my head is in chapter 3, where Ouma mentions “doing a little research” on the Caged Child ritual, and Maki in the very next line repeats him by saying… “study?”

On their own, removed from any context, these would both potentially be correct translations. However, it’s very clear that the translators just didn’t care to look at the context, or communicate with each other and share their work. The fact that characters aren’t even quoting each other properly in lines that are back-to-back is a pretty big oversight, and something that should have been accounted for knowing that four separate people were going to be translating various different characters.

This lack of context causes other, even more hilarious and blatantly wrong mistranslations. At the start of the chapter 3 trial, there is a line where Momota mentions that he couldn’t perform a thorough investigation on his own “because Monokuma disrupted him.” In the original, Ouma responds and tells Momota that he’s just using Monokuma as an excuse to cover for his own flaws. However, what we actually got in the localization was… this.

I don’t even have words for how badly this line was butchered (though I could make several hilarious jokes about Monokuma “over-compensating”). Presumably, this happened because Ouma’s translator saw Ouma’s line without any of the lines before it or the context of what Momota was saying, had no clue who Ouma was actually supposed to be talking to, and just ad-libbed it however they could, even though it literally makes no sense and doesn’t even fit into the conversation.

There are other similar instances of this, too. For example, did you know that the scene after Saihara faints in chapter 2, just before he wakes up in Gonta’s lab, is actually supposed to have Ouma talking to him? The narrator is unnamed, but there are several lines just before Saihara wakes up where Ouma tells him “come on, you can’t die on me yet!” and keeps prodding him and poking him to wake up. This is never explicitly told to you from the text… but it becomes pretty obvious when you look at the context and see that a huge CG of Ouma looking over Saihara as he starts to wake up is the very next part of the scene.

In the localization, however, Saihara’s translator pretty clearly had no idea what was happening or who was supposed to be talking to him, because they translated those lines as Saihara talking to himself, even though the manner of speech and phrasing is clearly supposed to be Ouma instead.

I could go on and on listing other examples: Tsumugi makes a joke in the original about Miu being able to dish out dirty jokes but not being very good at hearing them herself, but it’s changed in the localization to Tsumugi saying “I’m not so good with that kind of stuff,” and a line where Momota protests against Maki choking Ouma because she’ll kill him if she keeps going is instead changed to him saying “you’ll get killed if you don’t stop!” In my opinion, the fact that this is a consistent problem throughout the whole game shows that the translators weren’t really communicating or working together at any point, and that it wasn’t simply a one-time mistake here or there.

6.)    Edited CGs and Plot Points

I have made an entirely separate post about this in the past, but at this point I don’t think anyone actually knows anymore: the localization actually edited in-game CGs and made some of them completely different from the Japanese version of the game. I’m not accusing them of “censorship” or anything like that, I mean quite literally that they altered and edited specific CGs to try and fix certain problems with them and only ended up making them worse in the process.

In chapter 5, Momota gets shot in the arm by Maki’s crossbow when trying to defend Ouma, and Ouma gets shot in the back shortly afterward when attempting to make a run for the Exisals. These injuries are relevant to how they died, but they’re not actually very visible in the CGs of Ouma and Momota shown later in the chapter 5 trial.

There are a whole bunch of inconsistencies with the CGs in chapter 5 in general: Momota gives Ouma his jacket to lie on under the press, but is magically still wearing it when he emerges from the Exisal himself at the end of the trial (I like to think he snuck back into the dorms Solid Snake style to get a new one from his room before joining the trial), the cap to the antidote is still on the bottle when Ouma pretends to drink it in front of Maki and Momota, etc. None of these things really deter from the plot though, and so I would say they’re fairly unimportant.

However, for some reason, NISA decided that “fixing” at least some of the CGs in the chapter 5 trial was necessary. They did this by adding bloodstains to Momota’s arm while he’s under the press, to better show his injury from the crossbow…. and in doing so, for some completely inexplicable reason, they changed the entire position of his arm. Here’s what I mean for comparison:

This is how Momota’s arm looked in the original CG from chapter 5, shown when the camcorder is provided as evidence that it’s “Ouma” under the press.

And this is how the localization edited it to look. I can understand and even sympathize with adding the bloodstains, but… changing the entire arm itself? Moving it to be sticking out from under the press? To put it nicely, this change doesn’t make any sense and actually makes it harder to understand Ouma and Momota’s plan.

The whole trick behind their plan was that nothing was supposed to stick out from under the press, other than Momota’s jacket. They waited until the instant when the press completely covered every part of Momota’s body, arms and all, and then performed the switch to mislead people. But the edited version of the CG in the localization just has Momota’s arm sticking completely out, hanging over the side, meaning it would’ve been impossible for the press to hide every part of it and the whole switch feels… well, stupid and impossibly easy to see through in the localized version.

Again, this shows a total disregard for presenting the facts as they actually appear and actually makes things more difficult for English players of the game, because they’re not being given accurate information. I really don’t understand why these changes were necessary, or why the bloodstains couldn’t have just been added without moving Momota’s entire arm.

7.)    In Conclusion

This has gotten extremely long (nearly 10 pages), so I want to wrap things up. I want to specify that my intention with this masterlist isn’t to insult or badmouth the translators who worked on this game. I’m sure they worked very hard, and I have no idea what time or budget constraints they were facing as they did so.

Being a translator is not easy, and typically translators are not very well-paid or recognized for their work. I have the utmost respect for other translators, and I know perfectly well just how difficult and taxing it can be.

I am making this list because these are simply changes which were very different from the original version of the game, and which I believe could have been handled better. Personally, I disagree with many of the choices the localization made, but that does not mean that they didn’t do a fantastic job in other places. I absolutely love whichever translator was responsible for coming up with catchphrases and nicknames throughout the game: little localization decisions like “cospox,” “flashback light,” “Insect Meet n’ Greet,” and “cosplaycat criminal” were all strokes of genius that I highly admire.

I only want to stress that the Japanese version of the game is very different. Making changes to the way a character is presented or portrayed means influencing how people are going to react to said character. Skewing the information and facts presented in trials in the game means changing people’s experience of the game, and giving them less facts to go off of. Equating fictional gods to real-life ones can cause real harm and influence perception of real indigenous peoples. These are all facts that need to be accounted for before deciding whether a certain change is necessary or not, in my opinion.

If you’ve read this far, thank you! Again, feel free to share this post around if you’d like, since this is probably the most comprehensively I’ve ever covered this topic.

[antiloreolympus]

14 Anti LO Asks

1. To the one anon: good question - how is it that the mortals dont know who Persephone is / assume she is a minor goddess and therefore its okay to mess with her but the gods (or Olympians / underworld denizens) know exactly everything about her (despite her being there only every so often and only being 20ish) - enough to say shes "wearing her signature white color" during a murder trial.

Also the reason why Persephone is wearing white is because

A). RS wanted persephone to always be "dressed as a bride" (and have Hades dressed as a groom respectively) to show that their matching / is supposed to be a visual cue that their eventually gonna be together.

B). I believe this is RS way of saying that Persephone (despite murdering some mortals) is innocent because in purity culture White = innocence, virginity, youth etc. (Even though RS explicity ssid she wanted to go against purity culture morals shes very much leaning into them). 

2. why are Psyche’s eyes yellow even in her human form? Is she sick??

3. honestly? LO is just gossisp girl at this point, espect even GG (at least in the first season) bothered to saturze the rich and was calling out how wealth and power makes them corrupt assholes. meanwhile LO is just GG season 2 and on of being like no no, the poor people are the evil people and the rich people are the oppressed ones! all while also fawning over their  wealth and status and being way into grown men wanting to bang barely legal teens and claiming to be "feminist" somehow.

4. Tumblr is well-known for broken tag system. Check the post' tags before complaining that it's op's fault. How about you guys not tag greek mythology when posting about LO? LO is not one-shot or short fancomic. It's also definitely not considered actual greek mythology. LO is years long webcomic with huge fans. LO has its own tag. Tell your fellow fans to stop using the greek mythology tag.

5. I would argue nyx is the only woman with a unique in design in LO but thats only because she looks like a deformed chicken woman. why was my night mom disrespected this much 😭

6. So now that LO is back from break and I can finally read chapter 170 - Why oh Why do ALL the female characters Have to be defined by their male love interests??? (Or really just love interests in general).

I understand LO qualifies as the "romance" genre and there are certain stipulations or I guess themes or what have you that make it romance but for f*cks sake.

Psyche being worried about Eros loving the "fake" her I kinda get, but really? Thats your most pressing concern?? Hera is defined by her garbage marriage to Zeus - King of the gods (of which is why she is Queen of the gods). Hestia + Athena are now defined solely by their relationship to each other (not the TGOEM or their respective traits of being a goddess of the hearth + goddess of war, strategy etc etc).

Aphrodite is defined by giving Persephone "relationship" advice (e.g: telling her to curb stomp Minthe because "nymphs dont take things from gods" - doubly implying that people are things to own) And by her jealousy of Persephone in the first place because Hades made a comment about how he thought Persephone was prettier than her. And also because of her "house of debauchery" (Artemis'  words) - and relationship with Ares.

Persephone is defined both by Apollo raping her and by her fated future status as Queen of the underworld (so her relationship with Hades). Hell, even the minor characters such as nymphs are defined by this relationship status / standard. Minthe is defined by her mean spirited personality yes, but Also because of her abusive relationship with Hades prior to the introduction of Persephone. Psyche is defined by her relationship woes with Eros. Daphne is defined by her relationship with Thanatos (and because shes a flower nymph) but also mostly because she looks like Persephone.

Rhea is defined by her marriage / relationship to Kronos (lets ignore the whole "fertility goddess power" plot for a second). Even Aetna is defined by Haphestus creating her! Is there not a single character (especially female) is isnt defined by their romantic love interest???Sorry. Maybe I'm overthinking this, but thats definitely how ot comes off as of late, in regard to the latest chapters.

Okay, same anon as earlier - I take it back somewhat - we have Artemis and Hecate that are not defined by their romantic relationships - but rather their lack of one.

However the way they are shown - it still comes off as a standard - "Artemis is stingy / a stick in the mud" because shes not romantically involved and is "barbaric" (according to Hera). And Hecate is still somewhat defined by her being Hades' employee (and cheerleader for him and Persephone to be together).

So technically yes, we have at least 2 characters that are not defined by their romantic interests / relationships, but they are still held to the standard of their "un-ladylike / undesirable" because their not romantically involved.

(I guess I should count Demeter, but only because shes more defined by just being "Persephone's overbearing mom" )

7. i think whats also kinda weird about this trial is like?? persephone is obvs framed as not liking the attention (bc duh) but she didnt like the previous press either, she wanted to be private, but wouldnt being with hades force her to be in the spotlight that makes her uncomfortable? also the citizens of the underworld already dislike hades, why would they want a uncontrollable felon as their queen, even if she found innocent? idk the whole thing just makes the endgame less plausible, tbh.

8. love that rachel was able to find a random deity name to name her random nymph the greek word for "beans" meanwhile apparently cant google actual greek names for even one off characters? like andrew, ellen, george, alexis, damian, luke, phoebe, sophia, and so any other english names are also greek, but she cant even bother with that? what exactly is her "research" if she cant even bother to spend 30 seconds googling greek names? at this point LO seems determined to be as un-Greek as possible.

9. wait so everyone in LO went from having no idea who persephone was, to her only showing up on ONE magazine cover, to now being the most well known person with a signature color? all in the span of two weeks with no genuine public outings? how does that make sense? also white isnt even her signature color if 90%+ the female cast and even a lot of the men ((including ZEUS) all wear it too.

10. the fact the courthouse WASNT the areopagus, aka the place in greece where they say the first ever trial ever happened and where the court system was invented, is just another point of rachel talking out her ass about being "respectful" or "researched" on greece and their mythology. its literally one of the most famous mythology spots ever with some fantastic stories to it and she's just like "nah! boring rectangle will do!" like why even both with mythology then if its this devoid of it?

11. Anons are saying Hades in the FS chapter is leaning down and talking to Persy like a child. Say it aint true.

(I wanna see. I thought RS was finally giving Persy adult proportions). 😨

12. So wait, hold up. I kinda get where RS is coming from with the law school in the underworld (because Hades is supposed to be a kinda Judge, jury, executioner situation in the afterlife when it comes to mortals and their "punishments" and whatnot). However, is RS stating that the ONLY law school / courthouse exists in the underworld? If so, why? Why wouldn't Athena be there then. She's a goddess of strategy and justice (among other things).

Also is RS really implying that Hades owns not only the banks and underworld but the law too? She really wants Hades to be a Gary Sue along side her Mary Sue - Hades controls everything that matters and since its his realm and blah blah blah rules, Zeus, king of the gods cant do anything about it.

(Which is dumb. Because you would think that because Persephone committed the crime in the mortal realm / on, or near Olympus that therefore she would be brought back there to dole out justice under Zeus jurisdiction because she committed the crime in His Realm). 

13. FP Spoiler ahead:

Why on earth couldn't the reporters have Greek names? There is so much wrong and bad with this story, yet this irks me so much. It is Brenda all over again.

14. i dont really get the point of the trial plotline, tbh. even persephone says she should be punished and held accountable, but hades is framed in the right for trying to go against that and weasel her out of it. so?? plus zeus has legit reason to punish them? persephone is a danger to others, demeter and hermes both committed treason to cover it up, and hades was harboring a fugitive of the law and is now trying to force the system to let her go. how is zeus in the wrong for this?

[wack-ashimself]

Every single place I ever worked was anti-union. Hell the one place I actually worked that had a union was actually anti-union. It's called sag. It's for actors. Basically the only way you can get into their Union is strict stipulation and fees. If you didn't have enough credits or enough money, you didn't get in. Tell me how is that for the f****** people?

[hellopopculture]

Top 20 Wrestlers of 2021 (Part 4)

Description: 2021 was one of the strangest years in recent memory as far as Pro Wrestling is concerned. The pandemic era in general has seen a lot of changes and to a certain degree the business and the products produced in it have not completely gotten back to normal. If you had told me in 2019 we would have Bryan Danielson & CM Punk at the same company and a heel Roman Reigns would be one of the most over guys in the WWE, I would've argued it down, I wouldn't have been able to fathom it but here we are.

17. Bryan Danielson-While Bryan hasn't won any major titles in the pandemic era; he has been a notable main eventer since his return to the ring in 2018. Bryan is another guy on this same list that we didn't think we would see again in an in-ring capacity but after years of training and testing he would finally be medically cleared. He was still under contract when he went on his "either I'm going to wrestle for WWE again or I'll wrestle somewhere else" campaign; he was an on-screen general manager..so the timing of his comeback is a little suspicious, but I digress.

In 2021 Bryan made his run at the Universal Championship which was held hostage by Roman Reigns at the time. Bryan would give hints that this may be the road to his last WrestleMania and apparently it wasn't a work. He won the Elimination Chamber match but the stipulation this time wasn't that he gets a title shot on SmackDown or at the next pay-per-view or at WrestleMania but that he gets his shot immediately following the match. Bryan put up a good fight but ultimately Roman was victorious. WrestleMania 37 would in fact be his last WrestleMania. He would leave the company after putting his career on the line against Roman and he was banished from SmackDown in defeat.

Onward to AEW, Bryan made his presence felt immediately going after the AEW Champion, Kenny Omega and then his successor Hangman Page. The trio would have some of the best matches in company history. Bryan, win or lose seems to be "living his best life". It appears that at this stage in his career, he just want to chase his dream matches and get in the ring with guys he respects, even if it's just to put them over and make them look good.

16. Adam Cole-Adam had kind of a rocky 2021 but that's probably because he has such a monster 2019-2020 during his NXT Championship reign. He defeated NXT's golden boy, Johnny Wrestling at NXT: Takeover XXV and that opened up his path to becoming the face of the brand. The Undisputed Era had been pretty dominant since the team first formed so it was only a matter of time that the leader and head of the stable would become the top guy. After Cole was done consistently tearing the house down with Gargano, he moved on to his best friend, Tommaso Ciampa. Those three, may be the greatest champions the Gold belt has ever seen.

After Ciampa almost killed him at WarGames, he went on to Survivor Series (the first time NXT was a part of that event) to have a brutal singles match against The Bruiserweight, Pete Dunne. In September, Roddy Strong had defeated Velveteen Dream for the North American Championship and Fish & O'Reilly were already the Tag Team Champions so by the time the World's Collide event rolled around, Undisputed Era held all the male titles on the brand. That feeling would be short lived as Fish & O'Reilly would lose their tag titles to Imperium at World's Collide and Keith Lee would get his first title reign at Roddy's expense on an episode of NXT. Adam collided with Lee at the Great American Bash in the Summer of 2020 where he would also lose his title, ending historic reign at 403 days and making Lee the first double champion on the brand.

When 2021 came around it felt like Undisputed Era had overstayed their welcome in NXT. While they were still over with the fans as a unit, they kind of began to drift apart but it also started feeling like it was time to move on from the brand. NXT is developmental, after all. After a feud with Pat McAfee & The Kings of NXT, Cole would turn on Kyle O'Reilly which would result in the last days of The Undisputed Era. As Cole remained "The man to beat" on the brand, the Triple H era of the brand was coming to a close and the Adam's future became uncertain. He entered a tug of war between WWE and AEW that AEW ultimately won.

Cole debuted for AEW at the All Out pay-per-view that year and although The Elite "killed him off" and sent him on his way to WWE in the first place, he reunited with The Young Bucks to reform "SuperKliq". When Adam was a member of Bullet Club, SuperKliq was their trio drawing inspiration from their admiration for Shawn Michaels. The Kliq was kind of a secret alliance between Shawn Michaels, Sean Waltman, Kevin Nash & Scott Hall. When their contracts were up, Fish & O'Reilly joined Adam in AEW which marked the beginning of the tension between SuperKliq and what used to be known as Undisputed Era.

We don't know what 2022 holds for Adam but Tony Khan made it very clear when he came in, how valuable he is and how much him signing meant to the company. He's been a mainstay at the top since he showed up so I can imagine big stories and championships are in his future.

15. MJF-Maxwell Jacob Friedman-Max epitomizes the concept of a wrestler that does not need a title to validate him. In his early 20's he's already main evented PPVs and solidified himself as not just a consistent ratings draw but one of the most talented heels in the professional wrestling business. In 2021 he formed his own stable known as "The Pinnacle" with FTR, Shawn Spears and his right hand, Wardlow, with Tully Blanchard as their manager and continued his reign of terror over the company that he started by himself.

The Pinnacle came as a surprise as Max was trying to force his way into Chris Jericho's Inner Circle at the time. When it was revealed that Sammy Guevara was right all along and that he was trying to destroy the group from the inside, that's when his new villains club emerged.

MJF makes his presence felt by picking the biggest babyface in the company and claiming his head. In some instances, those babyfaces are never the same after. Jericho & Cody being the most notable at this point in his career. He was almost successful at destroying the Inner Circle and even as we speak Jericho is still trying to keep the pieces of his family together. He cost Cody his ability to challenge for the AEW Championship as a member of the Nightmare Family by throwing in the towel, then proceeded to humiliate Cody night after night.

Toward the end of 2021, he didn't pick the biggest babyface in the company, the biggest babyface in the company chose him. CM Punk set his sights on Max after his feud with Darby Allin. Punk would have his undefeated streak ended by MJF in his hometown of Chicago in 2022 which shows that even if he doesn’t win every battle, he usually wins the war. 

AEW has something special with him. He understands his role in the company and his role in his feuds. No one has gotten people to rally around babyfaces the way he has. When he starts winning championships and accomplishing more, he will be an even bigger asset. Ric Flair wasn't a 16x World Champion for nothing. Beating him had to mean something for the babyfaces, it had to be a big deal and nothing says "I've arrived", more than knocking down the biggest bully on the playground.